Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  “Those mountains had a soul: they thought, they spoke—one couldn’t hear it with the ears of the body, but what a voice it was! and how real.” This was Clemens writing to Twichell in January 1879 in an effusion of sentimental rhetoric. “Deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. Alp calleth unto Alp!” If, as André Gide once said, the worship of mountains is a Protestant invention, a confusion of the beautiful with the merely lofty, then Clemens’ other European reactions were also running true to form: he worshiped the Alps, a Protestant invention, and he reacted with discomfort to the sensual, Catholic arts of Italy. He objected to the fig leaf not only because it was prudish but because it made nakedness “most offensive and conspicuous,” and his prurient but still amused eye noticed fig leaves in all kinds of places, even under the tails of animals, noticed also that these fig leaves and, when exposed, the genitals on statues’were “handled so much that they are black and polished. Which sex does this handling?” But in Italy, too, visiting a life class in Rome, he was merely amused when the professional model who had been naked only minutes before adjusted her skirt because too much of her ankle was showing.

  It was not until he came to France at the end of February 1879 that he began to voice the full and anguished extent of his conflicts over sexuality and sexual morality, censorship and controls, double standards in taste and conduct. As usual, he was feted and sought after. He drank tea from Turgenev’s samovar, exchanged visits with him, gave him a copy of Tom Sawyer. “My dear Mr. Chatto,” he was writing to his English publisher in May, “Please send a copy of Roughing It to Monsieur Ivan Turgenev, 50 rue Douay, Paris.” With Conway and General Noyes he went to a reception at President Grévy’s; with Clara Spaulding and General Lucius Fairchild, the American consul in Paris, he went to see the Grand Prix run at Chantilly. At a session in Paris of a convivial masculine group called the Stomach Club he heard with delight the illustrator Edwin Abbey give an unprintable speech; in his own talk, not tested out on Livy and Clara Spaulding, he paid tribute to the high antiquity of masturbation and joked that modern progress and improvement now assigned to it somewhat the same social dignity as flatulence. (His talk, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” could be traced back to a favorite joke of Artemus Ward’s about “playing the lone hand.”)

  Despite all this pleasant and apparently untrammeled activity, the notebooks he kept during five months in Paris are those of a man obsessed. “Stomach Club has good times,” he noted. But the very next entry is, typically, a diatribe against a “grossly obscene,” “wholly sensual,” and “bestial” Venus by Titian that he saw at the Louvre. He was afraid a young lady could be “defiled” simply by looking at it. The conjunction of Clemens’ note about “good times” at the Stomach Club and this diatribe is, of course, a little like Baudelaire’s experience with the five-franc prostitute who said the indecencies on exhibit at the Louvre made her cover her face and blush. Clemens’ split attitude reflected in part a built-in American puritanism; fifty years earlier, for example, Samuel F. B. Morse, who began his career as a painter, said that it was the duty of American art to support truth and virtue and not to imitate the sensualism and “stench of decay” of European art. Clemens was also a Victorian gentleman who tacitly accepted a double standard even if he did not take advantage of it and who, at one and the same time, believed that prostitution was a necessary evil and occasional convenience but also denied the existence of any kind of urgent sexuality in the women of his own circle and social rank. He also made a rigid distinction between smoking-room sexuality and drawingroom purity. At the back of this same Paris notebook, as in other notebooks kept over about thirty years, he listed the “nubs” and “snappers” of dirty jokes that he never seemed to tire of: jokes about dogs copulating; about the bride who had stenciled across her stomach “Try Helmbold’s Balsam Coperia,” a patent gonorrhea medicine; about the old maid on her wedding night on a steamboat explaining, “I never could worth a damn on a steamboat”; about the man so short his doctor could not tell whether his trouble was a sore throat or hemorrhoids. And in examining such splits between the taboo and the permissible he was, as a writer, concerned with what seemed to him clear injustices. Watching a group of Salon pictures being carried into the Palais d’Industrie, he reflected sourly on the fact that an artist could exhibit a nude in public and even get a prize for it, while any writer who described nakedness would have his book banished from the parlor table. There were further inequities within printed literature. “It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not,” he said, thinking back on 1601. Along with a number of other schemes—including a plan to exhibit the tomb of the Virgin Mary in New York City—he made a note to collect his “profane works,” including the Stomach Club speech, and have them privately printed.

  Yet in Clemens’ reactions to the French and what he thought of as French morality there is a quality of fury and unrelenting invective—of obsession—which suggests that his troublement went far beyond the conventional split in the Victorian psyche, and far beyond France itself; Tom Jones, just as much as Titian’s Venus, he found simply “disgusting.” His comments on France and the French were veiled expressions of his own intensely troubled, incurably divided concern with sexuality. He was, in all senses, bothered: the Titian, he said, “inflames and disgusts at the same moment.” The “two great branches of French thought,” he said, were science and adultery. France was a nation governed by prostitutes, a nation without winter, summer or morals, a nation whose “filthy-minded” citizens were “the connecting link between man and monkey” and practiced unspeakable “bestialities.” “A Frenchman’s home is where another man’s wife is,” he went on, and on: scratch a Frenchman “and you find a harlot”; “’Tis a wise Frenchman that knows his own father” (“When all other interests fail,” he was to say in 1895, his anger unabated, a Frenchman “can turn in and see if he can’t find out who his father was”). And explicit in this invective is the contrast with America, the once rejected, now beckoning homeland. The contrast was quite as much an act of shaping history to the daydream as his claim that the gold rush was the watershed dividing an era of purity and innocence (sexual as well as commercial) from an era of cynicism and money lust. America, he now began to say, was the most civilized of nations: American “native-born” (the italics are his) women and men were pure-minded; American girls did not read smutty novels, and, he was absolutely certain, they were unacquainted with “unclean thoughts.”

  He was homesick, eager to rejoin the mainstreams of American life. He would never again be an expatriate out of choice. He wanted “hot biscuits, real coffee with real cream—and real potatoes. Fried chicken, corn bread, real butter, real beefsteak, good roast beef with taste to it.” Even England, where he spent July and August, had lost most of its glory and glitter for him; his Anglomania had waned. He now predicted a widening cultural gap between England and America. In resources and technology his own country had pulled ahead, and he felt that the American century was at hand. A visit to Darwin failed to excite him much more than did dining out in London society with two eminent Americans, Whistler and Henry James, the occasion for a possibly apocryphal but perfectly credible exchange between James and Clemens: “Do you know Bret Harte?” “Yes, I know the son of a bitch.”

  Mark Twain returned to New York with his family on September 3. The Sun reporter noted that his hair had turned quite gray.

  IV

  Also returning from a stay abroad in the autumn of 1879 was another American anomaly. The life of Ulysses Grant, like Mark Twain’s, had been a saga of the unpredictable and the unlikely, of a man without promise who, after years of drift, failure, alcoholism, and disgrace, was touched by history and the Holy Ghost and achieved greatness. “Useless” Grant, an unprepossessing man who turned out to have the powers of a giant, was an archetype that never ceased to fascinate Mark Twain, also a twice-born man, who could never explain his own gifts and powers and who wrote a book about Joan of Arc, an ignorant c
ountry girl who had the unaccountable military genius of a great general like Grant. This strange, brooding man took Vicksburg, but he could not stand the sight of rare meat. He was imperturbable and almost expressionless, but as a commander he had unequaled charisma. Even Sherman, a nonbeliever, said that he fought under Grant with “the faith a Christian has in his Savior.” To the North, during the war years, Grant seemed God’s tool, but, like Mark Twain, he was God’s fool as well: his cabinet officers betrayed him, he demeaned himself with Jay Cooke, and he was later to be the cat’s paw and victim of his Wall Street partner, the swindler Ferdinand Ward.

  Since May 1877 Grant and his family had traveled through Europe and the Orient sightseeing, collecting souvenirs and addresses of welcome, and, as they came into conflict with the protocol of courts and royalty, spreading a peculiarly democratic brand of consternation. At Windsor, young Jesse Grant had insisted on his right to dine with his parents at Victoria’s table, given her an ultimatum through her master of the household, bent her to his will, and then celebrated his victory over a bottle of her brandy. Ulysses Grant at the age of fifty-seven came back to America rehabilitated by time, absence, and foreign celebrity, and he shone with some of the old heroic fire. He seemed once again, as Sherman was to say, “the typical hero of the great Civil War.” The scandals and the plain ineptitudes of his two disastrous terms in office were now forgotten sufficiently for there to be open talk of a third term for him in 1880. Their fervor fanned by the waving of the bloody shirt, Republican stalwarts (including the desouthernized Mark Twain) who had once been mortified by President Grant now offered up three cheers. The cheers were not for the “Let Us Have Peace” Grant of the White House but for the pre-political Grant of Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Spottsylvania, and “Unconditional Surrender” (a phrase with his own initials as well as his country’s, it was pointed out). In November Grant made his way to Chicago, where, in the course of a week-long patriotic and military celebration, he was to be welcomed home by Sheridan and Sherman and by eighty thousand men marching under ten thousand banners. The city belonged to its “Man of Destiny,” as a broadside called him, “our own General Grant,” “the admitted and undisputed Military Genius of the whole world, the man especially created by Providence to triumphantly trample out the most wicked rebellion of the Christian era, and crush to the earth those uncompromising TRAFFICKERS in human flesh, in their heinous, unholy and unpardonable crime of attempting to destroy the most indulgent government the sun ever shone upon.”

  In Elmira, struggling to finish A Tramp Abroad and sinking deeper into a creative torpor, Clemens felt the mighty appeal of the occasion and he expressed it in terms which suggest the almost religious nature of his hero worship. “My sluggish soul needs a fierce upstirring,” he wrote to Howells, “and if it would not get it when Grant enters the meeting-place I must doubtless ‘lay’ for the final resurrection.” He compared Grant’s journey from San Francisco to Napoleon’s progress from Grenoble to Paris; to see the great reunion in Chicago, he said, would be like seeing Napoleon meeting his Old Guard. He eagerly accepted an invitation, offered him as a popular spokesman for the Republican party, to come to Chicago as honored guest of the Army of the Tennessee and to speak at the banquet to Grant at the Palmer House on November 13.

  In Chicago, by his account, Mark Twain reached the high point of his career as speechmaker; still, a mingled strain runs through the various roles he played there. He worshiped Grant, he identified himself with Grant. Their lives, it now seems, became interlocked: when Grant died in 1885 Mark Twain started on the long road downhill toward ruin. But as a former Confederate who comes to terms—of intimate friendship, it developed—with the Union commander, he combats, in subtle and symbolic ways, Grant’s tremendous authority, competes with him, even seems to want to destroy him.

  At times Mark Twain was the comic alter ego of authority, Grant’s court jester. On November II Clemens found himself on a flag-canopied reviewing stand with Grant and others. They watched the endless processions march past, led by Sheridan, in martial cloak and plumed hat, mounted on his giant black horse. In plain sight of the crowd—“It was dreadfully conspicuous,” Clemens told Livy—the mayor of Chicago presented him to Grant, and Clemens, in some embarrassment, made a move to withdraw to the back of the platform. “I’ll step back, General,” he said, “I don’t want to interrupt your speech.” “But I’m not going to make any,” Grant said. “Stay where you are—I’ll get you to make it for me.” Clemens delightedly reported the conversation to Livy that afternoon. (Less than a year later, again in this relationship of comic hero to military hero, Clemens put on Sherman’s coat and military hat, stepped out on a train platform, and made a speech impersonating him. “Say, that ain’t Sherman,” came a voice from the crowd, “that’s Mark Twain.”)

  On the stage of Haverley’s Theatre that night, sitting elbow to elbow with the Union generals, Clemens again took the measure of his hero. Through all the patriotic rant, the bombardments of praise and adoration, the unfurling of a shredded battle flag and the roar of a thousand men singing “Marching through Georgia,” Grant sat slouching in his chair, his right leg crossed over his left, not moving a muscle, an iron man. Twice, at Sherman’s urging, he rose to acknowledge the storms of applause. And: “He broke up his attitude once more—the extent of something more than a hair’s breadth,” Clemens carefully noted for Livy the next morning, “to indicate me to Sherman when the house was keeping up a determined and persistent call for me.” The anti-hero vied with the hero, and the hero deferred to him. Clemens, a Grant-intoxicated man in an age that loved heroes, oratory, and patriotic ceremony, “went to sleep without whiskey,” he wrote. “Ich liebe dich.”

  The climax of the Chicago celebration was the Palmer House banquet. Surfeited with claret, champagne, and rum punch, with oysters, fillet of beef, and buffalo steaks, five hundred Union veterans settled down with their brandies and whiskeys for six consecutive hours of oratory, applause, and military music, an orgy of the spoken word which increased in passion and intensity as the night wore into morning. “I doubt if America has ever seen anything quite equal to it,” Clemens told Howells. “I am well satisfied I shall not live to see its equal again. How pale those speeches are in print—but how radiant, how full of color, how blinding they were in the delivery!” In the accent of the angel of mercy, as it impressed Clemens, Colonel Robert Ingersoll declaimed, “Blood was water, money was leaves, and life was only common air until one flag floated over a Republic without a master and without a slave.” He seemed, Clemens said, “the most beautiful human creature that ever lived,” and his speech, which brought his audience to their feet clapping and stamping and waving their napkins, was “the supremest combination of English words that was ever put together since the world began.” As he waited his turn to speak, Clemens was transfigured by oratory, too excited to eat or to drink anything but ice water, his “sluggish soul” certainly now upstirred to a pitch he would hardly reach again.

  Somewhat after two in the morning, Clemens, the fifteenth and final speaker—“I was to ‘hold the crowd,’” he told Livy—mounted the banquet table and responded to the toast he himself had devised for the occasion: “The babies—as they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities.” By the end of his third sentence—“When the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground”—he knew he had mastered his audience, and, all the while watching Grant, who was no longer impassive now but laughing like the others, he marched through an elaborately double-edged tribute to the man of war, majestic on the battlefield but ridiculous in the nursery with an infant. “You could face the death storm at Donelson and Vicksburg and give back blow for blow,” he told these veterans, “but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted your nose, you had to take it.” He even worked in a reference to Sheridan’s recent twins: “As long as you are in your right mind don’t you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot.” And, ha
ving appeared to deflate the military, he now went on to glorify the babies. He summoned up visions of the America of fifty years thence, a vast country to be governed by the future leaders who were now lying in three or four million cradles. It was worth risking everything in order to win an audience over, body and soul, he once told Livy; now he led up to a climax which for a brief moment seemed more like a disaster. Relentlessly, with an apparent unawareness of the reverence in which these veterans held Grant, he described the future commander in chief of the American armies lying in his cradle and occupied with “trying to find some way of getting his big toe in his mouth.” (Grant had, in fact, spent eight years in the White House trying to get it out.) This goal, Clemens went on, “the illustrious guest of this evening turned his entire attention to some fifty-six years ago.” Here he remembered that the laughter ceased, there was only “a sort of shuddering silence,” which he associated with the Whittier dinner, and then he sprang his masterful and breathtaking surprise: “And if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”

  Two days later the Philadelphia Press described Clemens’ speech as “a humorous and highly-appreciated satirical eulogy”; the Chicago papers did not make even this much of it; and George Warner reported from Des Moines that the Western papers ranked the speech as number three of the evening. Yet three or four hours after his performance, in long letters he was writing to Livy in Hartford and Orion in Keokuk, Clemens saw himself as the hero of the banquet, as if he had been borne aloft in triumph after a symbolic tournament in which he had vanquished Grant himself. By making this iron man laugh and cheer with all the others he had, in a sense, destroyed him. And in keeping with a speech which, until its very last sentence, had seemed headed toward catastrophic insult, the images that Clemens used to describe his triumph suggest that on this occasion, as well as on so many others, he thought of his humor as something violent and painful that he did to someone else. “I fetched him! I broke him up utterly!” he wrote to Livy. “The audience saw that for once in his life he had been knocked out of his iron serenity.” “I knew I could lick him,” he told Howells. “I shook him up like dynamite … my truths had wracked all the bones of his body apart.” And to Orion: “He laughed until his bones ached.”