Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Tornadoes of applause and laughter continued to ring in his ears. “I say it who oughtn’t to say it,” he wrote to Livy a little after five that morning, “the house came down with a crash. For two and a half hours, now, I’ve been shaking hands and listening to congratulations.” The Army of the Tennessee was his, an officer told him—“You can command its services.” “Mark, if I live to be a hundred years, I’ll always be grateful for your speech,” Ingersoll said. “Lord, what a supreme thing it was!” The following noon, in his own eyes a new hero, he attended a breakfast given in his honor by a group of Chicago journalists, and after his fast of the night before he feasted on mushrooms, sweetbreads, quail, coffee, and cognac. “Grand times, my boy,” he wrote to Howells, “grand times.”

  * “Hell or Heidelberg, whichever you come to, first,” Clemens wrote in his notebook in 1891, when he was again in Europe. “Hadleyburg” is an anagram of “Heidelberg.” The passing stranger’s note, in the short novel Clemens wrote in Vienna in 1898, reads: “… some day, for your sins, you will die and go to hell or Hadleyburg—TRY AND MAKE IT THE FORMER.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Everything a man could have”

  I

  ON JANUARY 7, 1880, in a fit of impatience followed by wild elation, Clemens thrust the final manuscript pages of his despised travel book into the hands of Elisha Bliss. The next day, leaving their children behind in Hartford, he took Livy to Elmira for a rest. Pregnant again, she had been brought to the edge of one of her periodic collapses by the strain of reopening the house on Farmington Avenue, redecorating it, and installing five or six thousand dollars’ worth of European bric-a-brac and furniture, including a four-hundred-dollar music box and a massive Venetian bed adorned with carved cherubs. That Clemens and Livy had bought this much abroad at a time when they were “feeling poor” and economizing on hotel rooms and cab fares was one more proof of their self-sacrificial devotion to their eccentric mansion. Clemens thought of the house in sacramental terms. “Our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart, and a soul,” he was to write in 1897, having derived from Susy’s death the single consolation that she had died at home; “it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction.” But he and Livy also feared the house and fled from it—it committed them to a frenzied pace of management, entertainment, and expenditure which devoured their energies and their money. Within a year and a half after this winter flight from Hartford, Clemens was to spend over thirty thousand dollars to buy up a strip of adjoining land, lower some of the grounds in order to “bring the house into view,” reroute the driveway, tear down the kitchen and build one twice as big, remove the reception room and enlarge the front hall, install temperamental new plumbing, heating, and burglar-alarm systems, and decorate the walls and ceilings of the first floor with hand-stenciled designs by Louis Tiffany of New York. When all this work was done, Clemens joked, he “had three hundred dollars in the bank which the plumber didn’t know anything about,” and he felt that what the house needed most of all was an incendiary to put them out of their misery. Later on he compared Susy’s death to the fire which destroys a house and everything in it.

  Clemens had finished A Tramp Abroad with even less interest than he had had when he began it. Still, by several standards, it was a success. “You are a blessing,” Howells told him. “You ought to believe in God’s goodness, since he has bestowed upon the world such a delightful genius as yours to lighten its troubles.” Howells’ review in the May Atlantic paid tribute to what Livy agreed were her husband’s strong points—his underlying seriousness, common sense, and moralistic fervor. Published in March 1880, the book sold sixty-two thousand copies during its first year in print. This was far better than any of his previous three books and only about seven thousand copies fewer than The Innocents Abroad. In returning to the proven mode if not the true vitality of his first success Mark Twain reversed a six-year declining trend of sales and popularity, and he was well on his way to achieving the eminence of a national institution. “You Americans,” an English guide was to say to some tourists in the summer of 1882, “have Mark Twain and Harper’s Magazine.” The obligations of such celebrity, which at times he accepted with delight, were self-imitation, constant exposure and performance. He walked along the streets of Hartford as if they were a stage and he were doing a cakewalk. He had a rolling gait like a sailor or one of Tim Dooley’s patrons, and, whenever he could, he wore the sealskin coat and fur hat which set off his cascade of gray curls. The people stopped and turned around to stare, and if they did not know who he was they asked and always found out. Everywhere he went they hung on every word he spoke. In June 1881 he visited West Point and stayed with Lieutenant Charles Erskine Scott Wood, the post adjutant (who, the following year, supervised the printing of 1601 on the Academy’s press), and for an entire evening he held a group of cadets spellbound with his monologue. He was at his best, he knew, with a stag audience; even “male corpses,” he once said, could give him more satisfactions than the young ladies of the Saturday Morning Club. The next morning over coffee he gleefully tormented Wood’s spinster sister, who had brought in her infant nephew. “Don’t you adore babies, Mr. Clemens?” she asked unsuspectingly. “No, I hate them,” he answered, and he told her how once, when he was convalescing from typhoid, his own sister’s infant son had climbed on his bed and kissed him. “I made up my mind, if I lived I would put up a monument to Herod,” he said, and an expression of horror crossed his face. “Miss Wood, since then I have hated babies.” Miss Wood refused to believe he was joking; she was glad when her brother’s “coarse” visitor left.

  Often, however, the price of celebrity seemed to him too much to pay. More and more he traveled under incognitos and signed hotel registers as “Samuel Langhorne,” “C. L. Samuel,” “J. P. Smith,” “J. P. Jones.” From time to time, as when he finished The Prince and the Pauper, he thought of publishing anonymously, because his celebrity as a humorist would do harm to a “serious” book. Samuel Clemens had created Mark Twain, and now he had to run away from him. Interviewers and autograph hunters pursued him; in Australia there was even an impostor who passed under the name Mark Twain. Standing near the pinnacle of a world-wide fame, Clemens faced it with a double-edged attitude, wallowing in attention one moment, and in the next becoming snappish and resentful and feeling sorry for himself. The day’s mail brought him letters begging money and advice, letters from strangers and cranks, letters asking for an answer and an autograph. He scribbled his comments on them—“From an ass,” “No, Sir,” “Persecution,” “And a curse on him”—but he saved the letters all the same. In a moment of mild vindictiveness he asked the Howells children to sign a batch of postcards for him “S. L. Clemens—per J. L. McWilliams.” “It is wonderful,” he explained to their father, “how that little ‘per’ does take the stuffing out of an autograph.” Even the distinguished Moncure Conway, visiting Hartford, found himself pressed into service as an amanuensis. This time it was “S. L. Clemens, per M. D. C.,” and Clemens smiled triumphantly. Yet only a few hours later, in the middle of a billiard game with Conway, Clemens was perfectly delighted to put down his cue and write a sentiment and a signature in the autograph book of a ten-year-old boy who had stopped by and rung the doorbell. It was all a matter of accident and approach, it seemed. George Washington Cable, playing an April Fool’s joke on him in 1884, had a moment’s fear that he might provoke Clemens’ celebrated temper, which could be hair-triggered to tantrum even by such annoyances as a missing button (he once shattered the peace of a Sabbath morning in Hartford by screaming and throwing his shirts out of his bathroom window). Cable arranged for 150 or so of Clemens’ literary acquaintances to write in for autographs. Some of them, like Aldrich, pushed the hoax a step further and pretended to confuse Mark Twain and Bret Harte. The letters poured in on April 1. After a flash of annoyance Clemens saw the joke and enjoyed it so much that he gave out the story to the papers. New intervi
ewers appeared, and soon there was a fresh flood of genuine requests from strangers for his autograph. So celebrity fed upon and reproduced itself, and the cycle quickened.

  In mid-March 1880 one stranger, a twelve-year-old Dallas boy named David Watt Bowser, wrote a letter to “Mr. Twain.” Out of a list of favorites which included Edison, Tennyson, Holmes, and Longfellow, Wattie had chosen him as the living great man with whom he would most like to change places. As the boy explained in a school composition which he enclosed, along with his report card, Mark Twain was “jolly,” “happy,” and rich (“worth millions”) and had “a beautiful wife and children.” In short, Wattie concluded, his hero had “everything a man could have.” Would Mr. Twain be willing to change places with him and be a boy again? he asked. “I hope you will send me at least your autograph for my album. I do not think Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Whittier &c. can stand a joke like you, so I feel surer than the other boys, that I will have a line in return.” Acting in Wattie’s favor, beyond the flattery and charm of his letter, was something he mentioned in his postscript: “Our principal used to know you, when you were a little boy and she was a little girl, but I expect you have forgotten her, it was so long ago.” For a long time Clemens had nursed romantic recollections of this principal, Laura Dake, whom he had met when he was a twenty-two-year-old pilot.

  Wattie received in return an extraordinarily intimate and revealing letter, which was followed by four others over the next two years. As always, recollections of the river awakened Clemens. He would be willing to be a boy again, he told Wattie, but only under certain conditions. “The main condition should be, that I should emerge from boyhood as a ‘cub pilot’ on a Mississippi boat, and that I should by and by become a pilot, and remain one.” Among the other conditions he listed eternal summer, with the oleanders in bloom and the sugar cane green, the middle watch in the pilothouse on moonlit nights, friends to talk to and sing with, long trips and short stays in port, a big freight boat that would ignore passenger hails and lay up whenever the fog got thick, and a crew that would never change and never die. “One such crew I have in mind, and can call their names and see their faces: but two decades have done their work upon them, and half are dead, the rest scattered, and the boat’s bones are rotting five fathom deep in Madrid bend.” But even though, in this daydream, he is isolated from society on shore and outside the pilothouse, he still insists on fame and recognition:

  And when strangers were introduced I should have them repeat “Mr. Clemens?” doubtfully, and with the rising inflection—and when they were informed that I was the celebrated “Master Pilot of the Mississippi,” and immediately took me by the hand and wrung it with effusion, and exclaimed, “O, I know that name very well!” I should feel a pleasurable emotion trickling down my spine and know I had not lived in vain.

  He was remembering the grandeur that surrounded the lightning pilot, the gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin sort of pilot who lived on a princely salary and answered to no man. But steamboating was dying on the Mississippi now, the railroads were killing it off, the pilot was prince no longer. Within five years after this letter to Wattie, Clemens published two books celebrating the river of bygone days, and in these books he demonstrated as a writer the freedom and command he had once had as a pilot. “Master Pilot of the Mississippi” is a metaphor for the literary achievement of Mark Twain, a name born of the river and by then so linked with it that in 1886 young Clara Clemens, hearing the leadsman on a steamboat sing out soundings, said, “Papa, I have hunted all over the boat for you. Don’t you know they are calling for you?”

  For a brief period between 1880 and 1885 Mark Twain achieved a maturity and a balance which permitted him as a man to live fully in the glorious, opulent present and as an artist to live imaginatively in the transfigured past. During these years of exuberance and creation his imagination embraced two transcendent figures who suggested to him what remained inexplicable in his own genius. The first was Grant, who even over a sent-in lunch of beans, bacon, and coffee at his Wall Street office still seemed to have the stature of Julius Caesar or Alexander. Visiting Grant frequently there and at his house uptown, Clemens smoked in silence, listened to Grant spin his “sensational history” in a soft Ohio River accent, and urged him to write his memoirs. But Grant was still feeling too rich and lazy to get to work. The second figure was another “Master Pilot,” Captain Edgar Wakeman. Year after year Clemens struggled with his story about Wakeman, as Captain Stormfield, entering heaven. He was afraid it was too blasphemous for print, often thought of giving it up, and at least once thought of burning it, before he published part of the story in 1906. The grandeur of “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” is not in its theological extravaganza or in its relatively mild burlesque of the Protestant heaven as a place where the better sort of people mingle. The drive and the vitality of the story spring from its images of total freedom—of Stormfield, the Master Pilot, racing with comets and hurtling through outermost space at about a million miles an hour and pointed straight as a dart for the hereafter.

  Grant and Wakeman represented limitless possibility. But limit, failure, futility were made visible for Sam Clemens in Orion, his mirror image, his burden, his baseline for judging the distance he himself had traveled from Hannibal. True, Orion had, in his brother’s eyes, one recent achievement that stood to his credit and was a conspicuous blot on a nearly unblemished record of ineffectuality. During his brief service with Bliss Orion had studied the company’s account books and warned Sam that Bliss was misrepresenting his expenses and profits. Sam insisted on revising the terms of his contract for A Tramp Abroad, and in October 1880 told Orion that because of his advice the new book had earned about twenty thousand dollars more than it would have under the old contract; from now on, he said, Orion was going to receive the income from this extra twenty thousand, about seventy-five dollars a month. “This ends the loan business,” Sam wrote to Orion (who for five or six years had lived on the quixotic plan of “borrowing” from Sam and sending him a check for the interest by return mail). “Hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money but on money which you have squarely earned and which has no taint or savor of charity about it.” At other times Sam looked on his brother with amusement and affection, remembering, for example, three occasions on which Orion demonstrated an absent-mindedness more extreme than his own: In Hannibal late one night Orion climbed into the upstairs bedroom of the wrong house and found himself sharing a bed not with his brothers but with two terrified spinsters. (“You really mustn’t let Orion have got into the bed,” Howells said in 1906 after reading Clemens’ account of the episode in his autobiography. “I know he did, but …”) Once he forgot what time it was, paid a courting call on a girl at three in the morning, and stayed to breakfast. During the period he was working for Bliss and living in a Hartford boardinghouse, Orion forgot to lock the bathroom door and was discovered by a maid lying in the tub with his head under water and his bottom in the air (this was Orion’s way of getting relief from the hot weather). The maid ran out screaming that Orion was drowned. “How do you know it is Mr. Clemens?” Orion’s wife asked. According to Sam’s delighted retelling of the story, the maid answered, “I don’t.”

  For years Sam tried to exploit Orion’s possibilities as literary material, first starting a novel about him called Autobiography of a Damned Fool but giving it up after 114 pages of bad farce: its vacillating hero, named Bolivar, is a convert to Mohammedanism and becomes the disgrace of his Mississippi River village when he tries to round up a harem there. In 1878 and again in 1879 he urged Howells to write a book or a play about Orion. He also proposed that they collaborate on the play. “Orion is a field which grows richer and richer the more he manures it with each new top-dressing of religion or other guano,” he wrote. “I imagine I see Orion on the stage, always gentle, always melancholy, always changing his politics and religion, and trying to reform the world, always inventing something, and losing a limb by a new ki
nd of explosion at the end of each of the four acts.” Probably afraid of the backlash of satirizing this exasperating but beloved brother, Howells declined all these invitations, which were renewed from time to time over the next three years, and Clemens tried another approach to what he believed was a comic gold mine.

  In February 1880 he wrote Orion a letter which suggests his own scattered interests. “I believe I told you I bought four-fifths of a patent some ten days ago for several thousand dollars.” This was “Kaolotype,” a chalk-plate process for making printing plates and, as later refined and applied, for casting brass stamping dies; soon the letterhead of the Kaolotype Engraving Company, of 104 Fulton Street, New York, listed S. L. Clemens as president. This characteristic venture, the direct antecedent of Clemens’ disastrous investment in the Paige typesetter, was to end in financial loss, litigation, and, worst of all, an inescapable involvement with business affairs. In the same letter he told Orion that he was working away “with an interest which amounts to intemperance” on The Prince and the Pauper and in all likelihood would never in this life get around to writing two other books he had had in mind for a long time, The Autobiography of a Coward and Confessions of a Life That Was a Failure. With what now seems open cruelty he suggested that Orion tackle one of these books—they were hardly distinguishable—and write an autobiography which for unswerving candor would rival Cellini, Casanova, and Rousseau.