Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Not the least bit discouraged by Sam’s charges that he lacked literary training, Orion got to work at once. The first installments struck Sam as so “killingly entertaining” that he sent them on to Howells hoping that the Atlantic would pay Orion at the customary rate for anonymous contributions. Howells backed away. Orion’s autobiography had wrung his heart, but he found it “shocking.” It was altogether too candid, and he was horrified by a passage which described young Sam at the keyhole watching the post-mortem being performed on his father. “Don’t let anyone else even see those passages about the autopsy,” Howells wrote. By 1883, after three years of weekly and even daily installments from Orion, Clemens had lost all interest in the book, and what he originally envisioned as a classic of autobiography had become just “the autobiography of an ass” and “more damned lunacy.” As a writer, he now told Orion in brutal dismissal, “you cannot achieve even a respectable mediocrity,” and he demanded that Orion sign an oath which pledged him for two years not to submit any writing or any literary or business proposition to Sam, to give up lecturing, to stop interpreting Sam’s silences as assent (there had been a misunderstanding about an “electric project”), and to turn all his attention to the law. Some of the manuscript ended up as fire-starter to warm the boardinghouse that Orion and Mollie kept in Keokuk.

  Recognizing that Orion was bound by the laws of his nature to a lifelong fickleness of purpose and a butterfly vagrancy, Sam once meant to reassure him that there was no reason why a kaleidoscope should not have as good a time as a telescope. But the melancholy Orion, continually hounded by every member of his family to focus on a single star, did not have a good time. Both brothers followed the same pattern of red-hot enthusiasm followed by almost catatonic indifference, but Sam’s peaks lasted longer—his genius as a writer gave a small but sufficient number of them validity and staying power. Orion, the victim of a hundred fresh enthusiasms each day, lived in the troughs of the waves, not on the crests. Despite this difference, and despite the staggering contrast of his own fame and success with Orion’s total failure, Sam could still read Orion’s career as a cautionary tale.

  The one constant in Orion’s life in the ten years after he and Bliss parted company was change. For a while he worked as a proofreader on the New York Post and lived on milk and graham crackers. With money advanced by Sam he bought a chicken farm outside Keokuk, but he soon gave it up. “He casually observed,” Clemens reported to Howells, “that his books had shown there was no money in fattening a chicken on 65 cents’ worth of corn and then selling it for 50.” The next step was to move into Keokuk, where he lived frugally enough on Sam’s money and in Sam’s castoff clothing (Mollie wore Livy’s), but still rented a pew in the First Presbyterian Church. This extravagance outraged Sam, and it did Orion little good when, in 1879, after he gave a lecture entitled “Man, the Architect of Our Religion,” he was excommunicated by the church elders. He kept up an office as a lawyer, but he was about the only person who ever saw the inside of it. He earned five dollars the first year, nothing the second, and six dollars the third; he occupied himself with various schemes concerning the Tennessee land, and he planned to raise goats. Besides the autobiography he had other literary projects: an article, “Immigration and Wages,” which the Atlantic refused, newspaper paragraphs, a burlesque of Paradise Lost, and a burlesque of Jules Verne in which (as suggested by Sam) the main character was a gorilla who turns out to be Jules Verne himself, “that French idiot.” Only a scream of rage from Hartford stopped Orion from going on the lecture circuit billed as “Mark Twain’s Brother.” He was short of everything except advice from Sam.

  By 1881 Mark Twain’s scale of living was so high that just running the house and providing champagne, canvasbacks, fillets of beef, and ice-cream cherubs for his procession of visitors cost about as much as he earned from royalties and investments. He was already pledging his capital toward a number of major expenditures. During 1881 he spent about $100,000 in all. Over $30,000 went toward expanding and renovating the house. About $5,000 went into conventional investments such as securities of the New York Central, the American Bank Note Company, Adams Express. The largest single amount, about $41,000, went into the sort of irresistible speculation that would later bankrupt him—Kaolotype (he was putting up a building in New York to house this shaky venture), the Paige typesetter (whose acquaintance he made in 1880 with a down payment of $2,000 on the eventual cost to him of close to $200,000). He supervised and financed, to the extent of $4,500, the Paris art education of Karl Gerhardt, a young sculptor, formerly a mechanic at the Pratt and Whitney works. He was on the way to becoming his own publisher. Later that year he brought out The Prince and the Pauper at his own expense, and he made a trip to Canada to protect his copyright there. (Certain recent improvements in copyright relations, he said at a dinner in Montreal, made him hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eyes of the law, “literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any of the other necessaries of life.”) He made plans to coedit with Howells an elaborate Library of Humor; by March 1882, when he left Hartford to go on a six-week trip on the Mississippi, he had made selections for the anthology running to more than 93,000 words. He believed he had a “perfectly stunning literary bonanza” in the autobiography of that “tramp” and “bummer,” Cousin Jesse Leathers, the American Earl. He began a burlesque book of etiquette, and he worked with such zeal on a burlesque Hamlet, an old idea come to life again after a talk with Howells, that after three days he was flat on his back, “burned out, devastated, and merely smouldering.”* He worked up a scheme for the citizens of Elmira to petition Congress for the exclusive right to erect a monument to Adam in their city. According to his Barnumlike calculations, the Adam Monument would have been as powerful a tourist draw as the Tomb of the Virgin or, something he began to plan about 1884, the bones of Columbus exhibited in the base of the Statue of Liberty or in the Capitol rotunda in Washington. He abandoned the Adam Monument after Senator Joseph Hawley of Connecticut, who had agreed to sponsor the petition, fled to Europe in embarrassment.

  All in all, Mark Twain was living beyond his means financially, and it was in the belief that he was also living beyond his energies that at the end of April 1881 he appointed as his business manager his twenty-eight-year-old nephew by marriage, Charles L. Webster of Fredonia, sometime civil engineer, real-estate agent, and stock promoter for a Fredonia watch company and now about to become a Jack of all trades. His function at first was to supervise Kaolotype, which was already a disaster, but by the beginning of August he was in charge of everything, publishing contracts and the scrapbook included, and with considerable bewilderment he told his wife, Pamela’s daughter Annie, that he had enough assignments from Uncle Sam to keep a dozen men busy: he had to get after the plumber and the builder, talk to John T. Raymond about the contract for the old Colonel Sellers play and make arrangements with a French actor to produce the play abroad, track down some delinquent royalties, renegotiate the Tramp Abroad contract with Elisha Bliss, discover the extent of Dan Slote’s peculations with the scrapbook royalties. In the years following, until neuralgia, blinding headaches, fatigue, and galloping anxiety compelled him in 1887 to retire from business, Charley Webster was to be publisher, sales manager, auditor, researcher, private detective, watchdog, and errand boy, as the whim or the fury of his tireless uncle dictated.

  Two years earlier Clemens had scolded Orion for wasting money on pew rent “and other idiotic vanities.” “I am not proposing what I would not propose to myself,” he explained, “that is, live clear within my income, whether it was a thousand dollars a week or fifteen.” And in May 1880, riding the crest of his fame and energies, he addressed Orion as if Orion were the man he saw each morning in his shaving mirror: “The bane of Americans is overwork—and the ruin of any work is a divided interest. Concentrate—concentrate. One thing at a time. Yrs in haste, Sam.”

  II

  By May 1880 it was clear that Elisha Bliss was dying of
heart disease—he had only four and a half months to live. His most important author, having been alerted by Orion to Bliss’s liberal interpretation of “half profits,” now looked back on their relationship, including even the triumphant experiment of The Innocents Abroad, as merely “ten years of swindlings,” and he looked forward to going off in a new direction and earning a great deal more money than ever before. Bliss’s son Frank, who had failed in his attempt to set up business on his own, now seemed to Clemens far too ineffectual to take over from the father; besides, Frank was in poor health. Despite Clemens’ own education in subscription publishing he made a strangely self-defeating choice to replace Bliss and the American Publishing Company. James R. Osgood of Boston had been heading unerringly toward bankruptcy since 1871, when he had bought out James T. Fields, publisher to the American pantheon. Bret Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and even Fields complained loudly about Osgood’s carelessness and flickering application. In 1880 Osgood sold out to Henry O. Houghton, but he was soon ready to make a fresh start as a publisher with two important authors—Howells, who resigned from the Atlantic early in 1881, and Clemens, who yielded after years of being importuned by Osgood over billiards and dinner. By choosing to do business with Osgood despite so many clear warnings, Clemens made it inevitable that after three books he would become as disgusted as he had ever been with Bliss—Osgood made a “mighty botch” of subscription publishing, he later said—and would take the fateful step of setting up his own publishing house. His arrangement with Osgood was a step in that direction, for instead of receiving royalties while the publisher bore the capital risks, Clemens decided to finance his own books and to pay Osgood—nominally the publisher, actually only an agent—a seven-and-a-half-per-cent royalty for selling them. The traditional roles of publisher and author were reversed, just as in the first book by Mark Twain that Osgood brought out under this arrangement a pauper changes places with a prince.

  Since November 1877 Clemens had worked intermittently, at times (as he told Orion) “with an interest that almost amounted to intemperance,” on his tale about sixteenth-century England. By mid-September 1880 he believed he had finished it. As usual he was premature; it was not until January or February that it was really completed and revised. But despite this vagrant process of composition, Clemens was guided by an absolute singleness of purpose. Unlike A Tramp Abroad, which he undertook as an act of commerce, The Prince and the Pauper was to be an act of culture. He had no hesitation, as he had had with Tom Sawyer, over whether this was a book for children or for grownups. From the very start he knew that he was writing for children and the family circle, and he was determined that the book would exhibit him not as a humorist (he thought for a while of concealing his authorship), but as a serious practitioner of polite, colorful literature meant to entertain and inform children instead of arousing them to mischief (as might be charged of Tom Sawyer) or to violence (as was charged of “blood and thunder stories” and Beadle’s Dime Novels). He was going to write a costume drama full of ceremonials and historical information which would, at one and the same time, cater to the fashionable taste for monarchical England and also assert the superiority of democratic ideals without offending anyone. He was determined to give genteel culture exactly what it wanted.

  The “Master Pilot of the Mississippi” had stepped ashore, and there to welcome him were the women and children and clergy of Hartford. “Your rank as a writer of humorous things is high enough,” the Reverend Edwin Pond Parker, pastor of the Second Church of Christ Congregational, wrote on December 22, 1880, “but do you know, Clemens, that it is in you to do some first-class serious or sober work…. It might not pay in ‘shekels,’ but it would do you vast honor, and give your friends vast pleasure. Am I too bold?” “I thank you most sincerely for those pleasant words,” Clemens answered on Christmas Eve. “They come most opportunely, too, at a time when I was wavering between launching a book of the sort you mention, with my name to it, and smuggling it into publicity with my name suppressed. Well, I’ll put my name to it, and let it help me or hurt me as the fates shall direct.” And in search of further blessings from Parker he went on to ask of him a service which he had already been promised by Twichell: “Will you, too, take the manuscript and read it, either to yourself, or, still better, aloud to your family.”

  Even Howells, champion of naturalism, was willing to abet the transformation of his “sole and incomparable” Mark Twain into a practitioner of the art of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who in due time received an inscribed copy of The Prince and the Pauper from its author. There were a couple of things in the book Howells found “rather strong milk for babes,” but on the whole he liked it “immensely,” even though, as he delicately ventured, the book could have used a little more satire and a little more humor. “This would not have hurt the story for the children, and would have helped it for the grownies.” (Howells too was a captive of the children’s hour.)

  During the winter months of 1881 the women and children had their say. Sitting by a blazing fire, with Susy and Clara on the arms of his chair, with Livy and their visitor, Mary Fairbanks, listening intently, Clemens read his manuscript aloud, and they pronounced it good. “A lovely book,” Mary Fairbanks said, pleased that her protégé had finally come all the way around, “your masterpiece in fineness.” In recognition of his ideal audience he was to dedicate The Prince and the Pauper to Susy and Clara, “those good-mannered and agreeable children,” adjectives which scarcely suggest his remembered boy life in Hannibal. “Unquestionably the best book he has ever written,” Susy said some years later, after she had learned to dislike Huckleberry Finn and dread her father’s ghost story about the Golden Arm. “The book is full of lovely, charming ideas, and oh the language! It is perfect!” Even the Reverend Dr. Parker would have felt this was going too far, for he acknowledged Mark Twain to be a master of “forcible, racy English.” It is the language of The Prince and the Pauper—nerveless, bookish, conventional, totally denatured—that is the measure of Mark Twain’s chameleon identity as a writer, his crablike progress toward his true idiom, and most of all his luck, in the sense that over all the exclamations of the women and the children he heard inner voices and eventually paid attention to them. The Prince and the Pauper received an official critical acclaim that was new to him, but he soon went back to work on his masterpiece of the American vernacular, Huckleberry Finn, “a language experiment” (as Whitman said of Leaves of Grass) in which Mark Twain employed three main dialects and four Pike County varieties, all carefully shaded.

  When Joe Goodman first heard about The Prince and the Pauper, he was distressed by the remoteness of the subject. After he had read it, he was frankly disappointed and told Clemens so. He also said that he hoped Clemens would come to his senses and get back to what he ought to be writing about. But Goodman’s unawed Western judgment was the exception. “I find myself a fine success as a publisher,” Clemens wrote in 1882 to the critic and scholar Hjalmar Boyesen, another discovery of Howells’, “and literarily the new departure is a great deal better received than I had any right to hope for.” With hosannas and rejoicing the custodians of official culture celebrated the taming of the maverick. The Hartford Courant greeted its publication at Christmas time 1881 with an editorial that echoed the sentiments of Susy Clemens: “Mark Twain has finally fulfilled the earnest hope of many of his best friends, in writing a book which has other and higher merits than can possibly belong to the most artistic expression of mere humor.” And in the New York Herald and the Boston Transcript, the Atlantic (under Aldrich, Howells’ successor), and the Century, the words “pure,” “lovely,” “subdued,” “delicate.” “refined,” and “ennobling” recurred as part of a grateful appreciation of just those qualities which any conventional romancer might be expected to possess: professional polish, descriptive power, neatness of plot construction, and an over-all correctness. Even the English reviews, as Clemens told his London publisher, Andrew Chatto, were “surprisingly complimentary.” �
�I am reading your Prince and Pauper for the fourth time,” Harriet Beecher Stowe was to tell Clemens in 1887, pressing his hands in hers and speaking with such fervor it brought the tears to his eyes, “and I know it is the best book for young folks that was ever written.”

  Howells, given his usual freedom to “slash away” at the proofs—he suggested deleting such objectionable words as “devil,” “hick,” and “basting”—gave the book a final reading in October 1881, a month or so after he had solicited from John Hay, who was managing the New York Tribune during Whitelaw Reid’s wedding trip in Europe, a commission to review the book. Howells’ unsigned review, twice as long as most in the paper, ran on October 25, two full months before publication, and as far as Clemens was concerned it served its purpose: it helped prepare the press and the public for his new incarnation as a writer of serious, morally sound romance. “That is the kind of review to have,” Clemens said happily, remembering the bitter episode with Hay and Reid over their grudging treatment of The Gilded Age. “The doubtful man, even the prejudiced man, is persuaded, and succumbs.”

  For Clemens there was nothing improper in having his adviser and editor act as his reviewer; Howells, whom he respected as a man of high literary ethics, had made a practice of it in the Atlantic and was never bothered by the conflict of roles. The Tribune review, moreover, was unsigned, and Howells had taken pains to explain to Hay that he wanted the commission so that he could have an opportunity to publicize the “unappreciated serious side of Clemens’ curious genius.” He believed he was performing a service to both the public and the Tribune, for which Reid had cultural aspirations. Yet John Hay, a more worldly and diplomatic man than either Clemens or Howells, realized that they were headed for trouble with Reid. He explained to Reid that Howells had asked for the commission and had argued that it would be a good thing for the Tribune if it set a pattern of recognizing new literary departures. “I took into account your disapproval of Mark in general and your friendship for Howells—and decided for the benefit of the Tribune,” Hay wrote on September 4. “If it does not please you—wait for his next book and get Bret Harte to review it. That will be a masterpiece of the skinner’s art.” (“Now, isn’t that outspoken and hearty, and just like that splendid John Hay?” Clemens, all unsuspecting, had written to Howells in December 1874.)