Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  The decision did not please Reid. “It isn’t good journalism,” he wrote from Vienna on September 25, “to let a warm personal friend and in some matters literary partner, write a critical review of him in a paper which has good reason to think little of his delicacy and highly of his greed.” And with the recollection of the Gilded Age episode still fresh in his mind, he concluded: “As you remember, we agreed, years ago, a new book by Twain is not (as he modestly suggested) a literary event of such importance that it makes much difference whether we have our dear friend Howells write the review, or whether indeed we have any review.” But it was too late. Howells, whose good will Hay and Reid valued, had already been commissioned.

  Confidential though this correspondence was, some notion of its drift reached Charles Dudley Warner by the editorial grapevine. In a rash moment Warner cautiously “intimated,” as Clemens told Howells, “that the N. Y. Tribune was engaged in a kind of crusade against me.” Following up this intimation, Clemens questioned other friends, who told him that as soon as Reid returned from abroad in November the Tribune had begun to fling a series of sneers, insults, and brutalities his way—some said frequently, others said “almost daily.” Someone told him Osgood was worried that these “constant and pitiless” attacks would destroy his reputation. But Osgood had real cause to worry when Clemens told him that the sequel to The Prince and the Pauper was going to be the “dynamitic” biography of Whitelaw Reid that he had been contemplating for a couple of years. In the spirit of vendetta he was working day and night collecting material and taking notes; he had researchers at work in England; for three hours in New York he spewed out his rage to a stenographer. He, was going to write a book, he said, “which the very devils and angels would delight to read, and which would draw disapproval from nobody but the hero of it, (and Mrs. Clemens, who is bitter against the whole thing).”

  While the reviewers were praising his new delicacy and refinement, Clemens was filling page after page of his notebooks with the rubrics of his great revenge: “skunk,” “idiot,” “eunuch,” “missing link,” “receiver of stolen goods,” “property of Jay Gould,” “Guiteau with the courage left out,” “chased after all the rich girls in California” (Reid’s new bride was the daughter of Darius Ogden Mills, the California mogul), “Grant calls him Outlaw Reid.” The preface was going to be simply a compilation—which he would get around to making by and by—of Reid’s slurs and sneers at Clemens from 1873 on. Howells, hearing the news of the impending holocaust from Osgood, who begged him to intervene, decided to remain strictly neutral. “I did not know how you would take unprovoked good intentions from me,” he explained to Clemens on January 20, and he used precisely the same reasoning which Clemens habitually used with Orion: “I believe you will be sick of the thing long before you reach the printing point.”

  After three weeks of frenzied involvement with this biography which Clemens was sure would wipe Reid off the face of the earth, a touch of cold reality was introduced in the form of a suggestion, apparently from Livy, that before he went any further it might be well for him to look up these “almost daily insults.” So far the revenge machine had been running on hearsay only. As a start, he subscribed to the Tribune and read it daily. On January 21 he instructed Webster, who was already supervising more business affairs than he was able to handle (including several litigations and all the bills for remodeling the house), to “put in an hour or two” and “quietly copy off and send to me every remark which the Tribune has made about me since the end of October up to the present date.” An air of autocratic unreality, like Lear commanding the hurricane, now enveloped the project. Four days later, disappointed by what Webster had culled from three months of the paper, Clemens asked John Russell Young of the Herald to investigate. Young’s findings were the same as Webster’s: four minor items, critical but not malicious, no crusade, just a “prodigious bugaboo.” “What the devil can those friends of mine have been thinking about?” Clemens asked ruefully as he abandoned the biography to which he had devoted three weeks of intense work and total attention. This spurt of creativity, misguided and fruitless like many of Orion’s enthusiasms, was followed by the inevitable fallow period of visiting and entertaining, getting deeper and deeper into business, working on the Library of Humor. Clemens calculated, in a characteristic way, that he could have earned ten thousand dollars in those three weeks and with infinitely less trouble, if only he had had the motivation. “I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf,” he said to Howells, resigning himself to the less than mouse his mountain had produced, “to be willing to work for anything but love.”

  III

  In search of love he left Hartford in mid-April 1882. “After twenty-one years’ absence,” he was to write later that year in Life on the Mississippi, “I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there.” Ever since his piloting articles in the Atlantic seven years before, he had intended, given suitable company (he wanted Hay or Howells), to go back to the river and collect enough new material to make a book. The subscription book, by which he lived, was making its usual demands on him. What he had to do was take a three-hundred-page series, already seven years old, and make a six-hundred-page book of it. And, as he soon discovered, the trouble was that the original three hundred pages, for all their apparent factuality, had been a work of the imagination, an attempt to recapture the past; the new material was by and large a chore, a work of travel journalism, an attempt to document the present. Eventually, after believing that “the powers of earth and hell are leagued against it,” he managed to finish Life on the Mississippi. Then he dismissed it as “this wretched Goddamned book.” This was to be expected. What was unexpected and showed once again the vagrant but also purposive workings of his creative process was that his river trip and his struggles to finish his river book were directly related to the finishing of Huckleberry Finn, itself the child of six years of sporadic inspiration.

  The Atlantic piloting articles as well as Tom Sawyer were Mark Twain’s celebrations of life and adventure in the South before the Civil War. The second part of Life on the Mississippi, with its constant reminders of the decline of piloting and steamboating from their former glory, and the last two thirds of Huckleberry Finn are the work of a matured and more reflective Mark Twain who has not yet taken the final turn in his road toward cynicism and despair. Even before leaving on his 1882 river trip he had begun to attack the South and to tell himself what he expected to find. The South was poverty-stricken, barren of any progress, he wrote in his notebook. Except in the arts of war, murder, and massacre, the South had contributed nothing. It had no architecture, it was sophomoric, its speech was “flowery and gushy.” (By the time he finished the book he had worked up such a rage against the South that Osgood asked him to omit certain chapters and passages as offensive and damaging to Southern sales.) And along with this growing disenchantment with his homeland came recollections of loss, violence, and dread: Henry Clemens, scalded to death; the tramp who burned to death in the village jail; men shot down or stabbed on the streets of Hannibal; a slave man struck down with a chunk of slag for some small offense. In his age as well as his youth, these recollections filled his nights with remorse.

  Getting ready for his Southern trip, Clemens put away the Library of Humor books that littered his billiard room on the third floor, reminded himself to buy some whiskey flasks and to bring enough cigars and pipe tobacco for the trip (he attributed his good health to the fact that he took no exercise, drank in the morning and again in the evening, and smoked continuously, with all his might when he was working). In New York on April 17 he made a careful inventory, including certificate numbers, of the $110,000 in securities he kept in a box at the Mount Morris Bank. The next morning he left for St. Louis on the Pennsylvania’s eight-o’clock train. With him were Osgood and a Hartford stenographer, Roswell Phelps, hired at a hundred dollars a month and expenses to take d
own not only Clemens’ travel impressions but also, inevitably, reminders of the business turmoil he left behind: a letter to Charley Webster suggesting litigation to recover some of the scrapbook royalties, a letter advising a certain R. E. Elliott, Esq., that the American Publishing Company was not a reliable concern, inasmuch as on one book alone the late Elisha Bliss had swindled the undersigned out of twenty-five thousand dollars.

  From the start Clemens was oppressed by a sense of change and loss. The levee at St. Louis, once packed solid with steamboats, was empty now except for half a dozen, their fires banked or dead. The pilot and the steamboat man were heroes no longer—in the old days, he said, the pilot was “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.” The young men in river towns who used to delight in repeating the names of the gaudy, smoke-plumed boats that passed each day now rolled on their tongues the names of railroads. Even the sight of a steamboat named Mark Twain, tied up inside the wooded mouth of the Obion River, did not relieve the general air of desolation—it was the only steamboat he saw that day. The second day out of St. Louis, on board the packet Gold Dust bound for New Orleans, Clemens tried to pass himself off in the pilothouse as a credulous visitor. He was recognized right away. The pilot remembered his voice, remembered his habit of passing his fingers through his hair, and, as a punishment, put him at the wheel. The pilothouse was as familiar to him as if he had never left it. It was the river that had changed, Clemens said. It was “as brand new as if it had been built yesterday,” and there were new islands, landings, towns. The changing river had cut away the banks at Parker’s Bend where Sam Bowen, Will’s brother, was buried and had washed his grave away. All that now remained of the wondrous pilot knowledge and pilot memory that Sam Clemens had acquired under Horace Bixby, who taught him the river, was a landsman’s skill in remembering names and addresses.

  In Concord on April 27, 1882, four weeks and six days after Longfellow, died Ralph Waldo Emerson, long remote from the world of the living. Two of the three “gracious singers” were dead, and along with the old order were passing the centers of literary vitality. In New Orleans in late April and early May, while New England mourned, Mark Twain and two other masters of Southern vernacular, George Washington Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, were meeting in friendship and festivity. At thirty-seven, Cable, a tiny mandarin-looking man, was “the South’s finest literary genius,” said Clemens, who liked and admired him so much that he went along on Cable’s usual Sunday round of sermons and church services. “I got nearer to heaven than I hope I ever shall again,” Clemens said about the Sunday he spent with Cable in New Orleans. During the day, Harris arrived from Atlanta, where he was an editor on the Constitution, and Clemens called on him at his hotel. They had never met, although a year earlier they had corresponded and exchanged versions of the Negro ghost story Clemens told as “The Golden Arm.” According to Clemens, Harris, whose first collection of Uncle Remus stories had been published in 1880 and became one of the best sellers of the decade, was “the only master” of Negro dialect. Monday afternoon they all spent together at Cable’s red-and-olive cottage, surrounded by orange trees and a garden, on Eighth Street, on the lip of the Garden District. A crowd of children had come to see their beloved old Uncle Remus, who disappointed them, because he turned out to be white, young, rather Irish-looking, and, even with a three-year-old in his lap, still too shy to read his stories. To console the children, Clemens and Cable talked about Brer Rabbit, told “The Tar Baby,” and read some of their own work. In the evening the festivities continued at the house of James Guthrie, a friend of Cable’s. There was piano music by some young ladies, Cable sang a Creole song, Clemens read from The Innocents Abroad and some unpublished travel sketches, Guthrie recited Shakespeare, and two of Guthrie’s children, a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl, played Romeo and Juliet in the balcony scene. “I have never seen anything that moved me more,” Clemens wrote to Livy. The children had performed with “perfect simplicity and unconsciousness” and they “required prompting only once.”*

  This day of love-feasting climaxed a stay in New Orleans which Clemens, exhilarated and tireless, described for Livy as “a whirlpool of hospitality.” Despite his hostility to the South and to much of its culture, which he said was a feudalistic sham borrowed out of Walter Scott, it was still his South he had come back to, a region but also a background and experience he could never wholly share with Livy. His days began early with social breakfasts and ended late at night after rounds of banqueting on pompano and crayfish and soft-shell crabs. He explored the French Quarter with Cable as his guide, attended mule races and cockfights, went on a visit to an ice factory and an excursion on Lake Ponchartrain. He left New Orleans on May 6, having waited until then so that he could make the trip upriver with Horace Bixby, now captain of the resplendent City of Baton Rouge. From the crowd of friends and admirers standing near the gangplank stepped a young man who said, “I have not read all of your writings, Mr. Twain, but I think I like ‘The Heathen Chinee’ best of all.” According to Cable, the young man’s wits had been rattled by the excitement of meeting Mr. Twain. But the compliment was not wasted. “A thousand thanks,” Clemens said heartily, taking his hand. The young man replied, “You are perfectly welcome. I am sure you deserve it.”

  He saved for the end of his Southern trip a three-day visit to Hannibal. He arrived on a still Sunday morning. The town seemed deserted. “Everything was changed,” he noted, “but when I reached Third or Fourth street the tears burst forth, for I recognized the mud.” He was to say in Life on the Mississippi that he felt that morning like a prisoner seeing Paris again after years of captivity in the Bastille. The scenes of his Hannibal boyhood liberated him as a writer from the captivity of prosperous middle age in his house in Hartford, itself a kind of Bastille which he sometimes wished could be razed to the ground. He climbed Holliday’s Hill again and looked out over the drowsing white town. Inevitably Master Wattie’s question about being a boy again came back to him, and with it came his own nagging sense of unreality in the face of change. Years later, after he had tasted failure and loss, he would ask, Which was the dream—the hideous present or the remembered past? But now, in the confidence of his forty-sixth year and on the eve of his greatest fulfillment as a writer, it was still possible to move from present to past and back again, to move in and out of the dream. The Pauper, after all, is a bad dream from which the Prince awakens, but the Connecticut Yankee, only six or seven years later, will not have this freedom—his dream of ruined chivalry and self-destroyed technology has become the addled reality from which he cannot escape. In Hannibal, Mark Twain could believe he was a boy again, a boy who had never left the town in 1853 to set out on his travels but instead had a dream twenty-nine years long about growing up. He woke up each morning a boy, but at night, after visiting with old friends who were rich or fat or grizzled and had children long since grown up and gone away, he went to bed feeling a hundred years old. “That world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and melancholy now,” he wrote to Livy. “It will be dust and ashes when I come again. I have been clasping hands with the moribund—and usually they say, ‘It is for the last time.’”

  He reached St. Paul after a “hideous trip.” May 21: it snowed, he lay in his bed at the Metropolitan Hotel homesick, hiding from the cold, waiting for the eastbound train. For once the reporters did not clamor for interviews with S. L. Clemens of Hartford, who had given up registering under some other name. They were much more interested in talking to a party of English peers led by the seventh Duke of Manchester—grand parallels to the titled rapscallions of Huckleberry Finn—who were passing through St. Paul on their way to Manitoba to look into some land speculations.

  IV

  In mid-June 1882, just as Clemens was about to leave Hartford for his summer’s work at Quarry Farm, the infant, Jean, came down with scarlet fever. The house was quarantined, and they unpacked the trunks and undid the elaborate prepa
rations for the trip. A few days later, Susy became delirious with some undiagnosed fever, and Clemens himself was laid up in bed with a fever and lumbago. All in all, the departure for Elmira was postponed about a month. During the following winter, when there was an epidemic of pneumonia in Hartford and the city’s death rate rose about thirty-five per cent over the season’s norm, Clemens had colds and rheumatism, Susy had scarlet fever, and they were quarantined again. After a fright that Clara had diphtheria, Livy not only came down with it but also had quinsy and high fever. By the end of the spring she was so emaciated. Clemens joked bitterly, “it’s been like sleeping with a bed full of baskets.” Eventually, dogged by chronic ill health in his family—he once remarked that two such highstrung people as he and Livy should probably never have had children—Clemens became something of a faddist, and he looked for miraculous cures through hydrotherapy, osteopathic manipulation, electric treatments, mind cure and mind science, health foods, and such homemade nostra as a daily shampoo with strong soap to keep his hair from falling out and a mixture of turpentine and scent to cure chilblains. He believed that he could cure myopia and astigmatism by abolishing eyeglasses, and in consequence he and Livy, Howells recalled, came “near losing their eyesight.” He kept grim inventories of his physical ailments, including hernia and chronic constipation. Susy was to die of meningitis; Jean’s pattern of physical and emotional disturbance was diagnosed finally as epilepsy; Clara had nervous breakdowns; and Livy had hyperthyroid heart disease. By the time all of this had become clear to him, during the last twenty years of his life, he had developed, with considerable justification, a sense of horrible nemesis.