Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  But in the early 1880s, even though he often felt he was running a hospital in his home, he was still able to find a kind of humor in it all. In his notebook he made a list of names for the characters in some fictional pathology he never got around to writing; among them were Gonorrhea Jackson, Pneumonia Bascom, Cancer Collins, Lockjaw Harris, and Rectum Jones. “Yes, sir,” he exclaimed to Cable after the terrible winter of 1882-83, “my poor wife must get sick, and have a pulse that ran up to 150 in the shade.” He had just been sick in bed, was finicky and anxious, and impatient with Cable, who wanted to go out without an overcoat in April and had said, “The air is full of a soft warm glow.” “Soft warm glow!” Clemens said. “It’s full of the devil!—the devil of pneumonia,” and he made Cable borrow an overcoat to wear for the few yards that lay between his house and Charles Dudley Warner’s, where Cable was staying. Two days later Clemens was able to bounce back completely. On April 4 he introduced Cable to a full house at Unity Hall and gave a party for him after the reading. The next morning, after Cable read for the Saturday Morning Club at Mary Perkins’ house, Clemens bubbled with delight and enthusiasm and praised him as a reader over Howells, Henry James, and Bret Harte. Then they went to a three-hour lunch.

  In all ways other than health the external conditions and the accidents of Clemens’ life were now as favorable as they would ever be. He was rich (although not so rich as Wattie Bowser imagined him to be); his business ventures, and failures, were constantly mounting in number and in cost, but they were still not the catastrophic drain on his resources and energies that they would soon become. He was still expanding in a carefree way. “Dear Charley,” he wrote on September 9, 1882, taking the next-to-last step toward starting his own publishing house, “I want you to be the General Agent for my New Book for the large district of which New York is the centre. I can make it pay us both.” The praise which The Prince and the Pauper brought him was given canonical form by Howells’ full-length critical essay in the Century magazine that September, an appraisal of Mark Twain’s total literary achievement in terms of his moral fervor, the “ethical intelligence” underlying his humor, and his strength and artistry as a storyteller. “I hope the public will be willing to see me with your eyes,” Clemens said in gratitude. The public, and others as well, were willing indeed. Thomas Hardy, his own reputation already firmly based on The Return of the Native, remarked at a London dinner party in 1883, “Why don’t people understand that Mark Twain is not merely a great humorist? He is a remarkable fellow in a very different way,” and Hardy went on to praise Life on the Mississippi.

  Clemens’ six-week trip of hail and farewell to Hannibal and the river gave him material and impetus for more than a year and a half of productive work on two books. In Life on the Mississippi he described Huckleberry Finn as “a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more.” The two books were by now symbiotic, and he used one to jog the other. (In 1885, by which time he had finished both of them, he planned a book in which Huck was to ship as a cabin boy on a steamboat; the book would enable Mark Twain to “put the great river and its bygone ways into history in the form of a story.”) His working notes for the two books overlapped, and while he was wrestling with Life on the Mississippi during the summer and fall of 1882—“I never had such a fight over a book in my life before,” he told Howells—he managed to make some progress on Huckleberry Finn. And, in turn, to pad out his river book to its inexorable subscription bulk he not only followed his usual practice of quoting extensively (in one long day’s work, from nine one morning until one the next, he added 9,500 words, most of them quotations from earlier travel writers), but also borrowed from the novel. Almost the whole of Chapter Three of Life on the Mississippi is the raftsmen’s chapter from Huckleberry Finn, seven thousand words or so, and he also adapted or rehearsed other material from the novel, including the feud and his period-piece description of the Grangerford parlor as the “house beautiful.”

  By January 1883, when the book was finally ready to be set in type, Clemens had cut about fifteen thousand words, most of the deletions reflecting Osgood’s fear that sentimental Northerners as well as loyal Southerners might find grounds for offense. Even so, there remained one more editorial hurdle. Howells was away in Europe, and Clemens now turned to Livy. She “has not edited the book yet,” he told Osgood in January, “and will of course not let a line of the proof go from her till she has read it and possibly damned it. But she says she will put aside everything else and give her entire time to the proofs.” Osgood’s role was getting smaller. He was accountable to his author, who was the sole financier of the publishing project. He was also, as he learned, accountable to Charley Webster, no mere general agent now but his uncle’s vicar in all publishing as well as business matters. “I will not interest myself in anything connected with this wretched God-damned book,” Clemens told Charley, and he ordered him to take charge. “We must give Webster all the thunder-and-lightning circulars and advertising enginery that is needful,” Clemens had instructed Osgood that January. “We must sell 100,000 copies of the book in 12 months, and shan’t want him complaining that we are the parties in fault if the sale falls short of it.” Now, with all these pressures on him, Osgood was ordered both to rush the book through and to wait for word from his author’s wife, whose changes in galley and page proof were likely to cost time as well as money. As it turned out, some of the changes Livy insisted on, though reasonable enough in terms of taste, were more troublesome than Osgood’s worst expectations. That May, with fifty thousand copies already printed and forty thousand of them bound, Osgood had to delete two illustrations which Livy objected to. One showed the author being cremated, with an urn initialed “M.T.” standing in the foreground to receive the ashes. The other showed a corpse in graveclothes, chopfallen and with staring eyes—“She says the chapter is plenty dreadful enough without,” Clemens told Osgood.

  It was to be more than sixty years before Life on the Mississippi approximated the 100,000-copy success that Clemens and Webster demanded for it. The scapegoat, inevitably and also with some justice, was Osgood, whose brief career as Mark Twain’s publisher was clearly coming to a close. Years later Clemens was to remember him as “one of the dearest and sweetest and loveliest human beings to be found on the planet anywhere.” But in December 1883, after the book had been out for half a year, Clemens put all the blame for what he considered its failure on Osgood. “The publisher who sells less than 50,000 copies of a book for me has merely injured me, he has not benefitted me,” and he charged that Osgood’s “apprenticeship” in the subtleties of subscription publishing had cost fifty thousand dollars on this book alone, not to mention The Prince and the Pauper. Nevertheless, despite the agonies he had writing it and despite its disappointing sales, the publication of Life on the Mississippi, eight years after he first began it as an Atlantic serial, was part of a constellation of circumstances which favored Mark Twain as he worked and flourished during the summer of 1883.

  That summer he achieved a state of creative euphoria in which all things seemed possible and, to a sufficient extent, actually were. The genius works in a dazzling darkness of his own which normal modes of explanation hardly penetrate, and to describe Mark Twain as he neared the age of forty-eight, one has to invoke the same rich symbols that occupied his imagination. This master of quotidian reality, whose life was a sort of love affair with the transient, gaudy satisfactions the Gilded Age offered him, was in the grip of the same benign and transcendent force that raised Grant and Joan of Arc from obscurity to greatness, gave a small man unsuspected strength, enabled Jack to kill the giant. Like the best of his literature, Mark Twain himself had his roots in myth and folklore, thought of himself as a prodigy of nature or an “unaccountable freak” like Halley’s comet, which had blazed over his birth in 1835 and which he expected to go out with when it returned. “Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool,”
he had written to Howells after the Whittier disaster, “—but then I am God’s fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.”

  Clemens took Livy, still “thin as a rail” after a hard winter, and his children and servants to Elmira in the middle of June by a private sleeping car on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Hudson. They stayed at Quarry Farm until mid-September. Six days a week, and sometimes Sundays, during these three months he hurried through breakfast and spent the entire day working in his study. His normal summer pace, he calculated, was four or five hours a day five days a week. Now he was working just about twice as long and as hard as he was accustomed to and doing “two seasons’ work in one,” and though he had brief spells of exhaustion, during which he would spend a day or two in bed reading and smoking, he was more robust than ever. In the euphoria of an immense release of creative energies his miseries and symptoms of the previous year vanished. To describe his own state he repeatedly used the same word, “booming,” that he used for entrepreneurial ventures, steamboats and rivers in full course, and anything splendid or grand (“We can just have booming times—they don’t have no school now,” Buck Grangerford tells Huck). “I’m booming these days,” Clemens wrote to Howells in July, “got health and spirits to waste—got an over-plus.” “The children are booming and my health is ridiculous.” “I haven’t had such booming working-days for many years,” he told his mother. “This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie.” In a surge of creation which, he recognized, was unique in his experience, he finished Huckleberry Finn and began revising it, a job on which he continued to work enthusiastically, although intermittently, during the following winter and spring. And instead of being dubious about his novel, as he was in 1876, when he thought he might “pigeon-hole or burn the MS when it is done,” he proclaimed his enthusiasm for it. “I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not,” he told Howells even before he finished, and in September, with a finished manuscript on his table, he wrote to Andrew Chatto, “I’ve just finished writing a book, and modesty compels me to say it’s a rattling good one, too.”

  That summer was the high point of his creative life—at the end of the next summer he complained that he did not have a paragraph to show for three months of work—but, like microtomized tissue, it both recapitulated and predicted his entire career. Huckleberry Finn, which had fought him to a standstill several times during the previous seven years, fitted into a characteristic mosaic of other projects and preoccupations, literary and unclassifiable, to which, incongruously, he seemed to give equal enthusiasm and energy. In the ecstasy of booming along at the rate of three or four thousand words at a sitting he became self-intoxicated to the point of having the blind staggers about his own work. More or less concurrently, he finished two books that summer. One was his masterpiece. The other was something quite different, a burlesque continuation of the Arabian Nights on the thousand-and-second night of which Scheherazade, lying in bed with King Shahriyar, is talking him to sleep; in literary terms, she is really talking him to death. But Clemens was so taken with this new book that, as he told Charley Webster, he wanted it published “right after Huck.” Confronted with the manuscript of this numbing extravaganza, Howells felt himself just as much a victim of Scheherazade’s “prolixity” as the King and was nothing if not frank. “It was not your best or your second-best,” he told Clemens, who eventually put the manuscript away in his archive of false starts and exhausted inspirations. Other, equally misbegotten schemes occupied him that summer. Through Charley Webster he planned to manufacture and put on sale sixty dozen pairs of grape scissors of a type invented and patented by Howells’ father. Joe Goodman interested him in investing in California vineyards. He was in danger for a while of being involved in Captain Duncan’s libel suit against the New York Times. He was storing up ideas for a play, which he wrote that fall with Howells, in which Colonel Sellers, now become a scientist and an American Claimant, capered around the stage equipped with wings and, as a firm believer in homeopathic principles, with a fire extinguisher full of Greek fire strapped to his back. Among other projected literary works was a burlesque account of the Second Advent in which Paddy Ryan and some other disciples talked in a music-hall brogue.

  On July 18, after three and a half weeks of “booming along” on his two mismatched books, Clemens had a premonition of overwork, quit for the day, and, characteristically, gave himself entirely over to something altogether different but also, as he found it in his high mood, equally absorbing. On this idyllic summer day, with Susy, Clara, and Jean by his side, he measured off with a yardstick 817 feet on the winding driveway that ran up the hillside. Then, using as markers pegs which he whittled and drove himself, he measured out on the scale of one foot per year all the reigns of the English rulers from William the Conqueror on. His idea was to amuse and instruct his children by teaching them history (as he regarded such collections of dates and facts) by the running foot. Standing in the door of the farmhouse and surveying history, they could see 1066 near the foot of the hill and, with opera glasses, the forty-sixth year of Victoria’s reign uphill, past his study. The game at first consisted of running past the markers, calling out the names and dates of the rulers, and trying to reach 1883 first and with fewest mistakes. The following night, however, Mark Twain’s demon sprang on this innocent pastime. Lying in bed, churning with the idea, Clemens devised a way of playing this game indoors, on a cribbage board with pins and cards. He began to see it as a commercial venture which, patented and manufactured, would sweep the world with his own mania for facts (“I never care for fiction or story books,” he told Kipling in 1889. “What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind”).

  The next day he fired off the news of his invention in several directions. “The reason it took me eight hours,” he wrote to Twichell, “was because with little J’s interrupting assistance, I had to measure from the Conquest to the end of Henry VI. three times over,” and he outlined his plans for the indoor version. Soon Orion, never hard to inflame, was at work collecting all kinds of facts and dates and working on the typographical problems of designing a board for the game. Webster too got the news and was ordered to drop his other responsibilities and rush up to Elmira “for a couple of hours”—the round trip might have taken up the better part of two days—to discuss patents and manufacturing. Twichell quickly got himself in deep trouble with his friend, for in a moment of boyish indiscretion he had given Clemens’ description of the game to the Courant, which published it. Other papers, in Boston and New York, picked up the story, and Howells felt that he had to counsel Clemens to “patent it or copyright it before someone else gets hold of it.” Twichell “not only made me feel ridiculous,” Clemens said to him, “but he broke up and ruined a fine large plan of mine,” part of which was to publish a small illustrated book about the game. Even so Clemens was not discouraged. He was back pacing and repacing his driveway, whittling and hammering new pegs and stakes, working on the board and the pins and the cards, filling his notebooks with lists of other categories of fact and date that the game could be played with, including authors, geography, Irish history, religion, and the rulers of France.* He even considered imposing a three-point penalty on the player who stumbled over Judas Iscariot or—his animosities faded very slowly—Whitelaw Reid: “It is called being smirched.”

  Even in the booming summer of 1883 this exuberant plunge displayed his fatal addiction, which he observed with an amused and angry eye in Orion, to drowning his important goals and also his judgment in some 180-proof, hypomanic tipple of speculation. He was in the grip of a compulsion to think and act always in terms of exploitation and profits; even a game intended to teach chronology to little girls had to become a commercial venture right away. This is not to say that Mark Twain could have written another Huckleberry Finn or two in the time and with the energy he gave to such ventures. But these ventures eroded and colored his literary interests, and by trapping him into such irreversible in
volvements as his publishing house and the Paige typesetter they ofen made any writing, of any quality, next to impossible. In 1883, however, Mark Twain was still able to put Huckleberry Finn aside in favor of his history game and, in the plenitude of his creative powers, come back to his book later and finish it. The door was still open, the future ahead of him. History was still only a “game.”

  * Since 1873, when he first mentioned the idea to Edwin Booth, Clemens had been unable to solve a problem of propriety: how to write a burlesque of Hamlet without altering the text. His solution was to invent an extra character who made humorous comments on the other characters but was totally ignored by them. The character he hit upon after talking with Howells was a subscription book salesman named Basil Stockmar (the last name borrowed from Victoria and Albert’s éminence gris) whose mother was supposed to have been Hamlet’s wet nurse. “They’re on the high horse all the time,” Basil mutters about court life at Elsinore. “They swell around, and talk the grandest kind of book-talk, and look just as if they were on exhibition.” Howells, customarily cautious and decorous, predicted “a great triumph” for Basil the book agent, but the project soon died. Clemens eventually believed that the author of Hamlet was not William Shakespeare of Stratford, who was just another claimant.