Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  * This children’s performance, combined with a passage (from Chapter 51 of Life on the Mississippi) about “a couple of young Englishmen” who “got themselves up in cheap royal finery” and “did” the swordfight from Richard III, ends up in the program given by the Duke and the King in their “Shakespearean Revival” in Chapters 20 and 21 of Huckleberry Finn.

  * Clemens eventually got a patent for his game apparatus in 1885, and in 1891 his own publishing house, which was already shaky on its feet, went one step further toward bankruptcy and brought out “Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates.” It consisted of a board, a small pamphlet of “facts,” and a box of straight pins.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Our great Century”

  I

  ON A WEEKDAY MORNING in mid-February 1884, tired out after a winter’s work, Clemens declared a half holiday for himself and lingered over his breakfast steak and coffee with his house guest, George Washington Cable. Cable was close to overstaying his welcome. While passing through Hartford on a reading tour two and a half weeks earlier, he had developed a fever and racking pains in his lower jaw, and he had been an invalid at Farmington Avenue since. Even though the three Clemens children and the private nurse hired to take care of him all came down with the mumps not long after, Cable maintained that whatever he had was noncommunicable, probably just neuralgia. The seeds of Clemens’ profound disgruntlement with him were already planted. Privately Clemens blamed him for the mumps epidemic and told Ned House that Cable complained altogether too much about his pains—“Lord, if I dared laugh as I want to laugh—but Mrs. Clemens would kill me.” And later Clemens refused to deny published rumors that Cable had demanded a steady flow of champagne and tried to duck out of his medical bills. “Don’t give yourself any discomfort about the slander of a professional newspaper liar,” he wrote to Cable in May 1885, after having been asked for the second time to discredit a particularly demeaning account of their personal differences. “Why, my dear friend, flirt it out of your mind,” he concluded, disingenuously—for while soothing Cable he was also writing reminders to himself to “tell the truth” about Cable and about one other house guest, Bret Harte. But whatever his resentments of Cable were to be, Clemens admired him as a writer and social thinker, and Cable repaid his admiration in kind. They had in common a passionate interest in the shadings of spoken vernacular, a histrionic talent, a deep-grained but liberalized Southernness, and an outspoken humanitarianism. That morning in February they talked with an intensity and a shared concern that overshadowed all their differences, present and future.

  In the library after breakfast Clemens sat smoking his yellow corncob pipe, one slippered foot flung over the arm of his chair, his chin cradled in his right hand. As they talked, Cable could see coming out on Clemens’ face the vivid pink spots that meant his mind was racing along with excitement, and soon they were both on their feet, pacing up and down and across the library floor, Cable a tiny man weighing a hundred pounds or so, Clemens, by a contrast that was to jog and delight their audiences when they appeared together on lecture platforms, seeming to be six feet tall. They stopped a moment to watch a strange bird hopping in the wan sunlight outside the window, tried to identify it in Clemens’ Audubon, went back to their pacing. They talked, Cable wrote to his wife later that day, “about our great Century and the vast advantages of living in it—the glory and beauty of it.” Clemens’ brave world was still new, he had not yet been betrayed by the machine, nor had he composed his sad and sardonic farewells to what he called “the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.” In his lifetime alone, he believed, the human race had made more progress toward achieving its full stature than in any five centuries in history, and he celebrated the advance of technology and medicine, the toppling of the monarchies and the triumph of democracy, the emancipation of serf and slave.

  They talked for hours that morning. Only once did Clemens become “ferocious and funny,” Cable recalled, and that was when he came to his favorite subject of publishers who swindled him. “Oh,” Clemens groaned, contemplating some ideal revenge, “if it could be, I could lie in my grave with my martial cloak around me and kick my monument over and laugh and laugh.” Then he was at the piano singing “Tannenbaum” in German, banging the bass notes hard with one finger, while Cable followed the tune in his high tenor. The January 1885 issue of the Century magazine was a commemoration of such fellowship as this between two writers at the peak of their powers, for that bastion of intellectual respectability carried both an installment of Huckleberry Finn and Cable’s “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” a demand, stated in terms of legal and moral imperatives, for full civil equality for the Negro. Cable’s position, which he stated in other reform articles, inevitably made him a pariah in the South. Clemens acknowledged Cable’s courage and correctness; he himself had already, as his part of “the reparation due from every white to every black man,” put a Negro student through Yale, and was determined to make this reparation in other ways, including small courtesies, reading at Negro churches, and interceding with Garfield on behalf of Frederick Douglass. There were certain residual attitudes, however, which he could never shake. He had a Negro butler, he explained to Howells, because he did not like to give orders to a white man, and with some anxiety he said that in a hundred years there would be Negro supremacy in America, the “whites under foot.”

  Out of Clemens’ mind that morning also sprang one of his innumerable collaborative schemes. He, Cable, Howells, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and one or two others were each to write a long story based on the same characters and roughly the same situations. As Cable recognized, this “little literary scheme” bore a family resemblance not only to The Ring and the Book, which Clemens would soon be explicating for the ladies of his Browning circle, but also to another kind of scheme which they talked about that morning. Clemens had been thinking about his “travelling menagerie” for several years; the plans called for Howells, Aldrich, Joel Chandler Harris, and Cable, with Clemens as both impresario and star, to live in a private railroad car served by a private cook and to go around the country reading from their works on a tour which was bound to make them all rich, fat, and happy. By one o’clock, when Livy made her first appearance of the day and called them in to lunch, Cable’s head was spinning with possibilities. Three days later Mark Twain, the great projector, was still working his spell on him. They were in New York, riding uptown in a carriage from their hotel near Union Square and on their way to 3 East Sixtieth Street to call on General Grant—“whom Mark knows well,” Cable noted admiringly—to ask him if he would preside at “a big show for the relief of the Ohio River overflow sufferers,” the entertainment to be provided by Mark Twain, Cable, and Henry Ward Beecher.

  “If the book business interferes with the dramatic business, drop the former—for it doesn’t pay salt,” Clemens instructed Charley Webster at the beginning of January 1884. Only a few months later, after a disagreement with Osgood over costs, Clemens set Charley up in the book business, as Charles L. Webster and Company, to publish Huckleberry Finn and the rest of Mark Twain’s works. But all that winter, even though he was making elaborate preparations to bring out his book, he was in the throes of a hopeless passion for a seductive but totally incompatible Muse. The stage obsessed him, as it did Henry James, Howells, and Bret Harte, and it exhausted him. Despite mounting evidence that he had little talent for either dramatic plotting or stage management, Clemens persisted in believing that the theater, like a bonanza mining strike, would yield him a maximum of income from a ludicrous minimum of effort. He dramatized Tom Sawyer, only to have it turned down by Augustin Daly, the leading producer of the day who had already staged Roughing It as well as Ah Sin. “Tom might be played by a clever comedian as a boy,” Daly wrote to him that February, “but the other parts would seem ridiculous in grown people’s hands.” (Three years later Clemens himself deci
ded that no one could put that celebration of youth on the stage—“One might as well dramatize any other hymn.”) That February also he applied for a dramatic copyright on his adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper, but the only stage this version saw was the makeshift one in the carriage house at Farmington Avenue. Even Howells had not bothered to soften his disapproval. The play was “altogether too thin and slight,” he said; it lacked life and incident, it was only half as long as it should have been, “and the parlance is not sufficiently ‘early English.’” Clemens began a novel set in the Sandwich Islands, piled his billiard table high with source books, and tacked his notes all over the walls, but even before he had an outline of the book he was talking dramatization to Howells, who, for all his realistic appraisal of a script, was generally just as beguiled by the theater and by his own fancied talent for it. Together he and Clemens also planned an abolitionist melodrama and a play set in the time of Oliver Cromwell, and all through the winter, spring, and summer they followed with dismay, befuddlement, and exasperation Charley Webster’s desperate campaign to negotiate with the original Mulberry Sellers, the actor John T. Raymond, a production of their joint play, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist. “If the play is altered and made longer I should be pleased to read it again,” Raymond finally said in September; he was certain that “in its present form it would not prove successful.” “Never mind about the play,” Howells said wearily to Clemens. “We had fun writing it any way.”

  Such discouragements prefigured worse to come. After having had gout during the spring (“I suppose this comes from high living when I was a boy,” he told Osgood,“—corn-dodgers and catfish”), Clemens was spending a couple of hours every other morning that July writhing in the dentist’s chair in Elmira, having his teeth scaled, “gouged out and stuffed.” He sent away for personal narratives of Indian fighters and plainsmen—he was planning a novel about Tom and Huck out West among the Indians “40 or 50 years ago”; but nothing came of the idea except a few chapters. It had been a lost summer, he told Charley in September; “I haven’t a paragraph to show for my 3-months’ working season.” That summer he had often seemed to be considerably more interested in a “perpetual calendar” he had developed. He optioned a half interest in a patented “bed clamp” meant to keep children from kicking off their sheets and blankets at night, presumably when they had bad dreams. Then he discovered that the bed clamp was too cheap to yield a decent profit margin, and he “invented” one that was “more expensive and more convenient.” Hardly any of his investments had been anything but a disaster. Paige and his typesetting machine clamored for more attention, more time, always more money. Clemens already had a considerable amount tied up in manufacturing Huckleberry Finn and in supporting a publishing house which had nothing else to publish as yet; the drain was to go on through the beginning of 1885. He was feeling the old money pinch again. He could not afford to go to Europe, as he had vaguely planned in the spring—he had to stay home and earn some money. He even had to put off paying two thousand he owed to Howells for work on the Library of Humor. “I am like everybody else—everything tied up in properties that cannot be sold except at fearful loss,” he apologized to Howells at the end of June. “It has been the roughest twelve-month I can remember, for losses, ill luck, and botched business.” A week later he decided that to recoup his losses he would have to go back on tour again, but this time not alone. “I want good company on the road and at the hotels,” he later told a reporter. “A man can start out alone and rob the public, but it’s dreary work and a cold-blooded thing to do.” His companion and fellow performer was to be Cable, and their joint tour—an abridged, austerity version of the grandly conceived “travelling menagerie”—was to begin in November.

  Clemens had been rocked out of prosperity by one of the systolic events that set the life rhythm of the Gilded Age. For him and many of his contemporaries, no fewer than fourteen of the years between 1873 and 1897—the period of his own economic rise and fall—seemed to have been either “recession” or “depression” years. The little panic of 1884 distempered the nation’s business and doubled the rate of bank failures. Even the canny and conservative financier Russell Sage, caught short for once in his career, lost seven million dollars in a few days’ time. General Grant’s stockbroking firm failed early in May, and the Marine Bank collapsed under the weight of Grant and Ward’s overdrafts. The General, who a few days earlier had reckoned his assets at over two million dollars, discovered, at the age of sixty-two, that his partner had picked him so clean that the Grant family could put together only $180 in cash on the parlor table at Sixtieth Street. The Union commander and eighteenth President of the United States, a dupe in business as well as in politics, was paying the butcher and the baker with rubber checks. Soon after this humiliation, when he was beginning to fail in health, he was to write a book which would link his life pattern to Mark Twain’s once and for all. For the General’s Personal Memoirs, which he wrote to get his family out of bankruptcy, earned so much money that Mark Twain, his publisher as well as his friend, was encouraged—in terms of his bonanza psychology, compelled—to extend himself in bigger and bigger ventures until, ten years after the panic of 1884, he found himself a bankrupt, too, the victim of his own success. And again because of this, ten years after the money pinch forced him to take to the road with Cable, he had to plan another tour, this time around the world, a voyaging which became for him the sign and symbol of despair.

  “I think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of some vast creature’s veins,” Clemens wrote in his notebook that August, “and it is that vast creature that God concerns himself about and not us.” Like the tragic figures in some of the stories he was later to begin but never finish, he spent hours at the eyepiece of his English brass microscope. Its objective was focused on a drop of rainwater or of blood; its mirror cast upward the harsh glare of his gas lamp. His fantasies of pluralities of worlds, of intolerable disparities in time and size and distance, of a dark area where dream and reality meet and shatter each other, embraced a growing despair and confusion and prefigured the decline of his powers as a writer. The miscroscope, the dream, the voyage became dominant symbols of a great hopelessness that existed side by side with his faith in the great century. The summer before, he had made notes for a story about life in the interior of an iceberg which drifts in a vast circle year after year for 130 years, by which time generations of people inside are dead and frozen; he would return to this theme after Susy died. In January 1885, as if anticipating just such a loss, he translated into English the last part of a German prose version of “The Pied Piper.” He called this episode “The Great Loneliness”; the mothers wake out of sleep, push open the doors of their children’s rooms, see that the beds are still empty and always will be, call out in a last hope, and then turn away—“Ah, dear God, if it could have been but a dream.”

  II

  During those barren summer months at Quarry Farm Clemens was also occupied with the unfamiliar challenge of his imminent reading tour. In a laggard response to Charles Dickens’ last visit to America, the vogue had shifted from the humorous lecture, which Clemens had mastered after a long apprenticeship, to the “author’s reading,” a semidramatic form with its own set of demands and conventions which he had to learn almost from scratch. He aimed to make writing sound like talk, but in order to do this and create the illusion of a man telling a story instead of just reading it, he had to modify as well as memorize the printed word; it was the audience that had to be watched, not the page. And by now Clemens was entrepreneur as well as platform artist, and through the summer and fall he sent out a flood of impresario instructions to Charley, who negotiated the contracts for the tour, and to Redpath’s successor, Major James B. Pond, veteran of long tours with Henry Ward Beecher and with Ann Eliza, nineteenth wife of Brigham Young. Out of the proceeds Pond was to pay Cable $450 a week plus expenses and to get ten per cent of the profits himself; the rest was to go to Cle
mens. For although Pond billed them as “Twins of Genius,” and Clemens said that Pond was the “boss and head ring-master,” there was no doubt about who the real boss was. The programs had to be planned, Clemens insisted, not to exceed two hours, including laughter and applause; the time was to be divided so that he had the edge over Cable. As the tour progressed, in fact, every minute Cable was on stage became something of an agony for his partner, and their constant fiddling with the program began to reflect not just accumulated knowledge of their audience but also a naked contest between two hungry egos. “He keeps his programs strung out to one hour, in spite of all I can do,” Clemens was soon complaining. “I am thinking of cutting another of his pieces.” His own readings included “advance sheets” of Huckleberry Finn, but even this sort of promotion was in general tempered by a shrewd public-relations strategy. “I may possibly get up one or two original things for the series,” he told Pond at the end of July, “but I shan’t want the fact mentioned that they are new. I think it dangerous policy to let the people suppose we need any attraction but just our names alone.” No detail escaped him, from the printed programs, which had to be small enough to be useless as fans and stiff enough not to rattle, to “vast red posters” bearing the single line, “MARK TWAIN—CABLE.” His promotional as well as his artistic judgment turned out to be correct, for despite lean times that followed the panic, the fifteen-week tour was to earn him seventeen thousand dollars and Cable six thousand.