Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  With Livy in the audience, Clemens and Cable opened in New Haven on November 5. A week later, after polishing their performance in Melrose, Lowell, and Waltham, they were in Boston, their first major city, reading at the Music Hall. “You were as much yourself before those thousands as if you stood by my chimney corner,” Howells said in admiration. “You are a great artist, and you do this public thing so wonderfully well that I don’t see how you could ever bear to give it up.” Livy wrote to him, not yet recognizing how such comparisons fed his resentment of Cable: “Mr. Charles Warner said the other evening that he enjoyed your reading so much more than Mr. Cable’s, because it was so much more natural.” And many others, including Hamlin Garland, then a young student of elocution in Boston, were also struck by this chimney-corner naturalness, which was actually a triumph of actor’s artifice and a deliberately heightened contrast to Cable’s stylized, dramatic, somewhat stagy manner. Mark Twain lounged about the platform solemnly (Cable said that only once during their 104 performances had he seen him smile), coughed dryly from time to time, wrung his hands, passed them through his hair, stroked his chin, pulled at his mustache, and, lulled by his own long drawl and buzz-saw voice, seemed to be half asleep only an instant before he sprang those nubs and snappers which made his audience “jump out of their skins,” he told Livy, after which his ears rang with “a long roll of artillery laughter” punctuated by “Congreve rockets and bomb-shell explosions.” It was after tasting such invincibility that at the end of a reading on Tuesday evening, November 18, in New York, he embarked on a venture which, in its meanings and consequences for him, dwarfed the successes and the problems of his tour with Cable.

  Dictating his autobiography in 1906, Clemens provided the event with the atmosphere of a Poe story:

  I had been lecturing in Chickering Hall and was walking homeward. It was a rainy night and but few people were about. In the midst of a black gulf between lamps, two dim figures stepped out of a doorway and moved along in front of me. I heard one of them say, “Do you know General Grant has actually determined to write his memoirs and publish them? He has said so today, in so many words.” That was all I heard—just those words—and I thought it great good luck that I was permitted to overhear them.

  As a matter of fact, however, Grant, who was desperate for money, had been talking about his book since early September with Roswell Smith and Richard Watson Gilder (one of the “two dim figures”), both of the Century. He agreed in principle to give them the book for trade publication when he finished it, and he even declared himself to be “very disgusted” with most subscription publishers and their army of “scalawag canvassers.” He also eagerly accepted the offer of five hundred dollars for the first of eventually four articles in the Century’s notable series “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” And Clemens learned about these negotiations, which were about to be consummated by contract, in the considerably less dramatic and more refined circumstances of a late supper at Gilder’s studio on East Fifteenth Street, which he attended with Livy after the Chickering Hall reading. The overheard conversation between two mysterious strangers on a dark street was Clemens’ way of acknowledging that the hard facts of his dealings with Grant also had a dimension of myth and mystery. To become Grant’s publisher, as he shortly did, was to combine piety with commerce, to administer as sacrament to the dying General and his family what Clemens described as the largest single royalty check in history.

  “I wanted the General’s book,” Clemens later said, “and I wanted it very much.” In all likelihood, until that evening at Gilder’s he never meant to publish anyone’s books but his own. The next morning—while Cable was worrying that his portion of the performance might have been “a wee bit too long”—Clemens, with the reading tour entirely out of his mind for the moment, was in the library of the house on Sixtieth Street, hot on the track of a publishing bonanza and turning the full power of his dazzling personality on Grant and his son Fred. He recalled for them his attempt three years earlier to persuade Grant to write his memoirs and his prediction then that the book was worth a fortune. Having established his moral claims, he described his own experience as author, director of one publishing house, and owner of another, and he argued the merits of subscription publishing in general and the particular superiority of Charles L. Webster and Company. As Grant listened, that army of “scalawag canvassers” began to seem noble joint-venturers in a great and profitable cause. Within the limits of tact Clemens scored the Century’s timid offer of a ten per cent royalty (an offer, he confided to his notebook, which was “the most cold-blooded attempt to rob a trusting and inexperienced man since Ward’s performance”). He made a princely offer: ten thousand dollars against a twenty per cent royalty or, as he preferred for Grant’s sake seventy per cent of the publisher’s profits. Grant yielded to these persuasions to the extent of putting off any agreement with the Century until they had had a chance to match these terms. It was to be over three months before the book was Clemens’ by contract. Still, that morning he could celebrate a possibility, a change in his fortunes and, as he sincerely intended, a change in the Grants’.

  After the session in the library, the General showed Clemens his swords and medals and Oriental souvenirs and took him into the parlor to talk to Mrs. Grant and their guest, Lew Wallace, back from his post as American minister to Turkey and enjoying the snowballing success of Ben Hur. Even Grant, who had no appetite for novels, had stayed up thirty hours straight to read Ben Hur—he wanted to see, he explained, what kind of book another Union general could write. “There’s many a woman in this land that would like to be in my place,” Julia Grant said, “and be able to tell her children that she once stood elbow to elbow between two such great authors as Mark Twain and General Wallace.” In the festivity of the moment Clemens, as he told Susy, turned to Grant and said, “Don’t look so cowed, General. You have written a book, too, and when it is published you can hold up your head and let on to be a person of consequence yourself.”

  The next day he was back on the road with Cable, swinging south to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington and then northwest to Toronto and Cleveland before coming back to Hartford for a holiday at Christmas. The continuing negotiations with the Grants he left to Charley Webster as item number one in a roll call of responsibilities which now included the history game, the perpetual calendar, the bed clamp, various litigations either in progress or being planned, an investment in a fire extinguisher that worked like a hand grenade, the purchase of a $250 or $300 diamond solitaire ring at Tiffany’s for Livy’s birthday (“You must guess at the size”), and the publication, apparently jinxed from the start, of Huckleberry Finn.

  III

  The book is to be issued when a big edition has been sold—and not before, Clemens repeatedly told Charley. His goal was an advance sale of forty thousand copies, and he said he was willing to wait seven years for it if he had to, but he was sure they would reach it early in December 1884, in time for the holidays. In Elmira that summer Clemens sat long hours for a portrait bust by his protégé, Karl Gefhardt, had it photographed in profile, and ordered reproductions printed and bound in the book, facing the frontispiece and protected by a basic furnishing of the fancy book, the tissue guard. By his own as well as by critical fiat he was now a standard author, and along with this status came a heightened sense of accountability to his public. Consequently, even though Howells combed the manuscript and some of the proofs, Clemens subjected the book to Livy’s final scrutiny and gave her the page proofs to “expergate” (this was Susy’s word for the editorial act). Livy’s standards of decorum were scarcely more rigorous than his own. They were, in fact, considerably more liberal than those of Gilder, who, in editing selections from Huckleberry Finn for the Century, deleted references to nakedness, blasphemy, smells, and dead cats, and made such genteel emendations as changing “in a sweat” to “worrying.” When Clemens came to judging the illustrations by E. W. Kemble, a then unknown artist whom he had chosen
himself, he displayed the extremest Victorian severity. Kemble’s Huck, at first, was a trifle too “Irishy” or “ugly” for Clemens’ taste. Some of the pictures were too violent, “forbidding,” or “repulsive,” and one of them had to go altogether, he told Charley—“the lecherous old rascal kissing the girl at the campmeeting. It is powerful good, but it mustn’t go in—don’t forget it. Let’s not make any pictures of the campmeeting. The subject won’t bear illustrating. It is a disgusting thing, and pictures are sure to tell the truth about it too plainly.” Caught in a conflict between realism and decorum, he had worked himself into the uncomfortable position of relying on the printed word to muffle “the truth” about “a disgusting thing.”

  Despite all these precautions, it seemed for a while that a kind of wicked justice would prevail. An engraver, whose identity was never discovered even though Webster posted a five-hundred-dollar reward, made a last-minute addition to the printing plate of Kemble’s picture of old Silas Phelps. In the mischievous tradition of graffitti he drew in a male sex organ, and what was originally a pleasant scene shared by an appreciative Aunt Sally asking, “Who do you reckon it is?” suddenly became a flagrant case of indecent exposure. The alteration was discovered by one of Webster’s agents only after thousands of the pictures, including those for the agents’ canvassing books, had been printed and bound. “Had the first edition been run off our loss would have been $250,000,” Webster told a reporter from the New York Tribune on November 28. “Had the mistake not been discovered, Mr. Clemens’ credit for decency and morality would have been destroyed.” At J. J. Little’s plant in New York the offending illustration was cut out by hand and replaced by a new printing of the plate, but though decency and morality were rescued, damage of another sort had already been done. Webster had to postpone publication until February 1885, thus missing the holiday trade, and the inevitable publicity that the affair of Uncle Silas’ organ won for the book only confirmed the opinion of some custodians of public morals that the book was coarse and degrading.

  Back in Hartford for a Christmas vacation, Clemens found another emergency. His eye fell on the catalogue of Estes and Lauriat, booksellers, of 111 Nassau Street, New York, and the pink spots came to his cheeks, for there, in cold print, was the announcement that Huckleberry Finn was “now ready” and available at a reduced price of $2.25. (The lowest price at which the book could be bought from Webster’s agents was $2.75.) Tearing out the page, he penciled a note across it: “Charley, if this is a lie, let Alexander & Green sue them for damages instantly. And if we have no chance at them in law, tell me at once and I will publish them as thieves and swindlers.” And he wanted each of Webster’s agents to get a facsimile of a handwritten note signed “Mark Twain”: “These people deliberately lied when they made that statement…. They will have an immediate opportunity to explain, in court.” Five days later, on the train going to Pittsburgh, he met one of the Estes and Lauriat men, who offered the feeble explanation that his company had supposed the book would be out in time for the holidays. “I said we couldn’t help what they ‘supposed,’” Clemens reported to Charley, “and we should have to require them to pay for supposing such injurious things.” It took him hardly any time to become implacable. Now Livy entered the fray, but her control over him extended, as usual, only to what he volunteered to her control. “Youth dear,” she began mildly enough. Then she told him bluntly that his conduct in the Estes and Lauriat affair, in particular a menacing letter he was about to send them, was making her “sick.” “How I wish you were less ready to fight, and more ready to see other people’s side of things … If you write, write civilly.” But he was already past writing civilly or uncivilly to Estes and Lauriat; his attorney had applied for an injunction against cut-rating the book. In Boston on February 10 Judge Le Baron Colt of the United States Circuit Court denied the injunction, a ruling which, according to Clemens’ disgusted and sardonic interpretation, gave his opponent the right to “sell property which does not belong to him but to me—property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge’s homestead for sale; and if I make as good a sum out of it as I expect I shall go on and sell the rest of his property.”

  Even the simplest transactions were going wrong. A request from Allen Thorndike Rice, the thirty-three-year-old owner and editor of the North American Review, for an excerpt from the book quickly became in Clemens’ eyes a kind of Byzantine intrigue. Seduced by Rice’s celebrated glitter, an assistant of Charley’s named Bromfield was handing over literary property without authorization, and Rice apparently planned to pay less for it than he told Clemens he would. “Bromfield is an idiot,” Clemens decided after getting, as he believed, to the bottom of it all, “and Rice—well, Rice seems to have acted very much like a rascal.”

  Inevitably Clemens’ impatience and mounting discontent with his book spilled over into his reading tour with Cable and magnified the normal tensions between two high-strung men compelled to share ten thousand miles of travel, four months of homeless nights in the hotels of seventy different cities. On peaceful days they sang together, shadow-boxed, joked for reporters, allowed their manager to register at a Cincinnati hotel as “J. B. Pond and two servants.” In Albany they were entertained by Grover Cleveland, the President-elect, properly grateful to Hartford’s most prominent mugwump, who now sat on the governor’s desk and by accidentally sitting on the electric bells as well summoned a squad of pages. In St. Louis they talked to Cousin James Lampton, whom Cable immediately recognized as the model for Colonel Sellers—Lampton invited them to visit his imaginary house and drink beer out of the water taps. They read together at the Opera House in Hannibal, where Clemens once again felt, as he told Livy, “infinite deeps of pathos” and where he carried his heart in his mouth the whole day. Jane Clemens, eighty-one and full of dance and gossip, was in the audience at Keokuk. “What books she could have written!” Clemens said after an evening of her talk. In a Rochester bookstore one Saturday night in December Cable had introduced him to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur—“You’ll never lay it down until you have read it from cover to cover,” he promised—and thereby became, as Clemens acknowledged a year later, the “godfather” of A Connecticut Yankee. Despite the frictions, his admiration for Cable grew. “Cable is a great man,” he was writing to Livy in February, and if he continued his fight on behalf of the Negro “his greatness will be recognized.” “Cable’s gifts of mind are greater and higher than I had suspected,” he told Howells a day before the tour ended. “But …”

  The “but,” he went on to explain, had to do with Cable’s religion, his piety and abstemiousness, and, above all, his inflexible Sabbath observances. Sunday in any town found Cable at church services and Bible classes. Clemens either stayed in bed resting and spinning tales of the mutiny on the Bounty and the Pitcairn Islanders to Major Pond’s brother, Ozias, or applied a lesson from Cable. “He has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day,” he told Howells, “and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.” And although Cable was hardened after a while to being teased about his religion, he was tormented by some of the masculine company Clemens deliberately exposed him to, company which, Cable was afraid, showed all too well one side of his partner’s personality that had remained hidden during that morning talk in Hartford a year before.

  On January 6 Clemens’ distant cousin “Marse” Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal took them to lunch at the Pendennis Club. Cable was horrified by Watterson’s rough language, his talk about getting drunk, and his appearance, which, according to Cable, mirrored a “moral distortion”: Watterson had one blind eye, the other was nearsighted, and his face was hard, razor-scraped, and suffused with blood. A few weeks earlier they had spent an evening with Petroleum V. Nasby, publisher of the Toledo Blade, who took them out for a supper of birds. “I’ll tell you, Clemens,” Nasby said as Cable flinched in distaste, “I’ve settled down upon the belief that there is but one thi
ng in this world better than a dollar, and that’s a dollar and a half.” Nasby was a big, coarse-looking man with a knotted forehead and thick, disheveled hair; Cable was relieved to see that in contrast “the fine lines” in Clemens’ face seemed to shine out. Nasby was drinking only ginger ale and lemonade now; he had sworn off drinking, he told them, after twenty years of going to bed drunk every night. He had often lectured, he said, so drunk that his audience was “invisible”—“I knew it was going right only by the laughter and applause.” After dinner he insisted on going back with them to their hotel and talking late into the night, the kind of talk he and Clemens had had in Hartford and Boston in the old lecturing days, all part of a distressing past, and not the kind Cable was accustomed to. “I’m glad he’s gone,” Cable wrote to his wife at the end of the ordeal. “He’s a bad dream.”

  These encounters were one way in which Clemens could pay back Cable for a series of petty grievances which seemed more and more infuriating as the tour went on. In November Livy had cautioned him not to get angry at Cable, to guard everything he said about him, even in fun. The only concession he made was to send her indignant accounts in which Cable, in fulfillment of some idea of discretion, was referred to as “K.” K., he complained, saved up a whole trunkload of dirty laundry from his vacation and intended to have it washed at Clemens’ expense when they were on the road again. Ozias passed on the veto to Cable, and although a crisis was averted Clemens continued to fume about Cable’s parsimony—“His closeness is a queer streak,” he told Livy—and about countless other objections and episodes, most of them just as ludicrous. “He has never bought one sheet of paper or an envelop in all these 3½ months,” he wrote after he found that Cable had been using his paper. “He is the pitifulest human louse I have ever known.” Cable had interrupted him in the middle of a story; Cable had marched out of a hotel dining room rather than sit with some children; Cable was arrogant with servants; Cable starved himself when he had to pay for his own meals and gorged himself when he was on expenses. The complaints went on and on, always coming back to the favorite target of Cable’s religion. “This pious ass” (or, “this Christ-be sprinkled, psalm-singing Presbyterian”), Clemens recounted to Livy, had never gone to hear Beecher give a sermon, because he refused to cross over to Brooklyn on a Sunday. Tiny differences were blown up to monster size by too much proximity, and also by plain jealousy. In 1899 Clemens was still brooding—“With his platform talent he was able to fatigue a corpse.” The fact was that Cable was being well received, and that on occasions Mark Twain was dismissed by some small-town citizens and reviews as a humbug and a buffoon. But even by mid-January Clemens was fed up with more than Cable: he was fed up with performing every night, fed up with early rising and daily railroad trips. One morning, to his annoyance, they had to leave Springfield, Illinois, at 6:35 A.M. Four hours later, crossing the Eads Bridge into St. Louis, the engine jumped the tracks, and as the cars clanked and swayed Clemens rushed for the door. (He explained later, his irascibility temporarily drawn by emergency, that he would rather fall on top of the train than have it the other way, and besides, the river was perfectly familiar to him.) Three days later, however, the prospect of taking another morning train so vexed him that as Ozias Pond (who had earlier noted that Clemens had “a heart as tender as a child, as loving as a woman”) and Cable watched in silent amazement, he worked himself into a tantrum, went after a window shutter with his fists, and clubbed it off its hinges.