Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  In time Huckleberry Finn would be read in ten million copies printed in nearly every tongue, and nobody would question its rank as literature. But during the winter and spring of 1885 it seemed to promise its author-publisher a scarifying lesson in bad luck, bad planning, bad timing, entrenched orthodoxy, and public humiliation. On February 10, two days after Judge Colt ruled against him in Boston, Clemens was in Columbus, worrying. “I am not able to see anything that can save Huck Finn from being another defeat,” he told Charley. Charley, it was clear from his answer, still hoped for the best, but he was prepared for the worst and he already had an explanation for it. “Huck is a good book,” he wrote soothingly on February 14, only four days before publication, “and I am working intelligently and hard and if it don’t sell it won’t be your fault or mine but the extreme hard times. It shall sell however.” But “extreme hard times” had nothing to do with the fact that they still did not have a single American review of any influence or importance to overcome both genteel hostility to a novel of vernacular naturalism and the traditional hostility that editors had toward subscription books in general. This once, Howells, who had set the critical tone for nearly every one of Mark Twain’s books, was without a regular reviewing forum. (His admiration for the book and his editorial involvement with it would have been sufficiently good reasons, in Whitelaw Reid’s view, for him to remain silent.) The Century waited three months after publication to run a review. “A vivid picture of Western life of forty or fifty years ago,” the Bostonian scholar and critic Thomas Sergeant Perry wrote in the May issue, and he went on to praise the book’s “immortal hero” and Mark Twain’s grasp of truth and reality which enabled him—a key issue in the stormy career of Huckleberry Finn—to teach “by implication, not by didactic preaching.” But Perry’s was a nearly solitary voice, and even that November Joel Chandler Harris concluded a public letter of praise for the book with the pointed acknowledgment that “some of the professional critics will not agree with me.” What most of the professional critics may have been saying, when they said anything at all, was indicated by a savage attack, in two issues of the comic magazine Life, on the book’s “blood-curdling humor,” gutter realism, “coarse and dreary fun,” and total unsuitability for young people. The genteel tradition, far from dead, had simply been lying in wait.

  For nearly a month Huckleberry Finn existed in a kind of critical outer darkness until, one day in March, the Library Committee of Concord, Massachusetts, made a public announcement. After deliberation, these custodians of the town’s flickering transcendental flame pronounced the book rough, coarse, and inelegant, expelled it from the library shelves, and began to earn for Mark Twain the now traditional rewards of being banned near as well as in Boston. “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses,” said Louisa May Alcott, with the moral weight of a lifetime of well-loved books behind every word, “he had best stop writing for them.” Soon enough, the newspapers, silent until then, came to life. “It is time that this influential pseudonym should cease to carry into homes and libraries unworthy productions,” the Springfield Republican said, and, in the course of anathematizing both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as degrading, immoral, and no better than dime novels, it whipped up the old horse of the Whittier dinner; now, as in 1877, “the trouble with Mr. Clemens is that he has no reliable sense of propriety.” The Boston Advertiser connected the failure of the book with his “irreverence.” According to the Transcript the Concord banning was unnecessary—“The book is so flat, as well as coarse, that nobody wants to read it after a taste in the Century.”

  “Dear Charley,” Clemens wrote on March 18, “The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass., have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as ‘trash and suitable only for the slums.’ That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.” This letter, released to the papers, stirred up a second wave of reaction. For some editors Clemens’ confident prediction was only further evidence of his venality and cynicism. But many agreed with him that the Concord committee had assured the success of the book. At the end of March a Concord group called the Free Trade Club proffered an amende honorable by electing him to membership, and he immediately seized on this opportunity for publicity as well as public vindication by writing a graceful and ironic letter of acceptance, which was published in the New York World and other papers. His new membership, he said, “endorses me as worthy to associate with certain gentlemen whom even the moral icebergs of the Concord library committee are bound to respect.” The excommunication of Huckleberry Finn was going to benefit him in several ways beyond doubling the sale:

  For instance, it will deter other libraries from buying the book and you are doubtless aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates. And secondly it will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so after the usual way of the world and library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book, after all.

  Instead of “another defeat” he soon found that Huckleberry Finn was “a handsome success” which sold better in its first two months than even The Innocents Abroad—forty-two thousand copies by March 18, fifty-one thousand by May 6—and there was every indication that it would never stop.

  Through all of this Clemens managed to present to his public the image of a confident, masterful, and good-humored author. “Those idiots in Concord are not a court of last resort,” he told Pamela, “and I am not disturbed by their moral gymnastics.” But he was disturbed. Why banish Huck from the family circle, he fumed, but let in not only the Bible but also a paper like the New York World which carried tidings of adultery, abortion, and prostitution into a million homes every week? (“The truth is,” he said more than twenty years later, “that when a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.”) Until Howells talked him out of it, he planned to give the Concord library a blast at a public dinner in New York. “You can’t stir it up,” Howells reasoned, “without seeming to care more than you ought for it.” Until Livy forbade it, Clemens intended to hand out to the papers and insert in all future printings of the book a “Prefatory Remark” in which he would pay back some of his enemies: “Huckleberry Finn is not an imaginary person. He still lives; or rather, they still live; for Huckleberry Finn is two persons in one—namely, the author’s two uncles, the present editors of the Boston Advertiser and the Springfield Republican.” He added that “in deference to the taste of a more modern and fastidious day” he had taken the liberty of departing from his models in one respect: “This boy’s language has been toned down and softened here and there.”

  The spokesmen for the genteel tradition, who had taken Mark Twain to their bosoms for The Prince and the Pauper, a piece of literary playacting which they praised for its finish and refinement and delicacy, turned their backs on the book which sprang from his deepest personal and creative imperatives. Betrayed, rejected, and seriously confused in goal and standard, Mark Twain henceforth looked back on Huckleberry Finn with mingled pain, pride, and puzzlement, as on a favorite child who had brought disgrace on his father and whom the father would at times reluctantly acknowledge as his favorite and at other times reject in favor of the chaste and unexceptionable Maid of Orleans. His own conflict was mirrored within his family. Livy was fond of “dear old Huck,” but was never at all comfortable with the book. Susy, whose disapproval he dreaded, disapproved of Huck, because she wanted her father not to be a humorist, a naturalist, or a teller of dreadful ghost stories but a writer of high seriousness, moral uplift, and thrice-purified English. Prophetess of the cultural values he seemed all too often to be flouting, she was, fittingly
, his model for Joan of Arc.

  The popular success of Huckleberry Finn in the face of official disapproval and indifference made it finally clear to him that there was no such thing as a unitary society in America and that he would have to decide whether to write “for the Head” or for “the Belly and the Members,” for the “uncultivated class” or “the mighty mass of the uncultivated.” Huck Finn lit out for the Territory, but Mark Twain had to stay at home to nurse his wounds, and he submerged some of his goals in enterprises that appeared more rewarding than writing books: the publishing house, the typesetting machine, and, in general, making money. Before he published another book, four and a half years were to pass—his longest silence since he came East—and in this book, A Connecticut Yankee, he translated into a fantasy of warfare some of the tensions he felt between vernacular and genteel values, between laity and clerisy. A Connecticut Yankee was to be his “swan-song,” he said more than once, his “retirement from literature permanently.” He planned to make certain that “those parties who miscall themselves critics” did not have the chance to “paw the book at all”—“I wish to pass to the cemetery unclodded.”

  IV

  “One of the highest satisfactions of Clemens’ often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant,” Howells wrote in 1910, but in suggesting the range and intimacy of the relationship Howells also suggested its ominousness. The Grant bonanza led Clemens to “excesses of enterprise” and to a preoccupation with business which debilitated him as a writer and nearly destroyed him as a man. From the start, Clemens himself recognized the importance of the Grant chapter in his life. He went to unusual lengths to set down accounts of it which he could recite as history and in self-vindication and possibly use as material for fiction. He kept a detailed record in his notebook. During the summer of 1885, to combat ugly rumors about his dealings with Grant and the Century, he dictated about seventeen thousand words for his autobiography. In a long letter to Henry Ward Beecher two months after Grant died of throat cancer, he reviewed the story once again. And in 1906 he dictated another long account, this one colored by his venomous recollections of Charley Webster.

  In February 1885, Charley, still in favor with his uncle, sounded one of the ground notes of the enterprise: “There’s big money for us both in that book and on the terms indicated in my note to the General we can make it pay big.” Throughout the winter Clemens and Charley argued their case before Grant and his advisers, presented testimonials and various evidences of their business fitness, and also fell back on small diplomatic maneuvers such as the gift of a leather-bound Huckleberry Finn, suitably inscribed by the author, to Colonel Fred Grant’s eldest little girl. A week after Charley’s letter, on his way to read in Brooklyn with Cable, Clemens called on Grant, and he was shocked to see how weak and thin the General was despite a newspaper report that his throat symptoms were gone. “Yes,” Grant said uncomplainingly, “if it had only been true.” But Clemens came away reassured on one point at least. “I mean you shall have the book,” Grant said, “I have about made up my mind to that.” On February 27 he signed a contract with Charles L. Webster and Company, publishers—as Clemens proposed their new letterhead should read—of “Mark Twain’s Books and the forthcoming Personal Memoirs of General Grant” the five last words “in just a shade larger type, and in RED INK.” The day after the contract was signed Clemens’ reading tour ended in Washington, and, utterly absorbed in his new career as publisher, he stopped being a writer as well as a public performer. By February 1886, while Livy and Susy worried that he had forgotten his own work altogether, Clemens was making some round-sum calculations. His $15,000 investment in the publishing house was now worth $500,000, and he was about to pay Mrs. Grant $200,000 against her eventual earnings of nearly half a million.

  But, as part of the price he paid for this success, he was at the mercy of every detail of the enterprise. He simply could not hand over authority, and Charley’s days as publisher were numbered. “I wish to be close at hand all the time General Grant’s book is going through the press and being canvassed,” Sam wrote to Orion in March to explain why he had canceled plans for a reading tour in England and Australia. “I want no mistakes to happen, nothing overlooked, nothing neglected.” He worked up an incentive plan for canvassers, and he undoubtedly had a hand in writing an aggressive sales manual which exhorted the canvasser to avoid “the Bull Run voice” and to “keep pouring hot shot” until the cowed prospect signed his name on the line. He was occupied with circulars, handouts for the press, photographs, medallions, the index, security measures to keep books out of the hands of pirates and cut-raters, a de luxe edition to be sold at auction. He praised Charley for the serene and capable way he was guiding “the vastest book enterprise the world has ever seen,” and he warned him to slow down: “overwork killed Mr. Langdon, and it can kill you.” But he was constantly at Charley with instructions and errands to run, and he grumbled about the clerks Charley took on to absorb some of the overwork, about new offices on Union Square, and about expenses like postage, telegrams, and thick letter paper. He arranged for a portrait bust of Grant to be made by Karl Gerhardt, who was now systematically exploiting his patron’s influence for all it was worth.* At the beginning of April, when the country sat a premature death watch over Grant and expected momentarily to hear the muffled fire bells toll out sixty-three strokes, he delicately interceded to get Gerhardt the death-mask commission. By December Gerhardt and the Grant family were involved in an acrimonious and ghoulish squabble over property rights in the death mask, and Clemens, now thoroughly disillusioned with the sculptor, offered to buy him off in order to avoid the “degrading scandal” of a lawsuit which would drag Grant “out of the rest and peace of the grave.”

  At the end of April Clemens took Susy with him to visit Grant. The General, Clemens noted, had made a remarkable recovery. He looked and felt better than he had in months, his throat had stopped hurting him, and, in his terse fashion, he was talkative again. “Neither of us originated the idea of Sherman’s march to the sea,” he said, answering one of the crucial questions about his campaign. “The enemy did it.” Clemens came away encouraged, for Grant was back at work again on his unfinished book. That morning he had spent two hours dictating an account of Appomattox, and his manuscript needed no revision at all.

  As always, however, there were enemies out there to be dealt with after the manner of the Comanches. First, there were the Century people, who, Clemens heard, were spreading the story that he stole the book from them and was out to fleece the helpless Grants. There were rumors that he was writing the book himself. At the end of April he decided to go after the New York World—“that daily issue of unmedicated closet paper”—for publishing the manifest lie that Grant’s aide General Adam Badeau was the author of the Memoirs. No compromise or apology would do, he told Fred Grant, and he urged him to press for punitive damages “that will cripple—yes, disable—that paper financially.” On second thought he decided to let it drop; since no other paper had bothered to repeat the World’s “libel,” obviously the World was not worth suing. The next year the target was to be “that unco-pious butter-mouthed Sunday school—slobbering sneak-thief” John Wanamaker, “now of Philadelphia, presently of hell,” who was cut-rating the book. When a court decision failed to support his claim against Wanamaker, Clemens called for a new tactic. In the hope of provoking a libel suit, he planned to have William Laffan of the New York Sun publish a fictitious interview in which, after accusing Wanamaker of “picking Mrs. Grant’s pocket,” Clemens asked, “Is there really any kind of property he wouldn’t take, in case he wasn’t being watched?” The interview, however, apparently went no farther than Webster’s office.

  But the major problem had been, of course, whether Grant would live long enough to finish the book. After his brief remission, the suffering came back again redoubled; he depended on larger and larger amounts of cocaine. Under the drug his mind reeled back to the cannon, and he clutched at his
throat. Water, he said, went down like molten lead. In a hoarse whisper he talked his book to a stenographer for hours at a time. Then he fell back, exhausted, for two or three days, and slept half reclining in his easy chair, a heavy scarf wrapped round his throat. It seemed to Clemens, sitting quietly near him in the bedroom at Sixtieth Street, that Grant in his last days had fully regained the stature of a hero and also that no one had ever sufficiently noted Grant’s “exceeding gentleness, goodness, sweetness.” “He had dictated 10,000 words at a single sitting,” Clemens noted in awe and envy. “It kills me, these days, to write the half of it.” He had almost forgotten that he was a famous author and was startled, he said, when Grant, diffidently and through another person, asked what he thought of the Memoirs. He later said he felt the way Columbus’ cook would have felt if Columbus had asked his views on navigation. But he recovered from his embarrassment, compared the Memoirs to Caesar’s Commentaries, and told Grant that his book belonged with “the best purely narrative literature in the language.” (His opinion was shared over the years by Gertrude Stein as well as by Howells; today the book seems as remarkable as ever for its muscular directness and its avoidance of chest-thumping and martial rhetoric.) In 1886, after Matthew Arnold had criticized Grant for writing “an English without charm and high breeding,” Clemens rushed to the defense of his dead author with a show of indignation and injured pride that suggests that what shrank the distance between Columbus and his cook was the threat of a common enemy: Arnold’s high culture—“superficial polish,” Clemens once called it—which looked down on Grant because he made mistakes in grammar and looked down on America because it lacked “the discipline of awe and respect.” Clemens’ thundering answer described his own as well as Grant’s lack of formal literary training and orthodox antecedents, his own conscious and defiant nativism: “This is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.”