Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Twenty-one years later, the old and lonely Mark Twain, dictating his autobiography, remembered the occasion. “It was quite natural that I should think I had written myself out when I was only fifty years old, for everybody who has ever written has been smitten with that superstition at about that age.” Yet behind this casual explanation, and behind the hyperbole and calculated shock of his remark to Susy—he often, as he said later, posed for his biography—were two strands of circumstance which became tangled with each other and had the effect of making what he said to her come very nearly true.

  That January and February, while riding the crest of his new prosperity from the Grant book, Clemens had started serious work on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, his story about a Hartford master mechanic, superintendent at the Colt arms factory, who is hit on the head with a crowbar during an argument and begins to imagine himself bringing nineteenth-century technology, enlightenment, and venture capitalism to sixth-century England. “I have begun a book whose scene is laid far back in the twilight of tradition,” Clemens told Charley on February 13, and he explained that he was too engrossed to tend to the publishing business in New York. Yet only a week before this apparent return to full-time writing he organized a company to perfect, manufacture, and market all over the world James W. Paige’s typesetting machine, that “mechanical marvel,” Clemens declared, which made “all the other wonderful inventions of the human brain”—he cited the telephone, telegraph, locomotive, cotton gin, sewing machine, Babbage calculator, Jacquard loom, perfecting press, and Arkwright frame—“sink pretty nearly into commonplace” and seem “mere toys, simplicities.” For five years he had been a quiet backer; now, along with boundless expectations of wealth, he took on the entire financial and managerial burden of the machine, and it crushed him.

  The Yankee and the Machine were twinned in his mind. Both were tests of a perfectible world in which, contrary to all his insights and experience, friction and mechanical difficulties were equivalents of ignorance and superstition. Both expressed a secular religion which had as an unexamined article of faith a belief not in eternal life but in perpetual motion. “Wait thirty years and then look out over the earth,” he was to write in 1889, on the occasion of Walt Whitman’s seventieth birthday. “You shall see marvel upon marvels, added to those whose nativity you have witnessed; and conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result—Man at almost his full stature at last!—and still growing, visibly growing, while you look.” He was capable of sustaining two moods of belief at the same time: the opposite of this paean to progress is A Connecticut Yankee. The ambivalences, disillusions, destructive fury, and, finally, homicidal tantrums of the novel were fire drills in his imagination for the actual failure of the machine, machine values, and his dream of capitalist democracy in which he expected to be a tycoon among tycoons.

  The writer Mark Twain saw omens of disaster long before the promoter Mark Twain, who all his life believed that he was lucky and also, like inventors and prophets in general, maintained a mulish faith that despite constant delays and breakdowns his machine would turn up trumps eventually. “I want to finish the day the machine finishes,” he kept saying of his new book, acknowledging a magical kinship between a writer writing words and a machine setting them in type. Yet he fatalistically accepted the fact that the life history of the machine would have to be written in terms of those delays and breakdowns. “Experience teaches me that their calculations will miss fire, as usual,” he said of Paige and his workmen. Four years before he formally conceded that he was beaten, he wrote of himself as a victim of his own and the machine’s powerful spell, and he made it clear that what was at stake for him was not just a business venture bigger and more promising than most but an entire framework of aspiration, for himself and for his century:

  And I watched over one dear project of mine five years, spent a fortune on it, and failed to make it go—and the history of that would make a large book in which a million men would see themselves as in a mirror; and they would testify and say, Verily this is not imagination, this fellow has been there—and after would they cast dust upon their heads, cursing and blaspheming.

  II

  In 1880 Dwight Buell, a Hartford jeweler, cornered Clemens in the billiard room, described a typesetting machine that was being built at the Colt arms factory, and persuaded him to buy two thousand dollars’ worth of stock. Clemens invested three thousand more after he visited the factory and saw the machine at work. With an operator seated at its keyboard, the machine set entire words at a time; it fed itself from a galley of dead matter and distributed its own case. An assistant removed the sticks of type from the machine and did the hand work of inserting space to align it at the right; later on this assistant was replaced by a built-in mechanical justifier. Even at this early stage of its development the machine was doing the work of four men. It set six-point type at the rate of about three thousand ems an hour (four times the best speed the seventeen-year-old Sam Clemens had achieved as an itinerant practical printer), and it would eventually be capable of setting five thousand ems and then eight thousand and more an hour.

  Until he saw it in action Clemens had not believed such a machine could exist. Soon after he saw it and fell under the spell of its inventor, James W. Paige of Rochester, New York, he began to believe that it was about the only machine of its kind that did exist. Actually, the Pianotype, a similar machine designed by Henry Bessemer, the inventor of the iron converter, was used to set type commercially as early as 1842; a number of other machines since then had seen limited practical service; and the basement of the London Times was said to be filled with typesetting machines that had been tried and discarded. For all of them, including the one Mark Twain backed, represented successively intricate elaborations, unworkably delicate and temperamental, of the same outmoded principle. These machines were designed to imitate the work of a man setting, justifying, and distributing single foundry types by hand. Actually type distribution, which was one half the function of Paige’s early machine, was no longer necessary or practical, as Clemens might have discovered if he had not been so beguiled by Paige’s eloquence and ingenuity. The London Times was using a rotary type caster, patented in 1881, which worked so fast—it turned out sixty thousand characters an hour from one hundred molds—that instead of distributing type at the end of the run the printers simply melted it down and started all over again with fresh type. This bypass of the human analogy was the basic principle of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine, which cast its own type from its own matrices in single slugs of a line’s length which were afterwards thrown back into the melting pot. Mergenthaler was to sweep the field.

  A mechanical typesetter would have to think in order to work, Clemens persisted in believing, and the machine he saw at Colt’s appeared to be able to think. The inventor of such a machine must be a divine magician, he also believed, and the machine itself a living, intelligent organism which, as it was improved and articulated, paralleled human ontogeny. It became “an inspired bugger,” “a cunning devil,” and, after passing through a “sick child” stage, a “magnificent creature” ranking second only to man.* What Clemens was expressing in personifications such as these was not only his hope for the machine but also his basic layman’s ignorance, his credulity in the face of what seemed to him a divine mystery only because he knew hardly anything about mechanics.

  Clemens later remarked of his second investment and total commitment to the machine, “It is here that the music begins.” Urged by William Hamersley, a lawyer and fellow investor (later to earn from Clemens the accolade of having the pride of a tramp, the courage of a rabbit, the moral sense of a wax figure, and the sex of a tapeworm), he took on the job of raising money to bring the machine to an unattainable perfection. For perfection, not just working order, had been the goal of its inventor, James W. Paige, ever since 1872, when he filed his first patent application for “an Improvement in Type-setting Machines.” Paige got his patent i
n December 1874 (ten years before Mergenthaler finished his first Linotype machine). The following August he was married in Rochester and soon after, listing his occupation as “patentee,” and equipped with a smart wardrobe, remarkable gifts of persuasion, and the confidence that he had the lead in his field, he moved to Hartford, attracted there by its combination of abundant investment capital, machine shops, and skilled mechanics.

  “He is a poet,” Clemens wrote of Paige even in 1890 (when he entertained the fantasy of locking Paige in a steel trap and watching him die), “a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel. He is the Shakespeare of mechanical invention.” (The first proper name set on Paige’s improved keyboard in 1889 was Shakespeare’s, misspelled.) Years earlier Sam had written about Orion, for whom he tried to lobby a clerkship in the Patent Office, in the same devout terms: “An inventor is a poet—a true poet—and nothing in any degree less than a high order of poet.” Mark Twain, a passionately believing child of the Great Century, defined his writer’s role as that of teacher, entertainer, and moralist for the masses. He deferred to another order of “poet” altogether, for the inventor, as the Yankee says, was “after God” the creator of this world. And Paige bestrode the two temples of nineteenth-century meliorism, the patent office and the printing office.

  The Yankee’s first official act in Arthur’s England is to start a patent office. “I knew that a country without a patent office was just a crab,” he says, “and couldn’t travel any way but sideways or backways.” Then the Yankee goes on to hammer away at sixth-century mind shackles by teaching people how to read and by starting a newspaper. At eighteen Sam Clemens stood before Benjamin Franklin’s wood-bed printing press in the Patent Office Museum in Washington and marked the changes that one hundred and twenty years had brought. Franklin’s press printed 125 sheets an hour, while the whirling cylinders of the Hoe press shed twenty thousand, fast and steady. For Mark Twain and for Walt Whitman, both of them journeyman printers in their youth, the Hoe press—as, later, the perfecting press, which printed both sides of a continuous sheet at the same time—symbolized dynamic democracy. It whetted and fed the word-hunger of the mass audience which Whitman aspired to and which nurtured Mark Twain. Clemens remembered all his life the drowsing summer afternoons he and another apprentice, Wales McCormick, had spent in Joseph Ament’s printing office in Hannibal. Wales once had to reset three solid pages of sermon because Alexander Campbell, a founder of the Disciples of Christ, refused to allow one abbreviation, made for convenience’s sake, of “Jesus Christ” to “J. C.” The angry preacher got more than he bargained for: Wales restored the name in full and also added a middle initial, “H.” For Sam Clemens this prank redeemed the afternoon’s lost fishing and the tedium of setting type by hand. At seventeen Sam was still a laggard typesetter, slower than the slowest in the composing room of the Philadelphia Inquirer—he could set only ten thousand ems on a Sunday while the others were doing fifteen thousand. “For some cause,” he wrote to Orion, “I cannot set type so fast as when I was at home.” All his life he was interested in improvements that would take some of the work out of writing and communicating: he was probably the first author to turn in a typed manuscript, he was a connoisseur of fountain pens, he owned the first private telephone in Hartford, he dictated part of one of his books into a phonograph.

  In its most advanced state Paige’s machine had eighteen thousand separate parts, including eight hundred shaft bearings. The patent application he filed in 1887 contained 275 sheets of drawings and 123 pages of specifications, and it was pending for eight years. The typesetter was a remarkable piece of machinery, the most ambitious and complex device of its kind, and when it worked it worked like a miracle. Eventually, in the hands of an operator of average skill, it could set twelve thousand ems an hour, compared with the 1890 average of eight thousand ems an hour for a practiced Linotype operator. But the typesetter was also impossibly delicate and high-strung, broke down frequently, needed specially trained workmen in attendance at all times, and was something like a mechanical human being, dazzling for a demonstration but not so sturdy and reliable as the real thing.

  The inventor’s “noblest pleasure dies with the stroke that completes the creature of his genius,” Sam had written in 1870. It was scarcely likely that the typesetter would ever be pronounced finished. “It did seem to me the last word in its way,” said Howells (another former practical printer) after seeing a demonstration of “the beautiful miracle,” but he felt that that last word “had been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously.” He recognized that Clemens and Paige were trying to bring the machine “to a perfection so expensive that it was practically impracticable.” Clemens’ psyche as well as his fortune came to be disastrously over-invested in the typesetter’s gears and levers. For him the machine was poetry and power, the brass and steel fulfillment of his century. When the machine died, more than money died with it.

  “Very much the best investment I have ever made,” Clemens said to Charley in October 1881 about his five-thousand-dollar stake in the typesetter. “I want an opportunity to add to it—that is how I feel about it.” He predicted an initial world sale of 100,000 machines. For the next four years he made a series of progress statements which had a Phrygian music of their own (the music was the merest overture, it turned out) : “finally got it right” (April 1881), “now flawless” (February 1883), “could be perfected” (March 1883), “in lucrative shape at last … in perfect working order” (April 1885). But the “perfect working order” of April 1885 was only the start of another cycle; during the five years that followed, Paige discarded the old machine and built a new one with a coupled mechanical justifier and Clemens was drained of hope and money.

  By the summer of 1885, when he was pushing the Grant book along, the original Hartford typesetter company had become a tangled corporate possibility which needed large administrations of cash. Clemens and Hamersley projected a parent company with a capitalization of $1,100,000 and subsidiaries in America and England to manufacture machines and then rent them at $2,500 a year. The schemes proliferated: they would need money to build two hundred machines before the dollars would start flowing back in; perhaps they ought to hold the justifier back for fifteen years so as to extend the patent life of the machine for an additional seventeen; in return for the net profits from foreign sales and rentals, Clemens undertook to secure and maintain the foreign patents. “Ask the President”—a notebook reminder—“if he will not give me a note to the government printer.” Hartford’s most prominent literary man was now to be seen in New York at the Union League Club and on Wall Street singing the virtues of the machine to skeptical investors who agreed with him that the purse was big but were not so sure he had picked just the right horse to win it. (Some of them, as he discovered when it was too late, had been betting all along on Mergenthaler’s Linotype.) In return for the promise of a half interest, he was also acting as agent for an improved printing telegraph, another Paige invention. On May 27 he visited President Norvin Green of Western Union. The next day, back at the Western Union tower on Broadway and Dey Street, he met Jay Gould and his son George—the Goulds owned the controlling interest in the company—and talked about the printing telegraph over lunch, without success. “Damned insignificant looking people,” he noted. (Still, the unmistakable face and beard of the senior Gould appear in Dan Beard’s picture of “the Slave Driver” in A Connecticut Yankee.) He met with little more encouragement from his old friend John Mackay, the Comstock millionaire who was now trying to break Gould’s telegraph monopoly. Paige’s invention soon merged into the somber background of the typesetter.

  On January 20, 1886, Clemens held an evening business meeting in his billiard room. Paige, heading for perfection, had decided to start all over again on a combined typesetter and justifier. He estimated that all the expenses connected with building a prototype machine, including wages, drawings, and patent applications, could not possibly go over thirty tho
usand dollars. He offered Clemens a half ownership of the new machine if he would underwrite this expense and then go on to capitalize, manufacture, and promote it. Clemens, who had already surrendered over thirteen thousand dollars to keep Paige going, jumped at the offer even though his business adviser, Franklin G. Whitmore, warned him that his obligation to support the venture from beginning to end could easily bankrupt him. “Never mind that. I can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can get a perfect machine,” he answered, the captive of his own dream. Two weeks later, he formally took over the new venture and hoisted all the gaudy banners of his expectations. If money was needed, he reminded himself, Andrew Carnegie was the man; he planned to see Thomas Edison. Bigger schemes of capitalization filled his head: by autumn he was thinking of a $5,000,000 stock issue; the next year, as his hopes and needs grew, it became $10,000,000. He wanted to measure his market, and he ordered surveys of the amount of new matter set each day by all the newspapers in the United States and Canada. He tried to find out the membership and organization of printers’ and compositors’ unions; when a union official objected to these inquiries Clemens answered cagily—and through an intermediary to keep his name out of it—that he was interested in some sort of printing invention and “wanted to get an idea of how small the market for such a thing might be.” He was tangled in a paradox. As Howells once characterized him, he was a theoretical socialist and a practical aristocrat; but he was also a practical capitalist and, by Howells’ definition, a plutocrat, a man who dreams of and pursues enormous wealth regardless of whether he gets it or not. That March, speaking as a theoretical socialist to the Monday Evening Club in Hartford, Clemens hailed the rise of organized labor. Labor was “the new dynasty,” he said, which would rule and own the coming age; the Haymarket Square riots in Chicago in May showed that the transfer of power was near at hand and might not occur without bloodshed. Yet as a plutocrat and a practical capitalist Clemens figured that Paige’s machine did the work of four or five men, did not get drunk, did not join the printers’ union.