Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  On Susy fell the burden of a relationship compounded of hectoring and worship. He idealized all her gifts and was disappointed when she decided she wanted to study to be an opera singer, for he always hoped that she would be a writer. “She was a poet,” he said. “Every now and then in her vivacious talk she threw out phrases of such admirable grace and force, such precision of form, that they thrilled through one’s consciousness like the passage of the electric spark.” In everything she did he subjected her to demands for perfection, but he himself was vulnerable to her slightest criticism and was easily angered, pursued by a guilty sense that he had failed her. Volatile, tense, and moody, she responded to him in an equally conflicted way. When she was nearly eleven she drew up a list of famous men which delighted him: “Longfellow, Papa (Mark Twain), Columbus, Teneson, Ferdinad.” As she grew older she knew he was a great man, but she was not at all sure a humorist was any better than a clown, and more and more she wanted him to be a great man in some other way. “In a great many directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous,” she wrote in her biography. She wanted him to be a moral philosopher, for example, and the author not of Huckleberry Finn but of The Prince and the Pauper and especially Joan of Arc; much more than her mother she demanded purity, gentility, high sentiment—the criteria of the female reading audience described by one of Clemens’ contemporaries as “the iron Madonna who strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist”.Susy sometimes expressed her aspirations for him, with a cruelty she could hardly have acknowledged, in open resentment of the fame and identity of that deliberate creation, Mark Twain. “How I hate that name! I should never like to hear it again!” she told the New Orleans writer Grace King, and she said that she had suffered during every moment of a court ball in Berlin because she received no attention “save as the daughter of Mark Twain.”

  For his part he minded so much her leaving home in the fall of 1890— “Susy is a freshman at Bryn Mawr, poor child”—that he was half glad to hear she was almost too homesick to stay at college. “The last time I saw her was a week ago on the platform at Bryn Mawr,” he wrote to Pamela, and his sentence has the cadence of his own grief and loneliness without Susy. “Our train was moving away, and she was drifting collegeward afoot, her figure blurred and dim in the rain and fog, and she was crying.” To his “private regret,” he confided to Howells a few months later, she was beginning to love Bryn Mawr. She had managed to put aside her homesickness and was busy practicing the part of Phyllis in Iolanthe. But Clemens was reluctant to leave well enough alone, and he cast about for pretexts for visiting Susy. He would even have delivered her laundry from home if he had been allowed to, Livy told one of Susy’s classmates. It was clear that Livy, who had wanted her to go away to college to begin with (and had arranged for the tutoring to prepare her for the entrance examinations), thought it was a good thing for father and daughter to be separated.

  Clemens eagerly accepted an invitation from President James E. Rhoads to read to the students at Bryn Mawr on Monday, March 23, 1891, and he took unusual care in planning his program, even though this was the sort of reading he had done time and time again, with Cable or alone. Even the special audience was nothing new to him—he had read at Vassar in 1885 and had taken Susy along with him. In the three successive programs Clemens wrote out in his notebook, the crucial number came to be (as it was at his Vassar reading) the Negro ghost story he had learned as a boy on his uncle’s farm near Florida, Missouri, and had been telling ever since, on the stage, at dinner tables, in living rooms: A man digs up his wife’s body to take her golden arm, solid gold from the shoulder down; he hears her accusing voice—“Who got my golden arm?”—growing nearer and louder; he himself is half dead of terror; the voice, now at his head, cries out, “You’ve got it!” He made it a hair-raising story, even for those who heard him tell it over and over again.

  For Clemens “The Golden Arm” had an extraordinary range of associations and covert meanings. (At the time, his own golden arm was worthless from the shoulder down.) It was one of his most effective performances (the actor Hal Holbrook recently showed just how effective the story still is). As Clemens theorized about it, and he theorized very rarely about his craft, it became the supreme illustration of the art of the oral story—the basic model for his best work. It depended for its effect “upon the manner of the telling” and the timing of the pause before the “snapper” at the end. “If I got the right length precisely,” he said in 1897 in How to Tell a Story, “I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat—and that was what I was after.” But, as he described “The Golden Arm” to Joel Chandler Harris years earlier, it was more than “a lovely story to tell.” It was also a kind of cautionary economic fable about a man who was willing “to risk his soul and his nightly peace forever” for the sake of wealth. Here again in Mark Twain’s pattern of associations the relationship with a woman has got turned into money.

  Susy had been hearing her father tell “The Golden Arm” as long as she could remember; by the time she heard it at Vassar she had made up her mind not to be frightened, but she was frightened all the same. She hated the story not only because it terrified her but also because there were implicit parallels that were bound to set up some disturbing subliminal vibrations. An anxious and sensitive child like Susy could easily believe that her adored and invalid mother was dying every time she fell ill; there was something unpleasant in this story of her father’s about a dead wife. The children knew also that their father, in order to support his household and his ventures (and to send Susy to Bryn Mawr) was increasingly dependent on his wife’s wealth (and it might as well be mentioned that Livy’s money, derived from coal, was dug up out of the ground, just like the golden arm).

  Susy begged him not to read his ghost story at Bryn Mawr; her reason, as she explained to a classmate, was that it was not right for a “sophisticated group.” “Promise me that you will not tell the ghost story,” she said when she met him at the station. He laughed, patted her on the head, and promised, even though at no time had he considered leaving it put of the program. She trembled through the reading. Toward the end she whispered to a friend, “He’s going to tell the ghost story—I know he’s going to tell the ghost story. And he’s going to say ‘Boo’ at the end and make them all jump.” When he started the story, she ran up the aisle and out of the room, weeping.

  “All I could hear was your voice saying, ‘Please don’t tell the ghost story, Father—promise not to tell the ghost story,’” he said later, taking her in his arms, “and I could think of nothing else. Oh, my dear, my dear, how could I!” For this and for so much else, willed and unwilled, that had happened over the past five years he was back where he seemed determined to be, on his knees begging forgiveness.

  VII

  “Stop street sprinkling—and electric lights—and publications—and clubs, three years—and pensions,” Clemens reminded himself that spring; stop the telephone, sell the piano, the pew, the horses, find places for the butler and the coachman. Hamersley, the first of a long line of creditors he would eventually have to face, demanded his money back; the best Clemens could offer was a seventy-five-day note. He told Howells that for Livy’s health they had decided to go to Europe for an indefinite stay, take the baths during the summer and spend winters in Berlin. It was a matter of necessity, he said. “Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to see except heaven and hell.” Howells could have guessed another reason for going: the house had finally become too much for Clemens to keep up. After seventeen years the mansion on Farmington Avenue was stripped bare, furniture, carpets, and books had gone to the warehouse. Clemens’ footsteps echoed in the empty rooms. Outside the conservatory door waited another symbol of Nook Farm’s twilight: Harriet Beecher Stowe, holding flowers in her hands, smiled vaguely, and made strange noises. “This maniac,” a
s he now called her, escaped daily from her hired Irish companion and wandered about frightening people with “her hideous gobblings.”

  “We are going to a world where there are no watermelons, and not much other food or cookery.” On June 6, 1891, the Clemenses sailed for France on the Gascoigne, to be gone for more than eight of the next nine years and as a family never to live in Hartford again. On shipboard he wrote down some topics for the travel letters he had just contracted to write for the McClure Syndicate, and he added a familiar note of quite a different sort: “Tom and Huck die.”

  * In July 1889 Clemens was telling Livy about another wonder, a “charming machine” that could make 9,000 envelopes an hour, gum them, print them, count them, package them. “It oils itself, it attends to its own glue and ink.” And years after Paige’s typesetter had bankrupted him Clemens still had the same tendency to humanize machines (and mechanize people). Watching one of McClure’s giant presses stop and signal for a foreman to shift its roll of paper, he exclaimed, “My God! Can that thing vote, too?”

  * In 1892 the firm published two books by Walt Whitman, Selected Poems and Autobiographia. By this time, however, Clemens was an absentee partner, and the company was run by Webster’s successor, Fred Hall.

  * “Webster kept back a book of mine, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as long as he could,” Clemens said in 1906, with a malevolent disregard of fact that the mere thought of Charley brought out in him, “and finally published it so surreptitiously that it took two or three years to find out that there was any such book.” Actually, Webster was out of the business before the manuscript was even finished.

  * In “Civilization in the United States” Arnold argued that despite America’s material prosperity the basic “human problem” had not been solved. He cited the lack of “what is elevated and beautiful, of what is interesting,” and, choosing Lincoln as an example, he also cited the lack of “distinction.” “In truth, everything is against distinction in America, and against the sense of elevation to be gained through admiring and respecting it. The glorification of ‘the average man,’ who is quite a religion with statesmen and publicists there, is against it. The addiction to ‘the funny man,’ who is a national misfortune there, is against it. Above all, the newspapers are against it.” In a speech which he never delivered but set in type on the Paige machine, Clemens replied to Arnold’s attack on the newspapers; “a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty,” was his general point.

  Arnold’s attack on the status of “the funny man” in America had home-grown counterparts, and Clemens was all too familiar with them. For example, the author of a literary history published in New York in 1886 made the following assessment: “The creators of Uncle Remus and his Folklore Stories and of Innocents Abroad must make hay while the sun shines. Twenty years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in some higher literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the privileged comedians of the republic. Humor alone never gives its master a place in literature.”

  * In February 1887, before he had finished the first half of the book, Clemens read a paper with this title to the Monday Evening Club in Hartford. A fragment of the paper survives as an interpolated passage in Chapter 10 of An American Claimant (published in 1892). The speaker is identified as a middle-aging man who has got his education in a printing office. He argues that “the imagination-stunning material development of this century” has so drastically “reconstructed” America that 17,000 persons can now accomplish the same work that 50 years ago would have kept 13 million busy. Restating, he figures that the 1887 population of 60 million has the productive potential of 40 billion. He does not speculate about possible concentrations of wealth and power or surpluses of goods, labor, and leisure.

  †On Oct. 12, 1876, years before he used this famous phrase in Chapter 13 (which was apparently Franklin D. Roosevelt’s source) Clemens had written to Howells, apropos of an abortive literary scheme, “We must have a new deal.” But in that same sense the phrase had been American usage as early as 1834.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Get me out of business!”

  I

  DURING THE SUMMER of 1891 Clemens and Livy placed their two oldest daughters at boarding school in Geneva and, looking for relief for the rheumatism that now crippled both of them, visited the fashionable watering places, Aix-les-Bains and then Marienbad. In between, with tickets bought months in advance, they attended the equally fashionable Wagner festival at Bayreuth. Clemens’ feelings about this rite of cultural piety, performed in the cavernous Festspielhaus (he called it “the Shrine of St. Wagner”) were those of an unreconstructed admirer of spirituals and minstrel shows who would always apologize to his children for his taste in music. He preferred Wagner in pantomime, he said; the singing in Lohengrin reminded him of “the time the orphan asylum burned down.”

  Clemens’ travels and appearances were in part dictated by his standing as the most celebrated American in Germany. He dined at the right hand of the Kaiser, who, having dropped one pilot recently, was happy to entertain another and told Clemens that Life on the Mississippi was his best book. Helmholtz called on him. He was twice mistaken for the students’ idol, the seventy-five-year-old Mommsen, a little man with long hair and an Emersonian face. A new six-volume edition of his works was being published in Stuttgart. He had a reputation to live up to, whatever the price in money and privacy might be. In Berlin that winter the family lasted only two humiliating months in a cheap apartment across Körnerstrasse from a warehouse before they moved into an eight-room suite in an Unter den Linden hotel from which they could watch imperial Wilhelm ride past. They saved money by taking their meals in the public dining room, where Clemens’ entrance created a sensation. Sometimes, as he ate with his family, strangers stood only a few yards away to watch him and perhaps overhear a scrap of table talk. He was not at all embarrassed; to Clara he even seemed “utterly unconscious” of such attentions. Howells, walking on Fifth Avenue with him years later, recognized how much Clemens actually delighted in the turned head and the undisguised stare.

  Years of wealth and social pre-eminence had made Clemens and Livy unable to economize for long in any significant way. The enormous villa in Florence that they were soon to rent needed a brigade of servants to make it habitable. Their style of living in Berlin and elsewhere, boarding schools and all, made only small, nominal concessions to the pressures that weighed heavier and heavier upon him. “I have never felt so desperate in my life,” he had written to his publishing partner, Fred Hall, soon after the collapse of yet another scheme to rehabilitate the typesetter, “for I haven’t got a penny to my name.” They were altogether dependent on what he could earn with his disabled writing hand and on the small sum—barely enough to keep them two months even in Europe, he figured in July 1891—that Livy’s brother was holding for her.

  Late that summer Clemens made a symbolic return to the river, to the one source of vitality that had never yet failed him. He left his family in Lausanne, bought a flat-bottomed boat, hired a man to steer it and a courier to take care of the travel arrangements, and set out on a ten-day trip down the Rhone from Chatillon on Lake Bourget to Lyons, Vienne, Avignon, and finally Arles. He drifted downriver by day, smoking, reading, and writing under a canopy that reminded him of a covered wagon, and spent the nights ashore. Nothing compares with a raft voyage, he wrote to Twichell, recalling the delight he always took in such trips, for “extinction from the world and newspapers, and a conscience in a state of coma, and lazy comfort, and solid happiness. In fact there’s nothing that’s so lovely.” But for all its associations with his boyhood idyl, Samuel’s Rhone journey, his attempt in late middle age to recapture some of the simplicity and freedom of Huck and Jim on their raft, had somber Nibelung overtones. This passive surrender to the river’s larger rhythm—“to glide down the river in an open boat, moved by the current only” and to experience a “strange absence of sense of sin, and
the stranger absence of the desire to commit it”—might, he hoped, refresh and replenish him as a writer. But it also prefigured the next five or six years, whose tragic symbols were to be so many futile voyages across the oceans; his will, talents, and powers increasingly frustrated, the luck he always counted on clearly running out, Clemens became a victim of circumstance, a man on the run.

  And in fact this once the river did fail him. His ten days became all too deliberately a search for travel copy for William Laffan’s New York Sun. His posthumously published account, “Down the Rhone,” is Albert Bigelow Paine’s devitalized abridgment of a projected book-length manuscript which Clemens began, returned to over the next ten or so years, and could never finish. Its title, The Innocents Adrift, describes his own state. During his years in Europe the volume and range of quality of his work was considerable, but even that part of it written in haste but with dead aim for ready money reflects his compulsion not only to go back over familiar ground but also to let the current of the river take him further and further back in time. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, a sustained, powerful satire in which as a novelist he took his last long look at America, he returned to Hannibal, now become Dawson’s Landing, like Hadleyburg an archetypal town enclosing a somber but not totally despairing vision of the race. The confused course of the composition of the book reveals all too well Mark Twain’s faltering sense of direction during the 1890s. He began this novel about slavery, moral decay, and deceptive realities as a mistaken-identity farce about Siamese twins, a subject which had long fascinated him. “It changed itself from a farce to a tragedy,” he said, explaining the painful process—the rewritings nearly killed him—by which The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson came to be equipped with a pendant piece called The Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins. “I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other one—a kind of literary Caesarian operation.”