Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  He also returned once again to the matter of Hannibal in Tom Sawyer Abroad, an adventure story with antecedents in Jules Verne. Tom and Huck are “still fifteen years old” when they set out on their voyage in a self-propelled balloon. The “genius” who invented this mechanical marvel—which, for purposes of the story, is basically just an airborne raft—is a combination of Pap Finn and James W. Paige. He is a mad professor who falls into a drunken, paranoidal rage and is, in effect, murdered by Tom, who pushes him overboard into the Atlantic. After this start the story was more or less conventional going for the young readers of Mrs. Mary Dodge’s St. Nicholas Magazine. After writing Tom Sawyer Abroad Mark Twain continued to go back in time. During 1893 and 1894 he seriously made plans for a monthly magazine of which he was to be editor and publisher, figured costs for a first issue of twenty thousand copies, and wrote a draft of a prospectus. The contents were to be gathered from old autobiographies and reminiscences, from “moldy old newspapers and moldy old books.” The purpose of the magazine was to call up “the great yesterdays, the sublime yesterdays, the immemorial yesterdays of all time.” Clemens tried to explain his own sense that the past was becoming more immediate to him than the present: “The word ‘yesterday’ seems to whisk us back and set us face to face with the occurrence and make it a personal affair to us.” And the title of this venture, suggesting his awareness of time passing and powers failing, was to be The Back Number. But he was never able to persuade any publisher to make the experiment; years later, in 1906, he was still sorry that the idea remained only an idea.

  In 1893 he had turned instead to the distant yesterday of Joan of Arc’s Domrémy. Having been betrayed by the dynamo, he threw himself at the feet of the virgin and wrote an idealization of nonsexual (and, as he understood it, constitutionally non-nubile)* young womanhood which was so single-mindedly devout and so unabashedly sentimental that for once even Susy (from whom he secretly drew Joan’s physical portrait) was thoroughly proud and pleased. It promised to be “his loveliest book,” she told Clara, “perhaps even more sweet and beautiful than The Prince and the Pauper;” to hear him read aloud from his manuscript was “uplifting and revealing.” Joan of Arc was an act of piety for him, and he explained over and over again that he wrote it out of love, “not for lucre.” If it was to be published at all he wanted it published anonymously, as if Mark Twain and his laughter had never existed.

  Joan was to be his refuge from hard work, quick business trips to America, and poor health. In Berlin during October 1891 he worked himself into exhaustion by spending three days and nights translating into English Dr. Heinrich Hoffman’s children’s classic, Struwwelpeter. He wanted his translation either published as a book right away, in time to catch the Christmas trade, or sold to McClure as a serial “for several hundred dollars.” Fred Hall, by now accustomed to Clemens’ hand-to-mouth planning and impatience with the normal pace of book publishing, said he could manage it neither way, and along with other abandoned manuscripts Mark Twain’s Slovenly Peter went into the trunk, not to be published until 1935. During the winter of 1891-92 Clemens was in bed for over a month with what started out as a racking cough and turned into influenza and congestion of the lungs. He came out of his sickroom at the end of February with one lung permanently damaged, an unshakable head cold, and rheumatic threatenings so severe he could hardly pick up a pen. Months later, his own health apparently restored, he reported to Orion that he was “in the clouds”: the doctors at Bad Nauheim were now positive that Livy did not have heart disease but only a “weakness of the heart muscles” which they said would improve with rest. But by the time Clemens was ready to leave Bad Nauheim for Italy in September Livy was suffering from severe headaches, and her neck and face were grossly swollen. The same doctors said it might be erysipelas. More likely it was the onset of acute hyperthyroid heart disease. Throughout the rest of her life she was subject to attacks of shortness of breath, complained of the heat and of overexcitement, and was terrified, when her attacks were severe, that she was choking to death; That summer Clemens and Livy observed an alarming change in Jean’s personality: she had become contrary, rude, and sullen. He harshly concluded that her “real nature” had finally emerged and that her former gentle and lovable personality had been only “an artificial production due to parental restraint and watchfulness.” Four years later he gave up this sort of moralizing, for she had had a convulsion at school and all her earlier symptoms were now explained: she was an epileptic.

  “A fine soft-fibered little fellow with the perversest twang and drawl, but very human and good,” William James wrote to Josiah Royce from Florence in 1892. “I should think one might grow very fond of him.” Clemens had come to Florence in search of a house for the year. He settled on Villa Viviani at Settignano, a hill village about five miles outside the city. Livy’s health seemed to improve when they moved there late in September, “and the best is yet to come,” he believed. Soon, however, she had dysentery and was weak and wasted away. Clemens was afflicted with some scalp ailment and had to have all his hair cut off. “I seem able to forget everything except that I have had my head shaved,” he noted. He was bothered by drafts and itching, by flies walking on his head. He was bothered most of all by a real and symbolic divestment of identity and power, and he went into seclusion, which he welcomed. Yet he made the most of it, in his way, for he sprang the bald surprise on his daughters one morning. He stood silently in the doorway of Susy’s bedroom. She saw him, gave a little cry, and blushed. He had paid her back, no doubt, in this cruel but self-abasing way, for some friction between them, some infraction of the cast-iron Victorian code by which he sternly forbade his daughters to go unchaperoned in Europe or to be exposed to public view. Clara too suffered. Still shuddering at the image of her father’s naked head, she escaped for the winter to Berlin, where she was studying music, but letters of strictest advice from him followed her. “We want you to be a lady—a lady above reproach,” he scolded; he heard that she had allowed herself to be the only female in a room full of admiring German officers. He had recently locked her in her hotel room after he caught her exchanging glances with a young man. Years later, after he saw some Italian officers in a tearoom staring at her, he took a scissors to her hat and cut off the artificial fruit because he thought it was coquettish and provocative. Nor was Susy to be happy in Florence. She went to the theater and the opera “to ease the dullness of eternal study,” he recognized sympathetically, but still there were tensions between them—she dreaded going down to breakfast with him, “altho’ Papa hasn’t stormed yet.”

  The square stone house was so vast that he thought of setting a time and a room for the family to find each other once a day. There was a constant confounding of tongues among the servants and their employers: the cook and the butler were Italian, the housekeeper was French, one maid was German and one Irish. Still, both Clemens and Livy managed to find quiet and rest. “There is going to be absolute seclusion here—a hermit life, in fact,” he said. He needed a “serene and noiseless life,” and he was able to turn out an enormous volume of work: eighteen hundred pages in five months, he told Hall. There was a chance, he now began to feel, that he might be able to keep his family out of the poorhouse. He stopped work only when the sun set over the hills west of Florence, and then he had tea on the terrace under the olive trees, smoked his pipe, took his ease. He was enchanted with the view—“drunk with pleasure all the time”—but still he remembered other views. “It cannot be compared with the sun on the Mississippi,” he told Grace King, and he talked about pilots and steamboating and, one evening, half jokingly about hell. “I don’t believe in it,” he said, “but I’m afraid of it. When I wake up at night, I think of hell, and I am sure about going there.” “Why, Youth,” Livy said, “who, then, can be saved?”

  II

  Between June 1892, when he returned to the United States alone for a month, and May 1894, when he came back to Europe a bankrupt, Clemens made eight Atlantic crossings and
was away from Livy for about a year altogether; one period of seven months during 1893 and 1894 was the longest separation of their married life. He was called from his European seclusion by the worsening condition of his publishing house, which was now collapsing under the weight of the ten-volume Library of American Literature, and also, at first, by a revival of hope in the typesetter. Clemens estimated the potential value of that one publishing project at well over half a million dollars; his share of the machine he carried on his psychological books at about a quarter of a million plus the value of his one sixth of Paige’s patent. What both ventures needed, of course, was a large administration of cash. Directly and through Hall he was plotting a $100,000 loan from Carnegie, who resisted all invitations to diversify his investments and even, in an epigram which Clemens soon made famous, defended a contrary policy. “Put all your eggs into one basket,” Carnegie is supposed to have said, “and watch that basket.”

  One problem with the machine, as always, was that it was worthless until a company could start manufacturing it, and here, Clemens recognized, was the deadlock. “Nothing but a Co. can manufacture—and P is determined there never shall be one, except on his terms—and they will never be granted.” After less than a month in New York and Hartford he concluded it was futile even to visit Paige, and, distraught and lonely, he sailed for Europe once again and played the fool. “I am a Yale man now, you know,” he said, citing the honorary M.A. he had received in 1888, and he injected himself into the company of a group of sixteen members of the class of 1892, on their way to taste the wicked pleasures of the Continent. On the last night out he submitted to a mock trial on the charge of “outrageous and habitual lying” and was sentenced to solitary confinement in his cabin with only his own books to read. He talked too much, monopolized attention in the first-class smoking room, and told mildly smutty stories which shocked the boys, who remembered him long after as a not so entertaining humorist, a garrulous older man who had drunk more champagne than was good for him and was up past his bedtime.

  Eight months later, in April 1893, he was back again in New York, hoping to break the Paige deadlock but also full of remorse for having left his family behind in what he still considered near-penurious exile. “My dear darling child,” Livy tried to console him, “you must not blame yourself as you do.” But soon he was as deeply involved with the machine as he had been before he swore off. It actually seemed to be in production at a factory on Eighteenth Street and Broadway. Fifty machines were well along, Paige assured him, but this would never do; the factory could turn out only one a day, and how could the immediate market for ten thousand machines be satisfied? The answer, Paige went on hypnotically, ignoring the rumblings of the panic that was soon to sweep the country (the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad had already gone into receivership; in May the rope trust was to fail), was to shift the manufacturing operation to Chicago, where some huge company seemed to be willing to put up all the money for a factory with an eventual capacity of five machines a day. Paige’s improved machine could now set thirteen thousand ems an hour: “Competition is impossible.” Once again under Paige’s spell, with the future suddenly seeming quite bright, Clemens sent off jubilant letters to Livy which made her “just about wild with pleasurable excitement. It does not seem credible that we are really again to have money to spend,” she answered from Florence. “It is astonishing to think that perhaps there is not yet a very long time for us to keep up this economy.” He celebrated by going off on a round of lunches and dinners, with Rudyard Kipling and his wife, Howells, Mary Mapes Dodge, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Andrew Carnegie, who tried to interest him in a scheme for absorbing Great Britain, Ireland, and Canada into an American commonwealth.

  In mid-April he went to Chicago with Hall, only to spend eleven days sick in bed with a bad cold at the Great Northern Hotel, smoking against his doctor’s orders, reading Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, and receiving a stream of visitors, including Eugene Field. Orion came up from Keokuk to see Sam and the machine, and to look for work. Paige, overflowing with confidence and good will, came to apologize for all past bitterness and misunderstanding and promised Clemens half the money forthcoming from the Chicago backers. Clemens still wanted proof that all along he had not been dealt with “in an absolutely shameless and conscienceless way,” but, as usual, he was impressed by Paige, “the smoothest talker I ever saw,” who gave him “an abundance of gilt-edge promises.” Hall, who had listened to praises of the machine all the way from New York to Chicago, rushed to see it in action. As usual, it was dismantled. Whatever premonitions Clemens had he took out on Orion, and Hall was shocked not only by Clemens’ sarcasms but by the unprotesting silence with which Orion received them. Sam’s sixty-eight-year-old brother sitting by his bedside now seemed more than ever failure and futility in the flesh, a warning. Unaware as always of his effect on Sam, Orion a week or so later gave him a pretty comprehensive report of unsuccess. He had tried to get the job of Columbian Exposition correspondent for the Keokuk Gate City and then the St. Louis Republican; he had tried to get a job with a Keokuk law firm; he had tried to sell an article to a magazine; and he failed in every one of these attempts. He and Mollie would have to scrimp along on their monthly remittance from Sam, keeping careful account of ten cents’ worth of coffee beans and fifteen cents’ worth of crackers, and dodging the collector from the water works.

  With a sense of having accomplished absolutely nothing, Clemens left Chicago without even a preliminary glimpse of the White City at the World’s Fair; he returned to New York too late to see the great international naval parade on the Hudson. The Columbian year had also come and gone without seeing the realization of his cherished scheme to buy up the Discoverer’s bones and put them on exhibit. “It was wonderful to find America,” he was soon to write at the end of Pudd’nhead Wilson, “but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”

  Back in Europe that summer he was racked with worry. The stock market crashed in June. One after another—the Erie in July, the Northern Pacific in August—the great railroads, more than seventy of them, were failing. Before the year was out five hundred banks and nearly sixteen thousand businesses had collapsed, and the American people, a London financial journal remarked, were “in the throes of a fiasco unprecedented even in their broad experience.” Clemens’ publishing house, an unsound enterprise even in the most favoring business circumstances, had borrowed heavily and was clearly headed for ruin. “Get me out of business!” he wrote to Hall, “and I will be yours forever gratefully.” “I think Mr. Clemens is right in feeling that he should get out of business, that he is not fitted for it,” Livy agreed. “It worries him too much.” Yet in “these hideous times” of a panic year it was going to be hard to find anybody to buy anything, especially a company in trouble. Although Clemens knew that the machine offered only “a doubtful outlook,” that it was tough on prophets, and that even now (thirteen years and about $190,000 since his first investment) it might not be ready for a long time to perform reliably in a printing office, he kept hoping. And then the hope began to fade. “I watch for your letters hungrily,” he wrote to Hall from London on August 9, “as I used to watch for the cablegram saying the machine’s finished—but when ‘next week certainly’ suddenly swelled into ‘three weeks sure’ I recognized the old familiar tune I used to hear so much.” A week later, with not a glimmer of daylight visible and now terrified that he might have to assign even his copyrights and thus become “a beggar,” he made the reluctant decision: “I am coming over, just as soon as I can get the family moved and settled.”

  When he returned to New York early in September, leaving the others in Paris for the winter, the business cyclone was gusting harder than ever. At first he saw some hope for his personal finances: he sold a story to Cosmopolitan for eight hundred dollars, which he kept for his expenses in New York, and he sold the serial rights in Pudd’nhead Wilson to the Century for an eventual $6,500. A week later, though, he was plunged once again into the
entrepreneurial nightmare. “The billows of hell have been rolling over me,” he wrote Livy from Frank Fuller’s New Jersey farm, where he had gone to recuperate after a terrible week. With eight thousand dollars in notes about to fall due, the publishing house seemed to be going under. Clemens could not raise the money in New York. Nor could he raise the money in Hartford, where the friends of the old affluent days, hard hit like everyone else, seemed to him hardly interested, hardly moved by his distress, and he came back to New York ashamed of himself for having tried. He was resigned to another round of futile appeals up and down Wall Street. Even the Langdon family could come up with only five thousand dollars in negotiable bonds, not enough to save the firm, Hall told him. At the Murray Hill Hotel on Friday evening, September 15—the notes fell due the following Monday—his friend and physician, Clarence Rice, with whom he was staying, arranged for him to talk to someone Rice described as a rich businessman who admired Mark Twain’s books and read them aloud to his wife and children. This man had learned of Clemens’ troubles, and wanted to help, if he could. They talked, and at the end of the evening the businessman told Clemens to send Hall in the morning to 26 Broadway, where a check for eight thousand dollars, with the firm’s assets as security, would be forthcoming. Utterly worn out in mind and body, and suffering from a cough so violent that, as he was told a week or so later, it had caused a hernia, Clemens came back to Rice’s apartment on East Nineteenth Street and before falling asleep managed to write a few lines to Clara on a prescription blank: “The best new acquaintance I’ve ever seen has helped us over Monday’s bridge. I got acquainted with him on a yacht two years ago.” A few months later, after this benefactor had taken over all the problems of the typesetter and had also arranged another transfusion for the publishing house in the form of a purchase offer from a publisher (the benefactor’s son-in-law, it turned out) for the firm’s millstone, the Library of American Literature, Clemens described him as “the only man I care for in the world; the only man I would give a damn for.” In 1902 he wrote, “He is not only the best friend I ever had, but is the best man I have ever known.”