Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  This benefactor, it soon became public knowledge, was Henry Huttleston Rogers, fifty-three years old, one of the chief architects of the Standard Oil trust and, according to the common stereotype of that trust as all horns and tail, one of its arch villains.* Together with John D. Archbold and William Rockefeller he was in operating control of the trust’s daily affairs. Of the twenty companies that in 1895 made up the “interests” of the vast amalgamation, Rogers was a director of thirteen and of these was president of six, and he might just as well have been president of the other seven, for he let it be known that “all meetings where I sit as director vote first and talk after I am gone.” From his offices on the eleventh floor of the Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway his interests eventually extended beyond oil and pipelines into gas, copper, steel, coal, municipal traction, nails, rails, insurance, and the stock market, and he often left behind him a wake of ruined competitors and thwarted investigations. “We are not in business for our health,” he said in a moment of candor to a governmental commission, “but are out for the dollars,” and to defend that principle he became as skillful a master of the evasive answer—and of the finely controlled inexactitude just this side of outright perjury—as John D. Rockefeller was of plain silence. In an era of freebooting Rogers distinguished himself for daring, rapacity, intrigue, and a total lack of business scruples. In his Who’s Who listing he called himself simply a “Capitalist.” His enemies, among whom were victims with lifelong scars and grudges, called him “Hell Hound” Rogers, invoked comparisons with rattlesnakes, sharks, and tigers, and in compassionate moments saw him as the victim of a “cannibalistic money-hunger” which turned him into “a fiend.”

  But the same enemies recognized a paradox. Any man who had Rogers as a friend, it seemed, was thrice blessed as the beneficiary of his company, protection, and fiscal advice. He was handsome and vigorous, he had hypnotic charm and social brilliance, he was a superb host and storyteller, and he was capable of enormous kindness, generosity, and delicacy. His services to Mark Twain, which rescued a great writer from probable destruction and the entire Clemens family from shame and poverty, were founded on affection and admiration, and Rogers had to render these services with especial tact as well as shrewdness. From the start Livy’s pride as well as Clemens’ eliminated the possibility of a disguised gift or personal loan, although by Rogers’ standards the amounts involved were relatively small. Later on he took considerable pains to deny the imputation that he had been speculating for Clemens’ account. He was helping a writer, but, unlike an Otto Kahn, he had to do it in ways that were acceptable to a fellow man of affairs and standing who was also his friend. His association and frequent appearances with Mark Twain could only help rehabilitate his own (and Standard Oil’s) public image. Still, he put no overt demands on Clemens. Rogers also paid for Helen Keller’s education, was a patron of the arts, and with Carnegie gave money to Cooper Union in New York. To the town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where he had delivered groceries and newspapers as a boy and was still known to some as “Hen,” he gave paved streets, school buildings, a Masonic lodge, a town hall, a library and a Unitarian church and parsonage. He was not, therefore, lacking in social utility. The trouble was that, like any condottiere, he believed that justice consisted in being kind to his friends and ruthless to his enemies, and since he, like his compeers, understood economic life to be a raw state of nature, anyone who stood between him and his next acquisition was likely to be treated as an enemy.

  For Mark Twain, who all his life had plutocratic ambitions but at the same time believed that money was evil and created evil, there had to be a price for any alliance he would make with archetypal plutocracy. The representative of a broad spectrum of paradox, as a writer he stood outside American society of the Gilded Age, but as a businessman he embraced its business values. When he went bankrupt and then not only paid off his creditors to the last cent but even became a rich man all over again, he re-enacted the capitalist passion and resurrection. “Our friend entered the fiery furnace a man,” Andrew Carnegie said of him, “and emerged a hero.” He was the idol of the common man and also the pet and protégé of the very rich, but though he was naïve at times about the very rich he rarely became their apologist. He once said about Rogers, “He’s a pirate all right, but he owns up to it and enjoys being a pirate. That’s the reason I like him.” The satirist and moralist was always breaking in. “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter,” he said in an autobiographical dictation in 1907, “they are an entire banquet.” He took a savage pleasure in the egotistic gambols of Andrew Carnegie. “He has bought fame,” he said of Carnegie’s public libraries, “and paid cash for it.” He took the same savage pleasure in examining the marriage of plutocracy and Christianity. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., applied “the fox fire of his mind” to arguing that “Sell all thou hast and give to the poor” didn’t apply to money at all, but to anything that stood between a man and salvation; by this interpretation, Clemens reasoned, the Rockefellers’ millions were “a mere incident in their lives,” of no importance to them at all. (The Rockefellers’ notion that they were merely the custodians of wealth, Mr. Dooley said at about this time, made them “a kind iv a society f’r th’ previntion iv croolty to money.”) When in 1907 Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis fined Standard Oil of Indiana a total of $29,240,000 for violating the Elkins Act against rebates, Clemens was reminded of what the bride said the next morning: “I expected it but didn’t suppose it would be so big.” But this sort of hilarity he generally kept as private as the diatribes against money, money men, and money morality which he spoke as from the grave, intending them for his posthumous autobiography.

  The price of his becoming a provisional member of the plutocracy was a certain blunting and demoralizing of purpose, a sense of powerlessness and drift. He began to see himself, and everyone else, as driven by self-interest and the compulsion to conform. “You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone,” he liked to quote, “and I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.” The price was also the stilling of a magnificent public voice presented with a magnificent public subject. He had not been bought out. It was largely a matter of loyalty to Rogers, to whom he felt he owed his life and whom he worshiped, and this loyalty excluded all other considerations. Clemens accepted this personal code despite all the contradictions it carried with it. And it was clear from the start that the price he volunteered to pay was public silence. By some horrendous misjudgment George Warner, Charles Dudley Warner’s brother and a friend of Henry Demarest Lloyd, approached Clemens during the autumn of 1893 and suggested that there might be a “splendid chance” open to him as a publisher if he were to take on Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth, which was then making the rounds at Harper, Houghton Mifflin, and Appleton. “I know a man—a prominent man—who has written a book that will go like wildfire,” Warner said, “a book that arraigns the Standard Oil fiends, and gives them unmitigated hell, individual by individual. It is the very book for you to publish.”* Clemens swallowed his rage and the temptation to tell Warner that it was one of those fiends who (in contrast to the genial folks at Nook Farm) was keeping him and his family out of the poorhouse. He was proud enough of the self-control he had shown with Warner to tell Livy about it. He had answered that he “wanted to get out of the publishing business and out of all business” and therefore was not interested in taking on any sort of book. Orion too, having learned of the role that Rogers was playing, accepted his brother’s simple code, and with characteristic ease he disembarrassed himself in one instant of a conviction he and a good part of the American population had held for years. “I have been abusing the Standard Oil Company,” he apologized to Sam. “I did not know it was run by angels.”

  III

  During the bleak autumn and winter of 1893-94 over two and a half million men were out of work. The tramp, wandering from city to city, was as familiar on the American landscape as the silent factory and the deserted
mine pit. “If we have built many railroads, we have wrecked many,” Howells wrote in the February North American Review, “and those vast continental lines which, with such a tremendous expenditure of competitive force, we placed in control of the monopolies, have passed into the hands of the receivers, the agents of an unconscious state socialism…. In our paradise of toil, myriads of workingmen want work.” Writing to Livy from his economy room at the Players Club on Gramercy Park, Clemens also expressed the national despair, in terms of his own situation. He was full of shame and remorse at having brought his family to the edge of ruin. He foresaw the terrible necessity of mounting the lecture platform again, first in India and Australia while presumably his own country was recovering from the depression. He was desperately lonely, minding their separation more and more, absent-minded at times, distracted enough with anxiety to forget to mail his letters to Livy. “A body forgets pretty much everything, these days, except his visions of the poorhouse,” he wrote.

  Rogers, who had taken over the supervision of all of Clemens’ business interests, including the typesetter, had said to him, “You stop walking the floor,” and while one rescue scheme or another was being tried out, Clemens, hungry for public activity to keep his mind off his troubles, hungry for public adulation, submerged himself in an intense social life. He was busy from the beginning of one day until far into the beginning of the next. Then, wanting sleep and oblivion, he went back to his room and fell asleep immediately, or he drugged himself with whiskey and slept as soundly as a dead person. He led the sort of public existence which, years later, would prompt Howells to regret that his friend was eating too many dinners and writing too few books.

  He was busy turning down invitations, inventing ways to cut short some of those that he did accept. During one day alone he might have a breakfast engagement, dinner engagements at three and again at seven, a couple of business conferences, and then an evening party of magic-lantern slides and stories at Mary Mapes Dodge’s apartment off Central Park, or billiards at the Racquet Club with William Laffan, or supper and dancing to a Hungarian band until four-thirty in the morning. The Lotos Club gave a banquet in his honor at which, in response to superabundant praise and welcome, he gave no fewer than three speeches. He dined at Charles Dana’s house, where he had a “shouting good time” telling “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” and learning from a retired diplomat that copies of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had been seen on Bismarck’s writing desk, in the Czarina’s boudoir, and in the private parlor of the President of Chile. He dined at Delmonico’s with Sir Henry Irving, a five-hundred-dollar investor in the typesetter. He dined without fear of indigestion on oysters and corned beef and cabbage with John Mackay, traded Comstock anecdotes, inscribed to Mackay a copy of Roughing It in token of a thirty-one-year friendship. Mackay told him that any message, any time, that he wanted to send to Livy would go free via Postal Telegraph cables, with Mackay’s personal frank. He went to Fairhaven to speak at the dedication of Rogers’ town hall. In Boston, at Annie Fields’s house on Charles Street, he dined with Sarah Orne Jewett and with Dr. Holmes, now eighty-four and failing in sight. Holmes tired easily and he rarely went out, but this evening he was as sparkling as ever, refused to go home until late, was full of compliments, and was delighted to be told once again that his Autocrat had been Clemens’ courting book and was kept along with the love letters in Livy’s green tin box. Holmes said he had the Century’s monthly installments of Pudd’nhead Wilson read aloud to him as they came out. These installments were causing a stir everywhere, even on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange—one of its governors, Theodore Wilson, was suspected of being the original Pudd’nhead and someone circulated a petition for his removal.

  The chorus of praise was unremitting, and Clemens generally fed on it. “I can stand considerable petting,” he said. He was delighted to be told that his fame was both “substantial and permanent,” to be accosted on the El by a prosperous-looking master mechanic who said, “You look enough like Mark Twain to sit for his portrait.” Dr. Rice told him that his welcome to New York had been “phenomenal,” that the people loved him. John D. Archbold, who each morning whistled “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as he entered his office at 26 Broadway, took him and Rogers to the prize fights at the New York Athletic Club to see a boxer named the Coffee Cooler flatten a white man in five rounds. As Clemens reported it to Livy, Rogers remarked to Archbold, rather “pointedly, it seems, “that other people’s successes in this world were made over broken hearts or at the cost of other people’s feelings or food, but my fame had cost no one a pang or a penny.”

  He never felt tired any more, he said. Supporting this manic stamina was a renewed faith in “mind-cure,” which he had dabbled in for years as a remedy for colds, headaches, and even astigmatism. Now he and thousands of others were taking it up seriously; the far from gay Nineties saw the founding of Mrs. Eddy’s Mother Church in Boston, an event which dramatized the remarkably brief evolution of Christian Science from a sect to a religion. “Do find that Christian Scientist for Susy,” he told Livy. Susy now had what a Paris doctor diagnosed as a chest condition stemming from anemia and proposed to treat by gymnastics and massage. Susy and later Clara were to become converts to what their father called “that rational and noble philosophy.” Clemens himself, suffering from bronchitis and a chronic cough, was going to a Dr. Whipple at 328 Madison Avenue in New York, recommended to him by George Warner and credited with having so successfully cured a Hartford boy of “heart disease” that the boy was playing football for Yale. During these treatments Whipple sat silent in a corner with his face to the wall while Clemens walked around the room and smoked. Mind cure seemed to work on him (although he conceded the possibility that some homeopathic powders given him by Rogers might have helped, too); it also seemed to work on Elinor Howells, who was going to a lady named Mrs. E. R. de Wolf at 1418 Broadway and whose improvement in health won over even her husband from his view of the whole business as a hoax. Sadly, Clemens told Livy that there were no mind-curists in Europe; Whipple said anyone who tried to practice his healing art in France would be put in jail right away. Soon, however, convinced by Elinor Howells that mind cure and hypnotism were really all the same thing, Clemens had a new and urgent proposal for Susy’s therapy. “The very source, the very centre of hypnotism is Paris. Dr. Charcot’s pupils and disciples”—among whom, seven years earlier, had been Sigmund Freud—“are right there and ready to your hand,” he wrote to Livy, and he asked her to get from John Mackay’s wife the name of one of them. “Do, do it, honey. Don’t lose a minute.” Mind cure, beyond the real or imagined physical relief it was giving him, offered Clemens a cure for the blues and an antidote to “the religion of chronic anxiety” (the phrase is William James’s) in which he had been raised.* Above all, by making “what in our protestant countries is an unprecedentedly great use of the subconscious life” (again William James), it helped liberate that vast body of dream and fantasy material which, in the late 1890s, he relied on to preserve his sanity.

  In addition to his genius as a corporate organizer and manager, Rogers had a strong technological bent. In his late twenties he developed and subsequently patented the first workable process for separating naphtha from crude oil. Consequently, through the tremendous power of his endorsement there occurred a sort of electroconvulsive movement in the late career of the typesetter, which suggested to Clemens that the old dream of being a millionaire might come true after all, if he could only hold on for a while. “I have got the best and wisest man in the whole Standard Oil group of multi-millionaires a good deal interested in looking into the typesetter,” he wrote to Livy on October 18, 1893, and he warned her that a rumor of Rogers’ even perfunctory interest would send the shares way up. After a preliminary study of several weeks Rogers went to Chicago with a son-in-law, Urban Broughton, for a demonstration. “Let all tests be applied,” Clemens ordered. They were, and along with all its sophistications and improvements the ma
chine performed brilliantly. At the same moment that the operator was setting a line on the 109-character keyboard, the machine was testing the previous line for broken and turned types, measuring it, and justifying it, using eleven sizes of space. Since the entire cycle of machine composition was now accomplished almost simultaneously, a skilled operator could turn out unheard-of amounts of work every hour. Rogers was convinced. Cutting through the dense tangle of royalties and options that had been suffocating the venture almost from the start—there were at least three companies involved, including one represented by Hamersley, now described by Clemens as “that cask of rancid guts”—Rogers devised a contract which, it seemed certain, Paige would have to sign. Paige, in Chicago, was down to his last seven dollars; as Orion told Sam, Paige had acted like a snake, but “now you’e got the fork on his neck.”