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Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

Page 48

by Justin Kaplan


  “A singularly clear-headed man is Mr. Rogers—this appears at every meeting,” Clemens told Livy. “And no grass grows under his feet.” From time to time Clemens was treated to displays of Rogers’ genius at hard and soft bargaining. He moved easily from hauteur and ultimatum to sudden displays of affability and compromise, even to pleas for sympathy and haste on the grounds that he simply had to get Mr. Clemens off his back. It was better than a circus, Clemens told Livy. “It was beautiful to see Mr. Rogers apply his probe and his bung-starter and remorselessly let out the wind and the water from the so-called ‘Assets’ of these companies.”

  Three days before Christmas Clemens and Rogers traveled to Chicago in a private car put at their disposal by a vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In this rolling symbol of the Gilded Age Clemens breakfasted on steaks, chops, and baked potatoes, dined on canvasback duck, claret, and champagne, and after a couple of hot Scotches slept in opulent comfort. They spent a day bargaining with Paige, then returned in the same car and style and got off at Jersey City, where Rogers’ coachman was waiting to drive them to New York. Clemens was back at the Players in time to cable a greeting to Livy: “Merry Xmas! Promising progress made in Chicago.” And although it would be more than a month before Paige signed the final contract, Clemens could barely control his elation as he moved toward what now seemed certain victory. On January 15, 1894, he learned that Paige had reached an agreement to manufacture; the machine was finally going into production under a sensible contract and that autumn would be put into experimental service at the Chicago Herald. Undressing in his room after an evening of billiards, he suddenly felt the weight of three and a half months of desperate worry slip away, suddenly began to believe that he was no longer a pauper deep in debt, and he was overwhelmed. He walked the floor in excitement; at the same time he wanted to sit down and cry. He vowed never to touch business again, but to finish Joan and for the rest of his life wallow in writing and swim in ink. “Nearing success,” he cabled on January 19, cautious after years of disappointment. Then it became “a ship visible on the horizon, coming down under a cloud of canvas.” Finally, on February 2, 1894, he cabled, “Our ship is safe in port.”

  But the publishing house, as he told Pamela at the end of February, was an altogether different story. Even the Grant Memoirs, the towering success of Clemens’ career as a publisher, now seemed to him “that terrible book!” all it had done for him was to get him in deeper. He now had about $110,000 in the firm, which owed Livy $60,000 and various banks and suppliers $83,000. Against this indebtedness there were assets of perhaps $60,000. Determined to get out at any cost, Clemens had considered going into receivership as early as January 1894. After a brief visit to Livy that March and early April he came back to New York to find a repetition of the September crisis and its “billows of hell” the Mount Morris Bank demanded immediate payment of $10,000 on the firm’s notes. There was no point to looking for another transfusion, Rogers told him; he had to decide whether to raise a great deal of money to put the company on a new and solid footing or to give up altogether. On April 16, in the middle of this latest crisis, Tom Sawyer Abroad was published in New York and London. That same day, figuring that according to all the signs (including a movement for beatification) Joan of Arc was going to be “the commanding figure” in literature, Clemens decided that he wanted to be at the head of the procession and that he should finish his book as quickly as possible and rush serial publication. To do this he would have to put aside his business distractions. Rogers had told him that bankruptcy was the only rational solution, and also the only compassionate one. How else, Rogers asked, could Clemens ever be relieved of his “fearful load of dread” and go back to writing? Two days later, on Wednesday afternoon, April 18, Clemens entered into voluntary bankruptcy proceedings.

  “Cheer up,” he wrote to Livy early the next morning, and, in his state of initial shock, before he knew what he was doing he had written, “the worst is yet to come.” Yet during the weeks that followed he felt relieved, blithe at times, convinced that this was only a temporary setback and without dishonor. At meeting after meeting with the creditors Rogers was engineering the financial salvation of the Clemens family. He insisted that Livy’s $60,000, the largest single claim on the firm, entitled her to be a preferred creditor and that in payment of her claim all of Clemens’ copyrights, which later proved to be worth $25,000 and more a year, and his typesetter stock be assigned to her. He insisted that the Hartford house was her personal property and could not be attached. Coached by Rogers before these meetings, Clemens learned to keep silent or at least to resist attempts to anger him into damaging admissions. He even became adept at the legal convention of always referring to “Mrs. Clemens’” copyrights, “her” books, “her” typesetter stock, “her” house and “her” plans for Pudd’nhead Wilson.

  All his friends told him there was no tinge of disgrace in going into bankruptcy. “Don’t let it disturb you, Sam,” John Mackay said, “we all have to do it at one time or another, it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” and historically Mackay was right.* But in Paris after “the hideous news” reached her, Livy was feeling old and wrinkled, convinced that her life was now a failure, full of “horror and heartsickness.” The ethical implications of bankruptcy practice, always more lenient in America than anywhere else, confused and depressed her. “I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace,” she wrote. She could not understand how Rogers, as Clemens had reported to her, could be “caustic” with the creditors; “I should think it was the creditors’ place to say caustic things to us.” She did not want to be a preferred creditor, and she was afraid that in order to protect the family Clemens and Rogers would turn to brutal bargaining and sharp business practices. “My first duty is to you and the children—my second is to these others,” Clemens answered, and he tried to explain Rogers’ long-term strategy: unless the property, and especially the literary copyrights, remained in her hands, the creditors in all likelihood would never get any money back.

  From then on, settlement in full, down to the last penny, became Livy’s ironclad law, and in this she was backed up by Rogers; between the two of them, as Clemens recalled in 1906, he was effectively prevented from taking any short cuts. He had no legal obligation to pay one hundred cents on the dollar, but he began to say publicly that “honor is a harder master than the law” and he intended to serve it. Rogers had told him that an author’s only stock in trade was character, and Clemens, remembering the example of Bret Harte, readily believed him. Soon Pamela’s grownup son, Samuel Moffett, editorial writer on the San Francisco Examiner, was trumpeting to the world at large that in his uncle’s case “honor knows no statute of limitations.” Certified by this gassy refrain, which after all had nothing to do with his craft or his purpose as a writer or with commercial realities as he understood them, Clemens was to become the sacrificial hero of a dollar code and of an artistic standard somehow confused with dollar honor. He was compared with Sir Walter Scott, whom he loathed but who had spent six years paying off his creditors and thereby worked himself into an early grave. The paradoxes of Clemens’ double commitment as writer and entrepreneur added up to a clear case of double jeopardy: he had assumed the risks but was denied the recourse of the businessman.

  It was about eight months before the real consequences of what had happened came home to him. Living in Normandy and later Paris, having cut the family’s expenses to what he considered the bone—$1,700 a month, he told Orion, “scrimp and economize as we may”—Clemens had returned to Joan of Arc and he was writing away with such freedom that the book seemed to write itself. “I merely have to hold the pen,” he told Rogers in September—fifteen hundred or two thousand words a day, sometimes three thousand. Despite the ease with which he wrote he began to feel that his head was worn out, full of cobwebs. What sustained him was not only the subject itself, as etherealized and remote as ever, but his absolute certainty that at any hour now the machine
would rescue him. It was the same old tune all over again, except that he was hearing it for the last time.

  In October, when the machine started its test at the Chicago Herald and Clemens saw actual samples of its work, he began to feel again like Columbus sighting land. At the end of a long exuberant letter to Rogers about his nightshirt adventures in the black corridors of a Rouen hotel while looking for the toilet, he returned to his old daydream: the Mergenthaler people were about to be brought to their knees, their $10,000,000 capital of no use to them at all in competition with the indisputable boss machine of the world. Then, following its usual form, the machine broke down, the stoppages became longer. The newspaper proprietors had seen all they needed to. Rushing to Chicago in December, Rogers watched the machine in action and inaction as it declined into invalidism. He decided that the test had proved once and for all that the dazzling machine could never be made practical and that the typesetter company, with its shrewd contract and glorious expectations, had better be dissolved right away. The news hit Clemens like a “thunder clap,” he told Rogers, and, “with just barely enough head left on my shoulders to protect me from being used as a convenience for the dogs,” he stumbled through the Paris streets, driven by the idea that either his “dream” must be rescued or he would have to go back to America to see it die. At the end of the afternoon, before he had collected his senses, he found himself at a steamship office on the Rue Scribe, about to buy a ticket on the 6:52 boat train to Le Havre. Still, when he returned to his Left Bank apartment, he had not given up. He sent Rogers six closely written pages of notes for improving the machine at least to a point at which Mergenthaler would have to buy them out: talk to Thomas Edison about using die-cut brass type; run the circular typedriver slower but the machine faster; lighten and simplify the machine, reduce the number of type channels and keys to sixty. These and other improvements, he told Rogers in desperate seriousness, still believing what he wanted to believe, could all be made “in a few months.”

  By the beginning of January 1895, the machine had taken on “the aspect of a dissolved dream,” and with it had gone Clemens’ certainty that his luck would never run out. He was born lucky, he told Rogers, he had escaped drowning in the Mississippi nine times before he even learned how to swim, had been somewhere else when the steamboat Pennsylvania blew up and Henry Clemens was scalded to death; he even avoided business dealings with certain relatives and friends because he considered them “unlucky people.” “All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity and carelessness.” And he summed up his bitter experience with the machine, his faith that had never until now allowed itself to yield to certain knowledge: “It disappointed me lots of times, but I couldn’t shake off the confidence of a lifetime in my luck.”

  At Clemens’ age, friends of Rogers had remarked, ninety-eight per cent of men who failed in business “never got up again.” With the death of the machine Clemens began to comprehend his bankruptcy as more than a financial reverse. With it came a loss of faith and a sense of betrayal, a kind of symbolic failure of manhood, failure as husband and father. That February, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his marriage to Livy (and roughly the fifteenth anniversary of his marriage to the machine), he took out of his pocket a silver five-franc piece—“It is our silver wedding-day, and so I give you a present.” They would never be able to live in the Hartford house again, he now realized, “though it would break the family’s hearts if they could believe it.” Back in America, alone, in March to wind up his shattered business affairs, he visited Farmington Avenue. They had decided to rent the house, furnished, to Alice Hooker Day and her husband, whose wedding Clemens and Livy had attended in the summer of their own engagement, and all of the family’s possessions had come back out of the warehouse and were in place again. He wanted never to leave, never even to go outside the grounds again, never certainly to go again to Europe. It was all so bright and homelike and splendid, and for a moment he imagined that Livy in a rustling silk gown was coming down the stairs and that the family idyl would begin all over again, just as it had been. “It seemed,” he wrote to her, using the image which was now indispensable to the way he read his experience, “as if I had burst awake out of a hellish dream, and had never been away.”

  IV

  Clemens tried to go back to writing. In January 1895 he finished Tom Sawyer, Detective, a frank attempt to cash in on the current rage for Sherlock Holmes and detective fiction in general. At the end of the month, after what he figured had been twelve years of preparation and two years of intense but intermittent work, he finished Joan of Arc, and with the long strain gone, he told Rogers, “I am in a sort of physical collapse.” Rogers had negotiated for him a contract with Harper and Brothers, who would publish the two new books in the trade. Afterwards the books were to go into an edition of his collected works, to be sold by subscription under the familiar imprint of the American Publishing Company of Hartford, now run by Frank Bliss. All the same, despite income Clemens anticipated from these projects, it was clear that he would have to lecture that year and the next. His dread of “the impending horror of the lecture platform” made him depressed and tired, unable to write—“The mill refuses to go.” He began to feel that he had been condemned to walk in a large circle. Approaching sixty and about $100,000 in debt, he was to start on a yearlong tour which even a young man might find too strenuous. Thirty years earlier he had planned to travel around the world, visit China and the Paris Exposition, come home, and maybe start out all over again. Now in order to pay off his creditors he had to lecture his way to the Pacific Northwest and from there to Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, and South Africa; even after that he would not go home but would go instead to England, where, in some quiet village with his reunited family, he hoped to spend six months or so writing a travel book, again for the benefit of his creditors, about his round-the-world lecture tour.

  In May the Clemenses landed in New York from Southampton, which Clemens considered his starting point for circling the globe, and spent a few days at the Everett House on Union Square. (Livy had felt that “it wouldn’t look modest for bankrupts” to accept her brother’s invitation to be his guests at the Waldorf, William Astor’s brand-new German Renaissance hotel at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street.) At Quarry Farm, confined to his bed for three weeks with carbuncles and gout and half expecting to start his travels on a stretcher, Clemens prepared his programs and worked over his itinerary. Pond, grown more prosperous in the decade since the Cable tour, shrewdly talked Clemens out of a plan to make a nostalgic return to California by lecturing six consecutive evenings in San Francisco; in August, Pond argued, the city would be empty. At ten-thirty on the evening of July 14, Clemens, with Livy, Clara, Pond, and Mrs. Pond, left for Cleveland, the first of a hundred cities he would call at. As the train drew out of the Elmira station, Clemens watched Susy standing on the platform in the glare of the electric lights, waving goodbye. “She was brimming with life and the joy of it,” he recalled more than a year later. It was the last time he ever saw her.

  As Mark Twain began once again to be a public performer and celebrity and tasted the first of a nearly unbroken succession of welcomes and ovations, the colds, the carbuncles, and even the sense of futility were, for a while, pushed into a corner of his awareness. Wherever he went he read to capacity audiences; the halls were hardly ever big enough and the cash account Rogers kept for him against the time he would be able to pay one hundred cents on the dollar grew. He netted five thousand dollars from his one month in North America; he was to net twenty-two hundred just from his first two weeks in Australia.

  He was in need of ego-building and was getting it, and it was in expectation of more that, as he left Vancouver in mid-August for the long voyage across the Pacific, he succeeded in inducing a state of self-exhilaration approaching euphoria. He now knew that he had friends all over the United States, he told Samuel Moffett. For Moffett�
��s Examiner he supplied a self-interview in the form of a letter to the editor.

  Perhaps [he wrote] it is a little immodest in me to talk about paying my debts, when by my own confession I am blandly getting ready to unload them on the whole English-speaking world…. Lecturing is gymnastics, chest-expander, medicine, mind healer, blues destroyer, all in one. I am twice as well as I was when I started out. I have gained nine pounds in twenty-eight days, and expect to weigh six hundred before January. I haven’t had a blue day in all the twenty-eight.

  He wrote to Rudyard Kipling the next day, about his visit to India:

  I shall arrive next January, and you must be ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.

  He told Henry Harper there was no longer any point to publishing Joan anonymously. He wanted to keep his name before the public, for, as if he expected never to be tired again and even to live forever, he intended to start on another American lecture tour just as soon as he got back.

  He had heard, he noted, that people in India knew only three things about America: “George Washington, Mark Twain, and the Chicago Fair.” Everywhere he went every word he said was hung upon and repeated. Sometimes this backfired. In Australia he praised unadulterated whiskey, but when he went on to dispraise Bret Harte as “sham and shoddy” he had to answer a storm of protest. (He told a reporter, only half apologetically, “If one criticizes a man one should do it thoroughly.”) Later on, entertaining the Jameson Raid prisoners in Pretoria, he spoke across the prison dead line and praised the comforts of life in jail. He told the prisoners they were better off there than anywhere else, luxurious indolence being preferable to the struggle for bread and shelter, and promised to ask President Kruger to double their sentences—which Kruger nearly did: Clemens had to call on him to explain that it was all a joke.

 

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