Yet he had “a steady, unceasing feeling,” as Livy had written to Susan Crane in September 1895, “that he is never going to be able to pay his debts. I do not feel so.” By the following June, as he was nearing the end of a triumphant tour, his despair had deepened; the voyage seemed endless, without purpose or achievement. “I don’t think it is of any use for me to struggle against my ill luck any longer,” he wrote to Rogers from Queenstown, South Africa. “If I had the family in a comfortable poorhouse I would kill myself.” Two weeks later he seriously considered applying for the vacant post of American consul in Johannesburg and staying there; Livy said no. In actuality he was retracing the steps of the ill-fated Riley, whom he had sent on that futile trip twenty-five years earlier. In East London he saw the inscribed copy of The Innocents Abroad which Riley had sold at auction before starting his trek overland to the diamond fields. He visited Kimberley, where, he was told, over fifty thousand dollars a day in diamonds was being taken out of the ground, and he played with the fantasy, which he intended to spin into a story for his travel book, that it was here that Riley had bought a claim for him and that during all those years someone had been searching for the true owner, now finally identified as Samuel L. Clemens.
On July 15, a year and a day after he left Susy on the station platform in Elmira, Clemens ended his tour in Capetown and sailed for England. There, in a rented house in Guildford, he waited for her and Jean to come over. Instead he received first a letter saying that she was ill, then a cable saying that her recovery would be slow. Livy and Clara rushed back to America. They were still on the high seas on August 18 when, as Clemens stood in the dining room at Guildford thinking about nothing in particular, he was handed a cable that told him Susy, twenty-four years old, had died of meningitis. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature,” he reflected when nearly ten years had gone by, “that a man, all unprepared can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.”
* In his copy of Jules Michelet’s Jeanne d’Arc (1853), opposite a passage citing the testimony of some Domrémy women that Joan had never menstruated, Clemens noted: “The higher life absorbed her and suppressed her physical (sexual) development.”
* Howells, whose critical judgments about American plutocracy were more consistent if less passionately stated than Clemens’, had played a role in creating this stereotype. Just before resigning his Atlantic editorship at the beginning of 1881, he arranged to publish in the March issue, some pages ahead of an installment of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, a pioneering exposé, “The Story of a Great Monopoly,” by Henry Demarest Lloyd, then one of the editors of the Chicago Tribune. Lloyd’s article, previously rejected by the North American Review on the grounds that it was explosive and possibly actionable, was the first all-out attack on Standard Oil for general circulation and the source of the basic image of that trust as the implacable enemy of competition and the public interest. The March Atlantic went through seven printings in order to meet the demand for Lloyd’s article, which was subsequently reprinted in England and circulated in Australia. “The Story of a Great Monopoly” was also the germ of Lloyd’s dissection of monopoly and Spencerian economics in general, Wealth against Commonwealth (1894). Again Howells was responsible for placing it—with Harper and Brothers, who, as fearful of the consequences as the several other publishers to whom Lloyd submitted the manuscript, had originally declined it. We shall come to Mark Twain’s tangential but highly charged connection with Lloyd’s book.
* Clemens’ account of this conversation does not mention the author or the title of the book Warner proposed to him. But it seems clear that the book was Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth. Warner’s description fits no other book by “a prominent man” at that precise time, when Lloyd was having trouble finding a publisher. Warner was a close enough friend of Lloyd’s to act as his informal intermediary in placing the book. When Warner visited him at Winnetka Lloyd confided to him that “he expected to be crushed by the Standard people” for what he had said in the book. It is ironic, in view of Clemens’ categorical refusal to have anything to do with the book, that in it Lloyd, discussing Rockefeller’s elusive South Improvement Company, quoted Mark Twain on sin in the Sandwich Islands: “no longer exists in name—only in reality.”
* Writing in 1885 to Charles Warren Stoddard, a convert to Catholicism, Clemens said: “I look back with the same shuddering horror upon the days when I believed I believed, as you do upon the days when you were afraid you did not believe.”
* In 1835 Tocqueville had written: “The Americans, who make a virtue of commercial temerity, have no right in any case to brand with disgrace those who practice it. Hence arises the strange indulgence that is shown to bankrupts in the United States; their honor does not suffer by such an accident.” The Scotsman David Macrae, describing the economic climate right after the Civil War, wrote: “Men are up today, down tomorrow, and up again the day after…. No man loses caste because he has failed, unless he has allowed himself to fail for a trifle.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Never quite sane in the night”
I
IN GUILDFORD CLEMENS PLAYED BILLIARDS UNTIL he dropped with exhaustion. He gathered together the circumstances of Susy’s death, tasted the pain and the shame of each, and used them in daily and nightly rituals of self-accusation. She had been staying with the Warners in Hartford, but each day she had visited the house next door. “She seems quite happy where she is,” Pond wrote at the beginning of July. He was in Hartford to attend the funeral of Harriet Beecher Stowe. “She says it seems very much like home to her, and she wished you would come back. The place is beautiful, but there is a terrible atmosphere of lonesomeness there.” She spent her last two weeks back in her own house, walked the floor in pain and delirium, became blind, and died after being in a coma for two days. What Clemens desperately searched for was some sign that before she died she had him in her thoughts, spoke of him in pride or love. “I wonder if she left any little message for me,” he wrote to Livy imploringly. “I was not deserving of it.” He wanted everything of her last days kept, even the agonizing pages she wrote in her delirium and with the light failing. “Mr. Clemens, Mr. Zola, Mr. Harte,” she had written in a large scrawl across the length of the page, “I see that even darkness can be great. To me darkness must remain from everlasting to everlasting.” In her delirium, he learned, she found a dress of Livy’s in a closet, believed that Livy was dead, and kissed the dress and cried. In her delirium also she heard the rumble of the trolley cars outside and believed that they were running because she was “Mark Twain’s daughter.” (“How I hate that name,” she had said only a few years before.) He was grateful, Clemens said, casting about for other straws, that she had died in the home of her childhood and surrounded by friends, that she had not lived on insane or enfeebled but that the light of her mind, whose quickness and subtlety he always marveled at, “passed swiftly out in a disordered splendor.” “When out of her head,” he wrote in his notebook, “she said many things that showed she was proud of being my daughter.”
When his brother Henry died, he told Livy, he had not allowed himself to think of it, in case the grief should become too heavy. But now he had no desire to put Susy out of his thoughts—he wanted to think about her death all the time. “I have hated life before—from the time I was 18—but I was not indifferent to it,” and his indifference and catatonic grief were only punctuated by a sudden, self-preserving need to vomit up rage and blasphemy. After a lifetime of hunting for a crime which he could say he had committed, his guilt had finally crystallized so massively around this real event that his grief at Livy’s death eight years later hardly compared in intensity. Their loss, he now said, “would bankrupt the vocabularies of all the languages to put it into words,” and, in another image as central to his experience, he said that Susy’s death was like a man’s house burning down—it would take him years and years to discover all that he had lost in the fire. At times he allowed himself to turn
his rage on the memory of Charley Webster—“He was all dog,” he wrote to Pamela months later, “the primal cause of Susy’s death and my ruin”—but even then he held himself responsible, for he remembered that he had not backed up Pamela when she opposed her daughter’s marriage to Charley, and so he turned his rage on himself all over again. “My crimes made her a pauper and an exile,” he said to Livy. He had been selfish and neglectful with Susy, an indolent father; he was sure, he said, that if she were brought back from the dead he would still be selfish and neglectful, condemned to obey the inexorable and brutish laws of his own nature. “It is an odious world, a horrible world,” he began to be fond of saying. “It is Hell; the true one.” His grief and anger, unchecked and turned against himself, were driving him toward destruction, and the only thing that saved him was work.
That fall, settled with Livy, Clara, and Jean at 23 Tedworth Square in Chelsea, he began writing his new travel book. He had already decided that as soon as he finished it he would begin on some other book, with no more than an hour between. “I have many unwritten books to fly to for my preservation,” he told Twichell. By December he was working from directly after breakfast each day until seven in the evening, without a break. “It puzzles me to know what is in me that writes,” he told Howells, “and that has comedy fancies and finds pleasure in phrasing them.” He was writing a travel book “whose outside aspect had to be cheerful,” he explained later, “but whose secret substance was all made of bitterness and rebellion,” and, needing to prove that his gift was still intact, he was deliberately invoking and following old precedents. He thought of naming his travel book Another Innocent Abroad; he held it up to the standards not only of that first success but also of Roughing It; and he had also returned to his original audience. For in signing up with Frank Bliss’s American Publishing Company, which guaranteed him a minimum of ten thousand dollars, and not with Harper, he was back with “the factory hands and the farmers,” readers who had to be hunted down by the publisher’s agents. “When a subscription book of mine sells 60,000 I always think I know whither 50,000 of them went,” he explained to Rogers. “They went to people who don’t visit bookstores.” And it was out of compulsion both to keep busy and to prove himself that he devoted an extraordinary amount of work and rework to this book, whose final character as Following the Equator, for all this care, still reflects the conflicting and demoralizing circumstances of its writing. He revised it at least three times and, as much to help her as to help him, submitted it to Livy’s careful editing.
But Livy, before this task was given her and especially after she finished it, had nothing to turn to and felt utterly purposeless. She was in a “submergence,” Clemens said, and was clearly declining into full invalidism. She had lost her interest in books, refused to see anyone, and sat solitary day after day wondering how it had all happened. She was interested in palmistry and spiritualism; they became friendly with the editor of a journal of psychical research, and they even went to séances together, but neither of them ever acknowledged a convincing contact. One of the mediums, Clemens remembered five years later, was a fraud, the other a vacancy. He had long ago undermined Livy’s religious faith, another thing he could claim guilt for. Now, when she looked for comfort in orthodox notions of a just or purposeful deity, he told her that the universe was governed by some sort of malign thug. He raged on and on, but when his storm subsided he stroked her hair and said softly, “Don’t mind anything I say, Livy. Whatever happens, you know I love you.” And then he took his daughters for a walk by the Thames and told them how vile the human race was.
In their house of mourning, which Clemens and Livy intended to keep so until they themselves were dead, the holidays and anniversaries passed and were marked only in sorrow. Susy’s two sisters became priestesses at her shrine. Thanksgiving Day 1896 reminded Clemens that seven years ago in Hartford Susy had put on a play for them, that both his mother and Livy’s mother had died around Thanksgiving in 1890. Christmas morning in London the family breakfasted together and talked quietly. No one mentioned that it was Christmas; there were no presents. The following August in Switzerland, on the first anniversary of Susy’s death, Clemens and Livy spent the day apart from each other. She took the steamer up Lake Lucerne and spent the day alone at an inn. He sat under some trees and wrote an in-memoriam poem. For years afterward wedding anniversaries and birthdays and holidays were observed only as they had some tenuous but harrowing connection with Susy. The milestones had become gravestones, Clemens said. “The cloud is permanent now.”
II
For both Mark Twain and his America the frontier was closed. That “great historic movement” which Frederick Jackson Turner, reading his celebrated paper to his fellow historians in 1893, said had come to an end in America had also come to an end in Mark Twain. Like his country, which he eventually symbolized for many, he was at an age at which he could no longer afford to be prodigal. In 1861, roughing it on the shores of Lake Tahoe, he had carelessly started a forest fire. He had been intoxicated by the spectacle, described it as “superb! magnificent! beautiful!” “Blazing banners” of flame, a hundred feet in the air, roared through the forest, were reflected in the lake, climbed up and over the mountain and left a charred wasteland behind. As a writer he judged his craft by the same standard of gaudy, profligate spectacle: he liked effects that worked like Fourth of July rockets or a torchlight procession. His writing table and manuscript trunk could never hold the projects he began in a forest fire of enthusiasm and then put aside, when the flames stopped leaping, in favor of some other conflagration. Like America’s untouched forests and inexhaustible herds of buffalo, there was always more where the first or fiftieth or hundredth came from.
Now, in the early twilight of his life, having suffered frightful affronts to his sense of plenitude and possibility, he felt frugality and defensiveness forced upon him, conservation, limits, self-inquiry, inwardness. He was no longer working a bonanza claim. He had already struck barren rock, had seen the failure of his frontier talent for improvising a way out of trouble and of his frontier faith that things always come out right in the long run. In 1897 an American paper ran a headline five columns wide, “Close of a Great Career,” and under it the baseless story that Mark Twain, abandoned by his wife and daughters, was living in abject poverty. He raged in disgust after he read it. Only a man, he said, could be capable of such lying and vileness, not a dog or a cow. But he knew that his luck, which he trusted all his life, had finally run out, even though he was far from poverty, and one day that winter he wrote out a list to prove it: the cook’s sweetheart was dying, one of the maids might go blind, the porter had pleurisy, a friend’s baby had died, another friend had fractured his skull, and on the way back from a visit to him in the hospital Clemens’ cab had nearly run over a little boy. “Since bad luck struck us,” he concluded from all this, “it is risky for people to have to do with us.”
In order to reach a kind of accommodation with the guilt and casualty that seemed to be his daily bread, he began to write what he thought of as his “Bible,” a one-sided Socratic dialogue called What Is Man? He believed that it was theological dynamite, that all the creeds which gave dignity to man and God would crumble under the force of its angry logic. Livy loathed it, shuddered over it, would not even listen to the last half, much less permit him to publish any part of it. He published the book only after her death, and even then privately and, he believed, anonymously. But its despairing ideas dominated his conversation from 1897 on. His children and friends dreaded the inevitable monologue of gloom and vituperation, and one of Livy’s consolations, maybe even one of her motives, as she spent more and more time isolated in a sickroom, was that she was spared these performances.
Writing in 1897 to the British psychologist John Adams—his longest letter in years, Clemens explained, unable to stop once he had started on his favorite subject—he outlined the few and pathetic basic ideas of What Is Man? He described it as a book on psycholog
y. Life had no dignity or meaning, he said, for each and every member of “the damned human race” was driven wholly by self-interest, the need to conform, the need, powerful above all others, for “peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for himself.” The Paige typesetter which once seemed to him capable of thinking and therefore second only to man, had now become, by a turnabout which sums up the whole bitter experience, the model for human personality: “Man’s proudest possession—his mind—is a mere machine: an automatic machine.” Adams recognized one fallacy right away: If man is truly a machine, why should he need “spiritual comfort?” But there is another, and a poignant, contradiction. Without choice there can be no responsibility, and—as if Clemens dimly perceived the logical goal of his illogic—without responsibility guilt has no meaning. “No one,” Bernard DeVoto wrote, “can read this wearisomely repeated argument without feeling the terrible force of an inner cry: Do not blame me, for it was not my fault.”
At the same time that he was writing his “Bible” Clemens was following another line of inquiry, one which turned out to be too complex and baffling to give him what he wanted, simple self-exoneration, but which was far more productive and relevant to his needs as a writer. Living in mourning and seclusion, he also went underground and turned inward to the enigmas of his own life. “S.L.C. interviews M.T.”—the idea is repeated throughout the notebooks he kept during the late 1890s, when he was also planning his autobiography, the one major work of the last decade of his life. He explored his dream life, and in brief notes or in long, unfinished manuscripts he tried to articulate his fantasies into fiction. In the nocturnal and irrational he found material which seemed richer, more suggestive, and more disturbing than anything he could find on the level of consciousness.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 49
