Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  “In my age as in my youth,” he was to say in his autobiography, “night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race—never quite sane in the night.”

  Was it dream or reality, he had asked in 1893, that he had been a pilot on the Mississippi and a miner and journalist in Nevada, that he had come East and then sailed to Europe and written a book that made him famous, that he had a wife and children and lived in a villa above Florence? “This dream goes on and on and on, and sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real,” he wrote. “I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real.” Years earlier he had found the confusion of dream and reality to be a subject for comedy. The Pauper was a bad dream that the Prince had, but with the Yankee, who is unable to wake from his dream, the comic possibilities vanished, and now, in the dark mood of Mark Twain’s old age, the confusion has another aspect. It has become, by itself, a nightmare.

  “Every man is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody,” he wrote, tacitly suggesting that this dark side might be hidden from himself as well. By the second half of his century the speculative notion of an unconscious mind had become almost an intellectual commonplace, and like many of his contemporaries Clemens was fascinated by ungovernable forces in the workings of the mind. In “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” the paper he read to his Monday Evening Club in 1876, he had tried to explain his feeling of duality and conflict, of having a demon inside him. He called this demon conscience, and in his fantasy he vented on it and on society in general the stored-up self-doubt and anger which are the price of possessing a conscience. Later, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), he found a further explanation, “nearer, yes, but not near enough,” for he recognized a falsity: unlike Jekyll and Hyde, “the two persons in a man are wholly unknown to each other.” But in his sixty-first year, during the winter of 1896-97 in London, he found, he believed, the solution to what had become for him “a haunting mystery.” He found the solution in a dream:

  I was suddenly in the presence of a negro wench who was sitting in grassy open country, with her left arm resting on the arm of one of those long park-sofas that are made of broad slats with cracks between, and a curve-over back. She was very vivid to me—round black face, shiny black eyes, thick lips, very white regular teeth showing through her smile. She was about 22, and plump—not fleshy, not fat, merely rounded and plump; and good-natured and not at all bad-looking. She had but one garment on—a coarse tow-linen shirt that reached from her neck to her ankles without break. She sold me a pie; a mushy apple pie—hot. She was eating one herself with a tin teaspoon. She made a disgusting proposition to me. Although it was disgusting it did not surprise me—for I was young (I was never old in a dream yet) and it seemed quite natural that it should come from her. It was disgusting, but I did not say so; I merely made a chaffing remark, brushing aside the matter—a little jeeringly—and this embarrassed her and she made an awkward pretence that I had misunderstood her. I made a sarcastic remark about this pretence, and asked for a spoon to eat my pie with. She had but the one, and she took it out of her mouth, in a quite matter-of-course way, and offered it to me. My stomach rose—there everything vanished…. My, how vivid it all was! Even to the texture of her shirt, its dull white color, and the pale brown tint of a stain on the shoulder of it.

  The sixty-one-year-old man who dreamed this dream had grown up in a slaveholding society which had among its commonest institutions Negro wet nurses and Negro concubinage. As a young printer’s apprentice in Hannibal Sam Clemens ate in the kitchen with the “very handsome and bright” young daughter of the slave cook. Wales McCormick, the other apprentice, was always flirting with the girl. Her mother, Clemens remembered, “well understood that by the customs of slaveholding communities it was Wales’s right to make love to that girl if he wanted to.” And only a few years before having this dream, Clemens, in Pudd’nhead Wilson, had put aside his usual reticence about sex, portrayed the one mature and explicitly sexual woman in all his fiction, Roxy the slave, and dealt squarely with the intertwined themes of micegenation and the corruptive effect of slavery. But Clemens did not acknowledge to any great extent the sexuality of his dreams. And it is, in fact, precisely his casualness about symbolic content that permitted him to write down his dreams without being afraid of violating any taboos. His solution to the “haunting mystery” was to accept the existence of a “dream self” who comes alive during sleep, is liberated, and does things which the waking self would never dare. “I go to unnameable places,” Clemens wrote, in the excitement of his discovery, “I do unprincipled things; and every vision is vivid, every sensation—physical as well as moral—is real.” Clemens’ dream self lost his way in caves and in “the corridors of monstrous hotels.” He appeared at social gatherings dressed only in nightshirt and told the people, “I am Mark Twain,” and no one believed him. He stood on the lecture platform without a subject to talk about (Martin Luther had comparable nightmares), his audience started to leave, and after a while he found himself alone in the semidarkness talking to an empty house. Sometimes he was standing at the wheel as his steamboat approached a black shadow, and he could not tell whether it was Selma Bluff, Hat Island, or a wall of night. Clemens’ dream self stumbled off the edge of cliffs, went into battles and hid from bullets, even made jokes which seemed funny in the morning (Queen Victoria, adrift at sea, was cross all the time—“This was the origin of the V.C.”).

  For about two years after Susy died Clemens lived in a sort of deliberate, self-induced dream state in which the reality was what he dreamed and the fantasy was what he lived by day, and he wrote story after story about men whose dreams turned into reality. By releasing himself from daytime rationality and consciously wooing the creatures of the night he found new ways to look at himself. He also found new literary material. He exposed himself to madness, and for a while was close enough to it to realize that the dream, as Freud said, was simply “a psychosis, with all the absurdities, delusions, and illusions of a psychosis.” But by turning his dream life into a literary problem—into work—he saved himself from madness. He thought and felt as a writer, and he was interested primarily in the overt shape and content of his dreams and fantasies, in their literary and anecdotal value, and not in interpreting their latent content. Like other writers of his period, he was satisfied to seize the literature and let the psychological mysteries go by.* But under the stress of his disasters he became more than ever a traveler in the spectral world of Poe and Hawthorne and among “the invisible spheres” that Melville said “were formed in fright.”

  Mark Twain’s dream stories have a number of symbols and situations in common. A rich and happy man at the peak of his powers falls asleep, and in the brief moments his eyes are closed—whether he sleeps for an instant or for a billion years, Clemens said, “the time to you is the same”—he dreams a life of disgrace and horror. His house has burned down and he is bankrupt. Or he has gone on a chartless, mutiny-torn voyage that lasts for years, and at the end of the voyage the passengers and the crew are all either dead or crazy. His consuming need is to beg forgiveness of his wife and daughters. When he wakes from his dream his hair has turned white and he cannot tell which of his two existences is the “real” one. Along with these instantaneous dislocations of psychological time and reality, which had fascinated Clemens for years, there are radical dislocations of place, scale, and perception of the sort usually associated with hallucinated and psychotic states. In some of these stories a man goes on a voyage inside a drop of water, or—an idea which Clemens first had in the early 1880s and was still working on in 1905—he has become a trichina in the intestine of God or a micro-organism in the bloodstream of a tramp named Blitzowski. Among the dominant symbols are Mark Twain’s own finely tooled brass microscope and, at the other end of the scale, the house on Farmington Avenue and all the ocean voyages that for thirty years and more he had
gone on and written about. Two years after Susy’s death Clemens was writing an article for the Century, “My Debut as a Literary Person,” in which he recapitulated some of the recurrent symbols as well as his 1866 newspaper story, written for the Sacramento Union and reprinted in Harper’s, about the clipper ship Hornet. The ship had been set on fire by the disobedient first mate; fifteen of the thirty-one men on board survived hunger, delirium, exposure, and the threat of cannibalism and mutiny and arrived in Honolulu after “a voyage of forty-three days in an open boat, through the blazing tropics, on ten days’ rations of food.” In general, the dream stories deal with the question of guilt and responsibility, with the experience of the destruction of identity and of the sudden recognition of the possibility of never having existed at all. The chronological and thematic relationships between these stories are almost impossible to disentangle; Clemens probably began writing the first of them in May 1897, a few days after he finished Following the Equator. Most of the stories are autobiographical epitomes in which, framed by the relentless questions, What have I done wrong? How can I make amends?, he introduced the people around whom his life was built: Livy and their daughters, especially Susy; Orion; villains—Paige, Charley Webster, various publishers, businessmen, bankers; friends and heroes—Grant, the silver-tongued agnostic Robert Ingersoll, Joe Goodman, Ned Wakeman. Mark Twain had always believed that his best work came out of his own direct experience. Now the accumulated, bitter experience of a lifetime came flooding in over him with such a rush and volume that he was barely able to give it a voice and a shape. Fearing madness if he became the creature and not the master of his past, he worked like a man pursued by furies and turned out manuscript after manuscript, most of them unsatisfactory to him. It hardly seems possible, said Bernard DeVoto, the first to recognize their role in this ordeal of Mark Twain, that any man could write so much.

  One long manuscript, “Which Was the Dream?,” concerns a brilliant and famous general, happily married to a rich wife and at the age of thirty-four certain of being the next President of the United States. His name, Tom X (X was the “mark” with which Huck signed his oath as a member of Tom Sawyer’s gang) is but one of any number of autobiographical references—for example, it was at the age of thirty-four that Clemens became famous as the author of The Innocents Abroad and married Livy. One evening, while Alice, his wife, and their three daughters entertain Washington society in their great mansion, Tom goes up to his study to write and falls asleep. When he “wakes,” the house is on fire, and it burns to the ground. An undistinguished and unpromising lieutenant known to his friends as “Useless” Grant leads the guests to safety. Tom plans to build an even grander house. Suddenly and irreversibly—and all proceeding from the fire (Clemens’ metaphor for Susy’s death)—his fortunes turn. His accounts are all overdrawn, his insurance policies are all fraudulent; the California mine—called the Golden Fleece—in which he invested all of Alice’s money is also a fraud. The villain, who has made off with all their money, is Tom’s business agent and confidential secretary, Jeff, whom he had trusted against Alice’s advice. Jeff’s handwriting and even his set of mind are so similar to Tom’s that he writes and signs Tom’s letters.* He is Tom’s alter ego, the Doppelgänger of Poe’s William Wilson, and the “dream self” Clemens had recently discovered—“my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me.” Tom is now a ruined man, not only a bankrupt but an accused swindler. On March 19 (Susy’s birthday) he meets with his creditors, who provoke him into a paroxysm of rage, and he falls unconscious. Over a year later, on August 18 (the day of Susy’s death) he “wakes.” He is lying on a straw mattress in a humble cabin, one with an earthen floor, tin plates, a sack of navy beans, and a cracked mirror, in a California mining camp called Hell’s Delight. (Outside Angel’s Camp, in just this sort of cabin on Jackass Hill, Clemens, a fugitive from the San Francisco police, had spent a depressed winter in 1864-65.) In order to leave his disgrace behind, Tom now has a new name, Jacob Edwards. The manuscript is unfinished: Clemens had brought Tom’s life up to the point his own had reached.

  Another one of these stories, entitled by DeVoto “The Great Dark,” also concerns a man named Edwards who moved from a domestic idyl into nightmare. While looking through his microscope at a drop of rainwater, to which he has added a little whiskey to stir up the microbes, he falls asleep. An ominous figure, really a Satanic stage manager, identified as “the Superintendent of Dreams” arranges for a ship and a crew to take Edwards and his family on a long voyage inside the drop of rainwater. (In a related and also unfinished story Edwards is supposed to have committed some unspecified crime; everyone on board is certain that he is guilty, but he is never allowed, and never tries, to deny his guilt.) His favorite daughter is kidnapped, and for years, as the ocean grows hotter and hotter and begins to dry up under a merciless white light (from the microscope lamp), they follow a phantom ship. They are surrounded by sea monsters, including an enormous blind cuttlefish, who battle each other to the death. The compasses spin crazily. The crew mutinies. In Mark Twain’s notes for the completion of this story, the narrator, his hair turned white, is awakened by his wife and children, but by now he has been crazed by his voyage. He thinks they are the dream.

  Few of the recognizable people in these stories come from Mark Twain’s boyhood, his years as a pilot, or his years as miner and journalist in the West. Even Orion here is not the hope of the Clemens family as newspaper editor in Hannibal and august secretary of the Nevada Territory who took his younger brother with him to Carson City as his unpaid assistant; instead he is the chronic failure that he later became. The experience of the years before he came East was Mark Twain’s basic endowment in raw materials and sensibility, his working capital, the bank note sewn inside the coat of the country boy coming to the big city. He came East and plunged into the life of the Gilded Age wholeheartedly, hungry for reward and recognition, willing to submit his only half-formed identity to a bewildering number of adaptations—literary, intellectual, social, economic. But though his Eastern years often appeared to him to be meaningless, in these dream stories, whose shape and symbols they supply, they have a tight and urgent coherence: a man makes a spectacular rise to eminence, lives on a plateau of triumph and fulfillment, is betrayed by something within him which he can never discover, and falls. At the end of Roughing It Clemens described what he did in the autumn of 1866, soon after writing his Hornet story:

  When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade goodbye to the friendliest land and the livest, heartiest community on our continent, and came by way of the Isthmus to New York—a trip that was not much of a picnic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage, and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.

  The difference between that account, casual despite its horrors, and the story of Edwards’ nightmare voyage inside a drop of water is the difference between the young Clemens and the broken one.

  Reciting the past over and over again, he still never found out why he was accusing himself or how he could earn forgiveness. His insights into the workings of his dream self had carried him as far as he could go. He eventually came back to the gospel of What Is Man? and to a shrill, philosophically shallow nihilism which enabled him to dismiss responsibility and to obliterate all distinctions between the real world and the dream world, or, using other favorite co-ordinates, between truth and lies. “Nothing exists,” Satan declares at the end of The Mysterious Stranger. “Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams.” He rationalized his guilt away, but this left him with an insatiable appetite for approval and adulation, and he spent a good part of the last ten years of his life trying to feed it. He had begu
n his career as a teller of tall stories. Then, as his craft matured, fiction became a delicately controlled illusion in which the “truth,” in order to be believed, had to be disguised as a lie. “I disseminate my true views,” he told an interviewer in 1900, “by means of a series of apparently humorous and mendacious stories,” and at other times he was willing to argue with some passion that all spoken lies put together existed in a proportion of “1 to 22,894” to “the silent colossal National Lie” that supported such “tyrannies and shams” as Negro slavery and the imprisonment of Captain Dreyfus. But at some point in this development fiction, dreams, and lies had become confused, and he could not tell them apart. They were all “frankly and hysterically insane.” The fiction he wrote after his ordeal no longer has the rich sprawl of accident and anecdote of his mature work. Instead it is marked by spareness in structure and invention and by moral and logical clarity; the best of this fiction has a sardonic power, the worst of it is merely sentimental. In addition to these quasi-philosophical tales the forms he was to be most at home with were reminiscence and polemic, and to bring himself to write or dictate he relied for stimulus on larger and larger doses of indignation directed against larger and larger objects: Mary Baker Eddy, King Leopold II, William Shakespeare, and God. I do not agree with DeVoto that Mark Twain came out of this ordeal with his gift “whole,” and that The Mysterious Stranger vindicated and solved the problems of all those despairing manuscripts he could never complete. But he survived, and that, considering what he went through, is in itself something of a triumph. It illuminates with a grim, retrospective irony the celebrated public statement he made in June 1897 to the London correspondent of the New York Journal: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”