Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  III

  His travel book finished, his literary energies committed to his cycle of dream stories, Clemens was also occupied during the summer of 1897 with what sometimes seemed the hopeless task of paying off his debts. He continued to be obsessed with gravestones instead of milestones, but still there were certain triumphs of the distant past that he looked back on with satisfaction. In July the first twenty-eight-year copyright term of The Innocents Abroad expired; he had already, during the darkest part of the winter, applied to Ainsworth Spofford, the Librarian of Congress, for a renewal. In June, hearing that friends in New York and San Francisco wanted him to come back for a gala benefit lecture, he devised a characteristically nostalgic and gaudy scheme. His vanity, he admitted, was tickled by the possibility that he might make the largest single money scoop in lecturing history. A group of millionaires, including Adolph Sutro, would put up twelve thousand dollars and invite him to lecture at the Waldorf. The choice seats were to be auctioned off “at Jenny Lind prices,” and the others were to go at whatever the market could bear. The man he wanted to entrust with “the engineering of so delicate and so large an undertaking” was Frank Fuller. As a further re-enactment of his Cooper Union debut of May 1867, he proposed to tell the story of that lecture, of how he and Fuller had taken in only thirty-five dollars in paid admissions and papered the rest of the vast hall, and to show lantern slides of all the famous people—Grant, Emerson, Whittier, Greeley—whom they had invited but who had sent regrets. A week after broaching the idea to Fuller he tacitly acknowledged that though it might get him out of debt it was also contrary to the spirit of the code stubbornly imposed by Livy and Rogers, which committed him to earn dollar for dollar. “If that project is doubtful,” he wrote to Fuller, “don’t consider it for a moment. And in writing to me or in talking to people don’t indicate that I know anything about it.” Fuller took to the plan with enthusiasm, but his work went to waste. Livy learned about the benefit, said no, and insisted that if Clemens returned to the lecture platform it would have to be “in the old way and at the ordinary prices.” And even this grim solution was closed to him. A few days later, having decided that a hard winter of traveling would destroy Livy’s health and unwilling to leave her behind in her depression, he turned down an offer from Pond of fifty thousand dollars and all expenses for 125 nights in America.

  At the same time Clemens had been flirting with yet another way out. The New York Herald, for which in November 1867 he had written his sardonic valedictory to the Quaker City and its pilgrims, organized a Mark Twain subscription fund. It represented, James Gordon Bennett’s writers editorialized, a debt of gratitude for “the sunshine spread among the American people by the writings of the author.” The Herald itself put up a thousand dollars, Andrew Carnegie another thousand; on June 24 the Herald said the fund amounted to $2,601.65, and that day one of its readers sent in a dollar and proposed that everyone who had read Huckleberry Finn do likewise. “All friends think Herald movement mistake,” Rogers had cabled on June 16. “Withdraw graciously.” Three days later Frank Bliss, certain that the fund would hurt Clemens, asked him to cable his disapproval immediately. Up to this point Clemens had maintained an attitude of silent—and therefore, to one way of thinking, blameless—acquiescence. But the pressure mounted, especially from his family. “I have grown so tired of being in debt,” he wrote to Bennett in Paris on June 19, “that I often think I would part with my skin and teeth to get out.” Still, he went on, his family had convinced him that he had no right to take other men’s money to discharge his debts. (As he later wrote to Carnegie, declining his contribution, “My wife won’t allow me to accept any money so long as I am not disabled.”) But, indicative of his own sorely tempted and wavering feelings about the fund, his first letter to Bennett somehow miscarried; five days later he had to repeat his request for the Herald to close its subscription list and return the money. Apparently determined to help him in other ways, that October, a month before Following the Equator was to be published, the Herald ran a full-page advance review which included, without permission, about six thousand words of quotation as well as six pictures. This time, his pride stiffened, and apparently forgetting his own bitter maxim about the difference between feeding a starving dog and feeding a starving man, he told Bliss to go ahead and sue and “put the damage at a good figure.”

  On November 30 Orion wrote to congratulate him on his sixty-second birthday and on the success of Following the Equator. Orion, who had spent the money from their mother’s estate to enlarge his boardinghouse in Keokuk, was busy with a new literary scheme, a biography of Judas of Galilee which would penetrate the mystery of the Essene sect known as the Society of the Dead Sea. “I imagine those Essenes to have been Buddhists established there about 150 B.C.,” he wrote, “and that their secret was the Buddhist worship, as now seen in Roman Catholic Churches.” And, turning to another project, he proposed himself as model for “a fool character” in a comic novel he wanted Sam to write. Eleven days after this letter Orion was dead. “He was good—all good and sound: there was nothing bad in him, nothing base, nor any unkindness,” Sam wrote to Mollie from Vienna. Then, falling back into his customary bitterness, he went on with a condolence letter remarkably lacking in comfort: “It was unjust that such a man, against whom no offense could be charged, should have been sentenced to live for 72 years.”

  Soon after Orion’s death the tide of Clemens’ affairs began to turn. “I hear that your latest work is succeeding splendidly,” Howells wrote from New York in January 1898, “and I have lately heard people talking proudly and gladly of your rehabilitation in the business line.” Following the Equator had sold thirty thousand copies right away; the royalties and the other earnings Rogers had invested for Clemens added up, by the end of that January, to enough to pay off the creditors in full and still leave thirteen thousand to spare. “The debts … took the spirit out of my work,” Clemens had told Rogers in December. “For the first time in my life I am getting more pleasure out of paying money than pulling it in.” He began to feel “abundant peace of mind” once again, and even Livy showed signs of coming out of her depression. Rogers had sent on the letters of thanks and acknowledgment from the satisfied creditors, and Livy, reading them over and over again, told Clemens that this was the first happy day she had had since Susy died. Within the next two years a substantial measure of the old prosperity returned to him. Reflecting his life in two divided and distinguished worlds, his notebook entries are a sort of antiphony of dream stories and records of his rising cash balances. Between October 1898 and April 1899 his account with Rogers increased from $18,068.89 to $51,995.29. In January 1899 “a quite unexpected $10,000 tumbled in here,” he joyously told Howells. “Come—respect the capitalist!” Cables between Rogers and Clemens now told a new story. “Profit $16,000,” Rogers reported after closing out a stock investment. “Splendid bird,” Clemens replied. “Set her again,” and he watched the swelling of his “hen-fruit”: Federal Steel up in two weeks from 32 to 38½, Brooklyn Gas up from 75 to 155. He was feeling young and comfortable again, free of the long nightmare of leaving his family in want. Livy, keeper of the accounts and the bankbook, figured up with pencil and paper for her own satisfaction that they owned a house and furniture in Hartford, that his royalties in America and England were equivalent to the income from an invested capital of $200,000, and that they had $107,000 cash in the bank. “I have been out and bought a box of 6 cent cigars; I was smoking 4½ before,” he told Howells after this accounting in January 1899, and he said that they were thinking of coming back to New York to live next year. Meanwhile, in Vienna, they were living in de luxe hotels, in enormous suites of four bedrooms, a dining room, drawing room, three bathrooms, and three antechambers.

  Every once in a while he was presented with reminders of the old disaster. Since April 1890 Pratt and Whitney had been trying to collect $1,744.20 from him for estimating the cost of a typesetter factory; Whitmore, his Hartford business agent, a
ssured him that by and by the company would give up. And in April 1903, after mistakenly calculating that his expenses had grown 125 per cent greater than his income, he was to spend a night of dread thinking himself back “in the black days when I was buried under a mountain of debt.” He came down in the morning “a gray and aged wreck” and then discovered his arithmetic had been off. “It is quite within the possibilities,” he said, “that two or three nights like that night of mine could drive a man to suicide.” As it was, he came down with a chill and was sick in bed for a month after.

  He had still kept his fatal hunger for a sure thing that would make him millions. In March 1898, only two months after paying off the last of his debts, Clemens encountered another “Shakespeare of mechanical invention,” Jan Szczepanik, a Pole whom he promptly named “the Austrian Edison.” A few years earlier, at the age of only twenty-five, Szczepanik had made a name for himself as the inventor of the Fernseher, or “telectroscope,” a rudimentary television system. When Clemens met him in Vienna he was occupied with textile machinery. He had invented a weaving machine that reproduced photographic images, and as Clemens watched in amazement the machine wove his unmistakable portrait into silk. Szczepanik had also invented a computerlike machine that stamped out the basic instruction matrices for the Jacquard loom, and Clemens, after a conversation with the inventor’s backer, a man named Kleinberg, became fired with the idea of becoming the Carnegie of carpet weaving, and began to think of forming a syndicate to buy the option on the American rights for a half-million dollars or so. From Rogers, fortunately, came the report that there were not enough Jacquard looms in America to make the invention worth while, and the bonanza was abandoned, without regrets. Progress, Clemens reflected, is generally achieved through the cooperation of an Inventor and a Fool, the Fool being the man who finances the venture until the Wise Man takes over and sends the other two to the poorhouse. But now there was a difference: “Sz is not a Paige, but a gentleman; his backer, Mr. Kleinberg, is a gentleman, too, yet is not a Clemens—that is to say, he is not an Ass.”

  Even so, the self-styled Ass turned without hesitating from carpet weaving to the profit-breeding and medicinal properties of Plasmon, a granulated high-protein food concentrate certified by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow. It appeared, Howells recalled, that “‘the damned human race’ was to be saved by Plasmon” stirred into its milk, soup, coffee, chocolate, or oatmeal, or taken dry. Soon after investing twenty-five thousand dollars—“all the cash I could spare,” he explained to Carnegie—in a London-based international Plasmon syndicate, Clemens was urging this tasteless, odorless, but supposedly sovereign powder on anyone who had ever suffered from constipation, indigestion, seasickness, or just plain hunger. Plasmon, he said, “digests as easily as water,” and it was almost as cheap. One pound of it, costing half a crown, would feed a family of four for four days and yield the nutritional equivalent of “sixteen pounds of the best beef.” He himself was able once again to eat raisin cake, plum pudding, lobster salad, candy and ice cream, all of which had been “deadly to me, and taboo” before he started taking Plasmon. But soon the old story of the Inventor, the Fool, and the Wise Man began over again. Early in 1900 Clemens was elected a director of the Plasmon syndicate and promoted stock in the United States. By April 1901 things looked rosy: Plasmon sales were up to seven or eight tons a month. But by January 1906 two Wise Men, “by nature and training rascals,” had taken over and, Clemens charged, had stacked the cards on him: they planned to start a new Plasmon company, throw the American one into bankruptcy, and freeze him out altogether. Under the circumstances, he told a fellow organizer, he would not put another penny into Plasmon, “not on your life.”

  At the time of his love affair with Plasmon, Clemens had also become a convert to osteopathy (then also known as “the Swedish movements”), and in Mr. Heinrick Kellgren’s office in London or at his sanatorium at Sanna, Sweden, he and his family submitted to daily manipulations. The osteopath plowed him up and down, Clemens said, “leaving no muscle and no nerve unvisited … waking and shaking up all my machinery,” and he felt refreshed and renewed, as if he walked on air, and considerably lightened of the chronic discomforts of his rheumatism, piles, constipation, dysuria, hernia, headache, and heartburn; even an unpleasant tingling in his left arm had stopped, now that the “gas” which had caused it was given a free passage by manipulation. Clemens had found another cure for the blues, a passive pleasure corresponding to his lifelong taste for self-punishment and perhaps as effective as drifting down the river on a raft. He also believed that Kellgren’s miracle-workers cured Livy of bronchitis and influenza. Jean, for whom there had seemed to be no hope at all, stopped taking large doses of bromides to suppress her convulsions, and her attacks of petit mal had become less frequent. In accepting rather than fighting Kellgren’s treatment she had lowered the flag of her hostility and contrariness, and this, Clemens noted, was “the first flag she has voluntarily lowered in two years.”

  “Damn all the other cures, including the baths and Christian Science and the doctors of the several schools,” he wrote to Gilder in August from Sanna, “this is the satisfactory one!” He became a publicist for the new cause, and even, in 1901, went to Albany to testify in support of a bill to recognize and regulate osteopathy. “The objection is, people are curing people without a license,” he told a public-health committee there, “and you are afraid it will bust up business.” To anyone who would listen to him he declared that Kellgren (in conjunction with Plasmon, as he told William James) could cure any disease that a regular doctor could and some that a regular doctor couldn’t. Sir Henry Stanley, he said, had been dying of gastralgia and jaundice; Kellgren had raised him from the dead, along with five or six Rothschilds of Vienna and a Frau von Kopf of Bremen, who had chronic heart disease but was enabled by her annual two months of Kellgren treatment to go mountain climbing. Osteopathy and its attendant mood of benevolence became associated in Clemens’ mind with other worthy causes. In Vienna at the end of 1897 he planned a book about the Dreyfus Affair. As he told Chatto and Windus, the book would show “the French backside” as well as justice triumphant (he expected Dreyfus to be vindicated momentarily). As an offshoot of his interest in the Dreyfus Affair he wrote an admiring article on the Jews—“a marvelous race,” he told Twichell, “by long odds the most marvelous that the world has produced, I suppose.” When Zola published J’accuse in January 1898. Clemens was quoted in the American press as declaring, “Such cowards, hypocrites, and flatterers as the members of military and ecclesiastic courts the world could produce by the million every year. But it takes five centuries to produce a Joan of Arc or a Zola.” On September 19, 1899. Dreyfus was released from prison, pardoned but still not vindicated. Five days later, at the suggestion of Frau von Kopf, Clemens asked Chatto, who was to use Zola as an intermediary, if necessary, to pass along a constructive suggestion: to “get Madame Dreyfus to consider the idea of entrusting to Mr. Kellgren the restoration of Captain Dreyfus’ health,” and Clemens enclosed an elaborate letter of testimonial to go to her in the south of France.

  IV

  In Vienna during 1898 and 1899 Mark Twain was treated like a Hapsburg. He enjoyed his special privileges. “For God’s sake, let him pass,” said a mounted officer ordering a police barrier opened. “Don’t you see it’s Herr Mark Twain?” “My,” Clemens said to Clara after they had passed through, “but that makes me feel damned good.” He and Livy had begun to come out of seclusion. Afternoons, from five o’clock on, a stream of visitors poured into their drawing room, which was becoming a sort of second American Embassy. He felt that during his nearly ten years of self-exile he had been serving as “self-appointed Ambassador at Large of the U. S. of America—without salary.” And from America itself were coming unmistakable evidences that during this time of his low creativity and morale his reputation had passed through a remarkable change. Popularity had turned into fame. He had become a part of his nation’s history as well as it
s literature.

  In 1884 the Critic had asked its readers to nominate forty American “immortals.” Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier led the list, Howells was fifth, Bret Harte eighth, and Mark Twain fourteenth, one place ahead of Charles Dudley Warner and two places ahead of Henry Ward Beecher. In 1899 John Kendrick Bangs, editor of the American edition of the transatlantic journal Literature, asked his readers to nominate ten living writers for a hypothetical American Academy. Howells was first with eighty-four votes, the popular philosopher and historian John Fiske was second with eighty-two, and Mark Twain was third with eighty. “Your 84 votes place you where you belong—at the head of the gang,” Clemens wrote from Vienna. The readers of Literature had already been told by Howells in June 1898 that the greatest American literary center was at present neither in New York nor in Boston but in Vienna, and from Howells directly Clemens had received a string of heartfelt tributes compounded of love, admiration, and Howells’ unswerving conviction that, polls and academies and other literary men aside, his friend was “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.” “I wish you could understand how unshaken you are, you old tower, in every way,” Howells wrote in January 1898. “Your foundations are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare.” And that October, after rereading “The Recent Carnival of Crime,” he concluded, “You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is no use saying anything else.”