Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  In 1899 Hamlin Garland, carrying letters of introduction from Howells, called on Clemens and Bret Harte, who were then both in London. Garland was shocked by the changes which had come on Clemens since the Cable tour fifteen years earlier. His shaggy hair had turned white, his shoulders were stooped, he seemed smaller than he had been, and at first he was curiously aloof, as if he had forgotten he had a visitor. But when Garland, who had written a biography of Grant, asked him about the publishing history of the Memoirs, his interest was finally engaged, and his eyes became as keen and piercing as ever. It seemed to Garland that this old man—“the largest and most significant figure in American literature”—had lost little of his vigor or his indignation. Actually, as Garland may have realized years later, Clemens was also in the grip of one of his monomanias. For he said—contrary to all the facts, as Garland was to find out—that Charley Webster had “chouselled” him out of fifty thousand dollars and had brought about the ruin of the publishing house. He cursed Charley with fervor and Oriental magnificence, going on and on with “cold malignity” and “deadly hatred in face and voice,” and he told Garland that what he had written about Charley in his autobiography “would make the son-of-a-bitch turn in his grave.” Suddenly changing from this vein to an ironic prank, he gave Garland permission to publish the interview in McClure’s, provided, of course, that Livy also gave her permission, and Garland went off on his fool’s errand, to ask and be refused.

  Garland’s visit to Harte, who was living in a dainty apartment in Lancaster Gate, shocked him more deeply, for this man who had almost single-handedly created the literary image of the American West, and who had been idolized by an entire nation, now “looked and spoke like a burned out London sport.” He was dressed like an American actor’s idea of an English clubman, in striped trousers, a cutaway coat over a fancy vest, and lavender spats, he wore a monocle, and he carried a pair of yellow gloves. “My California is gone,” he told Garland. “Sometimes I wish I had never come away.” He had not lived in America since 1878. At thirty-five his best work had been behind him, and for twenty years and more Bret Harte had lived on what he knew to be hackwork—“I grind out the old tunes and gather up the coppers,” he had written to his wife long ago, when he was consul at Krefeld. Now, jaded with London society, whose pet he was, he was tired and sick, his hair was white and his figure stooped, his eyes were yellowish, and his skin was puffy. Three years later he was dead of throat cancer, having acted out to the letter F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that there are no second acts in American lives.

  “My California is gone,” Bret Harte had said. Mark Twain, aware of the passing of the frontier and touched by a fin-de-siècle wistfulness, also felt that time and history were passing him by. The century to come was not his century. As if to mark the close of a literary era, Frank Bliss during 1899 and 1900 published a signed and numbered twenty-two volume edition, The Writings of Mark Twain. Bliss appeared to be having an easy time selling it, Clemens told Chatto—“President McKinley and other big guns have subscribed.” For this “Autograph Edition” Clemens, while in Vienna in March 1899, wrote fourteen manuscript pages of an autobiographical sketch. He submitted it to Livy, who made a few small but characteristic changes (for example, she suppressed his reference to “one James W. Paige, a fraud”). Then, with the reminder that what he hated above all was “gush and vulgarity,” he sent the manuscript to his nephew, Sam Moffett, who was to put it in his own words, add to it or elaborate according to his judgment, and sign it for publication. Clemens was to have final approval of this piece, which contained much that he said himself—in the freedom of anonymity—and nothing that he disapproved of. “Mark Twain, A Biographical Sketch, by Samuel E. Moffett,” which appeared at the end of Volume Twenty-two (just after “In Memoriam,” Clemens’ poem about Susy), is therefore more than an authorized biography. It can be read as a statement about himself by a man who had already in his lifetime become a legend, who continued to manipulate and redefine the symbols on which his legend was based, and who was driven by the need to impose order on a sprawling life which he often felt was without meaning.

  Viewing his life as history from the very start, the sketch places Mark Twain’s birth in the context of America’s new “Western empire” and of the frontier, defined, in terms similar to Turner’s, as “the extreme fringe of settlement” between cultivated land and wilderness. The “sleepy river towns” of the frontier, which Mark Twain grew up in and later knew as a pilot, are now a “vanished estate” whose charm and “warm, indolent existence” are preserved in his books, from Tom Sawyer to Pudd’nhead Wilson. Later on the sketch introduces another symbol as powerful for Americans at the turn of the century as the frontier: Mark Twain’s “humor is as irrepressible as Lincoln’s,” and, again like Lincoln’s, it has a profound aptness “in spite of the surface incongruity.”

  Instead of being swept on to wealth by the great westward tide of American expansion, Mark Twain’s parents, we are told, had an almost “miraculous” faculty for the “eddies and back-currents,” and they remained poor. But they still owned land and slaves, and the ancient Anglo-Saxon antecedents which the sketch cites complete a stereotype, familiar in success literature, of poor but blood-pure and proud gentry: Mark Twain’s father was descended from Gregory Clemens, identified as one of the judges who condemned King Charles I to death, and through his mother the boy was descended from the titled “Lamptons of Durham.” His formal education ended at the age of twelve (as late as 1890 the average American did not go beyond the fifth grade); “his high school was a village printing-office,” and “his education in real life” had begun. The traditional anti-intellectualism—or, at the very least, mistrust of higher education—of the self-made man is heavily underscored: “It is a fortunate thing for literature that Mark Twain was never ground into smooth uniformity under the scholastic emery wheel.” He “made the world his university.” His preparation to be a pilot was “a labor compared with which the efforts needed to acquire the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at a university are as light as a summer course of modern novels.”

  At one point the sketch turns, without warning, into tall story. Mark Twain while a journalist in Nevada had in fact been challenged to a duel by a rival editor; the duel had ended in apologies, but to escape imprisonment under the territory’s anti-dueling statute Mark Twain had left for California. In the sketch he and his second go out to a gorge to practice with Colt revolvers. “A small bird lit on a sagebrush thirty yards away, and Mark Twain’s second fired and knocked off its head.” The opponent thinks this was Mark Twain’s work, and, suddenly terrified by this deadly display, he offers a formal apology, thus “leaving Mark Twain with the honors of war.” These details are borrowings from a comic story long familiar in the West in countless versions.

  After this brief interlude the sketch goes on with a number of historically oriented or overtly self-vindicating statements. The Innocents Abroad established him as “a literary force of the first order.” His acquaintance with Livy led “to one of the most ideal marriages in literary history.” The house in Hartford was neither a practical joke nor a public demonstration of “the financial success possible in literature,” but instead “one of the earliest fruits of the artistic revolt against the mid-century Philistinism of domestic architecture in America.” The sketch tells in considerable detail about his career as a businessman, emphasizing “the series of unfortunate investments” that followed the “brilliant coup” of the Grant Memoirs. Bankrupt, he “could easily have avoided any legal liability for the debts,” but he “felt bound in honor to pay them,” and he paid them in full. His work as a writer has been “irresistibly laughter-provoking,” but its more important purpose has been to make people “think and feel,” and in Joan of Arc he emerged most distinctly as “a prophet of humanity.” The sketch concludes with a discussion of Mark Twain as “characteristically American in every fiber,” yet possessing a “universal quality” which has made him “a
classic, not only at home, but in all lands whose people read and think about the common joys and sorrows of humanity.”

  His life had become history and biography, legend and stereotype, expressing the values and achievements of his country and his century. He had become a hero of the American experience, and when he came home in 1900 he was given a hero’s welcome and led a hero’s public life. Meanwhile, impatiently living out in London his last year of “this everlasting exile,” Clemens looked back on history, and against the perspective of time his bitterness faded momentarily and he remembered only the fulfillments. “The 20th Century is a stranger to me,” he wrote in his notebook. “I wish it well, but my heart is all for my own century. I took 65 years of it, just on a risk, but if I had known as much about it as I know now I would have taken the whole of it.”

  * The period is framed by the work of two doctor-novelists. Holmes wrote several psychiatric (or, as he called them, “medicated”) novels, and around the turn of the century the Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell wrote fictional studies of dual personality. But a number of nonmedical writers were turning to dreams or psychotic states for sources as well as subjects for fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson arrived at the idea for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a dream. One stalwart of New England intellectual society (whose chivalry in helping a fat lady onto a trolley car in Harvard Square is commemorated by the lines, “The noble man by whom this deed was done/ Was Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson”) wrote a novel, The Monarch of Dreams (1886), about a man who is unable to come out of his dreams; at the end he lies in bed helplessly as the train carrying his Union regiment starts south. Higginson became so engrossed in the novel that his sister thought he was sick or seriously depressed. “Ten Years Dead” (1885), Hamlin Garland’s first published story, is about a man (in almost all respects the author himself) who returns to familiar scenes after a deathlike dream absence of ten years; Garland said that the subject came to him “in a dream.” Two years later Howells (who said he had been having dreams “worth dreaming”) told Garland he was planning to write a story about the effect of one dream on a man’s life. Garland, as he reconstructed the conversation years later, tried to discourage him: “There are plenty of men, Mr. Howells, who can do ‘the weird kind of thing,’ but there is only one man who can imagine A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham.” Howells wrote the novel anyhow, The Shadow of a Dream (1890), and he continued to investigate the relationship of dreams to fiction. By 1895, however, in an article in the May Harper’s, he had decided that “the plots of dreams are not much more varied than the plots of romantic novels, which are notoriously stale and hackneyed.” In Rudyard Kipling’s The Brushwood Boy (1895) the dream becomes merely the central plot device for a charming romantic story. Mark Twain’s “My Platonic Sweetheart” (written in 1898 but not published until 1912), about a girl he consistently encountered in his dreams, is similar to Kipling’s and may have been suggested by it. Soon after Clemens sent the story off to Gilder at the Century, he had a change of heart, and just as he began to hope that Gilder would reject it he heard that Gilder already had done so. Typical of his interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena, he concluded that this was one more example of “mental telegraphy.” “I have had 21 years of experience of it,” he wrote to Gilder, “and have written a novel with that as motif (don’t be alarmed—I burned it) and I know considerable about it.”

  * In Stevenson’s novel, Mr. Hyde’s handwriting was Dr. Jekyll’s sloped backward. Clemens may have borrowed the detail of the counterfeit hand from newspaper accounts of a breach-of-promise action brought against the American journalist William Henry Hurlbert in England in 1891. Hurlbert presented the amazing defense that the letters in question, some of them obscene, had been written by his secretary, who had learned to imitate his handwriting so successfully that it was impossible even for Hurlbert to detect a forged letter. The secretary, Hurlbert further testified, had somehow disappeared and could not be found. Tom X’s career was undoubtedly suggested by that of General John C. Frémont, who, after a career as explorer and soldier and his marriage to Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s daughter, was nominated for the Presidency in 1856, at the age of 43; after he was defeated by Buchanan he went back to mining in California, and his last 34 years, before his death in 1890, were spent in relative obscurity.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Whited sepulchre”

  I

  ON OCTOBER 15, 1900, after an exile of nearly ten years and an unbroken absence of over five, Mark Twain returned to America and to an ovation that went on for the rest of his life. “He looks like a fighting cock,” Livy said, her own health apparently restored. Howells also recognized that this homecoming corresponded to a sense of triumph that pervaded Clemens, body and soul. “Younger and jollier than I have seen him in ten years,” he told Thomas Bailey Aldrich. “He says it’s all Plasmon, a new German food-drug he’s been taking, but I think it’s partly prosperity. He has distinctly the air of a man who has unloaded.” The same remarkable change, along with its suggestion of renewed youth, was evident to the reporters who met Clemens in New York that October evening as he walked down the gangplank of his ship, appropriately the Minnehaha of the Atlantic Transport Line. They found him smiling and ruddy, generous and playful while being interviewed. As funny as ever, one reporter noted, and a little better-natured. Soon newspapers all over the country hailed the return of “the bravest author in all literature” and followed the lead of the New York Times in paying tribute, with unvarying comparison with the career of Sir Walter Scott, to “the Hero as Man of Letters.” “It is a great thing to possess genius,” the Boston Weekly Transcript said; “it is a greater thing to be a man of unsullied honor.” Mark Twain’s “splendid fight” against the dread enemy, debt, had made him the hero of a morality supported by a sound currency. “In this age of selfishness and commercialism,” said a Southern church paper with an inadvertent gift for paradox, “he has taught the world a lesson that will bear fruit.” It was clear to the custodians of public values that this lesson gave them an opportunity to congratulate themselves. “It makes us proud of our race and age,” the New York Evangelist said, “all the more as he comes off a winner.” He had just been elected to a life membership in heaven, and while one of his favorite characters, the Recording Angel, was exploding in laughter, Clemens lightheartedly discussed with the press his belief that “the trouble with us in America is that we haven’t learned to speak the truth,” and he outlined his short-range plans to spend the winter in New York, to work and travel as little as possible, and to run for President on the broad platform of being in favor of everything.

  Hartford had already become “the city of heartbreak.” After attending Charles Dudley Warner’s funeral there at the end of October Clemens realized that there was no longer any possibility of coming back to live in the house on Farmington Avenue. He was willing to sell it at a substantial loss and managed to talk Livy out of her refusal to allow it to be advertised. In 1903, following complicated negotiations, he finally sold it, to the president of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. Clemens settled his family for the winter of 1900-1901 in a furnished house at 14 West Tenth Street which had been scouted for him by F. N. Doubleday. There, while Livy entertained quietly, while Clara prepared for her debut as a mezzosoprano in Washington that January, and while Jean took treatments from Dr. George Helmer, an osteopath at Thirty-first Street and Madison Avenue, Clemens received a stream of visitors and interviewers who solicited his opinions on just about everything, including heaven, hell, the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion, and his favorite method of escaping from the Indians. “It always puzzled me,” Clara later recalled, “how Mark Twain could manage to have an opinion on every incident, accident, invention, or disease in the world.” Less than thirty years before, he had been dismissed by the H. K.s and the J. G. Hollands of the time as a trifler and a clown whose opinions on subjects of any gravity were at best presumptuous. Now, Howells felt, Clemens was
in danger of being taken so seriously as a sage that people might forget that he was, after all, a humorist. Almost daily and nightly he set out on a round of lunches, banquets, speeches, and appearances that nearly devoured him and that left him after two or three months worn out, pale, and coughing. “I hate to have him eating so many dinners,” Howells told Aldrich, “and writing so few books.” The Lotos Club and the Aldine, the Nineteenth Century Club and the City Club, the Society of American. Authors and the New England Society gave banquets in his honor, in honor of the American Century, and in honor of the eliteness and achievement that the club way of life was supposed to foster. And for the sake of the redeeming moment when he rose to speak and gave public play to his spellbinding personality Clemens was willing to endure the “dreadful ordeal” of hearing dinner music, clashing cutlery, and shrieking human voices compete with each other and finally rise to a level of sheer pandemonium. After a while, “in order to save my life,” he learned to skip the banquet, arrive after the speeches had begun, enjoy his moment, and leave early.

  Late in 1901, after a summer at Lake Saranac and a visit to Elmira, Clemens rented a baronial mansion in Riverdale which was only twenty-five minutes from Grand Central and the banqueting world. It had a dining room sixty feet long and a commanding view of the Palisades, the Hudson, and the steamboats passing. Soon after, he bought for nearly fifty thousand dollars a house in Tarry town overlooking the Tappan Zee; they never moved into it, for Livy’s health had begun to crumble for the last time. In all this, Clemens’ style of living matched his status as a steady guest, on cruises to Nova Scotia and Bermuda, of Henry Rogers on his steam yacht Kanawha; he was seated at the poker table one night off the coast of Florida when Tom Reed, former “czar” of the House of Representatives, took twenty-three pots in a row. Clemens was now a man of property, a major celebrity, and a semi-retired man of letters who no longer kept notebooks but instead pocket diaries in which he recorded a few literary ideas and a lot of social and business engagements. He could afford to pick and choose among a variety of lucrative offers and reject most of them. During 1900 he turned down Pond’s offer of ten thousand dollars for ten lectures. (In 1902, he said, he would give benefit performances only, and only in private houses.) He turned down S. S. McClure’s visionary offer of five thousand a year (and later an estimated twenty-thousand-dollar share of the expected annual profits) to edit a magazine of “rising young American literature” to be called The Universal. He turned down an offer from the humor magazine Puck of ten thousand a year (or more, Clemens believed, if he insisted) for one hour a week of his editorship. During 1902 his cash income from all sources was over $100,000, of which book royalties accounted for sixty thousand. In October 1903 he signed a contract, negotiated by Rogers, by which Harper acquired the inventory and rights in his work from the American Publishing Company, became his exclusive publisher, and guaranteed him a minimum of twenty-five thousand dollars a year for five years. As he noted at the time, he expected his books to “yield twice as much as that for many a year, if intelligently handled” fifty years after his death, with many of his books having passed into the public domain, the royalties received by his estate were averaging about twenty thousand dollars a year.* His new and assured affluence was proof even against his investments in Plasmon, which inevitably turned into another “chouselling,” and in smaller ventures such as a new kind of cash register, a patented spiral hatpin, and a stock promotion called the Booklover’s Library. Livy herself became interested for a while in a revival of the Tennessee land, having been told by Sam Moffett that because of a possible defect in the title some of the land, long since sold, might now revert to them. Soon, however, she was advising Moffett to proceed with caution. “Be very guarded in what you do,” she wrote to him in January 1902, and she warned him that it was unlikely that his Uncle Sam would take any interest in recovering the land—“He is afraid it will bring you trouble as it has brought it to those who went before you.” (As late as 1906 Clemens was still hoping to be rid of such vicarious claims on the land, claims which only swelled its sixty-year-old burden of “accumulated misapprehensions.”)