Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  On the streets and in theaters and restaurants Clemens was so often recognized and applauded that, as Clara said, “it was difficult to realize he was only a man of letters.” He had, in fact, become something else. His career had followed a mythic pattern of journey from poverty and obscurity, of mortal struggle, and of victory and return. His hero’s fame was transformed by a revolution in the printing of news and the appetite for news, and he became a celebrity—in Daniel Boorstin’s definition, “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” The reporters who dogged his steps were attracted not so much by his literature, which they rarely read or understood, as by his personality, his mane of white hair, his drawl, his astonishing opinions and mannerisms—all of which, having already been the subjects of bales of news clippings, now, by the dynamics of celebrity and his own skillful management, made him even better copy. Two old friends of his, survivors of the Boston group which years earlier had received if not exactly welcomed him, pondered his new dimension. “Mark’s spectacular personality is just now very busy all over the world,” Aldrich wrote to Howells in December 1901. “I doubt if there is another man on earth whose name is more familiar.” “What a fame and force he is!” Howells remarked, and he described for Aldrich the experience of accompanying Clemens to the train for Riverdale. Clemens did not have to carry a timetable. When he arrived at the station the gatemen and the starters, who were proud to know him, arranged for him to board something that stopped at Riverdale, and even then he made them hold the train while he went to the station toilet. “But they would not let it go without him,” Howells said, “if it was the Chicago limited!” Impressed and amused, Howells was also aware that Clemens’ celebrity was becoming a barrier in itself. Howells called him “Clemens” the pseudonym Mark Twain “seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense.” He preferred, he said in a critical essay in the February 1901 North American Review, his friend’s “personal books”—the books of travel and reminiscence—for there “we come directly into the presence of the author, which is what the reader is always longing and seeking to do.” In a humorous letter to Clemens two years later Howells stated, in an oblique way, his sense of bafflement and isolation. He had had a dream about visiting Clemens in Riverdale, and in the dream he had encountered a servant named “Sam” who was planting potatoes in a plowed field. “Sam” had insolently refused to allow Howells to go up to the house, refused even to bring his card in, and Howells had gone back home humiliated. “I must really complain to you of the behavior of your man Sam,” he said in his letter. “Bet Howells is drunk yet,” Clemens noted on the envelope. He wrote back immediately to apologize and to tell Howells that Sam had been fired.

  At the same time that he luxuriated in celebrity, Clemens broodingly recognized that it had its costs and imperatives and also that it was only the delicate child of public opinion. “We all do no end of feeling and we mistake it for thinking,” he wrote in 1900 at the end of “Corn-Pone Opinions.” “And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the Voice of God.” He then put this bitter little essay away in his box of “posthumous stuff,” but, remembering its lesson well, he displayed in his public behavior over the next five or six years an irregular pattern of magnificent courage and fervor punctuated by retreats and compromises which he managed to rationalize in one way or another. The Spanish-American War (which Howells, more of a political realist, predicted would inaugurate “an era of blood-bought prosperity”) impressed Clemens at first as a noble cause, the only occasion in history when one man was willing to fight for another man’s freedom. But soon the application of this principle to the “liberation” of the Philippines fused in his mind with the Boer War and the Boxer reparations. By the time he returned to America he was, like most intellectuals and writers, a professed and outspoken anti-imperialist. In December 1900, when he introduced the twenty-six-year-old Winston Churchill to his first American lecture audience at the Waldorf-Astoria, he could not pass up the opportunity to elaborate on the circumstance that it was not alone through Churchill’s mother that America and England were kin. “I think that England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa, just as we have sinned in getting into a similar war in the Philippines,” he said. “And now that we are also kin in sin, there is nothing more to be desired.” A few weeks later, disgusted by what he saw as an unholy alliance of Christianity, cash, and colonialism going under the collective name of civilization, he published in the New York Herald a salutation to the twentieth century: “I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.” Finally, in the February 1901 North American Review, Clemens published “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” an impassioned attack on “the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust,” its managers—Mr. McKinley, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the Kaiser, and the Czar—and its chosen representatives, the Christian missionaries who marched to distant lands to conquer in the double sign of the cross and the black flag. “We can even make jokes,” Clemens said, after noting that these missionaries were now busy collecting reparations, sometimes hundreds of taels of silver and the life of a Chinese for each believer killed by the Boxers: “Taels, I win, Heads you lose.”

  “I am not expecting anything but kicks for scoffing, and am expecting a diminution of my bread and butter by it,” he wrote to Twichell, “but if Livy will let me I will have my say.” Livy was sometimes angry with him for pursuing some personal vendetta until, she said, “you seem almost like a monomaniac.” But on large issues of conscience she respected his indignation, and it was not Livy but Twichell who urged him to be silent. “I can’t understand it!” Clemens raged. “You are a public guide and teacher, Joe, and are under a heavy responsibility to men, young and old; if you teach your people—as you teach me—to hide their opinions when they believe the flag is being abused and dishonored, lest the utterance do them and a publisher a damage, how do you answer for it to your conscience?” A few years later, during Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign, Clemens was scolding the solidly Republican Twichell for writing a campaign speech built “on the oldest and best models. There isn’t a paragraph in it whose facts or morals will wash.” For not the least among all the changes Clemens had seen in his lifetime was the decline of the Protestant clergy in influence and function. The social and moral leaders of his youth were now, he believed, merely apologists for dollar civilization and the status quo. The pulpit, he said, had become about as indispensable as “the sun—the moon, anyway.”

  One afternoon in December 1907 Clemens and Carnegie had a talk about the news that Theodore Roosevelt—“the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century,” Clemens called him—had impetuously decided to abolish the motto “In God We Trust,” because coins “carried the name of God into improper places.” The fact was, Carnegie said, that “the name of God is used to being carried into improper places everywhere and all the time.” It was a beautiful motto, Clemens said. “It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always sounds well—In God We Trust. I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.” But the fact was, he went on, it hadn’t been true since the Civil War; what the country trusted in was not God but “the Republican party and the dollar—mainly the dollar.” And as for the United States being a Christian country (as twenty-two clergymen, protesting Roosevelt’s order, had just declared in a formal resolution), “Why, Carnegie,” Clemens said, and one can hear the triumphant drawl, the soft and deadly pounce, “so is hell.”

  Twichell had predicted a storm of abuse over “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” and the storm broke. One New York Congregationalist minister publicly denounced Clemens as “a man of low birth and poor breeding
.” But Clemens was also applauded and supported by people he respected, and, far from backing down, he pressed the attack in a second article, “To My Missionary Critics.” That October he and Howells came to Yale to receive honorary degrees. Theodore Roosevelt stood apart at the ceremony; since the assassination of McKinley he had been forbidden to mix in crowds or shake hands. As a long ovation went up for Clemens, Roosevelt declared privately, “When I hear what Mark Twain and others have said in criticism of the missionaries, I feel like skinning them alive.” But Mark Twain was the students’ hero. After the exercises, when he was touring the campus, a crowd of them gave the college cheer and roared out his name. He took off his hat and bowed.

  “Praise to the Eternal!” said a leading anti-imperialist. “A voice has been found.” Serving as a public conscience, Mark Twain was applauded for his courage, anger, and truth. Yet at the same time, privately, he was capable of the kind of volte-face which, by his own standards, made him scarcely less culpable than Twichell. Over 1,500 Negroes and whites were lynched during the 1890s; in 1900 there were 115 lynchings, in 1901 there were 130. “In ten years this will be habit, on these terms,” Clemens noted in September 1901. The citizens of Pierce City, Missouri, a village in the southwest corner of his native state, had just gone on a rampage, lynched three Negroes, burned out five households, driven thirty families into the woods. Stirred by the outrage, Clemens occupied himself that summer at Saranac with two related projects. One was an article, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” which he intended for the North American Review. “O compassionate missionary,” he pleaded, “leave China! come home and convert these Christians!” The disease of moral cowardice was epidemic, and it could be fought only by brave men taking a stand, for “no mob has any sand in the presence of a man known to be splendidly brave” (the same point Colonel Sherburn made to the Arkansas lynch mob in Huckleberry Finn). The second project, which he proposed to Frank Bliss, was a subscription-book history of lynching in America—maybe three thousand cases in all, he figured. His article was to be the introduction. “Nothing but such a book can rouse up the sheriffs to put down the mobs and the lynchings,” he told Bliss. Moreover, “No book is so marketable as this one—the field is fresh, untrodden, and of the strongest interest.” The idea continued to excite him—at one time he thought of asking George Kennan to take it over—but in the end he abandoned the book and turned instead to writing “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story,” a heavy-handed burlesque of Sherlock Holmes and “his cheap and ineffectual ingenuities.” For he had felt compelled to agree with Bliss that in one crucial respect the lynching book was a poor idea: it would kill sales in the South. “I shouldn’t have even half a friend left down there, after it issued from the press.” “There is plenty of vitriol in it and that will keep it from spoiling,” he rationalized as he consigned the article to his pile of posthumous manuscript. (Paine had an even more desperate rationalization: “The moment of timeliness had passed.”)

  His need to be loved dictated the answer to the question of whether to speak out about lynching or remain silent. “Desouthernized” as he was, his imagination and his youth still lived down there in Hannibal. During 1902 he was intermittently occupied with further Tom and Huck stories, elegiac in tone and with a new element frankly acknowledged: now there are girls in Tom Sawyer’s gang, kissing parties, and even a suggestion that one girl, as Huck says, was a “horlat.” Clemens’ notes call for the boys and girls to promise to meet after fifty years at midnight on Holliday’s Hill. Tom and Huck call the roll: they are old and withered like the others; “Old Jim” answers for all the absent ones. There are railroad tracks now where once there had been open land; the levee is dead; the steamboats are all gone.

  It was in this valedictory mood that at the end of May 1902 Clemens returned to Hannibal—for the last time, he was certain. He was on his way to receive an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Missouri at Columbia on June 4. The five days he spent in Hannibal represented the accumulated and reciprocated loyalties of a lifetime. On the first morning he visited the tiny frame house on Hill Street where he had spent most of his boyhood. “It all seems so small to me,” he said. “I suppose if I should come back here ten years from now it would be the size of a bird-house.” Wearing a white shirt and a pale-gray suit, he stood hatless in the sunlight, his hands in his coat pockets, and leaned against the open screen door. The photographers took his picture while crowds of townsfolk, boys in galluses and girls in smocks, watched from the sidewalk. Then he drove off in a carriage to visit the family graves in Mount Olivet Cemetery. In the afternoon he went to the Decoration Day exercises at the Presbyterian church. He rose to speak, and the entire audience rose with him and applauded and applauded. When they stopped he had to stand silent for a long minute before he was able to speak without his voice breaking in emotion. That evening he dined in formal dress with two old schoolmates, Helen Garth and Laura Hawkins Frazer, both widows now; Laura, who had been his “very first sweetheart,” was a plump old lady, gum-fallen and purse-mouthed. Later, at the Opera House, he gave out the diplomas to the high-school graduating class and shook hands for an hour. When he left from the depot in Hannibal at the end of his stay, he posed once again for the photographers, this time holding a bunch of flowers. Over the din of the huge crowd that had come to say goodbye, his boyhood playmate Tom Nash shouted to him in a deaf man’s whisper, “Same damned fools, Sam.” At way stations on the trip to Columbia and then back to St. Louis, where he stood at the pilot’s wheel of the harbor boat Mark Twain, other crowds waited for him, with applause and flowers, and his eyes filled with tears. For such love who can blame him for putting aside, out of a lifetime’s work, one book and one article?

  Clemens was as certain that American democracy was headed toward “monarchy” (or dictatorship) as he was that Christian Science was the coming religion—“I regard it as the Standard Oil of the future.” “When we contemplate her and what she has achieved,” he said about Mary Baker Eddy, “it is blasphemy to longer deny to the Supreme Being the possession of a sense of humor,” and in articles published in 1902 and 1903 he went at Eddyism with the same savage glee he took in cataloguing Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses. A few years later his target became the Belgian depredations in the Congo, and he wrote “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” the most effective and most widely circulated piece of American propaganda in the cause of Congo reform. But he declined to commit himself to being a systematic reformer. He was a lightning bug, not a bee, he said, explaining why he could not go on to write a second piece about the Congo. “My instincts and interests are merely literary, they rise no higher; and I scatter from one interest to another, lingering nowhere.” There were other explanations. The Harper firm, he said, had been doubtful all along of his commercial wisdom in dipping into Leopold’s “stinkpot” as well as Mrs. Eddy’s, and he accepted their proposal to publish Christian Science “silently” and to allow “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” to be published as a pamphlet, illustrated with atrocity photographs, by the Boston Congo Reform Association, a gratis contribution from the author. Underlying even his most courageous and outspoken public positions was the demoralizing gospel of “Corn-Pone Opinions.” His response to years of bankruptcy and disaster, during which he felt his powers and his popularity waning, was a kind of post-traumatic syndrome, part of which was a refusal to take serious risks with what he had regained. By 1905 his celebrity had become addictive and had begun to blunt his purpose as a public conscience. Sometimes he was not at all sure that it had been worth while to give up the freedom of the humorist in order to become a sage. In a satire called “The War Prayer,” not published until 1923 in Europe and Elsewhere, he wrote a Swiftian indictment of the martial spirit, of patriotism which was basically blood lust. But Jean told him it was sacrilegious: it did, after all, suggest the paradox of God being on both sides in any war between two Christian countries. Clemens accepted her veto, and, pacing the floor in his slippers and dressing
gown, he admitted to Dan Beard that he was not going to publish it in his lifetime. “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world,” he said, perhaps recalling that Montaigne admitted to speaking the truth not as much as he wanted but only as much as he dared. “He did not care to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic,” Albert Bigelow Paine wrote in his biography, “or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and conclusions of mankind.”