When he first heard of the plans for this banquet Clemens was enchanted. Bang away, he told Colonel George Harvey, editor of both Harper’s Weekly and the North American Review; Harvey’s genius as organizer, publicist, and kingmaker was soon to be applied to the political career of Woodrow Wilson. “The dinner scheme is unique and just and a jewel,” Clemens said, and when it was all over he thanked “Harvey the Magnificent” for “the most satisfying and spirit-exalting honor done me in all my seventy years, oh, by seventy times seventy! By George, nobody but you could have imagined and carried out that wonderful thing.” During the weeks before the banquet, however, he grumbled to Miss Lyon that the whole thing was a publicity stunt for the Harper list. With his chronic mistrust of publishers (and of practically everyone with whom he had business dealings), he had already, on various occasions, damned Harvey, Duneka, and all the Harpers to the same hell he reserved for Elisha Bliss and Charles Henry Webb, “liar and thief.” (In the category of “Permanent,” Bliss, Charley Webster, and Paige were on a list of “Hated Persons” Clemens drew up around 1904 or 1905; Countess Massiglia and Fred Hall, on the other hand, occupied only a kind of purgatory under the heading “Temporary—fleeting. Good for one year and Train only. To be taken up in idle moments and hated for pastime.”)
As he approached his seventieth year—“the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity,” he was to say at the banquet—he alternated between such angers and pastimes and a mood of warm sunset. Sometimes he saw himself as saying goodbye to a long procession in which he himself marched not far from the end. Livy, Mollie Clemens, and Pamela all died in 1904. He made a new will. “Who is it I haven’t known?” he asked that May when he heard that Sir Henry Stanley was dead; he had known him since 1867, when Stanley had covered his St. Louis lecture. Any man whose death was worth cabling he was sure he had met somewhere or other, and when he thought back to Nevada and California he felt that just by naming the names he could almost start a resurrection. “Those were the days!—those old ones,” he wrote in 1905 as he declined an invitation to go West again. But his time for wandering was over: he planned “to sit by the fire for the rest of my remnant of life and indulge myself with the pleasure and repose of work.” It was in one of these evanescent mellow moods that he composed his birthday speech, said he was greatly satisfied with it, and rehearsed it twice in front of Miss Lyon.
“I will not say, Oh King, live forever,’” Howells addressed him as the great evening neared its climax, “but Oh King, live as long as you like!’” The hundreds who waved their napkins, cheered, and paid tribute to Mark Twain summed up his years in the East and the rewards he had sought from the Gilded Age: Howells, the only man of letters he deferred to, whose praise certified Clemens to a literary status higher than any he had first aimed for as humorist, entertainer, and lecturer; Twichell, who had conducted Livy’s wedding service and then her funeral service, bridging the heartbreak and the enormous bliss and triumph of the years at Nook Farm; his barnstorming partner, Cable, who had come from his sickbed this evening to declare a lifetime of affection for a humorist who was never the king’s jester—“He is always the King”; his friends the plutocrats Henry Rogers and Andrew Carnegie, who had seen him through financial ruin and in whose favor and admiration he now luxuriated—“He stands forever with Scott,” Carnegie said later that evening, “he has done everything that Scott did.” There was even a representative from the Four Hundred, Perry Belmont, the future doyen of Newport, where Clemens felt quite as much at home as he did at Tuxedo Park, Pierre Lorillard’s enclave for sifted millionaires. The molders and the servants of official opinion, the editors and the critics, were here; so were the stars of a new generation of humorists, George Ade and Finley Peter Dunne, who would never match Mark Twain’s enduring popularity; sitting among them were women as varied in the directions their talents would take as Willa Gather and Emily Post. But mostly facing Mark Twain were the respectable, workaday practitioners who would soon be forgotten but were the night sky for the brilliance of his departing comet.
Seated at their flower-decked tables, participating in what they felt was a memorial service for a living writer, they expected a valedictory, and that is what he gave them. In his funny and sad speech, a feat of illusionism which was the first in a long series of swan songs, he looked back over the seventy years since his birth in “a little hamlet, in the backwoods of Missouri, where nothing ever happened,” and, joking about his cigars and his morals and his habits in general, he said that each person listening to him now would have to find his own way of living to seventy—“We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.” Old age had its desolations, he said. After the banquet he would come out into the night, the winter, and the deserted streets—alone again, as he had been nearly forty years before when his cholera-torn ship came into New York Harbor. Even so, having reached “Pier Number Seventy,” he was prepared, he told them—and he believed it himself for the moment—to sail again with “a reconciled spirit” and “a contented heart.”
One of the many Harper authors at the Delmonico banquet was Albert Bigelow Paine, editor, writer of fiction for children and adults, and author of a distinguished biography of Thomas Nast, published the year before. Paine had been raised in the Midwest; at the age of eight he listened night after night to his parents reading aloud from a new book called The Innocents Abroad. For a while he was an itinerant photographer and a dealer in photographic supplies at Fort Scott, Kansas. He came to New York in the 1890s and joined the group of writers and editors who made their social headquarters at the Players Club on Gramercy Park. It was there that he first met Clemens, in 1901. Later, after one or two other meetings, Clemens gave him permission to quote from some letters to Nast. At the beginning of January 1906 they met again; at a Players dinner in Clemens’ honor. They talked about Joan of Arc; nearly twenty years later Paine was to publish his own painstaking and scholarly book about her. On Saturday, January 7, after having been encouraged by a friend to propose himself as Clemens’ biographer, Paine called at 21 Fifth Avenue. In the dark red room upstairs which doubled as workroom and bedroom, Paine found Clemens propped up in his carved mahogany bed smoking a cigar and answering some letters. Paine told about his lifelong admiration for Clemens’ work and then, with considerable trepidation, explained the purpose of his visit. There was a long silence, and Clemens said, “When would you like to begin?” The next Tuesday morning Paine moved into the adjoining room. So began a relationship which lasted until 1910: Paine was his biographer, constant companion, steward, and finally editor and literary executor.
At first, as notes for the biography, Clemens dictated long answers to Paine’s questions. These answers quickly turned into the daily monologues which now make up the greater part of Clemens’ published and still unpublished autobiography: in two and a half years he dictated something like half a million words. To supplement this outpouring he gave Paine access to his letters and papers—limited access only, as Paine, Howells, and others soon found out—and also a credential, dated March 1, 1906, introducing “my biographer and particular friend, who is seeking information concerning me for use in his book.”
The summer before Paine appeared on the scene, Clemens had made vague plans for Clara and Jean, assisted by Miss Lyon, to arrange and publish his letters someday. “I don’t want it done by any outsider,” he told Clara. “Miss Lyon can do the work, and do it well.” He had in mind an orthodox and dutiful life-and-letters treatment which, customarily in two imposing volumes, was as inevitable a reward for a man of letters as his gravestone and sometimes pressed a little more heavily. Later on, in order to avoid conflict between Paine’s biography and what had to become simply an edition of the letters, he made the stipulation that Paine limit his quotations from them to ten thousand words. For years, with curses and threats of litigation, he had fought off unauthorized biographers and people who made unauthorized use of his letters; he regarded them all as invaders of his privacy, and
, beyond this, he wanted his story told in his own way. He once thought that he might have to go to law in order to stop his old friend Pond from quoting from letters. Even Twichell, who injudiciously released a private letter to the papers, was denounced as a “damned fool.” “I shall never thoroughly like him again,” Clemens told Sam Moffett in 1907. Years earlier he had explained to Moffett, “All private letters of mine make my flesh creep when I see them again after a lapse of years.” It was in the hope of avoiding this kind of distress that in 1904 he told the administrator of Mollie Clemens’ estate to destroy any letters of his to Mollie, Orion, or Jane Clemens (he wanted saved only his father’s old Britannica and his mother’s illustrated family Bible). He hated the past, as he once told Howells—“It’s so damned humiliating.” Now, with an accredited biographer in full pursuit of the past, Clemens had his worries, and so did Paine. Isabel Lyon, watching with some satisfaction the inevitable cross currents and tensions, noted in January 1908: “Mr. Clemens has lost confidence in Paine.” The maid Kate Leary, always loyal to the family, had seen Paine going through Clemens’ letters to Livy and reported this to Clemens, who was angry. Paine asked Isabel Lyon to use her influence. She not only refused but also seems to have reported to Clemens that Paine, without permission, had obtained directly from Howells and Sam Moffett “a lot of the King’s letters.” Now Howells as well as Paine was in trouble. The impossible situation was finally resolved: Clemens was to go over all letters before Paine was allowed to consult them. “I don’t like to have those privacies exposed in such a way even to my biographer,” he told Howells: “If Paine should apply to you for letters, please don’t comply.”
Clemens had been writing or dictating his autobiography off and on since the 1870s, when he wrote some fragments about the Tennessee land and his early years in Florida, Missouri. In 1877 he planned to write “and publish” an account of his life up to the time of his marriage. In 1885 he dictated detailed accounts of his dealings with General Grant. He took up his autobiography again around 1896 and planned to write it in full, with “remorseless” accuracy. In Florence the year Livy died he dictated a substantial amount of material to Isabel Lyon. The impulse behind most of these starts was, of course, that of a professional writer whose favorite modes were autobiographical and oral. Behind his Florence dictations of 1904 was a special purpose, somewhat in violation of the spirit of the copyright laws, it now seems: he intended to tack pieces of these dictations as “new matter” onto each of his old books and thereby extend their life in copyright. By the summer of 1906, when George Harvey, who at first had been dubious about the autobiography pronounced it the “greatest book of the age” and started selecting installments for the North American Review, Clemens felt that a gold mine had been opened up. He was sure he could turn out fifty thousand words a month for the rest of his life. With the money that began to come in from the Review he bought 248 acres near Redding, Connecticut, and on his hilltop there over the Saugatuck valley he commissioned John Howells, his friend’s son, to build him an Italianate villa. Isabel Lyon wanted to call it “Autobiography House.” Clemens held out for “Innocence at Home,” but finally let Clara have her way with “Stormfield.”
All his life Clemens juggled with shifting notions of lies and truth. In his autobiography—which, with only an occasional caution, he was giving to his authorized biographer as primary material—he planned to write the truest book ever written. It is a “true” book, in the sense that he poured into it his deflected angers and heterodoxies. He had said that only the dead have free speech. Speaking “as from the grave,” he could tell “the truth” about some of the people he had known; he could dictate passages about God and religion which he was sure would get his heirs and assigns burned at the stake if they dared take them out of his box of “posthumous stuff” and publish them before 2006 A.D. But this was only one kind of truth, “You are dramatic and unconscious,” Howells wrote to him, “you count the thing more than yourself.” Clemens too acknowledged tacitly that introspection and self-analysis were not his strong suit. The truth about himself might have to be deduced from his own inevitable lies, evasions, and (as with the letters that Paine was not allowed to read without supervision) reticences. “The remorseless truth is there, between the lines,” he assured Howells, “where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell.” But by this time Mark Twain was too scarred an author-cat, and also too habituated a storyteller and performer, to give the spectator much of a chance at the truth. Even the vein of self-accusation which runs through the autobiography, and which he regarded as sure proof that he was baring his soul, is in part dramatic rationalizing. Self-accusation was one of his bulwarks against chaos, an act of obedience to the laws of an official and historical identity, Mark Twain, whose authorized biography Clemens himself, long before Paine, had been writing for years.
Only a few weeks after they began working together, Paine realized that Clemens’ spellbinding reminiscences “bore only an atmospheric relation to history.” He could recall something that had happened only the day before with absolute conviction but with all the essential circumstances turned around, and when Paine reminded him what the facts really were his face took on a blank look, as if he had just waked up. “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not,” he said to Paine, “but I am getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter.” The question of “whether it happened” is not much more relevant to certain parts of the autobiography than it is to Huckleberry Finn. But throughout this chronicle is the talk, the like of which, Howells said, we shall never know again—and we never have. As a record of magnificent talk, magical, hilarious, savage, and tender, the autobiography is a major work, Mark Twain’s last, a sprawling and shapeless masterpiece whose unity is in the accent and rhythm and attack of his voice.
In the fifty-four years since his first sketch was published, Mark Twain had written novels, travel books, short stories, essays, plays, plain and fancy journalism. Formal construction baffled him; he wrestled constantly with the problem of point of view, solved it often by writing in the first person, sometimes had to give up altogether. For a while after Susy’s death he could finish nothing and was afraid that he could no longer write at all. But in the autobiographical dictations he discovered an anti-form which allowed him a perfect and joyous freedom. “What a dewy and breezy and woodsy freshness it has,” he exclaimed to Howells. He might have been speaking from Eden the day talk was invented. Each morning he took up whatever subject interested him and developed it whatever its logical or chronological direction might be; his method was associative, naturalistic, random; in a week’s work humor, diatribe, and nostalgia would be all mixed together. In the afternoon he went over the typescript of the morning’s dictation and polished it, but he was careful not to eliminate the slips and halts and stumbles which added up, he said, to “the subtle something which makes good talk so much better than the best imitation of it that can be done with a pen.” There were drawbacks, of course, when others than Paine and the stenographer were exposed to the method. “Poor man,” William James wrote to his brother Henry after dinner with Clemens in February 1907, “only good for monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he’s a dear little genius all the same.” James could have saved his pity, because for two and a half years Clemens, spinning out his wild and wonderful history, lived in a creative ecstasy of talking, talking, talking.
He lay in bed and talked, smoking, clenching his fist, pointing with his index finger. When he paused and waited for the word to come he folded the sleeve of his robe or cocked his head at an angle and looked about him. At Dublin, New Hampshire, where he rented a summer house, he paced the long veranda or, when it stormed, the living room, talking all the while. “When I think of that time,” Paine wrote, “I shall always hear the ceaseless, slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down
the long gallery.” And Clemens continued his dictations until the summer of 1908, when he moved into his new house at Redding, discharged his stenographer, and entered, he said, “upon a holiday whose other end is in the cemetery.” That year he stopped keeping even the little engagement books that had been serving him for his notes. The last entry he made was the single word, “Talk.”
IV
On December 7, 1906, Clemens was in Washington to testify before a Congressional joint committee on copyright. When his turn came, he stripped off his long overcoat; he was dressed from shoulder to foot in white serge, and, with his great mane of white hair, he stood out in the dimly lighted committee room at the Library of Congress like a blaze of sunlight. “Nothing could have been more dramatic,” Howells remembered. “It was a magnificent coup”—which Clemens followed with a talk, equally magnificent, in defense of intellectual property rights. Dining at Willard’s Hotel that evening he wore full dress and insisted on entering the dining room by the most conspicuous way—not by a secluded elevator, as Paine had supposed he would prefer, but by the stately steps at the F Street entrance and by Peacock Alley, the corridor that ran the length of the hotel. It was only after this that Paine realized “the fullness of his love for theatrical effect.” That winter Clemens began to wear white suits more and more frequently. He had ordered six from his tailor to begin with, and by spring he was wearing them all the time, on every sort of occasion. He had a dress suit of white broadcloth, swallow-tail coat and all, which made him white as a ghost. It was “just stunning,” he told Clara and Jean, “my don’tcareadamn suit,” “a very beautiful costume—and conspicuous.”
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 55
