His favorite recreation in New York, when he was not playing billiards, was to stroll up and down Fifth Avenue in his white suit, chat with the police, and be stared at. Sometimes he walked as far as Carnegie’s house at Ninety-second Street and rode back on the open deck of a Fifth Avenue coach, smoking and looking down. On Sunday mornings he walked to Fifty-ninth Street, and before starting downtown again he waited in the Plaza lobby until the churches were out and the sidewalks crowded with fashionable strangers who lifted their hats to him. “It was his final harvest,” Paine said of this public homage, “and he had the courage to claim it.” But it was as much a matter of need as of courage. His white suits, which focused on him such attention—love, really—were the fetish of what had become an obsession with guilt, with forbidden and therefore unclean thoughts. (His “box of posthumous stuff” and all the letters he wrote in anger but never sent provided him with one outlet for this sort of uncleanness.) In a rambling but curiously insistent dictation in July 1908 he went on about the subject of cleanliness. He had kept his hair, he said, by scouring it every morning with soap and water; after ten hours the “microscopic dust floating in the air,” even in the country, made it dirty again, and after twenty-four “raspy” and “uncomfortable.” People washed their hands several times a day, but what about the dirt on their heads? In addition, the dark clothes that most men wore carried so much dirt that “you could plant seeds in them and raise a crop.” “I wear white clothes both winter and summer,” he said, “because I prefer to be clean in the matter of raiment—clean in a dirty world; absolutely the only cleanly-clothed human being in all Christendom north of the Tropics. And that is what I am.” To be clean was to be deserving of love, and, as the scribes and Pharisees were supposed to have believed, to be clean outside was as good as being clean inside. When Clemens was just beginning to wear white suits morning and evening he reported to Clara, not only with delight but also with a full and scriptural knowledge of the implications, that Howells had given him a new title: “Whited sepulchre.”
In other ways he seemed to be realizing an ambition to be the “most conspicuous person on the planet.” At the Oxford convocation in June 1907, Lord Curzon, the new chancellor of the university, was to confer honorary degrees on two Americans, Mark Twain and Ambassador Whitelaw Reid. (A third American, Thomas Edison, declined on the grounds that he was too busy in his laboratory to make the trip.) Howells had been honored by Oxford in 1904; now Clemens saw it as his turn to have “a secret old sore of mine” healed. For over a generation, he said two weeks before leaving for England, he had been “as widely celebrated a literary person” as America had ever produced. Now the Oxford degree, “a loftier distinction than is conferrable by any other university,” he said, was to be his final credential for immortality. He had planned never to cross the ocean again, but, he told Paine, he “would be willing to journey to Mars for that Oxford degree.” On June 8, forty years to the day since the start of his first voyage to the Old World, on the Quaker City, he sailed on his last. He took with him as secretary Ralph Ashcroft, a young Englishman originally hired to manage the Plasmon affairs.
During the voyage’s quiet interval between his American sendoff and his English welcome, Clemens stripped off some of the lineaments of his incomparable celebrity and showed himself in all his private loneliness. He had never recovered from the death of Susy. Clara was thirty-three now, busy with her singing career, away much of the time. He and Jean quarreled when they were together. She said he was rude, impatient, and angry with her; she felt her life was useless. Off in some rest home or other, tormented by daydreams about men and by the fear that she would never marry and have children, she complained about the food and accused him of wanting simply to get her out of the way. He barely had daughters any more, he felt, and here he was old enough to have grandchildren almost as old as Susy had been when she went off to Bryn Mawr. So he had taken to adopting grandchildren. To the end of his life he liked to be surrounded with bright and pretty young girls, his “Angel Fish,” the members of his “Aquarium.” He wrote them overflowing, sentimental, curiously feminine letters. He gave them tiny pieces of jewelry and the adoration of a bereaved old man. What he expected in return was gaiety and innocence, love, and flattery. “Butter wanted,” he once joked. “Any Kind: New; Old. Real preferred, but Oleomargarine not turned away.” On his way to England now he met one of these girls, Carlotta Welles, whom he called Charley. She was eighteen and, as someone in Paris told her later, she looked like Susy. He asked her to sit at his table, wanted her to spend every waking moment with him, and although he was delightful she became restless after a while and avoided him. He was disappointed when she did not come to hear him read from the manuscript of The Mysterious Stranger. “Well,” he said sadly, “she’s very young.” He waited outside her stateroom one morning and sent in a little note on his calling card: “Charley, dear, you don’t know what you are missing. There’s more than two thousand porpoises in sight, and eleven whales, and sixty icebergs, and both Dippers, and seven rainbows, and all the battleships of all the navies, and me. SLC” The steward told her it was a shame to keep the old gentleman waiting like that, just walking back and forth and waiting. There was something tender, sad, and heartbroken about him, she remembered. The night of the ship’s concert he read aloud from Susy’s biography, and he was close to tears.
But with the first cheer from the stevedores at Tilbury dock—the most precious kind of love, he wrote to Jean, because it was from the people, “my own class”—the public Mark Twain, wearing a derby and spectacles and carrying a cotton umbrella (“the only kind the English won’t steal”), reappeared in all his brilliant gaiety and told the reporters that he had come to show Oxford “what a real American college boy looks like.” Crowds lined the street when he drove to the royal garden party at Windsor. There he had a private talk with Edward VII; the Queen commanded him to keep his hat on—she was afraid he might catch cold. He was honored at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, by the Savage Club and by the proprietors of Punch. The parties and celebrations never stopped; there were so many invitations coming in that Ashcroft had to hire an assistant. During Mark Twain’s stay in England, Harper’s Weekly said, “he was the most advertised man in the world.”
On the platform at St. Pancras Station he had been introduced to George Bernard Shaw, who described him to a reporter as “by far the greatest American writer.” Shaw talked about one of the several parallels between them: “He is in very much the same position as myself. He has to put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking.” A few weeks later, after Clemens had lunched with the Shaws, Max Beerbohm, and Sir James Barrie at 10 Adelphi Terrace, Shaw (fifty-one then and therefore, according to Clemens, “merely a lad”) touched on something else they had conspicuously in common: a public personality. “My dear Mark Twain,” Shaw began a letter on July 3, “—not to say Dr. Clemens (although I have always regarded Clemens as mere raw material—might have been your brother or your uncle).” He said that like William Morris (“an incurable Huckfinnomaniac”) he believed that Mark Twain was one of the great masters of the English language, and besides: “I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire. I tell you so because I am the author of a play in which a priest says ‘Telling the truth’s the funniest joke in the world,’ a piece of wisdom which you helped to teach me.”
In the same vein of homage, at Oxford on June 26 Curzon had read out the citation, “Vir jucundissime, lepidissime, facetissime … Most amiable, charming and playful sir, you shake the sides of the whole world with your merriment.” Even the dons stood up in the Sheldonian Theatre and cheered, Kipling remembered in 1936. Afterward, wearing the scarlet robe that he cherished and flaunted until the end of his life, Mark Twain marched into the sunlight in procession with the King’s brother and the Prime Minister, with Rodin, Saint-Saëns, a
nd Kipling. When he returned to America toward the end of July he seemed lonely, Paine said, not for companionship but for what seemed the high point of his life, which he had just passed. “Get your cue,” he said to Paine. “I have been inventing a new game.”
In 1909 a writer in the North American Review, Eugene Angert, asked the question “Is Mark Twain dead?” and made out an amusing case for the probability that he had died in 1906 in an obscure village in Switzerland. Reviewing Is Shakespeare Dead?, Angert applied Clemens’ analytic methods and reached the conclusion that the writer currently known as Mark Twain was as much an impostor as “Mark Twain” said Shakespeare was. This new book, for example, was subtitled “From My Autobiography” and dealt with Shakespeare as a false claimant who could take his place in history with Mark Twain’s other anti-heroes, Satan, Louis XVII, Arthur Orton, and Mary Baker Eddy. But this new book had been copyrighted by, and possibly written by an employee of, a legal entity called “The Mark Twain Company,” chartered by the state of New York in 1908. A careful study of Baconian cyphers might even prove that the “Mark Twain” of Christian Science and Is Shakespeare Dead? was none other than the sage of East Aurora and author of A Message to Garcia, Elbert Hubbard.
Underneath the lighthearted ingenuity of all this ran the serious suggestion that by 1906, four years before his death, Mark Twain had outlived not his fame but the identity that had made him famous. The stagecoach and the river boat, symbols of the Western Mark Twain, had become the motorcar and the steam yacht, symbols of the plutocracy. He had shed his negligence about what he wore and was now, in his highly individual way, even something of a fashion plate. Sometimes he wore what Howells called “that society emblem,” a silk hat. He lived on Fifth Avenue, rented a summer house at Tuxedo Park. He was to be seen in the company of Henry Rogers and other moguls at Palm Beach and Bermuda. His friendship with Rogers had continued to deepen—“I am his principal intimate and that is my idea of him.” Stretched out on the sofa in Rogers’ private office in the Standard Oil Building, smoking or reading while Rogers conducted his daily affairs, Clemens was completely at home and completely trusted. He was now a family friend as well: he had dedicated Following the Equator to Rogers’ son Harry; to Rogers’ daughter-in-law, Mary, he was “affectionately, your uncle”; and almost day and night for the rest of his life he played billiards, “the best game on earth,” on a luxurious table given him as a Christmas present by Rogers’ wife. He was Andrew Carnegie’s crony and dinner companion, the recipient and consumer of bottles, cases, and finally barrels of Carnegie’s private-stock Scotch—“the best and smoothest whisky now on the planet”—which always seemed to come at the right time. “Whisky never comes at the wrong time,” Clemens said in one of a cycle of such thank-you notes. To each other they were “Saint Mark” and “Saint Andrew.”
“Money-lust has always existed,” Clemens could say to Twichell, “but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine.” But the moralist and the people’s author had also become the pet and the peer of the moguls, and on a personal plane he was loyal to them in return. In 1905 he contributed anecdotal material to Isaac Marcosson’s profile of Rogers for World’s Work; that profile was meant to counteract Thomas Lawson’s slashing attack in Frenzied Finance. Earlier Clemens had arranged for Ida Tarbell, just starting on her epochal history for McClure, to interview Rogers. This was Rogers’ opportunity to present the Standard Oil side of the story (and possibly also his opportunity, as John D. Rockefeller, Sr., believed, to divert as much censure as he could from himself to his associates). On occasions Clemens could even be convinced that the Standard Oil captains were simply the victims of an unremitting public hostility whipped up by magazine publishers like McClure and a demagogic trust-busting President. The simple fact that in forty-five years the employees of Standard Oil had never gone out on strike, he said, proved that their “chiefs cannot be altogether bad,” and in this benevolent mood he was willing to be an agent in the public rehabilitation of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Frank Doubleday, one of Rockefeller’s golfing companions, made a strategic approach: he told Clemens about the work of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, especially about its research into meningitis, the disease that had killed Susy. On the strength of these good works Clemens agreed that the Standard Oil leaders deserved a fair hearing; he also agreed to appear on their behalf. At the Aldine Club on May 20, 1908, about fifty magazine publishers had the dramatic surprise of seeing the Rockefellers, father and son, file into their lion’s den. With them were Henry Rogers and Mark Twain, who made a conciliatory speech, after which the elder Rockefeller, “speaking sweetly, sanely, simply, humanly,” told them about the work of his Institute. As Clemens described the speech and its reception in an autobiographical dictation the next morning, Rockefeller “achieved one of the completest victories I have ever had any knowledge of.” Doubleday’s published impressions of Rockefeller as a “modest and friendly man” were soon followed by other revisionist accounts in the newspapers and magazines. A year later, after Rogers died suddenly of an apoplectic stroke, Andrew Carnegie wrote a condolence letter to the shocked and grieving Clemens which also contained a plea for his loyalty. “Mr. Rogers had to bear the odium of a system, one blamed for unavoidable consequences. Rebates were part of transportation in the early days and railways fought each other as private manufacturers did,” Carnegie wrote from Stresa. “Well, his memory will be kept green in your heart and I doubt not history will do him justice because you will take care to record him as your friend in need, showing the real man. Goodnight, Saint Mark.”
V
“The country home I need is a cemetery,” Clemens had grumbled when the house at Redding was built. But when the house was ready for him he was in a mood for holiday. At the end of his first day there, in June 1908, he played billiards with Paine until midnight, and during the weeks and months that followed he played endless billiards and games of hearts, walked, went for rides around the countryside in the carriage that had been part of Jervis Langdon’s wedding gift; its springs were stiff with age. There were almost always visitors at Stormfield: Howells, Colonel Harvey—bringing with him Lord Northcliffe—Helen Keller, Laura Hawkins, always the Angel Fish with or without their mothers. Occasionally Clemens came out of his retirement. In November he gave a performance—“the same old string of yarns”—for the benefit of the free library he presented to the town. “Poor fellow,” Howells said, declining his invitation, “I thought you went to Redding to get rid of Mark Twain.” And even though Clemens had begun the vacation that he felt sixty years of work had earned him, he still spent his mornings writing in bed. He was busy with letters, his Shakespeare book, and Letters from the Earth. In 1909, for Harper’s Bazaar, he wrote “The Turning-Point of My Life”: reviewing his life and legend once again, he saw everything he had done and become as predetermined from the beginning of time, each event only another link in a chain forged by “circumstance, working in harness with my temperament”—he was still pushing away the heavy burden of his freedom. He had discharged his stenographer, but he had not finished his autobiography. He even hit on a new scheme: to write it in the form of letters to friends, letters he would never mail. More than ever he seemed to live in the past and among great expanses of space and time which he figured in light-years. “My father died this day 63 years ago,” he wrote to Clara on March 24, 1910, less than a month before his own death. “I remember all about it quite clearly.” He remembered standing in the pilothouse in 1858 and reading a newspaper by the white spray of light of Donati’s comet. He had come in with Halley’s comet in 1835. In the fall of 1909 the returning voyager was visible again, at first as a faint nebulous star not far from Orion. “Here are those unaccountable freaks,” he imagined God to be saying about Halley’s comet and Mark Twain. “They came in together, they must go out together.” And he added, “Oh! I am looking forward to that.” Like his Connecticut Yankee, he was “getting up his last effec
t”: he was to die at sunset on April 21, one day after the comet reached its perihelion.
During Jean’s last six months, when she came to live with him and worked as his secretary, Clemens and this willful, troubled, and pathetic daughter of his finally achieved a brief and loving peace together. “Oh, the irony of it,” he told Clara in July 1909. “That reptile Lyon mistress of our house these several years and Jean barred out of it.” The long power struggle behind the King’s back between Clara, “Painchen,” “the Lioness,” and Ashcroft had reached a horrible dénouement which Paine was sure undermined Clemens’ health. Urged on by Clara and Paine, he looked into the way Miss Lyon and Ashcroft had been administering his affairs, including the payrolls for his staff and his children’s allowances, and discovered that he had grounds enough to charge them with mismanagement and possibly larceny. He threatened legal action, including a suit to recover a small house on the property that he had given her as a Christmas present (he accused her of diverting money to improve this house). Ashcroft and Miss Lyon married in haste and left for England—in order to avoid testifying against each other, according to Clemens and Paine. “I caught Miss Lyon stealing (she had been at it for more than two years), and I bounced her,” Clemens told Melville Stone of the Associated Press in September. “That is the whole of the dispute.” By this time he had had the pleasure of seeing her “stretched on the rack” by his lawyers and every last detail of his connection with her legally erased. Having been suspicious of so many all his life, now, at the end of it, he seethed with hurt and anger at this new betrayal, not the least agonizing part of which was his separation from Jean. “A liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite,” he described Isabel Lyon for Clara, “a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction and always getting disappointed, poor child.”
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 56
