Yet the Paige Compositor was still not done, and the New York Tribune had already ordered twenty-three Mergenthalers. Irony of ironies, Twain had had the chance to invest in Mergenthaler’s machine—its investors had offered the Paige investors a trade of stock in each other’s companies—but Twain had declined. The fact that Mergenthaler’s investors had wanted a piece of the Paige Compositor only convinced him of its superiority.
But Twain’s confidence and his family’s financial resources were not inexhaustible. He was now starting to lose faith in Paige and began to fear that Whitmore’s prediction might prove true. Finally, in January 1888, Paige said his machine would be ready by April 1. On April 1, he said September. Then September came and went, and in October, he said he had three more months of work to do. “The machine is apparently almost done,” Twain told Orion in November, “but I take no privileges on that account; it must be done before I spend a cent that can be avoided. I have kept this family on short commons for two years and they must go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that may be.”
“Scrimping,” of course, must be seen in the context of the society in which Twain moved. The family still inhabited its mansion, where they were waited on by servants. The girls still had private tutors and took music and dancing lessons. But Livy, who was now forty, was having to keep a close eye on the finances. She had rarely had to do so earlier in her married life and looked forward to the day when she could again relax about money and follow her own generous impulses to her family, to friends, to servants, and to the needy of Hartford. Each Christmas, she prepared and distributed 110 food baskets, and she wondered sometimes how long she could continue to do so. “How strange it will seem,” Livy wrote, “to have unlimited means, to be able to do whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without counting the cost.”
Just two years earlier, Twain had been “frightened at the proportions of my prosperity.” Now, after investing so heavily in the typesetting machine, he needed money but was too distracted by business to write the books that could have been his bread and butter. He was working on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in early 1886, but by November he hadn’t made the progress he had hoped to make. “Only two or three chapters have been written, thus far,” he told a friend. “I expect to write three chapters a year for thirty years; then the book will be done.”
Their vacation that year was not to Europe, but to Iowa. They went to Keokuk to see Twain’s mother, who was living with Orion and his wife. Twain was aware that he was now on the other side of fifty and that less than a year before, he had been rich—really rich. But he sensed that unless the profits he envisioned from the typesetting machine were in fact realized, they might live out the rest of their days in poverty, albeit of the genteel variety. Despite early successes with Huckleberry Finn and Grant’s memoir, there was no guarantee that these profitable books would be followed by others of comparable commercial appeal. The pressure was on, and Twain was growing impatient with Paige and his endless dithering.
Twain, meanwhile, redoubled his efforts to raise additional capital. He contacted the big-hearted John Percival Jones, invited him to Hartford, and entertained him at the mansion. He told Jones that from American newspapers alone the Paige Compositor would earn $35 million a year, and another $20 million from Europe. Then he took Jones to see a demonstration of the machine. But when they arrived at the Pratt & Whitney factory, there was a hitch. A day or two before their visit, Paige had decided to add a feature—an “air blaster”—so the machine Jones had come to see firsthand had been disassembled. Underwhelmed, Jones left.
The air blaster—whatever it did—was considered an improvement. A machine that could also justify lines was not only improved, it was perfected—and Paige was nothing if not a perfectionist. Paige again talked his benefactor into the pursuit of perfection. “What a talker he is!” Twain said. “When he is present, I always believe him; I can’t help it.” So it was back to the drawing board yet again.
Then, finally, just after New Year’s there was a break. Twain, four other men, and the inventor gathered at the Pratt & Whitney factory for a demonstration of the machine in its latest iteration. Afterward, Twain wrote in his notebook:
EUREKA!
Saturday, January 5, 1889—12:20 p.m. At this moment I have seen a line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! This is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done.
Then he shared the glad tidings. “This is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived by man,” he told a London publisher. “And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of massive steel, and will last a century.” The “death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world was signed at 12:20 this afternoon.” Twain was no less enthusiastic in telling Orion the news:
All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing machines, Babbage calculators, Jacquard looms, perfecting presses, all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and far into the land of human inventions.
Or so it seemed.
16
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“Our Prosperity Became Embarrassing”
There were other projects on Twain’s agenda during this period besides the Paige Compositor, of course. On the publishing front, the week after Huckleberry Finn sold out and Grant’s widow received her royalty checks, Twain dispatched Charley Webster to Rome. There Webster was to go over details of the firm’s next big book deal. This was to be an authorized biography of Pope Leo XIII, which was already being written by Father Bernard O’Reilly, the author of, among other books, The Mirror of True Womanhood.
The rights to the pope’s book were apparently owned by Charles Dana of the New York Sun. Twain sent Webster to offer Dana $100,000 to buy the rights. Evidently, Dana took the money, because, in 1886, Twain’s company signed a contract with Vatican officials and took over the project. Webster’s assignment in Rome was to make sure all parties to the new contract fully understood its terms. Minor details still had to be worked out, like how much access the author and publisher would have to the Holy Father, and what degree of control his Holiness would have over the book.
Twain couldn’t have been more excited. The target market was immense, and the book’s sales would make those of Grant’s memoir seem paltry and insignificant. When he discussed the book with Howells, Twain spoke
in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe, and [Twain’s] book agents would carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved.
Webster was to enjoy a private audience with the pope, and Twain was determined to send a suitable present for the Holy Father. Twain envisioned a special edition of Grant’s memoir, with a calfskin binding and solid gold lettering, designed and engraved by Tiffany. The gold alone, Twain told Webster, would weigh “a couple of pounds, perhaps, & cost $500.” He was willing to spend up to $12,000 on this special edition of the book, for the publicity value would be tremendous. It would be on display in Tiffany’s window, and “all New York & all strangers visiting New York would flock to see it.” Newspapers would publish pictures of the book, “& descriptions of it would appear in all languages & in all the newspapers in the world—& Webster & Co. would score another point in the way of originality & enterprise.”
To the letter in which Twain presented these ideas, he affixed a PS. The gold, he figured,
“would cost nearer $3,000, instead of $500. That is all the better. And so I still think the idea is sound. Can’t get so much advertising so cheaply in any other way.”
But the gold-plated edition of the Memoirs proved too costly or otherwise impractical, and Webster sailed for Europe bearing a more modest version of the Grant book. Even so, Webster’s visit to Rome did not lack for grandeur. In July 1886, he was taken to the Vatican in a carriage, with a plumed footman at his service. There, gazing on the white-haired man on a gilt throne, Webster discussed the book with the pope. The pope proved surprisingly well informed about the American book business. He knew how many copies of Grant’s memoir had been sold, for example, and seemed impressed when told that his own life story was guaranteed to sell at least 100,000 copies. Whatever other matters they discussed aren’t known, but everyone seemed delighted with how well the meeting went. “You did well to go to Rome, & you did wisely to spend money freely,” Twain told Webster.
Livy was happy for Webster but envious too. “Ah,” she said, “why didn’t we go, too?”
THE POPE GOT his copy of Grant’s memoir, and Webster, though not a Catholic himself, received a papal knighthood. As a “proof of Pontifical consideration,” he was made a Knight of the Order of Pius. Deeply moved, Webster ordered (from France) a Knight of Pius uniform. This, according to the bill of sale, consisted of a
coat of bleu stuff lined of silk with revolts & neck of scarlat stuff embroidered with fine gold, fine gilded buttons with the coat of arms of the Pope. Pants of fine white cashemir with bands of fine gold. Epaulettes of fine gold in granes [sic] with a star embroidered with silver. Sword-holder of white stuff, little sword with gilded hilt with mother of pearl, dragon of fine gold, pointed hat embroidered with gold & little flakes of cocarde of the Pope. Rosette & mostrine included for the black dress.
It was, in other words, just the thing for an American book publisher to wear to the office. Maybe not on casual Friday, but certainly every other day of the week. Webster’s son remembered seeing his father wear the uniform once or twice in Fredonia, where the local newspaper took to calling him Sir Charles Webster. “We were very short of foreign titles in Fredonia,” he explained. In Fredonia, he said, the druggist’s son was always called “Doc.”
Twain was only a little put off by Webster’s high honor. If the pope made Webster a knight, Twain said, he ought to have made him an archangel. He could get on well with people from almost all stations in life, but Twain wasn’t especially interested in meeting a pope. He would prefer “to swap courtesies with the cardinals and archbishops,” who “are nearer my size.”
Of course, Twain did not come away from Webster’s papal audience exactly empty-handed. Webster gave his boss’s family a rosary blessed by the pope. Neither Twain nor Livy nor their daughters were Catholics, but they were thrilled with the present. The pope’s rosary created such a “stir in this household as was before utterly unimaginable,” Twain wrote to Webster’s wife. “I would not take a thousand dollars for it—& I guess your aunt Livy’s price would run higher still. We have three excellent girls in the house, & I believe they value more the telling their beads on that rosary than they would the handling [of] government bonds that fell in their laps as a free gift.”
Livy so cherished the rosary that she expressed a desire “to send some money to Father O’Reilly to buy three more with, & see if [Charley] can’t persuade him to get the Holy Father to bless them. If Charley thinks it would be an indelicate or improper thing to ask, he mustn’t think about it any further; but otherwise Livy would very much like it.” She wanted to present them to three of the family’s Irish servants.
WHILE ALL THESE FORMALITIES were playing out, O’Reilly finished the manuscript, and Twain oversaw design of the brochure for sales agents to distribute on their rounds. This, the brochure proclaimed, was “The Greatest Book of the Age,” issued in six languages, with the price kept low enough that every household could afford its own copy. Everything was falling into place. Aided by the sales brochure, the book was “going to go, sure.”
Except it didn’t go. Published in 1887, The Life of Pope Leo XIII fell far short of the promised 100,000 copies. Howells, who had been nearly as charged up as Twain by the book’s prospects, realized the flaw in their calculations. “We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to read the life of the Pope,” even though it was “issued to the world with every sanction of the Vatican.”
It was all a little like the baby-bed clamp. Yes, there were multitudes of people who had babies—millions of them—but that didn’t mean they all wanted to buy a baby-bed clamp. Yes, there were Catholics all over the world, but that didn’t mean all of them wanted to read, much less buy, this book. The intended purchaser, Paine wrote, “had decided that the Pope’s Life was not necessary to his salvation or even to his entertainment.”
There was another problem that Twain and Howells never seemed to notice. Leo XIII had been pope for only nine years when Webster & Company published his autobiography. His papacy was just getting started; it did not end until his death in 1903. Leo XIII was the oldest pope and ultimately had the third-longest pontificate. People might have wanted to read about his papacy once there had been more of it, but at this early stage there wasn’t much of a story to tell. Later on, there would be. Even non-Catholics might like to read about how he was the first pope to allow himself to be filmed by a motion picture camera. (Afterward, he blessed the camera.)
The book’s failure hit Twain hard. This was almost incomprehensible to him. His “sanguine soul was utterly confounded,” Howells recalled, “and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so exuberantly jubilant.”
AT THE SAME TIME that Webster & Company was struggling with the pope’s biography, its other sure-fire hit was the life story of another major religious figure of the age. This was Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most famous, most beloved, and most controversial Americans of his time. The pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church, Beecher associated himself with the most advanced enthusiasms of the century: abolition, female suffrage, Darwinian evolution, and phrenology, which purported to discern a person’s psychological makeup from the bumps on the subject’s head. Beecher was also an impassioned advocate of welcoming Chinese immigrants. He said they could do “what we call menial work.”
Twain’s and Beecher’s paths had crossed—sort of—with the Quaker City cruise. Beecher was to be the most illustrious passenger. His name was used as advertising to attract other pilgrims. When he decided not to go on the cruise, forty customers also dropped out. Beecher was also the brother of Twain’s neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe and a frequent visitor to Hartford. In early 1887, when Beecher pondered writing his life story, he thought Webster & Company should publish it. “I do not love Beecher any more than you do,” Webster told Twain, “but I love his money just as well, and I am certain that book would sell.”
There were good reasons for this optimism. Not only was Beecher a household name, he’d become one, in part, because he had been the defendant in one of the most sensational courtroom dramas of the decade, if not the century. In 1875, while using his pulpit to preach against Free Love, he was practicing it in private, with a parishioner. A few years earlier, a woman in his congregation told her husband she had been carrying on an affair with Beecher. The cuckolded husband then told Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in turn passed along this juicy bit of gossip to Victoria Woodhull, the outspoken stockbroker, spiritualist, and 1872 presidential candidate on the Equal Rights Party ticket. Woodhull published an account of the affair in her weekly newspaper.
Beecher’s indignant response was to call on the police to arrest Woodhull on obscenity charges, which they did. Plymouth Church excommunicated Beecher’s mistress’s husband, who then sued Beecher for alienation of affection. The case went to trial. Twain and Jo
seph Twichell, his Hartford pastor, were among the spectators in the courtroom. After six days of deliberation, the trial ended with a hung jury. Beecher asked the Congregational church to conduct its own investigation, which it did—and exonerated him. (Rumors of similar infidelities dogged Beecher’s entire career. “Beecher,” it was said, “preaches to seven or eight of his mistresses every Sunday evening.”)
Twain saw a gold mine in Beecher’s story, and in January 1887 signed him to a book deal with a $5,000 advance. Within a month of the signing, Twain said his valuation of the book had gone up already, presumably based on what he had since seen of Beecher’s work in progress. “If he writes the book in that way, & heaves in just enough piousness,” Twain told Webster, the profits would hit $350,000. Twain later upped that figure to $750,000—or, in today’s currency, roughly $18 million.
But things never seemed to work out quite as Twain planned, did they? On March 8, 1887, just weeks after the contract was signed, Beecher died, not of shame, apparently, but from a stroke. Loss of the $5,000 advance was easily absorbed. But in preparing for publication of the autobiography, Webster & Company had begun to purchase paper and other materials. By the time of Beecher’s death, the firm had already spent $100,000 on those supplies.
How Not to Get Rich Page 11