Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Roy Blount

  “They were not. They were mixed.”

  “Oh, that’s right — I understand you shredded them all yourself.”

  Do I need this? I do not. Is this sublime? It is not. Does this stir up something new from ancient depths; does this bid fair to ricochet from age to age to age? Yes, and Kleenex is the Golden Fleece.

  None of the so-called established writers at this chickadee-infested retreat seem to have read anyone except whoever of their number has just left the room, which gives those remaining an opportunity to remark that the departed one has evinced, in his latest overpraised offering, a failure of nerve.

  As you know, I refuse to show my manuscript to anyone who is incapable of reading something larger than himself. Accordingly, I have not shown it to anyone here. Today I had a “conference” with my “adviser,” none other than Edward Noone, the author of Hurled. “Do you have anything to show me?” he asked.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  That seemed to throw him. A silent moment passed. “So, uh, who do you read — who’re you influenced by?” he inquired, assuming no doubt that the first words out of my mouth would be “Well, aside from you, of course …”

  “Scott,” I said.

  He brightened. “Oh, you know Scott Spencer?”

  “Sir Walter,” I snapped.

  He looked startled.

  “And, now that you mention it, Edmund.”

  No, not startled. He looked afraid. As if he had asked whether I had any pets, and I had handed him Bucephalus, Leviathan, a breathing Sphinx. Grandeur is not a notion to these people. They shrink — which had seemed impossible — at the merest whiff of esemplastic sweep.

  Another silent moment. “I believe,” I said, “that you have nothing to show me.” And then I left him with his word processor, which I hear he gnaws.

  “Nice young women who share my interests” you desired me to meet. The only female I have seen here who is not hoping, by all appearances, that her tube-top will snag her some pull with a prizewinning poetaster or at least with a tall editor of a small magazine is one Ariel Garms — who yesterday, with one swing of her still inchoate yet rather pursy autobiography, squashed the septum of an already nasal specialist in acquisitional lunching who was offering her counsel on publishers’ advances. She claimed he made one. Perhaps you think me bashful to a fault. Yet and still (to employ the favorite locution of Reid Whiteblood, the tenured South Carolinian ironist who chairs our daily neo-ambiguity sessions), I steer clear.

  Also in attendance here: a married couple who have been driving around the nation eating chocolate chip cookies du pays, taking copious notes, and working up a guidebook they plan to turn into a musical about a couple falling in love while searching America for the perfect cookie. (Their working title: “Looky!”) They seek pointers, never having taken on anything of this magnitude before.

  Chocolate chip cookies!

  To think that I am wasting my substance in a place where I must acknowledge, even to myself, that there exist people into whose minds even an inkling of such a subliterate project could filter!

  Ah. Ah. I hear your puncturing voice. Yes. Yes. In the absence of Mallomars, I do eat chocolate chip cookies, for creative energy. And so would have Victor Hugo, had there been chocolate chip cookies in his time. But I would not write about chocolate chip cookies. Any more than I would write about the several distinct rashes I have acquired during my idyll on this green mountain, from various poisonous plants and an institutional alfresco diet. The people here would, though. I do not doubt for one instant that people here are at this very moment pounding out leadenly minimalistic short-story collections based on remarks and glances passed during the “buzz session” following this afternoon’s advisory on garnering invitations to conduct workshops on “Writing the Work in Progress” when a proposal for a work in progress is all that one has yet produced.

  Fwok. Fwok. A tennis tournament is slated for this weekend. Top-seeded is a former investigative reporter from Sacramento who is said to be nearly finished with a rush-job novel about a President and a Vice-President who are having an affair that Muammar el-Qaddafi cottons onto. A sure guide: the trashier an author’s themes, the more heavily muscled his right forearm.

  A lecture is scheduled for tomorrow evening. “How to Break Through.” By an émigré Australian, so possessed of divine afflatus that (according to a notice stapled to a tree that leans dangerously over the path to the lecture hall and is swarming with ants) he “reviews for many periodicals.” His name is Osip. I believe assumed.

  Tomorrow there will be a picnic on the raft in the middle of Lake Sotweed. One is expected, it would appear, to paddle out there on one’s own steam, in one’s trunks. Did Milton swim?

  Pfaugh!

  This afternoon I was called “unprofessional” by an aspiring children’s playwright.

  So you have had your desire. A Paper Mountain camper am I, hey nonny nonny. Today I saw an immense snake. “Ah,” I apostrophized the serpent, from a hastily quadrupled distance, “you must know my mother, Eve. Give her my best, when you see her next over some new woe-fraught apple she has in mind forcing between the teeth of her only son, whose narrative gift he must somehow shield and nurture all on his own against cheeseheads, pharisees, and probably-anopheles mosquitoes because she thinks it is good for him.”

  Now I go to hear an agent read.

  Your abandoned issue,

  Gavin

  Who’s the Funniest American Writer?

  MARK TWAIN.

  Who’s the most essential?

  Same answer.

  What other nation can make that claim?

  Now: What are the three great American things?

  Jazz, the Bill of Rights, and Mark Twain.

  Where did they all come from?

  The South.

  That’s right. Jazz came together in New Orleans; the Bill of Rights came from the Virginia Declaration of Rights; and Samuel Clemens was conceived in Tennessee of Kentucky parents, was born in Missouri and reared there among slaves and hardscrabble whites on the banks of the Mississippi River, and got his pen name from his days as a pilot on that river. He fought, ingloriously, for the Confederacy, which would have been a lot better off had it followed his example and demilitarized after two weeks.

  But Mark Twain scarcely set foot in Dixie for the last two-thirds of his life. (Jazz also moved up the river, and the Bill of Rights has never been entirely at home in the South.) In his prime as author and paterfamilias he resided at 351 Farmington Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut. Sixty thousand pilgrims visit his house every year. In its parking lot recently sat a Cadillac from Florida whose bumper sticker read:

  GOD SAID IT

  I BELIEVE IT

  THAT SETTLES IT

  Mark Twain didn’t settle that easily. You don’t know about Mark Twain without you have read a book by the name of Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, by Justin Kaplan, of Cambridge, Mass. According to that book neither of them, Clemens or Twain, knew whether he was coming or going half the time.

  Let’s say Jehovah had dropped into Hartford, suddenly filled Mark Twain’s billiard room one afternoon and said:

  sam, What you Ought To Do Is Get On Back Down South, Amidst All That Backwoods And Afro-American Hellaciousness And Juice That Is your True Soul. Maybe Build you A Big Place In Memphis And Invent Rock and Roll Early.

  I doubt Mark Twain would have heeded. By the time he moved to Hartford, he was too much into big commerce, New England respectability, and machinery. William Dean Howells, the Boston literary Brahmin out of Columbus, Ohio, said Mark Twain “was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew.”

  And Mark Twain didn’t trust God. Any further than he could throw Him. Another thing you ought to read before you visit Mark Twain’s house is a poem by Robert Penn Warren (who himself has migrated from Kentucky to Vermont). This poem, “Last Laugh,” tells how eleven-year-old Sam Clemens watched through a keyhole as his father, always distant, was cut open and partly
dissected by way of postmortem. (Incidentally, when Richard Pryor, the funniest living American, was a boy he watched through a keyhole as his mother turned tricks.) And how Sam went on to become almost hysterically, though straight-facedly, funny, professionally. And how he chaffed his beloved wife, Livy, out of her faith, then saw her die without its consolations, “And was left alone with his joke, God dead, till he died.”

  But what you mostly ought to read is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Ernest Hemingway said was the beginning of American fiction, and several hundred thousand other words of Mark Twain’s stuff, which is dark inside but makes you smile profoundly.

  The same may be said of his High Victorian Gothic dream house. Nineteen mostly crepuscular but spirited rooms, kaleidoscopically decorated by Louis Tiffany. And a ground-floor gallery where I viewed, among other mementos, a slate on which Twain would jot notes to himself. The slate, I am pleased to report, was not left clean. Few of the overlapping scribbles are decipherable, but I did make out two sensible reminders:

  Leave the cat here.

  Take the whiskey along.

  Insofar as Clemens/Twain ever settled, he did it in this house — from 1874, when it was built at his behest, to 1891, when business, fiascoes compelled him to close it and go lecturing and writing abroad for big money. During these seventeen years he wrote most of his best books, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Life on the Mississippi, and he enjoyed his (doomed) family life to its fullest.

  I envy him his billiard room, where Mark Twain repaired to drink, smoke cigars, and curse. He also wrote in that room, but not much, because he shot a lot of billiards, entertained a plenitude of literati and Union generals, and pursued bad business deals.

  It is clear why the house suited him: it’s a house with a lot of nerve, its exterior made of red, black, and vermilion brick, with deep-red wood trim and a jauntily gabled, tricolor, diamond-patterned roof. But Hartford? This is a question that interests me particularly, as I am myself a writer from the South who has wound up in New England, an area that I find — generally speaking — more tasteful than Georgia but less tasty. At least I live in the woods of New England. Hartford?

  Well, you may write like an angel in the South, but unless you can get those northern publishing gears to turn for you, you are not an American writer. Hartford was a big publishing city in Mark Twain’s day, and less stuffy than Boston, the capital of American lit — handy enough to Boston, however, that Twain could develop a close friendship with Howells, who reviewed him glowingly and published him prestigiously in the Atlantic, which, as Twain put it, “don’t require a ‘humorist’ to paint himself striped and stand on his head every fifteen minutes.”

  For reasons of both the wallet and the spirit, Mark Twain always wanted to write for as many people as possible. (Toward the end of his life, in fact, he set aside an antilynching book so as not to alienate his southern readers.) He first visited Hartford in 1868 to meet the publisher of his first full-scale book, The Innocents Abroad, which made him rich and famous. He saw elegant lawns and, for the first time, huckleberries. “I never saw any place,” he wrote, “where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here.”

  Hartford also boasted a well-to-do literary community called Nook Farm, where Mark Twain’s mansion was erected a stone’s throw from that of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Later on Harriet Beecher Stowe became a neighbor most notable for vigorous senility, which moved her, as Twain put it, to “slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes.” But she represented literary respectability and social prominence, partly because her brother was the eminent minister Henry Ward Beecher, who, as a matter of fact, was tried in court for adultery with a parishioner the year after Twain’s Hartford house was built (the case ended in a hung jury).

  Had Twain encountered the Reverend Beecher’s shame or Mrs. Stowe’s whoops as a young man in the South or the West he would surely have relished them, worked them into yarns. But in Hartford, at early middle age, he found them unsettling. He had been roving, escaping various things, since his boyhood. Like Huck Finn he felt trapped by civilizing influences, but he also sought them out, because (also like Huck Finn to some extent) he felt a growing aversion to redneckery. “Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckleheadedness — and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at nineteen and twenty; and that is what the average Southerner is at sixty today,” he wrote in 1876.

  But to get away from all that takes more than a geographical move. As Mark Twain aged in New England, his image of the people he sprang from became his image of people in general, not to mention himself. In 1882 he wrote Howells: “Oh, hell, there is no hope for a person who is built like me; — because there is no cure, no cure. If I could only know when I have committed a crime: then I could conceal it & not go stupidly dribbling it out, circumstance by circumstance, into the ears of a person who will give no sign till the confession is complete; & then the sudden damnation drops on a body like the released pile-driver, & he finds himself in the earth down to his chin. When he merely supposed he was being entertaining.”

  He was, of course, being entertaining. He was ripping and snorting, and not just joyfully. Wherever he lighted he could not get disentangled from his own lacerating fruitful complex of self-innocence and remorse. Much as he doted on them, his daughters — when he learned this he felt terrible guilt — were frightened by his bellowing. One genteel Hartford Sabbath morning he flung open his bathroom window and hurled shirts and sulphurous language from it, because of a button problem.

  There were high times in Hartford, though. Once, the Thomas Bailey Aldriches and other proper literary Bostonians visited. They were met by Mark Twain’s carriage, driven by a liveried coachman, with Mark Twain’s butler riding footman. Dinner was luxurious. The next morning Mark Twain knocked on the Aldriches’ door and stiffly accused them of disturbing the household with their bedroom noises. Only at the breakfast table did the mortified couple learn that their host was pulling their legs. In the evening after dinner he astonished the visiting gentry in another way by singing, in a pleasant but eerie voice, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Go Down, Moses.” Then, as Justin Kaplan describes it, he “changed from his evening slippers into something considerably odder for Hartford, white cowskin moccasins with the hair on the outside. And, in a crowning act of confident alienation from his guests, he twisted his body into the likeness of a crippled uncle or a Negro at a hoe-down and danced strange dances for them. Howells always remembered … the joy and disoriented surprise of the guests.”

  That must have made Mark Twain feel oriented for a while. But he craved a more lasting fix. Unfortunately for him, one of Hartford’s industries was the Colt arms factory. That was where Hank Morgan, hero of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, worked; it was from the Colt plant that Morgan was transported to Camelot, where his mechanical know-how awed and eventually alienated ignorant, intolerant sixth-century England. Mark Twain, whose first profession had been manual typesetting, was Connecticut Yankee enough to love machines, but he loved them in what seems to me a southern way: as if they were flesh and blood and also metaphysical. He desired an anthropomorphic machine without human flaw.

  At the Colt factory he saw an early working model of the Paige typesetting machine. Into the development of this wondrous device Mark Twain plunged years of his time and almost two hundred thousand dollars of his and wife Livy’s fortunes. “In two or three weeks,” he wrote his brother, “we shall work the stiffness out of her joints and have her performing as smoothly and softly as human muscles.” But the machine — which he estimated would earn him fifty-five million dollars a year — was always too high-strung to be practical. It resides now in the basement gallery of his house. Its failure was the main reason Mark Twain had to move.

  His f
avorite daughter, Susy, stayed behind in Hartford — staying with friends but regularly visiting Mark Twain’s now deserted house — as the rest of the family roamed. While they were gone she contracted meningitis, began going blind, took up some paper in Mark Twain’s house (she showed writing promise herself), and scrawled deliriously: “Mr. Clemens, Mr. Zola, Mr. Harte, I see that even darkness can be great. To me darkness must remain from everlasting to everlasting.” She died before the family could get back home. They were on their way to solvency by then, but they could never stand to live in the house again.

  In 1903 it was sold to the Richard Bissell family.* It later housed a boys’ school, then a library. Now it’s a shrine. On my recent tour of the house, we were admonished not to touch anything, but I did sneak one turn of a doorknob. George Griffin, Mark Twain’s butler, is described by Kaplan as a gambler and a moneylender to Hartford’s black community. Our guide, Carolyn Volpe, said it was Griffin’s duty, when there were guests for dinner, to sit behind a screen in the dining room, awaiting discreet commands from Livy; but he would betray his presence by beginning to laugh, ahead of the punch line, at Mark Twain’s stories, which he had heard before. Livy would fire him for these lapses, and Mark Twain would hire him back.

  Our guide pointed out the door to Griffin’s room upstairs. It hadn’t been restored, she said. “We don’t know what it looked like, because he was the only one who went in there.”

  Didn’t Marse Mark ever pop in? Maybe the two of them would get together in there and sing a spiritual, share a pipe, or even josh about how they ought to take a raft down the Mississippi as Huck and the slave Jim did — Huck having decided, against all the strictures of civilized religion as he knew it, to commit the great crime of Mark Twain’s fiction: helping a sold man get free.

  I wanted to know what it was like in there. I stuck my head in, heard a hum, saw metal ducts. Modern-day heating. A machine.

  *Richard Bissell, Jr., the CIA official who authored the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was born in Mark Twain’s house. Richard P. Bissell, who wrote funny novels about the Mississippi (and in fact was the first author licensed as a pilot on that river since Mark Twain), was born in Dubuque. Go figure.