Twain added fifteen dollars a week and the cost of lodging to Stoddard’s income by making him his personal secretary during his lecture tour and their stay at the Langham Hotel in London. A few years later he told Howells, who had published Stoddard in the Atlantic, that he had hired him as a secretary to keep a scrapbook of the daily newspaper reports of the Tichborne Claimant trial going on at that time, but his true reason for hiring Stoddard was so that he would “sit up nights with me & dissipate.”7 As Twain later commented, he was simply looking for a drinking partner in Charlie, whose friendship with Twain ultimately prompted him to decline payment for his secretarial work. During the lectures in December, Stoddard accompanied Twain to the theater, sat in the empty royal box during the lecture, and accompanied him and his manager, George Dolby, back to the hotel for late-night drinking.
“How the hours flew by,” Stoddard recalled years later, “marked by the bell clock of the little church over the way! . . . We sat by the sea-coal fire and smoked numberless peace-pipes, and told droll stories, and took solid comfort in our absolute seclusion.” Since Dolby probably wasn’t always present during their drinking sessions, we might wonder whether Stoddard, when intoxicated, didn’t broach an intimacy with his friend, perhaps confessing or hinting at his sexual attraction to men. Although Twain may have suspected that Stoddard was a homosexual, he was probably tolerant, perhaps because he, too, may have had a personal history of unconventional sexual behavior, albeit heterosexual, in Nevada and Hawaii. He probably understood that his somewhat effeminate friend was different but that this difference did not make him morally corrupt. Despite his good times with Stoddard, he missed Livy dearly and because of it would cut short his lectures in Scotland and Ireland after Christmas. “Poor, sweet, pure-hearted, good-intentioned, impotent Stoddard,” Twain called him in a letter to Howells a few years later when they were trying to get him a consulship through the influence of President Rutherford B. Hayes, Howells’s cousin by marriage.8 It is doubtful that Howells ever suspected Stoddard’s homosexuality; otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have given South-Sea Idylls such a favorable review.
Twain went home to America for the third time in two years, apparently empty-handed. Or at least that’s what he may have thought at the time. But he did return for the publication of The Gilded Age, coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner (discussed in the following chapter). More important with regard to the long gestation of Huckleberry Finn, however, was the fact that he also returned with Stoddard’s scrapbook filled with the newspapers’ daily descriptions of the Tichborne Claimant trial. This trial had fascinated him at least partly because of his distant cousin Jesse Leathers’ letters over the years urging him to finance an investigation into the Lampton family’s claim to the earldom of Durham. The Tichborne case concerned the claim of an Australian butcher who insisted that he was Roger Tichborne, believed to have been lost at sea in 1854. When the claimant arrived in London in 1866 to press his case, the lost boy’s mother accepted his claim. When she died in 1872, he lost an ejection suit against his alleged nephew, the reigning baronet, and was subsequently tried and convicted of perjury and served the next ten years in prison. To this day, it has never been determined whether his claim was valid or not.9
Twain made brief reference to the case in chapter 15 of Following the Equator (1897), but the preposterous idea of asserting a claim to royalty manifested itself first and most magnificently in the Duke of Bridgewater in Huckleberry Finn. Twain, as noted, attended one session of the Tichborne perjury trial and long afterwards remembered seeing and perhaps conversing with the supposed “Sir Roger.” “He was in evening dress,” Twain recalled, “and I thought him a rather fine and stately creature. . . . It was ‘S’r Roger,’ always ‘S’r Roger,’ on all hands; no one withheld the title, all turned it from the tongue with unction, and as if it tasted good.”10 Nobody said, as the King does in chapter 19 of Huckleberry Finn, “Looky here, Bilgewater.” Twain’s uncompleted book about the English would have more than one afterlife.
25 Colonel Sellers
The Gilded Age, a satirical novel about government corruption in postwar America, appeared at the end of 1873, while Twain was still in England. He had written it with Charles Dudley Warner in five or six months earlier that year. It was a subscription book issued by the American Publishing Company (and by the Routledges in England), but, despite Twain’s name recognition, not to mention Warner’s reputation as a genteel humorist, it did not sell nearly so well as either Roughing It or The Innocents Abroad. (These sales may have had something to do with the fact that The Gilded Age was possibly the very first American novel to be issued by subscription.) The project had apparently been undertaken almost whimsically on a dare from the authors’ wives during a dinner party in Hartford, soon after Clemens returned from England in 1872.1
James Fenimore Cooper, not one of Twain’s favorite fiction writers, as we shall see, wrote Precaution (1820) on a similar dare from his wife as to whether he could write a better novel than Jane Austen. It was his first novel, and it was a failure, both artistically and commercially. He succeeded the next year with The Spy (1821), a forgotten classic about the American Revolution. Today, a visitor to Cooperstown, New York, where Cooper grew up, will find that the author has also been largely forgotten by the locals, who reinvented Cooperstown in the twentieth century as the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Indeed, the tide may have first turned against our greatest historical novelist with Twain’s 1895 essay (discussed in chapter 43) that became because of its hilarity one of his most anthologized works in the second half of the twentieth century. Practically all that remains of Cooper in Cooperstown is a lonely statue where his house once stood around the corner from the now bustling Hall of Fame. Today’s visitors seem never to notice the seated author of the Leatherstocking Tales.
Cooper has not been forgotten, of course, in the annals of American literary history, but Warner has, apart from his identification with Twain. If Twain’s contributions to American literature had ended with The Gilded Age, he would still be remembered but only as a minor travel writer and humorist. He was yet to make a full discovery of his Hannibal past and the river, whose culmination is not found so much in Tom Sawyer as it is in “Old Times on the Mississippi” and Huckleberry Finn. Neither Cooper nor Twain achieved their greatness by answering those dares from their wives, because in both cases the undertaking was a distraction from their identity-themes. For Cooper it was the Revolution, the sea, and the frontier. For Twain it was Hannibal and the river, where he met all “the damned human race” that he would ever need to know in order to write as he did.
To some extent, Twain’s half of The Gilded Age also came out of his past, mainly in the use of his father’s worthless land in Tennessee and his mother’s cousin, James Lampton, as Colonel Eschol Sellers (changed, after the real Eschol Sellers threatened to sue, to “Beriah Sellers” and in the subsequent play to “Mulberry Sellers”). Twain saw Lampton for the last time in a hotel room in St. Louis in 1885 while on a lecture tour with George Washington Cable. With Cable in the next room, Sam got his voluble cousin to hold forth. After Lampton’s departure, the New Orleans writer, who had recorded some of the visitor’s talk, stuck his head in the door and said, “That was Colonel Sellers.”2 Twain’s part of The Gilded Age also included his first substantial literary use of steam-boating and the Mississippi River. In chapter 3 he introduces Uncle Dan’l from his Florida days on Uncle John Quarles’s farm. In the novel, he is one of the slaves owned by the Squire or “Si” Hawkins family who regularly tells scary stories to the children, just as the real Uncle Dan’l had done for young Sam and his cousins. The story in the novel that frightens the Hawkins children is about “de Almighty,” which turns out to be a steamboat coming down the river in the black of night. In the following chapter, Twain even includes a fatal steamboat race, despite knowing (as he must have known) that such a race had likely been the root cause of the explosion of the Pennsylvania and the death of his
younger brother in 1858.
When the poet Masters criticized Twain for writing religious satires instead of political ones, he partially misjudged The Gilded Age, which targeted not only Congress and the Grant scandals but also the temporary insanity plea. The corrupt Senator Dilworthy is modeled on Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, whose indictment for bribery was the subject of newspaper conjecture at the time. The novel’s treatment of the insanity plea forms the basis of Laura Hawkins’s defense for killing the bigamist she had unknowingly married. Masters was closer to the truth when he called the novel “a surface examination of a diseased body politic.” Allusions to the shady dealings of the Grant administration, for example, were left somewhat oblique, presumably since Twain had already met the president and would in time profit from publishing the Civil War general’s memoirs. For the most part, the story’s thrust as a muckraking novel took a back seat to its political humor (which has not survived its age), but it went far enough to arouse the condemnation of several newspapers involved with the tawdry governmental politics of the day, including the influential Chicago Tribune.3
Aesthetically, the plot of the novel is rather chaotic and today obscure. Twain wrote the first eleven chapters, which tell the story of a patriarch in Tennessee very much resembling his father, all the way down to his running a village post office. His son Washington is based upon the dreamy Orion. The children include two youngsters, picked up along the way as the family migrates to Missouri and a river reminiscent of the Salt River (in the novel there is a scheme to secure federal funds to dredge the newly named Columbia River). One of the children is Laura, who eventually kills her husband with impunity, tries to lecture about it, and dies of a heart attack. The family is initially answering the call of Colonel Sellers, who eventually gets involved with Senator Dilworthy in schemes not only to reroute rivers and railroads but also to rededicate the worthless Tennessee land as a site for a trade school for ex-slaves. Warner took over at chapter 12 with a plot that involves a more traditional love affair between Philip Sterling and Ruth Bolton; it is never satisfactorily integrated with Twain’s story line. The rest of the novel was completed by each writer taking his turn in the development of this zigzag plot. Today, the novel is—after Twain’s book about Joan of Arc and perhaps The American Claimant (1892)—his least read work. Mostly, its title has survived to designate a greedy era in American history.
The Gilded Age was attacked in the press for being a lackluster novel that was promoted and sold by subscription advertisements even before the critical verdict could be heard. Several important magazines such as Scribner’s and Harper’s declined to review the book, and even the faithful Howells simply relegated it without comment to the “Other Publications” list in the Atlantic. Twain tried to use his influence with Whitelaw Reid, Horace Greeley’s successor at the helm of the New York Tribune, but Reid, who had earlier solicited Twain for articles for the Tribune, refused to allow Edward House to review the book, either out of an animosity for House or because House was a personal friend of Twain’s, or both. “Ask House to tell you about Whitelaw Reid,” Twain wrote his coauthor Warner in the spring of 1873 when the still- unpublished book was being heralded as a potential best seller. “He is a contemptible cur, & I want nothing more to do with him,” and Twain didn’t have much to do with Reid for almost thirty years. For his part, Warner would soon lose his faith in the quality of their joint work. “On second thought,” he told the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson only weeks after the book appeared, “it is not best to send you The Gilded Age. . . . I have already found out that it is not much of a novel.”4
As we have already seen and shall see again, Mark Twain never permanently lost faith in anything he wrote, and Warner’s frailty in such matters may have lost him thousands of dollars when the novel was turned into a successful play. It is clear that he and Twain early on realized the book’s possibilities as a play, most likely because of its ready topicality. They took out a dramatic copyright on the novel’s adaptation in the spring of 1873. But when Gilbert B. Densmore, an editor and drama critic of the Golden Era, dramatized the play for a San Francisco production, Twain immediately threatened suit and ultimately purchased Densmore’s play for two hundred dollars and the promise of two hundred dollars more if he used the material in his own dramatization. Because the Densmore play was based exclusively on Twain’s characters, Twain asked Warner to relinquish his dramatic rights. In his authorized biography, Paine made it a point to argue that Warner “very generously and promptly” conceded that the play version was the property of his coauthor. He added, however, “Various stories have been told of this matter, most of them untrue.”5
What Paine left out of his less than impartial picture of Warner’s stolid indifference to losing a significant amount of money he probably deserved was the answer to a letter Paine had received from Twichell about the matter. Paine may have hoped that Twain had at least offered his coauthor a nominal payment for relinquishing dramatic rights to their joint enterprise. For regardless of whether the play was based solely on Twain’s contribution, Twain would never have written the hit that became Colonel Sellers without having first coauthored The Gilded Age with Warner. On June 1, 1911, Twichell told Paine that there had been “some unpleasantness between them,” but whether it was about the royalties from the book or Twain’s claim for exclusive rights to the play is not known. This suggestion about “unpleasantness” may be supported by John Hooker, Twain’s Nook Farm landlord in Hartford, who told his brother Edward on January 8, 1875: “Clemens has made a real stroke with this drama—It is too bad Charles Warner was not with him in it.”6 Hooker’s expression of pity for Warner’s loss, along with the authorized biographer’s defensive posture on the matter, suggests that there was nevertheless some uncomfortable feeling between the coauthors. Perhaps Warner and Hawley’s earlier slight of Twain when he had become interested in buying into the Courant came into play. Whatever the case, Twain’s insistence on cutting out Warner, without so much as a token share of the play revenue, while voluntarily paying Densmore for the use of his text, shows him to have been a victim himself of the very Gilded Age that he and Warner had criticized in their novel. This goldrush mentality would culminate in Twain’s greatest folly—his monomaniacal investments in the Paige Compositor. In the meantime, as Colonel Sellers would say (in the play, not the novel), “There’s millions in it.”
The man who made the Colonel famous and the play almost as popular as the dramatic versions of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was John T. Raymond. Raymond had been in the Densmore production in San Francisco in the spring of 1874, and it can be said that his performance as Colonel Sellers was what sold the play. This fact did not entirely please Twain because he thought Raymond consistently failed to bring out the full humanity of the flesh-and-blood original, James Lampton, and had merely portrayed his delusional and thus humorous side. Besides being a little defensive about exploiting a relative loved by his mother, Twain may have simply resented the fact that Raymond was the key to the play’s commercial success. He even belittled his performance in one curtain speech. Yet as one contemporary remembered, there was an unequal division of labor in the play’s success:
Sellers gleams faintly on the printed page,
As drawn by Clemens in the “Gilded Age,”
But dominates, in Raymond, all the stage.
Long may we live to see before us stand
That humorous figure with uplifted hand!7
Raymond was already a popular actor, but this role made him nearly as famous (for a time, at least) as Joseph Jefferson became in his title role in Rip Van Winkle.
Colonel Sellers (touted as “Mark Twain’s Drama” in the printed program) officially opened at the Park Theater in New York City on September 16, 1874. Twain claimed to have completely rewritten Densmore’s dramatic adaptation “three separate & distinct times,” ultimately using fewer than twenty of his lines, but “so much of his plot” that
he doubled his payment to Densmore. This assertion is found in a response to a criticism of his dealings with Densmore that appeared in the New York Sun on November 2 and was reprinted, with a dismissive first paragraph, the following day in the Hartford Evening Post. Twain immediately drafted his response, but it was never mailed, possibly because he thought the Evening Post’s denial of the Sun account made his own denial unnecessary. The only public response which argued that Twain was the sole author of most of Colonel Sellers came from Raymond in the Sun of November 3, but then, the actor was already financially linked with the author, splitting the profits fifty-fifty.8 Without Densmore’s version, apparently lost, there is no way of knowing precisely how much Twain used of the other’s work. The fact is, however, that Mark Twain was never again successful as a playwright in spite of many endeavors in that direction. But this play was an immediate success that ran consistently for 119 nights, closing on January 9, 1875. Because of its successful opening season (not counting the performances in San Francisco and Rochester in the spring and summer of 1874), it was often revived and played six-week seasons between 1876 and 1888, ending only (and significantly) with Raymond’s death.9
Reading the play today and finding genuine humor in it is difficult. Without Raymond, it is like the novel, a melodrama with a few satiric asides. American drama, of course, did not find its spark until the twentieth century. Today even the dramatic versions of “Rip Van Winkle” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though superior to Colonel Sellers, have mostly lost their appeal (especially the one based on Stowe’s classic for its distortion of the character Uncle Tom). The character of Sellers is immediately introduced with an imbedded off-color joke about his chasing “after every ‘Ignus Fatous’ that comes along.” The Great Illusionist responds with vaudevillian angst that that is “no way to talk to me, you ought to know better. I’m too old a man. . . . I’ll swear I’ve never heard the woman’s name before.”10 There is a faint hint in the play that the Colonel is actually Laura’s father, suggesting the illicit sexual relations that form the basis of the plot of Pudd’nhead Wilson, but nothing ever comes of it. The only slave with a speaking part is Uncle Daniel, who is present for the steamboat race and collision. Nine years of Sellers’s foolish speculation in everything from mules to a perpetual motion machine have passed by the opening of act II. The only constant that looms over the Washington Hawkins family is the Tennessee land, which is never sold.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 24