Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  27 The Riley Book

  Considered as adult literature, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is possibly the most overrated work in American literature. If Mark Twain had never written Huckleberry Finn, it would today be regarded as simply one of the era’s great paeans to the American boy, in the tradition of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s forgotten classic (The Story of a Bad Boy) “about the pleasant reprobate” who “in spite of the natural outlawry of boyhood,” as Howells put it, “was more or less part of a settled order of things.” Instead, paired with the “sequel” that became an American classic, it has been either overexposed or overpraised in the public mind. Tom Sawyer was the novel that ultimately fulfilled the contract with the American Publishing Company for the diamond mine book that had sent the fated John Henry Riley to Africa before his untimely death.1 Like “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” it has a stranger—too well dressed on a weekday for St. Petersburg, as the omniscient narrator observes. But this youthful rival is soon dispatched by Tom and thus dismissed as nothing more than an extra in the plot, whereas the other outsmarts Jim Smiley and becomes the prototype for Twain’s other, more mysterious strangers. Tom Sawyer’s title and chief features are even better known to the average reader than those of its so-called sequel. Its memorable fence whitewashing scene, for example, is as famous as the plight of the henpecked husband who takes a twenty-year nap in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” Neither story was entirely original with its author. Tom Sawyer combines the detective story with the boy’s tale, while the idea of “Rip Van Winkle” was borrowed from a German folktale. At least Irving’s story contains something resembling a literary theme—the idea that while things change, they also stay the same. When Rip wakes up, he is no longer a subject under George the Third but a citizen under George Washington. He merely exchanges a termagant wife for a termagant daughter. Twain’s novel is also a dream—the author’s reminiscence of childhood—but where is its theme, other than the sentimental one that childhood is a time of innocence and worthy of celebration? Its distinguished achievement clearly lies in the genre of children’s literature, and it should not be judged by the standards of adult fiction.2

  Yet it was also a major contribution to the local-color movement that had arisen after the Civil War opened Americans’ eyes to geographical areas beyond what had been their hundred- or two-hundred-mile travel radius from home. As Walt Whitman wrote of his soldier brother George: “He has marched across eighteen states, traversing some of them across and back again in all directions. He has journeyed as a soldier since he first started from this city [Brooklyn], over twenty thousand miles; and has fought under Burnside, McClellan, McDowell, Meade, Pope, Hooker, Sherman and Grant.”3 Moreover, Americans during this postwar period, when the South was becoming increasingly resentful of the continued presence of federal troops, welcomed this walk down memory lane. For its part, the North was becoming weary of the Negro and his cause (gained in war and lost in peace, as Frederick Douglass sadly concluded in 1894) and so was now losing interest in its continued punishment of the South.4 It, too, yearned for the simplicities of childhood.

  One of the reasons for the misclassification of Tom Sawyer is that Mark Twain himself could not decide whether he was writing a children’s book or one for adults. In his author’s preface, he says: “Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women.” Earlier, while finishing the book, he told his friend Howells, “It is not a boy’s book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.” Yet in another letter to the editor, after Howells had worked over the manuscript for him, Twain stated that the book was “now professedly & confessedly a boy’s and girl’s book.” He added significantly that this designation bothered him “some nights, but it never did until I had ceased to regard the volume as being for adults.”5 Clearly, he could not hold up his head high enough when under the impression that he was writing for children. Once it was admitted, the task was easier to live with. He simply hoped, as he confessed in this preface, that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer would not be “shunned” by adults.

  The embryo for the novel, in the opinion of Bernard DeVoto and others, is a sketch labeled by Twain’s literary executor as the “Boy’s Manuscript,” penned in late 1868 (not 1870, as guessed by Paine). As John Gerber observes, Twain wisely abandoned it because—probably like “An Appeal in Behalf of Extending the Suffrage to Boys”—it was too much of a burlesque to succeed.6 Yet the idea of the boy stayed with him, fortunately until its culmination in Huckleberry Finn, where he would confront rather than extol what he had believed as a boy. In Tom Sawyer, where slavery is practically never mentioned, he had stayed within the boy’s sanctuary of naiveté and innocence. Tom, the boy Sam had been in Hannibal, becomes in the “sequel” to his story the adult his creator became in Hannibal before the war, the one who voted against Lincoln in the 1860 election. Indeed, Tom is almost wholesomely good in his own book, but a hypocrite in Huck’s, withholding the crucial information that Jim is already free. Twain states in the preface to Tom Sawyer that the adventures recorded in the novel were not only his own but those of his schoolmates as well. We know that his model for Huck Finn was Tom Blankenship, but in many ways the model wasn’t this member of the Hannibal underclass but the “boy,” or person, Twain hoped he had become by the time he wrote Huckleberry Finn: one who followed his conscience in a corrupt society. The other boy—Tom Sawyer—was in fact “drawn from life” in the sense that he was a stand-in for the consensus in this slaveholding village, a consensus that the young Sam Clemens had innocently subscribed to at the time.

  Twain may have written as many as a hundred pages of manuscript for Tom Sawyer by the time he broke off to work on The Gilded Age. He didn’t get back to the story until the spring and summer of 1874, and he finished the book the following spring and summer, all or most of the writing having been accomplished at Quarry Farm. After Howells read and critiqued the manuscript, he told Twain on November 21, “It’s altogether the best boy’s story I ever read,” but he had made a number of corrections. After recovering from bronchitis during the Christmas season of 1875, Twain finally opened the package with Howells’s editing and accepted almost everything without even reading through the manuscript. “There [never] was a man in the world so grateful to another as I was to you day before yesterday,” he wrote his friend on January 18, “when I sat down (in still rather wretched health) to set myself to the dreary & hateful task of making final revision of Tom Sawyer, & discovered . . . that your pencil marks were scattered all along. . . . Instead of reading the MS, I simply hunted out the pencil marks & made the emendations which they suggested.”7

  Twain hated to revise anything, but Tom Sawyer may have been more irritating than other works. For one thing, he had not soared to the same romantic heights in the book as he had in the “Old Times” sketches. That kind of profound engagement wouldn’t recur until Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, until the story in Tom Sawyer gets fully into its rhythm with the grave-robbing scene and the murder of Dr. Robinson in chapter 9 (“When you fairly swing off,” Howells observed about the last two-thirds of the text), it is self-consciously if also cleverly narrated. Tom becomes almost a puppet in this patriarchal storyteller’s hands. When the boy tricks one of his comrades into whitewashing the fence, he is a “retired artist.” This young man, who is old enough to be sexually attracted (we would assume) to Becky, is also innocent enough to show off to the new girl in town by balancing a straw upon his nose. This exaggerated state of innocence may have been conceived when Twain was still considering taking him into adulthood in the story. In any case, the author seems to have been at odds with himself in organizing the tale. The plot at first wanders from episode to episode as if he were merely arranging vignettes from his past. Tom matures somewhat during the novel, but he experiences no epiphany or attack of conscience like that which besieges Huck. Regardless of Twain’s indecision on the matter, the book was
finally written for children. Unlike its “sequel,” it was no bildungsroman, or novel of adolescence in which a young protagonist verges on the difference between childhood illusions and adult reality. Twain’s Tom would never have inspired the creation of Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Huck, on the other hand, did influence Salinger and many other writers besides.

  The American publication of Tom Sawyer was fraught with difficulties. Howells, as he promised, started “the sheep to jumping in the right places” by giving the book a glowing review in the Atlantic for May 1876, but it appeared six months before the book itself was published. Because of production delays at the American Publishing Company, the American edition of the book did not appear until December. In the meantime, to again prevent pirating in England and (he thought) in the colonies, Twain had arranged with Moncure Conway to have the British edition appear first. But this routine protective strategy backfired when Belford Brothers of Toronto, the unscrupulous firm that had pirated “Old Times,” began in the summer of 1876 to publish cheap editions of Tom Sawyer by reprinting the English edition put out by Chatto and Windus. Belford Brothers claimed that Canadian law superseded British in this case. Since Clemens had not sent an agent to Canada or gone himself (as he would with The Prince and the Pauper) to obtain Canadian copyright for Tom Sawyer, it was not protected there.8 Twain was naturally bitter and threatened to write only plays in the future, thinking he could reproduce the success of Colonel Sellers. “Belford has taken the profits all out of ‘Tom Sawyer,’ ” he told Conway as the American edition finally came out. “We find our copyright law here to be nearly worthless, and if I can make a living out of plays, I shall never write another book.”9 But there would be no more dramatic successes like Colonel Sellers.

  This was a rather devastating blow, which manifested itself throughout the 1870s with his going back and forth between at least three manuscripts. He had already collected what he considered the best of his short pieces under the heading of Sketches New and Old in 1875. He faced many distractions. He was now the father of two daughters with the birth of Clara in 1874. He was active in several Hartford societies, including the Monday Evening Club. He and Livy fell into a heavy schedule of entertaining at their grand Hartford house, often inviting the Howellses and the Aldriches as weekend guests. He was now in his early forties and in the prime of life. He was an accomplished author, whose greatest work lay just over the horizon. He touched on Huck’s life in the “sequel” in the last chapter of Tom Sawyer. It was cut from that novel at Howells’s suggestion, and possibly became the first chapter of Huckleberry Finn.10 Here we meet Huck at the home of the Widow Douglas, and his tale starts out almost as innocuously, in terms of Twain’s satire and irony, as Tom Sawyer.

  When Twain changed the point of view of this chapter to the first person, however, he began to speak in a voice that would hardly suit the Victorian standards of New England. It was not simply the American vernacular that had replaced the English narrator’s silver tongue, but the American point of view as well—which used language, words so full of Whitman’s vocabulary that they would bleed, as Emerson once noted of Leaves of Grass. The trouble began in Boston and would suggest that Mark Twain was almost as much of an affront to the Boston Brahmins and their literary way of depicting the world as that upstart from Brooklyn who had once published without permission a letter of Emerson’s praising Leaves of Grass. Twain, too, was seen as stepping out in the wrong direction. Already, the newspapers were picking up his audacious opinions. In the earliest recorded interview with the press, he told the Chicago Evening Post of December 21, 1871, that he was glad that the prince of Wales, who would become King Edward VII in 1901, was recovering from typhoid fever. “I’m glad the boy’s going to get well,” he told the reporter. “For he will probably make the worst king Great Britain has ever had.” He developed a public brashness that the press loved—and exploited. He spoke of “politician scum” to the New York Herald during the Hayes-Tilden presidential race of 1876.11 It was the beginning of the era of Mark Twain the Humorist, who whenever he visited New York or Boston would usually be interviewed by the press and whose political views were savored by journalists looking for material to sell newspapers. The public welcomed him. The literati were rather puzzled, but since he was now an Atlantic Monthly author, Howells generously suggested that he speak at the journal’s seventieth-birthday dinner party for John Greenleaf Whittier.

  28 Banned in Boston

  The most memorable event for Mark Twain in 1877 should have been his second visit to Bermuda, this time in the welcome company of his “pastor,” Joe Twichell. As we will recall, Twain had made a brief first visit there a decade earlier at the tail end of the Quaker City cruise. His second visit in May would set in motion a pattern of returning there numerous times throughout his life, particularly in his final years, for the island reminded him of his happy childhood in the Mississippi Valley as well as his time in the paradise he had found in Hawaii.1 But for sheer biographical importance, this particular Bermuda interlude is easily overshadowed by the failure, both imagined and real, of his speech at the Atlantic Monthly’s seventieth-birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier on December 17.

  We remember it today as Twain’s speech about three drunks purportedly named “Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson & Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes” who invade the cabin of a miner in the foothills of California. The dinner at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston involved fifty-eight distinguished male writers of the day. Women were invited only to the after-dinner speeches, which began at 10:15, when the doors were opened to a select public. The diners included not only this noble trinomial of literary saints—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—but also such now largely forgotten writers as Charles Dudley Warner and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose work was typical of what we would now call the age of Howells. Present as well, of course, was the ex-westerner Howells himself, by now—it was thought—thoroughly scrubbed of his Ohio backwoods odor. In a description the following day in the New York Evening Post, George Parsons Lathrop, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son-in-law, made the gathering sound like something out of James Russell Lowell’s A Fable for Critics but without the friendly satire: “Here robust and cheerful, with an expression of richly courteous dignity, stands Longfellow, a white-haired Hyperion. There, Emerson, himself beyond seventy, but to all seeming wonderfully well and wearing that incurious but searching inquiry which in a company like [this] gives him the air of one who does not suspect his own fame.” The article named the most prominent writers present, including Whittier himself, “quietly talking with a group of friends at one side of the room” in the east dining hall of the hotel.2

  The dinner began sharply at 7:00 P.M. Its seven courses were washed down with Sauterne, sherry, Chablis, claret, and Burgundy—objected to the following day in a formal resolution by the local chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Such lubrication must have placed more than a few of the auditors in an alcoholic haze that has perhaps forever compromised the accounts of how Twain was actually received that evening. According to Henry Nash Smith, who has written the fullest account of the evening and its aftermath: “Henry O. Houghton [publisher of the Atlantic] made a short address of welcome and introduced Whittier as guest of honor. Whittier excused himself from speaking and asked Longfellow to read a sonnet, ‘Response,’ composed by Whittier for the occasion. Houghton then introduced Howells as toastmaster, and Howells introduced Emerson, who . . . recited Whittier’s ‘Ichabod.’ ”3 Howells himself made a short speech, Holmes read a new poem of his own, and Charles Eliot Norton responded with a toast to Lowell, who was absent as minister to Spain. Howells then read letters from those dignitaries unable to attend, after which he introduced Mark Twain. This wasn’t actually Twain’s first appearance as a speaker at an Atlantic dinner, and that may have been part of the problem. He had attended and spoken briefly at his first Atlantic dinner on December 15, 1874, following th
e publication of “A True Story” in the journal the previous month. Because of his perceived success as a charming humorist (that earlier time, he spoke somewhat impromptu on “The President of the United States [Grant] and the Female Contributors” to the Atlantic), he was expected this time to give a performance in line with his recent Atlantic pieces, not just “A True Story,” but the “Old Times” pieces of 1875.4 His latest book after all was Tom Sawyer, a lighthearted tale ostensibly written for children. In other words, he was expected to offer safe comic relief to a program laden with high seriousness and deep sentiment.

  To those fifty-eight writers, with Howells perhaps excluded because of his own lingering fear of being an outsider, Mark Twain may have represented potential anarchy. Smith concludes his lengthy analysis of the dinner with the suggestion that the speech “expressed a deep-seated conflict” on Twain’s part regarding the literary Brahmins of New England. Another literary executor of the Twain estate and lifetime student of Mark Twain’s, Bernard De Voto, even theorizes that The Innocents Abroad had possibly been a burlesque of Longfellow’s travel books.5

  Twain rehearsed the story of his shame over the speech in a chapter from his autobiography published in the North American Review in December 1907. He recalled being preceded at the podium by William Winter, drama critic for the New York Tribune and nemesis of Walt Whitman for “inappropriate” writings in Leaves of Grass. Initially, Winter had been one of the drinkers along with Howells who were friendly to Whitman during his days in 1860 at Pfaff’s Broadway saloon in New York, but Winter had since defected and would soon denounce the poet whose book became the first to be “banned in Boston” in 1882. (Howells, too, would later keep his distance from Whitman, but as we shall see later on, Twain contemplated publicly supporting the “obscene” poet.) We don’t know what Winter thought of Twain’s characterization of the putative Emerson as “a seedy little bit of a chap,” or for that matter his description of the pretended Holmes as “fat as a balloon” and the impostor Longfellow as having the physical build of “a prize-fighter,” but to any reader out west when Twain was writing hoaxes for the Enterprise, the wholly inaccurate physical descriptions would have signaled the farcical nature of his talk that evening. (Holmes, for example, was hardly “fat as a balloon,” but so short that he had to have special hooks in his front parlor so that he could reach them to hang his hat.) All Twain recorded was that the pleasure of the evening for everyone ended when Winter sat down and he stood up to deliver a memorized tale that turned the faces of his audience “to a sort of black frost.”