Twain was followed by William Henry Bishop, a writer now completely forgotten in the annals of American literature. His first romance, entitled Detmold, was just beginning its serialization in the Atlantic. Twain remembered that the faces of his auditors that evening, as he finished his own performance, wore the “expression faces would have worn if I had been making these remarks about the Deity and the rest of the Trinity.” Exactly such remarks about “the rest of the Trinity” had already been literally made long ago in Emerson’s own “Divinity School Address,” after which he had become persona non grata at Harvard for more than thirty years. Only in recent years had Emerson, one of Twain’s alleged victims that evening, been hailed as a member of the (literary) godhead. Twain recalled or claimed that the shock of his address was so severe that his successor at the speaker’s platform lost all composure and could not complete his address. Having “burst handsomely upon the world with a most acceptable novel,” Twain noted in his autobiography, Bishop crumbled. “He was facing those awful deities . . . with a speech to utter. No doubt it was well packed away in his memory, no doubt it was fresh and usable, until I had been heard from.”6
Bishop, coincidentally, was born in Hartford. During his eighty-one years he wrote many other books, taught Italian at Yale in the 1890s, and occupied two different consulships in Italy. Indeed, he had modeled his early work after that of his mentor Howells, who himself had also enjoyed a consulship in Italy and later sponsored Bishop for admission to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Like many so-called realistic novels in the dawning age of Social Darwinism, however, Bishop’s Detmold ran the risk of waxing sentimental. A cautionary tale about Americans trying to discover themselves in Verona, where they worship its ancestral history and lush landscapes, its marriage plot features Louis Detmold, an architect schooled in Ruskin who has followed his love Alice Starfield abroad in the hope of persuading her to reconsider his proposal of marriage. Alice herself is a typically proud Victorian heroine who is headstrong in ignorance of the fact that she actually loves Detmold.
Detmold, however, has a skeleton in his closet. Long ago his father committed a vague financial crime not unlike the one Silas Lapham, Howells’s most famous protagonist, is tempted to commit to save his business. (Typically, in such Realistic genres, the hero may suffer personal misfortune, but the loss does not rob him of his dignity.) By now Detmold’s father has fully atoned for his mistake, but the shame endures. When an Italian rival for Alice’s hand reveals the ancient crime, it turns out that Alice, the adopted child of a wealthy American family, is actually the daughter of Detmold’s father’s partner in crime. The melodrama bristles with the ideology of American or Emersonian individualism. “The self-made man is our cornerstone,” Detmold declares, and blames American women (not invited to the Whittier banquet, we recall) for perpetuating most of the American snobbishness and love for the undemocratic ways of Europe. Howells may also have been attracted to Bishop’s rather patronizing defense of American humorists in the novel. They are, Detmold states, “something more” than humorists—like Artemus Ward and Howells’s friend and guest that evening, Mark Twain—who “have a much better claim to statues than a great many who get them. . . . I go even further,” Detmold exclaims. “I wish to see a bust of the Jumping Frog in Central Park.”7
In fact, Bishop didn’t lose his composure at the Whittier birthday dinner, as Twain remembered in his autobiography, but delivered his speech as planned. Furthermore, the rest of the speeches went forward as well. The Post the next day in its report of the dinner did not even mention Twain’s speech, while the Boston Globe of the same date noted that it had “produced the most violent bursts of hilarity.” The negative response emerged a couple of days later. Once the Boston Transcript pronounced the speech “in bad taste,” similar newspaper verdicts followed. And for Twain this reaction was also probably fueled by Howells’s statement to him in a letter on Christmas Day that “every one with whom I have talked about your speech regards it as a fatality.” At Howells’s suggestion, Twain sent letters of apology to Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow, all of whom (with the possible exception of Emerson) quickly regarded the speech as generally harmless and even entertaining. Gradually, Twain forgave himself as “God’s fool,” and a few weeks later even told his friend Mary Fairbanks that it was one of the funniest things he had ever written. Later—almost twenty-nine years after the event, in 1906—his social secretary Isabel V. Lyon recorded in her diary that even though Twain took the blame for the Whittier speech in his autobiography, he was privately, in her words, “chuckling with delight over the speech. . . . ‘Oh [he exclaimed], it will do to go into print before I die’ and the couch [shook] with him and his laughter.” He subsequently insisted on reading the Whittier speech to Lyon, word for word.8
Some today still insist that it was funny, and it is. Possibly, it is more entertaining today than the Jumping Frog story that first made him famous, particularly in the way that Twain sets New England’s greatest verse against the arid landscape of the Sierra Nevada mines of California. Here, it should be remembered, Clemens himself had failed at silver mining in 1862 and at the time had yet to discover his calling as a writer. Now, as he said on this fateful evening in 1877, standing before the country’s “biggest literary billows,” he was “reminded of a thing which happened to me fifteen years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary ocean-puddle myself.” In the story, the three miners cheat at cards and threaten to brawl until their host falls asleep. He wakes just in time to spot the three miners leaving his cabin. Longfellow, who is making off with the host’s only set of boots, is called out as “Evangeline.” The fraud impersonating that century’s leading poet then answers with the following lines from Longfellow’s most famous poem, “A Psalm of Life”:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime;
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Twain was performing as he was expected to—having fun with some sacred verses. It was a traditional frame story with the exception that “The Miner’s Story” within the frame is told by the “fourth littery man,” Mark Twain, a younger version of the outside narrator. But while poets like Whitman were being parodied constantly for their experimental verse, writers like Longfellow, Holmes, and Emerson were then considered sacrosanct. Yet it wasn’t the poets themselves who objected, but their admirers. Apparently, neither Longfellow nor Holmes took offense. Longfellow responded on January 6, 1878, to Twain’s apology by saying he was “a little troubled, that you should be so much troubled about a matter of such slight importance.” He added, “The newspapers have made all the mischief.” And initially the newspapers had supported Longfellow and Holmes’s favorable impression of Twain’s speech. The day after it, the Boston Globe noted: “Mr. Longfellow laughed and shook, and Mr. Whittier seemed to enjoy it keenly.”9
Only Emerson, the review said, appeared “a little puzzled about it.” We know that by this point he was entering a phase of dementia, and this condition may have come into play here. But if fully alert, he too wouldn’t have minded Twain’s joke at his expense. The author of “The Comic” knew, as he wrote in that essay, that man was “the only joker in nature” because he alone possessed an appreciation of incongruity, which is at the heart of not only humor but the challenge of nature itself as an emblem of God or the Oversoul. In other words, we become grotesque and the object of humor, the transcendentalist decreed, when we fall out of harmony with nature. If any Emerson was offended, it was his daughter Ellen, one of the many admirers of these Schoolroom poets and New England Brahmins. For her there would be no statue of the Jumping Frog in Boston Common, or in Concord for that matter. In answering for her father, Ellen Emerson, who had become his secretary and constant companion at his lectures and other public events, responded (to Mrs. Clemens, incidentally) that the Emerson family was disappointed since “we have liked almost e
verything we have ever seen over Mark Twain’s signature.”10 That is to say, they had appreciated him merely as a humorist. Twain, in spite of his real or simulated contrition about the speech, must have found Ellen Emerson’s condescending letter as galling as Whitman, another vernacular writer associated with Emerson, would find her brother Edward’s slight of him in Emerson in Concord (1889). Yet Twain had recently put away the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn after running out of gas, as he often put it, and he was having a hell of a time as a writer. He was so low at that point that he couldn’t even have insisted that Concord take him for anything except a clown.
Whitman had been an object of scorn to the Emerson family ever since 1855 for twice publishing without permission the Concord philosopher’s famous letter of greeting to the poet “at the beginning of a great career.” First Whitman had it published in the New York Tribune of October 10. Then, as if this liberty were not sufficiently offensive, the poet copied (and answered) it in an appendix to his 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass and plastered its most prominent clause in gold letters on the spine of his book. Not only Emerson’s family but also his many friends and acquaintances were outraged. Yet Emerson said nothing at the time. He even struck his “tasks,” as he promised Whitman in the letter, and visited him in Brooklyn. Had Emerson been in possession of his full faculties in 1877, he no doubt would have responded as nobly as Longfellow and Holmes did. It wasn’t the great writers but their New England audience that was so protective of the region’s culture and so fearful of the barbarism of the West and New Yorker ideologies such as Whitman’s. This group of writers, it is sad to say, included Howells, who maintained throughout his life that his friend had “trifled” with the personalities of the great on that bedeviled December evening.11
The question remains as to why Twain publicly subscribed to the view of his speech expressed in the North American Review as scandalous, while privately rejoicing in it. As noted, he had defended the speech to Mrs. Fairbanks shortly after the event. The answer may be that Twain did not want to openly disagree with his friend Howells’s interpretation. Moreover, the rather pompous North American Review, which published his account of the Whittier dinner in 1907, probably wouldn’t have published any other view. But Twain also knew when something was truly funny, and to protect himself in perpetuity, he included in that December article a copy of the 1877 speech with only slight and insignificant changes.12 He knew that the best humor had to be irreverent, but also that that irreverence, as the basis of humor, could never be personal or spiteful. That made it merely local and quickly dated, like the drollery of so many other humorists of his era (and ours) who relied on current events for their material. (In poetry it would be the difference between a sentimental poem for a particular person and an elegy whose personal subject is never named so that the lament becomes universal.) Twain hadn’t in fact attacked the personalities of Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes, nor would that have been humorous if he had; it was the story’s incongruity that put their grand poetic lines in the mouths of three drunks. Twain discovered a great lesson in all this, one that he would apply in his greatest book: the impersonal was the gateway to the greatest humor. Twain’s speech would have been in bad taste, as some of the newspapers later charged it was, if its humor had in fact depended on personalities and belittled actual people, but this tall tale merely deflated bloated sentiments, such as those in Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life.” In Huckleberry Finn, the protagonist is most hilarious (deadly so) when, in observing human behavior, he naively juxtaposes hard reality with the sentimental or craven distortion of it. Of course, his creator had probably sensed the difference long before, even before Jim Smiley bet against the parson’s fervent hope that his wife would recover from her life-threatening illness.
29 The Innocent Abroad Again
“I HAVE THE HONOR TO REPLY TO YOUR LETTER JUST RECEIVED,” the automatic letter with his facsimile signature said, “THAT IT IS MY purpose TO WRITE a CONTINUATION OF TOM SAWYER’S HISTORY, BUT I AM NOT ABLE AT THIS TIME TO DETERMINE WHEN I SHALL BEGIN THE WORK.” Perhaps the form letter, datelined Hartford, 1877, with a blank for the month and day, was one of Twain’s first attempts at cloning himself through the latest technology, a small way toward turning out more books; for Tom Sawyer, in spite of its difficult American birth, proved so popular that letters from readers demanding a sequel arrived “WITH SUFFICIENT FREQUENCY TO WARRANT THIS METHOD OF REPLYING.”1 The letter was a bit disingenuous in saying that such a sequel had not already been begun. Between July and September of 1876, while Tom Sawyer got ravished by the Belford Brothers and languished in proofs at the American Publishing Company (for reasons due both to Bliss’s trying to sell too many books by subscription at the same time and Twain’s temporary loss of interest in Tom Sawyer because of the nearly yearlong lag in production), he had completed 446 manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn, specifically the first twelve and a half chapters plus what became chapters 15 through the middle of 18, where Huck meets Buck Grangerford. Until 1990, when the first half of Twain’s manuscript was found in an attic in Hollywood, it was thought that the first of three (or possibly four) phases of Twain’s writing of it ended with the steamboat crash in chapter 16. This was the part of the book Twain told Howells he liked only “tolerably well” and that he might “pigeon-hole or burn the MS when it is done.”2
Unfortunately for its continued progress, Twain found other fish to fry in the years intervening between phases one and two of his masterpiece, which did not recommence until the waning weeks of 1879. He wrote A Tramp Abroad and The Prince and the Pauper. He marketed his only successful nonliterary invention, Mark Twain’s Patent Self-Pasting Scrap Book, through Dan Slote’s firm beginning in 1877. The following year he published Punch, Brothers, Punch! and Other Sketches, mainly as “a 10-cent advertising-primer” to boost sales of his scrapbook.3 He also wrote a series of essays on his second trip to Bermuda, published in the Atlantic between October 1877 and January 1878. His life contained so many distractions that he decided he had to hide from it in order to write. “Life has come to be a very serious matter with me,” he told his mother on February 17, 1878, in one of his increasingly infrequent letters to Jane Clemens, still living in Fredonia. “I have a badgered, harassed feeling, a good part of my time. It comes mainly of business responsibilities and annoyances, and the persecution of kindly letters from well meaning strangers—to whom I must be rudely silent or else put in the biggest half of my time bothering over answers.” All this added up to the admission that “I cannot write a book at home,” and now “home” meant not only Hartford, from which he could previously escape to Elmira, but the United States itself. “I have about made up my mind,” he told his mother, “to take my tribe and fly to some little corner of Europe and budge no more until I shall have completed one of the half dozen books that lie begun, up stairs.”4
In fact, his brother Orion seemed to be doing at least as much writing, while also switching back and forth between journalism and the law and working on nonliterary inventions of his own. When he sent Sam a sample of his working novel that winter, his brother advised that instead of imitating Jules Verne’s science fiction, he ought to parody his work. “I think the world has suffered so much from that French idiot,” he added, “that they could enjoy seeing him burlesqued.” But that work went nowhere. Sam privately complained to his mother a few days later: “Orion sends his hero down . . . into the interior of the earth, . . . [where] he meets & talks with a very gentlemanly gorilla. . . . Can you imagine a sane man deliberately proposing to retain these things & print them, while they already exist in another man’s book?” His older brother, his former boss in Hannibal, Sam concluded, was “absolutely destitute of originality.”5
Before sailing with his family, a servant, and Livy’s childhood friend Clara Spaulding on the Holsatia on April 11, Twain traveled to Fredonia to say goodbye to his mother and sister Pamela as well as his niece Annie Moffett, now married to a civil engineer dabbling in r
eal estate, Charles L. Webster. He also visited Buffalo and at least one of his old friends, David Gray, an editor on the Buffalo Daily Courier.6 Twain was apparently delighted to discover that Bayard Taylor, a well-known travel writer and translator of Goethe’s Faust, was embarking on the same ship, having been appointed U.S. minister to Germany by the Hayes administration. He attended a farewell banquet for Taylor on April 4 at Delmonico’s and even made a very short speech. It was a typical gathering of the literary elite, or what we would call today the literary establishment, of Victorian America. Howells was present, of course, along with many of the Atlantic writers he had published.7
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 27