One of the severest drains on Charles L. Webster & Company was the publication (within three years) of an eleven-volume anthology titled the Library of American Literature, coedited by the poet-businessman Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson in 1891. The capital outlay was enormous because these subscription volumes had to be produced, sold, and delivered as a set before they brought in any income whatever. When the Panic of 1893 washed over the country, Webster & Company was unable to borrow enough money to sustain the overextended enterprise. Interestingly, this ambitious selection of texts was quite democratic, including not only Whitman but also his most enthusiastic supporter and a minor poet and fiction writer in his own right, William Douglas O’Connor, author of the panegyric on Whitman entitled “The Good Gray Poet” (1866).4 It did not include, however, Sara Parton, better known as “Fanny Fern,” a popular feminist writer and a devotee of Whitman’s.
Aside from complaints to his sister and brother, Twain saved most of his vitriol concerning Webster for an autobiographical dictation of 1906. By that time, his authorized biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, was on hand to hear the rancorous remarks, but he never included the material in either his 1912 biography or his 1923 edition of the autobiography. In fact, he dismissed Clemens’s account as “the result of misunderstanding and disagreement,” saying that “Webster was probably vainglorious and irritating, but in all the letters and records there is nothing to show that he was not working for the best interests of the firm, or that he ever was unfair in his mistakes. In fact, he was very industrious—and literally worked himself to death.”5 When Twain’s true feelings about his niece’s husband became public in Bernard De Voto’s Mark Twain in Eruption in 1940, Webster’s son Samuel published Mark Twain, Business Man in 1946, a defense of his father’s actions with regard to the firm and its failure.
The truth is that neither Twain nor Webster was very astute at business, or at least at accounting (resulting in a bookkeeper theft of twenty-five thousand dollars discovered in 1887). After the coups of Huckleberry Finn and the Grant memoirs, the company acquired a reputation as one of the most prestigious presses in the country, and it should have succeeded. Simply put, it was poorly run, guided by little or no effective marketing plan. As publishers, Twain and Webster chose one loser after another, even though Webster did manage on several occasions to talk Twain out of making contracts for obvious failures. One of them was the proposed continuation of Grant’s life from where it leaves off in the Memoirs, to be written by one of the general’s sons (a biography never published).6
Another problem between them was that Twain the artist didn’t want to be bothered with business matters, yet he often complained that he wasn’t kept adequately informed about company profits and expenditures. He also couldn’t understand the firm’s financial statements, and—given their bookkeeper’s embezzlement—apparently Webster couldn’t either. Twain also used his nephew-in-law as a personal factotum, asking him to purchase this or that item for his “Aunt Livy” or sending him up to Hartford to check on renovations and repairs to their house while the family spent the summer at Quarry Farm. On one occasion, he even expected Webster to travel all the way from New York City to Elmira just to discuss a particular problem the company was then experiencing. Webster was at a particular disadvantage in dealing with Twain because his senior partner was also his wealthy uncle. Yet he would occasionally flare out at his “Uncle Sam” when asked do his personal bidding, such as handling his unprofitable inventions and patents, including an impractical bed clamp designed to keep children from kicking off their bed covers (duly tested on the Webster children). Twain’s attitude toward Webster was doubtless tainted from the beginning. Shortly after Webster made his move to New York in the spring of 1881, his mother-in-law told her son Sam Moffett that she “always believed that C[harley]’s moral nature was weak and undeveloped.”7 Such idle speculation would have made the family rounds to Pamela’s younger brother, who all along thought he was doing his niece a favor by hiring Webster in the first place.
The conflict that developed between them arose because, while Twain had finished his masterpiece by 1885, he still had less and less time for writing because of the demands of other “business.” During the first half of the 1880s, everything looked positive. Yet the distractions of the second half of the decade went beyond simple business problems with Charles L. Webster & Company. All along, the smooth-talking Paige was increasing his death grip on Twain’s imagination (and his money). Twain had first met the mechanic-turned-inventor in the Colt Fire Arms Manufactory in Hartford, where he was working away not only on his typesetter but on another invention for improving the telegraph. Justin Kaplan has described the whole ordeal and is best at capturing Twain’s utter fascination with the financial possibilities of the technology. Twain was persuaded by Dwight Buell, a Hartford jeweler, to see the prototype and to meet Paige. “Until he saw it in action,” writes Kaplan, the former printer “had not believed such a machine could exist. Soon after he saw it and fell under the spell of its inventor, . . . he began to believe that it was about the only machine of its kind that did exist.”8 There were others undergoing perfection, however, including the Merganthaler Linotype, which would ultimately sweep the field of competition, but Twain’s state of denial along with his unbounded faith in James W. Paige kept him a prisoner to a tragic illusion.
Twain’s notebooks are full of fantasies about how much money the typesetter would earn, exact calculations as to how many newspapers would either buy or lease it and how much they would be forced to pay. He was obsessed with the machine, which usually functioned well enough with light workloads, but never performed reliably enough to meet the relentless demands of a daily newspaper. It was as if all those notions of getting rich—dreams that first danced through his head when he was a young teenager in Hannibal and everybody was either leaving or traveling through town on their way to the Gold Rush of 1849—had suddenly rematerialized. He spent much of his time trying to interest other investors, but, as the machine failed test after test and Paige repeatedly tore down his machine of eighteen thousand parts to make corrections and improvements, Twain was left as virtually its sole financial backer. Over the decade, he may have invested as much as $200,000 on the project. Estimates vary and go as high as $300,000—roughly $6 million in today’s dollars. While his publishing company was still making money, Clemens apparently used part of that profit, or at least his personal share, to fund the machine. He even resorted to spending part of his wife’s inheritance. By 1887 Livy’s share in J. Langdon & Company had dwindled to less than $55,000, and that was its value before Twain began siphoning part of it away to sustain Paige’s folly.9
He soon began to lose money in the publishing company, too. And all the while there were frequent requests for loans, major sums, often from near strangers. Calvin Higbie, his old mining partner from the Aurora days, to whom he had dedicated Roughing It (“When we two were millionaires for ten days”), asked him for a $20,000 loan. One of General Grant’s sons, Jesse, persuaded Twain to pay $5,000 for a trip he made to London to look into a railroad investment that came to nothing. Evidently the Grant family thought it had found a magic fountain in Webster & Company and even challenged its bookkeeping on the Memoirs—this despite the fact that Grant’s widow had received from the company the biggest royalty check in history up to that time. Jesse also wanted to become a partner in Webster & Company before he would allow it to publish Grant’s letters to his wife (another Grant book the firm did not issue). To Twain’s credit, he regularly contributed to worthy causes, such as sending two black students through an all-black college in Pennsylvania and financially helping another African American to finish Yale Law School. He generously supported a promising sculptor, Karl Gerhardt. He even gave Walt Whitman money on more than one occasion. In 1887 he contributed fifty dollars to funds Whitman’s disciples were raising to provide him with a summer cottage, money that ultimately helped build the aging poet’s mausol
eum.10 Yet Twain was also digging his own grave, financially. In addition to everything else, he was paying Paige an annual salary of $7,000. He was perpetually fuming over Paige’s endless delays, only to be charmed again and again into continuing his support every time he confronted the inventor, who simply could not be hurried.
As business went down, costs went up. Webster moved the firm to larger offices, having earlier hired a stenographer, Fred A. Hall, to take dictation from General Grant for the Memoirs. Hall soon became a junior partner in the firm and finally replaced Webster when he fell ill in 1888. Hall had also filled in for Webster during his two trips abroad, once in August 1885 to secure foreign rights for the Grant Memoirs and again in June 1886 for an audience with the pope, who in return for publishing his biography made the Protestant Webster a papal knight. That was the most Webster & Company got for publishing a book the partners cynically thought all American Catholics would want to buy if not read. Hall himself was a manipulative sort who did not hesitate to deceive authors when he thought it necessary. One of the firm’s books was entitled The Legends and Myths of Hawaii, purportedly written by the current king of the islands. When its ghostwriter, Twain’s former associate at the Virginia City Enterprise, Rollin M. Daggett, grew impatient in 1888 because another book was placed ahead of it in the publishing schedule, Hall suggested that they could “have a die made and bind up a few volumes. . . . We can easily dispose of these, send three or four of them to [Daggett], and that will keep him quiet.”11 Nor was Hall shy when Twain, later that year, conspired with him to force Webster into permanent retirement so that they could stop his salary, which had continued after his initial departure.
Webster did retire permanently in the fall of 1888 with a final compensation of around twelve thousand dollars (really a free loan from Twain, not the company, which was already in the red and beginning to borrow from the Mount Morris Bank in New York). In retirement Webster was periodically seen on the streets of Fredonia in his papal regalia, and it was known that he liked to be addressed as “Sir Charles Webster.” Privately, Twain spoke of him as “not a man but a hog,” thinking erroneously that Webster had pilfered small sums while still running the firm. Yet he paid out the pension because of his regard for his niece.12 Webster enjoyed only three years of retirement before dying in 1891, probably of pancreatic cancer. Twain, who refused to write to Pamela directly while she resided in Webster’s home, did not attend his funeral. Nor did Livy. Six years later he told his sister: “I am not able to think of [Webster] without cursing him & cursing the day I opposed your better judgment of the lousy scoundrel & thief & sided with Annie in her desire to marry him. The thought of that treacherous cur can wake me out of my sleep.”13 By this time Webster & Company had long since declared bankruptcy.
By then Twain had washed his hands of Paige, too. In February 1891 he finally untangled himself from the “machine” and, in an agreement three years later, freed himself of any lingering financial responsibility for it. When told that Paige had signed on the dotted line, the weary writer, then about to travel the world to repay his publishing firm’s debts, replied: “I am glad Paige has signed. I wish it was his death-warrant.” Earlier, when every potential investor including his brother-in-law had failed to commit, Clemens had assumed almost complete financial responsibility for the machine and had to be formally released from that obligation.14 Before this final and complete break with Paige, he had held out hope that one day the inventor would stop his incessant dismantling and reassembling of the five-thousand-pound machine and announce its definite completion. Its success would still have brought Twain—or his heirs, it seemed more probable—millions. In 1891, sounding like Colonel Sellers, he wrote Orion (whose own version of the typesetter had been the Tennessee Land): “It is worth billions; & when the pig-headed lunatic, its inventor, dies, it will instantly be capitalized & make the Clemens children rich.”15 Serious or not, he was echoing the refrain of their father, John Marshall Clemens, as well as his literary incarnation in The Gilded Age. In chapter 1, Squire Hawkins tells his wife as the impoverished family is about to answer Colonel Sellers’s call for them to move to Missouri: “I have taken up Seventy-five Thousand Acres of Land in this county—think what an enormous fortune it will be some day! Why, Nancy, enormous don’t express it—the word’s too tame!”
35 A Romance of the White Conscience
Twain’s edginess in getting Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ready for publication in 1884 shows in some of the prefatory material he inserted at the last moment—as if to delay that final plunge into this “sequel” to Tom Sawyer. For this book would take him deep into the American experience of slavery, a topic first stirred in “A True Story” but hardly touched on in his first two novelistic uses of the matters of Hannibal and the Mississippi. Slavery as an institution had effectively died with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, but its impact on the country and this writer surely had not. That is one of the reasons why this particular “boy’s book” is so compelling, not only to Twain’s readers in the nineteenth century but to readers ever since: it evokes the human ideal of doing right in the face of inconvenience and indeed ruin. Huck does what Silas Lapham does in Twain’s best friend’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, published the same year. In a moment of crisis, he refuses to act in his own behalf when it will injure another. Silas, of course, is consciously doing right by refusing to take advantage of naïve investors in order to save his company from bankruptcy. Huck, on the other hand, makes a similarly risky sacrifice but thinks he is doing wrong. Therein lies the difference between Howells the realist and Twain the emerging naturalist in the mid-1880s. For Twain, Huck’s “sound heart” is not ruled by any common standard of morality but is simply that way through another Darwinian accident.
Apparently somebody at Charles L. Webster & Company (or the photoengraver the company used) didn’t care for either Jim the sympathetic slave or Twain’s implicit determinism, because the engraving for the illustration at the end of chapter 32, depicting Huck’s being greeted by Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas, was sabotaged to show the sway-backed Uncle Silas with an erect penis protruding through his trousers, the caption now conveying a double entendre: “Who do you reckon it is?” The defaced illustration made it into the prospectus (sample pages of the book to be used by the subscription book salesmen) and into the signature of the first printing of thirty thousand copies.1 This act of subversion, whose perpetrator was never discovered, naturally outraged Clemens, who was forced to delay publication beyond the 1884 Christmas season in order to recall every copy of that page in the prospectus and the book and to replace them with the original undamaged engraving (only one or two survived to tell the tale).
The plot of the novel is probably as generally familiar as the fence whitewashing scene in Tom Sawyer, certainly more recognizable to most readers today than the plot of the first Hannibal book. It picks up with Huck living at the home of the Widow Douglas on the hill overlooking St. Petersburg. He is kidnapped by his father, who wants Huck’s share of the money that he and Tom found in the earlier novel. Huck escapes to Jackson’s Island, where he finds the slave Jim, owned by Miss Watson, sister of the Widow Douglas. Jim “runs off” to avoid being sold down the river. Their subsequent river journey takes them through different levels of southern society that are described in almost anthropological detail—from a backwoods wife to family feuds and river con artists. During his retreat from the world with Jim, as they travel on a raft downriver at night under the stars, Huck decides to risk being known as a hated abolitionist and to help Jim escape from slavery. Jim is ultimately sold by the Duke and the King—two frauds who take over the raft—and ends up a prisoner on Aunt Sally’s farm in Arkansas, where he is being readied for return to his owner. Twain, as he later wrote, literally moved the farm of his Uncle John Quarles and Aunt Patsy downriver to Arkansas to become the farmhouse residence of Tom’s Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas. Huck is obliged to pose as Tom and agrees to help Tom, posing as Sid, free Ji
m. Huck is both surprised at and disgusted by Tom for agreeing to “steal” a slave, but as we ultimately learn, Tom knows that Jim is already free and is simply seizing the opportunity to use him as a pawn in his exotic escape plans. All is discovered by the adults, and Jim ends up officially free. Huck resolves to “light out for the Territory,” where his creator had gone to escape the war in 1861, rather than remain in a society in which Jim will never be truly liberated. The issue of Jim’s real ultimate fate, of course, is not addressed in a novel that required a happy ending.
The first edition, oddly, had two frontispieces, perhaps the result of the author’s last-minute decisions. From the start, there was the first of E. W. Kemble’s sketches throughout the book, this one showing Huck standing before a fallen dead tree holding a rifle in his left hand and a shot rabbit aloft in his right. The second was a photograph of a bust of the author’s profile, done by Karl Gerhardt, a Hartford artist Twain had supported during his study in Paris for many years. In order to help Gerhardt get the neck right, Twain had a photograph taken of himself stripped to the waist (see the frontispiece to this biography). In the Gerhardt bust, Twain essentially exchanges the usual accoutrements of an author for the gaze of a Roman general whose orders may not be disobeyed.2 In a way, the trade-off is similar to Whitman’s achievement in the frontispiece to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, where he exchanged the author’s black coat and tie for the uniform of the workingman who wrote poems about such nontraditional subjects as jobs and sex. But Twain was more inhibited in his visual plunge into the vernacular, mainly because he, as well as his family, didn’t want to be confused with the underclass Huck. Traditionally, the outside narrator in southwestern humor took pains to distinguish himself from his inside or vernacular storyteller. Hence, it was prudent to juxtapose this backwoods figure in Huckleberry Finn with a classical bust of somebody suggesting Twain’s difference from his first-person narrator.
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