Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Something else snapped within. Mark Twain finally submitted to the tragedy behind all the jokes he had been making about what he would ultimately term “the Creator’s pet” in Letters from the Earth, his final work and a scathing satire on the human condition written in the year prior to his death. When it was finally published with Clara’s consent in 1962, coinciding with the agreement between the writer’s surviving daughter and the University of California Press for a limited edition of his papers, a project that continues today, it not only reinvigorated interest in Mark Twain but re-alerted his reading public to his serious side.10 Yet it was not in 1909 but in the years during which he wrote his masterpiece that he realized that there was no more territory to “light out” for—merely the “damned human race” of cosmic microbes. Mark Twain tried several times to get Huck back to the boyland where he might make the right choice, but all his sequels to that world failed because the escape out west or into space or back into antebellum Hannibal had already been closed off.

  36 Publishing Grant

  “It had never been my intention,” Mark Twain recalled in his 1906 autobiographical dictation, “to publish any body’s books but my own.” He was referring to the publication of Grant’s Memoirs and his own Huckleberry Finn by Webster & Company, formed after his break with Osgood & Company in 1884. James Osgood had failed miserably, in Twain’s opinion, in his subscription sale of Life on the Mississippi, and he didn’t want to go back to the American Publishing Company with his sequel to Tom Sawyer because that “company had been robbing me for years and building theological factories out of the proceeds.”1 But on the evening of November 19, 1884, following his joint appearance with Cable at Chickering Hall in New York City, he decided that he wanted his publishing company to get the contract for Grant’s memoirs. He claimed he had heard strangers coming out of the hall mention Grant’s intention to publish them through the Century Company, but in fact he had actually learned of the plan from the editor of Century magazine, Richard Watson Gilder, who had commissioned four of Grant’s Civil War essays for his journal.

  Twain’s mood the day of his visit to the Grant residence at 3 East 66th Street on the east side of the newly constructed Central Park may have been a bit sour. As would happen more than once during his 1884–85 tour with the sentimental Cable, his performance had, in the press, been unfavorably compared to Cable’s. According to the New York Times of November 19, “Mr. Cable was humorous, pathetic, weird, grotesque, tender, and melodramatic by turns, while Mr. Clemens confined his efforts to the ridicule of such ridiculous matters as aged colored gentlemen, the German language, and himself.” It might as well have been Grant instead of Cable who upstaged him, for he had been mildly obsessed with the general ever since his own rather embarrassingly brief military service in 1861, the near-encounter with Grant in Missouri he would soon exaggerate in his own Civil War essay, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” U. S—“Unconditional Surrender”—Grant had always loomed in Twain’s conscience as a rebuke to his boyish behavior as a Marion Ranger. Now he could perhaps assuage his guilt and win over the conquering general, who was nearly broke because of his fated partnership with Ferdinand Ward, the “young Napoleon of finance” who had fled the country to avoid prosecution for schemes in which he pledged the same security for several different bank loans. Grant was also battling cancer at the base of his tongue. Had he not procrastinated when he first felt the awful pain in his throat, he might have survived. Even in those relatively dark ages of medical science, it was an ailment that had been successfully treated with surgery. Yet by the time his overly delicate and euphemistic physicians reluctantly used the word “cancer,” it was too late. The growth had invaded the surrounding cells that lined the soft palate.

  Now the cigar-smoking Twain sat before the ailing Grant and one of his sons, Fred (a former soldier who would die of the same disease in 1912 at the same age), and belittled the Century offer in no uncertain terms. Twain was probably as blindly confident about the success of Grant’s memoirs as he had been about so many earlier business deals that had lost him thousands of dollars. Indeed, here sat two men who were remarkably similar: both had grown up poor with the burning desire to become rich. Mark Twain had succeeded by his writing, not his investments thus far, but neither had anything in the investment portfolio of Ulysses S Grant ever come to full bloom. Denied the Republican nomination for a run at a third term as president in 1876, he had since failed to make (and keep) enough money to become financially independent. This shortcoming contrasted sharply with the success of his well-heeled and highly placed friends, many of whom had doubtless benefited through their relationship with the conquering general of the War Between the States and two-term president of those reunited states. Even his home on East 66th Street had been purchased with funds collected by those prominent friends. “Any number of them,” as biographer William S. McFeely observes, “could have taken Grant into their firms, but none of them did.” Now after the failure of his heavy investment in the Mexican Southern Railroad and the financial loss as well as taint of the scandal from his “silent” partnership in the failed Grant & Ward firm (that would be Buck Grant, another son, christened Ulysses S, Jr., and Ferdinand Ward), the senior Grant was nearly destitute, the object of pity, and—worst of all—possibly implicated in some of Ward’s financial trickery. An editorial in the New York World asked in its headline, “Is Grant Guilty?” The nation at large merely felt sorry for its hero and wanted him left alone.2

  Twain never doubted the general’s impeccable character and towering greatness, not only as a public figure but also as a writer. He had urged Grant to write his memoirs long before the Century Company commissioned the essays that led to its offer of a book contract. Since his triumphant “fetching” of the silent and stony-faced Civil War icon in 1879 in Chicago (see chapter 8), Twain had come during their subsequent meetings to appreciate Grant as “a fluent and able talker—with a large sense of humor, and a most rare gift of compacting meaty things into phrases of stunning felicity.”3 He was confident that the commanding general’s memoirs would outsell many times over those of William Tecumseh Sherman, published nine years earlier. Notably, his prescience in this case was rooted in his intuition and experience with language, not with investing. And Grant, as it turned out, more than fulfilled Twain’s expectations—even proved to be a much better writer than his intended ghostwriter and former member of his military staff, Adam Badeau, already the author of a three-volume history of Grant’s military career (1882) and another on Grant’s life since the war. While Grant was writing his book, it was often asserted in the press that Badeau was doing it for him, a claim Webster & Company strongly, and correctly, denied.

  A few days after his visit with Grant in the fall of 1884, Twain described the experience to his daughter Susy. General Lew Wallace, author of the popular Ben Hur (1880), was present. He, too, was contributing to the Century magazine’s series on the Civil War. “Mrs. Grant got up & stood between Gen Wallace & me,” Twain bragged to the teenager, who was then beginning a biography of her father. Mrs. Grant then said, “ ‘There, there’s many a woman in this land that would like to be in my place & be able to tell her children that she had stood once elbow to elbow between two such great authors as Mark Twain & General Wallace.’ ” “We all laughed,” Twain continued and, more to the point, told Susy that he took the compliment as an opportunity to encourage Grant to finish his memoir. “Don’t look so cowed, General,” he teased him. “You have written a book, too, & when it is published you can hold up your head & let on to be a person of consequence yourself.”4

  No doubt, Twain “fetched” the general as he had in Chicago, but he now dared him to place his literary mind on the printed page. Following the success of his Century articles at a mere five hundred dollars apiece (“easily worth ten thousand dollars apiece,” Twain guessed after the first one had “lifted the Century’s subscription list from a hundred thousand to two hundred and twenty thousand
”), the Century Company had offered Grant a standard contract of a 10 percent royalty on their list price. It based its terms on Sherman’s success with his memoirs, which sold between 200,000 and 300,000 copies. “Strike out the ten percent from the Century offer,” Twain suggested to Grant, “and put twenty per cent in its place. Better still, put seventy-five percent of the net returns in its place.” Grant demurred, saying that no company would pay him that much, no matter how great his military reputation. Twain told him that there wasn’t a reputable publisher in America who would not be more than glad to pay the terms he named. That included, he coyly suggested, the American Publishing Company, which along with several other presses eventually did offer much more than the Century Company’s initial bid.5 We should keep in mind that this was the Gilded Age, the term originating in part with Twain and Warner to describe a time when moguls like Carnegie and Rockefeller were amassing huge fortunes. Why not writers as well? The ongoing success of Huckleberry Finn underscored the possibility.

  At a second meeting at Grant’s house, Twain dropped all pretense of being neutral and made his own offer for the memoirs. Sensing the deep popular appeal of Grant’s book, he knew that a well-run subscription house could sell many more copies and pay much more per copy than a trade press could, by hawking the prospectus in the hinterlands where so many military veterans (and potential readers) resided. He suspected that the American Publishing Company would jump at the deal on the very terms he proposed to Grant, but his mention of his former publisher was clearly a ploy to plant the idea of subscription publishing in Grant’s mind even as he was about to sign with the Century Company. Once this alternative was broached, Clemens knew that he would be in the running with his own subscription house. It would take some time before the general decided, first to reject the Century Company’s initial offer, then to turn down all other offers to the exclusion of the one from Charles L. Webster & Company. Its namesake, Twain’s hardworking “nephew-in-law,” would follow up on the offer, making calls on Grant while Twain continued the lecture tour with Cable.6 Grant signed their contract in late February 1885 and spent the rest of his life—literally—completing his memoirs, published in two volumes, the first of which appeared at the end of 1885, nearly six months after his death. Volume 2 was issued in the winter of 1886.

  Webster & Company had acquired a sure thing because Grant’s writing of his memoirs was well under way by February. Yet as Twain was leaving the Grant residence soon after the signing of the contract, Fred Grant “stunned” him by confiding that his father’s physicians had been holding back on the general’s true medical condition. “In fact they considered him to be under a sentence of death and that he would not likely to live more than a fortnight or three weeks longer.”7 He had completed about half of the second volume, or 900 of the eventual total of 1,232 printed pages in both volumes. Yet he also had to revise both volumes and check his facts against other military accounts—all of this under the threat of a premature demise, one the general surely sensed as his throat tightened and he was forced to carry on all communications with penciled notes.

  News of the general’s failing health began to fill the nation’s newspapers that spring and summer. The spurned Century Company, which had commissioned and publicly advertised his four Civil War articles, had yet to receive the last one. That commitment was ultimately finessed by dividing the third twenty-thousand-word essay on the Battle of Vicksburg into two articles, thus satisfying the contract.8

  There were other rather painful distractions. As Webster & Company celebrated the advance subscription sales of the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (allegedly at one hundred thousand sets by the end of May and swiftly climbing), press reports began to grumble about Twain’s having taken unfair advantage of the Century Company in securing the Grant contract with inside information through his association with the Century editors, Richard and Joseph Gilder. Jeanette Gilder, whose literary vision was as progressive as that of her brothers (she had commissioned a series of “out-door sketches” from Walt Whitman for the Critic in 1881), furnished a fairer account to the Boston Herald. This encouraged Twain on July 6 to ask the newspaper for a special favor: that it show him, before printing, any malicious claims similar to what had already appeared in the New York Advertiser. “I will correct them, & at the same time will leave untouched all statements about me which are true, howsoever damaging they may be.”9

  Still, the rumors of Twain’s alleged exploitation persisted and even expanded into a tale in which the wealthy humorist had taken direct advantage of the dying and impoverished general. As the end approached, Twain could do nothing but bite his tongue and keep silent (and later commit his defense to his autobiography). He told the sculptor Karl Gerhardt, who had won the commission from the Grant family to do the general’s death mask, that he wanted to contribute to the fund to cover the artist’s work. He would give five hundred dollars, but his name, he told Gerhardt, “need not to go on the subscription list and so furnish the shabbier half of the world a chance to say General Grant’s publisher is craftily trying to advertise himself.” “I’m like Brer Rabbit,” he told his old friend Ned House only days before the general’s death, “I ‘ain’t sayin’ noth’n.’ . . . Everybody thinks I sneaked in & got the book by underhand processes: whereas I merely sneaked in & told the General what terms to require of the Century people.”10

  Grant was fading fast, but he was as intractable and resistant in the face of death as he had been in the face of war. In fact, what evidently kept him going was the work on the memoirs. “The last time I saw Gen. Grant alive,” Twain recalled a decade later, “was a few days before his death. He knew that his end was very near. He was sitting in his chair, fully dressed; his book was finished, and he was putting one or two finishing touches to it with his pencil—the last work he was ever to do.”11 Reduced in circumstances and humiliated by the Ward scandal, he had written not only to save his wife and family from financial ruin but to relive the days of his absolute glory as a soldier and military leader. He wrote with the same spontaneity and clarity that had dictated his military plans and orders during the war. Now the world would soon know that this natural warrior was also a gifted writer. In the preface to the Personal Memoirs, Grant euphemistically called his literary labor “a pleasant pastime.” But he also revealed that he wrote the second half of volume 2 after “I had reason to suppose I was in a critical condition of health.” This preface was dated July 1, and Grant died on July 23, 1885. Its coolness and reserved tone barely obscured the pent-up passion of the so-called “Silent Man,” or “the Sphynx,” as Twain called him in 1895.12

  The obtaining of Grant’s memoirs may have been, as Twain said, an afterthought, but its success unfortunately led Webster & Company to believe, especially after the similar success of Huckleberry Finn, that anything it touched would turn to gold. Both Huckleberry Finn and Grant’s Memoirs were books that circumvented the troubling aspects of the contemporary post-Reconstruction era in American history and returned to a time when the issues were more clear-cut: Twain’s novel cast back to the antebellum era of slavery, avoiding the confusing terrain of post-slavery race relations in the United States, and Grant’s memoirs invoked the Civil War itself, reinscribing Grant as a war hero and diverting attention from his subsequent political failures. The American reading public clearly was seeking that kind of retreat, and this enthusiasm led Webster & Company to publish at least three more military memoirs, which didn’t sell that robustly, especially the posthumous recollections of General Philip Sheridan in 1888. All this was leading down the road to ruin, but neither Twain nor his partner, Charles L. Webster, at this point had any doubts about the company’s success. Among the better sellers were books by Mark Twain himself—reissues of The Prince and the Pauper in 1885 and 1887;13 The Stolen White Elephant and Other Stories in 1888; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889; a pamphlet entitled Facts for Mark Twain’s Memory Builder (part of Twain’s financially unsuccessful board
game), a reprint of Life on the Mississippi, and a cheap edition of Huckleberry Finn in 1892;14 The American Claimant, Merry Tales (containing “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”), and a cheap reprint of The Prince and the Pauper, also in 1892; The £1,000,000 Bank-note and Other New Stories in 1893; and—just before the declaration of bankruptcy—Tom Sawyer Abroad in 1894. Charles L. Webster & Company did not survive long enough to publish The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), which would take Twain back to the American Publishing Company.

  37 Brooding in King Arthur’s Court

  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court represents the first and last time Mark Twain published in a literary work the kind of satiric diatribe that would typify the tenor of his posthumous publications. The English reaction to it was unsmiling disapproval. As the reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette said, Mark Twain might as well have burlesqued the Sermon on the Mount. His trifling with Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the very first prose masterpiece in English following the Middle Ages and a national romance embodying the core ideals of British and Western civilization, was simply more than most English readers could take. This marvelous romance had set the pattern for such English classics as Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene and, more recently, had inspired poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King. The story—or stories, as twentieth-century scholars have discovered—of Morte Darthur sees the idea of manhood, as evoked by King Arthur’s Round Table, as part of the knighthood of Christianity. The Pall Mall Gazette added that Twain’s ridicule of the Quest for the Holy Grail (the chalice of the Last Supper) was simply a vulgar American attack on the central symbol “of the individual effort to arrive at perfection in personal life, to attain high, unselfish, irreproachable conduct.”1