Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  In the 1890s, when Charles L. Webster & Company was also on the wane, it issued reprints of five of Henry George’s economic and social screeds, including his controversial Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879. George had argued for a “Single Tax” on unused land owned by the rich as a remedy for the country’s social and economic ills. At the same time Twain was entertaining radical ideas and publishing radical books, he was also happy in the knowledge that his Paige typesetter wouldn’t have to join a printer’s union. When in 1887 his own brother, now permanently unemployed and on a regular monthly stipend from Sam, tried to assist a journalist working on an article about his famous brother, his younger brother flatly refused him permission to make public any aspect of his very guarded private life, saying: “I have never yet allowed an interviewer or biographer-sketcher to get out of me any circumstance of my history which I thought might be worth putting some day into my autobiography.”3 He was apparently still laboring under the illusion that everything he touched would turn to gold.

  Orion was one of the American “roughs” who had never received a college education. Twain valued this kind of American over the dyspeptic college graduate who never got his hands dirty. Though Orion would prove the exception to Twain’s notion of a “divine average” of American labor, the older brother had the same aspiration for getting rich as an inventor that Sam, another non–college graduate, harbored. James W. Paige, the inventor in whom Twain still placed all his confidence, also had no university training. In a February 1887 talk before the Monday Evening Club on “Machine Culture,” one applauded by Howells when he read the text, Twain reminded his audience that most of the inventions of the nineteenth century had not been the work of “college-bred men.” “What great births you have witnessed!” he told Walt Whitman, another school dropout and skeptic of higher education, on his seventieth birthday. “The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photogravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine.”4 Twain believed, as he has his advocate of labor (who “got his education in a printing office”) say in chapter 10 of The American Claimant, that the nineteenth century was “the only century worth living in since time itself was invented.” It was the era, at least during the last part of the century, when monarchies began to weaken and the common man started to rise.

  Twain had grown up in the era of the American lyceum movement, in which many in the working class could overcome a lack of formal education by studying a subject and delivering a lecture on it to their peers. Teaching a subject, they joyfully discovered, was the most effective way of mastering it. Such lyceum gatherings served as the country’s first “adult education.” Here one could raise himself up by dint of arduous study after a hard day’s work in the factory or shop. By Twain’s adulthood after the war, those who had succeeded without college were beginning to mix with college-bred men. After hearing the printer in his remarks outclass those of the Harvard-educated James Russell Lowell before the Senate Committee on Patents in 1886, Twain thought that the time for the self-educated working man had arrived. Yet as the decade progressed and his Connecticut Yankee failed to erase the ideology of class from Camelot, Twain ultimately lost faith in this “divine average.” Twain’s egalitarianism—at least with regard to the working class—never got beyond the theoretical.5

  The American Claimant was originally serialized in the New York Sun between January 3 and March 27, 1892, marking the first time Clemens had ever serialized a complete work. Its twenty-five brief chapters were subsequently published by Webster & Company with illustrations by Dan Beard, now his favorite illustrator. The novel, usually dismissed as a farce, has rarely been reprinted except as part of uniform editions. It ought to be featured in its own edition, because it is full of Mark Twain’s wit (in one scene a sham painter is said to have “libeled the sea”), and it most immediately anticipates Pudd’nhead Wilson with regard to lost identities. The American Claimant also works out Twain’s modified criticism of aristocracies. It is in part the story of Colonel Mulberry Sellers, who becomes the “American claimant” to the House of Rossmore in England upon the death of Simon Lathers (adapted from the name of Twain’s mother’s cousin Jesse Leathers, who had urged Clemens to finance an inquiry into the Lampton genealogy leading back to the earl of Durham). Twain makes the Colonel, now fifteen years older, almost as poor as he had depicted him in The Gilded Age, and Washington Hawkins remains loosely based on the hapless Orion.

  Unlike previous claimants in the fiction of Mark Twain, this one is not lying. As the true earl of Rossmore tells his son the Viscount Berkeley back in England, the authentic earl had come to America several generations earlier and “disappeared somewhere in the wilds of Virginia, got married, and began to breed savages for the Claimant market.” His disappearance allowed his younger brother to quietly assume his title back home. The current heir Berkeley, however, bristles with anti-royal propaganda and decides to go to America to surrender his title to the Sellers family. Once there, however, he is declared dead in a hotel fire and takes the opportunity to shake off his aristocratic identity. The reality of having neither friends nor money in a new country soon becomes clear: he finds himself penniless and without any means of support. When, out of desperation, he asserts his noble rank at a typically austere and noisy boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., he is promptly ridiculed. Like the prince in The Prince and the Pauper, he finds himself out in the cold; there is even a comrade named Barrow who facetiously accepts his claims the way Miles Hendon does the claims of the prince in The Prince and the Pauper. Taking the name of Tracy, Berkeley subsequently becomes an artist of cheap chromos and falls in love with Sally Sellers, the Colonel’s daughter. Although once a believer in the family quest, she has thrown off all her father’s pretensions to royalty and, in a humorous twist, now fears that Tracy loves her only because he believes in her social rank. Upon hearing of his son’s impending engagement to an American woman, Berkeley’s father comes to America to reestablish his son’s identity. He hopes to break up the love match with the family of the American claimants, but he is immediately charmed by his future daughter-in-law, and thus the aristocratic family from both sides of the Atlantic is brought together again through the marriage of Berkeley to Sally.

  In the book’s farcical subplot the Colonel and Hawkins originally think that Berkeley is a rematerialized spirit from the hotel fire and fear that Sally has fallen in love with a ghost. At one point, Hawkins tries to discourage her infatuation by persuading her that her lover is a criminal by the name of S. M. Snodgrass, the son of a mad scientist who named all his children after dread diseases. “S. M,” we soon learn, stands for spinal meningitis—ironically, a disease that would five years later visit Sam Clemens’s family and change it forever. For now, he was changing politically, having lost completely the romantic fancy of Huckleberry Finn and still recovering from Hank’s failed experiment with the human race in A Connecticut Yankee. In chapter 22 of The American Claimant, Berkeley says good-bye to his youthful objections to nobility. He is ready to return home to England and resume “his position and be content with it and thankful for it for the future, leaving further experiment, of a missionary sort, to other younger people needing the chastening and quelling persuasions of experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to health.” Berkeley clearly spoke at this juncture for Mark Twain, who was now content, as we have noted, to be a theoretical socialist and a practical capitalist.

  In June 1888 Twain could not attend the commencement at Yale University to receive an honorary master of arts, but he did use the occasion to speak up for his own “labor union,” the fraternity of humorists. He was particularly gratified at this time to receive the degree, he wrote the school’s president, because the “late Matthew Arnold [had] sharply rebuked the guild of American ‘funny men’ in his latest literary delivery.”6 Twain’s sense of the d
ivide between college-bred individuals and non–college graduates extended into the realm of literature. He was a blue-collar writer, a humorist, who had written an American classic but barely knew it. “I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies,” he told a friend, “who has ever been given a degree by any College in any age of the world, as far as I know.”7

  He told Orion, who still lived in Keokuk with his wife, Mollie, and his mother, now suffering dementia in the final years of her long life, that he probably should have made the effort to go to New Haven. But life then seemed overwhelming. With his mother failing, Sam planned a visit to Keokuk in the spring of 1888, but it was canceled because of another family illness, terminal as it turned out, that of Theodore Crane, the husband of Livy’s adopted sister, Sue. Sam’s mother-in-law was also approaching the end of a long life, though she was clearheaded to the last—with an evolving sense of humor that eventually erased her initial sense of shock at her son-in-law from the West. “Mother dear,” he told her the day after his fifty-third birthday: “Thank you ever so much for my end of that check; I shall buy something nice & warm with it—whisky, or something like that.”8

  The following year he reached another hallmark when his long friendship with Edward House came to an end through an apparent misunderstanding over who had his authorization to dramatize The Prince and the Pauper. Its production in the winter of 1889–90, adapted for the stage by Abby Sage Richardson and produced by Daniel Frohman, who had instigated Richardson’s agreement with Twain, led House to file an injunction, claiming that Twain had promised him the right to dramatize the play. Ironically, the only “play” from the works of Mark Twain to survive him (aside from the recent production of Is He Dead? discussed in chapter 47) was The Prince and the Pauper, though not this particular version, which he hated.9 He pretended to remain undisturbed by the ugly publicity over House’s claims, which were rehearsed in the New York Times. Clearly favoring House in reporting on the litigation, the Times contrasted Twain’s personal wealth with House’s relative penury. It reported on February 26 that House claimed Twain had not only asked him to dramatize the play but also reasserted their agreement the previous December, offering him between one-half and two-thirds of the proceeds from the production. Twain later explained that he had tried his “level best” to persuade House to dramatize the play, but that House didn’t think it would be profitable. Years before, House had gone to Japan as a music and drama critic for the Tribune and had become an English professor at the University of Tokyo. There he had adopted a young divorcée named Koto, ostensibly to become her foster parent and protector. He brought her to the United States in the mid-1880s and made himself an unwelcome guest in the homes of Twain and his Hartford neighbors. By this time, he was crippled with gout, but financially sustained by a generous pension from the Japanese government as well as royalties from his librettos for comic operas. House returned to Japan in 1892, where he lived as an invalid cared for by Koto until his death in 1901. Twain ultimately blamed him for his 1873 falling out with Tribune editor Whitelaw Reid, who had refused to allow House to review The Gilded Age.10

  Although the suit against Twain was ultimately dismissed, the House affair left its scars because of all the attention the press had given the proceedings. The Fourth Estate had emphasized the plaintiff’s disabled state. Readers may well have been reminded of the claims a few years back that Twain had exploited his friendship with the late General Grant. And it was only one of a dozen or more distractions he faced at the close of the decade. “The machine is finished,” he told his wife on New Year’s Eve 1888, but the saga of the Paige typesetter in fact was far from over. He didn’t even have time for a young writer named Hamlin Garland, who would publish his classic of prairie realism, Main-Travelled Roads, in 1891. An evolving naturalist himself, Twain clung to the realist tradition at least in his literary friendships. “I am heels over head in work and cannot possibly spare time for giving the subject you speak of the proper thought,” he told Garland in the winter of 1889. At home his wife became afflicted with a series of minor health problems as well as the first signs of a weak heart that marked the beginning of her downward spiral of more than a decade. That spring she contracted conjunctivitis, or “pink eye,” which, before the availability of antibiotics, lasted well into the summer.11 Twain himself suffered from severe bouts of rheumatism. The Clemens family was by then back to its seasonal retreat outside Elmira, but Crane’s looming death, occurring on July 3, dispelled any sense of relief from the daily grind of life. His passing would mark the end of all but one of their summers at Elmira.

  Susy entered Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia in the fall of 1890. Sam’s firstborn daughter, she was probably his favorite, especially since she showed early signs of authorship in beginning her father’s biography. During the summer before her entry into college, he praised a sample of her writing, saying, “I knew you could write, if you would take the pains.” In looks, unlike her sisters, she favored her father, especially in the mysterious and distant appearance of their eyes. Like her sisters, she was an attractive young woman, ethereally Victorian in her bearing but also brightly modern. Susy remained at Bryn Mawr only one academic year, and at least one biographer has speculated that her parents removed her from the school because of a lesbian relationship she had developed with another student, Louise Brownell. The letters Susy wrote her from Europe are intensely affectionate, though also typical of nineteenth-century terms of endearment between young female adults. Signing herself “Olivia,” she told Louise a few months after leaving college, “My darling I do love you so and I feel so separated from you.” We will probably never know the true reason for her early departure from Bryn Mawr, but Karen Lystra has speculated that it was to help out the family financially.12

  Evidently, Susy enjoyed the academic work at the school, an institution for which she had to take an extra exam to gain admission since she had originally intended on going to Smith. But she didn’t like the dormitory food or, if her mother is to be believed, the permissible late hours. In a letter to a friend apparently considering Bryn Mawr for her daughter, Olivia Clemens wrote at the beginning of 1891 that Susy suffered from homesickness as well as a lack of sleep in rooms in which the other girls “sit up too late.” Twain was “homesick,” too, for Susy and sought out excuses to visit her at college. A classmate, Evangeline Walker Andrews, described Twain’s eldest daughter as emotional and high-strung.13

  During one of his visits to Bryn Mawr, he put on a performance for the students and perversely included a ghost story called “The Golden Arm” after his daughter had begged him not to tell it. She had first heard him read the story in public at Vassar when she was thirteen and objected to its startling close, which made the audience jump as “one man.” Susy may also have been embarrassed because the story had to be told in black vernacular. As soon as he began to recite it, as her classmate recalled, “Olivia [Susy] quietly fled up the aisle, I following.” She went into an open classroom and “flung herself down and with her head on a desk wept aloud! . . . There was nothing to do or to say, no comfort that I could give her. . . . The applause was thunderous and people began to pour out of the Chapel. Finally, Mr. Clemens appeared and seeing Olivia in the classroom, he rushed in, and in a moment he had her in his arms trying to comfort her.” When she protested the telling of the story and asked him why he persisted, he responded that he couldn’t think of another story to tell, only of her voice saying not to tell the story.14 Twain’s emotional ties with his first daughter remain something of a mystery—even in this age of armchair psychoanalysis.

  Clara, two years younger than Susy, was apparently the most stable of the Clemens girls. She was not interested in going to college, because her talents were already focused on music. She had begun taking lessons twice a week from a student of Liszt in New York City. The youngest child, Jean had a major interest in the care of animals, especially horses; she seemed perfectly normal until she reached the age of te
n in 1890. That year her parents noticed a “sudden and unaccountable change” in her personality. It was the first sign of epilepsy, a disease not medically diagnosed until 1896 and one not fully understood in Jean’s lifetime.15

  With the arrival of the new decade, Twain pretty much found himself with his hands both full and empty. The “machine” was eternally not ready for investors’ inspection. His play was an artistic embarrassment and its controversial origin a public relations nightmare. His wife began to suffer more serious health problems, and both his mother and his mother-in-law died in 1890. Livy lost her treasured mother, and Sam his “first and closest friend.” The family thought of going abroad. With the typesetter and the publishing firm draining his income as well as Livy’s inheritance, Twain decided to close up the Hartford house and reside for six months or more in Europe, where it was cheaper for them to live. By now his dreams of eventual typesetter wealth had begun to flicker.