Apparently Twain had not told his Hartford friends, or anybody outside the family, that “Hell-hound Rogers” was now his principal financial adviser and even silent partner. Hence, when George Warner, his former Hartford neighbor and brother of Twain’s coauthor of The Gilded Age, approached Webster & Company with a manuscript by a friend that arraigned the Standard Oil Company individual by individual (very likely Henry Demarest Lloyd’s influential Wealth against the Commonwealth, published by Harper & Brothers in 1894), Twain declined the opportunity, not with any defense of the Standard Oil Company and his friend Rogers but with the excuse that his publishing company was not accepting any new manuscripts. Indeed, since the firm was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, that may well have been true. But he told Livy that what he truly wanted to tell Warner, what he “wanted to say [was]—‘The only man I care for in the world; the only man I would give a damn for; the only man who is lavishing his sweat and blood to save me & mine from starvation & shame, is a Standard Oil fiend.’ ” “ ‘If you know me,’ ” he continued, “ ‘you know whether I want the book or not.’ But I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t want any book; I wanted to get out of the publishing business & out of all business.”7
Ethically speaking, Twain had made a similar compromise when his father-in-law had been attacked in the press back in 1869 for driving up the price of coal with his monopoly of interests; the Buffalo Express, which Jervis Langdon had helped Twain purchase, fell curiously silent while criticism continued in other regional newspapers. Yet even his brother Orion, who had thrown away a political career in Nevada for the principle of teetotalism, changed his tune about the trusts when he heard what Rogers was doing for his younger brother and—by extension—himself. “I have been abusing the Standard Oil Company,” Orion readily confessed. “I did not know it was run by angels.”8
Another perhaps more indirect beneficiary of Rogers’ generosity, Samuel E. Moffett, Twain’s nephew, would offer the same point of view in his Cosmopolitan article about Rogers for the magazine’s “Captains of Industry” series in 1902. Having been a journalist for the Hearst newspapers, and now managing editor of Cosmopolitan, Moffett went on to become an editorial writer for the New York World and then for Collier’s Weekly before his life was tragically cut short in 1908, the victim of a stroke while bathing in the ocean off the New Jersey shore. His Uncle Sam had monitored his career since its beginning, and there is little doubt that he influenced Moffett’s favorable piece about Rogers in 1902. By that time the Tarbell articles had thoroughly tarnished the name of Rockefeller and many of those connected with him. “Some men who have won great success are indifferent to public opinion,” Moffett wrote. “Mr. Rogers, keen, cool, and at times grimly hard as he is, is sensitive on that side. He knows that Standard Oil methods are not popular.” Clearly measuring everyone, especially Standard Oil critics, by their financial portfolio, Moffett wrote, “You may be a person of utter financial insignificance, making less in a year than he can make in an hour, but . . . he will devote two hours of argument in an attempt to convince you that the recording angel would be wasting time in inspecting the books of the Standard Oil Company.” “The notion that the Standard Oil monopoly rests in any degree upon railroad discrimination”—favoritism in shipping charges, a central accusation against Rockefeller—“is a pure delusion,” Moffett concluded before going on to describe Rogers’ generous contributions to the New England town of his youth.9
“Inclined to keep piety and business separate,” as Moffett put it, Rogers was loyal to his friends and favorites, not only to Mark Twain but also to the seaside town of Fairhaven, directly across the harbor from the famed whaling port of New Bedford, prominent in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. He and his wife were at the time of his budding friendship with Twain in the process of giving Fairhaven a new courthouse and post office. For the opening ceremony on February 22, 1894, Rogers asked his friend whether he would accompany the family and make a few remarks. “He was as shy & diffident about it as if he were asking me to commit suicide,” Sam told Livy about ten days before the Fairhaven visit. “But said Mrs. Rogers was afraid it was asking too much of me & was sure she could never get up the courage to do it.” “Think of that!” he closed. “Why, if they should ask me to swim the Atlantic I would at least try.”10 Today, the Rogers fortune has declined, mainly because of the Great Depression of the 1930s, but Fairhaven has become a summer tourist attraction that commemorates on its website “the magnificent European-style public buildings built between 1885 and 1906 by Standard Oil Company millionaire Henry Huttleston Rogers, a native of the town.” Perhaps typical of Rogers’ sense of philanthropy, the surviving gothic edifices stand more as a monument to Henry Rogers than anything else. Andrew Carnegie, a financier equally as ruthless, left the nation hundreds of libraries, including one in Pittsburgh that helped Theodore Dreiser become a writer.
Mark Twain may have been guilty of joining the American plutocracy in the final years of his life and of becoming its clown and defender, but in 1894 he was desperate to protect his family from the encroachments and embarrassments of poverty. He worried constantly about them—about Livy, who was increasingly ill; about Susy, who was endangered by what we would today call anorexia; by Jean’s more and more obvious epilepsy. Only Clara, who had returned to Europe in November, seems to have been unmarked by the harshness of life then. Twain wasn’t about to compromise their safety. His final years, without most of them, after the productive decade of the 1880s through the composition of Pudd’nhead Wilson, suggest that his immediate family had been the heart and the soul of the man and the writer.
By the end of February 1894, it was becoming clear that, while the typesetter still held promise, Webster & Company was in deep trouble in spite of its sale of the Library of American Literature. Rogers was advising Twain to sell everything to the Century Company “on the best terms I can get,” but the publishing house was interested only in acquiring the Twain titles from the Webster list, not the others. Webster & Company’s sales were depressed, and—incredibly—Twain was starting to blame the Grant Memoirs— “that terrible book! which made money for everybody concerned but me.” (His argument in the main was that the success of the book, subsequently “insanely managed” by Hall—yet another scapegoat—had led him into debt.) “It owes me a hundred & ten thousand dollars,” he ranted to his sister Pamela. “It owes Livy about sixty thousand, & it owes banks and printers eighty-three thousand.” His only consolation was the success of Pudd’nhead Wilson, still being serialized in Century. When assured repeatedly that it was his best work since The Prince and the Pauper, he said to Livy privately, “I could have said, ‘No, sir—it don’t even begin with Joan of Arc.’ ”11 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wasn’t even on the radar screen.
Twain returned to his family in Paris in mid-March 1894, after a six-month absence, satisfied that this trip had accomplished more than the last. Yet he had to rush back to the States the very next month, marking his fourth crossing since 1891, because of the imminent bankruptcy of Webster & Company. It finally occurred on April 18, four days before he arrived. Twain and Hall were hoping that its creditors would allow them to resume business in order to pay their debts, but the Mount Morris Bank refused. Indeed, the only real sympathy came from “a stranger out in New York State” who sent Twain a dollar and planned to organize a dollar relief fund for his favorite writer (shaming and exasperating Livy). Webster & Company owed the bank alone almost thirty thousand dollars. As partial payment for what the firm owed Mrs. Clemens as the principal creditor, Rogers arranged to have all copyrights to her husband’s books transferred to her name. At one point the bank hoped to cash in on the coming success of Pudd’nhead Wilson, but Twain parried that he would have to ask the “author.” “It was confoundedly difficult at first for me to be always saying ‘Mrs. Clemens’s books,’ ‘Mrs. Clemens’s copyrights,’ ‘Mrs. Clemens’s type-setter stock,’ & so on but . . . I got the hang of it presently,” he told his wife, who
was now beginning to get a bit accustomed to the ordeal. “I was even able to say with gravity, ‘My wife has two unfinished books, but I am not able to say when they will be completed or where she will elect to publish them when they are done.’ ”12
Twain sailed for Europe again on May 9 to a summer of relative rest and relief, leaving Hall to take the blame for the Mount Morris debt (even though Twain would have to repay it because Hall had secured that particular loan in 1892 behind his back).13 It would not be until October that the other shoe would drop.
43 Broken Twigs and Found Canoes
“I’m writing a review of Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer,” he told Livy on May 16, 1894, on his way back to England, “the most idiotic book I ever saw.” It is not entirely clear why Twain decided to target the work of James Fenimore Cooper, one of his literary forefathers, but “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” became the most anthologized of all his writings. His comment to Livy that March about his expectations for Joan of Arc, after he had received so much praise for Pudd’nhead Wilson, suggests he was worried about being known, or remembered, simply as a humorist. The essay appeared in the North American Review in 1895, and it hilariously made the point that Cooper was a slovenly writer, even as it gave a lift to Twain’s credentials as a serious literary craftsman. “In one place in Deerslayer [1841], and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page,” the former printer announced in his essay, “Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115.” Some of what Twain wrote may have been edited out of the published version in the interest of space, or perhaps even as a covert slight for ridiculing one of America’s most cherished writers at the end of the nineteenth century. He told Richard Watson Gilder three years later: “The North American Review didn’t want it; they were afraid of it. I had to make them take it, at the revolver’s muzzle.”1
While living at the Players on Gramercy Park in New York City earlier in 1894, he had been keeping company with a number of established critics and journalists, some of whom thought highly of Cooper. One of these was Brander Matthews, at the time a professor of English at Columbia University. “We must be a little wary,” Twain said in his essay, “when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper’s books ‘reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention.’ As a rule, I am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews’s literary judgments and applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt.” Just before Christmas 1893, Twain had given an impromptu speech at a dinner honoring Matthews. He was grateful for his “platform training,” he told his wife, because he had not had time to memorize the speech he had written out about this friend and critic, someone who had praised Huckleberry Finn when it was first published. He observed that other speakers (he had agreed to be last) had spoken well of the guest of honor, but, he said, they had overlooked “the most notable achievement of his career—namely, that he has reconciled us to the sound of his somber & awful name—namely—Bran-der Math-thews!”
Twain enlarged on that odd but simple point, saying that “his lurid & desolating name—>BRAN-der MATH-thews! B-r-r-ran-der Math-thews! Makes you think of an imprisoned god of the Underworld muttering imprecations & maledictions. . . . The first time you hear it,” he continued, “you shrivel up & shudder; & you say to yourself that a person has no business using that kind of language when children are present. . . . And on the other hand when the veteran profane swearer finds all his ammunition damp & ineffectual from long exposure, how fresh & welcome is the dynamite in that name—B-r-r-RANder M-m-ATHthews! You can curse a man’s head off with that name if you know how & where to put the emphasis.” It was an enormous success, and no one suspected, he told Livy, that it had been merely his “bold delivery that made it seem a good speech.”2
Twain’s North American Review essay began with three epigraphs from eminent scholars and writers—one then dead, the British mystery novelist Wilkie Collins, who had stamped Cooper “the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction yet produced by America.” Brander Matthews was quoted as saying that Cooper’s woodsman Natty Bumppo was “one of the very greatest characters in fiction.” The third was Thomas R. Lounsbury of Yale, who had written on Cooper in the “American Men of Letters” series in 1882, edited by Charles Dudley Warner. Twain’s epigraph quoted Lounsbury declaring that The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer were the best of Cooper’s novels “as artistic creations.” This praise for the very kind of vernacular fiction that Twain was even then trying to get beyond with Joan of Arc may have been irksome to the writer who wasn’t yet counting on Huckleberry Finn to give him the reputation he enjoys today. “It seems to me that it was far from right,” he said of these august experts, “to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it.”
Cooper’s reputation had already suffered over the years because of lawsuits he had launched against newspapers that he thought had libeled him. He had also aroused the ire of his countrymen for criticizing the rude manners of Americans he had noticed after living, like Twain, abroad for a number of years. Moreover, as Cooper’s most recent biographer notes, his works had suffered somewhat from hasty book production resulting in sloppy copyediting and faulty proofreading.3 Yet none of these facts overrides the truth about Cooper’s redundancy as a storyteller. Twain had accused Cooper, among other things, of writing awkward and superfluous sentences. But his most serious charge was that Cooper’s fiction was unrealistic, or, one might say, “romantic” in Twain’s age of Howellsian realism. Today it might be likened to chastising a Turner Classic for lacking realism and subtlety, but the target of Twain’s satire also included Cooper’s didacticism in the Leatherstocking novels. Even in The Deerslayer, which contains more forest adventure than The Pioneers (1823) or The Prairie (1827), we find the embedded political theory that distracts from the narrative, even while it makes Cooper our most important historical novelist in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott. The argument that underlies the extended adventures of Natty Bumppo (another name for “Deerslayer” in the series) is that European civilization with its laws and traditions has come to the wilderness, and, in spite of all of Nature’s goodness, law must inexorably dominate the wilderness.
Yet in these novels the wilderness is ultimately respected. Cooper may have been our first environmentalist writer. Unlike his fellow New Yorker Walt Whitman, who in “Song of the Redwood Tree” celebrated the death of the giant Sequoias as part of the western progress of democracy, Cooper tempered his faith in the westward movement of civilization with a respect for nature’s virginal beauty. Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers, for example, is convicted of shooting a deer out of season, even though he has a greater respect for nature than most and has also recently, through his wilderness skills, saved the life of the daughter of the very judge who sentences him. Although Cooper, unlike William Gilmore Simms, his southern counterpart, did not know Indians firsthand, he did extensive historical research. But to Twain, who grew up on another frontier only a few hundred miles from hostile Indians and who did not much like them, the picture that Cooper drew—whether friendly or hostile—was irresponsibly romantic and, in a word, false.
Cooper’s characters are clearly more emblematic than realistic, for he was often using them to make a political argument in his novels. The Deerslayer opens with a long discussion between Hurry Harry and the young protagonist, still uninitiated in actual combat with the red man, as to what constitutes honorable behavior in time of war. Twain also chose the weakest titles in the Leatherstocking saga to attack, for while The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder were cast in the earliest period of the overall chronology, they were written last, in the 1840s, when Cooper, in need of money, was persuaded to add them to the other three novels already in the series. No detail, it seems to the modern reader, was too small or unworthy of discussion in The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder. Cooper was pretty much defenseless in the face of Twain’s minor tour de force, whose hilarious wit to this day
continues to have a bad effect on his reputation. Yet the theme of these stories—the clash between nature and civilization, the individual and the state—was very similar to what Twain himself pursued in his magnum opus. Cooper’s Daniel Boone–like hero—whom Twain in his essays mockingly calls “Deerslayer-HawkeyeLong-Rifle-Leatherstocking-Pathfinder-Bumppo”—is surely one of the literary ancestors of Huckleberry Finn. Both possess an inborn sense of moral justice in society and yet prefer the innocence and purity of that natural utopia beyond civilization—the wilderness forest in Cooper’s case and the river in Twain’s. Both seek its isolation. Both have sidekicks who are racial minorities in the societies from which they seek to escape. For Cooper’s hero the sidekick is Chingachgook (pronounced “Chicago” in Twain’s essay on Cooper) and for Twain it is “the nigger Jim” (miscalled “Nigger Jim” in too many commentaries of the last century, the misnomer actually tracing back to the publicity for the Twain-Cable tour).
But in terms of realistic plot and detail, Twain was almost as fanciful as Cooper in the sense that both the Leatherstocking Tales and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are romances in which many of the crucial details require the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief, if not outright credulity. In saying that Cooper’s series ought to have been called the “Broken Twig Series,” Twain joked that Cooper “prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around.” Yet how many times does Huck or someone else in Twain’s Mississippi Valley novels magically come upon a canoe or a raft when he needs one? By Twain’s standards, we might call his river fiction “The Found Canoe Series.” Indeed, the very idea that an adolescent redneck brought up to believe that slavery was biblically ordained would ever go against the rules and become a hated abolitionist is, in and of itself, helplessly romantic. This is not to say that the gritty scene in which Huck decides to “go to hell” for helping Jim escape does not rise on its own terms to realism.
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