Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Richards and his wife tremble in anticipation of having their envelope opened last, but Burgess mercifully stops at eighteen and later tells them that he was doing so to return a favor. Years before, Burgess had been accused of an unidentified offense, and Richards warned him just before his fellow citizens were about to ride him out of town on a rail. Actually, Richards had information to clear Burgess of the supposed crime, but he never came forward to save the clergyman’s reputation. (Burgess eventually returned to the town but never recovered his congregation.) Richards has another skeleton in his closet. When the money first appeared, it was assumed that the Good Samaritan who aided the stranger was Barclay Goodson, by then deceased. A stand-in for Twain in his late cynicism, Goodson had lost a love match and remained a bachelor: “By and by [he] became a soured one and a frank despiser of the human species.” All during his time in Vienna and afterward, Twain, who had lost a very special loved one in 1896, had ranted in letters to Howells and others about the worthlessness of the human race.

  But, with Richards as a “friend,” Goodson needed no enemies. When the object of Goodson’s love died, Richards spread a rumor that the woman “carried a spoonful of negro blood in her veins.” As a result of his guilty conscience, at least with regard to Burgess, Richards and his wife fear that the clergyman has somehow laid a trap for them, and both eventually pine away into their graves. No one ever is able to utter the full words of the stranger, who finally reveals that the entire affair has been a scheme to ruin the town’s undeserved reputation for honesty. Appropriately, when the full statement that Goodson was alleged to have made to the stranger is revealed, we find that it advised him to reform or “you will die and go to hell or Hadleyburg—TRY AND MAKE IT THE FORMER.”

  Harper’s Monthly paid Twain two thousand dollars for the story, which first appeared in its December 1899 issue. When he informed Rogers, who was now making more and more money for him through investments, he added that he was slightly puzzled that the magazine took the story, because “it had a sort of profane touch in the tail of it.”9 He was referring to the logo at the end of the story that quoted and distorted a line from the Lord’s Prayer (“Lead us not into temptation”), but he also may have been hinting that, in publishing this story, he had in effect published the first and only version of “The Mysterious Stranger” that would see print during his lifetime, as it turned out. Hadleyburg’s “foreigner” performs no magic, but he does maintain the mysterious stranger’s same low opinion of the human race.

  After a summer in Kaltenleutgeben, a dozen miles outside Vienna, the Clemens family rented quarters in a newer and more luxurious hotel for the following year. The Krantz, he told Rogers that summer, was “a kind of splendid Waldorf” and offered a parlor, dining room, a study, and four bedrooms at around $560 a month.10 That fall he took another run at the story he was trying to tell in “The Mysterious Stranger.” This time he shifted the action back to Hannibal and changed the point of view to the omniscient third person, producing another fragment of sixteen thousand words. In this version, he returned to Hannibal’s “Schoolhouse Hill,” where his schoolmates lost their footing on the ice and “went skimming down the hill.” In this version, Satan’s nephew, renamed 44, appears at the school one day to perform miracles and learn things in mere seconds. More and more, it appears, Twain was becoming confined to the time of his youth, which had in previous retrospective writings seemed relatively carefree. Now, though, it was also susceptible to evil in the world. The six chapters are far inferior to either “The Chronicle of Young Satan” or “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” as Twain recycled incidents from the first fragment, mixed them with items from other works such as “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” and even included a cameo appearance by his dead brother Orion, who “changed his principles with the moon, his politics with the weather, and his religion with his shirt.”11 (Even in death, it appears, Orion continued as the loving target of his brother’s sense of humor.)

  “You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived,” Howells had told his friend as Twain settled into Vienna to write these serious stories seething with anger toward God, “and there is no use saying anything else.”12On the face of it, Howells’s qualification (“of your sort”) suggests the condescension that most Victorian era writers used when they praised humorists. The same attitude appears to color slightly his memoir My Mark Twain (1912). Yet humor was Twain’s most important tool in becoming one of the greatest writers of American literature. “Against the assault of Laughter,” Little Satan tells the boys in “Chronicle,” “nothing can stand.”13Mark Twain was at the top of his form when he used humor to expose hypocrisy and pretense. There is, for example, hardly any more moving condemnation of slavery than that found in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where its author is a magician who contrasts illusion and reality to reveal the stark truth about humanity. And there is no more original condemnation of the taboo on miscegenation than that found in Pudd’nhead Wilson, where practically all the principal characters are “white” but legally black. In “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” nobody except Goodson and Jack Halliday is anything but ludicrous in his mendacity, and these two exceptions have developed into brooding pessimists. The only defense against becoming a cynic in Twain’s world, it appears, is self-delusion and egoism.

  Another project that occupied him while in Vienna was an edition of his collected works, growing to twenty-three volumes by 1903, issued by the American Publishing Company under the direction of Frank Bliss. Twain told Howells, “He is going to make a very handsome edition out of that Uniform, very; and moreover, he is working away with an energy which reminds me of his sainted father, who is now in hell.” Frank Bliss wouldn’t let go of the company’s hold on Twain’s earlier books. He and Harper’s—before its bankruptcy (and immediate reorganization) at the end of the century—had been going back and forth on how they could jointly publish Mark Twain’s works. In the end Harper’s simply bought out and absorbed the American Publishing Company and its Twain list. Concluding that an author could not “successfully” introduce his own collected works, Twain suggested Howells for the job. Howells declined when Bliss would not meet his price, and Brander Matthews (BRAND-er MATT-hews!) wrote the introduction. Twain provided a short “Author’s Preface,” in which he staged a mock protest against touting his own works. “I cannot say without immodesty that the books have merit,” he wrote. “I cannot say without immodesty that a ‘Uniform Edition’ will turn the nation toward high ideals & elevated thought; I cannot say without immodesty that a ‘Uniform Edition’ will eradicate crime, though I think it will.”14

  By the time they were well into their second year as residents of Vienna, everybody in the family but Clara thought it was time to return to the United States for good. Two barriers stood in their way. First, they wanted to live, for a time at least, in New York City before reopening the Hartford house, but Twain was afraid that they couldn’t afford it. He even toyed with the possibility of dwelling in nearby Princeton, New Jersey, where his friend Laurence E. Hutton resided. Second, they were waiting for Clara to finish her piano lessons. When she abruptly abandoned them that winter, they thought even more about going home—before Clara as quickly took up singing lessons under a different teacher in Vienna. Thinking that her fingers were too short “to cover the technicalities” of the piano, she was now following the path of her dead sister, and her parents could only silently submit. By now the “dread” of leaving his “children in difficult circumstances” had subsided, but he didn’t want to do anything else to interfere with their future—much in the way Little Satan suggested that the minutest change in a human being’s preset life pattern could possibly mean a more severe “swindle of life.”15

  A third barrier to their overdue homecoming became more and more apparent. Jean’s epilepsy was getting worse—the attacks more frequent. Nothing had helped her. None of the doctors she saw in Vienna could recommend anything more than frequent doses of potassium bromide
, used as a sedative in the nineteenth century. Finally, he turned to Jonas Henrik Kellgren, whose course of “medical gymnastics” (today it would be called chiropractic) was available in both London and Sanna, Sweden, where the family went via London in August 1899. Obviously, the spinal manipulations didn’t help ease or cure Jean’s epilepsy, but for a time Twain convinced himself they were working. In fact, he took the course himself and raved about the sanitarium in Sanna to several close friends and even to William James, whom he urged to take the course. By the turn of the century, James had been diagnosed with a heart murmur. He didn’t, however, go to Sanna for the Kellgren manipulations. The Clemens family resided in that small northern village until October and then returned to London, where Jean continued the Swedish Cure. The family clung to the hope that Kellgren’s method would finally work. Their American homecoming, they feared, couldn’t become a reality until it did.16

  49 Weary Sojourners

  Three months later—at century’s end—they began to get impatient with Kellgren. “Livy is discouraged—& properly—about Jean’s case,” Sam told Sue Crane. Although his daughter’s general health had clearly improved, “Livy considers that the treatment has done nothing with the disease. These people have cured this disease,” he insisted. “We know this, or we should not meddle with it any longer; but we can’t find out when Jean’s cure is to begin, nor how many months or years it will take, for these idiots keep no record of their cases, & don’t know any more about the phases & stages & other vital details of them than a cow might.” Yet two weeks later Twain told Rogers that he thought Kellgren’s course could have saved Susy from spinal meningitis. Jean’s parents were lost in the maze of nineteenth-century medicine. Only forty years earlier, during the American Civil War, its hospitals had killed more soldiers than they saved. Jean’s epilepsy, the Clemenses suspected, may have begun seven years earlier with a head injury she suffered as a girl.1

  “I am tired to death of this everlasting exile,” he told Rogers in the same letter. By this time, England was at war with the Boers in South Africa. He found London, then the largest city in the world, depressing “in these days of fog & rain & influenza & war.” Privately, he told Howells, it was “a sordid & criminal war,” and yet his head was with England, while his heart was with the Boer farmers, who had already taken charge of native South Africans on their part of the continent. Echoing the sentiment expressed in Following the Equator, he still subscribed to the idea that primitive peoples would be better off in colonies run by the major powers. But this heavy use of military force against the Boers revolted him and gave him second thoughts about the Spanish-American War, which had begun in 1898. After the initial American liberation of Cuba from Spain devolved into an invasion of the Philippines (the U.S. Navy needed coaling stations around the world), he told Joe Twichell at the end of January 1900: “Apparently we are not proposing to set the Filipinos free and give their islands to them; and apparently we are not proposing to hang the priests and confiscate their property. If these things are so, the war out there has no interest for me.”2 The groundwork was being laid for his anti-imperialistic writings, then just around the corner.

  Reading about the British slaughter of Boer farmers and the American mistreatment of rebellious Filipinos, he soon changed his mind about the wisdom of so-called civilized powers overseeing “primitive” societies. In the summer of 1900 he wrote a letter to the London Times denouncing the political mischief of missionaries in China. Chinese peasants had risen up in the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) against foreign occupiers, slaughtering missionaries among others. “I do not know why we respect missionaries,” he wrote in this letter to the editor that he wanted published anonymously (“Don’t give me away, whether you print it or not,” he told its editor, C. F. Moberly Bell). “Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith & winning them to the worship of alien gods. . . . When a French nun in Hong Kong proposed to send to France for money wherewith to establish an asylum for fatherless little foundlings, . . . the Chinese authorities said, ‘How kind of you to think of us—are you out of foundlings at home?’ ” He decided not to send the letter, but its perspective would flavor his most famous anti-imperialist essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” published in the February 1901 North American Review. (The “person sitting in darkness” was a term taken from the Book of Matthew and used by missionaries when referring to “savage” or “uncivilized” peoples in the colonized lands. In an era of the railroad trust, the beef trust, the milk trust, and so on, he called these colonizing powers “The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust.”)3

  Mark Twain’s fame was now such that it sometimes seemed to others that he would not object to any amplification of it. Several people had annoyed him by proposing to write his biography or publish letters from him they had received or found. These petitioners included Pond, Orion, Will M. Clemens, and even his nephew Sam Moffett (who subsequently published more than one biographical article on his famous uncle). Generally, Clemens said no in thunder. As early as 1887, Orion had asked permission to talk to a reporter about Sam’s boyhood, even submitting a list of possible topics: “your philosophical dissatisfaction with your lack of a tail; your sleep-walking and entrance into Mrs. Ament’s room; your year’s schooling; your quitting at 11; your work in my office; your first writing for the paper (Jim Wolfe, the wash-pan and the broom); your going to Philadelphia at 17 . . . your swimming the river and back; ma’s complaint that you broke up her scoldings by making her laugh; Pa’s death.” Sam replied: “I have never yet allowed an interviewer or biographer-sketcher to get out of me any circumstance of history which I thought might be worth putting some day into my autobiography.” He added, “I hate all public mention of my private history, anyway. It is none of the public’s business.”4

  Orion desisted, but not Will Clemens, who was unrelated to them (“I wonder what this bastard’s real name is,” Twain said to Moffett in the summer of 1900). Clemens had already published Mark Twain: His Life and Work in 1892 without either permission or approval from its subject. Now he proposed three more books—“The Mark Twain Story Book,” “The Homes of Mark Twain,” and an updated biographical sketch. “I am sorry to object,” Twain wrote, hardly containing his anger. “But really I must. . . . A man’s history is his own property until the grave extinguishes his ownership in it.” Will Clemens, however, was not to be deterred. Saying that he observed the caveat against using any “of your copyrighted work,” he insisted that Twain’s speeches were fair game, “and there is no law against writing truthful facts concerning a man’s life.” Will Clemens promised to shelve the project for the time being, saying, “I’ve waited now forty years for other things—and I can add you to the collection now in storage.”5

  No doubt such assaults upon his privacy were part of what prompted Twain to choose his authorized biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, in 1906. Ever since Twain’s day, writers and others in the limelight have abhorred the idea of having their lives laid out like a corpse to be probed and analyzed. Thirty years before his death in 1910, he might have been granted the sanctuary of a biography in the “American Men of Letters” series, but Twain was now in the twentieth century. Before it was over, one biographer would even suggest latent pedophilia. Privately, Twain told Sam Moffett that Will Clemens was a “singular tapeworm who seems to feed solely upon other people’s intestines & who seems barren of any other food-supply. . . . He thinks it very harsh that after he has slaved all his life gathering sewage from my drain, I should drop ruthlessly down upon him & say ‘Drop that!’ ” Through Rogers he instructed Colonel George Harvey, manager at Harper’s after it emerged from bankruptcy that year, to watch out for any advertisements of Will Clemens’s threatened books. As in the past, Mark Twain was ready to sue. Ever since he had become famous in the 1870s, there had always been somebody who wanted a piece of him.6

  The family’s winter in Lond
on was a cold one that seemed to last forever, well into the spring. They had tentatively planned to return to the sanitarium in Sanna for the summer, but changed their minds. No one but “Papa” had enjoyed the experience there. As Jean’s health went up and down, they also set and canceled dates for their departure for America. He told one correspondent in June that Jean had recently “drifted into one of her bad times.”7 Because her illness confined her to the privacy of family life and kept her almost childlike, we don’t know very much about this young lady who tried to keep up with her sisters but eventually focused on raising and grooming horses. Jean (a family nickname for Jane) had been named after her paternal grandmother, Jane Lampton Clemens, who had also been a skilled horseback rider in her youth.

  That summer they moved once again, this time into a country house on Dollis Hill on the margins of London. “The house is on high ground in the midst of several acres of grasses & forest trees,” he told Twichell, “& is wholly shut out from the world & noise.”8It was here on the eve of his homecoming that he found again the serenity he had enjoyed in their rented villa outside Florence. That time had been productive, but now he was without Susy and Clara, who was preoccupied with her singing career. Livy continued to have her own medical ups and downs, and Jean apparently continued slowly to lose the battle against that mysterious malady called epilepsy. They recruited Sam Moffett to investigate several osteopaths in New York so that they might return to the United States before Kellgren was finished with her.