It may have been Jean’s illness that drew Twain’s interest back to Christian Science in general and prompted his objections to Mary Baker Eddy in particular. Susy’s illness had first focused him on the movement because he put some trust in the “mind cure” that he’d heard about through Howells and his wife. The first of several essays, which would eventually be collected into a book, was “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy.” It appeared in the October 1899 issue of Cosmopolitan. He wasn’t critical of Christian Science per se, which sought to replace medicines and surgery with exercise and massage. He did object, however, to its becoming another religion, or trust, as he put it—“the Standard Oil of the future.” Borrowing from his early farce, “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man,” the Cosmopolitan essay talked about a man who had fallen off a cliff and sustained an “incoherent series of compound fractures,” causing him to resemble “a hat-rack.” Taken to a Christian Science healer, he was told that his injuries were not real—that matter “has no existence; nothing exists but the mind.”9Overall, the essay is droll but also somewhat tedious; it didn’t bode well for his future writings. That he could publish what he himself considered potboilers demonstrates how much in demand his writing had become—just as long as it had “Mark Twain” on the title page.
“I wish I could live on offers,” he told Rogers. McClure wanted him to edit his own humor magazine. The English humor magazine Puck offered him $10,000 a year for “one hour per week” of his editorial judgment. Pond, who had been trying to get Twain back on the lecture circuit under his auspices, offered him another $10,000 for ten nights of lecturing.10 While initially interested in the offer from McClure, Clemens ultimately turned down all such offers. He would lecture now, if at all, only for free, because only then was it enjoyable.
As Twain approached the end of his long exile abroad, he might have looked back on the road that had led him to world fame and a complete edition of his published works up to that time (though it did not yet include “Hadleyburg”). It had started with the Jumping Frog in a story that wasn’t original with him. Like Shakespeare, he had many sources, but his adaptations of the works of others were always original. Twain had come out of the oral tradition of the Old Southwest and proven to be its culmination. But that feat was just the starting point for his greatness as a writer. He turned harmless humor into profound tragedy, always reflecting his times and the nation that had nurtured him. He couldn’t have started out from a less promising place than Florida, Missouri, but then Whitman was the son of a drunkard and Dreiser was the twelfth of thirteen children of impoverished parents. These democrats of our literature thrived because they drew from the nutriment of their native soil and humble beginnings. Yet all three employed the American vernacular in literary plots that were sharpened by their sense of competition with world literature. Like Whitman and Dreiser, who objected to European pretentiousness, Mark Twain couldn’t have achieved the heights of his humor without the sham of English aristocracy and its American claimants.
In 1900, as he produced fodder for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Twain hardly realized just how remarkable his accomplishment was. When he gave Paul Kester permission to dramatize Tom Sawyer, he told him: “Turn the book upside down & inside out if you want. . . . My literary vanities are dead, & nothing that I have written is sacred to me.”11 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc may have been the one exception here, but generally he took a dim view of his work as having served its time and place in a writing career dedicated to making money. From now on, he would rule out not just lecturing for money, but writing literature that catered to the popular view. As he turned inward, he wrote more and more for himself. He would put much of his energy into his autobiography (admittedly written in part for money, since he was sure it would furnish his survivors with a steady income after his death). Most of what he would write but decline to publish would attempt to be directly autobiographical.
Having made arrangements for an osteopath to care for Jean in New York, and receiving Kellgren’s release certifying that she was well enough to leave his care, the Clemenses booked passage on the steamer Minnehaha, where they secured “promenade quarters.” Their ship departed on October 6 and arrived in New York on October 15. They planned to stop at the Everett House for a week or so while they looked for a furnished house in what had become the second-largest city in the world.
50 Exile’s Return
The America to which Mark Twain returned was changing as he stepped into the twentieth century. The old assumptions about principle and decency and an ordered universe were giving way ever so steadily to the pragmatic view of a relativistic universe in which the weaker members of the old Social Darwinist world were now seen as cosmic if not yet social victims. The first month of Twain’s homecoming saw the publication of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a tale about commonplace people committing unprincipled acts and mostly getting away with it. Howells, who had encouraged other literary naturalists such as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, flatly told Dreiser that he didn’t like Sister Carrie. The reason: while Crane’s Maggie of Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Norris’s Trina in McTeague (1899) are ultimately punished for their behavior, Dreiser’s Carrie is not. Her lover Hurstwood dies in a flophouse in the Bowery, but she is spared and even elevated essentially by chance. Dreiser’s novel was the harbinger of the twentieth century, a world in which human beings are like leaves in the wind, blown this way or that for no particular reason and according to no particular plan. Just before he left England, Twain wrote in his notebook: “The 20th Century is a stranger to me—I wish it well but my heart is all for my own century. I took 65 years of it, just on a risk, but if I had known as much about it as I know now I would have taken the whole of it.”1
The Clemens family spent its first few weeks, as it turned out, at the Hotel Earlington on West 27th Street before moving into a furnished house at 14 West 10th Street. (The rental was arranged with the help of Frank Doubleday, whose firm, after accepting Dreiser’s Sister Carrie without fully consulting its president, was now arranging for its suppression even as it reluctantly published the novel to meet the terms of its contract.) Before the Clemenses could make that move, however, they were summoned to Hartford for the memorial service for Charles Dudley Warner, who had died on October 20, 1900. “The Monday Evening Club,” Twain told the Hartford Courant, was “assembling in the cemetery,” so many of his fellow Nook Farmers had already passed away.2 He told a reporter present at the wake that his family soon hoped to return to their home, but seeing it once more in the context of another death, the remaining members of the Clemens family presumably decided then and there that they could never return home to Hartford again.
But Hartford wasn’t the only home Twain couldn’t return to. He had also lost his literary home through an exhaustive series of fragmentary works that would characterize almost the rest of his writing life. In its stead he had now found politics and become an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in the Philippines and of imperialism in general. All the criticism of the human race that had been bottled up in his earlier works now manifested itself in his political harangues in the press. Twain was aghast when Twichell tried to discourage him from publishing “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” “I can’t understand it!” he told this old and dear friend, the man who officiated at his wedding, who had been his companion for six weeks during the European romp that became the basis for A Tramp Abroad, the man who would preside at his funeral. “If you teach your people, as you teach me, to hide their opinions when they believe the flag is being abused and dishonored, . . . how do you answer for it to your conscience?” Livy, too, was apparently uncomfortable with his speaking out, seeing it as simply an extension of the venom she found in the stories of “The Mysterious Stranger.” “I’ve often tried to read it to Livy,” he told Twichell, “but she won’t have it; it makes her melancholy.”3
We know that there was a direct connection between the theme of “The Chronicl
e of Young Satan,” which Twain must have gone back to after coming home, and “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” While Little Satan is telling the boys the future, he states that “two centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christian; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christians: not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those, to kill missionaries and converts with.” In the essay, he refers to the severe indemnities that Germany demanded of China after the Kaiser had “lost a couple of missionaries in a riot in Shantung.” “The Kaiser’s claim was paid [$100,000 for every dead missionary, twelve miles of territory, and the construction of a Christian church]; yet it was bad play, for it could not fail to have an evil effect upon Persons Sitting in Darkness.” Either this particular essay or those that followed in its wake inspired Livy to join Twichell in trying to moderate, if not silence, his public anger. Twain had published “To My Missionary Critics” in the April number of the North American Review in response to public criticism, including the New York Times’ characterization of his protesting as “the sour visage of an austere moralist.”
An angry letter he evidently proposed to publish about a New York writer who had offended him (the details of which have been lost to history) may have triggered Livy’s admonition, but her cautionary note to him clearly had a broader application. “Why don’t you let the better side of you work?” she pleaded. “Your present attitude will do more harm than good. You go too far, much too far in all you say, & if you write in the same way as you have in this letter people forget the cause for it & remember only the hateful manner in which it was said. . . . There is great & noble work being done, why not sometimes recognize that? Why always dwell on the evil until those who live beside you are crushed to the earth & you seem almost like a monomaniac.” Livy dearly loved the man she still called her “Youth,” but she hoped, she said, that he would heed her words.4
In looking back today on the subsequent century or more of U.S. foreign policy involving protracted combat operations in such places as Vietnam and Iraq, it is not implausible to think that Mark Twain, with those essays and other anti-imperialistic writings, would today be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, for he was clearly placing his reputation on the line when he wrote his political pieces that still possess historical insights. Admittedly, he felt the majority of the American people agreed with him, in spite of the carping from the press and the attack from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions following the appearance of “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” His friend Howells, who lived nearby at 115 East 16th Street, was earning his own reputation as an anti-imperialist through polemical essays in the “Editor’s Easy Chair” of Harper’s and in the North American Review.5 One of the reasons Twain may have pulled no punches in his condemnation of imperialism at home and abroad was that he was feeling more and more solvent financially. He faltered, however, when it came to the home front—his old home in the South. As noted earlier, when he thought to publish “The United States of Lyncherdom” in 1901, in the middle of an era in which the first generation of blacks born and raised outside the confines of slavery were being murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, he was quickly talked out of it for fear of alienating his southern readership.6
This self-censorship extended to other moral questions less compelling. Twain speaks in his autobiography of counseling a British writer who “by the time this chapter reaches print . . . may be less well known to the world than she is now.” Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) became a pioneer in producing women’s erotic fiction for the mass market. At the time of their meeting, she proposed a novel whose “unstated argument . . . is that the laws of Nature are paramount and properly take precedence [over] the interfering and impertinent restrictions obtruded upon man’s life by man’s statutes.” Glyn sought Mark Twain’s support for this post-Victorian theme in literature, but he refused. “I said we were the servants of convention; that we could not subsist, either in a savage or a civilized state, without conventions.” In other words, we must “steadfastly” refuse to obey, or write about succumbing to, the laws of nature.7 He might have added, of course, that she could have written such a novel privately, just as he had been writing but not publishing highly anti-conventional things since just before the turn of the century.
After spending the summer of 1901 in a cabin on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks—during which Twain left the family for a few weeks in August to accompany Rogers and a number of his influential friends on a cruise on the tycoon’s yacht the Kanawha—the family rented (for $3,000 a year) the Appleton estate in Riverdale-on-the-Hudson between 248th and 252nd streets, only twenty-five minutes by train from city center. The furnished mansion had fourteen bedrooms on three floors. Across from the beautiful Palisades, the place—Howells jokingly called it Twain’s “baronial hall”—had a dining room sixty feet wide and thirty feet long. That fall he extended his political activities by speaking at a dinner sponsored by the opposition to Tammany Hall. His subsequent efforts in this vein may have helped defeat the Tammany candidate for mayor. In October he went (in person this time) to Yale for another honorary degree, this one a Doctor of Letters, which Howells also received at the same ceremony. While touring the campus, he wrote Livy, “a great crowd of students thundered the Yale cry, closing with ‘M-a-r-k T-w-ai-n. Mark Twain!’ & I took off my hat & bowed.”.8
Before his summer on the lake had ended, Twain had written not only “The United States of Lyncherdom” (the title indicating Twain’s fear for America’s future international reputation because of the murderous epidemic) but also “A Double-Barreled Detective Story.” A rather bland burlesque of the Sherlock Holmes stories that were then at the height of their popularity, it came out in the January and February issues of Harper’s Magazine. Arthur Conan Doyle’s most successful book in the series, The Hound of the Baskervilles, was then appearing in the Strand Magazine prior to its book publication in 1902. Doyle may have been a particular target of Twain’s displeasure because he had defended the Boer War in a highly publicized pamphlet, for which he would subsequently be knighted. To write “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” Twain reached back to his silver-mining days in Nevada for a setting in which a wife beater is pursued by the woman’s son, who has the gifts of a bloodhound. This theme, or “barrel,” is doubled with a tale of murder in the same mining town in which Sherlock Holmes is accused and almost burned at the stake, like Joan of Arc. Twain even borrowed from his 1862 hoax, “Petrified Man.” Holmes, “The Extraordinary Man,” is earlier depicted in the same pensive attitude as Twain’s petrified man, with his thumb on the side of his nose. The lode that brings the miners together in this detective story is called “The Consolidated Christian Science and Mary Ann.” Finally, Twain even took something from his unpublished anti-lynching arsenal in a scene in which the sheriff stops the “lynching” of Sherlock Holmes. In doing so, he sounds like Colonel Sherburn in Huckleberry Finn when the colonel condemns mob violence as well as any sheriff who would allow a mob to take a prisoner out of his custody. “By the statistics,” he has the sheriff say, in a clear echo of “The United States of Lyncherdom,” “there was a hundred and eighty-two of them drawing sneak pay in America last year.” “Magazinable at 20 cents a word,” as he bragged to Rogers, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” also appeared as a twenty-thousand-word book from Harper’s in 1902.9
One of those influential friends on the Kanawha that summer had been former Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, who had recently quit Congress after President McKinley promoted the war with Spain. “Czar” Reed, as he had been known on Capitol Hill, would have been one to whom Rogers might have appealed when the Ida Tarbell storm clouds began to gather in McClure’s Magazine. Rogers did turn to his friend “Mark,” since Twain had recently discussed business with the McClure Syndicate. “I send you a clipping from the ‘World’ relating to the much advertised history of the Standard Oil Company now being prepared for McClure’s M
agazine,” Rogers told him on December 26. “I do not know whether you can be of any service in the matter, but it would be a kindness to Mr. McClure as well as myself if you could suggest to him that some care should be taken to verify statements which may be made through his magazine.” Twain agreed a day later, and eventually Ms. Tarbell sat down with Rogers first at his palatial residence at 26 East 57th Street and then in a long series of meetings at his office at 26 Broadway, where Tarbell remembered that she was ushered in and out without anyone else seeing her. Evidently, their “frank” discussions, as Tarbell remembered them in a 1939 memoir, didn’t lessen the impact of her success as America’s first muckraker. Although Rogers defended the Standard Oil Company without appearing defensive, he was personally concerned about the lingering damage to his reputation from an 1885 indictment against him and two other Standard Oil directors for illegal business practices, even though he had been acquitted. Tarbell found the oil and gas tycoon charming at first but ultimately cunning. Their relationship broke down finally with the publication of one of the McClure’s articles in her series. The Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil Trust as an illegal monopoly in 1911. It would take another generation and the philanthropy of John D., Jr., to change the negative perception of the Rockefeller dynasty.10
Leaving Clara well chaperoned in Riverdale, the rest of the family set out by train for a visit to Elmira in January 1902. On the way, Jean had one of her more severe epileptic attacks. In telling Clara of the ordeal in a letter that night, Twain dwelled not on Jean’s condition altogether but the “fagged out” condition of her mother as a result of the attack. This may have been the beginning of his alleged insensitivity or intolerance with regard to his youngest daughter’s medical condition, whose worst moments were also social irruptions. “Jean is bad again,” he reported to Rogers ten days after the attack. “It is a continuous distress—without a break these 5 years.”11 Twain dealt with his daughters best through Livy, occasionally complaining to her of Clara’s talking back to him, and entrusting the supervision of Jean’s care more and more to his wife’s hands. Livy was the hub that held that wheel together.
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