Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Her own health continued the same up-and-down pattern. In Riverdale, Livy was plagued by gout, but otherwise she was well enough for her husband to go on another cruise on the Kanawha in March—this time to the Caribbean. Twain took a train to Palm Beach, where he boarded the boat with a crew of friends very similar to the group that had gone out the previous summer—Congressman Reed, Dr. Clarence Rice, Laurence Hutton, and other mutual friends of his and Rogers. He wrote affectionate letters to his wife at every port they touched, but he barely acknowledged Clara and Jean (now twenty-seven and twenty-one), except to say in one letter: “Children! make your mother’s days a pleasure to her.”12 Their ship’s itinerary included Key West briefly because Rogers had to consult a lawyer there. (The robber baron in him was still active, soon to be involved in the copper war in which he and his partners attempted a monopoly in that metal to match their success in oil.) Twain had touched Key West almost as briefly thirty-four years previously, when his malaria-ridden shipmates had emerged from the Nicaragua Isthmus to take another ship north to New York.

  51 Homeless

  While Sam was cavorting around the West Indies with Rogers, Livy bought a house with nineteen acres in Tarrytown, New York. She made the $45,000 purchase without consulting her husband, and the house wasn’t even big enough for their needs. This impulsive act underscored her sense of homelessness, which had been growing ever since they left their Hartford residence in 1891. The nuclear Clemens family, which had profoundly enjoyed the Nook Farm community of close friends and neighbors for nearly twenty years, had now been on the road for nearly a decade, going from hotel to rented house or villa on a yearly, sometimes monthly, basis. Livy yearned to “settle down” again in a home of their own, as she told Frank Whitmore, who had managed the Hartford house while they were abroad. She had finally given him permission to sell that house in order to pay for the Tarrytown place as well as its planned expansion. They first listed Hartford at $75,000, a bargain, they thought, for what the land, house, and stable had cost them in 1872 (almost $140,000), not to mention the expensive interior renovations made in 1880. After several months they dropped the price to $40,000 and then to $30,000. The quaintly old-fashioned house was finally sold to Richard M. Bissell, an insurance executive, for $28,800 in the spring of 1903.1 Much of its furniture was sold at auction at the same time.

  Sam, who seemingly never expressed disapproval of anything his wife did, was hoping to sell the Hartford house to help pay for the Tarrytown place, on which only a down payment of $2,500 had thus far been made. They found the money elsewhere, including $21,000 in the Guaranty Trust and some unknown amount in the Lincoln bank, and by selling shares of stock in Union Pacific or U.S. Steel.2 Encouraged by his Plasmon investment abroad, he had also purchased, earlier in the year, $25,000 worth of stock in the new American Plasmon Company—an investment ultimately undercut by unscrupulous financiers. These renewed financial pressures were pushed into the background by the news that the University of Missouri in Columbia had selected its native son for an honorary LL.D. degree to be awarded at its commencement on June 4. The invitation gave Mark Twain what proved to be his final opportunity to revisit the town that had been the source of his greatest writing. He left New York on May 27 on the thirty-hour train ride to St. Louis, from where he was accompanied by a reporter upriver to Hannibal.

  In a charming description of his visit, he told Livy that, after checking into his hotel, he “went & stood in the door of the old house I lived in when I whitewashed the fence 53 years ago; was photographed, with a crowd looking on.” He visited the cemetery where his parents and his younger brother Henry were buried and by noon “was driven to the Presbyterian Church & sat on the platform 3½ hours listening to Decoration-Day addresses; made a speech myself.” He mentioned meeting Laura Hawkins (now Frazier), the “Becky” of his boyhood infatuation, diplomatically described to his wife as a “schoolmate 62 years ago.” That night he attended the high school commencement at the opera house and handed out diplomas to the sixteen graduates, making another speech. Before he closed his letter to Livy, he backed up to mention his Memorial Day speech, in the church again: “I was speaker No. 3, & when I stepped forward the entire house rose; & they applauded so heartily & kept it up so long, that when they finished I had to stand silent a long minute till I could speak without my voice breaking.” Afterwards he shook hands with practically everyone in the church that day—his final day in Hannibal.3 It and the brown river that rolled by it had together made him “Mark Twain.”

  Happy at the prospect of returning “home” once more, albeit ever so briefly, he hoped that some of his old friends farther out west might meet him halfway in Missouri. He wrote to the Gillis brothers, hoping for some sort of reunion in Columbia. He even sent out feelers to one of his oldest friends, Joe Goodman. “I feel old, but not often,” he told his former boss. “But I am persistently old in this . . . Wine & beer do not invite me any more, & it has taken me 5 months to drink one bottle of Scotch whisky, my pet of brews.” “But I smoke all day,” the sixty-six-year-old confessed, “& I get up twice a-night to do the like.”4 The same day he wrote those letters—May 16, ten days before he left for St. Louis and Hannibal—Livy suffered an asthmatic attack that she and Sam viewed as a heart problem. Actually, it was both, since the coughing and difficulty of breathing during such seizures put a strain on her heart. Today, from the vantage of our smoke-free environments, scholars have already suggested that thirty years of passively inhaling her husband’s cigar and pipe smoke was a part of the problem.

  In June they took a cottage in York Harbor, Maine, not far from Howells’s summer place on Kittery Point. Here the trouble began. Just as Twain was settling down to write—he was working on a story prophetically entitled “Was It Heaven? or Hell?”—Jean suffered another epileptic attack. This was either July 6 or 7. A month later—on August 12, 1902—Livy collapsed from another asthmatic attack that raised her pulse to an alarming rate and gave her heart palpitations. Both she and Sam thought she was dying. He blamed it in part on her worry over Jean, and that feeling perhaps began to color his relationship with his youngest daughter especially later on, with her mother gone, when she needed him the most. For now the focus was entirely on Livy, who was felled by the attack, couldn’t breathe easily even after the acute phase had subsided, and was soon surrounded by doctors and specialists, who concluded that she was in a state of “nervous prostration.” This led to her isolation from the world and all its possibly disturbing news. It barred Sam from seeing her at all for the next three months, and after that, all day except for three or four minutes. The only family member allowed to see her on an unlimited basis was Clara, who had been in Europe (probably to see Ossip Gabrilowitsch) but arrived home on the day of the attack. Sam and Jean simply excited the patient too much. Clara in effect replaced her mother as head of the household and went about hiring and firing nurses. She even censored her father’s letters and advised him on “Was It Heaven? or Hell?”5

  That story, whose plot he had gotten from Howells, eerily foretold the sickroom drama that actually occurred that summer and fall in York Harbor. Twin maiden aunts Hannah and Hester rigidly consider all lies sinful—black or white, regardless of whether they are told in the service of a higher good. They are tending after a niece sick with typhoid when they discover that her teenage daughter Helen has told a lie. Not knowing that their niece’s ailment is contagious and potentially fatal, they force Helen to admit her sin before her bedridden mother. The mother quickly forgives her, but the daughter also becomes ill with typhoid and is taken to her own sickbed. The two aunts finally are forced to lie themselves to protect the mother from the emotional distress of knowing that her child is fatally ill. In real life, Clara had to do the same thing to protect her mother from any form of bad news; this became doubly necessary when in December 1902 Jean, who had been free of her attacks since July, came down with double pneumonia and barely survived the winter.

  In the story the d
aughter dies, her only relief at the end being that she died hallucinating that she lay in her mother’s arms even though they were in fact the arms of one of the maiden aunts. When the piece appeared in the December 1902 issue of Harper’s, Twain received a letter from a reader who said he had gone through a strikingly similar experience, thus reinforcing Twain’s long-standing belief in mental telepathy. Yet in this case, he told A. H. Tyson, he hadn’t invented most of the plot, including “the dying girl’s mistaking the old aunt for her mother. My own dying daughter (26 [sic] years old)—blind the previous 3 hours, and out of her mind, rapturously embraced the maid who had tended her from childhood, and died happy thinking she was her mother.”6

  Reflecting on Susy’s loss was soon swept aside by events. In September, Livy suffered another asthmatic attack after a “strenuous” massage by the attending osteopath. Twain again feared that she was dying, telling a friend that she was now “only a shadow.” The rented cottage could hardly contain the nurses and specialists attending her, and Sam often had to sleep at a next-door neighbor’s house. It wasn’t until October 16 that his wife could safely travel by train back to Riverdale. The family had come to York Harbor on Rogers’ yacht, and there were plans in the making to return that way. But Livy was simply too weak to withstand a sea voyage of any length. Instead, Sam arranged an invalid car to be attached to one of the trains going to Hoboken, from where they took Rogers’ yacht up the Hudson to the Riverdale house on October 16.7

  Sam was again banned from the sickroom in Riverdale, and it wasn’t until the end of the year that he was allowed to visit his wife at all. He told Twichell that the interview lasted exactly three minutes and fifty seconds, as timed by “the trained nurse holding the watch in her hand.” Except for Clara, who ran errands into town and tried to continue her singing lessons in the city, the Riverdale house became a prison of sorts. Even though Sam wasn’t allowed to see Livy, she didn’t want him to go too far away from her. Jean continued her recovery from pneumonia in January 1903, when she was able to travel to the sunshine of the South, accompanied by Katy Leary, to complete her convalescence. By that time, Livy had begun to show some improvement. She was allowed to sit up in bed and see her husband for fifteen minutes once a day.8

  He put his banishment to good use, however. Even before leaving Maine, he had gone back to “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” a tale begun in Vienna, in which Jim, now “a free nigger this last year and more,” is almost lynched by vigilantes after Tom and Huck start a rumor about an invasion of abolitionists from across the river in Quincy, Illinois. In the wake of all the lynching at the turn of the century and Twain’s unpublished essay about it, the old Hannibal days were taking on a darker hue in his mind’s eye. This led him back to “The Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts not long after settling back into the Riverdale house. In November 1902 he began the version he titled “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” the longest and most nearly complete of the three surviving versions. In it he took the devil’s nephew back to Austria, where “The Chronicle of Young Satan” takes place, but now it is 1490 instead of 1702, soon after the invention of printing and two years before Columbus discovered America. The change allowed him to integrate his early memories of working as a printer’s devil in Hannibal. In a fan letter, a reader of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories (1900) got Twain to admit that his recent fiction could be read “between the lines.” Twain added that he had nevertheless always tried to restrain himself in this respect, “to keep from breaking my wife’s heart, whose contentment I value above the salvation of the human race.” We now know just what he restrained in that story: his utter pessimism about the worth of the human race as exemplified in Hadleyburg’s nineteen leading citizens.9

  “The Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts—and the Hadleyburg story with its devious stranger ought to be included among them—evidently put a strain on the couple’s relationship. In the fall of 1903 Sam wrote his wife that after much thought, he was “vexed to find that I more believe in the immortality of the soul than misbelieve in it. Is this inborn, instinctive, & ineradicable, indestructible? Perhaps so.” Livy replied, expressing gratitude for this unprecedented confession, and wondering why he felt “vexed” at the discovery. “I should think you would be most pleased, now that you believe or do not disbelieve, that there is so much that is interesting to work for.” What Livy surely never knew was what her husband penciled on the envelope of her letter, probably after her death: “In the bitterness of death it was G. W.’s chiefest solace that he had never told a lie except this one.”10

  In the December 6, 1902, issue of Harper’s Weekly, he introduced yet another version of the mysterious stranger in “The Belated Russian Passport.” It is the story of a Yale student abroad who is duped into traveling from Berlin to St. Petersburg without a passport or visa, thereby risking twenty years’ incarceration in Siberia. The duper is another mysterious actor, this time a Major Jackson, whose refrain is that everybody knows him (“the very dogs know me”), including the Russian authorities who confront the student about his lack of the proper traveling credentials. In 1902, peasant unrest over land reform (which would lead to the unsuccessful 1905 revolution) was in the world news, and Twain, whose anti-czarist philosophy had been evident since A Connecticut Yankee, readily sided with the serfs. In the “Passport” story, the cruelty of the Russian ruling class is represented by the looming threat of imprisonment in the subfreezing wastes of Siberia. The piece was one of the seeds for “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” a severe condemnation of the Russian autocracy that appeared in the March 1905 issue of the North American Review, soon after the czar’s soldiers had fired upon striking workers in St. Petersburg in January.

  Twain set aside, or pigeonholed, “The Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts at regular intervals over eleven years. During those interludes, he worked on shorter pieces, including “The $30,000 Bequest.” Appearing in Harper’s Weekly for December 10, 1904, it resembles “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” with a plot in which the prospect of unearned income ruins the lives of a married couple. In narrating how the imagined bequest warps their lives, Twain may have been reflecting on his own love of money and the fact that he continued to make bad investments. Besides the American Plasmon Company, whose failure would not become apparent for a few more years, he also lost another sixteen thousand dollars in the American Mechanical Cashier Company.

  Harper’s Weekly printed almost anything and everything Twain gave it. Indeed, he was in a position now—Howells as well—where he could publish just about whatever happened to be on his mind, so long as it did not exceed the tolerance of his audience at the dawn of the twentieth century. When he and Howells had a conversation in which they both condemned a life sentence given to a woman who drowned her baby after having it out of wedlock, Twain published “Why Not Abolish It?” in the Harper’s Weekly of May 2, 1903. The “It” of the title was the legal age of consent, the point at which a woman could be held personally responsible for her sexual conduct. In the case being discussed, because the woman had reached the age of consent when she conceived the child, she was held responsible for killing it, even though she had been seduced and was unmarried. Arguing that the seducer should have been held responsible for the child’s murder, Mark Twain was still primarily concerned with the disastrous effect seduction had on a woman’s reputation and—perhaps even more important—that of her family. We will remember the harsh lecture Twain gave to Clara back in 1893 when she was left alone in a room with forty men. He closed his 1903 article by suggesting that he and his readers (“many of us”) would want to sign a petition recently circulated for the girl’s pardon. Back in his Buffalo days, when he scoffed at the lack of objectivity in jury trials, he may not have been so sensitive to this kind of social issue.

  In December 1903 he published “A Dog’s Tale,” an anti-vivisectionist story with a moral that began: “My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian.” The story is pa
rtly a reminiscence of Twain’s mother, who appears as a collie presiding over “dogmatic gatherings” and impressing on the female dog, Aileen, the value of using big words without knowing what they mean. The story also echoes the Hartford days when the Clemens family was young and enjoyed its pets. Aileen, the dog narrator, is sold to a human family and separated from her mother. Her new family’s state of innocence is broken by the family patriarch, who savagely kicks the canine narrator when he thinks it has attacked the baby (when in fact it has just saved the child from a burning crib). Later, this unfeeling father, a scientist, allows Aileen’s puppy-child to be operated on in a cruel, though supposedly useful, optical experiment, which ultimately kills it.11

  By the winter of 1903 Livy was getting better, but as Twain told Whitmore, the doctors had ordered her “to some suitable climate in Europe.” The family decided to return to Florence, and to pay for that, they rented the Tarrytown house with an option to sell for $35,000. In this case, however, Livy’s one known speculation paid off, and they made a profit, eventually selling the house for $52,000—$7,000 above their initial investment. It surely didn’t come close to offsetting the loss in Hartford, but then, Twain was simply happy to be rid of the expense of keeping up the Hartford house and paying its enormous taxes. Livy, the doctors pronounced, would be ready for the transatlantic trip by October.12