by Ben Tarnoff
• • •
TWAIN HADN’T CHANGED. He had the same rumpled hair, the same owlish eyebrows. But his fame had grown considerably since Stoddard last saw him in San Francisco. By 1873, he had finally begun to overtake Harte as America’s favorite western writer. For years, Twain had lagged behind. Now, as Harte’s fortunes kept falling, Twain’s continued to climb.
A big boost came from Roughing It, his chronicle of the Pacific coast. Twain had agonized over its reception: while confident of its commercial potential, he feared the critics would tear it apart. After all, Roughing It was an unrepentantly western piece of writing, steeped in a woolly vernacular that might prove indigestible to the eastern press. To limit the damage, Twain instructed Elisha Bliss to send out review copies only to a select few, compared with the two hundred they had used to hype the release of The Innocents Abroad.
Twain had nothing to worry about. Not only did Roughing It sell—more than seventy-five thousand copies in the year after it appeared in February 1872, earning the author more than $20,000 in royalties—it got good reviews. In the Atlantic, Howells praised the book’s “grotesque exaggeration” and “broad irony.” He recognized that these hallmarks of frontier humor were in fact forms of realism: “the truest colors” available to describe the Far West. This was because the region itself had the air of “an extravagant joke, the humor of which was only deepened by its nether-side of tragedy.” Twain didn’t just try to make readers laugh, in other words. He had a higher aim: to give a true portrait of a particular part of America.
Twain felt relieved when he read the review. “I am as uplifted & reassured by it as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto,” he wrote Howells. This stamp of approval from the editor of the country’s most eminent literary paper had real significance. Roughing It was a bigger risk than The Innocents Abroad—a purer dose of frontier folk art—and its critical success suggested that Twain had finally begun to infiltrate the inner sanctum of elite opinion. Howells would be his most important ally in that campaign. The Atlantic editor had a weakness for western talk. He knew that Americans didn’t speak dictionary English, but a variety of local idioms rich with homespun metaphor and slang. In Twain, Howells found someone who could turn these native sounds into art. He found what he had hoped to find in Harte: the torchbearer of a new national literature that spoke the language of ordinary people.
He also found a friend. They grew closer in the months after their literary lunch in Boston with Harte and others. They discovered the affinities beneath their obvious differences. Twain wore outrageous outfits that made him stand out. Howells wore conservative suits that made him invisible. Twain’s mustache swept like a lightning bolt across his upper lip. Howells’s hung walruslike over his mouth. But they were both westerners in the East: self-taught, hugely hardworking. Born two years apart, both began as typesetters and came of age while sitting out the Civil War: Twain as a Bohemian on the Pacific coast, Howells as the American consul in Venice. Both worked to expose the nation’s moral shortcomings, especially the injustices of its postwar economy and the unfinished business of emancipation. But mostly, they liked each other. They never ran out of things to talk about, whether sitting up late drinking Scotch or writing long, chatty letters. It was a perfect marriage of two complementary personalities: the intense, wiry Twain and the stumpy, genial Howells, teaming up to make one of the most important literary alliances in American history.
Over the years, Howells would earn accolades as an editor, an author, and a critic. But his most public role would be as the country’s chief tastemaker—the “Dean of American Letters”—and he threw his considerable cultural weight behind Twain. At first this meant helping the “low” humorist gain acceptance in New England. Eventually it meant something more: to champion Twain as the representative writer of modern America, the “Lincoln of our literature.” Howells validated the radicalism at the root of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” He saw Twain as an incomparable artist of everyday American life, an evangelist for “the superiority of the vulgar.” His support enabled Twain to become a transformative figure, the wild-haired prophet who led the country away from the Europeanized gentry of the Atlantic coast and into the western interior.
But that was later. When Roughing It came out in 1872, Twain and Howells were still in the courtship phase. Meanwhile, Howells and Harte were halfway through a slow, bitter breakup. Relations between the two men had taken a chilly turn. The poor quality of Harte’s Atlantic pieces was one reason. His unforgivable laziness was another. Harte had “a queer absent-minded way of spending his time,” an observer noted, and what few hours he still devoted to writing yielded only feeble imitations of his former glories. The critics were willing to go easy on him at first. But as the afterglow of his eastern arrival wore off, and the media heat generated by “The Heathen Chinee” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp” cooled, they lost patience. In March 1872, the New York Evening Post called Harte’s latest Atlantic offering a “catastrophe.”
No one could’ve foreseen that America’s hottest literary property would promptly self-immolate after relocating across the country. The large-hearted Howells felt sympathy for his struggling contributor, as his warm reminiscences of the man make clear. But Harte wouldn’t go down gracefully. He once bragged that he had “burned his ships” after leaving California, and his flameout in the East would produce another pile of wrecked friendships. The same month the Evening Post pilloried Harte’s story, the beleaguered author sent Howells a new poem called “Concepción de Argüello.” When Howells made a few editorial suggestions, Harte spat back a snarling reply. The poem dealt with the Spanish history of California, and Howells had apparently consulted his Cambridge friends to help fact-check it. Harte was indignant. He patronized Howells as “my dear boy,” and insisted those “Yankee Professors” had no idea what they were talking about. “I am careless in composition at times,” he snapped, “but I am never careless with my facts, general outlines, details or color.”
Even the affable Howells found this hard to take. He wrote an angry response, and Harte, recognizing he had crossed a line, quickly backtracked with an apologetic follow-up. They reconciled, and the Atlantic published the poem. But the damage was done. Harte finished out his contract, but it wouldn’t be renewed. He was every editor’s nightmare: sloppy in his writing, sluggish in his habits, hostile to revisions. A photograph from 1872 showed him with bags under his eyes, staring into the middle distance. The fashionable necktie and sideburns were intact, but his face had the absent look of an actor who had forgotten his lines. These days he played the role of the writer more than he actually wrote, and his most important performances involved persuading rich men to lend him money. “He was utterly destitute of what is sometimes called ‘the money sense,’” said a friend. This meant he spent freely, even while living on borrowed cash. But he couldn’t stay afloat on credit forever. He needed to rekindle his career. So he turned to an old friend for help.
• • •
ON JUNE 13, 1872, Harte went to see Twain in Hartford. It was a hard time for the household to have visitors: eleven days earlier, Twain’s firstborn had died of diphtheria. Always sickly, baby Langdon had grown weaker after the birth of his sister Susy in March. He was only a year and a half old. Livy dropped into a profound depression. Twain blamed himself.
One cold morning, Twain had taken his son for a drive in an open carriage to give him some air. He wrapped the child in furs, but grew distracted, and didn’t see that the blankets had slipped off. Langdon’s legs were exposed. When the coachman finally noticed, he told Twain, who rushed the baby back to the house and felt wholly to blame for what followed. “Yes, I killed him,” he once told Howells, although nobody shared this opinion and the facts didn’t support it. He felt responsible for Langdon’s death, just as he had felt responsible for the steamboat accident that took his younger brother’s
life fourteen years earlier. When tragedy struck, he made himself the scapegoat. Guilt was how he grieved. “I have always felt shame for that treacherous morning’s work,” he reported in his autobiography more than three decades later.
He went to the grave believing he had betrayed his only son. For Twain, treachery was the worst sin, and loyalty the supreme virtue. This explained why, despite their checkered history, Twain graciously hosted Harte at such a challenging moment. Harte himself had lost a son five years earlier. He showed little empathy during his visit, however. He had often mistreated Twain, most recently by humiliating him at their Boston literary lunch. And even now, in Hartford, Harte couldn’t resist dispensing “sparkling sarcasms about our house, our furniture, and the rest of our domestic arrangements,” Twain remembered. But their friendship could survive these strains. It had deep roots, dating back to their Bohemian days. Harte had helped make Twain a writer. Now Harte needed a favor. He was broke. He couldn’t even pay his rent. So Twain lent him $500—certainly knowing it wouldn’t be repaid—and promised to cajole Elisha Bliss into giving him a book contract. This kindness wouldn’t go unappreciated. When Harte returned to New York, he composed a grateful letter that reflected the renewed warmth between the two men. “Tell Mrs. Clemens I deputize you to kiss the baby for me,” he wrote. “You ought to be very happy with that sweet wife of yours . . . It is not every man that can cap a hard, thorny, restless youth with so graceful a crown.”
Harte’s own conjugal crown was a constant headache. Illness made his unhappy marriage harder. His wife had been unwell since coming East, and their daughter Jessamy, born in May, nearly died in infancy. In July 1872, the family moved to Morristown, New Jersey, to escape the summer heat. The climate was healthier, but Harte faced a familiar problem: he couldn’t write. The “sleepy dolce far niente air” made work impossible, he told Twain. “Could not you and I find some quite rural retreat this summer where we could establish ourselves . . . in some empty farm house a mile or two away from our families, and do our work, with judicious intervals of smoking, coming home to dinner at abt. 3 p.m.?”
Perhaps Harte felt some sliver of nostalgia for the collaborative spirit of San Francisco, for the camaraderie of the Overland offices and Coolbrith’s parlor. But Twain couldn’t help. He couldn’t hole up in a farmhouse at the moment. He had something else in mind. Roughing It had been out for months. He needed a new project, and felt confident he would find it abroad.
On August 21, 1872, Twain sailed for England. He went alone, leaving Livy behind with the baby. “I do miss him so much,” she confessed to a friend. But she knew the trip would be good for him: “England is a subject that he will get inspired over.” Inspiration wasn’t the only reason for Twain’s trip: he also hoped to protect his work from unauthorized printing by English pirates. Still, the literary possibilities of England seemed endless. A country obsessed with caste and custom would be easy prey for Twain’s pen. He could play the American barbarian, and produce another pillaging narrative like The Innocents Abroad.
What he didn’t expect was how much he would love the English—and how much they would love him. He arrived to find himself hugely famous. Everyone knew his books, thanks to the pirated editions that sold for a shilling or two apiece. Most surprising, his readers came from all classes. In America, the masses embraced him but the elite still kept their distance; in England, both high and low delighted in him. He became a darling of the British press, and a featured attraction at London’s swankest gatherings. At a state banquet attended by nearly a thousand of the empire’s ritziest citizens, he walked arm-in-arm with the lord chancellor while the wigged minister, accompanied by a servant holding the train of his gown, explained how much Twain’s work meant to him. At a dinner held by the sheriffs of London, 250 guests broke into spontaneous applause when Twain’s presence was announced. “I was never so taken aback in my life,” he wrote Livy. “I did not know I was a lion.”
The English craze for American humor owed much to Artemus Ward, who had traveled to London in 1866 and achieved terrific success before succumbing to tuberculosis the following year. The press hailed Twain as his successor—the best specimen of the “peculiar humor invented by our American cousins.” The English infatuation with him wasn’t purely a fascination with the exotic frontier regions of their former colony—although that certainly played a part. It went deeper, recognizing Twain’s shrewd intelligence, and his original contributions to the language they held in common.
Flattered wasn’t the word. Twain was giddy. Never in his life had he enjoyed the praise of such powerful men—and in his letters home, he trembled with pure childlike joy at the honors heaped on his head. Long days spent socializing and sightseeing left little time for his book project. “Too much company—too much dining—too much sociability,” he told Livy. He visited the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey. He saw Handel’s Messiah performed at the Royal Albert Hall. In the pages of the Spectator, he publicly shamed John Camden Hotten, the pirate publisher who had capitalized on the absence of international copyright to print Twain’s books without paying him any royalties. He loved every minute, but he wished Livy were there to share it with him. “I am not going abroad any more without you,” he wrote. “It is too dreary when the lights are out & the company gone.”
He kept his promise. By November, he was back in Hartford. Six months later, in May 1873, he returned to England—this time, with the whole family. Livy had never left the country before. She wouldn’t be going as an ordinary tourist, but as the wife of Mark Twain, the great American humorist. She would be seeing things she had long imagined, like the thatched roofs of English cottages and Shakespeare’s tomb in Stratford-upon-Avon. She would also be seeing things beyond imagining, like the sight of her husband surrounded by lord mayors and ministers and Robert Browning and Anthony Trollope. When she had agreed to marry him in 1868, she never could’ve predicted that, within five years, the ill-dressed westerner would be the most sought-after man in London.
No wonder Twain loved England: it gave him the legitimacy he always wanted. The irony was that his work could get a fairer hearing here than in his home country, where most of New England’s literary nabobs still scorned him. The English could see the genius of their “American cousin” more clearly than the elite of his own country. It would be a while before Boston realized its mistake. In the meantime, London offered a foretaste of his future eminence.
American Humour, by Frederick Waddy, for Once a Week (London), December 14, 1872.“California has developed a literature of its own and its proudest boast is the possession of Mark Twain,” declared the accompanying article.
EIGHT
By October 1873, Livy was done with London. “I am blue and cross and homesick,” she announced—and newly pregnant. Adding to the urgency, a disaster had broken out back home. In September, a major investment bank went bust, sending a shock wave through the financial system. Railroads were hit especially hard. The stocks and bonds that financed their construction had also helped power the postwar boom, and when their value plunged, a substantial chunk of the postwar American economy came tumbling down with it. Credit contracted, prices fell, and the country entered a six-year depression.
One night after the Panic of 1873 began, Twain sat up smoking in his London hotel room. He couldn’t sleep. He had already spent more than $10,000 satisfying his expensive tastes abroad—closer to $200,000 today. As the crisis spread, triggering a wave of bankruptcies, threatening his and Livy’s investments, he decided to shore up his finances by booking a brief lecture engagement in London. In mid-October, he delivered six performances to admiring crowds. He did a seventh in Liverpool on October 20—drawing so much traffic that he shut down the streets around the hall—before yielding to his wife’s wishes and getting on a boat to New York.
He wouldn’t be gone for long. He would see his family all the way to the door of their home in Hartford, and then retrace his route b
ack to England. He didn’t mind the travel—he loved lying in his berth, reading late into the night alongside a porthole filled with the passing ocean—but he did hate to be separated from Livy. By the morning of November 20, 1873, he was back in his comfortable corner suite at the Langham Hotel, eating his breakfast of bacon and eggs, staring out the window, missing his wife.
He had returned to London to oversee the English edition of his next book. This wasn’t the one he wanted to write about England, which never materialized, but a novel about contemporary America, coauthored with his friend and neighbor Charles Dudley Warner. Composed at breakneck speed over four months in Hartford, it drew a bleakly funny portrait of the country as a gambler’s paradise populated by knaves and fools and sycophants. Its title gave a name to the postwar era whose financial fragility had just been exposed by the Panic of 1873: The Gilded Age, suggesting a thin layer of prosperity disguising a deeper decay. If The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It showed a young country struggling up to adulthood, The Gilded Age would be the story of its growing pains.
Ever since moving East in the late 1860s, Twain had noticed a new shamelessness in American life. Nearly every day the papers carried reports of widespread corruption, from the endless scandals of Ulysses S. Grant’s sleazy administration in Washington to the thuggery of Boss Tweed’s Tammany machine in New York. Private greed and public crookedness conspired to create “an era of incredible rottenness,” in Twain’s phrase. Politicians bought elections, stole taxpayer dollars, and cut backroom deals with plutocrats. The country was becoming one big boomtown, an economic frontier of fast, ungovernable prosperity, and everyone wanted in on the bonanza.