Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  A great final project continued to elude him; there would be no transcendent ‘late phase’ to his artistic career. Twain’s best work, for which he hoped to be remembered, was becoming a thing of the increasingly distant past. His first bestseller, The Innocents Abroad, had been published forty years earlier. The torrent of great works that followed – including Tom Sawyer in 1876, The Prince and the Pauper in 1881, Life on the Mississippi in 1883, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889 and Pudd’nhead Wilson in 1894 – had, by century’s end, slowed to a trickle.

  Helen Keller and Mark Twain, 1902, photograph by E. C. Kopp

  Searching for something to write about, Twain turned to the subject he knew best, one that had always been at the centre of his fictional world: himself. He had been experimenting with autobiography for decades and now seized on a new approach, a kind of free association, recorded by a stenographer: ‘Start at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life: talk only about the things that interest you for the moment.’ Twain even invited his recently appointed biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, tosit in while he dictated a half-million words in 250 or so sessions between 1906 and 1909. Twain was convinced that he had stumbled onto something original: ‘I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method.’

  What he dictated wasn’t all that revealing or even necessarily true. Paine, who was familiar with the basic facts of his subject’s life, saw soon enough that ‘Mark Twain’s memory had become capricious and his vivid imagination did not always supply his story with details of crystal accuracy. But it was always a delightful story.’ The experiment was a financial, though not critical, success: in 1906 Twain began selling five-thousand-word autobiographical instalments to The North American Review, a venture so profitable that he was able to purchase the 248-acre Redding estate and build a villa that he had initially considered naming ‘Autobiography House’ before settling on ‘Stormfield’. He was confident that he could churn out fifty thousand words a month of autobiographical dictation for the rest of his life.

  Twain’s last book, published in 1909, was subtitled From My Autobiography, which at first glance seems peculiar, since the book is titled Is Shakespeare Dead? The book is celebrated to this day by those who believe, as Twain came to believe and wittily argued in these pages, that Shakespeare could not have written the plays attributed to him. What’s easily overlooked, both by those who hail the book and by those dismayed that such a prominent author could write it, is what led Twain to this conclusion: a conviction that great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical. It followed that, given what was known about his life, Shakespeare could have no claim to the works. A great deal was riding on this argument for Twain, for if the man from Stratford had indeed written the plays, Twain’s mostly deeply held beliefs about the nature of fiction and on how major writers drew on personal experience would be wrong.

  Twain’s fascination with autobiography coincided with a significant shift in Anglo-American literary culture. By the early twentieth century, autobiography was fast establishing itself as a major form of imaginative writing, a position from which it has yet to be dislodged. When in 1887 Twain’s friend William Dean Howells asked him to recommend titles for a series of ‘Choice Autobiographies’, Twain couldn’t name many: ‘I didn’t know there were any but old [Benjamin] Franklin’s and Benvenuto Cellini’s. But if I should think of any I will mention them with pleasure.’ Many others had in fact been written, but the genre was only beginning to command attention and a reading public; the very term ‘autobiography’ had only entered the language at the start of the nineteenth century. A hundred years later, major literary figures were turning to the form in increasing numbers. As Twain was dictating his autobiography, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett and Henry Adams were writing theirs.

  It’s not easy to determine how many autobiographies, especially by novelists, were being written in the early twentieth century. But something was clearly happening: one of the few scholars who has tried counting American literary autobiographies concludes that between ‘1800 and 1880 only twenty-six autobiographies were published by authors, journalists, or novelists, but in the forty years between 1880 and 1920’ that number had more than doubled and redoubled again. By the mid-twentieth century, propelled in part by psychoanalytic theories about how we become who we are, the number of those – especially writers – publishing the story of their own lives had skyrocketed, with one scholar counting over five thousand American autobiographies in the thirty-five years following the Second World War. My guess is that figures in Britain followed a similar steep curve.

  Fiction, too, was becoming much more autobiographical, and self-consciously so, on both sides of the Atlantic. And at some point along the way it had become a commonplace that writers had always mined their life experiences in furnishing their fictional worlds. Allon White, whose The Uses of Obscurity illuminates this development, identifies ‘a new kind of reading, a new kind of critical attention in the period, whereby the sophisticated read through the text to the psychological state of the author’. Novelists, meanwhile, were becoming increasingly sensitive to the ways in which fiction-writing was inescapably self-revealing. White quotes as illustrative of these simultaneous developments Joseph Conrad’s reflections in Some Reminiscences, first published (at the urgings of Conrad’s friend Ford Madox Ford) in the pages of the English Review:

  I know that a novelist lives in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, among imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than seen presence – a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction.

  Conrad wrote this in 1908, as this mode of reading and writing was becoming fully established. It’s hard, though, to think of a major novelist in England or America much before Mark Twain who could confess, as he did in 1886, that

  my books are simply autobiographies. I do not know that there is any incident in them which sets itself forth as having occurred in my personal experience which did not occur. If the incidents were dated, they could be strung together in their due order, and the result would be an autobiography.

  But I suspect that quite a few novelists would soon concede as much. It’s surprising that such a major shift in what writers offer – and in what readers look for – has attracted relatively little critical attention. This emerging if largely unexamined conviction that fiction was necessarily autobiographical would affect not only what subsequent novelists would write, but also how previous authors, especially Shakespeare, were read. This, as much as any other factor, explains why so many – Twain included – came to question Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays.

  For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life – rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined – was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked. He held himself to this strict standard when, in 1870, in his mid-thirties, he decided to write about mining diamonds in South Africa, but didn’t want to risk going there himself. Rather than abandon the idea, he hired a stunt-writer; he would draw on his first-hand experience and write the book ‘just as if I had been through it all myself’. His stand-in, James H. Riley, was a journalist who in his younger days had been a gold miner. Twain drew up a detailed contract: Riley was to ‘skirmish, prospect, work, travel, and take minute notes … for three months, or five or six if necessary’. Twain saw himself in the tradition of Daniel Defoe, drawing on the travails of Alexander Selkirk to create his masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe (conveniently forgetting that Defoe hadn’t paid Selkirk to be marooned on an island for four and a
half years so that he could fictionalise his experiences). Upon his return, Riley was to move into Twain’s house for as long as a year and be debriefed for ‘one or two hours … every day’ until Twain had ‘pumped [him] dry’. Riley sailed off, had adventures, and took notes. Unfortunately, on the voyage home he ‘wounded his mouth with a fork while eating, with ensuing blood poisoning and death soon after his return’. Twain now owed his publisher $2,000 that had been handed over to Riley for expenses, and his publisher preferred repayment with a book rather than cash. So Twain went back to mining his Mississippi boyhood – his views on writing from life hadn’t altered – and the death of Riley led to the birth of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876.

  Retelling his life-story overlapped with Twain’s other great preoccupation: ensuring that he would still be read long after his death. A biographical sketch of Twain published in 1899 (signed by his nephew, Samuel Moffett, who touched it up, though it was written by Twain himself) made the case for both at once: ‘In the thirty-eight years of his literary activity Mark Twain has seen a numerous succession of “American humorists” rise, expand into sudden popularity, and disappear, leaving hardly a memory behind.’ The last phrase echoes one of Twain’s favourite lines from Shakespeare, Prospero’s description in The Tempest of how all

  shall dissolve,

  And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a wrack behind.

  (4.1.154–6)

  To speak of artistic legacy was inevitably for Twain to invoke the one writer whose reputation had never flagged. As if to reassure readers that he would follow in Shakespeare’s footsteps rather than those of the forgotten ‘American humorists’, Moffett (or rather Twain himself) declares that ‘Mark Twain has become a classic, not only at home, but in all lands whose people read and think about the common joys and sorrows of humanity’.

  Writers had long engaged in self-promotion; Twain was the first to brand himself. As early as 1873 he had tried to trademark ‘Mark Twain’, and in 1908 formally established the Mark Twain Company to promote his work and image. Starting in 1909 the company, rather than Twain himself, retained copyright to new works. Mark Twain cigars and Mark Twain whiskey were already on the market. We may struggle to call to mind what Emerson or Hawthorne or Melville looked like, but not Twain. From early on, he made sure that his image remained distinctive and unforgettable – from the shaggy moustache, shock of white hair and ever-present pipe to the white serge suits, worn year-round, that were his signature outfit. Twain had become iconic, his visage almost as familiar as the one staring back at us from the frontispiece of the 1623 Folio. Those invited to his seventieth birthday celebration in 1905 were given ‘foot-high plaster busts’ of Twain to lug home. He left an extensive photographic trail (making sure to include his picture and autograph in the front of his books), wouldn’t talk to unauthorised biographers, and recognised the power of new media, even licensing Thomas Edison’s company to film The Prince and the Pauper, complete with out-takes of him padding around Stormfield. Twain worked hard at being a celebrity – one of those words that now seems timeless but had first been used to describe ‘a famous person’ only in the course of his own lifetime.

  *

  Another celebrity was visiting Twain that weekend in January 1909: Helen Keller, whose fame was fast approaching his own. She was hailed internationally for having overcome the loss of sight and hearing in early childhood as well as for her widely admired autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903). Keller deeply valued her friendship with Twain, who treated her, she recalled, ‘not as a freak but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties’. Looking back on their friendship in Midstream: My Later Life (1929), she describes how they first met in 1894, when she was fourteen and he was still ‘vigorous, before the shadows began to gather’. They had stayed in touch since then and after Keller had sent him a copy of her second book, The World I Live In (1908), Twain wrote back urging her to visit – ‘the summons’, she recalled, ‘of a beloved king’.

  Travelling with Keller to Stormfield was her longtime teacher and companion, Anne Sullivan – now Anne Sullivan Macy – famous in her own right for having taught her deaf and blind pupil how to communicate. She had recently accompanied Keller to Radcliffe College at Harvard University, and assisted her there by spelling into her hand the content of classroom lectures. Keller had the good fortune while at Harvard to take two Shakespeare classes with the eminent George Lyman Kittredge, and wrote a thesis on the minor playwright George Peele for a class taught by another Shakespeare expert, William A. Neilson, who soon became her friend. Keller’s interest in Shakespeare only intensified after she received her degree. She even corresponded with a leading sceptic, Edwin Reed, whose books – Francis Bacon Our Shakespeare and Bacon and Shake-speare Parallelisms – had been devastatingly reviewed by her teacher, Kittredge, in The Nation. ‘It was to Reed’, Keller records, ‘that I wrote that my Shakespeare was so strongly entrenched against Baconian arguments that he could never be dislodged.’

  In the months leading up to her visit to Stormfield, Keller had immersed herself in Shakespeare scholarship, reading everything in Braille she could get hold of, and having other printed works communicated to her by tactile signing onto her hand by Anne Sullivan Macy, her mother and others. Her reading left Keller increasingly disappointed by the way that biographers had deified Shakespeare, whose life, she writes, as ‘presented to the public in books and essays composed by scholars and literary men, is a myth of imposing proportions, and is growing every year in volume and fatuity’, a ‘mysterious, inspired Shakespeare whose godlike head is “lost among the clouds”’.

  She began to turn her attention to the literature generated by the authorship controversy and in the weeks preceding her visit to Twain had published on the subject, reviewing George Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated (1908). Keller now admitted to grave doubts:

  some years ago I declared that … no siege of fact or argument could make me honour another than Shakespeare of Stratford … but Mr. Greenwood’s masterly exposition has led to the conclusion that Shakespeare of Stratford is not to be even thought of as a possible author of the most wonderful plays in the world.

  ‘How long must we wait’, she wondered, ‘for the solution of the greatest problem in literature?’

  Joining Helen Keller and her teacher on the visit to Stormfield was the man Anne Sullivan had recently and somewhat reluctantly married, John Macy, eleven years her junior. A lecturer at Harvard and a rising star in literary circles, Macy had been recruited to work with Keller on her first book, The Story of My Life. Since then, he had been tirelessly promoting Keller’s career and, after his marriage to Anne Sullivan, sharing his political and literary enthusiasms – including the authorship question – with them both.

  Twain greeted his house guests on the veranda of his Italianate villa dressed in his familiar white suit. Isabel Lyon kept detailed notes as well as snapshots of the memorable visit. Lyon writes of Twain appearing in one photograph ‘in an elated mood, yet somewhat wistful’, alongside his guests. The photograph only hints at the tensions just beneath the surface. Lyon was struck with how openly John Macy flirted with Helen Keller (she may have heard rumours that Macy had wanted to marry Keller rather than her teacher). Lyon also thought Keller was ‘in love with Macy’ and watched as Macy ‘encourages this emotion’. A ‘plaintive and tired’ Mrs Macy could only look on and confess her obvious distress to Lyon. Lyon herself was on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Twain’s closest companion, she was soon to be banished from Stormfield.

  After dinner that first evening Macy announced that he had brought along galley proofs of a forthcoming book, written by an English friend, William Stone Booth, called Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon. Isabel Lyon observed that ‘the King was instantly alert’. The following day the conversation returned to the authorship question and Macy announced that Booth had found in every one of the plays published in the F
irst Folio an acrostic, hidden there by Francis Bacon. To prove the point, he pulled out some page proofs and showed the ciphers to Twain, including one from the closing lines of The Tempest, where Booth had underlined a dozen key words in the facsimile of Prospero’s Epilogue as they appeared in the 1623 Folio. Booth believed that the hidden signature in this play was especially convincing, coming as it did from the play’s closing lines, ‘the playwright’s last word to his audience, and the place where he would be likely to sign his name in cipher if writing either under a pseudonym or anonymously’.

  Macy couldn’t have chosen a better example to pique Twain’s interest – or indeed that of most admirers of Shakespeare’s works at the time, since Prospero’s departure from the stage was nearly universally read as Shakespeare’s own, the most transparently autobiographical moment in the canon. Twain had trouble identifying Booth’s seemingly random string cipher. With Macy’s help, he was finally able to follow it from the bottom of the page to the top, singling out the first letter of each key word and successfully spelling out the encoded signature: ‘FRANCISCO BACONO’. Macy confidently announced that Booth’s book was ‘going to make a complete establishment of the fact that Shakespeare never wrote the plays attributed to him’.