The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Over the decades, the field of Samuel Clemens biography has often resembled a bloody battleground. The most famous critical war occurred in the late 1920s and 1930s between the first two curators of the Mark Twain Papers, Paine and DeVoto, with Clemens’s surviving daughter and heir, Clara, a self-interested spectator. In 1906 Clemens commissioned Paine, a young sycophant without a pedigree, to write his official biography. After Clemens’s death in 1910 Paine managed the papers with the goal of maximizing their profitability to the Mark Twain Company and his estate by churning out a steady stream of Twain-related books and magazine articles based on materials in the archive: the hagiographical Mark Twain: A Biography (1912) and bowdlerized editions of Mark Twain’s Letters (1917), Mark Twain’s Speeches (1923), Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924), and Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935). Thomas Sergeant Perry once disparaged the archival method of compiling such magisterial works. “The biographer,” he wrote, “gets a dustcart into which he shovels diaries, reminiscences, old letters, until the cart is full. Then he dumps the load in front of your door. That is Vol. I. Then he goes forth again on the same errand. And there is Vol. II. Out of this rubbish the reader constructs a biography.” Paine tightly controlled access to the manuscripts; that is, his proprietary interest in Mark Twain was at least as pronounced as Leon Edel’s in Henry James a couple of generations later. Paine was a gatekeeper, and among those he denied entry was DeVoto, a young Harvard University graduate who believed that Van Wyck Brooks had distorted the record by contending in the thesis-ridden The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) that Sam’s native genius had been repressed and his writings censored by his genteel wife Olivia “Livy” Langdon Clemens, editors, and friends. As Brooks suggested most succinctly, “the making of the humorist was the undoing of the artist.” Without rehearsing this controversy or his conflict with Paine in detail, DeVoto needed to examine the original manuscripts in order to dispute Brooks’s thesis, but Paine colluded with Harper & Bros., Sam’s last publisher, to refuse DeVoto access to the papers. As he advised the editors at the House of Harper, “on general principles it is a mistake to let anyone else write about Mark Twain, as long as we can prevent it. . . . As soon as this is begun (writing about him at all, I mean) the Mark Twain that we have ‘preserved’—the Mark Twain that we knew, the traditional Mark Twain—will begin to fade and change, and with that process the Harper Mark Twain property will depreciate.” In his introduction to a 1980 reprinting of the authorized biography, James M. Cox concludes unequivocally that Paine “acted as censor and custodian,” doing all he could to preserve the life he had written and unhesitatingly denying would-be revisionists like DeVoto access to the papers. Ironically, Paine appropriated some of Sam’s manuscripts for his personal use without permission, and carelessly lost other documents, including the manuscript of Orion Clemens’s autobiography. In the foreword to Mark Twain’s America (1932), DeVoto expressed scorn for Paine’s motives and methods. When he was starting to research his book, according to DeVoto, Paine informed him that “nothing more need ever be written about Mark Twain. The canon was established, and whatever biography or criticism had to say could be found in the six pounds of letterpress that composed Mr. Paine’s official Life.” DeVoto observed that the furor caused by Brooks’s thesis “rested on one marginal note quoted by Mr. Paine which accused [the primary scapegoat, Olivia Langdon Clemens] of steadily weakening the English language.” DeVoto eventually concluded, too, that Sam—not Livy, Howells, or his other ostensible censors—“was responsible for many of the euphemisms and avoidances” in his writings. Paine delivered his patronizing reply in the preface to the centenary edition of Mark Twain: A Biography (1935): DeVoto seemed “a young man . . . more talented than exact” and “not always pleased with the facts as he finds them. . . . The young man plainly was not pleased with Mark Twain’s choice of those to whom he trusted his literary effects—his daughter, Clara, and the writer of these lines.”9 Ironically, in the same year DeVoto also began to contribute a popular column, “The Easy Chair,” to Harper’s Monthly, and in 1938, the year after Paine’s death, he was selected to succeed him as curator of the Mark Twain Papers. He remained in this office until 1946, and before his own death in 1955 he had received both a Pulitzer Prize for history and a National Book Award for nonfiction.

  Nevertheless, Brooks’s contention that Sam had been crippled artistically by the censors who surrounded him, including his wife Livy, editor Howells, and his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks, had the effect of fostering the false notion that Mark Twain was his alter ego or that he suffered from a multiple personality disorder like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Twain biography became and has remained a fertile field for psychoanalytically inclined critics. In Freudian terms, if “the Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” (Twain) was the id, then the bourgeois family man who resided in a Victorian mansion (Clemens) was the superego. “The solution for critics . . . at least since Brooks,” according to Richard S. Lowry, has been to resolve the contradictions in his character “by literally dividing him in two.” Arthur G. Pettit alludes darkly to his “multiple personality.” Even DeVoto, Brooks’s most vocal opponent, conceded that “for a time” after the death of his wife and favorite daughter, Sam “lived perilously close to the indefinable line between sanity and madness.” Paul Fatout epitomized this tendency toward armchair psychoanalysis when he tried to gauge precisely the “vague and shifting” line “where Clemens yields to Twain and vice versa,” as if there were “two persons occupying the same body,” which is exactly what Andrew Hoffman asserted in his biography Inventing Mark Twain (1997). Forrest G. Robinson flirts with the same notion by claiming that “the line separating Clemens from Twain was far from clear,” even “to the man who bore those names,” though Robinson immediately qualifies his point by affirming a more conventional view: “Clemens was a historical person of many and complex dimensions, but there was only one of him. Mark Twain was a fiction of many and complex dimensions—not the least of them his relationship to his maker—but he was a fiction.”10 That is, his ego was more intact than many critics have been willing to grant.

  In short, for decades after the publication of The Ordeal of Mark Twain, Brooks’s thesis skewed the field of Clemens studies. In his 1930 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, Sinclair Lewis betrayed Brooks’s influence when he declared that Howells “was actually able to tame Mark Twain, perhaps the greatest of our writers, and to put that fiery old savage into an intellectual frock coat and top hat.” According to Justin Kaplan, he was “a double creature”: “The Hartford literary gentleman lived inside the sagebrush bohemian.” The very title of Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966), a play on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, nods in Brooks’s direction, as does the milder common critical judgment that Sam was a welter of “contradictions” or “inconsistencies” sometimes verging on the pathological. To cite only a few examples: Gladys Bellamy (“Mark Twain seethed with contradictions”); Edward Wagenknecht (“There are contradictions in Mark Twain’s attitude about himself, as in everything else about him”); J. Stanley Mattson (“the contradictions in Mark Twain’s character were legion”); Fred Kaplan (“a man of many inconsistencies”); Joseph F. Goeke (“chronic vacillation, impulsiveness, and self-contradiction”); Peter Krass (“a complex man who was almost schizophrenic”); and Margaret Duckett (“Mark Twain contradicted himself on almost every subject”). Gregg Camfield avers that Sam’s “attitudes toward the world of commerce seem confused and contradictory,” particularly “the contradiction between his support of labor and his investment in a labor-supplanting machine.” He was an unabashedly countercultural figure—except when he was not. He also affirmed the standards of the social status quo—except when he did not. While Sam sometimes spoke truth to power, as when he condemned the depredations of the American military in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, he almost as often spoke what he considered truth to powerlessness, as when he sued a poor hack driver for overcharging his maid on a fare a
nd justified his action on the ground of “civic duty.”11 He scorned hypocrisy, but he was vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy in his own right. By the end of his life he had become both king and court jester, both Lear and the Fool.

  In his final years Sam even expressed profound uncertainty about his rank as a writer. On the one hand, he believed that the reputations of such literary comedians as Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby had “perished” after their deaths because “they were merely humorists. Humorists of the ‘mere’ sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration. . . . Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” On his part, he insisted that he had “always preached. That is the reason that I have lasted thirty years.” During his final visit to Missouri in 1902 he reiterated the point to an interviewer: “I am a preacher. We are all preachers. If we do not preach by words, we preach by deeds.” Put another way, while he was first and foremost a humorist, Sam Clemens was not a humorist exclusively. He even admitted in old age to a worry that he had “only amused people” and that “their laughter has submerged me.”12

  To be sure, Sam was never a systematic thinker, especially on matters of business and finance. He played with ideas the way a jazz musician plays the trumpet. For example, as Forrest Robinson puts it, his “contempt for money was matched by his craving for it.” On the one hand, he satirized Cornelius Vanderbilt’s predatory capitalism in “Open Letter to Commodore Vanderbilt” (1869), was a founding member in 1891 of the American Friends of Russian Freedom, and supported socialists such as Maxim Gorky. “I’m a revolutionist . . . by birth, breeding principle, and everything else,” he told an interviewer in 1906. “I love all revolutions no matter where or when they start.” On the other hand, he admired his father-in-law Jervis Langdon, a self-made tycoon, and late in life he hobnobbed with such nabobs as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Huttleston Rogers (aka Hell Hound Rogers to his enemies), vice president of the Standard Oil Company. Howells considered Sam both a “theoretical socialist” and a “practical aristocrat.” Justin Kaplan adds that “as a writer he stood outside American society of the Gilded Age, but as a businessman he embraced its business values.”13

  Sam was also an ambivalent or liminal figure in dozens of other ways. He was a popular lecturer who hated lecturing, especially in country villages. Depending on his mood, he could be either a flamboyant showman in a white linen suit or a recluse in pajamas, either a philanthropist or a misanthrope. He was a practical joker, but quick to anger whenever he became the butt of a practical joke. Blessed with an eye for the ironic or absurd, a harsh critic of cant, he was also notoriously prickly. He was both a devoted husband and a negligent father, both a debunker and an inventor of tall tales. He earned vast wealth by writing and lecturing, and lost most of it in wildcat schemes and poor investments. According to John Gerber, he was by turns “an optimist and a pessimist, an idealist and a materialist, a reformer and a determinist.” But, to be fair, Sam was no more enigmatic or contradictory a figure than the poet Walt Whitman, who famously proclaimed in section 51 of “Song of Myself,” “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then, I contradict myself. / I am large. I contain multitudes.” If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” then Sam was an unqualified genius. While he routinely resisted authority, repeatedly challenged the status quo, and earned a reputation for iconoclasm and irreverence, he also enjoyed French cuisine and luxury travel. He was a cultural icon who subverted cultural norms, less a conformist than a counter-counterculturist, so transgressive he sometimes rebelled even against nonconformity. Or, as DeVoto bluntly asserted, “He was anarchy.”14 He harbored divided loyalties, but not a divided psyche. That is, a second task of a Clemens biographer is to avoid the simpleminded view of him as a split personality.

  Still, all of his biographers must decide how to refer to him. Some resolve the issue by calling him Sam or Clemens in his youth and Mark or Twain after he adopted the pseudonym in Nevada in 1863. Others use the names interchangeably. It was a problem for Clemens, too. He began to sign some of his letters to his family “Mark” as early as July 1863, yet during his courtship and thirty-five-year marriage to his wife Olivia he always signed his letters to her as Sam. He complained in 1869 that he was often confused with his persona: “I am in some sense a public man . . . but my private character is hacked, & dissected, & mixed up with my public one.” In 1871 he alluded to his “hated nom de plume (for I do loathe the very sight of it).” For good or ill, the pseudonym became a trademark or brand name and a successful marketing tool. The name was used to sell brands of whiskey, cigars, self-pasting scrapbooks, and shirt collars; he sued publishing pirates not on the grounds of copyright violation but of trademark infringement. After the sales success of The Innocents Abroad, his publishers required him to use the pseudonym. The contract he signed with American Publishing Co. of Hartford, Connecticut, in June 1872 for a prospective book on the South African diamond mines (never written) stipulated that he “would receive an 8.5 percent royalty” if it appeared under the name Mark Twain, but “only 5 percent” if he “were to use a different nom de plume.” He wanted “A True Story” (1874), his first piece in the Atlantic Monthly, and his novel The Prince and the Pauper (1881) to appear either without signature or under his real name because neither was a comic tale of the type Mark Twain was known to write and he preferred not to “swindle people” with false advertising of the brand; and, in fact, later in his career he occasionally published “serious” work without signature or under a different pseudonym, including the allegory “The Curious Republic of Gondour” (1875), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and What Is Man? (1906). He practiced a form of self-erasure, publishing the risqué 1601 (1882) anonymously. “I shall never be accepted seriously over my own signature,” he told his biographer Paine. “People always want to laugh over what I write and are disappointed if they don’t find a joke in it.” In a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune in 1871 he endorsed capital punishment but to avoid confusing the public by attaching to it his comic pseudonym, he concealed (if only slightly) his identity by signing it Samuel Langhorne. Near the end of his life he admitted he should have assumed two noms de plume, one for his humor writings, the other for his “serious” work. Even Sam’s daughter Susy hated the pseudonym, reportedly telling the novelist Grace King in 1892 that she “should like never to hear it again! My father should not be satisfied with it! He should not be known by it! He should show himself the great writer that he is, not merely a funny man. Funny! That’s all the people see in him—a maker of funny speeches!” Howells wrote as late as 1908 that he thought Sam had moved from New York to Connecticut “to get rid of Mark Twain.” In short, Mark Twain was always an implied author or public persona or, as Edgar Marquess Branch put it, “Mark Twain was a highly adaptable, partly fictional version of Clemens,” an iteration or a pose.15 That is, Sam Clemens was Twain, but Twain was not Sam Clemens, and so I will refer to him throughout this biography by his given name, not his pen name.

  I have saved the most pressing question for last: Why another biography of the author? My best answer is that Paine was unable—for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was his lack of professional training—to write a thoroughly satisfactory biography, even in the space of a half million words, and all Clemens biographers since Paine have tailored their narratives to fit the parameters of a single volume. As Gregg Camfield explains, “The extraordinary amount of information available about his complex life makes any biographer’s task almost impossible, so that almost all of them narrow their scope in some significant way.” That is, for the past century every Clemens biographer has labored under constraints, like a painter with a small canvas and a limited number of colors on the palette. They have covered Clemens’s life selectively or piecemeal, usually b
y focusing on a period, relationship, or theme. Henry B. Wonham refers to this trend as the “shrinking critical gaze” on Clemens.16 For example, no fewer than a dozen full-length scholarly biographies have examined his life before his voyage to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City in 1867: Minnie Brashear’s Mark Twain: Son of Missouri (1934); Ivan Benson’s Mark Twain’s Western Years (1938); Effie Mona Mack’s Mark Twain in Nevada (1947); Walter Frear’s Mark Twain in Hawaii (1947); Dixon Wecter’s Sam Clemens of Hannibal (1952); Paul Fatout’s Mark Twain in Virginia City (1964); Edgar Branch’s The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (1966); Margaret Sanborn’s Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years (1990); Nigey Lennon’s The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain in California (1991); Joe Coulombe’s Mark Twain and the American West (2003); Terrell Dempsey’s Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World (2003); and James Caron’s Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (2008). Similarly, John Muller’s Mark Twain in Washington, D.C. (2013) spotlights Sam’s life in the nation’s capital during the winter of 1867–68; and a trio of scholarly books have been published devoted to the sliver of Clemens’s life in Buffalo, New York, in 1869–71: Jeffrey Steinbrink’s Getting to Be Mark Twain (1991); Joseph McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasburg’s Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express (1999); and Thomas J. Reigstad’s Scribblin’ for a Livin’: Mark Twain’s Pivotal Period in Buffalo (2013)—though the latter volume inexplicably fails to cite the other two. Kenneth R. Andrews’s Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle (1969) profiles Sam’s years in the Connecticut capital between 1871 and 1891; Robert D. Jerome and Herbert A. Wisbey Jr.’s Mark Twain in Elmira (1977) chronicles his twenty summers at his in-laws’ homes in the Southern Tier region of New York; Howard G. Baetzhold’s Mark Twain and John Bull: The British Connection (1970) logs the history of his travels in England; Harry B. Davis’s Mark Twain in Heidelberg (1985) recounts events during his months in that town on the Neckar River in 1878; and Philip W. Leon’s Mark Twain and West Point (1996) details his experiences at the military academy and with the cadets. Richard Zacks’s Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour (2016) chronicles Sam’s 1895–96 North American, Australasian, and African lecture trip, and Carl Dolmetsch’s “Our Famous Guest”: Mark Twain in Vienna (1992) his two-year fin de siècle residence in Austria; and Elizabeth Wallace’s Mark Twain and the Happy Island (1913) and Donald Hoffmann’s Mark Twain in Paradise (2006) record his experiences in Bermuda, most of them during the last decade of his life. Several volumes focus on Sam’s personal associations with and/or intellectual debts to other figures, including Arlin Turner’s Mark Twain and George Washington Cable: The Record of a Literary Friendship (1960); Margaret Duckett’s Mark Twain and Bret Harte (1964); Hamlin Hill’s Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss (1964); Kenneth E. Eble’s Old Clemens and W.D.H.: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship (1985); Resa Willis’s Mark and Livy: The Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him (1992); Anthony J. Berret’s Mark Twain and Shakespeare: A Cultural Legacy (1993); Jason Gary Horn’s Mark Twain and William James: Crafting a Free Self (1996); Susan K. Harris’s The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (1997); Philip Ashley Fanning’s Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers, Partners, Strangers (2003); Peter B. Messent’s Mark Twain and Male Friendship: The Twichell, Howells, and Rogers Friendships (2009); and Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Brahm, and Catherine Carlstroem’s The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx (2011). Yet, as Leland Krauth adds, missing from this list “is a biography emphasizing the family life that sees through the sentimental image fostered by Clemens, Livy, and their daughters.”17