Upon his return to Washington, Sam discovered that he was scheduled to speak about the Quaker City tour on the evenings of January 9 and 11 at Metzerott Hall—events booked without his knowledge, apparently by Frank Fuller. “To say that I was angry would imperfectly describe my mental condition,” he later told an interviewer.
By a careful series of inquiries I learned that an old personal friend of mine, whose libations sometimes led him into extravagancies and inconsistencies, had put up this job upon me, not through pique or malice, but in his exuberance at learning I was in the city, wanted to give a demonstration of his admiration for me. That explanation settled my fate. I saw I was in for it. I could not inform the public that the whole miserable business was the result of a drunken freak on the part of one of my personal friends. So I went to my room, denied myself to all visitors, and devoted that day to writing.
Of course, he also desperately needed the money. He informed his family on January 8 that he had been “working like sin all night to get a lecture written.” He titled it “The Frozen Truth,” though he confessed there was “more truth in the title” than in the talk. This first of his three versions of the Quaker City lecture, a précis of The Innocents Abroad, “came near being a villainous failure” because it “was not advertised at all.” Still, it was delivered before “a tolerably good house,” according to Sam, and was “a most successful attack upon the rustics” who traveled with him, as reported by his friend George W. Adams in the Washington Evening Star. Adams remarked particularly on Sam’s “slowness of speech and movement” on the stage. “In his most fluent and vivacious moods” he never uttered “more than ten words per minute; and the saunter of Walt Whitman is a race-horse pace compared with his snaillike progress over the ground.” The Washington Morning Chronicle noted that Sam’s descriptions “were replete with sparking wit.” The Washington National Republican added, “To say that the lecture and lecturer were a decided success is simply to record the verdict of a delighted audience.”17
Though scheduled for an encore two days later, Sam canceled the appearance, ostensibly because his manager was ill—“I had been reading my lecture to him”—and could not work the box office. In truth, Sam had agreed to reply to the toast to “Woman” at the Washington Correspondents’ Club first annual banquet at Welcker’s restaurant the same evening. Among the forty-six attendees were Senator Henry B. Anthony of Rhode Island; Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax; Assistant Secretary of the Navy William Faxon; Edward Jump, the San Francisco caricaturist; and four other congressmen. Though offensive by modern standards (e.g., “I love all the women, sir, irrespective of age or color”) and vacillating “between Victorian platitudes and sexual innuendoes,” Sam’s toast was pronounced by Colfax “the best after dinner speech ever made,” or so Sam reported to his family. A transcript of the remarks was widely reprinted, prompting him to warn Mary Fairbanks that the papers “had no business to report it so verbatimly” and to promise her he would not “make any more slang speeches in public” and to “rigidly eschew slang & vulgarity in future.” Nevertheless, the cartoonist Thomas Nast tried to hitch his wagon to the rising star. He invited Sam to join him on tour, Nast illustrating Sam’s talks with “lightning” sketches. Sam was tempted to accept but ultimately declined because he had “so many irons in the fire” already.18
Back at the boardinghouse on F Street, Stewart’s landlady was alarmed that Sam worked late at night by gaslight, increasing her household expenses, and smoked in bed, endangering the building and the safety of its residents. At her insistence, he left in mid-January—and by mid-February he had moved a total of five times and planned to “move again, shortly. Shabby furniture & shabby food—that is Wash[i]n[gton]—I mean to keep moving.” He soon found lodging at 356 C Street NW near the Capitol Mall. The landlord there remembered that his room “was always a sight—books, papers and newspaper clippings by the bushel. He would not allow his room ‘tuched’ and nothing to be disturbed. His shoes of all kinds were in a row alongside of the washboard.” By February 9 Sam had moved to a rooming house at 76 Indiana Avenue NW. Though he “did not mingle in the festivities of Newspaper Row,” as he told an interviewer in 1889, he resided in houses during these weeks with several of his journalist colleagues, among them Adams of the Evening Star, Hiram J. Ramsdell of the New York Tribune and Cincinnati Commercial, John Henry Riley of the San Francisco Alta California, William Swinton of the New York Times, and George Alfred Townsend (aka Gath) of the New York World. “Swinton was one of the dearest and loveliest human beings I have ever known,” Sam recalled in his autobiography, “and we led a charmed existence together, in a contentment which knew no bounds. Swinton was refined by nature and breeding; he was a gentleman by nature and breeding; he was highly educated; he was of a beautiful spirit; he was pure in heart and speech.”19
Sam and Swinton laid grandiose plans to launch a newspaper syndicate—that is, to send duplicates of letters to a variety of widely dispersed papers that subscribed to the service. Sam reported to Emma Beach in late January 1868 that he had “written seven long newspaper letters” over the previous two days. In his autobiographical dictation, he claimed that he and Swinton
invented a scheme for our mutual sustenance; we became the fathers and originators of what is a common feature in the newspaper world now—the syndicate. We became the old original first Newspaper Syndicate on the planet; it was on a small scale, but that is usual with untried new enterprises. We had twelve journals on our list; they were all weeklies, all obscure and poor, and all scattered far away among the back settlements. It was a proud thing for those little newspapers to have a Washington correspondence, and a fortunate thing for us that they felt in that way about it. Each of the twelve took two letters a week from us, at a dollar per letter; each of us wrote one letter per week and sent off six duplicates of it to these benefactors, thus acquiring twenty-four dollars a week to live on—which was all we needed, in our cheap and humble quarters.
Sam’s admission in an interview in 1889 that they “never really tried” the syndicate scheme seems more likely, however.20 Not a single item they sent to provincial newspapers that purportedly subscribed to the syndicate has ever been identified.
Sam and Riley likewise became intimate friends and “lodged together in many places in Washington” during the winter, “moving comfortably from place to place, and attracting attention by paying our board—a course which cannot fail to make a person conspicuous in Washington.” Sam celebrated his friend in A Tramp Abroad (1880) as “the most self-possessed and solemnly deliberate person in the republic.” Ramsdell remembered how during this period Sam not only drank to excess or “was addicted to John Barleycorn” but labored over his manuscripts
in a little back room, with a sheet-iron stove, a dirty, musty carpet of the cheapest description, a bed, and two or three common chairs. The little drum stove was full of ashes, running over on the zinc sheet and the bed seemed to be unmade for a week, the slops had not been carried out for a fortnight, the room was foul with tobacco smoke, the floor, dirty enough to begin with, was littered with newspapers, from which Twain had cut his letters. Then there were hundreds of pieces of torn manuscripts which had been written and then rejected by the author. A dozen pipes were about the apartment—on the wash-stand, on the mantel, on the writing table, on the chairs—everywhere that room could be found. And there was tobacco, and tobacco everywhere. One thing, there were no flies. The smoke killed them, and I am now surprised the smoke did not kill me too. He would strip down his suspenders (his coat and vest, of course, being off) and walk back and forward in slippers in his little room and swear and smoke the whole day long. Of course, at times he would work, and when he did work it was like a steam engine at full head. . . . Of course, at that time, we never thought that Twain’s book would amount to anything, and probably he did not think it would either, but he was writing for the money. . . . He needed that money, and so he wrote.
Sam had been “‘
green’ enough to look at things through his own eyes and weigh things with his own common sense,” Ramsdell allowed. “He knocked the old reverence and awe all to thunder. . . . Nobody knew him and nobody cared a rap for him,” but “the visitor was always welcomed” to his room because Sam “was so lazy” he stopped working if there was “an excuse for loafing.”21
Meanwhile, Sam’s contract negotiations with Bliss had stalled, so he decided to travel to Hartford to bargain with the publisher in person. On January 20, he paused in New York, where he was struck again by the “terrible activity” and pervasive poverty during the economic depression of the late 1860s. Despite “its scores of millionaires, there are to-day a hundred thousand men out of employment” in the city, Sam reported. “It is an item of threatening portent. Many apprehend bread riots, and certainly there is serious danger that they may occur. If this army of men had a leader, New York would be in an unenviable situation.” During the layover, he also agreed with the younger James Gordon Bennett to contribute occasionally to the New York Herald. Bennett “tells me that if I will correspond twice a week from Washington, I may abuse & ridicule anybody & every body I please,” he bragged. He assured Mother Fairbanks that he planned “to abuse people right & left, in case the humor takes me to do it. There are lots of folks in Washington who need vilifying.” In the end, however, nothing came of this arrangement. He also consulted with his friends Henry Ward Beecher and A. D. Richardson, both of them experienced in the method of subscription publication. On his part, Beecher told Sam “what to do and how to do it” in his talks with Bliss and “I listened well.” Sam asked Richardson a particular question. Bliss had offered two alternatives forms of payment: a flat ten thousand dollars for the copyright on a book or a 5 percent royalty on its sales—the same royalty Greeley received from another Hartford subscription press for his Civil War history The American Conflict and a full percentage point more than Bliss had paid Richardson for Beyond the Mississippi. Which option should he choose? Richardson advised Sam to take the royalty, even though it entailed some risk if the book failed to attract as many buyers as he hoped. Sam took Richardson’s advice, banking on a huge subscription. The manuscript tentatively was to be submitted “by the middle of July. . . . I had my mind made up to one thing—I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, & a good deal of it.” Once burned (on sales of the jumping frog book), twice shy. Sam again stayed in Brooklyn at the home of the Beach family, where he was treated so well he was “ashamed to think I ever thought uncharitably” of Emma’s father.22
On January 22 he arrived in Hartford to visit John and Isabella Beecher Hooker at their home on Hawthorne Street and to finalize contract terms with Bliss. As the headquarters of several insurance companies and such industries as the Colt Arms factory and Pratt & Whitney, the capital of Connecticut was one of the most prosperous cities in the country, and the Hookers lived in a 140-acre artists’ enclave in a western suburb known locally as Nook Farm. Among the other residents of the community were former U.S. senator Francis Gillette, his wife Elizabeth Hooker Gillette, and their son William Gillette, soon to be a successful playwright and actor; the lawyer Charles Enoch Perkins, brother of Frederic Beecher Perkins and uncle of Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin; Charles Dudley Warner, the co-owner and -editor of the Hartford Courant; and Warner’s brother George. Livy Langdon had visited the Hookers the previous fall and wrote her friend Isabella afterward that she had tasted “the delights of Nook Farm.”23
Still, the Hookers clearly cramped Sam’s style. They expected him to “walk mighty straight” and forbade him from smoking in their parlor—arguably with good reason. As Howells remembered, “Whenever [Sam] had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. . . . I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly.” Livy’s eventual heart problems may have been related in large part to Sam’s nonstop smoking. In the Hooker home, at any rate, he smoked “surreptitiously when all are in bed, to save my reputation, & then [drew] suspicion upon the cat when the family detect[ed] an unfamiliar odor.” It was the first suggestion of Sam’s hostility toward the eccentric feminist and spiritualist Isabella that only grew over the years. “I am afraid I never shall feel right in that house,” he wrote Livy a year later. “I let my trust & confidence go out to them as I seldom do with new acquaintances, & they responded by misunderstanding me.” He tolerated the Hookers at the time “more because you like them than for any other reason.” Ironically, in 1871 Sam and Livy would rent the Hookers’ house when they first moved to Hartford. But in November 1872, after Isabella publicly sided with her brother Henry’s accusers during the adultery scandal that rocked his career, Sam resolved that Livy “shall not cross Mrs Hooker’s threshold,” according to Mollie Clemens, “and if he talks to Mrs H he will tell her in plain words the reason.”24
Despite his disaffection with the Hookers, when Sam first visited Hartford in January 1868 he was favorably impressed. “I think this is the best built and the handsomest town I have ever seen,” he wrote his Alta readers. With a population of thirty-seven thousand, the city seemed “to be composed almost entirely of dwelling houses—not single-shaped affairs, stood on end and packed together like a deck of cards, but massive private hotels, scattered along the broad, straight streets, from fifty all the way up to two hundred yards apart. Each house sits in the midst of about an acre of green grass.” The city featured “the broadest, straightest streets . . . that ever led a sinner to destruction; and the dwelling houses are the amplest in size, and the shapeliest, and have the most capacious ornamental grounds about them. But I would speak of other things. This is the centre of Connecticut wealth. Hartford dollars have a place in half the great moneyed enterprises in the Union.” He toured the Colt factory, a collection “of tall brick buildings, and on every floor is a dense wilderness of strange iron machines that stretches away into remote distances and confusing perspectives.” He was particularly interested “in that birth-place of six-shooters,” he wrote his Alta readers, “because I had seen so many graceful specimens of their performances in the deadfalls of Washoe and California.” But he was even more amazed by the new Gatling gun, an early type of repeating artillery weapon, “a cluster of six to ten savage tubes that carry great conical pellets of lead, with unerring accuracy, a distance of two and a half miles” that could be fired “faster than four men can count. . . . It can be discharged four hundred times in a minute! I liked it very much.” The demonstration he observed of the destructive power of the gun became the germ of his inspiration twenty years later for the “Battle of the Sand Belt,” the Armageddon-like conflict that concludes A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (“the thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand”).25
As far as business was concerned, Sam finally agreed to terms with Bliss on January 27 for a lavishly illustrated five- or six-hundred-page work to be sold exclusively by subscription, though he did not sign a formal contract for the book until October. It specified that the American Publishing Company would electrotype the work “during the next 4 months,” with books placed in the hands of their sales representatives “very early next spring.”26
While passing through New York on his return to Washington, Sam also toured a slum tenement along with a group of philanthropists and described the plight of some of the residents to his Alta readers. Not much had changed since he visited the same slums in 1853. He met a former washerwoman with five children who had fallen ill, “lost her custom,” and begged for a living and a fourteen-year-old girl “who supported her father and mother and two young sisters” by selling newspapers during the day and playing tambourine and collecting pennies for an organ grinder by night. Back in Washington, Sam agreed to deliver his Sandwich Islands lecture for the benefit of the Ladies’ Union Benevolent Society in Georgetown on February 22, his fi
rst charitable appearance since he had spoken in Carson City in January 1864. The audience at Forrest Hall was “large” and “appreciative” and “for an hour or more” he kept them “in almost continuous roars of laughter.”27
Sam briefly considered at this juncture the offer of a government job similar to the one Harte enjoyed in the San Francisco Mint. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field, whom Sam had known in California, promised to help him to the San Francisco postmastership or some other office. Sam denied that the offer smelled of graft. Field was “an able man, a just one, and one whose judicial and political garments are clean.” On his part, Field told Sam that he “must have an office, with a good salary & nothing to do. You are no common scrub of a newspaperman. You have written the best letter about Pompeii that ever was written about it—& if you had an easy berth you could write more.” Field urged him merely to name an “office you want in San Francisco, & the President shall give it you.” By early February 1868, Senator John Conness had pledged his support, too. He promised Sam the Senate’s confirmation should he choose any of “five influential California offices” or even the post of U.S. minister to China. Ross Browne, who received the China appointment, offered Sam a position in the Beijing embassy. Sam initially planned to accept the invitation “as soon as I am free.” He resisted all temptations, however, because even the most lucrative of these jobs “would render it impossible to fill my book contract.” He also feared that a return to California as a federal appointee would be a career misstep, even if on the surface it guaranteed a salary. Such a move “seemed to me a falling from grace, the idea of going back to San Francisco nothing better than a mere postmaster, albeit the public would have thought I came with gilded honors, & in great glory”—and “besides, I did not want the office.”28
The Life of Mark Twain Page 66