by Ron Powers
If you live below Twenty-fifth street, you are “down town;” and if you live anywhere between that and Seven Hundred and Seventy-fifth street (I don’t know how far they run—have quit trying to find out), you will never get down town with out walking the legs off yourself. You cannot ride…unless you are willing to go in a packed omnibus that labors, and plunges, and struggles along at the rate of three miles in four hours and a half…Or, if you can stomach it, you can ride in a horse-car and stand up for three-quarters of an hour…or you can take one of the platforms, if you please, but they are so crowded you will have to hang on by your eye-lashes and your toe-nails.2
Sam called on Webb in the midst of a snowstorm. His host thawed him out with several jolts of Washoe-style “reporter’s cobbler,” and the reunion was cheery. Also present was a New York drama critic named Edward H. (Ned) House, a friend of Artemus Ward’s who, the previous June, had escorted the humorist to England, where Ward struggled with his lecturing career in the face of worsening tuberculosis.
Webb persuaded Sam, still focused on the Sandwich Islands project, that the “Jumping Frog” was the hot ticket for him. As the title sketch of a Mark Twain collection, its popularity was practically guaranteed in advance. Webb volunteered to help select and collate the other pieces, which appealed to the lazy streak in Sam. He even arranged an appointment for Sam with George Carleton, the publisher of Ward, Bret Harte, Josh Billings, and other Western humorists, whose list included Webb’s own poetry. (It was Carleton who, back in 1865, had forwarded the “Frog” sketch to Henry Clapp Jr., then editor of the Saturday Press.) Sam, “charmed and excited,” had every reason to believe that a contract would be extended to him as soon as he walked through Carleton’s door. So certain was he of this that he dashed off a private letter to his sponsor at the Alta, John McComb, in early February, boasting that he was about to “give” Carleton a volume of sketches for publication. The paper printed a brief summary of this letter for Mark Twain’s followers in mid-March—nearly a month after Sam had kept his appointment with Carleton, and been given the bum’s rush.3 He never forgot it: his diffident arrival in the publisher’s office at 499 Broadway, the brusque statement of the clerk that Mr. Carleton was in his private office; his admission to the great man’s quarters after a long wait; Carleton’s icily impersonal greeting: “Well, what can I do for you?”
Sam’s abashed response—that he was keeping an appointment to offer a book for publication—triggered a temper tantrum from Carleton that lives in the annals of bad editorial judgment. “He began to swell,” Mark Twain recalled,4 “and went on swelling and swelling and swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the second or third degree. Then the fountains of his great deep were broken up…”* Carleton later told a friend that it was Sam’s “disreputable” appearance that had put him on edge.5 (This was in the days when many writers dressed well.) Whatever the impetus, Carleton treated his speechless visitor to a vintage New York–style tongue-lashing. At the end, he swept his arm around the room and delivered the coup de grace that will forever be associated with his name: “Books—look at those shelves. Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I don’t. Good morning.”6
The apocryphal editor who sneeringly intoned, “Whales, Mr. Melville?” could scarcely have shoved his foot deeper into his mouth. To Carleton’s credit, he acknowledged the dimensions of his botched opportunity. More than two decades afterward, encountering Mark Twain in Lucerne, Carleton squared himself, shook the now-famous author’s hand, and declared (at least in Mark Twain’s memory): “I am substantially an obscure person, but I have a couple of such colossal distinctions to my credit that I am entitled to immortality—to wit: I refused a book of yours, and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century.”7
Mark Twain welcomed this “long delayed revenge” as “sweeter to me than any other that could be devised,”8 but it didn’t quite atone for the second affront that Carleton had perpetrated virtually at the same time he turned down Mark Twain’s manuscript: he’d agreed to publish a collection of Western sketches called Condensed Novels by Bret Harte. Sam’s envious fury over this perceived (but hardly intentional) slight magnified the insult Carleton had dealt him. A few weeks later, writing to a friend in San Francisco, he asked “How is Bret? He is publishing with a Son of a Bitch who will swindle him, & he may print that opinion if he chooses, with my name signed to it. I don’t know how his book is coming on—we of Bohemia keep away from Carleton’s.”9
Carleton’s rejection was not an isolated incident; it was simply the only documented one. Newspaper clippings and a later remark by Webb indicate that other houses may have turned down the manuscript as well. Ultimately, having persuaded Sam of the collection’s salability, Webb offered to publish it himself, handling the production and arranging for distribution. Sam would take royalties of 10 percent of sales. He plunged into a final editing process with Webb, making several handwritten revisions on newspaper clippings of his California sketches that he had collected in a scrapbook. His changes are almost entirely aimed at purging the most extreme of the rough-and-ready words and phrases that had been his natural coinage in the West. He denied this—the editing had been all Webb’s work, he told the Alta—but scholarship devoted to the scrapbook proves otherwise. The archive shows, for instance, that Sam converted “hell” to the safer “hades” in three instances. Other substitutions included “embrace” for “tackle,” “blucher” for “slush buster,”* “muggings” for “hog wash,” “fearful” for “rough,” “wickedest” for “vilest,” “leer” for “slobber,” “jolly” for “bully,” and “swindle” for “humbug.” He also deleted a reference to the inspiration he had derived from “the excellent beer” manufactured in New York.
These edits marked the beginning of an acute self-refining process that would consume him, to a considerable extent, for the rest of his life: a process of tempering his more atavistic impulses to satisfy the decorous tastes of—well, just about everyone: Mary Fairbanks, Howells, his wife, his daughters, the clergy, the East generally, Great Britain…The entire English-speaking world, it must have seemed to him sometimes, was preoccupied with making Mark Twain watch his mouth.
When he’d handed his revisions over to Webb, Sam turned his energies to getting some humorous pieces published in New York newspapers. Success came quickly: the Sunday Mercury published seven Mark Twain sketches that year, probably at twenty-five dollars each; the Evening Express bought one; and Street and Smith’s New York Weekly contracted for five of his Sandwich Islands letters recycled from the Sacramento Union.10
Broadway continued to be a lifeline of opportunity. Frank Fuller, another friend from Washoe days who had his offices there, told Sam that he should take that crackerjack Sandwich Islands lecture of his and get it going again in the East. The idea of facing a discerning Eastern audience gave Sam the fantods, but he said yes, and Frank Fuller joined Charles Henry Webb on the Mark Twain multimedia express, as his lecture manager. (For both men, it would be a long and ultimately bumpy ride.) Fuller sought the biggest hall available in New York, and set a date more than three months away. And then Sam fell back into another depression. He wrote candidly of his “blues” in a letter to the Alta, and admitted that his “thoughts persistently ran on funerals and suicide.” Sometime in late January, he moved out of the Metropolitan and into cheaper quarters on East 16th Street. He tried to keep his mind busy. Work, as always, was an antidote; he trudged about the wintry city, compiling vignettes for his California readers. His mood may have been dark, but his observations remain a rare and charming snapshot collection of the city and its people at the dawn of its international might.
He evoked the city’s swelling population, particularly its violent dispossessed, “the brown-stone frontier and the rag-picker of the Five Points.” He noted that the newly wealthy “upstart princes” of commerce had displaced the “old, genuin
e, traveled, cultivated, pedigreed aristocracy of New York, [who] stand stunned and helpless under the new order of things.” “Everything is high”—thirty dollars a week for rent, sixty cents a pound for butter, sixty cents a dozen for eggs. “Beggars charge two cents now.”11
He updated California on one of his favorite topics, women’s fashion.
The wretched waterfall still remains, of course, but in a modified form…now it sticks straight out behind, and looks like a wire muzzle on a greyhound…the glory of the costume is the robe—the dress. No furbelows, no flounces, no biases, no ruffles, no gores, no flutterwheels, no hoops to speak of—nothing but a rich, plain, narrow black dress, terminating just below the knees in long saw-teeth,…and under it a flaming red skirt, enough to put your eyes out, that reaches down only to the ankle-bone, and exposes the restless little feet…. To see a lovely girl of seventeen, with her saddle on her head, and her muzzle on behind, and her veil just covering the end of her nose, come tripping along in her hoopless, red-bottomed dress, like a churn on fire, is enough to set a man wild. I must drop this subject—I can’t stand it.12
He got himself invited inside the exclusive Century Club, whose membership was limited to authors, artists, and “amateurs of letters and the fine arts.” He poked some outsider’s fun at the shiny bald heads on the premises, but almost palpably drooled over a sampling of the membership: Edwin Booth, William Cullen Bryant, “Church, the painter,” Frederick Law Olmsted, “Putnam, the publisher,” Richard Henry Stoddard. “I carried away some of the hats with me for specimens. They average about No. 11.”13
He revisited the gaslit theaters along Broadway that he’d sampled as a youth; and noted that the girlie show, which had scandalized him when he gazed disapprovingly and at length upon “The Model Artists” in 1853, had been repackaged as “Grand Spectacular Drama.” But it was the same old fleshy dodge. “I warn you that when they put beautiful clipper-built girls on the stage in this new fashion, with only just barely clothes enough on to be tantalizing, it is a shrewd invention of the devil. It lays a heavier siege to public morals than all the legitimate model artist shows you can bring into action.”14 Thank goodness someone was speaking out.
He even managed to extend a genial bow to “My Ancient Friends, the Police.”
…[H]ow they work!—how they charge through the tangled vehicles, and order this one to go this way, another that way, and a third to stand still or back!…They are extremely useful…and they earn every cent they get. From one end of town to the other they march to and fro across Broadway with women on their arms…The women like it. I stood by for two hours and watched one of them cross seven or eight times on various pretences, and always on the same handsome policeman’s arm.15
He went to see the fiery twenty-five-year-old feminist Anna Dickinson lecture at the Peter Cooper Institute, noting that she was brought onstage by Peter Cooper and introduced by Horace Greeley. He took a detailed connoisseur’s interest in her wild, hectoring performance, which, he was forced to admit to Alta readers, was impressive.
She talks fast, uses no notes whatever, never hesitates for a word…and has the most perfect confidence in herself. Indeed, her sentences are remarkably smoothly-woven and felicitous. Her vim, her energy, her determined look, her tremendous earnestness, would compel the respect and the attention of an audience, even if she spoke in Chinese—would convince a third of them, too, even though she used arguments that would not stand analysis…she hath a certain grim humor that affords an uneasy sort of enjoyment…16
As for her message, which dealt with “the drudging, unintellectual character of those employments” available to women, he was uncharacteristically sympathetic: “She did her work well. She made a speech worth listening to.” Still, he couldn’t let her escape without a stiletto thrust: “Her sarcasm bites. I do not know but that it is her best card. She will make a right venomous old maid some day, I am afraid.”17
On Sunday, February 3, with the thermometer “at 180 degrees below zero, I should judge,”18 Sam boarded a ferryboat that bumped through the ice floes of the East River, and walked stiff-legged into the plump, plain-brick Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, to hear a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Beecher. He made the visit at the urging of his friend Moses Sperry Beach, an owner and editor of the New York Sun and a congregant at Plymouth, with close ties to Beecher. Sam pried his way through the packed sanctuary and into a space “about large enough to accommodate a spittoon,”19 and prepared to scrutinize the star attraction. His description of the service endures as the most vivid word-picture on record of Beecher at the pulpit. The great minister
got up and preached one of the liveliest and most sensible sermons I ever listened to. He has a rich, resonant voice, and a distinct enunciation, and makes himself heard all over the church without very apparent effort. His discourse sparkled with felicitous similes and metaphors (it is his strong suit to use the language of the worldly,)…poetry, pathos, humor, satire and eloquent declamation were happily blended upon a ground work of earnest exposition of the great truths involved in his text.20
Beecher preached that day on the theme of civic duty. His sermon abounded in rhetorical shrewdness, a skill dear to Sam’s heart. Beecher invoked the image of an automated loom he’d seen once in Lowell, Massachusetts, a machine that performed “with no apparent intelligence but its own to guide it.”21 Then he sprang his “snapper”: given the mental caliber of some “people to whom the elective franchise is accorded in America,” it was a shame that the machine “wasn’t allowed to vote!” The “congregation let go and laughed like all possessed.”22
The preacher’s physicality struck Mark Twain as well:
Whenever he forsook his notes and went marching up and down his stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point, I could have started the audience with a single clap of the hands and brought down the house. I had a suffocating desire to do it.
Twain could not resist, of course, a parting snapper of his own:
Mr. Beecher is a remarkably handsome man when he is in the full tide of sermonizing, and his face is lit up with animation, but he is as homely as a singed cat when he isn’t doing anything.23
Among Samuel Clemens’s most singular and least explicable gifts, or recurrences of good luck, was his social radar: his uncanny propensity for finding his way, time and again, into the most consequential circles of American cultural, intellectual, and political life. No constellation of relationships would ever mean more to him than the one centered on the bulky figure prowling the pulpit on this frigid Sunday morning. The adventures and the personal encounters influenced by Henry Ward Beecher would in time lead Sam to his first great book, his wife, his acceptance into the elite social and literary circles of the East, and to the nonesuch neighborhood that encompassed the twenty happiest years of his life. From the vantage point of that neighborhood, Sam would watch at close range as one of the greatest scandals of the American 19th century unfolded, a scandal whose central actor was Beecher.
Henry was only one member of a prodigiously accomplished family, and not even the most famous among his twelve siblings. That distinction belonged to his older half-sister Harriet Beecher Stowe. The patriarch was Lyman Beecher, a Connecticut Congregationalist preacher and theologian who fathered thirteen children by the first two of his three wives. Nine of those offspring attained some public recognition; of those, six would figure in Mark Twain’s life. As for Henry, he was a Transcendentalist thunderer in the Emersonian tradition; sweatier, more vernacular, a bit less of a heavyweight; and just now sharing the summit of American notoriety with the Sage himself and Ulysses S. Grant. He had been a somewhat equivocal abolitionist before the war (opposing slavery, but in favor of civil solutions instead of civil war), and now, in the welcome banality of peace, Americans doted on his fortune-cookieish aphorisms: “The mother
’s heart is the child’s schoolroom,” “The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.”24
Within days of his visit to the Brooklyn church, Sam Clemens found himself caught up in a scheme of Beecher’s that spoke to every impulse toward travel and adventure that he had nurtured since boyhood. A solicitation prospectus described it: an oceangoing excursion to the Holy Land, Egypt, the Crimea, Greece, and “Intermediate Points of Interest.” The excursion was to be sponsored by Plymouth Church, open to as many people as a steamship could accommodate. The excursion would get under way in June, from New York Harbor to Europe, along the Mediterranean Sea, and then across terrain through parts of Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. The ship would return to New York in November. Beecher, it was hinted (but never explicitly promised), would head the expedition. He planned to research a biography of Jesus. In effect, this would be the first organized luxury cruise in American history.
Sam most likely learned of the grand scheme from Moses Beach. But soon all the Eastern newspapers were trumpeting it. Rumors spread that celebrities from the military and the theater would crown the passenger list: William Tecumseh Sherman, the fearsome Union general who’d burnt his way through Georgia; Robert Henry Hendershot, who as a twelve-year-old had gained pop-cultural fame at Fredericksburg as the “Drummer Boy of the Rappahannock”; a touring actress named Maggie Mitchell, who had wowed Emerson and Lincoln, among many others, with her drop-dead shadow dance in the title role of “Fanchon the Cricket.” The celebrity list grew a little diluted a few weeks later with the rumored addition of the Massachusetts congressman Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, who as a Union general had been defeated twice by Stonewall Jackson, and had lost so many supplies in his retreats that the Confederates nicknamed him “Commissary Banks.”