Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The Quaker City would in some ways reprise the ambience of Sam Clemens’s Mississippi steamboat days. A 1,428-ton side-wheeler with two masts, she had patrolled against blockade runners around the Chesapeake Bay as a Federal gunship during the war. Despite her deep-sea hull, she’d chased a Confederate ramming boat along the lower Mississippi. Afterward, she was refitted for passenger use, with a grand dining hall and fifty-three belowdecks berths. There would be a daily onboard newspaper. As Sam digested the details of this pilgrimage, his depression evaporated, and exhilaration swept in. The prospect of travel always elated him, especially travel over water. Here would be a second chance at the promise offered by the Ajax in California: to sign on to a pioneering ocean voyage and observe the behavior of people, famous and ordinary, in a small enclave. Here would be a way to partly fulfill the half-notion he’d entertained since meeting Artemus Ward—lighting out for Europe and high adventure. More importantly to his creative life, here lay—quite literally—the route to his literature.

  Of all the writerly gifts available to Mark Twain, structure was conspicuously not among them. Prolific though he was, he worked most naturally in precise miniature. The exact word mattered to him; he knew and cared about the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning, as he put it. His sentences were typically supple, lean by 19th-century standards, evocative of mood, filled with aural and visual richness. His paragraphs were shrewdly organized to set up and then deliver the required snapper, or irate thunderbolt, or consummating grace note of elegy, as the case required. He had been trained to thematically shape the short sketch, but beyond that, Mark Twain was generally winging it. Formative design, structure, novel-length plot, a sense of the whole, were absent from his newspaper letters, and from most of the books that eventually came—even the masterpieces. Gloriously, in a way, it didn’t seem to matter to him. His novels tumbled forth with the serendipity of a wild river—changing channels, overflooding boundaries, trickling along on the force of their own blind weight, seeking a level. His non-novels (“nonfiction” seems a lightning-bug word as it applies to Mark Twain) tended to be sprawling pastiches, grab bags of personal narrative, some of it true, mixed with found art: sections from other books, recollected tales, happenstance memory fragments, self-plagiarized letters and essays, anything to meet the required word count.

  This formlessness has provoked strong criticism of Mark Twain, including the persistent opinion that he is at best a “secondary” or a “regional” literary artist—although that line of criticism coalesced mostly in the 20th century, and to some extent reflected aesthetic standards not strictly enforced in the 19th. Perhaps the most sensible way of regarding Mark Twain’s tendency toward headlong sprawl is that it removed all impediments from his greatest strength, which was his intuition and his skill at improvisation. There is some reason to believe that he avoided careful plotting or planning, even though he was capable of it, as in The Prince and the Pauper. Had he preoccupied himself with solemn formal obligations—had he allowed the Tom Sawyer inside him to become a grown man—the antic content that defined his genius might have died in discarded drafts.

  WHILE CHARLES Henry Webb scrambled to arrange publication of the “Jumping Frog” pastiche-book, Mark Twain announced the plan in the Alta under the title, “Grand European Pleasure Trip.” He began with the facts and figures, and grew progressively giddy. The ship could accommodate 150 passengers, but would carry only 110 to avoid crowding. It would be outfitted to satisfy refined tastes: a library, musical instruments. Fare would be $1,250 in currency, with an additional $500 expense in gold, for land travel from various ports. The voyage would begin the 1st of June and end near the beginning of November, Mark Twain wrote—and then dreaming Sammy took over, exulting in the storybook fantasy of it all.

  Isn’t it a most attractive scheme? Five months of utter freedom from care and anxiety of every kind, and in company with a set of people who will go only to enjoy themselves, and will never mention a word about business during the whole voyage. It is very pleasant to contemplate.25

  On the same day, in the same spirit, he fired off a terse telegram to the editors of the Alta California. “Send me $1,200 at once,” it instructed. “I want to go abroad.”26 No boy in the land could have put it more succinctly. Amazingly, the Alta agreed to fork it over.

  Sam had found a curious way of demonstrating his reportorial bona fides. He’d showed up at least mildly drunk at the booking office on Wall Street one morning in late February, in the company of the equally buzzed Edward House, the newspaper music critic he had first met in Webb’s rooms. Unshaven and sloppily dressed, the two young men tittered and preened before the excursion manager, a devout man named Charles C. Duncan, who had helped plan the expedition and who would be the Quaker City’s nominal captain. House introduced Sam as “the Reverend Mark Twain,” a Baptist minister just in from the Sandwich Islands and San Francisco, who fretted that he might not be welcome to perform religious ceremonies alongside the Reverend Mr. Beecher, who represented a different denomination. “I had to laugh out strong, here—I could not well help it,” Mark Twain confided to his Alta readers. “The idea of my preaching…with Beecher was so fresh, so entertaining, so delightful.”27

  CAPTAIN DUNCAN came alert. “You don’t look like a Baptist minister,” he seethed, “and really, Mr. Clemens, you don’t smell like one either!” Sam returned sober the following day, owned up to his true occupation, signed his name, and handed Duncan the $125 down payment for a berth aboard the Quaker City, the remainder due in mid-April. Clemens and the sanctimonious Duncan were destined to be spirited enemies, feuding frequently through the press after the voyage. After one of Duncan’s scoldings fully ten years later, Mark Twain struck back with a devastating wisecrack.

  The “captain” says that when I came to engage passage in the Quaker City I “seemed to be full of whiskey, or something,” and filled his office with the “fumes of bad whiskey”…[F]or a ceaseless, tireless, forty-year public advocate of total abstinence the “captain” is a mighty good judge of whiskey at second-hand.28

  Wearing a king’s robes, feeling solemn and absurd beneath them, Sam attended a Bal d’Opéra at the Academy of Music the first night in March. Instead of dancing, he slunk around the ballroom and, as Justin Kaplan has written, seemed to encounter some of the figures of his accumulating imagination in the crowd: a Joan of Arc pining for a mess of raw oysters; dukes and princes who called one another “Jim” and “Joe” as they debated who would buy the next drink. Alta readers must have puzzled over the confessional ending to his description of this glittering event: “I did not feel happy at that ball, but I never felt so particularly unhappy in my life as I do at this moment.”29

  ON MARCH 6, Artemus Ward died in Southampton, defeated by his long battle with tuberculosis. Like Oscar Wilde thirty-three years later—“Either those curtains go, or I do”30—he maintained his comic sense until the end. As he lay on his deathbed, his friend the playwright T. W. Robertson chided him for refusing his medicine: “Take it, my dear fellow, just for my sake. You know I would do anything for you.” “Would you?” asked Artemus. “Then you take it.”31 He was a month short of his thirty-third birthday.

  By that time, Sam Clemens was on his way home again, to the river that was his life.

  * This phrase, variations of which Twain used several times, and most memorably in a letter to William Bowen a few days after his marriage in February 1870, refers to Genesis 7:11: “the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”

  * In each case, a shoe with the leather sections overlapped and was tightly laced against moisture.

  18

  “move—move—Move!”

  (1867)

  The evening of March 3, Sam embarked on a fifty-two-hour rail connection to St. Louis, where the homefolks waited to see him for the first time in six years. Jane Clemens was nearly sixty-four now. Pamela was thirty-nine. Annie was an adoles
cent of fourteen. Sammy was six. Orion very likely was visiting from Keokuk at the time, nearly destitute, having failed again as a lawyer and as seller of the Tennessee land.

  The letters he sent to the Alta show that his social views had not noticeably moved beyond the conventional bigotries during his years in the West.

  The women of Missouri have started a sensation on their own hook. They are petitioning the Legislature to…extend to them the privilege of voting (along with us and the nigs., you know)…Thirty-nine members of the Legislature have declared in favor…Don’t you know that such a showing as that is amazing, in view of the colossal dimensions of the proposed innovation?…If four or five hen-pecked husbands, or badgered and bully-ragged old bachelors, had been driven into a support of the measure, nobody would have been surprised; but when the list soars up to thirty-nine, it is time for all good men to tremble for their country.1

  He witnessed the first stirrings of the social-control movement that later would be known as separate but equal: “The Superintendent’s Report…says of the colored schools ordered by State law, that ‘the efforts of the Board to establish schools for colored children have not as yet been successful,’ but that a special committee has been ordered to rent proper buildings and open such schools without any delay that can possibly be avoided.”2

  He was alert to changes in popular lingo, and showed off his biblical savvy as he described some of them. St. Louisans had taken to saying they’d been “peeking” through a crack instead of “peeping,” and to using “cal’late” for

  “reckon,” (which latter is a perfectly legitimate word, as the ALTA readers may see by reference to the 18th verse of the 8th chapter of Romans;) and [I] heard them say “I admire to do so and so,” (which is barbarous;) and heard them say “bosket” for basket, and “gloss” for glass; and “be you goin’ home” for “are you going home;” and heard them say “she is quite pretty” when they meant “she is right pretty”—the one expressing perfection and the other merely a degree of excellence.

  He picked up on the lingering sectarian bitterness in the city, a bitterness that would continue to taint American life for the rest of his and all of the next century.

  Individual friends and whole families of old tried friends are widely separated yet—don’t visit and don’t hold any intercourse with each other. If you give a dinner party…invite Democrats only or Republicans only. Even Church congregations are organized, not on religious but on political bases; and the Creed begins, “I believe in Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr-President of the United States,” or, “I believe in Jefferson Davis, the founder of the Confederate States of America.”3

  Sam’s elegiac touch remained graceful: “one of the pleasantest things I noticed was, that those old-fashioned twilights still remain, and enrich all the landscape with a dreamy vagueness for two hours after the sun has gone down. It is such a pity they forgot to put in the twilight when they made the Pacific Coast.”4

  At church with Jane and Pamela, he was delighted when the Sunday-school superintendent approached his pew and asked him if he would say something inspirational to the children. Sam ambled to the altar and unloaded the jumping frog story to a cascade of applause, as the horrified deacon tried in vain to shush everybody up. He liked that. “So I preached twice in the Mercantile Library Hall.”5 The St. Louis Republican observed that he “succeeded in doing what we have seen Emerson and other literary magnates fail in attempting—he interested and amused a large and promiscuous audience.”6 He made an impulsive swing upriver for appearances in Hannibal, Quincy, and Keokuk. On April 2, Hannibal gave him the largest turnout in its history.

  In St. Louis, one annoyance marred his lecturing triumphs. Before boarding the train back to New York, he noticed that a reporter for the Missouri-Democrat, evidently a lightning note-taker, had reproduced one of his Sandwich Islands talks so accurately that Mark Twain felt unable to repeat it in any other city. The reporter was a Welsh-born adventurer and journalist who had fought on both sides in the Civil War. Named Henry Morton Stanley, he was soon to gain worldwide fame for discovering the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who had disappeared into Tanzania, greeting the object of his search with the words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Thirty years later, he and Mark Twain would become good friends.

  Back in New York, Clemens transferred his residence from the “great caravan hotel” Metropolitan to the pricier Westminster, at 16th and Irving Place, a block east of Union Square. His new digs were “quiet, and genteel and orderly,” he assured his Alta readers, “—costly, but…prodigiously comfortable.”7 The plate-glass windows on the ground floor allowed one to read one’s paper, sip one’s coffee, and look out at people caught in the rain, “and enjoy it ever so much!”8

  On April 23, newspapers began to announce the venue for Mark Twain’s debut lecture in New York: the two-thousand-seat Great Hall of the Peter Cooper Institute at Astor Place in what is now the East Village. This imposing five-story brownstone, better known as the Cooper Union, was already a city landmark: a pioneering academy for adult education and a leading lyceum. It bore the name of its founder, the self-made polymath with a perfect half-disk of a white beard who had designed the country’s first steam engine, whose New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Co. had laid the first Atlantic cable in 1850, and who, with his wife Sarah, had invented the mixture that would form the basis of Jell-O.

  Rental for the Cooper was five hundred dollars, which Fuller seems to have advanced out of his own pocket. Fuller chipped in another hundred to cover the advance publicity: handbills hung inside omnibuses, pads of paper to be torn off and carried away, newspaper ads, posters, even a pamphlet that inventoried thirty-eight topics to be covered in his talk. The approaching lecture with its make-or-break stakes had Sam nearly as nervous as he’d been in San Francisco before his lyceum debut.

  He wanted an introduction from some eminence. His choice was James W. Nye, Orion’s former boss as governor of Nevada, now a United States senator in Washington. Sam remembered Nye as an eloquent speaker out West: “His eyes could outtalk his tongue and this is saying a good deal, for he was a very remarkable talker, both in private and on the stump.”9 From the Westminster, filled with “bloated aristocrats”—himself not least among them—he wrote to the homefolks that Webb would publish the “Jumping Frog” on April 25. A few days earlier, looking to the future, he had commanded by postscript: “Scrapbook my letters in Alta.”10 Pamela got busy on it; the scrapbooked collection (which still survives) of printed letters to the Alta would provide much of the printer’s copy for The Innocents Abroad.

  Around that time, a New York agent for the Alta presented him with a letter that formally, and almost obsequiously, requested his services on the Holy Land excursion.

  Your only instructions are that you will continue to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers of the Alta California.11

  As the embarkation date approached, his expectations of the voyage approached the positively Tom Sawyerish. The ship, he told his readers,

  is to be furnished with a battery of guns for firing salutes, by order of the Secretary of the Navy, and Mr. Seward has addressed a letter to all foreign powers, requesting that every attention be shown General Sherman and his party. We have got a piano and a parlor organ in the cabin, and a snare drummer, a base drummer and a fifer…If they have a choir in that ship I mean to run it. I have got a handsome state room on the upper deck and a regular brick for a room-mate. We have got the pleasantest and jolliest party of passengers that ever sailed out of New York, and among them a good many young ladies and a couple of preachers, but we don’t mind them. Young ladies are well enough anywhere, and preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty.12

  In the same dispatch, Mark Twain plugged his debut as an author of books. “Webb has gotten up my ‘Jumping Frog’ book in excellent style, and it is selling rapidly,” he tol
d his readers. He was fudging. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches reached the booksellers at the end of April in less than “excellent style.” Its two hundred pages, containing twenty-seven pieces, were littered with typographical errors, spelling inconsistencies, and unauthorized editorial changes—sixteen of those in the title piece alone, by Sam’s count.13 Only a thousand copies were initially bound. An additional 552 were bound on May 20, but in spite of favorable reviews, the book’s sales were anemic.

  Cracks were also appearing all along the surface of the grandiose picture he had painted of his forthcoming ocean adventures. The largest crack he had known about for at least a month: the ostensible organizer and star attraction of the Holy Land excursion, Henry Ward Beecher, had elected not to go. For weeks, the New York papers had been referring to the great preacher’s leadership role as an established fact, but on April 2, the Brooklyn Eagle—Whitman’s old paper—broke the story that he and his family would stay behind. Beecher was said to be bowing to pressure from certain congregants who had paid their annual pew fees and objected to the discount implied by his planned five-month absence. His withdrawal threatened the viability of the excursion. Only seventy of the 110 berths were now reserved, at least in part because dozens of Plymouth Church members withdrew on Beecher’s announcement. More bad news was to come on the shipboard-celebrity absquatulation front. But for now, Sam was facing a developing disaster at the Cooper Institute. With the Monday, May 6 lecture less than a week away, Senator Nye had not yet committed himself to introducing Sam on the platform. Sam sent Frank Fuller to Washington to repeat the request in person. Nye signed a letter of assent, but then grew suspiciously quiet.