Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  So had the public. Fuller’s promotional efforts seemed to evaporate into the city’s maw. The omnibus tearsheets were going unread, as Sam noticed during a few inspection bus rides. As for the small newspaper ads, they disappeared into surrounding columns of gray type. Advance ticket sales were comatose. Sam began to doubt whether anybody would show up. He pounced on Fuller, who was beginning to understand that running a railroad wasn’t shucks to running Sam Clemens’s career. Fuller dashed around to the papers, carrying copies of the letter that Senator Nye had signed and a list of ninety ex-Californians he’d prevailed on to issue a “call” for attendance by their fellow exiles. The notices ran on Sunday and Monday.

  Clemens and Fuller had reason to be concerned about empty seats in the Great Hall. The future Big Apple was to be ablaze with attractions the night of the lecture. The Black Crook was on at Niblo’s Garden, a ballet extravaganza with splashy stage sets, counts, villagers, star-crossed lovers, and show-stopping lyrics such as, “Hark, hark, hark / Hark the birds with tuneful voices / Vocal for our Lady Fair”—a proto-Broadway musical. A double troupe of “Imperial” Japanese jugglers was booked into the Academy of Music. The internationally acclaimed diva Adelaide Ristori was launching her series of farewell performances at the French Theater. Miss Naomi Porter was steaming things up at Tony Pastor’s Opera House in The Quaker’s Temptations. And the eminent Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax was slated to deliver his lecture to benefit the Southern Famine Relief Commission at Irving Hall. Luckily, the New York Knickerbockers weren’t playing night baseball yet.

  “With all this against me I have taken the largest house in New York & cannot back water,” he warned Jane and the family on May 1. “Let her slide! If nobody else cares, I don’t.” To Bret Harte, he asked, simply: “Pray for me.”14

  Fuller’s legwork ultimately paid off. Suddenly the New York papers were belching notices that Mark Twain was going to talk about “Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands,” at the Cooper on Monday night. “The gifted humorist from California,” the Citizen called him, adding that it hoped he drew a good crowd.15 The Times and the Dispatch plugged him, and the Evening Express and the Tribune. The Stage, a show business advertising circular, let on to its ten thousand readers that it spoke from a very deep and very personal relationship with the star in question: “Seth Twain is young, handsome, single and rich, and his future is altogether fair and promising.”16 All of which was gratifying, but not effective: advance sales at the box office remained flat.

  A few days before the talk, “Seth” Twain instructed Frank Fuller to paper the house. It was an old trick: print complimentary tickets by the thousands and hand them out to anyone who would take them. Fuller knew that school-teachers loved cultural events, especially free ones. He soon made sure that comps went out to every schoolteacher within thirty miles of the city.

  Sam was in a cursing, frothing rage as he and Fuller left for the Cooper half an hour before curtain time on the night of May 6. His skin crawled inside the new claw-hammer suit and starched collar that Fuller had insisted he wear—the first such getup of his life. Worse, Senator Nye was nowhere to be found. Fuller refused Sam’s plea to fill in for Nye with the introduction; he thought Sam should introduce himself.

  His mood brightened when their carriage halted a block or so from the Cooper before an astounding swarm of people, horses and coaches. The streets around Astor Place were paralyzed with schoolteacher gridlock. Anyone foolhardy enough to drop a final “g” or misstate the principal export of Portugal within half a mile of the Institute risked being rapped across the knuckles with six thousand rulers.

  Sam’s spirits transformed once he was inside the hall, watching the house fill up from the wings. Well over two thousand people from the mob outside had managed to shoulder their way through the doors and form a cheek-by-jowl, standing-room throng inside the Great Hall. Perhaps twice that many were turned away. The lucky ones witnessed a drop-dead performance. Sam converted his anxieties into a performer’s glee as he awaited the moment to take the stage. It was a stage already consecrated by history. Seven years and three months earlier, Lincoln had stood on these boards and made a last-ditch bid to save the Union with the light of reason. With the precision of a lawyer and the passion of a preacher—his talk was originally scheduled for Beecher’s Plymouth Church—the presidential candidate had demolished the Southern Democrats’ arguments that the Founding Fathers were indifferent to the expansion of slavery into the territories. Lincoln’s Cooper Union address had annealed his support within the Republican Party, probably made the Civil War inevitable, and conferred the damning attention of political genius on the very social atrocity that had drawn Marshall Clemens to Missouri, and thus, indirectly, created the figure who, promptly at 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 7, 1867, slouched onto the Cooper Union stage, a Lincoln of literature in chrysalis.

  Dapper in the claw hammer, its ebony fabric counterpointing his bright auburn hair, the stranger from the West began to speak, and the emerging American icon began to announce himself to the world beyond the West. Mark Twain’s mastery of moment, material, and audience was complete; nothing could deflect him from triumph on this night. Certainly not the missing Senator Nye, who had ducked his commitment, he explained years later, because he had always privately considered Mark Twain a “damned secessionist.” Mark Twain converted this potential humiliation into wicked stagecraft. “There was to have been a piano here, and a senator to introduce me,”17 he mused aloud, rummaging the stage as the chuckles rippled. He did a few minutes of drawling patter at Nye’s expense that drew screams of laughter from the knowing Washoe transplants in the audience. And then he swung into his lecture. For an hour and a quarter, he was in Paradise. “They laughed and shouted to my entire content,” he reminisced.18 The applause cascaded, and the reviews were pie. The Times reported that “from the appearance of their mirthful faces leaving the hall…few were disappointed…seldom has so large an audience been so uniformly pleased as the one that listened to Mark Twain’s quaint remarks last evening.”19 “No other lecturer,” wrote Ned House in the Tribune, “of course excepting Artemus Ward, has so thoroughly succeeded in exciting the mirthful curiosity, and compelling laughter of his hearers.”20

  The performance netted only about thirty-five dollars, at fifty cents apiece from the minority of paying customers. But the artistic success at the Cooper led him to repeat the lecture twice—in Brooklyn on May 10 and in Irving Hall, New York, six nights later. His new fans included the twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Nast, the illiterate German-born illustrator whose legacy would eventually include the images of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam, and Columbia; the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant; and the political cartoons that led to the downfall and imprisonment of Boss Tweed. Nast wanted to tour the country with Clemens, with Nast drawing pictures as Mark Twain lectured. Clemens didn’t have time.

  The night after his Irving Hall talk, Sam ran into yet another seminal figure of his century. Lolling in front of the New York Hotel around midnight, talking with a clerk, he glanced up to behold Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy just recently released from prison, walking toward him in a party of people. “He is tall and spare—that was all I could make of him,” Mark Twain told his readers. The spectral figure moved him to thoughts of greatness and oblivion.

  He was a fallen Chief, he was an extinguished sun—we all know that—and yet it seemed strange that even an unsuccessful man, with such a limitless celebrity, could drop in our midst in that way, and go out as meekly as a farthing candle…The newspapers…gave the usual acres of laudation to [Adelaide] Ristori yesterday, and only a dozen meagre lines to Jefferson Davis, head, and heart, and soul of the mightiest rebellion of modern times…I am glad I am not Jefferson Davis, and I could show him a hundred good reasons why he ought to be glad he ain’t me.21

  THE FRIGID Eastern winter of 1867 gave way to spring. The promise of postwar Progress floated through the metropolis. The New York legislatu
re approved a controversial plan to build a great suspension bridge over the East River, connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn for the first time. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass enjoyed a fourth printing; his Self went again to the bank by the wood and became undisguised and naked. Sam was impatient for the Quaker City to fire up its boilers. He fretted about the prospects of his Sandwich Islands manuscript, which he had offered to the publishing firm Dick & Fitzgerald. He lined up the New York Herald and the Tribune for correspondence from the Quaker City. Then, somewhere around that time, the debonair toast of the Cooper Institute got himself thrown in jail for brawling on the street. He told his Alta readers about it in a letter that veered from bravado, to anger at the police, to acutely observed notes on mid-1860s New York City jailhouse culture. He didn’t mind mentioning it, he averred, “because anybody can get into the Station House here without committing an offence of any kind. And so he can anywhere that policemen are allowed to cumber the earth.”22 It was all a mistake, he insisted. He and a friend had tried to break up a fight while heading home around midnight, “and a brace of policemen came up and took us all off to the Station House.”

  We offered the officers two or three prices to let us go, (policemen generally charge $5 in assault and battery cases, and $25 for murder in the first degree, I believe,) but there were too many witnesses present, and they actually refused.

  …I enjoyed the thing considerably for an hour or so, looking through the bars at the dilapidated old hags, and battered and ragged bummers, sorrowing and swearing in the stone-paved halls…I fell asleep on my stone bench at 3 o’clock, and was called at dawn and marched to the Police Court with a vile policeman at each elbow, just as if I had been robbing a church, or saying a complimentary word about the police, or doing some other supernaturally mean thing.23

  He was detained for several more hours with a gaggle of jailbirds that included some psychic casualties from the recent war, all well dressed, but torn inside: a clerk, a college student, and an Indiana merchant. “Two had been soldiers on the Union side, and one on the other, and all had battled at Antietam together. The merchant was arrested for being drunk, and the other two for assault and battery.” Also in the lockup was a Negro man, “with his head badly battered and bleeding profusely. He had nothing to say.”24 Sam found himself absorbed by a “bloated old hag,” who

  sat in the corner, with a wholesome black eye, a drunken leer in the sound one, and nothing in the world on but a dingy calico dress, a shocking shawl, and a pair of slippers that had seen better days…She…said she lived in the Five Points, and must have been particularly drunk to have wandered so far from home; said she used to have a husband, but he had drifted off somewhere, and so she had taken up with another man; she had had a child, also—a little boy—but it took all her time to get drunk, and keep drunk, and so he starved, one winter’s night—or froze, she didn’t know which—both, may be, because it snowed in “horrible” through the roof, and he hadn’t any bedclothes but a window-shutter…and then she chuckled a little, and asked me for a chew of tobacco and a cigar…and then she winked a wink of wonderful mystery and drew a flask of gin from under her shawl, and said the police thought they were awful smart when they searched her, but she wasn’t born last week…She said she was good for ten days, but she guessed she could stand it, because if she had as many dollars as she had been in limbo she could buy a gin-mill.25

  The judge soon let him go. He continued sending New York dispatches to the Alta, while impatiently waiting for his ship to sail. Delays in the embarkation, and further crushing blows to the celebrity passenger list, had driven him to the point of believing that the Quaker City was never going to leave port. On May 25, the voyage lost its “lion.” Captain Duncan had recruited General Sherman as the replacement star of the excursion after Henry Ward Beecher dropped out. Sherman’s abrupt decision to honor his military duty and head west to fight Indians in the territories was seen in the press as a “bombshell” to the hopes of Duncan, who was trying to recover from bankruptcy and who had imagined the red-haired hero filling up the ship’s berths and generating worldwide attention at every port of call. Instead, a new wave of cancellations resulted, reducing the complement to half the available space.

  But the celebrity attrition had not ended there: the Drummer Boy of the Rappahannock drummed himself out of the lists to elope with his fiancée. On June 5, the exodus was joined by Fanchon the Cricket, along with her mother cricket. The passenger list stood at fewer than eighty-five. A few days earlier, Clemens had written to his mother:

  All I do know or feel, is, that I am wild with impatience to move—move—Move!…Curse the endless delays! They always kill me—they make me neglect every duty & then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop any-where a month. I do more mean things, the moment I get a chance to fold my hands & sit down than ever I can get forgiveness for.26

  As for that companion in his stateroom,

  I am fixed. I have got a splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless room-mate who is as good & true & right-minded a man as ever lived…But send on the professional preachers—there are none I like better to converse with—if they ain’t narrow minded & bigoted they make good companions.27

  The roommate was a short, fat customer named Daniel Slote, a fortyish co-owner of a stationery-making firm in New York. Slote was a flamboyant fellow, and a wit. His wisecracks at the expense of tour guides, trinket hustlers, carriage drivers, and relic-touting priests would supply some of the excursion’s more memorable quips and aphorisms, amidst a company distinctly lacking in zaniness.

  Departure was finally set for Friday, June 7. On the day before, Sam jotted a note to Will Bowen that reflected the curious morbidity Bowen seemed often to activate in Sam.

  We leave tomorrow at 3:00 P.M…We have got a crowd of tiptop people, & shall have a jolly, sociable, homelike trip of it for the next five or six months. And then—if we all go to the bottom, I think we shall be fortunate. There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (& work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage. They were lucky boys that went down in sight of home the other day when the Santiago de Cuba stranded on the New Jersey shore…Good bye, my oldest friend.28

  To Jane and the family in St. Louis, he abandoned his usual flippancy and opened up a more tender, even remorseful side of himself.

  I wish Orion were going on this voyage, for I believe with so many months of freedom from business cares he could not help but be cheerful & jolly…My mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion & toward you all, & accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement & restless moving from place to place. If I could say I had done any one thing for any of you that entitled me to your good opinions (I say nothing of your love, for I am sure of that, no matter how unworthy of it I may make myself…) I believe I could go home & stay there—& I know I would care little for the world’s praise or blame. There is no satisfaction in the world’s praise, anyhow…29

  In this last sentiment, he was speaking from limited experience. That was soon to change.

  After finishing these letters, Sam Clemens left his hotel room for a night of Washoe-style dining and drinking with friends and newspaper editors—a nine-hour bender. The following afternoon, he made his way, woozily, through heavy rain to the piers at Wall Street, up the gangplank to the decks of the Quaker City, and into the company of some sixty-five unsuspecting American pilgrims,30 whom he was about to immortalize beyond their wildest possible dreams, and fears.

  19

  Pilgrims and Sinners

  (1867)

  After a delay of two days in New York Harbor because of high seas, the Quaker City steamed off into the Atlantic, and Sam came fully to life again. To move—move—Move! reliably fired up his senses, as it had ever since he slipped onto the night packet out of Hannibal for St. Louis fourteen years earlier. The cares and anxieties of New York evaporated into the salt spray, just as the oppressions of San Francisco h
ad lifted when he boarded the Ajax for the Sandwich Islands, and later the America, at Ned Wakeman’s side, for his return from the West. “[T]here is always a cheering influence about the sea,” he observed of this latest departure. In his berth, enjoying the rhythmic rocking against the waves, “I soon passed tranquilly out of all consciousness of the dreary experiences of the day and damaging premonitions of the future.”1

  Priding himself on his immunity from seasickness, Sam drank in the gladness in the air, the brightness in the sun, and the distress of one elderly passenger after another who lurched past him, hands clasped to the stomach, muttering, “Oh, my!”2 The steamer pointed itself toward its first port of call, the Azores, off the coast of Spain. Beyond lay Europe and the Holy Land; and beyond those lay the ultimate destination for the captain, crew, and passengers: a niche in America’s enduring memory as the Innocents Abroad.

  The correspondent for the Alta California, who would take them there, found himself filling the “celebrity” vacuum created by the defaulting of Beecher, Sherman, the Drummer Boy, and Fanchon the Cricket. Captain Duncan had tacitly acknowledged this status just before departure, inviting Clemens to occupy the luxury upper-deck cabin originally reserved for General Sherman. Now, Sam quickly emerged as the entourage’s most vivid, if not universally beloved, personality. “We have D.D.’s and M.D.’s—we have men of wisdom and men of wit,” a genteel Quaker City passenger wrote to her husband’s Cleveland newspaper after a few days at sea, under the demure pen name “Myra.”

  There is one table from which is sure to come a peal of contagious laughter, and all eyes are turned toward “Mark Twain,” whose face is perfectly mirth provoking. Sitting lazily at the table, scarcely genteel in his appearance, there is nevertheless a something, I know not what, that interests and attracts. I saw today at dinner, venerable divines and sage looking men, convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint original manners.3