by Ron Powers
They drink & drink & drink, in that No. 10 till it is horrible—perfectly horrible! And they smoke there—which is against the ship’s rules…& they burn safety lanterns there all night (which is against the rule, too) & say they are writing to the newspapers—which is a lie, brethren & sisters—they’re playing sinful 7-up.3
Sam’s relations with Captain Duncan had not improved since the day Sam arrived drunk to sign up for the voyage. Sam tallied up his grievances against the captain in his notebook (“No swapping false teeth allowed,”4 he’d written in parody of the Duncan’s tiresome regulations), but held back his public skewering until after the voyage.
When Sam eased back into life on deck, he gravitated toward those eight or so “respectable” travelers who had welcomed his company on the voyage out. He was looking for practical information. He knew that when he arrived back in America, his rough Western manners and speech would not be accepted, even as novelty traits. He had published a book in New York. He had spoken at the Cooper Institute. He was a candidate for inclusion among the Eastern literary men who mattered. It was time that he started figuring out the rules of the lodge.
Solon Long Severance, an elegant banker-intellectual from Cleveland, and his literate and beautiful wife, Emily, were reliably sophisticated, and open to his company. Moses Sperry Beach, the New York Sun editor and Plymouth Church stalwart, was companionable—though Mark Twain’s slur against the Quaker City ladies prompted a letter of rebuttal from him, published in the Sun. Young Emeline Beach remained a chess partner and attractive friend. So did three or four others: the witty Dr. Abraham Reeves Jackson, just then launching an adulterous, ultimately successful courtship of Julia Newell, who was also part of this group; the twenty-year-old Van Nostrand; the youthful churchgoer Julius Moulton of St. Louis; and Charley Langdon, the scion of Elmira wealth who had ingratiated himself to Sam in a couple of ways. (Dan Slote, a candidate for this group, had left the ship at Alexandria.) But it was the central figure in this circle who overshadowed all the others in her “sivilizing” influence on Sam, and whose lifelong friendship bore most powerfully on his literary career.
Mary Mason “Mother” Fairbanks was for Sam the anti-Menken, a beacon of Eastern womanhood unsullied by body stockings, or the debauchery of folding her scarf carefully upon entering a room. She was religious without making a big deal about it; an intellectual (fluent in French, at ease with art); a dispenser of good sense; a graceful if somewhat flowery essayist. Ohio-born, a product of the Troy Female Seminary in New York State, she had been a schoolteacher in South Carolina before marrying the Cleveland newspaper owner and publisher Abel Fairbanks. Brooched, braided, and brocaded, plump and tidily “handsome” rather than beautiful at the verge of forty, she had a touch of the Mona Lisa in her gaze, but a Mona Lisa with apple tarts in the oven. Sam adored her. She fed him Egyptian jam when he behaved, and sewed his buttons on.
Ever since the ship headed west from Alexandria, she’d been the young journalist’s sounding board. As Sam buckled down to his backlog of newspaper correspondence, he began reading his letters aloud to the small circle of receptive sophisticates. On October 13, Charley Langdon gave his mother an unwitting introduction to her future son-in-law:
I have been hearing Clemens Holy Land letters. I do wish you could hear them, they are characteristic of him[.] I do not like them as a whole but he says some good things. They are going to the Cal. Alta, so unless you have sent for that paper you wil not see them.5
Charley commented more favorably on the Tribune letters, and asked his family to save them. But Mary Fairbanks was the only listener whose criticisms mattered to Sam.
For a century, a cloud of conjecture has hovered over the effect of women, “Mother” Fairbanks prominently among them, on Mark Twain’s literary development (or the stunting of it). The Cleveland matron is the middle figure of a three-headed hellhag who, under the Freudian template of Mark Twain interpretation, leeched the writer’s precious raw Western genius, turning him into a literary girlie-man. (A more recent feminist theory played a variation on this tune: Mark Twain, at once patriarchal and terrified of women, viewed creativity as “illegitimately sexualized, a threateningly uncontrollable power,” which was even worse than the usual male pathology of adopting “the model of the pen-penis disseminating its writings on the virgin page.”)6
The first head is that of the guilt-sorceress Jane Clemens, and the third belongs to the ruthlessly domesticating Olivia Langdon/Clemens.
Did the influence of these women on Mark Twain correspond to this schematic theorizing—theorizing that influenced Mark Twain studies for much of the 20th century? Mrs. Fairbanks certainly would have liked to think so. Playing Margaret Dumont to Sam’s Groucho, she did her high-Victorian best, aboard the Quaker City and for years afterward, to haul Clemens’s voice upward into the high zephyrs of “polite” (read: forgettable) discourse. She enjoyed certain triumphs. In alliance with Olivia, Mother Fairbanks exhorted and applauded Mark Twain through his composition of The Prince and the Pauper, the first of his two self-consciously “literary” novels. She showered her blessings on the second—Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc—though it was written specifically as a bouquet to his idolized daughter Susy. Her influence was important, and yet the trajectory of Mark Twain’s ambitions suggests that reports of his debt are exaggerated. The real objective of his interest in Mrs. Fairbanks’s opinions, or Livy’s, or those of any man or woman willing to share them, was guidance on how far he could push the boundaries of propriety as defined by the Eastern neo-Calvinists, and still hold on to the views, voice, and vernacular that defined his soul.
Mary Fairbanks’s influence on the Alta letters was representative of the necessary guidance Mark Twain was seeking. She restrained (and thus added to the powers of) his Washoe-honed impulses toward slang and insolence. When reviews of his books began emanating from Boston and New York, they ratified her moderating instincts, but they also ratified the essential Mark Twain. Puritan standards of “edifying” literature still mattered in the East; but readers were ready for something new—specifically, a truth-teller. Thus Mark Twain’s bold comic voice was approved, even celebrated, so long as he could satisfy readers that his humor was not “mean,” and so long as he counterbalanced it with passages of eloquence and wisdom, and kept it psychologically accurate. When he stayed within these rather inexact boundaries, he was permitted to demonstrate, as no one had before him, that humor and thematic seriousness were not incompatible. When he stepped over the hazy line, his satire came in for severe scolding.
That audacious new voice rings through these dispatches. His contempt for pietistic art and his eagerness to debunk fraudulent relics survived, or defied, Mrs. Fairbanks’s censoring eye; as did his mockery of current standard travel literature; and his de-romanticized appraisals of Holy Land dwellers and terrain; and his chronicling of assorted naked bathing ladies and exposed breasts; and his depictions of hypocrisy and foolishness among the churchly passengers.
True, he succumbed to brief dalliances with “polite” literature in later years, but these hardly defined his life’s work. In between them, after all, he wrote Huckleberry Finn and the apocalyptic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
One of the first letters Mark Twain wrote after the Quaker City left Cadiz, one doubtless not known to Mrs. Fairbanks, was a private letter to Joe Goodman, and it scarcely reached for euphemism regarding the pilgrims.
Between you and I, (I haven’t let it out yet, but am going to,) this pleasure party of ours is composed of the d——dest, rustiest, [most] ignorant, vulgar, slimy, psalm-singing cattle that could be scraped up in seventeen States. They wanted Holy Land, and they got it…[I]t is an awful trial to a man’s religion to waltz it through the Holy Land.7
Mark Twain expanded and syntactically enhanced his chronicling of the Quaker City voyage from initial drafts to the printer’s copy of Innocents.8 But most of this revision occurred after the letters had been published, when
he used them as the foundation of his book in progress. For instance, in a coda appended to the celebrated “boatman” scene, he stipulates,
Lest any man think I mean to be ill-natured when I talk about our pilgrims as I have been talking, I wish to say in all sincerity that I do not…They are better men than I am…they are good friends of mine, too…I wish to stir them up and make them healthy; that is all.9
This and other revisions, of course, may well have been in keeping with Mrs. Fairbanks’s suggestions, which Mark Twain mostly ignored for the published letters but employed to satisfy the higher-toned standards of a book. His post-voyage letters to her are replete with assurances that he has “reformed,” yet he is perfectly willing to put her on notice about the hell he intends to raise in his new reporting job for the New York Herald: “I just mean to abuse people right & left, in case the humor takes me to do it. There are lots of folks in Washington who need vilifying.”10 As to that use of “Mother” (invented by Charley Langdon, who really did miss Mom): it might have been meant to signal his obsequiousness. Or it might have been meant to suppress an impulse quite the opposite of that. Mary Fairbanks was hardly a toothless crone at age thirty-nine. While photographs of her do not show a woman of mesmerizing beauty, they depict a figure who, enhanced by her urbane self-assurance, her obvious warmth and welcoming nature, might strike a rough-edged young Westerner as sexually attractive. Given the givens of Victorian protocol, what better way to defuse such dangerous feelings than to cast her as a “mother”?
It’s just a thought.
THE QUAKER City steamed into the port at St. George, Bermuda, at dawn on October 11, and the frazzled passengers enjoyed five restorative days as a storm raged on the Atlantic. Finally, on Tuesday, November 19, the steamer docked at New York Harbor. The first luxury cruise in American history was over. The journalistic core of its narrative had already been written: during the homeward voyage, Mark Twain completed the final third of the fifty letters he would send to the Alta. In addition, he had sent six letters to the New York Tribune and three to the Herald. Sam could not disembark fast enough. Whisking through customs without having to open his bags, he checked in at the Westminster Hotel, and then called on his newspaper friends and editors around the city, testing the market for his work. He had made plans for dinner and the theater that evening with Mary Fairbanks, Charley Langdon, and some other friends. He never kept that engagement. Six p.m. found him scribbling away in an editorial room at James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald at 35th and Broadway. The resulting 2,500-word outburst ran in the next day’s editions, just in time to be noticed by the pilgrims before they dispersed from the city.
Sam later claimed he hadn’t planned this in advance; an editor of Bennett’s had “sent for” him as he approached the hotel where his friends were waiting; and, strapped for cash, he’d accepted an offer of fifty dollars to produce the essay. (This was hogwash: he wrote to a Tribune editor a few days later that he had stopped there to place the piece, but could find no one he knew, and so turned to the Herald.) He worked partly from an earlier draft that had been read by Mary Fairbanks, who’d recoiled at it and later wrote an oblique rebuttal of it in her husband’s paper—further evidence that her opinion was not the final arbiter of his impulses. He bandied no words. Branding the ship a “synagogue,” and the trip itself “a funeral excursion without a corpse,” he churned out a stream of invective worthy of his Washoe rants. He composed a similar letter for the Alta. Among the highlights of the two:
The steamer Quaker City arrived yesterday morning and turned her menagerie of pilgrims loose on America…Their Pilgrim’s Progress is ended, and they…can talk [about] it from now till January—most of them are too old to last longer…11
The venerable excursionists were not gay and frisky. They played no blind man’s bluff; they dealt not in whist;…They never romped, they talked but little, they never sang, save in the nightly prayer meeting…Such was our daily life on board ship—solemnity, decorum, dinner, dominoes, prayers, slander.12
He dilated on their prayer meetings—“I said all along that we hadn’t prayer meetings enough; we ought to have them before breakfast, and between meals, and every now and then, and pretty much all the time”—and their fumbling with the French tongue—“We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language”—and their mawkish “raptures” in the Holy Land.13
I bear them no malice…We didn’t amalgamate—that was all. Nothing more than that. I was exceedingly friendly with a good many of them—eight out of the sixty-five—but I didn’t dote on the others, and they didn’t dote on me…I am tired of hearing about the “mixed” character of our party on the Quaker City. It was not mixed enough—there were not blackguards enough on board in proportion to the saints—there was not genuine piety enough to offset the hypocrisy.14
Seven months later, Sam still hadn’t cooled down. He shoehorned a slightly revised version of the screed into his book manuscript, calling it an “Obituary,” and pretended bewilderment that his fellow passengers could have taken offense at it: “I have read it, and read it again; and if there is a sentence in it that is not fulsomely complimentary to captain, ship and passengers, I cannot find it.”15
Sam returned to the Westminster from the Herald offices around midnight. He dashed off a note to his (real) mother before he went to bed, assuring her that he had written “a long article that will make the Quakers get up and howl in the morning.”16 The rush of it had left him a little giddy with grandeur: “When Charles Dickens sleeps in this room next week, it will be a gratification to him to know that I have slept in it also.”* The Herald piece ran unsigned, but an editorial the next day identified the Quaker City screed as Mark Twain’s, and predicted that a book by him about the pilgrimage “would command an almost unprecedented sale.”
There are varieties of genius peculiar to America. Of one of these varieties Mark Twain is a striking specimen. For the development of his peculiar genius he has never had a more fitting opportunity. Besides, there are some things which he knows and which the world ought to know about this last edition of the May Flower.17
This last sentence alluded to a thematic point of view that Mark Twain was already developing for the book: a full-bore satirical focus on the passengers themselves, never mind the “travel” paradigm. He backed away from this potentially self-destructive idea as the distress of Mary Fairbanks and other friends sank in with him. Yet he never apologized for his abhorrence of that crowd, nor minimized the pain he felt they’d visited on him. In a letter to Mrs. Fairbanks a couple of weeks later, he declared that “as for those Quakers, I don’t want their friendship…They can hurt me. Let them. I would rather they should hurt me than help me.”
He listed the people he’d considered his shipboard friends, a tight little list indeed: “Yourself; Mr & Mrs. Severance; the cub [Langdon]; Emma Beach; Dan; Moulton; Jack…” and concluded:
My opinion of the rest of the gang is so mean, & so vicious, & so outrageous in every way, that I could not collect the terms to express it with out of any less than sixteen or seventeen different languages. Such another drove of cattle never went to sea before. Select party! Well, I pass.18
ON NOVEMBER 22, Sam arrived by overnight train in Washington. He called on Senator Stewart to claim the secretaryship that Stewart had offered him, and boarded with the Nevada Republican at F and 14th streets, taking meals at the nearby Willard’s Hotel. Sam did not see this position as a career: before leaving New York, he had negotiated with both the Herald and the Tribune for “occasional” correspondence; and on November 24, he wrote to Frank Fuller to discuss lecture plans: “If I stay here all winter & keep on…getting well acquainted with great dignitaries to introduce me…I can lecture next season…to 100 houses, & houses that will be readier to accept me without criticism than they are now.”19 He saw the Washington job as a chance to build his Eastern reputation, and to observe and write about legislators in action, much as he had in Carson City.
Sam found that the nation’s capital had changed significantly during his fourteen-year absence, yet on one question remained frozen in antebellum time. The Kansas-Nebraska Act wrangling had transmuted into the debate over Reconstruction; but two years after the close of the Civil War, sectionalism and race remained a constant as the American dilemma. The low-slung city was bigger, brisker, muddier, more crowded with political parasites, buttonholers from railroad, timber, and mining interests, and other exemplars of the new America. Yet in the Senate, the argument Sam had seen waged by the likes of Stephen Douglas and William H. Seward in 1854 was still going strong. Now Sam Clemens would report on that debate as a seasoned newspaper correspondent.
The issue had become whether a Northern or a Southern version of “citizenship” was to be allotted to a newly emancipated people defined for centuries as slaves. The party of Lincoln favored full federal protection of Negro citizens; but Lincoln, who might have steered the country through the crisis, was dead. His overmatched (and overdrinking) successor, Andrew (“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men”) Johnson, was bungling the process. The former Tennessee tailor had been antislavery to this extent: he thought that Negroes were more productive when paid for their grunt work. He held the Southern view that Negro rights should be limited, and decided not by federal fiat but by individual states. His clumsy attempts to ensure this policy prompted the Radical Republican–led Congress to clamp the South under military supervision in March 1867. Johnson lurched on, vetoing bill after bill drafted to ensure justice for black Americans. Shortly before Sam hit town, the Judiciary Committee recommended Johnson’s impeachment. Sam covered Johnson’s surly “annual message” to Congress of December 2, writing that it was “making a howl among the Republicans” and that it “has weakened the President. Impeachment was dead, day before yesterday. It would rise up and make a strong fight to-day if it were pushed with energy and tact.”20