Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  He was right. Johnson’s ham-handed attempts to circumvent Congress continued, and in February 1868 the House voted to impeach him. The tippling Tennessean was acquitted the following May by a single vote, but his political career was finished.

  Sam’s new boss was in the thick of this historic struggle. Stewart had made himself a leading force in the quest for a humane Reconstruction. He was just then drafting what in the following year would become the Fifteenth Amendment, codifying a spectrum of voting rights for American Negroes. Yet it was just as well that Sam hadn’t pinned his hopes on Stewart’s Washington political career. The relationship between the spade-bearded legislator and the red-haired journalist was edgy from the start. Shortly after arriving, Sam hit Stewart up for a loan. Stewart turned him down. In his memoirs forty years later, William Stewart recalled his first glimpse of Sam in Washington as if it had happened just the previous nightmare.

  I was seated at my window one morning when a very disreputable-looking person slouched into the room. He was arrayed in a seedy suit,…A sheaf of scraggy black hair leaked out of a battered old slouch hat…and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance…21

  The author of the Fifteenth Amendment, in short, found himself sharing quarters with Sut Lovingood. It was not an arrangement that held a lot of long-range promise. Sam filled his notebook with shrewd and often pictorial thumbnail sketches of the legislators, sketches that he would draw on for his first excursion into fiction a few years later: “—very deep eyes, sunken unshaven cheeks, thin lips…whole face sunken & sharp,” he observed of the radical, dying Thaddeus Stevens, a leader in the fight against Johnson; “—belongs to another age,” he noted of a Maryland representative; “strong, unshaven face hermit—woman-hater—lives up in queer way in mountains alone…hair comes washing forward over his forehead in two white converging waves over a bare-worn rock…” Of Congressman Ben Butler, the radical Republican known as “the Beast” during his brutal military occupation of New Orleans, Sam accurately wrote: “—forward part of his bald skull looks raised, like a water blister…Butler is dismally & drearily homely, & when he smiles it is like the breaking up of a hard winter.”22 His aphorisms crackled: “Whisky taken into Com[mittee] rooms in demijohns & carried out in demagogues.” “Sherman—Hunt Indians—hadn’t lost any.”23

  One other interesting notation appears in Sam Clemens’s notebook for that period: an undated entry, worded with an elaborate carelessness that roars the significance it held for the former Ralls County Ranger.

  Acquainted with Gen Grant—said I was glad to see him—he said I had the advantage of him.24

  It is not clear what date or circumstances produced the first meeting between these two preeminent figures of the 19th century whose lives had orbited each other like charged ions, and would continue to do so, with historic consequences. (Sam, whose letters home had become a veritable Who’s Who of dropped names, does not mention the encounter in any extant letter.) It appears possible that Clemens and Grant first laid eyes on each other at a reception in Washington in December 1867.* After shaking the great man’s hand, Sam melted back a few paces, leaned against a wall, and trained his prodigious attention on the general for an hour, as the reception line continued.

  Poor, modest, bored, unhappy Grant stood smileless…nervously seized each hand as it came, and while he gave it a single shake, looked not upon its owner, but threw a quick look-out for the next. And if for a moment his hand was left idle, his arm hung out from his body with a curve that was suggestive of being ready for business at a moment’s notice.25

  Sam was fascinated with Ulysses S. Grant from the start. On the evening of January 19, four days after the reception, he called at the Grants’ Washington home, looking for an interview. “He was out at a dinner party,” Sam wrote to the homefolks, “but Mrs. Grant said she would keep him at home on a Sunday evening.” He continued, no doubt imagining Jane’s horror:

  I must see him, because he is good for one letter for the Alta, & part of a lecture for San F. Grant’s father was there. Swinton [a fellow journalist] & I are going to get [the father] into a private room at Willard’s & start his tongue with a whisky punch. He will tell everything he knows & twice as much that he supposes…26

  No such interview appears to have occurred. Either that, or the participants were later unable to remember what had been said.

  Grant was in Washington as a key—if inadvertent—player in the Andrew Johnson psychodrama. He had retained his military commission after the Civil War, and Johnson, jealous and fearful of Grant’s popularity, had ordered him to Mexico in the fall of 1866. Grant had refused to go. Now, in his dissolution, Johnson had contrived to let Grant humiliate him yet again—by installing him as the replacement secretary of war for Edwin Stanton, the Lincoln holdover whom Johnson had dismissed in a power struggle. One of the new secretary’s first actions had been to stand down, a devastating gesture against the president, and Republicans in Congress seized on the “illegal” sacking of Stanton as one of the reasons for impeachment.

  Looking into the eyes of the legendary general who had once menaced his Rangers in Missouri was a seminal event for Sam, but by then, he had a separate reason to feel elated. Three weeks earlier, a day after his thirty-second birthday, he’d opened a letter awaiting him at the Tribune bureau in Washington. Its author was Elisha Bliss Jr., secretary of the American Publishing Company, and its message thrilled Sam.

  We are desirous of obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the East &c., with such interesting additions as may be proper…If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to do so, we should be pleased to see you…27

  Sam fired back a reply the next day. (Induced to do so?) “I could weed [the letters] of their chief faults of construction & inelegancies of expression, & make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write…I could strike out certain letters, & write new ones wherewith to supply their places…”28 He asked for more details on the size and general style of such a book, and an idea of how much money he might make from it. “The latter clause has a degree of importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension.”29 Elisha Bliss was not an experienced literary man, but he was an experienced businessman. Balding, middle-aged, his sideburns looping up ferociously to his mustache, he had been a dry-goods and lumbering man before joining American Publishing that year—a house that had opened up only in 1865. His letter to Sam was as portentous as a page from Joan of Arc in the face. Suddenly the Washington appointment felt irrelevant. Within a week, Sam was allowing to Frank Fuller that maybe he had made a mistake in deciding not to hit the lecture trail during the winter. His reputation was stronger than he’d reckoned! The ensuing thought was virtually fore-ordained: “I am already dead tired of being in one place so long.”30

  Dutifully, he looked in on the 40th Congress, then winding up its session, but paid only cursory attention to the issues of nationhood being thrashed out on the floor. He sent off newspaper dispatches about these debates, but his mind was elsewhere.

  Back in St. Louis, the homefolks awaited word from Sam about employment prospects for Orion, who was foraging for typesetting jobs to feed and shelter even just himself (Mollie was in Keokuk). They could not have been overjoyed to receive a mid-December letter from him that touched on the topic, then shifted its focus to himself and what a big deal he was getting to be. “I called on the Secretary of the Interior, yesterday, but said nothing about a place for Orion, of course—must get better acquainted first…If it were myself, I could get a place pretty easily, because I have friends in high places who offer me such things—but it is hard to get them interested in one’s relatives.”31 He let it slip that Stephen Johnson Field, a pal from California days and now a Supreme Court justice, wanted to make him postmaster of San Francisco: “I told him I didn’t want any office. But he said, ‘
You must have an office, with a good salary & nothing to do. You are no common scrub of a newspaperman.’ ”32 Such esteem for Sam, plus thirty-five cents, would have bought Orion a good lunch in any hotel in the Mississippi Valley.

  Everyone was looking to enhance Samuel Clemens’s life. To Mary Fairbanks, who hinted that perhaps her “cub” should be scouting around for a young lady bear—“A good wife would be a perpetual incentive to progress”—he allowed that the idea had its points. “I want a good wife—I want a couple of them if they are particularly good—but where is the wherewithal? It costs nearly two letters a week to keep me.”33 The cub was pacing his cage again. “I look forward anxiously to my release from Washington,” Sam wrote to Emily Severance on Christmas Eve. “I am in a fidget to move.”34 He had ended his employment with Senator Stewart—prompted, as he later wrote, by a subtle hint: “Leave this house! Leave it for ever and for ever, too!”35

  On Christmas Day, he was back in New York for a boozy reunion with Dan Slote and the other Quaker City nighthawks. He stayed at Slote’s house, reliving old times in the Holy Land. “I just laughed till my sides ached…It was the unholiest gang that ever cavorted through Palestine, but those are the best boys in the world.”36 It was during this hiatus that Sam found an opportunity to unload his pent-up irritation at Captain Duncan. The captain had asked for it. Lecturing on the excursion at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church on December 3, Duncan claimed that he had observed rampant drunkenness aboard the ship. His charge was refuted by a fellow excursionist and Plymouth congregant, Stephen Griswold, who insisted that the only shipboard drinking was done by a man suffering from “consumption,” who had wet his whistle under a doctor’s advice. The Brooklyn Eagle, spoiling for a public feud, called in print upon the one authority who might give a true accounting: “Mark Twain is the man to settle the point, let us hear from him.”37

  On December 30, writing at Dan Slote’s house, he crafted a small masterpiece of satirical inversion that left the captain wiping custard pie from his bald dome and sailor’s goatee. Duncan’s charge was true but overstated, Mark Twain said, and demonstrated how facts and figures, while stating literal truth, can ruin a reputation when presented the wrong way. He offered some imaginary extracts from his notes.

  At sea, August 14—Captain Duncan appeared at breakfast this morning entirely sober. Heaven be praised!

  At sea, August 18—Four days of forebodings and uneasiness. But at last Captain Duncan appeared at breakfast again, apparently entirely sober. Cheerfulness sat upon every countenance, and every heart was filled with thankfulness.

  At sea, August 24—…Capt Duncan has not once been in liquor. Oh, how grateful we ought to be! A movement is on foot to present him a silver dinner service when we shall have arrived in Rome.38

  And then the “snapper,” offered as a P.S.

  I am sorry, I am truly sorry to say that in Italy Capt. Duncan bought wine and drank it on board the ship——, and it almost breaks my heart when I reflect that…it was his example that seduced the innocent passengers into getting intoxicated…Capt. Duncan offered wine to me—he tried to make even me fall with his horrid Italian intoxicating bowl—but my virtue was proof against his wiles. I sternly refused to taste it. I preferred the French article. So did Griswold.39

  The article ran in the Eagle the following day. That evening—New Year’s Eve—found Sam Clemens out on the town, taking in a reading by the world’s most famous living author, with the girl in the ivory miniature on his arm.

  He had stopped by the elegant St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway to call on Charley Langdon, who was staying there with his parents and his sister, down from Elmira. The Langdons were as wealthy and cultured as any people the former printer’s devil from Hannibal had yet encountered, short of the tsar’s family. Graciously, they included Sam in their dinner party, then invited him along to Steinway Hall at 14th Street in Union Square, to hear Charles Dickens read at 8 p.m. from David Copperfield. * Sam later remembered Dickens as a small, slender figure in a black velvet coat with a red flower in the button-hole, who stood under a bank of strong lights and read “with great force and animation, in the lively passages, and with stirring effect.”40 He was more absorbed with the slim young woman in his company: “sweet and timid and lovely,” he later recalled.41 Yet he was not so distracted that he failed to note, and file away in his mind, a critical bit of Dickensian stagecraft: “[H]e did not merely read but also acted.”42

  The next morning, Sam saw her again, on the first of thirty-four expected New Year’s calls on friends in the city. He canceled the remaining thirty-three, having

  anchored for the day at the first house I came to—Charlie Langdon’s sister was there (beautiful girl,) & Miss Alice Hooker, another beautiful girl, a niece of Henry Ward Beecher’s. We sent the old folks home early, with instructions not to send the carriage till midnight, & then I just staid there & deviled the life out of those girls. I am going to spend a few days with the Langdon’s, in Elmira, New York, as soon as I get time…43

  First, though, there was a book that needed to be written.

  * Dickens had arrived in Boston that same day to begin a five-month lecture tour in America; he was booked at the Westminster during his New York stop.

  * Some scholars, including Robert Hirst, suspect that this meeting may have taken place entirely inside Sam’s head, as did the imaginary exchange described in the unpublished manuscript he titled “Interview with Gen. Grant,” which he dated “Washington Dec. 6.”

  * In 1906 Mark Twain stated that he had first met Olivia Langdon on December 27, four days before the Dickens reading, over dinner with the family at the St. Nicholas; but the following year he gave December 31 as the date of the first meeting, and recalled the Dickens reading.

  21

  “A Work Humorously Inclined…”

  (February–July 1868)

  The girl in the miniature may have made a deep impression on Sam, but she disappears from mention in his letters and notes for the ensuing six months. Contrary to the legend created by Mark Twain and maintained by his biographer Paine, she may have disappeared from his thoughts as well. Evidence that Sam continued his bachelor ways after his introduction to Olivia Langdon has surfaced in a letter written to Mollie Clemens on February 21, 1868. Transcribed and then smothered in private files by Paine, it only recently made its way to the archivists at Berkeley.

  I received a dainty little letter from Lou Conrad, yesterday. She* is in Wisconsin. But what worries me is that I have received no letter from my sweetheart in New York for three days. This won’t do. I shall have to run up there & see what the mischief is the matter. I will break that girl’s back if she breaks my heart. I am getting too venerable now to put up with nonsense from children.1

  Even as he romanced other young women, including Emma Beach, Sam was working his way into the interlaced community that reached from his world to the Langdons’ in Elmira. He wrote to his mother on January 8:

  Henry Ward Beecher sent for me last Sunday to come over & dine (he lives in Brooklyn, you know,) & I went. Harriet Beecher Stowe was there, & Mrs. & Miss Beecher, Mrs. Hooker & my old Quaker City favorite, Emma Beach. We had a very gay time, if it was Sunday. I expect I told more lies than I have told before in a month.2

  If Jane Clemens ever needed an index from which to gauge her school-truant son’s rise through America’s social echelons, this letter provided it. In addition to the famous minister and his even more famous sister, Harriet, there was his sister Catharine, an educator and author; his wife, Eunice; as well as his half-sister, “Mrs. Hooker”—Isabella Beecher Hooker, a leader in the struggle to achieve equal rights for women. She was married to the great lawyer John Hooker, and their daughter Alice was a friend of Olivia Langdon’s. Emma Beach was a slightly different proposition. Sam seems to have played at a flirtation with his “old” (as in eighteen) Quaker City favorite. He kept up a correspondence with her, frisky in its early weeks (“Shipmate, Ahoy!” “Shipmate, Avast
!”).

  Isabella and John Hooker were the founding residents of Nook Farm, the half-enchanted utopian community at the western edge of Hartford, and which took its name from the forest and fields that encompassed it. Its hundred-acre plat had been a “farm” in name only for decades, as sycamores and sugar maples and chestnut trees reclaimed its hillsides and valleys. The name “Nook” referred to the forty-odd acres embraced by a bend in the Hog River, eventually Victorianized as the Park. John Hooker and a partner bought the estate in 1853 and sold lots to selected friends and relatives. Hooker was a sixth-generation descendant of Thomas Hooker, the Puritan cleric who founded Hartford in 1636. Along with his cerebral wife, John envisioned a city-within-a-city whose subtle borders allowed only kindred spirits: readers and thinkers, yet people impassioned enough to involve themselves in the great issues of the day, the greatest of which was the plight of African-American slaves.

  Hooker’s partner was Francis Gillette, a Christian abolitionist and United States senator. With his marriage to Hooker’s sister Eliza, Gillette forged relational as well as neighborly bonds on the Farm. The Gillettes’ son William would become famous for his stage portrayal of Sherlock Holmes (he introduced the deerstalker cap). He used some of his wealth to plant a medieval castle amidst the gabled manors of the Farm.

  Sam’s own bond to the Hartford area was now assuming its contours. As he hobnobbed in New York, a third letter from Elisha Bliss written on December 24 arrived at the Tribune rooms in Washington.