Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  By 1868, Nook Farm had coalesced into a miniature nonesuch realm: an intertwined and interrelated Camelot of wealthy artists, social reformers, thinkers, and writers, who shared a warren of ivy-draped houses in the Victorian, Gothic, and federal styles. It was as much a distillation of high Eastern culture as Virginia City had been a distillation of the lowdown West. Sam, wandering through this preternaturally small world, had already met some of Nook Farm’s denizens—the Hookers and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Now, he reentered their paradise—on the wings of Bliss, so to speak.

  “SET A white stone—for I have made a friend,” he crowed to Livy in that same you-have-rebuked-me letter. “It is the Rev. J. H. Twichell…I could hardly find words strong enough to tell how much I do think of that man.”24 No doubt Sam would have leapt to claim friendship with just about any clergyman at this point in his relationship with Livy. He made sure to work in the information that “I met him at a church sociable, (where I made a dozen pleasant acquaintances, old & young & of both sexes).” But in this case, he didn’t need to exaggerate. Joe Twichell was a spectacular personality—enthusiastic, virile, ridiculously handsome in a boyish, round-faced sort of way—he even sported an unruly lock of hair that curled over his forehead. He was at once a bookish grind and a fearless man of action: an honors student in English composition and port-waist on the Yale crew of 1859, just about the time that the concept of a “muscular Christianity” was beginning to challenge the pervading concept of an ascetic, rather sad-sack Anglican Jesus. He entered Union Theological Seminary after his graduation, but left at the outset of the Civil War to volunteer as a chaplain. At age twenty-two, he asked for a rough regiment—the more civilized soldiers already had plenty of chaplains, he figured. He was assigned to the ferocious New York Zouaves, who modeled themselves on the flamboyant and brutal French North African fighters of the 1830s. The Zouaves decked themselves out in turbans, fezzes, embroidered vests, leggings, and flared scarlet trousers. These outfits drew attention on the battlefield; the red pants held up well through the smoke and haze, as targets. The Zouaves didn’t seem to mind this, as long as they looked good.

  Twichell was shocked at the profanity of these “rough and wicked” men, as he described them in a letter to his father, but he soon saw worse things. His corps commander was General Dan Sickles, the former Tammany Hall congressman who in 1858 had gunned down his wife’s lover, the son of Francis Scott Key. Joe Twichell was with Sickles’s Third Corps on the second day at Gettysburg, when Sickles, ignoring orders, advanced his men into the open field below the Round Tops without protection, where they absorbed a charge by forty-five thousand of James Longstreet’s infantry. The general paid personally for his slaughterhouse mistake when a cannonball mangled his leg. Twichell accompanied the stretcher bearers from the lines to the surgical tent, as Sickles enjoyed a cigar. The two became rather fond of each other.

  Comradeships with profane fighting men, and witness to their suffering and deaths, informed Joe Twichell’s Christian sensibilities. His theology was less intellectual than emotional. Wagging a finger at commonplace sin mattered less to him than exalting life, and a faith centered on good works—what would come to be known nearly fifty years later as the Social Gospel. He was mustered out of the war in June 1864. After more seminary studies at Andover, he was called to the newly completed Asylum Hill Congregational Church at 814 Asylum Avenue in Hartford, where, during a reception on an October evening in 1868, Twichell overheard a small red-haired guest wisecracking that “this is the ‘Church of the Holy Speculators.’ ” A few minutes later, Amelia Bliss introduced Twichell to Sam Clemens. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  ON THE less satisfying side of the ledger, production on The New Pilgrim’s Progress languished. Elisha Bliss envisioned many engraved pictures “sandwiched” in the text, and Sam concurred; but rounding up the photographs, and then having these drawn and engraved on wood, was a slow process. Sam supplied many photographs that he had collected during the voyage, and had already solicited Moses Beach and others for any that they could offer. In the end, the book would contain some 230 wood engravings, many taken from the travelers’ own collection of prints made by the expedition photographer, William E. James. By mid-October it was clear to Bliss that the book could not appear before March 1869, and he told Clemens of that delay.

  The lecture, however, was ready. The finishing surge had kicked in after Mark stopped trying to please others, and homed in on the Holy Land adventure as he had experienced and understood it. In a day or two, he cobbled together a lecture of ninety minutes, taken whole, or lightly edited, from sections of the book manuscript. At the center of this work a gaudy figure preened himself, feet planted apart, green bottle-glasses covering his eyes. He clutched a parasol with one hand and a Bible in the other. His pockets bulged with trinkets and chipped-off specimens from cathedrals, the ruins of statues, the surface of the Sphinx. He was an American, his name was the Vandal, and he was ready to rock.

  * Ten years almost on the nose. Olivia’s birthday fell on November 27, three days before Sam’s.

  † This is Olivia’s own count. Many of the letters have not been recovered.

  23

  American Vandal

  (October–December 1868)

  Sam broke the news of the lecture’s title to Mother Fairbanks as gingerly as he could. As to her latest proposed outline, which even included “heads” for his various transitions—oops! It arrived too late.

  …I wrote the lecture the day before your letter came…I had planned the lecture just about as you did, & wrote & wrote & kept writing till I saw that I was never going to weave a web that would suit me. So then I altered the title to “The American Vandal Abroad,” & began again.

  Mrs. Fairbanks was not to worry, though, because “I treat him gently & good-naturedly…To tell the truth there isn’t a great deal of Vandal in the lecture.”1

  To tell the truth, there was: but in a form that was inconceivable to Mary Fairbanks’s tidy philosophies. This Vandal was not the crude pietistic scavenger that Mark Twain had lampooned in his first newspaper sketches after the Quaker City docked. He was a far more complex character than that, and far more original: a new archetype in American culture, eclipsing such provincial icons as Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, even Sut Lovingood. This Vandal bestrode the world. Unlike his cowed countrymen who for decades had approached the Old World on bended knee, the Vandal returned the appraising gaze of any European or Arab who dared assert a higher claim on history. If he was boorish and sanctimonious and frequently ignorant of what he surveyed, the Vandal brought a legitimacy to his observations, founded on the stubborn American self-invention and good common sense envisioned by Emerson. The Vandal was the ancestor of George F. Babbitt and Alden Pyle; the emerging face of America, as it appeared to the larger world, and also as it appeared in the mirror.

  As he marked the days until the unveiling of this new phenomenon, Sam took comfort in the evidence that “Honored Sister’s” attitude was thawing a little again. (“Your welcome letter made me entirely satisfied.”)2 Clearly, Livy saw promise in Sam’s new friendship with Reverend Twichell—his descriptions of the hearty, civic-minded minister probably reminded her a little of her father’s temperament. Sam saw this, and began shoehorning in as many Twichell references as he could think of, even if it meant clotting up his usually clean sentence line. “The idea of that party of ministers at his [Twichell’s] house the other night thanking me fervently for having written & published certain trash which they said had lit up some gloomy days with a wholesome laugh was a surprise to me.”3 And: “Mr. & Mrs. Twichell and myself…drove 10 miles out in the country & back the other day, & in the course of the conversation Mr. T. uttered several things that struck me forcibly.”4 And: “Twichell is splendid. And he has one rare faculty—he is thoughtful & considerate. He lends me his overcoat when I go there without one, lends me his umbrella, lends me his slippers.”5 Not to mention lending him several wa
gonloads of piety-by-association.

  By this time, Sam was feeling bold enough to launch an ongoing prank on his shy and literary inamorata: “deleting” certain passages in his love letters without utterly obscuring them, thus allowing Livy the illusion of reading what he had written, but then decided to take back.* His early dabblings at this were innocuous: “I would tease you, only you take everything in such dreadful earnest it hurts my conscience,” read part of a barely crossed-out postscript in an October 30 letter. “I never could venture farther than to convince you that there was 16 in a cribbage hand that hadn’t anything in it.”6 As time passed, his “deletions” grew more daring.

  Sam’s surface playfulness with Livy concealed a growing private despair. He feared that the courtship was futile; he would never prove himself worthy of this über–Becky Thatcher, and her parents would never approve the match even if he did. That despair flooded to the surface in one of Samuel Clemens’s rare emotional breakdowns, this one in a New York household parlor. Sam had popped down to the city on October 31 for a party at the invitation of a pair of actresses known as the Webb sisters, whom he had met in Virginia City. He was still in town on November 3, the day that Ulysses S. Grant was elected the eighteenth president. He paid a call on a family named the Wileys, who lived on East 49th Street near Madison Avenue. The Wileys, by a staggering coincidence, were family friends both of the Clemenses, from Hannibal days, and of Fidele Brooks, a friend of Olivia Langdon’s. A young Wiley daughter, Margaret, sat at her desk pretending to do her lessons during Sam’s visit, but eavesdropped as Sam sat and talked with her father, George Wiley. She was all ears when the auburn-haired visitor abruptly pleaded for George’s advice: “I am DESPERATELY IN LOVE with the most exquisite girl—so beautiful, unfortunately very rich…I have proposed & been refused a dozen times—what do YOU think?”7

  George Wiley replied that he thought Sam was crazy to even think of such a thing. Seventy-six years later, Margaret recounted the moment in prose that has the unself-conscious sweetness of stage melodrama.

  “That’s what I was afraid you would say. I know I’m too rough—knocking around the world.” And the tears came. He took out his handkerchief and wiped them away. Father said: “Sam, are you fooling? Is this one of your blank jokes?” He saw he was terribly serious and hurt. So father jumped up, ran over, took him by the shoulders…and said: “Sam you old Galoote, you. You’re not rough; you’re the most perfect gentleman—the cleanest, most decent man I know today. There is no girl in the world too good for you. Go for her, and get her, and God bless you, Sam.”8

  To which Sam replied, according to Margaret:

  “Well, I will go see her again tomorrow, and I’ll harass that girl and harass her till she’ll have to say yes! For George, you know I never had wish or time to bother with women, and I can give that girl the purest, best love any man can ever give her. I can make her well and happy.”9

  Which is what he proceeded to do, more or less. He arrived in Cleveland on Sunday, November 8, to prepare for his premiere lecture. He spent some time cultivating members of the Cleveland press, to whom he was already a celebrity. He chose a cunning way to get his name into the Sunday Herald two days before his talk—perhaps a revealing one as well, given his anxieties about acceptance by respectable society.

  In a humorous sketch titled “A Mystery,” Mark Twain reports that he has been bedeviled by an impostor, a “double” traveling around the country and using the name Mark Twain to borrow money, run up unpaid hotel bills, and get “persistently and eternally drunk.” In language that strained the definition of “humor,” Mark Twain distanced himself from this disreputable doppelganger.

  Now to my mind there is something exceedingly strange about this Double of mine…Doubles usually have the same instincts, and act in the same way as their originals—but this one don’t. This one…does according to its own notions entirely, without stopping to consider whether they are likely to be consistent with mine or not…It gets intoxicated—I do not. It steals horses—I do not. It imposes on theatre managers—I never do. It lies—I never do. It swindles landlords—I never get a chance.10

  On the stormy evening of Tuesday, November 17, Mark Twain ambled onto the third-floor auditorium stage in the newly completed Case Hall in Cleveland—deadpan as usual, one hand in his jacket pocket—to inaugurate the fund-raising lecture series for the planned city library. A crowd of twelve hundred, including Abel and Mary Fairbanks and several Quaker City passengers, awaited him in patent-opera chairs. The audience was skeptical. Some of the lyceum regulars doubted this newcomer’s ability to divert them. Mark Twain’s erstwhile shipmates had their own reasons for apprehension. “I am to speak of the American Vandal this evening,” Mark Twain began in his signature drawl, and then he told the audience what he had in mind by that darkly exhilarating term.* The term “Vandal,” he said, “best describes the roving, independent, free-and-easy character of that class of traveling Americans who are not elaborately educated, cultivated, and refined—and gilded and filagreed with the ineffable graces of the first society.”11

  Pacing around the podium, shifting his shoulders, scarcely consulting the sheaf of notes in his fist, but instead searching out individual pairs of eyes in the crowd—“buttonholing”—Mark Twain embellished the figure he had outlined. As he did so, he melted any Fairbanksean hopes that her protégé would become a gilded and pedigreed darling of high-lyceum pieties, an extension of herself. And he melted the audience’s frosty dignity into laughter and applause.

  The Vandal was a nosy, pushy cuss, never shy about crossing boundaries: “He attempts to investigate the secrets of the harems; he views the rock where Paul was let down in a basket, and seriously asks where the basket is. He will choke himself to death trying to smoke a Turkish pipe…”12

  The Vandal could be a philistine (but you had to admire his candor).

  The Vandal goes to see this picture [Da Vinci’s The Last Supper], which all the world praises—looks at it with a critical eye and says it’s a perfect old nightmare of a picture and he wouldn’t give $40 for a million like it—(and I endorse his opinion,) and then he is done with Milan.13

  The Vandal could be vulgar and confrontational. Listen to him telling off a noisy Venetian gondolier.

  Look here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo—Smith—I’m a pilgrim and I’m a stranger, but I’m not going to stand any such caterwauling as that! If this thing goes on one of us has got [to] take water. It is enough that my cherished dreams of Venice have been blighted forever, without taxing your talents to make the matter worse. Another yelp out of you and overboard you go!14

  Most incorrigibly, the Vandal could be…well…a vandal.

  You could find them breaking specimens from the dilapidated tomb of Romeo and Juliet at Padua—and infesting the picture-galleries of Florence—and risking their necks on the Leaning Tower of Pisa—and snuffing sulphur fumes on the summit of Vesuvius…and you might see them with spectacles on and blue cotton umbrellas under their arms benignantly contemplating Rome from the venerable arches of the Coliseum.15

  Yet the American Vandal was more than the sum of these parts. In his hardheaded, bull-in-a-china-shop way, he was the ambassador of a newly industrialized, populous, and therefore consequential America—no longer the familiar apologist for a backwoods culture sneered at by the French and English and Italian aristocracy, but the envy of all these, and damned proud of it.

  The lesson of the Excursion was a good one. It taught us that foreign countries are excellent to travel in, but that the best country to live in is America, after all. We found no soap in the hotels of Europe, and they charged us for candles we never burned. We saw no ladies anywhere that were as beautiful as our own ladies here at home and especially in this audience. We saw none anywhere that dressed with such excellent taste as do our ladies at home here.16

  In fact the Vandal had upended the entire rationale for the American as traveler. Humility, worship, self-abasement before the sple
ndors of antiquity? Forget it.

  If there is a moral to this lecture it is an injunction to all Vandals to travel. I am glad the American Vandal goes abroad. It does him good…for it enlarges his charity and his benevolence, it broadens his views of men and things…It liberalizes the Vandal to travel. You never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place ever since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction. So I say, by all means, let the American Vandal go on traveling, and let no man discourage him.17

  At the end, the fancy audience on the third floor of Case Hall in Cleveland had been witness to a turning that would be replicated in halls around the nation. The Vandal had taken his rude stance as the new representative American. How they loved it, these Cleveland doctors and businessmen in their soup-and-fish, and their ladies in brocade. How they laughed and applauded this novel good-bad boy as he paced and pivoted onstage. Mark Twain had perfect pitch that night: he reined in the Vandal’s coarser proclivities, he steered clear of the Holy Land minefield, and he threw in enough travelogue to establish his authority: the word-pictures of stately palaces; marble miracles of enchanting architecture; great cities with towers and domes and steeples drowsing in a golden mist of sunset; himself wandering the marble-paved lengths of mighty temples as the full moon rides high in the cloudless heavens, and walking on “pavements that had been pressed by Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Socrates, Phocion, Euclid, Xenophon, Herodotus, Diogenes, and a hundred others of deathless fame.”18

  Midway through the lecture, a couple rising to leave the auditorium caught Mark Twain’s eye. Thrown off balance, he struggled to regain his train of thought. As he fell silent, the audience started to laugh. Mark Twain’s silence and the laughter grew in tandem, until he blurted that he “would be everlastingly obliged if some one in the audience would tell me where I left off.”19 This made the audience laugh even harder. “Finally,” Mark Twain recalled years later, “when the suspense had become overpowering, an angel—with a bald head—arose and asked me if I was really in earnest in desiring to know which lie I was telling. I said I was.”20 The gentleman told him. He was Solon Severance, the banker-intellectual from the Quaker City voyage.