by Ron Powers
The Galaxy connection reawakened Mark Twain to the sheer dumb exuberance of writing. Freed now from the pressures of a long-form manuscript to establish his bona fides with book readers and critics, and playing hooky from his suffocating duties at the Express, he dove happily back into the kind of work that he had perfected out in the West: the short, packed, word-slinging serendipity of the sketch. His pieces ranged through pungent social commentary; parodies of the Horatio Alger–style “boy’s” book (this time the “good little boy” ends up launched skyward by nitroglycerine, Bugs Bunny–style); fanciful reminiscence; a rather brash anti-appreciation of the godly Benjamin Franklin (“He was twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of Boston”22). One of the first of his efforts, “About Smells,” unleashed the democratic indignation in him that would become a hallmark of his popular journalism. He administered a verbal whipping to a popular Presbyterian minister in Brooklyn, Thomas DeWitt Talmage, who had carped in a newspaper essay about the bodily odors of workingmen in his church. “We have reason to believe that there will be laboring men in heaven,” Mark Twain observed with dry deadliness; “and also a number of negroes, and Esquimaux…and a few Indians, and possibly even some Spaniards and Portuguese. All things are possible with God. We shall have all these sorts of people in heaven; but, alas! in getting them we shall lose the society of Dr. Talmage.”23
CREATIVELY, FINANCIALLY, and domestically, Little Sammy’s Fairyland prospered in the early months of 1870. Jane Clemens conquered her infirmities, and perhaps her nerves, enough to visit the newlyweds; she arrived at Buffalo on April 21, by train and then steamer across Lake Erie, escorted by Pamela and Sammy, now nearly ten. Jane’s daughter rented a house at Fredonia, New York, near the steamboat terminus, where she and her son took up residence, Annie joining them at the end of her school year.24 Later on her arrival day, Jane was hard pressed to recall whether Pamela and Sammy had made the trip with her from St. Louis or not.
Jane’s “wool-gathering” state, as Sam called it, was a harbinger of deeper family woes soon to follow. In Elmira, Jervis Langdon’s stomach cancer continued to spread; he weakened and endured terrible pain. From his sickbed, Jervis continued to dispatch gifts, and Livy sent back thanks accompanied by false high spirits: “There is no end to surprizes to this young woman, when I opened the check…I saw the one, I thought it was one hundred, and could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw that it was one thousand dollars—I felt as if I had suddenly discovered a fathomless mine…”25
Back in Missouri, Orion had started to drive Sam crazy—again. The drama was the familiar one: the Tennessee land, with Orion, as Trickster Sibling, notifying Sam that a Pittsburgh entrepreneur had offered $50,000 for the white-elephant property. (To add a little piquance to the plot, Orion—even as he declared himself “penniless,” as usual, and said he was reading proof for the St. Louis Democrat for $25 a week—had earlier let slip a $30,000 purchase offer from Jervis himself.) Sam, reprising his role of Credulous Brother, replied with the reasonable observation that the figure was more than the land was now worth. Take it, he urged: “Providence will not deliver another lunatic into our hands if we slight this present evidence of his beneficent care for us.”26 A few weeks later, that prospect having evaporated, Credulous Brother was still talking as if Trickster Sibling might actually have one oar in the water. “We are offered $15,000 cash for the Tennessee Land,” he reported to Jervis; “—Orion is in favor of taking it provided we can reserve 800 acres which he thinks contain an iron mine, & 200 acres of cannel coal…I advise Orion to offer them the entire tract…at $30,000…”27
Months passed, without any action. Then, on August 1, having let this latest opportunity expire, Orion sent Sam a request for a couple of hundred dollars…to cover Orion’s expenses…in trying to sell the Tennessee land. Sam’s reply virtually hissed with the sound of steam escaping his ears.
I have tried for 24 hours to write, but I am too infernally angry & out of patience to write civilly.
You can draw on me for two or three hundred dollars, but only on one condition…that you consider yourself under oath to either sell…or give away, one full half of the Tennessee land within 4 months from date…If any stupid fool will give 2,000 for it, do let him have it—shift the curse to his shoulders…[T]his is the last time I will ever have anything to do with…that doubly & trebly hated & accursed land.28
Then, after one more month of Orionian paralysis, the coda: “Leave it in Mellon’s hands but give him 25 per cent—can you never get that necessity before your face?”29
GREATER BURDENS than Orion’s bumbling gripped Samuel Clemens. Jervis Langdon lay dying at home, his cancerous stomach a garden of pain. His family kept up an optimistic façade, but the signs were apparent in the spring. On May 30, Jervis summoned Charley home from his global tour. He did not specify to his son that he was dying, but Charley would have had no trouble inferring it: the letter informed him that Jervis’s business firm had been reorganized as Langdon & Co., and Charley was to run it.
Sam and a dazed Livy, weakened by her pregnancy, traveled to Elmira on June 7 to commence the death-watch. The idyllic phase of their married life was over after a little less than five months. They would never enjoy such a pitch of untainted happiness again. “It is the saddest, saddest time,” Sam wrote to Mary Fairbanks. “There is no sound in the house…the sunshine is gone out.”30
Sam left the household on July 4 for a mission on Jervis’s behalf. In the company of some New York congressmen, he took an overnight train to Washington to lobby for a bill that would restructure the Tennessee judicial system. Jervis was suing the city of Memphis to collect half a million dollars due a firm of his for paving its streets. Sam’s efforts proved to be in vain, but the trip was productive in other ways. It was on this visit that he paid his second and more storied call on Ulysses S. Grant, now President Grant. Ushered into Grant’s office by Senator Bill Stewart, Sam shook the president’s hand, and then a heavy silence fell. “I couldn’t think of anything to say,” Mark Twain later recalled. “So I merely looked into the General’s grim, immovable countenance a moment or two…” and then Sam blurted, “Mr. President, I am embarrassed—are you?” “He smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast iron image,” Mark Twain recalled, “and I got away under the smoke of my own volley.”31
On July 8, he sat for a photograph by Mathew Brady in his Washington studio. This image is among the most arresting of the many hundreds made of Samuel Clemens. It reveals nothing of the anxieties now pulling at him; rather, it evokes an elegant, somewhat stern figure at a peak of manly vigor, his unlined face in three-quarter profile with the chin raised a little, his eyes narrowed, his mustache swelling over his lower lip, his thick hair piled neatly above his forehead. He is wearing a white waistcoat under a dark formal coat, probably his lecture-hall claw hammer.
Brady’s photograph of Mark Twain proved to be among the last successful works for the great Civil War chronicler and portraitist to presidents, whose photograph of Lincoln is still represented on the five-dollar bill. Brady had overinvested in his staff and equipment during the war. The public who, he’d assumed, would buy his prints en masse, had turned its back on all reminders of the nightmarish years. At the time he made his photograph of Mark Twain, Mathew Brady was lapsing into debt, blindness, and the alcoholism that would kill him after twenty-six more years of futility. The image captures the intersection of two artists, one declining and the other rising, who together furnished the preeminent images and language of the American 19th century.
Most usefully for his writing plans, Sam revisited his old haunts, the halls and gallery of the Senate; looked up his old acquaintances, and unleashed his acute noticing: “Oh, I have gathered material enough for a whole book!”32
Then he entrained back to Elmira to rejoin the death-watch. Livy drew additional support from a former schoolmate of hers, a slim young woman named Emma Nye. Miss Nye was en route from Aiken, Sout
h Carolina, where her parents now lived, to Detroit to begin her career as a schoolteacher. She politely extended her Elmira stopover to look after Livy.
JERVIS LANGDON succumbed around 5 p.m. on Saturday, August 6, 1870, after murmuring to his friend and minister, “Beecher, I’m going home.”33 His passing was one of the most-noted events in the history of Elmira. Thomas Beecher offered the memorial tribute at the packed Opera House on August 21. Mark Twain’s written eulogy, widely reprinted in northern New York, praised Langdon as a great man who lavished fortunes on the downtrodden and once forgave a recipient of his largesse who had gone on to defraud him. “He was an Abolitionist from the cradle…a very pure, & good, & noble Christian gentleman…The friendless & the forsaken will miss him.”34
Langdon’s widow, son, and daughter divided his estate of a million dollars. Livy’s share was $300,000, a significant sum, but short of a fortune. To his adopted daughter, Susan Crane, and her husband, Theodore, Jervis bequeathed a wooden house on East Hill above the city, overlooking the Chemung River. Jervis had bought the property for family getaways. It was Thomas Beecher who proposed the name for the leafy retreat, making reference to some abandoned slate-mining digs nearby: Quarry Farm.
Mercifully unequipped to imagine the second calamity bearing down on them, Sam and Livy mourned Jervis’s death for a few weeks. Sam fell prey to distractions. He noodled around on an idea for a “burlesque autobiography” and daydreamed, like everybody else in this age of better-mousetrap mania, of inventing things and patenting them. (Orion in St. Louis had come up with an idea for a new type of drilling machine.) More solidly, Sam began gearing up for a long narrative of his Western adventures, and for some vehicle that would carry that “whole book’s” worth of material he’d gathered in July about the Washington political scene.
On July 15, as sales of The Innocents continued to boom, Sam had signed a contract with Elisha Bliss for a second book, due January 1 of the following year. The subject, he confided to Orion on the same day, was a secret, but he more or less let the cat out of the bag in the next line: “Have you a memorandum of the route we took…Do you remember any of the scenes, names, incidents or adventures of the coach trip?…[F]or I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot down a foolscap page of items for me…I suppose I am to get the biggest copyright, this time, ever paid on a subscription book in this country.”35
Elisha Bliss may have set this project in motion by suggesting a book about Clemens’s experiences in the West, as Paine reports; but Sam had been thinking along the same lines since before he left California. Several weeks later, he thanked Orion for what his brother had put together for him, and promised him a thousand dollars from the “secret” book’s first earnings. Orion, possibly stunned to receive praise from Sam, got busy and forked over some more.
As for the Washington project, the first indication that Sam saw it as a novel, stocked with vivid and perhaps comic characters, came in a mid-August letter to Pamela.
I wish you would get all the gossip you can out of Mollie about Cousin James Lampton & family, without her knowing it is I that want it. I want every little trifling detail, about how they look & dress, & what they say, & how the house is furnished.36
James Lampton, of course, was the dinner host who served Sam turnips and water in St. Louis. Sam recalled him as a larger-than-life character, an incorrigible big-talking optimist and dreamer (Lampton was a lawyer and traveling salesman). A fellow born to inhabit a novel if ever there was one.
In early September, Sam, working from Orion’s memoranda papers, told Bliss that he had written the first four chapters of the book that would become Roughing It. “I tell you the ‘Innocents Abroad’ will have to get up early to beat it,” he boasted, estimating that it would sell ninety thousand copies in its first year. “Now I want it illustrated lavishly.”37 Before long, aided by Orion’s material and the misnamed “Around the World” sketches from the Express, Sam had completed twenty manuscript chapters.
While all this was going on, a new piece of sketch writing out of the West jolted the nation’s funnybone with even more force than “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” had some five years earlier. The sixty-line bit of doggerel appeared in the September Overland Monthly under the title, “Plain Language from Truthful James,” by Bret Harte. Reprints swept through the East under the title, “The Heathen Chinee.” People couldn’t stop reciting it to one another in saloons and on street corners and over the backyard fence. Harte later swore that it was the worst poem he ever wrote, maybe the worst poem anyone ever wrote; and he’d knocked it out only to fill up a corner of empty space in the magazine. But it catapulted him to national fame after sixteen years of obscurity beyond his adopted home state. The poem was about two California fellows cheating each other at euchre with cards hidden in their sleeves. The cheating was equal-opportunity; but one of the two, a Chinese named Ah Sin, overwhelmed the poem and caught the public’s fascination, partly via the strangely incantatory cadences of the chorus, echoing—lampooning—those of Swinburne’s 1865 verse tragedy, “Atalanta in Calydon,”
…I wish to remark,
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar…38
A larger reason for the doggerel’s impact was its nudging at a racial stereotype just then troubling the nation’s conscience. Americans had never been particularly kind to the hundred-thousand-odd Chinese immigrants attracted to the West by the Gold Rush and later by laboring jobs on farms and in railroad building. Mark Twain’s accounts of casual brutality toward Asians in Washoe had illustrated this. The economic downturn of the early 1870s had heightened tensions—and violence—in competition for jobs. Bret Harte had satirized this sort of abuse for years.
The ambiguity of “The Heathen Chinee” gave comfort to both sides of the divide. The narrator seems to argue that Ah Sin’s cheating was no worse than that of his Caucasian opponents; yet he alludes to the “Chinee’s” dark ways and vain tricks, and to Ah Sin’s childlike smile. The phrase “Heathen Chinee” entered the American lexicon. It was used ironically by reformers and straight on by bigots. Its cachet, soon global, did for Harte what the Jumping Frog had done for Mark Twain. Overnight, he was a literary icon. It didn’t hurt that James T. Fields, the publisher and Atlantic editor, brought out the Californian’s The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches at about the same time of the Chinee’s sudden sensation. Now Fields offered ten thousand dollars for the rights to anything Harte wrote over the ensuing year in the Atlantic, and placed The Luck of Roaring Camp at the top of the company’s “New Books” listing, ahead of John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Dickens.
Sam watched these developments with darkening spirits. He was receding from the public eye as Harte ascended. He had left the lecture trail; his Galaxy output had diminished as he concentrated on the Western book; and now, as 1870 drew to an end, that project started to founder as well, as he exhausted Orion’s memoranda notes. He had churned out twenty chapters, pushing his pace to fifteen and twenty pages a day, but he wasn’t happy with the results, and progress seemed slow to him. “Indeed Harte does soar,” Sam conceded grudgingly to Charles Henry Webb, “& I am glad of it, notwithstanding he & I are ‘off,’ these many months.”39 That was a reference to their overblown tiff over a “daintily contemptuous & insulting letter”40—Sam’s words—that arose from a misunderstanding about free copies of The Innocents.
SAM WAS at least able to immerse himself in his work during these days of grief and crisis. Livy Clemens could only struggle to cope with the absence of her loving, titanic father. Her limited strength further sapped by the six-month fetus growing inside her, she lay prostrate in the hot late summer ravaged by grief. She had not slept naturally since Jervis’s death; Sam forced her unconscious by nightly doses of a “narcotic.”
Livy wasn’t the only one prostrate. On September 2, Sam advised
Mary Fairbanks that “Miss Emma Nye is here & is right sick.”41 Three days after that, he informed a friend that “Poor little Emma Nye lies in our bed-chamber fighting wordy battles with the phantoms of delirium.”42 He and Livy canceled their plans to attend Charley Langdon’s wedding. On the morning of September 29, Emma Nye died. Sam and Livy were too depleted to attend her funeral the next day in Elmira.
Yet Mark Twain kept working. On September 15 he wrote to the postmaster of Virginia City in the Montana Territory asking for anecdotes concerning the hanged Slade, the desperado Sam and Orion had met in 1861. A couple of days after that, a specimen of his most madcap inventiveness appeared in the Express: an exuberantly crude etching of a fake war map, “Fortifications of Paris.” The “map” consisted of several shapes, variously labeled “River Rhine,” “Fort,” “High Bridge,” “Verdun,” “Erie Canal,” “Omaha,” “Farm House,” “Fence,” etc. The map was printed backward.
In its surface naïveté and underlying shrewdness—readers recognized it as a send-up of the many self-important newspaper maps illustrating the Franco-Prussian War—it anticipated James Thurber. It was reprinted in the Boston Sun, the New York World, and the November Galaxy, which went into three extra editions.
The map’s silliness was the polar opposite of the mood in the Clemens household, where Mark Twain carved it out with a penknife on a wooden printer’s block. He worked “with a heavy heart, and in a house of lamentation,” he recalled.43 In his old age, he mused that “The…periodical and sudden changes of mood in me, from deep melancholy to half insane tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life.”44 He attacked his Galaxy obligations and his new manuscript. He worked on through Livy’s narrow escape from a miscarriage, or premature birthing, a week later. He dashed off letters absently using Emma Nye’s stationery. “I am getting along ever so slowly,” he informed Mary Fairbanks, adding that “so many things have hindered me.”45 Among them, he noted tersely, was Miss Nye’s death. It was not callousness, exactly; more an instinctual resource that he drew on time and again as reversal and bereavement accumulated in his life.