Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  LANGDON CLEMENS was born at 11 a.m. Monday, November 7, a month premature and tiny: thirteen inches, four and one-half pounds. Livy struggled out of bed within a week to look after the infant for as long as she could before giving way to fatigue again. Her milk-giving capacities were anemic; a wet nurse was called in. Sam did not expect the baby to live—just as visitors to the one-room house of his premature birth had not expected him to survive. Yet he announced Langdon’s arrival in jolly letters to everyone he could think of, several of them in the infant’s voice: “I am not entirely satisfied with my complexion. I am as red as a lobster. I am really ashamed to see company.”46 Mary Fairbanks gamely spoofed herself in her reply: “Evidently…you are a stranger in these parts, and are not familiar with my idiosyncrasies, else your first greeting would not have been so familiar or so slangey.”47 He made some adept pencil sketches of the sleeping Langdon, and instructed James Redpath to book the infant on a lyceum tour.

  When Livy entered labor in October, Sam had been busy lining up a job in Elisha Bliss’s company for Orion. Bliss was starting up a monthly circular, American Publisher, to advertise forthcoming books. Sam thought that editing this sheet would be perfect for his forty-five-year-old brother, who had been complaining of bad hours and low wages. He promised Orion a monthly salary of one hundred dollars. Sam’s intentions were good, and thus paved a road to Hell. By one of those ironic, or Orionic, twists of fate, the elder brother’s proofreading salary had lately crept up to two dollars above the twenty-five dollars a week that he had wailed about earlier. A move east, then, in addition to disrupting his and Mollie’s lives, would actually involve an income reduction. Orion, nonetheless, slogged eastward, a distinctly reluctant Mollie in tow. Within a few weeks, his life had indeed changed: it was Elisha Bliss who was yelling at him now, not those greasy St. Louis pressmen. “I’ll work along here the best I can till I get my machine out,” he vowed to Sam.48 (The contraption was never patented.) He tried to further his writing career by producing a children’s story to run serially in Bliss’s new circular. After Bliss brushed it aside, Orion took it to Sam, noting that Mollie thought it was pretty good. Sam was characteristically helpful. “You mount a high horse & a dismally artificial one,” he explained to Orion, “& go frothing in a way that nobody can understand or sympathize with.”49

  Sam, in the meantime, had hatched another “writing-by-proxy” idea, à la the fizzled “Voyage Around the World” gambit involving Dr. Darius Ford. This would be a book about the new bonanza that was just then erupting in a far-off land, one that promised to beggar the riches of the Gold Rush and the Comstock Lode. Children had been picking up pieces of clear, bright, glasslike stones for a couple of years in the fields along the Vaal, Orange, and other rivers in the Cape Colony of South Africa. Soon the grown-ups got interested, and in the spring of 1870, the first diamond strike occurred along the Vaal River, near a town called New Rush. As new “pipes” were discovered, and news accounts spread throughout the world, and ostrich farming paled in comparison, thousands of fortune-seekers rushed into the territory, mining corporations were formed, and New Rush got a name change, to Kimberly.

  Sam convinced himself that a book about this “new Golconda,”* under his name, would be a Golconda of its own. His choice for a proxy traveler to South Africa was an old reporter friend from California days by the name of John Henry Riley. Riley was now a Washington correspondent for several California papers while he clerked for the House Committee on Mines and Mining. Sam got in touch with Riley and stirred him into a frenzy of excitement over the idea. Then he broke the scheme to Bliss. “I shall write [the book]…just as if I had been through it all myself, but will explain in the preface that this is done merely to give it life & reality.”50 Modestly, he scratched out “& sparkle.” “That book will have a perfectly awful beautiful sale.”51

  Bliss agreed to “go in on that game,”52 and on December 2, Sam handed Riley his marching orders: terminate all other obligations “instantly,” get packing for South Africa at Sam’s expense and on a salary, and “skirmish, prospect, work, travel, & take pretty minute notes” for three months,53 after which he would return to America and live at the Clemens house while Sam batted out a manuscript for a 600-page book. As a bonus, Riley could keep all the diamonds he found, up to five thousand dollars worth; after that, Sam got half. As a further bonus, “I can slam you into the lecture field for life & secure you ten thousand dollars a year as long as you live, & all the idle time you want…”54 Sam would even let Riley in on his “dead sure tricks of the platform.” “This thing is the pet scheme of my life,”55 he assured his prospective alter ego. It all sounded too good to be true, which it was. John Henry Riley sailed for South Africa in January 1871, narrowly escaped death at sea when his steamship got stuck on a sandspit off the African coast, worked the Kimberly fields for the full three months, found no diamonds, stabbed himself with a fork on the return voyage and contracted blood poisoning, and arrived home in the fall with nineteen pages of notes, which Sam never looked at, having lost interest. A year later Riley died of cancer.

  * Alma Hutchison Munson, a neighbor of the Langdons, recorded an estimate of the party in her diary. It is not clear whether her first figure is a 7 or a 9.

  * The Golconda mines in India generated great wealth from diamonds in the 17th century.

  26

  “My Hated Nom de Plume…”

  (1871)

  Sam’s manuscript for the “big book on California, Nevada & the Plains” was nowhere near finished by January 1871. He was tormented with the fear that his hard-won reputation would dissipate before he could get the new book out, his place in the spotlight usurped by Bret Harte. “Tell you what I’ll do, if you say so,” he offered to Elisha Bliss in the first month of the new year. “Will write night & day & send you 200 pages of MS. every week…& finish it all up the 15th of April if you can without fail issue the book on the 15th of May…my popularity is booming, now, & we ought to take the very biggest advantage of it.”1 He was kidding himself. He was in no shape to write night and day. His creative interest in the book had stalled,2 a recurring affliction that Mark Twain eventually came to understand metaphorically as his “tank” running dry. He also came to understand—later—how to deal with the “dry tank”: put the manuscript aside and wait, for months or years, until the tank filled up again. That insight was not available to him in early 1871; and so he tried, in effect, to will the manuscript to completion—scavenging previously published reminiscences of his time in the West, the notes Orion had sent him—anything that would add bulk to the pastiche in progress.

  His anxieties were stoked by the skyrocketing success of his rival out west. Bret Harte was everywhere Sam looked, and sometimes Sam found himself sucked into the Californian’s publicity orbit, as a paper villain. In mid-January, Sam was infuriated by an allegation in Every Saturday, a Boston weekly of the James Osgood combine, that he had written a “feeble imitation” of “The Heathen Chinee” and published it in the Buffalo Express, no less! “Will you please correct your misstatement…?” he demanded in a scorching letter to the magazine’s editor. “…I am not in the imitation business.”3 It was all a misunderstanding that might have been prevented had Sam still bothered to show up at the Express. A factotum there had innocently run the imitation poem, “The Three Aces,” over the byline of “Carl Byng.” “Byng” was a frequent contributor who some assumed was Mark Twain wearing another pseudonym. A week later, a cooled-down Sam pleaded with the editor not to publish his angry letter. Too late: 42,000 copies of it were already in print, along with the editor’s apology. Now Mark Twain was at least temporarily and enviously joined at the hip with Harte, a reluctant Siamese twin, if ever there was one.

  The Every Saturday editor, a long-faced fellow who wore his hair parted in the middle and slathered with grease, and who kept his mustache ends twisted into fussy little—well, twists, was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Aldrich was the author of that mischievous-boy’s nove
l of 1869, The Story of a Bad Boy, which chronicled, in mild Victorian-gentleman prose, the mildly naughty exploits of “Thomas Bailey” (a mildly disguised version of the mild Aldrich), a New Hampshire lad given to such depravities as helping push an old stagecoach down a hill (he repents) and absconding without paying for the nine-penny creams at Pettingill’s confectionery. Aldrich enlivened his tale with such whiplash prose as, “Great were the bustle and confusion on the Square.” Its limitations of audacity notwithstanding (or perhaps because of these limitations), The Story of a Bad Boy fed the new market for the boy’s adventure book, a genre launched in America two years earlier with the publication of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick. (Louisa May Alcott opened up the girl’s domestic book genre in 1869 with Little Women.) Mark Twain was familiar with Aldrich’s work. “I have read several books, lately, but none worth marking, & so I have not marked any,” he wrote to Livy. “I started to mark the Story of a Bad Boy, but for the life of me I could not admire the volume much.”4 He would soon explode the genre.

  MEANWHILE, HE was provoked into a creative success of a very different sort. He unleashed, in the February Galaxy, a scorching rebuke to a snobbish young Episcopal rector in New York who had refused to officiate at the funeral of an aged comic actor named George Holland. The clergyman, William T. Sabine, had told a friend of Holland’s that he “did not care to be mixed up” in the funeral, given that theaters did not teach “moral lessons.”5 Sabine then uttered the condescension that lent him a kind of immortality: “There’s a little church around the corner where they do that sort of thing.”

  Editorialists castigated Sabine. None approached the brimming indignation of Mark Twain, who began on an even-handed note, suggesting that Sabine was a “crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile,” then revealed his true feelings.

  It is almost fair and just to aver…that nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people to-day, got there by being filtered down from their fountain-head, the gospel of Christ, through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story…and NOT from the drowsy pulpit!6

  The incident became enshrined in the folklore of American theater. When Holland’s friend, Joseph Jefferson, had absorbed Sabine’s insolence, he blurted back: “God bless the little church around the corner!” From that time, the Church of the Transfiguration, on 29th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues—the “Little Church”—attracted people of the theater. And 103 years later, it was designated a United States landmark.

  The Sabine essay was a deviation from the dry period. Sam’s income was diminishing along with his published work, and with his interest in publishing work. Determined not to live off his new wife’s wealth, he began to face some baleful possibilities—such as that he might not not lecture anymore forever after all. “I may talk a little (only in New England) next fall,” he wrote to James Redpath, adding stubbornly that “all the chances are in favor of my not doing anything of the kind.”7

  On February 2, Francis Bret Harte, accompanied by his wife, Anna, and their two small sons, Wodie and Frankie, boarded a train in San Francisco and commenced a magisterial three-week journey across the continent to Boston, where Harte expected he would claim the national literary peerage toward which he had struggled for nearly two decades. Behind him, Harte left the offer of a professorship at the University of California in Berkeley, testaments to his greatness by the late Charles Dickens—and the peak creative years of his life. Crowds greeted him at stops along the way. Women went crazy over his good looks and flowing sideburns (the acne scars were hard to spot at a distance). Newspapers ran telegraphed reports of his eastward progress as if he were a conquering general. The Hartes arrived at Boston around 11 a.m.* on Saturday, February 25, to the cheers of a welcoming crowd. Foremost among the greeters, hunched against the cold, heavy air, was the destined gatekeeper of American literature, the thirty-three-year-old William Dean Howells, now the assistant editor of the Atlantic.

  Watching through the frosty puffs of his own breath as Bret Harte and family stepped down out of their car onto the crowded platform, Howells could tell himself (but probably didn’t) that the arriving hero’s literary fate was largely in his hands. He was half a year away from the editorship of the Atlantic, occasioned by Fields’s retirement. But already he had become a powerful, if unbylined arbiter. Many of the forty-odd book reviews he’d written had helped the careers of good young writers; that was the Atlantic’s traditional Brahmin role. What surprised readers and terrified his less-than-transcendent targets was the razor cut of his pans. William Rounseville Alger may have considered strangling himself with his own middle name when he opened the magazine in May 1867 and read that he “sometimes produces an effect of grotesqueness and extravagance which might be studied as a model of everything to be avoided in style.”8

  This new sauciness in Howells was borne of liberation. Fields and the Boston crowd could not finally overcome their snobbishness of his “Western” roots, but by God, they needed him anyway, and now that Howells was inside the club, he was going to bring a bit of the West along with him. His awe of the Brahmin brotherhood had begun to crack a little—his recent explorations of Italy and France had shown him that the travel writings of his idols Irving, Cooper, and Taylor were really a little mushy; worse, false. As for Hawthorne, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and the others, he now saw how their Puritan instincts had crippled their art—“marred [it] by the intense ethicism that pervaded the New England mind for two hundred years,” he wrote many years later,9 “and that still characterizes it.” As a result, “New England yet lacks her novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself.”10

  Which was exactly why realism now mattered, and why it was time to open the windows of the elite Boston club and let in realism’s fresh air. At the Civil War’s end, that air was blowing from West to East; it had propelled Bret Harte into Boston, and Mark Twain before him. These writers, with their direct style and skeptical, realist instincts, struck Howells as the future of American literature.

  William and his wife Elinor boarded the Hartes in their Berkeley Street house in Cambridge; and on his first day in town, Bret shook the hands of the literary “town team”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by now a Jehovah-like presence with his great cyclonic swirl of white mane and beard; James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the polymath Louis Agassiz, Richard Henry Dana Jr., and the skipper himself, Emerson. The twenty-six-year-old Henry James canceled a previous engagement the following Monday, “to meet the Bret Hartes at Mrs. Howells’s. An opportunity to encounter these marvelous creatures is, I suppose, not lightly to be thrown aside.”11 Harte was indeed worth a detour. He had already criticized as “over-literary” certain verses of Lowell’s—to Lowell’s face, had made fun of the way Emerson brandished his cigar, and generally had tweaked most of the rest of the Brahmins, with the exception of Longfellow. The Brahmins lapped it up. On March 6, Harte signed that spectacular $10,000 contract with James Osgood & Co. Not long after that, a faint thump emanated from Hartford, as of a redheaded man hitting the ceiling. “I must & will keep shady & quiet till Bret Harte simmers down a little & then I mean to go up head again & stay there,” Sam seethed to Orion. Several lines later, he added: “I tell you I mean to go slow. I will ‘top’ Bret Harte again or bust. But I can’t do it by dangling eternally in the public view.”12

  This was by way of rejecting a friendly request from Orion, prodded by his new boss Elisha Bliss, that Mark Twain regularly generate material for the American Publisher. “There isn’t money enough between hell & Hartford to hire me to write once a month for any periodical,” he raged, furious that Bliss was starting to count on him as the sole “father & sustainer” of the new trade sheet. “I lay awake all last night aggravating myself with this prospect of seeing my hated nom de plume (for I do loathe the ve
ry sight of it) in print again every month.”13

  Harte’s celebrityhood was only one assault on Sam’s peace of mind. Typhoid fever, the disease that killed Emma Nye, struck Olivia in February. Sam got the news while in Washington, from Susan Crane. He had pushed his manuscript aside for another lobbying trip to the capital in the matter of the late Jervis’s monetary claim, and was sitting for his Mathew Brady portrait as Mrs. Crane’s letter moved through the mails. He aborted his trip and returned to find his wife prostrate again, delirious and vomiting. Typhoid was fatal in about 12 percent of its cases in those days. Livy survived and was speaking coherently by mid-month. A doctor watched over her at fifty dollars a day. The crisis paralyzed Sam. “In three whole months I have hardly written a page of MS,” he told Elisha Bliss. “You do not know what it is to be in a state of absolute frenzy—desperation.”14 With Livy prostrate, the household slipped toward chaos. Sickly little Langdon, cut off from her care, abraided Sam’s sensitive ears—“I believe if that baby goes on crying 3 more hours this way I will butt my frantic brains out & try to get some peace,” he vented to Elisha Bliss. “I want rest.”15

  The Clemenses had spent nearly eight months now in households teeming with doctors, nurses, and anxious relatives. Buffalo had come to be as loathsome to Sam as the sight of his pen name, and Livy felt the same. Hartford, Nook Farm, the Twichells, the Hookers, tugged at Sam like a recurring dream. He would get his family there, somehow. In stages, he and Livy soon agreed: Elmira first. The future would take care of itself.