Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

It was true. Roughing It had taken off immediately. Twenty thousand orders poured into American Publishing even before distribution began. Within weeks the Chicago Tribune was reporting that “[o]wing to the immense rush” for the book “from all parts of the country, the publishers have been unable to manufacture them fast enough to meet the demand…”44 Its sales easily outpaced those of The Innocents two years earlier. Sam received his first check from Bliss in May, a handsome $10,562.13. In its first year, the book earned him a little over $20,000. Its sales would fall short of The Innocents over the decades; yet it proved a windfall for him and Livy at a moment when their house-building aspirations depended on it.

  On the day after Sam’s letter to Howells, he issued a raft of even happier ones to friends and relatives throughout the East. At 4:25 on the morning of March 19, Livy gave birth to Olivia Susan Clemens. Like Langdon, she was premature, and tiny at five pounds. But both she and her mother were doing well, Sam assured everyone. Abel and Mary Fairbanks arrived at Elmira within days. There seemed no limit to the joys that 1872 could bring.

  * Howells almost never spoke or wrote of “Mark” or “Twain” or “Mark Twain” or “Sam.” “Clemens” remained his reference of choice throughout the ensuing four decades.

  † Bostonians later amended this modestly to “Hub of the Universe.”

  * Livy was due to give birth in the spring. Like most expectant mothers of the 19th century, she understood that the process could kill her. Infection and unskilled handling by doctors and midwives caused as many as one in a hundred women to die during or shortly after childbirth.

  * A New York Times article of that year summarized the argument contained in Fishkin’s 1993 book, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  * Greeley ran on the Liberal Republican ticket, endorsed by the Democrats, campaigning against the corruption that had spread through Grant’s Republican administration.

  28

  The Lion of London

  (1872–73)

  Langdon Clemens died in Livy’s arms at nine o’clock on Sunday morning, June 2, 1872, in the Hookers’ Nook Farm house at Hartford. He was not quite nineteen months old. The cause was a cold that developed into diphtheria. His chronic coughing had turned severe in the days after Susy’s birth, as Livy nursed the infant in the Langdon household at Elmira. Susy was baptized on May 26, and Langdon grew feeble the day afterward, as Susan Crane recalled many years later. Still, a doctor said it was safe for the child to travel, and the Clemenses boarded a train for their journey back to Hartford on May 28. Their route took them through New York City, via a ferry crossing the Hudson from Jersey City. They spent the night at the St. Nicholas Hotel, and arrived back in Hartford on the evening of May 29, with Langdon struggling for breath. He lasted four more days.

  The loss plunged Livy into a depression so deep that friends and family feared for her life. She passed out of danger, but melancholy was now her new lifelong companion. “Sue do not think of me as always sad, I am not so I have great comfort in those are left to me, only I feel so often as if my path way was to be from this time forth lined with graves—”1 she wrote Sue Crane. The woman behind “the sweetest face that ever turned the cares of life into trifles & its ills to blessings” began to brood on the proposition that death was preferable to enduring the bereavements of life. These morbid thoughts anticipated those of her husband.

  Sam’s reaction to the loss of Langdon was more fatalistic, on the surface. A Nook Farm neighbor wrote to her absent husband that “Mr Clemens was all tenderness but full of rejoicing for the baby—said he kept thinking it was’nt death for him but the beginning of life.”2 Privately, he blamed himself, as he did for every death that touched him. Sam finally confessed this burden in 1906, in his autobiographical dictations, insisting that “I was the cause of the child’s illness.”3

  [Langdon’s] mother trusted him to my care and I took him for a long drive in an open barouche for an airing. It was a raw, cold morning, but he was well wrapped about with furs and, in the hands of a careful person, no harm would have come to him. But I soon dropped into a reverie and forgot all about my charge.

  It was then that the baby’s wraps fell away from him, Clemens recalled. When the coachman noticed the child’s bare legs,

  I hurried home with him. I was aghast at what I had done, and I feared the consequences. I have always felt shame for that treacherous morning’s work and have not allowed myself to think of it when I could help it. I doubt if I had the courage to make confession at that time. I think it most likely that I have never confessed until now”4

  But Sam had been guilty (he thought) of something more sinister than neglect.

  I have always felt shame for that treacherous morning’s work…

  “Treacherous,” as Sam described his behavior, implies deception, a willful betrayal of trust. This is the second time Clemens used the word in connection with the death of a close relative. Nine years earlier, in composing his detailed series of notes about Hannibal days (“Villagers of 1840–3”), he had written obliquely of the death of his brother Benjamin, and added:

  The mother made the children feel the cheek of the dead boy, and tried to make them understand the calamity that had befallen. The case of memorable treachery.5

  To those who knew him intimately, any notion of Sam’s “treachery” toward family members (or anyone else) was absurd. “[W]e never thought of attributing Langdon’s death to that drive,”6 Susan Crane told Paine after Mark Twain’s death. “Mr. Clemens was often inclined to blame himself unjustly,” she said.

  Sam resumed what was, to outward appearances, a normal life within weeks of Langdon’s death—just as he had after Henry’s, when he quickly returned to piloting. He wrote William Dean Howells a jovial letter on June 15, begging for a copy of a Howells portrait that had appeared in a magazine. “Bret Harte…says his family would not be without that portrait for any consideration. His children get up in the night & yell for it,”7 Sam joked—a peculiar joke, considering. He went on: “There is my uncle. He wants a copy. He is lying at the point of death…”8 He played host to Bret Harte, whose career had deteriorated since he reached the East, and loaned him five hundred dollars. He sent autographed copies of Roughing It to various people, holidayed down to New York, and quite likely went on to Boston to take in that city’s World Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival, with its chorus of twenty thousand voices. In the heat of early July he took his wife, baby daughter, and a nursemaid, Nellie, for a holiday at New Saybrook, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound, where he could be seen playing billiards, bowling, and imitating Charles Dickens characters at the nightly hotel socials. Livy stayed mostly out of sight with her baby—although she did write to Mollie Clemens in July, asking a favor: “Mr Clemens is determined that I shall bathe so I shall have to ask you to get me a bathing suit—they advertize them ready made caps & all—…”9

  New Saybrook likely was the setting for an auspicious literary commencement. Isabel Lyon, his secretary in the last decade of his life, repeated to a correspondent in 1934 Mark Twain’s memory that it was during this hiatus, with the grief over his son’s loss still fresh, that he began work on a novel about the boys he had known as a boy, and the “magic and freedom and careless young life on the river.”10

  ROUGHINGIT received generally good reviews along with its sales, though nothing on the scale of The Innocents Abroad. This was partly Sam’s fault: concerned that the daily press would scorn a book about wild doings in Washoe, and thus undercut his hard-won foothold in the East, he had persuaded Bliss to send out only a handful of review copies to selected reviewers—Howells and Charles Dudley Warner of the Courant among them—as opposed to the two thousand that Bliss had distributed for reviews of The Innocents. Now, when it became obvious that that misjudgment had severely hampered sales, Sam did the honorable thing: he blamed Bliss for his “frenzy of economy.”11

  The Boston Evening Transcript
praised the book’s eloquence and descriptive passages. Howells and Warner both came through for him. Howells unleashed another rave in the Atlantic, calling it “singularly entertaining,” applauding its “grotesque exaggeration and broad irony,”12 which he maintained were “conjecturably the truest colors that could have been used”; and praising its many excursions, digressions, and scattershot anecdotes as being true to the character of the West. “I am as uplifted & reassured by it [the review] as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto,”13 Sam responded to Howells.*

  Other reviews trickled in as the weeks and months went on, but eventually totaled only fourteen. By midsummer, the book’s sales had reached 67,395, and by the end of the year, 75,168. Mark Twain’s earnings from it in 1872 exceeded $22,000.14 Among Roughing It’s lasting effects on American culture, it provided the single indispensable template for the Old West: indelible word-portraits of terrain; the texture of town and mining camp; the pervading twin obsessions of money and violence; an accounting of social and racial hierarchies; the sharply observed paradoxes of filigreed wealth amid mountainside boulders, and bohemian poet-aesthetes amidst the gunplay; a gift for replicating (and adding to) the sustaining tall tales and myths; and enough stunningly rendered archetypal characters to populate a Dickens novel. Bret Harte and others had supplied elements of this template already. What they lacked, and what gave Mark Twain’s book permanence, was the unforgettable presence of the narrator at the center of things: deeply involved in what he described; at risk; suffering from his mistakes and rejoicing in his pleasures; always (unlike, say, the distanced observer Harte, putting his genteel spin on the vulgar subject and its even more vulgar language) on an equal footing with the characters around him; and always attuned to and unapologetic about the new blunt language of the West.

  IN SPITE of Roughing It’s artistic and financial success, however, Sam found a bone to pick with Elisha Bliss. Orion’s accusations against the publisher festered in his mind. What if his brother was right? Bliss had persuaded Sam to accept a royalty agreement of 7½ percent on the list price of the book, assuring the writer that this figure was equal to half the book’s profits. The figure in fact represented a third more than Sam had received for The Innocents, but he began to brood on the possibility that Bliss was profiting more than he was. In March he had insisted that Bliss go over the bookkeeping with him at Bliss’s Hartford house. Bliss obliged him—a risk-free concession, given that Sam knew as much about bookkeeping as he did about marketing an elastic strap for pants. (That particular invention never earned him a penny.) He eventually filed, then dropped, a lawsuit against Bliss. Whether Bliss really cooked the books on Clemens cannot be known, as Harriet Smith points out,15 because these records are missing. Bliss’s perfidy increased in Mark Twain’s memory with age, until the publisher had swindled him out of five-sixths of his profits.

  By mid-July, James Redpath was trying to cajole Sam into a new fall tour: “Will you? or Wont you? Lecture committees are getting importunate about you. We have $7000 or $8000 of engagements recorded for you—‘if he lectures.’ ”16 Sam had other plans. He wanted to move again, but not along those endless Eastern railroad lines. He was contemplating a getaway in the winter, either in rural England or in Cuba. Cuba interested him because of its on going rebellion against the Spanish government. England, with its chivalric legends and titles of nobility, had compelled him since childhood—especially given that some members of his family considered themselves displaced claimants to British royalty.

  Either place would no doubt inspire a new literary project, and Mark Twain needed one of those. He contractually owed the American Publishing Company two books. The first, the collaboration with John Henry Riley about the South African diamond mines, had died along with Riley—if it had ever truly lived. The second, a collection of sketches, hung in limbo partly because Mark Twain had cannibalized his own material: using some of those sketches for Roughing It, and dumping others into a sketchbook to be published by the British firm George Routledge & Sons. Sam inclined toward Cuba as late as the last week of July; but on August 21, he was aboard the Cunard steamship Scotia as it departed New York Harbor for Liverpool. (Mrs. Langdon had come down from Elmira to stay with Livy and Susy, who were still at the seashore.)

  Business as well as literary research finally informed his choice. In England he could set about solving an almost insoluble problem, but one that infuriated him more than it did most authors: protecting his work against unauthorized printing and sale by a foreign publisher. Such practice was not against the law—there were no laws in this area. In the years before 1886,* no American writer could control, or profit from, the republication of his or her work in England. The same was true in reverse. Regulations did not exist because American publishers had not pushed for regulations. Why should they? The balance of republication profits flowed their way: the enormous U.S. popularity of Dickens and other British writers overwhelmed that of most American authors in Britain.

  Clemens found this state of things unacceptable. Publishers’ interests be damned; he’d already been shut out of the enormous profits engendered by The Jumping Frog and The Innocents Abroad in the British market. The idea of being denied reward from his labor, while other people enriched themselves from it, outraged him, and he would pursue the battle for authors’ rights throughout the rest of his life. His choices of action were murky, and limited, but going to England was essential, no matter what came next. He would begin with Routledge & Sons. Routledge had published and profiteered from his two previous books. On the other hand, Routledge had shown a sense of fairness: in 1868 it had paid him generously for his “Cannibalism in the Cars” for use in its magazine, the Broadway. This was partly self-interest: by including “Cannibalism” in a second edition of The Jumping Frog, the firm could claim “authorized” status and thus protection against rival British publishers. Routledge had published Roughing It a few days before Bliss brought it out in America, paying Mark Twain about two hundred pounds in return for formal copyright privileges. That was a tiny fraction of what the book earned in the market, but at least it was something, and it had led to another modest partnership: Routledge was now preparing an edition of Innocents for which Mark Twain had revised the text, again for a modest sum.

  The author certainly favored Routledge—which at least flattered him as a coveted “star”—over a less elegant London rival named John Camden Hotten. Hotten had also brought out pirated editions of The Innocents and The Jumping Frog, and had followed them with two collections of Mark Twain sketches filched from American newspapers and magazines, which he coarsely titled Eye Openers and Screamers, and which he padded with material that was not Mark Twain’s. Faced with inevitability, Clemens decided to throw his weight behind Routledge, and destroy Hotten’s plans.

  Livy seems not to have resisted the idea of the trip. She believed that Sam would be inspired by England, and she seems also to have desired a period of burrowing in with her new infant daughter. In early August, working from Saybrook, Sam scrambled to put his affairs in order before embarking. He took pity on the deteriorating Bret Harte, who had never fulfilled Howells’s hopes, or investment, at the Atlantic, and was soon to embark on a disastrous lecturing tour arranged by Redpath. At Harte’s pleading, Sam brokered a subscription book deal between Harte and Bliss. Bliss ended up offering Harte a small advance for a novel that took years to produce and, when published, lacked distinction and sales.

  Just before departure, Sam tried to dragoon his brother, unemployed since leaving Bliss in March, into traveling around the country promoting Sam’s latest brainstorm, Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook. Anticipating the great American appetite for labor-saving devices, he’d envisioned a book whose leaves were precoated with gum-stickum, to ward off the heartache of brittle, ink-sucking mucilage. Just wet the stickum and put your clippings in place. Orion, usually malleable as a spaniel, wasn’t interested. (Typical of his l
uck, the scrapbook made good money.) His dreams of self-reliance had taken him to Vermont, where he considered buying a country newspaper, with Sam’s help. He zeroed in on the Rutland Herald. “The best thing I have seen on my whole route.”17 After that deal fell through, he arrived at the Hartford Evening Post, guided by Sam’s prodding foot at his backside, and took an editor’s job there. “Orion is as happy as a martyr when the fire won’t burn,” Sam reported to Jane in December.18

  Clemens dined with John Hay in New York on August 20 and boarded the Scotia at noon the following day. He had with him a new hat, some books, a sheaf of photographs of himself, a ream of heavy stationery engraved with a tricolor SLC monogram that Sam had designed, and a new journal, which seems not to have survived. Off the Irish city of Queenstown (destined to be the Titanic’s last port of call in 1912), he wrote to Livy in a mood reminiscent of his love letters three years and a lifetime earlier.

  Livy darling, I have little or nothing to write, except I love you & think of you night & day…& how the Muggins [Susy] comes on…& whether mother is cheerful & happy…consider, my dear, that I am standing high on the stern of the ship, looking westward, with my hands to my mouth, trumpet fashion, yelling across the tossing waste of waves, “I LOVE YOU, LIVY DARLING!”19

  At Liverpool, he boarded a train for London, where he observed a man reading The Innocents Abroad, without smiling. This depressed him: no profits, and no laughs, either. He was still feeling desolate when he awoke the next morning in the magisterial Langham Hotel in Oxford Circus. Overcome with the desire to shake somebody’s hand, or to see somebody smile, he impulsively took a hansom to his British publishing house at No. 7, the Broadway, Ludgate, off Fleet Street. The Routledges were a sprawling family, four of whom were involved in the firm: the father and founder George and his sons Edmund, William, and Robert. Sam swept in on these Routledges in their upstairs dining room, unannounced, as he had swept into the Atlantic offices three years before.