Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  “If the people of Napoleon want me to go to Washington, and look after that matter, I might tear myself from my home. It’s been suggested to me, but—not a word of it to Mrs. Sellers and the children. Maybe they wouldn’t like to think of their father in Washington.”37

  And here is Mark Twain:

  “Remarkable clock!” said Sellers, and got up and wound it. “I’ve been offered—well, I wouldn’t expect you to believe what I’ve been offered for that clock. Old Gov. Hager never sees me but he says, ‘Come now, Colonel, name your price—I must have that clock!’ But my goodness I’d as soon think of selling my wife. As I was saying to—silence in the court, now, she’s begun to strike! You can’t talk against her—you have to just be patient and hold up till she’s had her say. Ah—well, as I was saying, when—she’s beginning again!…Now just listen at that. She’ll strike a hundred and fifty, now, without stopping,—you’ll see. There ain’t another clock like it in Christendom.”38

  The recovery of voice-memories such as this one exhilarated Mark Twain as if he had struck a vein of ore in Washoe. (He had no idea how inexhaustible this vein would prove to be.) The memories, and the gamelike collaboration with Warner into which he shoveled them, activated his boyish exuberance; the work became a lark, enlivened by his zest for competition. “Have written many chapters twice, & some of them three times,” he reported to Mary Fairbanks, and added slyly, “—have thrown away 300 clean pages of MS…Warner has been more fortunate—he won’t lose 50 pages.”39 Reading the work in progress to the wives each evening sharpened Mark Twain’s gleeful sense of the game: “they have done a power of criticising…They both pleaded so long & vigorously for Warner’s heroine, that yesterday Warner agreed to spare her life & let her marry—he meant to kill her. I killed my heroine as dead as a mackerel yesterday (but Livy don’t know it yet).”40

  A minor feature of The Gilded Age is that it contains Mark Twain’s first effort to deal with race relations in fictional form. (“Sociable Jimmy” was written, but as yet unpublished, and was more a sketch than a story.) The scenes are of negligible importance to the plot; but they serve as a benchmark of Mark Twain’s developing interest in race as a theme, and the mark is not very far advanced down the bench. In Chapter 3, “Uncle Dan’l,” the Hawkins’s slave, is thrown into terror with his first glimpse of a steamboat on the Mississippi River at nightfall. He thinks the noisy, lighted monster is “de Almighty,” and goes into paroxysms of “deah Lord” and “dese po’ chil’en” and “De ole niggah’s ready, Lord.”41 Later, moments before the steamboat explosion, an exchange between two boatmen offers the reverse image of an enduringly famous ironic passage in Chapter 32 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In that one, Huck reports to Aunt Sally that the boat he’d been traveling on had “blowed out a cylinder head.”

  “Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

  “No’m. Killed a nigger.”

  “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”42

  In The Gilded Age, Mark Twain has the boatmen engaging in a strikingly similar bit of badinage, but here, three years before he began his fitful composition of his greatest novel, Mark Twain plays it just for laughs:

  “How’s your draft?”

  “Bully! Every time a nigger heaves a stick of wood into the furnace he goes out the chimney with it!”43

  THE COLLABORATION with Charles Dudley Warner overcame Mark Twain’s anxieties about tackling book-length fiction, and the barriers fell quickly. By early January, he regained the confidence to revisit the boy’s novel that he’d toyed with the previous summer in Saybrook, perhaps exploring the story on the days when Warner was writing. Worldly matters diverted him as well. “Have just bought the loveliest building-lot in Hartford,” he crowed to his friend Whitelaw Reid, “—544 feet front on the Avenue & 300 feet deep…the house will be built while we are absent in England.”44

  “The Avenue” was Farmington, in Nook Farm. The house to be built there would one day be celebrated as among the most famous, and most eccentric, in America, and would shelter the Clemens family for the happiest seventeen years of their lives together. The money needed to pay for it had finally come rolling in, on the first year’s royalties from Roughing It, which by January 1873 had earned Mark Twain more than twenty thousand dollars. That was twice the amount necessary to cover the purchase of the lot offered by a Hartford lawyer named Franklin Chamberlin, who had bought the land from John Hooker in 1864. The property fronted on Farmington—351 was the address—and on the west bordered the Park River. The purchase consummated the dream that Sam and Livy had shared for two years, and whose contours derived from Livy’s own sketches. They needed an architect. A recommendation came from Charles Warner’s brother George, who was also building a house on Farmington: Edward Tuckerman Potter, known for the churches he had built in the East. Potter, upon being hired (and somehow omitting credit to Livy and the plan she presented to him) announced that the Clemens house would be designed in the style called High Victorian Gothic. Was it ever.

  MARK TWAIN and Charles Dudley Warner signed a contract for publication of The Gilded Age on May 8, in the American Publishing Company offices of Elisha Bliss in Hartford. This would be the first work of fiction to be sold by subscription. The agreement stipulated a 5 percent royalty for each writer. Then Sam Clemens turned his attention to his dream of the previous autumn, a return visit to England with Livy at his side. He rationalized that he needed to continue his research on the England book, and also to be on British soil when The Gilded Age was published there to protect his copyright interests. The more accessible British soil across the border in Quebec was an option he never discussed. Prospects seemed bright not only for Sam but for the extended Clemens family. Orion and Mollie were ensconced in Rutland, Vermont, where Orion had assumed the position of editorial director for the Rutland Globe. His younger brother had offered him a typically warmhearted send-off, which Mark Twain recalled many years later.

  I said:

  “You are as weak as water. Those people will find it out right away. They will easily see that you have no backbone; that they can deal with you as they would deal with a slave. You may last six months, but not longer. Then they will…fling you out as they would fling out an intruding tramp.”45

  Everything seemed to be pie for Mark Twain as the embarkation date of May 17 neared. Warner had agreed to make any necessary final tweakings of the manuscript before delivering it to Bliss. Little Susy was in robust health at fourteen months, in happy contrast to her late brother. A nurse would accompany her to England. Clemens had enjoyed a respectful gesture from Whitelaw Reid: the Tribune editor had been publishing letters on various topics from Mark Twain, and sending along small but respectable checks for each. In January, Reid had invited Mark Twain to submit two long essays on the Sandwich Islands for the newspaper’s “Extra Sheet.” Reid paid a hundred dollars for the works, which stimulated new interest in the subject and led to three lucrative lecture invitations in February. The two men were enjoying a warm and jovial friendship. “I have a nice putrid anecdote that Hay will like,” Mark Twain advised the editor in late March. “Am preserving it in alcohol—in my person.”46

  The Clemens entourage gathered in New York on Thursday, May 15, for a couple of days’ quiet companionship before departure for Liverpool and the projected four months in England. Mary Fairbanks accompanied the family from Elmira, and perhaps Charley Langdon as well. Besides the three Clemenses, the party would include Clara Spaulding, Livy’s friend from Elmira days who resembled Livy a little; Susy’s nurse, Nellie Bermingham; and a twenty-five-year-old man named Samuel C. Thompson, a former Tribune reporter and schoolteacher whom Clemens had retained to act as a secretary and auxiliary note-taker in England: Clemens had met Thompson at a lecture in March, and Thompson promised that he would master shorthand if the author would invite him along. Their ship would be the Batavia, on which Sam had returned from England the previous November. Its skipper would be the same as well: Jo
hn Elsey Mouland, who, during the November voyage, directed a daring mid-Atlantic rescue of nine sailors clinging to a disabled barque. Mark Twain and others had recommended him for a medal from the Royal Humane Society of England.

  “We feel as happy as possible and as hopeful of a successful voyage,” Livy wrote happily to her mother on the day of departure. Sam added, “Good bye, mother dear, we are just backing away from the pier.”47 It was to be Livy’s first ocean voyage and her first journey outside the United States. At about the same time, Sam was scrawling out a decidedly less felicitous message on both sides of his calling card, addressed to Charles Warner.

  Ask [Edward] House to tell you about Whitelaw Reid. He is a contemptible cur, & I want nothing more to do with him…

  Yesterday I sued a New York fraud for $20,000 damages for violating my copyright…

  He signed off: “We are all well, & jolly.”48

  * This bit of naughtiness, of course, amounts roughly to the same wisecrack that Howells remembered hearing from Mark Twain on their first meeting in November 1869: “When I read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white.” Many scholars have concluded from this that Howells confused the date of Mark Twain’s quip when he wrote about it in 1910—a conclusion strengthened by the fact that Howells also “remembered” a sealskin coat in the 1869 encounter, a coat that Twain did not purchase until two years later. On the other hand, the two versions of the remark define the difference between written and spoken speech; and it’s not inconceivable that Mark Twain used it more than once, with variations.

  * When the Berne Convention codified international copyright rules.

  29

  Gilded

  (1873–74)

  The crossing was uneventful, except for some rough seas at the outset. Susy remained serene inside her basket. Livy was charmed by the courtesies of Captain Mouland, who took Clara Spaulding for long walks around the deck, when the seas permitted walking. A lunge of the ship caught Livy in mid-stride toward the dinner table one evening; she grabbed at a curtain and took it with her as she staggered into the adjacent saloon and crashed against a bustle of waiters. “Clara who was coming just behind me was so convulsed with laughter that she was obliged to return to her stateroom and laugh it out,” Livy wrote to her mother.1 They arrived at Liverpool on May 27, spent the night as guests of Captain Mouland and his wife, and then took a train to London. The scenery rushing past the window of the car fulfilled all of Livy’s imaginings:

  the ride was the most charming that I ever could imagine—…So many things that I had read were plain to me as we rode along—the little thatched villages, the foot paths by the side of the road…2

  The Clemenses set up residence in Edwards’s Royal Cambridge, a jewel-box hotel in Hanover Square. Its windows offered a view to a little oval green bordered by an iron fence, a cobbled promenade, and a line of red-brick Georgian buildings. Here Mark Twain planned to dictate to Thompson his daily notes for the book about England. The plan soon became impossible: word spread through the old city that the Lion was back in town, and intellectual/artistic/ aristocratic London—counts, earls, Benjamin Disraeli—came calling. When the Shah of Persia showed up, Clemens paid Thompson a hundred dollars and sent him back to America.

  Mark Twain wrote a series of letters about the Shah’s visit to England—for the New York Herald, and not for Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune. His wrathful turn against his friend scarcely seemed to fit with the good fortune that Samuel Clemens was enjoying in the spring of 1873. Given the upswings in his financial fortunes, his international reputation and his influence, not to mention his beachhead at Nook Farm and the new, healthy child, he would hardly seem to have cause for grievance. Yet there it was: an unforeshadowed strike by the serpent that lay coiled just beneath Mark Twain’s ingratiating charm, and just above his chronic insecurity.

  Reid had done Clemens the shocking injustice of calling a halt to Mark Twain’s use of the Tribune as his personal publicity organ. A look at the correspondence between Reid and Clemens in the early 1870s shows that beneath his comradely joshing, Clemens was generally angling for mention in the Tribune for a book or a lecture of his, or acceptance of an article he wanted to pitch. On April 20 he’d issued a long letter to Reid, thinly disguised as bantering, which chastised the editor for announcing the advent of The Gilded Age in a mere one-paragraph “item” (and in mere seven-point type at that!). Noting that recent sales of Innocents were still one thousand books a month, he said that it “looks as if it had entered permanently into the literature of the country.” Clemens brayed on:

  I have a good reliable audience in this country & it is the biggest one in America, too, if I do say it myself. So a novel from me alone would be a good deal in the nature of a literary event, & the Tribune, to be just, should have made it so appear, I think.3

  Reid, who usually had indulged Mark Twain’s self-promotion, was infuriated by this presumption. It almost certainly colored his actions in what happened next.

  About a month before the Clemenses left for England, the Tribune critic Edward House, a long-standing friend and fan of Mark Twain, read The Gilded Age in manuscript at Nook Barn, and—in Mark Twain’s version—urged Reid to let him be the first to review the work, in the Tribune. Reid refused. The friendship between critic and author tainted House’s objectivity, the editor maintained. Mark Twain hit the ceiling: what did objectivity have to do with it? House was merely doing him a “favor”!4

  Reid had thrown his body in front of powerful scoundrels intent on corrupting the newspaper; yet now, to Mark Twain, “Friend Reid” became a “cur.” He stopped speaking to the editor for more than a decade. That was fine with Reid, who’d had his fill of the author’s petulance and special pleading. “There is a nice correspondence on a part of the subject which would make pleasant reading,” he remarked to his intended wife, the lecturer and writer Kate Field, “and if Twain gives us trouble, I’m very much tempted to make him a more ridiculous object than he has ever made anybody else.”5 This little war also maimed the relationship between Reid and House. Based on House’s advocacy of Mark Twain, Reid decided that the critic was not to be trusted as a disinterested voice. Finally, several years later, to complete the circle of poisoned feelings, Mark Twain broke with Edward House: “Reid had labeled him correctly; he was a blatherskite.”6

  As to the $20,000 lawsuit Mark Twain had mentioned to Warner, it involved the author’s displeasure over the publication of some of his sketches by a man named Benjamin J. Such. The suit accomplished its intention of frightening Such into accepting Mark Twain’s conditions for publishing the book. Clemens’s attorney had been recommended to him by Edward House.

  Sam swept Livy into the world of British swank that he’d evoked in his letters to her. Hampton Court Palace. The Brighton Aquarium, among the world’s treasures. Stratford-on-Avon, where Livy drank in the environs of her beloved Shakespeare. (“Heavens, where am I!”7 she exclaimed on glimpsing the Bard’s tomb; Clemens and an expatriate American friend named Moncure Conway had brought her there without naming the destination.) Encounters with the philosopher Herbert Spencer and the novelist Anthony Trollope. Invitations to join eight hundred guests at a grand ball at the Mansion House of the Lord Mayor of London. Clemens broke away in mid-June to follow the Shah to Belgium for his Herald letters (his competitor for the Tribune was Katie Field).

  Clemens spent money throughout this trip as though he were a titled lord himself, and no restraints were offered by Livy. He decided that the rooms at the Royal Cambridge were no match for the august stream of visitors seeking an audience. “My wife likes Edwards’s Hotel,” he told Mrs. Conway, “& so would I if I were dead; I would not desire a more tranquil & satisfactory tomb.”8 Hotels held almost talismanic importance to Mark Twain throughout his sojourning life; his rule of thumb in choosing them seemed to be, the more expensive, the better. On June 25, a day before Clara Spaulding departed for a tour of the Continent, Mark Twain
transplanted his party to a suite in the six-story, six-hundred-room Langham Hotel on Regent Street at Oxford Circus, complete with billiard room, where he had stayed during his first visit. The palatial Georgian hostelry, completed in 1865 as the first European “grand” hotel, proclaimed itself the largest building in London. Surely it presented the largest bill. All of this suited Mark Twain, whose callers now included Robert Browning, the self-exiled Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, and various Cabinet members, playwrights, and authors. Not since Benjamin Franklin was received as a “sage of antiquity” by the French in 1776 had an American enjoyed such veneration in Europe.

  Submerged within the frenzy of all this England-gorging was the book on England. Once again—and not for the last time—Clemens put it aside. He and Livy visited Abbotsford, south of Edinburgh on the Tweed River, the final residence of Sir Walter Scott, whom Mark Twain considered responsible for inspiring the American South’s lunatic notions of class and chivalry. Toward the end of August they made the famously rough-water crossing to Belfast; headed south to Dublin; recrossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool; and from there toured a succession of English villages, arriving back at London by September 9. Sam shopped: eighty-eight pounds’ worth of sealskin coats for Jane, Pamela, and Charley Langdon, “little odds & ends” for the new house in Hartford. Soon the urge to move again grew overpowering; London by now may as well have been Paris, Illinois. On the last day of September, he whisked Livy off to Paris, France.

  When they returned to London, Sam and Livy had completed four months of international gadabout partying and holidaying that, but for sobriety, would have reddened the cheeks of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Their cash was about gone: Clemens estimated, perhaps hyperbolically, perhaps not, that he had spent ten thousand dollars since arriving in England. He sent to his New York bank for money, but a financial panic in America, prelude to a six-year depression, caused impediments in receiving it.