Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Sam may have been a proto–F. Scott, but Livy was no Zelda. For her, the charm of the trip had congealed into fatigue and homesickness. She had been away from America and her mother and sister for four months. The house at Nook Farm was being built in her and Sam’s absence. Livy grew blue, and cross. And pregnant.

  In a sense, Clemens felt trapped. He couldn’t leave England without jeopardizing his interests in The Gilded Age there (or so he believed). But when was the book going to be published? As usual, Elisha Bliss hadn’t a clue; production was running behind again at Hartford. To fill the time, and rebankroll himself, Mark Twain gave in to a London impresario’s entreaties to lecture. “Just now you are the most widely read author in England,” George Dolby told him, “and people are eager to see you.”9 Clemens dusted off “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” while the agent quickly arranged six October performances in London. His success was so great that Mark Twain wanted to extend the act for another month, but Livy finally put her foot down. As she had by cable the previous November, she insisted that it was time to go home. In one of the longer courtesy detours in 19th-century travel, Sam agreed to drop her off there.

  A farewell lecture in Liverpool on October 20, and the next morning Mark Twain and his entourage boarded the ever-handy Batavia for the transatlantic journey to New York. They were met at the dock on November 2 by Olivia’s mother and brother Charley. Orion was there, too. He’d washed out of the Rutland Globe about four months faster than Sam had predicted, after the paper got into a Washoe-style war of words with the Rutland Herald. The Herald had called the Globe people soreheads and Greeley candidates, which led the Globe to call the Herald editor a sellout, which led the Herald to call the Globe the Globule; after that, civility grew strained.10 Orion was trying to find work in New York as an editor or printer or proofreader or something; tinkering with his latest invention, a flying machine (he’d been reading Jules Verne), and working on a story that struck his brother as rather Verne-like.

  Clemens escorted Livy and Susy back to Hartford, arriving November 4. Having seen his wife and daughter safely to the doorstep of Nook Barn, and glancing at his mansion in progress long enough to notice that the roof was in place, Mark Twain turned around and went back to England. He arrived at Liverpool on November 18, made straight for London, resumed his lodging at the Langham, and prepared to push ahead with his lecturing schedule.

  A new private secretary had joined him: Charles Warren Stoddard, his poet-friend from California days. The clean-shaven, sad-eyed aesthete was spending a year in the city as a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. Clemens was moved by Stoddard’s gentleness and high character, and admitted late in life that he valued the younger man more as a companion than as a factotum. Stoddard returned the esteem, kept notes of their days together, and produced some glimpses of a Mark Twain rarely revealed to the world—perhaps even to Livy. Stoddard described their strolls through London parks and picture galleries in the leisurely days before Mark Twain resumed his performances. In the predinner hour, “perhaps the pleasantest in the day,”

  [t]here was chat or long intervals of dreamy silence by the fireside, or music at the piano, when to my amazement Mark would sing jubilee songs or “Ben Bowline” with excellent effect, accompanying himself and rolling his vowels in the Italian style.11

  This languorous routine shifted when Mark Twain resumed lecturing on December 1. Now, his mood began to darken along with the midafternoon London sky; bad nerves and irritation took hold, and Stoddard did his best to humor him, keep him “mentally occupied.” Stoddard described a typical lecture night.

  A little before eight we would walk over to the Concert Rooms and up the stairs into the tiny room at the back, Mark getting more and more irritable and nervous all the while, looking at his watch, anxious to plunge in and have it over. The moment eight o’clock arrived he invariably said, “It’s time now. I’ll not wait another moment,” and then, as cool and deliberate as could be, he walked on to the platform, “washing his hands in invisible soap and water,” slowly saying his first words. The moment he heard his own voice he began to feel better, and I knew he was all right.12

  It was in the hours après lecture, back at the Langham, as church bells tolled the night toward dawn, that Stoddard found his employer at his most revealing. As the two sipped cocktails, he watched Mark Twain’s carefully applied public persona melt away to reveal the melancholy creature beneath.

  One—two—three in the morning…and still we sat by the sea-coal fire and smoked…I could have written his biography at the end of the season. I believe I learned much of his life that is unknown even to his closest friends—of his boyhood, his early struggles, his hopes, his aims. I trust that I am betraying no confidence when I state that a good deal of the real boy is blended with the “Story of Tom Sawyer.”13

  Alcohol expedited the removal of the public mask. Clemens had long since fallen away from his courtship vows of temperance to Livy—he had begun to enjoy a drink or three in her presence, and out of it as well, though he seldom gave in to the ravening thirsts of his Washoe days. Stoddard observed Clemens’s construction of the cocktails: “Bourbon”* whiskey (for which he had to scour London) Angostura bitters, sugar, lemons. A London Manhattan, so to speak. With the first sip, the drawl of Sam Clemens’s voice would begin. Often it would continue until Stoddard was half-asleep, Clemens himself “talking so slowly that the syllables came about every half minute…”14 The thoughts conveyed on those syllables suggest that Samuel Clemens’s lifelong concern with making money, even when it meant coarsening his literary gifts or risking what he already had, was fueled by something deeper than mere avarice.

  Very, very often these nightly talks became a lament. He was always afraid of dying in the poorhouse. The burden of his woe was that he would grow old and lose the power of interesting an audience, and become unable to write, and then what would become of him?…And he’d drink cocktails and grow more and more gloomy and blue until he fairly wept at the misery of his own future.15

  There were lighter moments. Stoddard invited Clemens with him up to Oxford one evening to watch a company of acrobats perform. Inside the Gothic warren of citadels that spanned eight centuries, Clemens found himself less attentive to the performers than to the students in the audience. His description of them to Livy is a priceless snapshot of young Victorian nobles, prefiguring P. G. Wodehouse.

  —& how they do behave, these scions of the bluest aristocratic blood of Great Britain!…They wore their hats all through the performance, & they all smoked pipes & cigars…every rascal of them brought a bull pup or a terrier pup under his arm, & they would set these creatures up on the broad-topped balustrades, & allow them to amuse themselves by barking at anybody or anything they chose to.16

  HIS OWN turns onstage worked their usual magic, but he lamented to Livy about his homesickness, made more severe by the oppressive London fog. This yellow stew of vapor and ash from the smokestacks of industrial London coated people’s clothing and even crept into the lecture halls, making the eyes burn and rendering his audiences ghostlike. “Livy darling, I am so tired of lecturing,” he wrote not long before Christmas, adding that the fog had nearly broken his heart.17 He promised Redpath a couple of days later that he would give a few performances in New York and Boston on his arrival home, and then “retire permanently from the platform.”18

  Still, he kept up with his London appearances until December 20, and spent Christmas Day at Salisbury Cathedral and later at Stonehenge. He cancelled a January tour that included Belfast, Dublin, and Cork, and boarded the Parthia on January 13 for the voyage home, arriving in Hartford on January 27. “Livy my darling,” he had advised his wife eleven days before embarkation, “I want you to be sure & remember to have, in the bath-room, when I arrive, a bottle of Scotch whisky, a lemon, some crushed sugar, & a bottle of Angostura bitters.” He’d enjoyed this concoction before breakfast, dinner, and bedtime every day, he assured her, and would enjoy i
t even more in her company.

  I love to picture myself ringing the bell, at midnight—then a pause of a second or two—then the turning of the bolt, & “Who is it?”—then ever so many kisses—then you & I in the bath-room, I drinking my cocktail & undressing, & you standing by—then to bed, and everything happy & jolly as it should be.

  And lest Livy go all light-headed and forgetful from this lasciviousness, Clemens refocused her with a postcript: “Nothing but Angostura bitters will do.”19

  The Gilded Age was published by Routledge on December 22, 1873, and in the United States by the American Publishing Company the following day. True Williams again had supplied most of the illustrations, along with Henry Louis Stephens and Augustus Hoppin, whose full-page character portraits were daringly based on newspaper photographs of actual Washington insiders (these were all omitted in the Routledge edition).20 (Mark Twain had lobbied for Thomas Nast, given the book’s muckraking and allusions to timely events, but Bliss shied away from the great cartoonist’s presumed price tag.) In a subtle satiric poke at the “learned” pretensions of Walter Scott and others, Mark Twain and Warner had commissioned mysterious epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter. These epigraphs, presented in their original Sindhi, Japanese, Latin, Massachusetts Indian, Basque, Guatemalan Quiche, etc., were supplied by James Hammond Trumbull, a Hartford polymath whose store of learning was nearly as imposing as his name. Presented without translation, they offered such ageless profundity as, “Money is very scarce,” and “Have you anything to say for her justification?” and, “He who would buy sausage of a dog, must give him bacon in exchange.”

  The reviewers were not amused—nor impressed with the novel itself. Some of the notices were almost shockingly harsh. The virulence partly reflected the reviewers’ lack of preparedness for The Gilded Age’s genre: political satire in the novel form had virtually no tradition in America. The New York Daily Graphic, commenting on the day of publication, excoriated the book as “simply a rather incoherent series of sketches,”21 and observed that the authors had managed only to suffocate their usually brilliant voices. The Chicago Tribune was far worse: “utterly bald,” “so puerile,” “so vicious even,” was the judgment of its unsigned critic, who added, “Thousands will…find themselves cheated and robbed.”22 As for Howells, he privately informed Clemens that he would take a pass on reviewing this one: “Up to the time old Hawkins dies your novel is of the greatest promise,” the Atlantic editor wrote, “—but after that it fails to assimilate the crude material with which it is fed…”23 Considering that “old Hawkins” dies in Chapter 9 of a 63-chapter novel, Howells’s remark probably qualifies as faint praise.

  Initial sales of the book were strong, especially given the financial crisis that by now had damaged the stock market and clotted the flow of money through banks and finance systems. By February 1874, subscription agents had moved more than 35,000 copies; by the end of the year, more than 50,000 were in print. But only 56,000 copies were sold over the next six years. The Gilded Age remained in print through most of the ensuing century, its small but steady sales due more to its sociopolitical witness than its literary value. Mark Twain seems to have detached himself early on from an emotional investment in the novel. “My interest in a book ceases with the printing of it,” he declared to Joe Twichell.24

  BACK WITH his family at the Hooker house in Hartford, Samuel Clemens at thirty-eight now embarked on the most contented stretch of his satisfying years at Nook Farm. John and Isabella Hooker showed amazing patience, remaining at the Gillette mansion as work continued on the Clemens’s grand house on Farmington Avenue. Sam smoked his cigars and went to Joe Twichell’s church with Livy and kept up with sales of his various books, all of which were nourishing his bank account. His firmly Victorian views on women seemed to be thawing under Livy’s influence: he composed a letter to the London Standard reporting without sarcasm on the current women’s prayerful crusade against “the rumsellers.” The crusade was thoroughly justifiable, he maintained:

  the women find themselves voiceless in the making of laws & the election of officers to execute them.

  Born with brains, born in the country, educated, having large interests at stake, they find their tongues tied & their hands fettered, while every ignorant whisky-drinking foreign-born savage in the land may hold office.

  He concluded it with a call to women’s suffrage: “this country could lose absolutely nothing & might gain a great deal.”25

  Perhaps the second female in the household was influencing his views as well. Susy was now two; in a photograph of her that he handed out to everyone he could think of, she burns with chubby-cheeked intensity. Her big dark eyes and tiny, bee-stung mouth are fixed in an expression of attention paying, and her head is loaded with curls. Her father claimed that her hairstyle resembled that of the Modoc Indians in northern California, who had captured national attention in a bloody war against American troops. Sam Clemens, whose last unreconstructed bigotries were directed at Indians, but whose distaste for imperialism was equally strong, chose “Modoc” as Susy’s nickname.

  He took up his England chronicles again. He completed a five-act play “with only one visible character in it,” a project he had discussed with the actor Edwin Booth the previous November. The play, never produced, was a revision of Hamlet, and the “one visible character” made humorous and modern comments on the unseen action. In concept, if not in quality of execution, Mark Twain anticipated the Theater of the Absurd by about eighty years and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by ninety-five. He thought about another play, and worked at organizing some of his sketches for publication. “I am the busiest white man in America,” he told Mrs. Fairbanks, “—& much the happiest.”26 He resumed his playful twitting of his easy-target mother. “Kill Susy for me,” Jane had requested of him, meaning to write, “Kiss Susy for me.” Sam pretended to take her miscue at face value. In the Fredonia household, Annie Moffett watched as Jane read his mock-confessional letter.

  He wrote…“I said to Livy ‘It is a hard thing to ask of loving parents, but Ma is getting old and her slightest whim must be our law’; so I called in Downey [a servant] and Livy and I held the child with the tears streaming down our faces while he sawed her head off.”27

  It worked. “Sawed her head off!” Jane kept exclaiming as she stormed about the house. “Sawed her head off!”28

  Sam even managed some tenderness toward Orion. The older brother lingered in New York, living alone in a rented attic room (Mollie would soon join him from Fredonia), still subsisting on piecework in newspapering—typesetter, proofreader, reporter, whatever. He had tried to land a job at Whitelaw Reid’s New York Tribune by name-dropping himself as Mark Twain’s brother. Reid, with typical humanity, authorized a tryout for Orion; but it didn’t work out. Presently he was a substitute proofreader at the Evening Post, earning two dollars a day when he worked at all. Sam had given Orion a hundred dollars in November, and then scolded him by way of Jane about the futility of his New York hopes. Touched that Orion could not even afford to buy a copy of The Gilded Age, Sam wrote to him on February 4,

  God knows yours is hard luck, & one is bound to respect & honor the way in which you bear up under it & refuse to surrender. I thought you were heedless & listless…content to drift with the tide & never try to do anything. I am glad…to know that this is not so.29

  Then, with surpassing gentleness, alluding to Orion’s recent surrender of his latest addled invention project,

  I grieve over the laying aside of the flying machine as if it were my own broken idol. But still it must be done…It ought to be a savior & a thing to be clung to…30

  From Nook Farm, in the late winter months of 1874, Clemens issued invitations as promiscuously as he had distributed photographs of Susy. “The best train leaves the Grand Central Depot, in New York, at 10 AM & comes here in about 3 hours,” he informed his old friend Frank Fuller. “You MUST come…& we’ll have a royal good time telling lies &
smoking.”31 “Won’t you kindly name a day & hour that I may meet you & yours at the station here & bring you up to our house for a few days’ visit?” he coaxed a visiting British clergyman.32 “We shall look for you & long for you & hunger for you till you come,” he told Mary Fairbanks. “We shall have the serenest & happiest time while you are here, & nobody shall know care or fatigure.”33 He tried to coax Will Bowen, recently bereaved, out east for billiards and euchre.

  This starburst of bonhomie reached its apogee—and stayed there—in his correspondence to William Dean Howells. He opened up an exuberant, extravagantly facetious volley of correspondence with the terribly earnest Atlantic editor in Boston, and before long, humid Howells was answering Clemens in the same giddy manner. “I am in a sweat, and Warner is in another,” Clemens happily gabbled to Howells in late February, by way of revealing that Redpath had scheduled his Boston lecture series on the same date that Howells was supposed to visit Nook Farm. “Warner’s been in here swearing like a lunatic, & saying he had written you to come on the 4th—& I said, ‘You leatherhead, if I talk in Boston…March 5, I’ll have to go to Boston the 4th—& then he just kicked up his heels & went off cursing after a fashion I never heard of before.”34

  Mark Twain performed his Roughing It lecture on Thursday, March 5, at Horticultural Hall in Boston. (Among the competing entertainments was a performance of Our American Cousin, sans distractions, at the Boston Theatre.) “Why don’t you congratulate me,” he’d cabled Redpath two days earlier. “Honestly I never expect to stand on a lecture Platform again after Thursday night.”35 He was to honor that expectation for a decade.