Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Back in Hartford the following day, he and Livy prepared for what amounted to their debut as host and hostess in a legendary series of dinners, soirees, and overnight visits to Nook Farm. They were not yet able to offer the amenities of their (unfinished) house on Farmington Avenue, but they presided with assurance and aplomb as William Dean Howells, the Boston publisher James R. Osgood, and the Aldriches arrived for a three-day visit on Saturday, March 7. The host, braying his welcome in cornball Missouri dialect, boarded the visitors’ train at Springfield, Massachusetts, along with Charles Warner, for the final short leg of their trip to Hartford. Lilian Aldrich had glanced out her window as the train slowed, and spotted Clemens’s “waving, undulating motion” on the platform. This time, she understood it as part of Mark Twain’s “mannerisms and idiosyncrasies.” Too late: Lilian Aldrich was on Mark Twain’s “vengeance due” list, and this weekend, he would extract his payment. The weaving act may have been a sheathed reminder of her appraisal of him in Boston.

  Howells and Osgood lodged with the Warners during the visit; the Aldriches were guests of Sam and Livy, which was the way Sam wanted it. On the morning after the convivial first evening, the Aldriches were startled by a knock on their upstairs bedroom door. Then came Sam’s voice: “Aldrich, come out, I want to speak to you.” What ensued burned itself into Lilian Aldrich’s memory, and eventually into her 1920 memoir. As she wrapped her kimono around her and cupped an ear to the door, she heard Clemens speaking to her husband of something terribly serious. “[His] voice had its usual calmness and slowness of speech, but was lacking in the kindly mellow quality of its accustomed tone.”

  As Mrs. Aldrich remembered it, Clemens said,

  “In Heaven’s name, Aldrich, what are you doing? Are you emulating the kangaroos, with hob-nails in your shoes, or trying the jumping-frog business? Our bedroom is directly under yours, and poor ’Livy and her headache—do try to move more quietly, though ’Livy would rather suffer than have you give up your game on her account.”36

  Then he returned downstairs. The Aldriches stood flabbergasted. They looked at their bedroom floor: soft rugs. They finished dressing on tiptoe, speaking in whispers, and crept down to the breakfast room where Livy sat behind a silver coffee urn.

  With sorrowful solicitude we asked if her headache was better, and begged forgiveness for adding to her pain. To our amazement she answered, “I have no headache.”

  Then the Aldriches apologized for the noise they’d made.

  “Noise!” Mrs. Clemens replied. “We have not heard a sound. If you had shouted we should not have known it, for our rooms are in another wing of the house.”37

  At the other end of the breakfast table, silently taking this conversation in, sat Mark Twain—looking, Lilian Aldrich noted,

  “As guileless as a combination of cherubim and seraphim—never a word, excepting with lengthened drawl, more slow than usual, ‘Oh, do come to your breakfast, Aldrich, and don’t talk all day.’ ”

  “It was a joyous group that came together at the table that morning, and loud was the laughter, and rapid the talk.”38

  What is touching about Mrs. Aldrich’s remembrance of her host’s mind game—what softens her earlier moral superiority and lends her a little sympathy—is that she clearly does not grasp the malice beneath Mark Twain’s cherubim-seraphim pose, expressed in the sexual innuendo in his complaint to her husband. That Mark Twain harbored the venom necessary for such a veiled insult is obvious from his opinion of Lilian Aldrich, which remained as radioactive thirty-seven years later as on the day he met her. She was “a strange and vanity-devoured, detestable woman! I do not believe I could ever learn to like her except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.”39

  Other than that, it was a most congenial literary weekend. Howells raved about the “charming visit” to a friend, and remarked that Warner and Mark Twain seemed to be living, at Nook Farm, an ideal life.

  They live very near each other, in a sort of suburban grove, and their neighbors are the Stowes and Hookers…They go in and out of each other’s houses without ringing, and nobody gets more than the first syllable of his first name…I saw a great deal of Twain, and he’s a thoroughly good fellow. His wife is a delicate little beauty, the very flower and perfume of ladylikeness, who simply adores him—but this leaves no word to describe his love for her.40

  Howells was living out a similar stretch of domestic happiness. He and wife Elinor were the parents of three children now: John Mead had followed Winifred in 1868, and Mildred was born in September 1872. The following July, the Howellses moved into a small dream house of their own, at 37 Concord Avenue in Cambridge, designed principally by Elinor.

  Aldrich had brought with him a chapter from his forthcoming novel, Prudence Palfrey, hoping for advice on a chapter that required a close knowledge of ore mining. (Howells had published the chapter in the March Atlantic.) Clemens, who liked Thomas Aldrich, read it closely, and about ten days later sent him several pages of well-considered criticisms. Later still, he agreed to read proofs of the entire novel, and continued to show a diligent editor’s eye: “You see (page 109) you’ve got that ancient river-bed in your head, & you’ve got the modern river-bed in your head too, & you’ve gone & mixed the two together. But they won’t mix, any more than oil & water.”41 He apologized for the “long delay” in his initial response. Livy had suffered another near-miscarriage, this one a full three months before her delivery date. She endured ten hours of labor pains before the crisis passed.

  He enjoyed the idea of literary impresario, and handed out suggestions as freely as he’d assigned fantasy roles to Will Bowen and John Briggs back in Hannibal. “Dialect is your forte, not logic, my boy,”42 he informed the lecturer William Andrews. He tried to talk both Aldrich and Howells into publishing their work through Bliss and the more lucrative subscription method, but neither of these proper Bostonians could ever quite unbend to that level of commerce. He tried to appoint Orion as editor of a manuscript by the colorful old sea god of the Pacific, Edgar Wakeman, now retired and short of money, who’d pitched the project to Clemens (“I write you this letter to tell you not to take Hold of any other book until you have done with mine, the Public are anxious now about the Island World…”43) Orion passed, but Wakeman got his book published in 1878, possibly aided by Mark Twain’s influence. Carried away with exuberance over his new place in the literary firmament, Sam wrote to Howells with a wonderfully boyish fantasy that he seems to have intended in dead earnest.

  You or Aldrich or both of you must come to Hartford to live. Mr. Hall, who lives in the house next to Mrs. Stowe’s, will sell…You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can’t you? Come, will one of you boys buy that house? Now say yes.44

  Neither did. The Black Avenger sailed on alone, with folded arms. But his destination, after all these years since the halcyon raft days on the Mississippi, was at last coming into focus. On the tidal fountains of Mark Twain’s great deep, he was sailing into literature.

  * Stoddard may have been mistaken; Clemens later named Scotch as his preference for the cocktail.

  30

  Quarry Farm and Nook Farm

  (1874–75)

  You want to know what I am doing? I am writing two admirable books—I like a good strong adjective—& you shall claw them to pieces & burn the MS when you come,” Clemens announced to Mary Fairbanks early in 1874.1 This agenda was obsolete almost as he declared it. Well before that hectic year was out, the “busiest white man in America” would be even busier. He drastically revised those writing plans. He bailed his brother out of destitution yet again. He finished compiling more than eighty of his sketches and sent the collection off to Elisha Bliss (who selected about sixty of them). In the summer months he removed to a gazebo atop a windswept hill above a river, where, over a series of summers, he would produce much of his best literature. He welcomed a new daughter into the family. He joined the board of an insurance company. He returned to the theater world t
hat had captivated him as a young reporter in Virginia City (and exhausted him in San Francisco)—this time as a playwright and impresario. And he moved his family into their newly finished castlelike house on Farmington Avenue in Nook Farm, where he would commence the happiest—and the last happy—years of his life. Within weeks after his boast to Mrs. Fairbanks, Mark Twain set aside one of those “admirable” books in progress: his fitfully pursued England travel manuscript. By spring, Mark Twain’s passion had shifted to the other “admirable” manuscript, the one about “Tom Sawyer,” which now called to him with the same power of reverie with which “meadow, grove and stream” had called to Wordsworth seventy years earlier.

  The house’s exotic contours were already prompting gossip and news items, even though it remained months from completion. “Most of the residents of Hartford know that Mr. Samuel H. Clemens, otherwise known as ‘Mark Twain,’ is building a residence on Farmington Avenue,” purred the Hartford Daily Times of March 23, 1874, and then meowed, “Many of the readers of The Times, doubtless, have had at least an external view of the structure, which already has acquired something beyond a local fame; and such persons, we think, will agree with us in the opinion that it is one of the oddest looking buildings in the State ever designed for a dwelling, if not in the whole country.”2 At least they almost got his name right.

  In mid-April, the Clemenses surrendered Nook Barn back to John and Isabella Hooker. Servants were moving into the new house, but the uproar of dust and hammering still made habitation unthinkable for the family. An attractive alternative beckoned: a summer in Elmira, where Olivia Lewis Langdon and the Cranes offered hospitality. Sam and Livy planned to depart Hartford on April 15, stay at the Church Street house with Olivia Lewis Langdon until the weather warmed up, then accept Susan and Theodore Crane’s invitation to live at Quarry Farm on the hill outside of town, where Sam could write, and Livy, eight months pregnant, could enjoy the care of her sister.

  Five days before departing Hartford, Sam and Livy welcomed a forlorn guest to Nook Barn: Mollie Clemens, who had splurged on a train trip from New York and the 9th Street hovel she shared with Orion. Mollie’s mission was to beg for money. She sought help toward the $2,000 price of a farm that she and Orion wanted to buy in Mollie’s hometown of Keokuk, Iowa. The complications surrounding the request were endless, and pathetic: Jane had made it clear that she did not want Sam to help the couple out; she didn’t believe the move west would last. Orion, now fifty, weirdly agreed; he considered Mollie’s Keokuk idea to be a bad career move. Like Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman three-quarters of a century later (and like Marshall Clemens a quarter-century earlier), Orion was obsessed with a muddled American dream that had already failed to come true. Mollie Clemens, the former belle of Carson City, had no dreams left, nor illusions: “…everything he [Orion] undertakes fails,” she wrote to Sam several days after her visit, “and he lives the most dreadful life of fear FEAR FEAR.”3 She just wanted to get back to the place she’d started out from; to be near the apple trees of her childhood. And maybe one more small thing.

  “I yearn for indipendance.”

  Sam advanced the couple nine hundred dollars. “I wrote them to furnish their house with the very cheapest stuff they could find,” he reported to Jane, “& with no pretentious flummery about it—be chicken farmers & not hifalutin fine folks…”4 Orion knuckled under. And then, like Willie Loman, he turned his thoughts to getting some seeds in the ground. “My plan would be to work on the garden and chicken business during the day and refresh my memory in law at night…”5

  Sammy Clemens probably committed no “memorable treachery” against his doomed brother Benjamin, as Mark Twain believed he had. But a few weeks after Mollie’s visit, and with no provocation, Sam committed a treachery against Orion that was shameful, if not memorable: he held his hapless brother up to ridicule. The derision was contained in a letter to William Dean Howells (and his wife Elinor) on May 10, 1874: a letter that had little other purpose than to mock Orion’s bumbling futility in the world. Clemens compounded the transgression by violating Orion’s trust and privacy: he sent Howells the letter from Orion that had reactivated his fraternal contempt. This piece of correspondence does not survive; but its concerns are evident from Sam’s post to Howells, which begins,

  I am so strongly tempted to afford you & Mrs. Howells a glimpse of my brother’s last, (just received), that I can’t resist.

  You observe that he is afraid the interest might fall in arrears, so he pays it some weeks ahead of time.

  You perceive that he is still in some way connected with that infamous Tennessee Land which has been our destruction for 40 years (see opening chapters of Gilded Age—my brother is “Lafayette Hawkins.”)

  After indulging a few further condescensions, Sam signed off, then added,

  P.S. Do not fail to note the hopeful, glad-hearted, school-boy cheeriness which bubbles out of every pore of this man who has been ALWAYS a failure.6

  It hardly seems a stretch to imagine that this tawdry impulse was prompted less by meanness than by Sam’s own abiding terror of failure. He may have glimpsed a version of himself in Orion’s pathos—or feared that others, Howells’s circle in particular, might glimpse Orion in him. Not that Sam ran any risk of an identity switch with his brother. By the spring of 1874, some 240,000 copies of Mark Twain’s three latest books had been sold, representing a gross intake of nearly a million dollars for the American Publishing Company—an astonishing achievement for that time. While Orion prepared to grapple with the roosters and hens at Keokuk, Sam swept off for a summer of literary work at a farm that was more a country estate. He seemed unconcerned by a budgetary fact that augured serious financial pressures in the years to come: expenses on the Hartford house—land costs, architects’ fees, materials for the house and barn—had topped $40,000, more than $10,000 ahead of Livy’s projections of 1871. And the end was nowhere in sight.

  The family stayed at the Langdon house until May 5 and warmer weather, and then joined Susan and Theodore Crane on the hill at Quarry Farm. Livy’s kindhearted sister announced a surprise gift for Sam. She led the couple and Susy along a pathway that wound a hundred yards upward from the main house, through clover fields, and finally to the peak of the hill. On an out-cropping that overlooked Elmira, the Chemung River, and the “retreating ranges of distant blue hills” beyond,7 sat a small wooden octagonal enclosure with a peaked roof, glassed windows, wide doorway, coal grate, writing table, sofa, and chairs.* Susan had had it built as a congenial workspace for Livy’s husband, and it proved to be that: Mark Twain would produce some of his most enduring literature within its shelter. It survives on the campus of Elmira College as one of his most popular artifacts. “On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats,” Mark Twain told a friend, “& write in the midst of hurricanes, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirt bosoms of.”8 A photograph shows him there in a white linen suit, with a leg across a knee, sporting those twin badges of the successful salesman, two-toned shoes.

  Clemens’s affection for Sue Crane was established long before this gesture of hers. In 1872 he had written,

  Indeed Susie Crane is an angel, & it is such a comfort to me to know that if I do chance to wind up in the fiery pit hereafter, she will flutter down there every day, in defiance of law & the customs of the country & bring ice & fans & all sorts of contraband things under her wings…9

  Theodore Crane became a great friend as well, and a quietly important one. A spare-framed lumber-merchant’s son, a clerkish businessman with a high hairline and a deferential manner (Clemens once described him as “indestructibly honest,” but timid),10 Crane was usually eclipsed by his wife’s vivacity, and has left few traces. But in Elmira folklore, he is credited with ratifying Jervis Langdon’s approval of Clemens as Livy’s suitor, on the basis of having read and admired his sketches.11 The Cranes ranked with the Langdons amidst Elmira’s progressive and intellectual community, welcoming their Negro
servants into the extended family circle for conversations of an evening and including the Clemens girls and other family children at the dinner table. Friends recalled observing Clemens and Crane lying side by side in their portable hammocks on the farmhouse lawn in summer, reading to each other from the Diary of Samuel Pepys and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.12

  Upon settling into the study on the hill, Clemens absorbed himself in the great memory tale that had begun to reveal itself to him the Sunday afternoon following his wedding, when the old life in Hannibal swept before him like a panorama. He had completed the first five chapters of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by the end of January 1873, when the Gilded Age collaboration with Warner began to demand his full attention. He’d covered the introductions of Tom, his Aunt Polly, and half-brother Sid; Tom fast-talking his friends into whitewashing the fence for him, and paying for it; Tom’s infatuation with Becky Thatcher; the scene in which Tom bungles his Sunday-school Bible quiz and Judge Thatcher makes his grand appearance; and Tom playing with the pinch-beetle in church. He had not yet written his way into the novel’s sustaining, interweaving plotlines. But as Tom Sawyer might say, plot ain’t shucks to a Mark Twain novel.

  HIS WORK on the manuscript endured several interruptions. The most significant of these led to a new work that added greatly to Mark Twain’s wealth. In mid-May, word from San Francisco reached Sam that someone had pirated The Gilded Age for a stage adaptation. The perpetrator was Gilbert B. Densmore, a drama critic at the Golden Era, whom Clemens had known during his time in San Francisco. Densmore had pillaged the novel for its most colorful characters, Silas and Laura Hawkins and Colonel Sellers; then written new material around them, compressing the book’s political story lines and pumping up the comedy. (Densmore earlier had run a somewhat similar scam on Bret Harte, lifting several chapters of a Harte story for serialization in the Golden Era.) The character actor John T. Raymond had brilliantly captured the larger-than-life essence of Sellers, bringing out the exuberance and appetite that Mark Twain, the lover of Shakespeare, had invested in him—making him a kind of American Falstaff. With Raymond/Sellers stealing the show, the play had been a smash hit in its early performances.