Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  “I know Mr. D. mighty well & he shan’t run any play on MY brains,” Clemens fumed to Charles Warner in Hartford, and schemed to thwart the swindling playwright: he and Warner would each claim sole copyright for the characters that each of them had created, “& I will buy this play of Densmore, re-write it if it is worth it—or burn it, & write one myself & enjoin D. from playing his.”13 Warner, whose ego could not have been gladdened by the fact that Densmore had jettisoned all of his characters and used only Mark Twain’s, agreed. He probably did not cheer up much on discovering that Mark Twain intended to pay him no royalties, on the ground that Warner had no copyright claims on any of its characters. Clemens held his temper in check and negotiated a deal with Densmore, as he had in London with John Camden Hotten. He offered the Californian a hundred dollars for the script of Densmore’s play and an agreement to stop producing it—and sent him double that amount. Densmore agreed to the terms. On May 10, Mark Twain set the Tom Sawyer manuscript aside and began his own dramatic adaptation of The Gilded Age. Working through three drafts, he completed the five-act play in sixty-odd days. “I don’t think much of it, as a drama,” he told Howells, “but I suppose it will do to hang Col. Sellers on…He will play tolerably well, in the hands of a good actor.”14 Clemens had struck a deal with Raymond, who had come east after creating the stage “Sellers” in California. Mark Twain retained most of Densmore’s plot—in acknowledgment of which he sent the Californian another two hundred dollars—but created the dialogue essentially from scratch, leaving in only a few lines of Densmore’s. The resulting play regathered and heightened the most autobiographical contributions that Clemens had made to the novel: the migration of the Hawkins family to Missouri, the steamboat explosion, the presence of Uncle Dan’l, the delphic influence of the Tennessee land, even that infamous dinner of turnips and water that Sam had choked down at James Lampton’s house in 1861. He retained the subplot involving Laura Hawkins and her Confederate lover. But unlike the novel, these elements now served primarily as establishing context for the Colonel. Mulberry Sellers, as he was now called, towered above—obscured, smothered, knocked haywire—all the sociopolitical concerns of the original work. As he had with “Sociable Jimmy”—which finally ran in the New York Times in November of that year—Mark Twain tapped into the great catch basin of spoken language contained in his memory. Once again the language, this time that of a small-time white Southern blowhard, flowed easily onto his pages; the character who emerged drew comparisons to the best of Dickens.

  LIVY GAVE birth to her second daughter on the morning of June 8, after hours of severe labor pains, in the main Quarry Farm house. She was assisted by one of the pioneering women doctors of the mid-19th century, Rachel Brooks Gleason, an Elmira physician who had treated Livy’s progressive-minded parents and some of their friends. Mrs. Gleason was a year older than the first woman to graduate from an American medical school, Elizabeth Blackwell, whose admission to the Geneva (N.Y.) Medical School in 1847 was approved only because everyone there thought it was a practical joke. The infant weighed nearly eight pounds, twice the birth-weight of both Langdon and Susy, leading Sam to describe her as “colossal” and “the great American Giantess.” The parents named her Clara, in honor of Clara Spaulding. “It is an admirable child…[It] has intellect,” Clemens told the Twichells. “It puts its fingers against its brow & thinks.”15 To John Brown, he proclaimed, “I wish the nations of the earth would combine in a baby show & give us a chance to compete.”16

  (Competition would have been stiff. Among the babies of 1874 who would shape the century to come, Guglielmo Marconi entered the world, and Arnold Schoenberg. Winston Churchill was born on Sam’s thirty-ninth birthday. Robert Frost emerged wailing, and Gertrude Stein, and Amy Lowell, and Charles Ives, and Harry Houdini, and the computer pioneer Thomas Watson, and the third baseman Honus Wagner.)

  LIVY RECOVERED quickly after her delivery. “The Modoc” kindly offered her favorite doll to her new little sister. And Sam Clemens wrote like the wind. He was confident enough of his progress to break away on June 29 for a quick trip to Hartford. He checked in with Bliss at the publisher’s office. But the main purpose of his visit was to get in on the ground floor of the new Hartford Accident Insurance Company by buying fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stock, paying 25 percent down. (He’d been alerted to the opportunity by Joe Goodman in California, who knew an investor there.) Like nearly all his business investments, this one proved to be a turkey. The well-named Hartford Accident went under in a year and a half, and it took Sam “two or three” years to get back his investment (which was by then up to $23,000).17 But the company lasted long enough to hold an October banquet at which Mark Twain made one of his best-loved after-dinner speeches. (“Ever since I have been a director in an accident insurance company I have felt that I am a better man. Life has seemed more precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier aspect…I look upon a cripple, now, with affectionate interest…to me, now, there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.”)18 Back in his hilltop studio, he finished up the Gilded Age play with one of his typical headlong sprints. “During the past 3 days I have written 157 pages of literature & 25 letters,” he informed his mother on July 11.19 (Normally, he figured, it would take him the ice age of eight days to produce that many pages.) John Raymond organized a supporting cast and rehearsal schedule. He booked a preview performance in Rochester at the end of August before taking it to New York in the fall. Finally, Mark Twain plunged back in to Tom Sawyer, his draft pages mounting in his skyborne den. He often reached fifty pages a day. He did not discuss the plot with anyone, nor mention that this was a novel. The reminiscences possessed him. By September, he’d finished more than four hundred pages. And then the fountains closed up.

  He’d been displeased with a chapter—seen it as “a failure in conception, moral, truth to nature & execution.”20 So he burned it. Then he set the whole manuscript aside. He went back to playing billiards, and did other things. At least nine months would pass before he touched the work again.

  “It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry,” he wrote almost offhandedly to John Brown, using a metaphor that he came to favor—the inner “tank” draining, and himself helpless to proceed until it filled up again.21 But what had cut off the flow? The characters and episodes until that point—the end of Chapter 15—had crowded their way onto the pages, now up to the great getaway to Jackson’s Island in the Mississippi by Tom, Joe, Huck. He had fed from notes scribbled to himself in the margins of his pages as he wrote. “A ragbag of memories,” some scholars have called them22—reminders of characters and incidents, most of which eventually found their way into this or other of his books, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Tramp Abroad and Life on the Mississippi. A quite dissimilar note, inscribed on the first manuscript page, may hold the clue to the mystery of his sudden mental dry-pumping.

  1, Boyhood & youth; 2, Y & early Manh; 3 the Battle of Life in many lands; 4 (age 37 to 40,) return & meet grown babies & toothless old drivelers who were the grandees of his boyhood. The Adored Unknown a faded old maid & full of rasping, puritanical vinegar piety.23

  This little self-memo comprises the only outline that has ever been discovered for Tom Sawyer—not surprising given Mark Twain’s famous indifference to formal structure. The memo shows that structure was not utterly beyond his interests, and suggests that a structural quandary was what brought the writer to his skidding halt: namely, one posed by the third item, “The Battle of Life in many lands.” Hamlin Hill and others have argued that following this prompt would have taken Tom Sawyer into radically different territory than that bounded by “St. Petersburg” and the Mississippi River: namely, Tom’s escape from his hometown and his maturation into a man as he visited corners of the world perhaps similar to those described in The Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain pigeonholes the manuscript after Tom, having stolen away from his sleeping comrades on Jackson’s Island, slips back into St. Petersburg in t
he night and stands beside the bed of his sleeping Aunt Polly, pondering whether to leave her a note that he has written. What will the note say? Will it inform her that Tom and his friends are merely “off playing pirates,” as is the case with the published version? Or will it announce to his aunt the onset of a worldwide odyssey?—an odyssey that would culminate with Tom’s return in old age, to find his boyhood chums now toothless drivelers and the Adored Unknown a rasping old maid? The second option exerted a powerful pull on Mark Twain, in literature and in his life. The archetypal journey of the hero; Percival, Orestes, outward flight, initiation, the conquering of adversaries, the triumphal return. Mark Twain intended to take the myth a little farther than Homer’s Odysseus; into age, decay, death, toothless drivelers, and vinegary crones. (Sixteen years on, he was still haunted with the vision of his surrogate selves returning to Hannibal as old men.)

  SAM CLEMENS’S manuscript-writing pace seldom diverted him from spraying letters to friends and strangers—often a half dozen or more each day. On July 29, he answered a rambling query from one Mary M. Field, a self-described “Serial” writer who begged him for a hundred dollars to help her through a dry patch in the freelance market. Unconscious of the target she was presenting, she promised him a diamond ring and an Elgin watch as security, and mentioned a few publishing opportunities.

  The vituperation of Mark Twain’s reply nearly transcends hostility.

  Madam: Your distress would move the heart of a statue. Indeed it would move the entire statue if it were on rollers…I never have heard of a case so bitter as yours. Nothing in the world between you & starvation but a lucrative literary situation, a few diamonds & things, & three thousand seven hundred dollars worth of town property. How you must suffer. I do not know that there is any relief for misery like this. Suicide has been recommended by some authors…

  I suppose you will think, now, that I am not a “gentleman.” Then I shall be crushed clear into the earth.24

  And on in that vein for a few smoking pages. It is not clear that Mark Twain actually sent the letter; he retained the draft, and no response from Mary Field has been found. But the exercise of writing it must have cleared his passages wonderfully.

  By August the Nook Farm house was so close to completion that Sam and Livy began plans to occupy it. They departed Quarry Farm for a series of visits around August 5, preparatory to the move back to Hartford. They left their daughters with the Cranes, the idea being that this would be a relaxing hiatus for Livy. The “hiatus” became an extravaganza: first, a railroad trip of 180 miles to visit the Fredonia contingent; then on to Buffalo (47 miles) to look up old friends; then Canandaigua, New York (91 miles), to look up more old friends; then, finally, back to Elmira (75 miles) on August 14. All this relaxing had worn Livy out, so instead of departing immediately for Hartford, the family remained at Quarry Farm until September 10.

  Mark Twain’s version of the play made its road debut as scheduled on August 31 at the Opera House in Rochester, New York. Raymond sent an invitation to Sam, but received a curious telegram on the day of the performance: “We are threatened with scarlet fever, & I fear to leave my family.”25 Given that scholars Michael Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith have found no evidence of scarlet fever in Elmira, it may have been that Sam simply wanted to be near his recuperating wife, or even that Livy insisted that he stay at home. Perhaps it was just as well: one local paper panned the play as “simply an incoherent jumble of scenes and acts, without any sequence or continuity whatever;”26 another called it “a very clever drama” that still needed some fine-tuning,27 and a third congratulated Clemens on his success as a dramatist. The critics agreed that Raymond was brilliant in the role of Sellers and predicted great things for him. The company then shuffled off to Buffalo, and the Clemenses returned to Elmira.

  “I ENCLOSE also a ‘True Story’ which has no humor in it,” Mark Twain advised Howells on September 2, what would become his first published piece in the Atlantic, and endure as one of his finest short sketches. “You can pay as lightly as you choose for that, if you want it, for it is rather out of my line.”28 He misjudged the work’s value. “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” was the “afterthought” in a package of two pieces he was sending Howells, the other being a bit of Mark Twain foolery called “Fable for Old Boys & Girls.” Howells recognized the brilliance of “True Story.” Though only three magazine pages long, it encapsulated the centuries-long threnody of separation, suffering, and forbearance among African slaves and their children in America. One can hear the voice, and the moral concerns, of Jim developing in it.

  “A True Story,” like “Sociable Jimmy,” replicates the dialect of a Negro with whom Mark Twain has conversed. In this case, the person is Mary Ann “Auntie” Cord, born in 1798, a slave most of her life, and now the Cranes’cook at Quarry Farm. On an evening in late June, in the democratic little circle of household members and servants on the farmhouse porch, she had responded to an inane bit of small talk from Sam—“how is it that you’ve lived sixty* years and never had any trouble?”—with the story of the forced dispersion of her husband and seven children by slave owners in 1852; her years of yearning for them; and her near-miraculous reencounter with Henry, her youngest, during the Civil War. Henry, a Union soldier, turned up at an encampment where Mary Ann was the cook.

  “Dey put chains on us an’ put us on a stan’ as high as dis po’ch,” the cook tells her listeners, telling of her family’s forced breakup:

  An’ all de people stood aroun’, crowds an’ crowds. An’ dey’d come up dah an’ look at us all roun’, and squeeze our arm, an’ make us git up an’ walk, an’ den say, “Dis one lame,” or “Dis one don’t ’mount to much…an’ dey begin to sell my chil’en…an’ I begin to cry; an’ de man say, “Shet up yo’ dam blubbedrin’,” an’ hit me on de mouf wid his han’.29

  She describes the moment of reconciliation with Henry, thirteen years later.

  …I jist stopped right dah, an’ never budged! jist gazed, an’ gazed, so; an’ de pan [in her hand] begin to tremble, an’ all of a sudden I knowed!…“Boy!” I says, “if you an’t my Henry, what is you doin’ wid dis welt on yo’ wris’ an’ dat sk-yar on yo’ forehead? De Lord God ob heaven be praise’, I got my own ag’in!”

  Oh, no, Misto C—, I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!30

  As with “Sociable Jimmy,” this soliloquy is not so much “word for word” as artful reconstruction, intensely considered and revised. Mark Twain’s letter accompanying the submission advised Howells that he didn’t alter Cord’s story “except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle, as she did—& traveled both ways.”31 Three weeks later, offering to make more revisions on the proof sheets, Mark Twain gave Howells a glimpse into his methodology: “I amend dialect stuff by talking & talking & talking till it sounds right—& I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro sometimes (rarely) says ‘goin’’ & sometimes ‘gwyne’…& when you come to reproduce them on paper they look as if the variation resulted from the writer’s carelessness…”32 More important is the fact that the story could have fallen word for word from the lips of an elderly former slave woman. The rhythms and syntax are plausible, and there is not a trace of “stage-darky” dialect that would show up even in the early-chapter conversations between Huck and Jim. The climactic line—“I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!”—is not merely a Twainian “snapper”; it is a thunderbolt of accusatory irony. It is almost as though Mark Twain were telling the story to his prewar self, whose idea of a punchy ending to a slave’s ghost story was “You’ve got it!” and who looked forward to summer weather when “niggers begin to sweat and look greasy.”

  To Howells, reminiscing in old age, the story was nothing less than “one of those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned chiefly if not solely through him for all its despite to the negro…”33 With the consent of the publisher, Henry O. Houghton, he rewarded the author with the highest purchase rate in
the magazine’s history, twenty dollars a magazine page (sixty dollars).

  Sam was beginning to feel grateful for every dollar he could earn. Around that time, he noted to a friend that his new house was running up three times as much cost as he and Livy had planned for.

  THEGILDEDAGE enjoyed a successful weeklong tryout in Buffalo, despite equivocal reviews. Mark Twain attended the opening night this time, on September 7. He arose in his private box, by request, at the end of the fourth act, to make a speech, during which he appeared overcome with emotion. He sat down again to an ovation.

  Sam, Livy, and Clara Spaulding left Elmira on September 10 for New York and the white-marble Hoffman House at Broadway and 24th Street, two blocks north of the Park Theater, where The Gilded Age was to make its New York debut in less than a week. Sam spent the days supervising rehearsals, while Livy, fatigued and menstruating profusely, lay in her room under Clara’s care. “Now no doubt ‘treatment’ is necessary again,” Sam wrote delicately to Rachel Gleason. “If so, will you write & tell a reliable lady physician here to come to the hotel, & administer it?”34 Livy eventually showed an unmistakable sign of recovery: she wanted to go shopping, and did, and selected a ton of carpets and furniture for the new house.

  A “brilliant audience of literary people” greeted the retooled play on opening night in New York, September 16.35 The crowd responded warmly. In a curtain speech after the fourth act, Mark Twain told the audience that he had composed two endings, to be performed in rotation: in one, a jury would convict Laura of murdering her lover; in the other, she would be acquitted. He was unable to decide, he explained, which one was the more effective way of “teaching what ought to be done” given Laura’s circumstance—“strict truth” or “satire,” the latter being the not-guilty verdict. It was a curious rumination, and Mark Twain made it stranger still by launching what sounded on the surface like an attack on the play’s star.