Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  I threw all my strength into the character of Colonel Sellers, hoping to make it a very strong tragedy part and pathetic. I think this gentleman [referring to Raymond, as the actor listened from the wings] tries hard to play it right and make it majestic and pathetic; but his face is against him. And his clothes!…He is from one of the Indian reservations. Oh! I can see that he tries hard to make it solemn and awful and heroic, but really sometimes he almost makes me laugh.36

  Was he kidding? Yes, profoundly so. This was one of Mark Twain’s lecture-stage devices, the deadpan reversal of what he actually meant—or of what the audience expected him to say. Colonel Sellers, a tragedy figure?! As the author rambled on, the comic intent slowly grew more hilariously clear.

  I meant that turnip dinner to be pathetic, for how more forcibly could you represent poverty and misery and suffering by such a dinner, and of course if anything would bring tears to people’s eyes that would; but this man eats those turnips as if they were the bread of life, and so of course the pathos is knocked clear out of the thing. But I think he will learn…37

  At least the intent grew clear to some. The New York World printed Mark Twain’s remarks without comment in the body of a strongly positive review of the play, suggesting that Mark Twain’s joke was self-evident. But Margaret Duckett, among other scholars, accepts his sentiments at face value, noting his late-life remarks to Paine that Raymond was a pygmy of an actor and that the turnip-eating scene was intended as piteous.38 Given that the line between humor and sorrow was thin, tending toward nonexistent, in Samuel Clemens’s mind, and given that this scene was drawn directly from a highly fraught moment of his young manhood, he may have been speaking the truth as he felt it.

  He eventually accepted that The Gilded Age play (which, after all, came to be popularly known as Colonel Sellers) was a mediocre “vehicle” with one great role played by one great star, its chief virtue being its box-office appeal. The reviews tended to support this. The most perceptive one came from Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, writing as “Nym Crinkle.” Crinkle began his New York World column of September 17 with a detailed synopsis of the plot, praising the language and actions of Colonel Sellers throughout. And then he identified a weakness that pervaded Mark Twain’s literature:

  It is not possible to admire this plot. It bears all the evidences of having been fabricated round Colonel Sellers and worked out laboriously under exigent stage demands. What it lacks is the fluent, coherent, and natural growth of interest which alone would give it symmetry and strength.39

  Noting that “[t]here is no adequate motive until Laura kills Colonel Selby [two-thirds of the way through the play],” Crinkle remarks,

  Previous to that the interest is held mainly, if not altogether, by the play of character and not by the progress of events, which is an aesthetic defect…

  We do not think that it is from any lack of creative power that the play is thus amenable to criticism. It is rather the want of constructive art in the writer…[emphasis added]40

  “Constructive art,” of course, was the central weakness in question—or was it a weakness? The serendipity in Mark Twain’s narratives might be explained by his lack of formal training in rhetoric and composition. Or it might be explained by his intuitive understanding that he didn’t need it. The question begged by Crinkle’s declaration is: if he had been schooled in the formal requirements of literature, would that have suffocated the divine, anarchic spontaneity that provides the greatest pleasures in his work?

  Crinkle more or less acknowledges this conundrum with his next thought:

  The one remaining impression when the curtain falls has been made by Colonel Sellers. We do not connect him with the circumstances that have been narrated; we remember only with a keen sense of delight his personal peculiarities, his sincerity of self-deceit, his gentlemanly poverty, his egregious folly, wrapped about by his amiability and homely courtliness.41

  The Gilded Age or Colonel Sellers ran for 115 nights in New York, and, as Mark Twain pointed out, “as it has no scenic effects & no bare legs, this is extraordinary & was not a thing to be expected.”42 Among its devotees was President Ulysses S. Grant, who attended the September 28 performance, laughed and applauded along with everyone else, and made his way backstage afterward to congratulate Raymond.

  Mark Twain never published the play. Already burned by piracy, he had no intention of letting hinterland companies leech its profits. He was right about its value: Colonel Sellers netted $10,000 in its first three months. It earned Mark Twain around $70,000 across his lifetime. Its chief liability was that it inspired in him a renewed fascination with the theater, along with the dangerous notion that he was a playwright.

  ON SEPTEMBER 21, in the orange-tinted brilliance of a New England autumn, the Clemenses took possession of their Nook Farm house at last. Or perhaps, the Nook Farm house took possession of them. It sat nearly completed in its three-storied splendor, its salmon-hued brick façades outshining the maple trees in sunlight, at the crest of a rise at 351 Farmington Avenue, across the lawn from the house of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Its five balconies and several sharply pitched gables lent it the aspect of a Gothic castle. A two-story tower, its main window overlooking the long canopy that crossed the driveway entrance, put some people in mind of a pilothouse above a deck, and a false myth took hold over the years that Mark Twain had intended the house to resemble a steamboat.

  Inside, Edward Potter’s handiwork generally fulfilled the vision that Livy had begun sketching out nearly three years earlier. The house boasted nineteen rooms and seven bathrooms, each equipped with the modern wonder of a flush toilet. “Speaking tubes” carried the voice from floor to floor. A coal furnace provided heat, and gas lamps supplied illumination. On the main floor a grand entrance hall displayed ornamentally carved wood. The drawing room, the house’s social center, was dominated by a huge mirror that had been a wedding gift to Sam and Livy. In 1881 its walls, like those of other rooms, acquired the stenciling designs of Lockwood de Forest, a partner in the Associated Artists firm founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The library (the center of family life), the dining room, and the servants’ kitchen commanded the remaining ground-floor space. Bedrooms occupied most of the second floor, with Sam and Livy’s set off to itself. In Venice a few years later, Sam purchased what remains the house’s most famous furnishing: a heavy bed of carved oak, the posts at its head crowned by sculpted angels. Sam and Livy placed their pillows at the foot of the bed so that they could admire these. Mark Twain was often photographed in this bed in his old age, head propped on a pallet, cigar in mouth, a manuscript tucked against his stomach. It was the bed he died in.

  The third floor was dominated by a billiard room: Sam’s sanctuary, his refuge for poking his cueball and smoking his cigars and working on his manuscripts.

  When the Clemenses moved in, carpenters and plumbers still crowded the downstairs rooms; hammers rang throughout the day, and the family was obliged to decamp on the second floor, sleeping in the guest room, eating in the nursery, and using Sam’s hideaway upstairs as a parlor. Life for the rich in those times was not always easy.

  The Hartford house was Livy’s creation. Sam contributed the Venetian bed, a Scottish-castle mantel for the library, an assortment of gadgets (in addition to the speaking tubes, they included a telephone, a “type-machine,” and a home-rigged rubber tube that transferred gas from a chandelier to a bedside lamp for nighttime reading). But as the house filled up with statuary, paintings, carpets, tapestry and fabric, lamps, plants, silver and pewterware, framed portraits, books, piano, travel souvenirs, and—not least—fashionable guests, it perfectly reflected Livy’s understanding of Victorian material display as evidence of moral and intellectual worth. Judging by her house, the Clemenses were saints.

  OCTOBER FOUND the hammers still rat-a-tatting away in the house; Mark Twain couldn’t concentrate on writing. The carpenters were there for eternity, he fumed to Howells. “I kill them when I get opportunities, but the builder goes
& gets more.”43 He was responding to a plea from the Atlantic editor that most literary men would have killed a carpenter or two for: “Couldn’t you send me some such story as that colored one, for our Jan’y number—that is, within a month?”44 On a hazy Saturday afternoon three weeks later, he was still depleted. “So I give it up.”45 But just a few hours later he excitedly reversed himself: “I shall not stop the letter I wrote 2 hours ago, because it has the suggestion about the play—but I take back the remark that I can’t write for the Jan. number.”46

  Inspiration struck during a walk through the fallen leaves in the woods with Joe Twichell.

  I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steamboating glory & grandeur as I saw them…from the pilot house. He said “What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!” I hadn’t thought of that before. Would you like a series of papers to run through 3 months or 6 or 9?—or about 4 months, say?47

  Howells saw the magnitude in the idea at once. Soon Mark Twain had an agreement with the Atlantic to submit a series of essays, at the premium rate of twenty dollars the printed page. His boyhood self and chums would have to cool their heels a while longer before their novel could be finished. The Mississippi “river book” that he had begun imagining nearly a decade earlier on the landlocked slopes of Nevada now welled up in him, and suddenly he was writing again. On November 20, he mailed Howells the first of seven essays for the Atlantic under the heading, “Old Times on the Mississippi.” He proposed an every-other-month schedule, but Howells would have none of that. “The piece about the Mississippi is capital,” he notified Clemens, “—it almost made the water in our ice-pitcher muddy as it read it…I want the sketches, if you can make them, every month.”48 His enthusiasm galvanized Sam. Thirteen days later he had completed three installments. His cover letter reflected his mounting ecstasy. Piloting! That was the perspective from which he, alone among all writers, could evoke the river.

  I have spoken of nothing but of piloting as a science so far; & I doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject. And I don’t care to. Any muggins can write about Old Times on the Miss of 500 different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble about the piloting of that day—& no man has ever tried to scribble about it yet. Its newness pleases me all the time—& it is about the only new subject I know of.49

  Thus began Mark Twain’s symbolic return, as his thirty-ninth birthday approached, to the river that he had never wanted to leave. The reencounter with this part of his past transformed him. He hardly stopped writing for the ensuing decade, the most prolific and profitable of his life, although his social and ceremonial calendar was unsparing and his travels took him back to England, and a good part of Western Europe, and back to the corporeal river itself, and, briefly, to his hometown again. The river figured in the three greatest of the seven books he published through the beginning of 1885, along with another play and many of his strongest sketches and tales.

  SAMUEL CLEMENS capered and backslapped his way through the last months of 1874 like a boy on the last day of school. On a bright frigid Thursday morning two weeks before Thanksgiving, he and his muscular-Christian chum Joe Twichell left Hartford and headed northeast on foot, intending to walk the hundred miles to Boston. Twichell was carrying a small bag of something; Sam had a basket of lunch, and a pocket filled with envelopes Livy had addressed to herself and given him so he could write along the way. “Our jaws have wagged ceaselessly, & every now & then our laughter does wake up the old woods,” he reported from Vernon, eleven miles out.50 They made it to Ashford, Connecticut, twenty-eight miles, an hour after dark, with Sam’s knee joints aching enough to give him “the lockjaw,”51 he said; they found a hotel run by a man who answered every conversational gambit of Twichell’s with a stream of unself-conscious profanity; Sam thought it was the funniest scene he’d ever seen. The next morning, with Sam sleepless and limping, the pair managed seven subzero miles to North Ashford, where they said the hell with it and hitched a ride for the nearest railroad line to Boston. Sam telegraphed the trusty Howells that they would be in town around 7; Howells fired back orders for them to report to his Cambridge house “near observatory Party waiting for you.”52 They arrived at 9, and partied hearty with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose, one of Longfellow’s daughters, and the philosopher John Fiske, among others. Howells described Sam’s behavior in much the same way a younger Sam had described the Unreliable: “I never saw a more used-up, hungrier man, than Clemens. It was something fearful to see him eat escalloped oysters.”53

  Back in Hartford, Clemens informed Howells that “Mrs. Clemens gets upon the verge of swearing & goes tearing around in an unseemly fury when I enlarge upon the delightful time we had…& she not there to have her share.”54 This was part of an ongoing joke the two men had worked out—the notion that their mild wives were hell-raising harridans.

  In a Boston store window, Sam had spotted the new contraption called a “type-machine.” He went inside, watched the salesman’s “type-girl” demonstrate that she could bang out fifty-seven words a minute, and bought one for $125. Back in Hartford, he practiced typing “The boy stood on the burning deck” until he could make twelve words a minute (all in caps and with a carriage return that worked via a foot pedal), and sent typewritten letters to relatives and friends, most of them on the topic of sending typewritten letters. Howells was so intrigued that he wanted to play with it, too: “when you get tired of the machine, lend it to me,” he coaxed Clemens.55

  Late in life Clemens claimed that he was “the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature.”56 He thought he’d written part of Tom Sawyer with it, but he misremembered: an assistant typed out his handwritten manuscript of Life on the Mississippi. It was likely the first book ever typed before being sent to the printer.

  The capstone to his year was a dinner at the Parker House in Boston on the evening of December 15, an event “to be ranked with the most noteworthy gathering of the kind that the Athens of America has seen,” panted the Boston Globe.57 The dinner was to celebrate the Atlantic’s first year under its new owners, a group that included Henry O. Houghton and George H. Mifflin. “Don’t you dare to refuse that invitation,” Howells had scolded him a few days earlier.58 The tables were landscaped with sideburns and mustaches: authors, editors, leading clergymen, academic dons, Oliver Wendell Holmes, architects, Houghton, Mifflin, a former Confederate soldier who was now a memoirist featured in the magazine. Mark Twain spoke—twice—shook hands with everybody, then hosted an all-nighter in his room, along with Howells and Aldrich. He went home feeling good, wrote a third installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” and launched a practical joke at Aldrich, who had requested a photograph: Clemens sent him one every day for the last week of the year, crowning it on New Year’s Eve with an avalanche of forty-five envelopes, “containing an aggregate of near seventy differing pictures of myself, house & family. It loaded the postman down.”59 Included in this mélange was a reasonably good self-portrait sketched in thick strokes of black ink. These were the sorts of things a fellow from the wilds of Missouri could get away with once he’d become the representative voice of America.

  But no voice remains representative forever. Seated not far from Mark Twain and Howells at the Atlantic dinner was the same suave young writer who four years earlier had canceled an appointment so he could meet Bret Harte at the Howells household in Cambridge. Mark Twain almost certainly shook hands with him, but there was no particular reason for him to have marked the moment. Henry James was still largely unknown at thirty. His first novel, the mildly shocking Watch and Ward, had appeared just three years earlier, and more or less disappeared again. Roderick Hudson was finished but unpublished, and James’s own chronicle of an innocent abroad, Daisy Miller, which would establish his international reputation, lay three years in the future. In time, Mark Twain would learn very well who Henry James was: the complementary “other half” of the American literary sensibility.

  Th
e younger writer’s life comprised a striking antithesis of Mark Twain: he was urban-born (New York) into a wealthy and intellectually powerful family. His father, Henry Sr., was an eccentric heir to a family fortune (after he sued his own father’s estate) who drank, gambled, and then became a prominent religious philosopher, European habitué, member of the storied Metaphysical Club, and an edgy friend of Emerson. His older brother, William, was the polar opposite of Orion: a graduate of Harvard Medical School, a visionary psychologist, and the philosophical father of pragmatism. Henry’s own life filled the blanks in Sam Clemens’s: as a boy in his father’s orbit, he was tutored in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna, and Bonn, and absorbed the classics of international literature. He briefly attended Harvard Law School before settling into a life of letters.

  IN THE span of his twenty novels, James pulled American literature in as different a direction from Mark Twain as Mark Twain had pulled it from the pietistic Concord masters. Mark Twain democratized the national voice by availing it of vernacular; rough action that sprawled over waterway and open terrain; comedy, political consciousness, and skepticism toward the very idea of lofty instruction. James, a skeptic of a different sort, introduced techniques and concerns unavailable to an uneducated prodigy such as Mark Twain. His novels were rooted in the urbane subsocieties of Eastern America and of American expatriates in Europe; they viewed human character indoors, as it were, and through the emerging prisms of symbolism and psychological nuance, and they explored the drastic post–Civil War reversals of Christian optimism. Henry James imposed new obligations on the reader, as Howells himself perceived—not least among them a reexamination of one’s very motive for reading fiction. “We must take him on his own ground,” Howells wrote, “for clearly he will not come to ours…[and] find, when we can, a name for this new kind in fiction. Evidently it is the character, not the fate, of his people which occupies him; when he has fully developed their character he leaves them to what destiny the reader pleases…It is, after all, what a writer has to say rather than what he has to tell that we care for nowadays.”60