by Ron Powers
Mark Twain’s own assessment was somewhat less varnished. “I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven,” he famously told Howells, than read The Bostonians.61
Henry James’s challenge to Mark Twain at least had the virtue of an aesthetic idea. The seeds of another, blinder, far more destructive menace to his supremacy were sewn within a few days of the Atlantic dinner, when an obscure Rochester machinist named James W. Paige was granted a patent for an invention in progress of his, a new kind of typesetting machine.
* Susan Crane had hired Alfred Thorp, an associate of the Farmington Avenue’s house architect Edward Potter, to design the structure, with small decorative details that referred to Potter’s creation.
* Twain fictionalized both her age and her name; in the story she was “Aunt Rachel.”
31
The Man in the Moon
(1875)
As “Old Times on the Mississippi” began running in the Atlantic in January 1875, a wave of racial violence swept through the South. Reconstruction was falling apart under a reactionary onslaught against the masses of former Negro slaves who had acquired full citizenship and voting power through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The depredations of 1875 differed only in degree from previous years: Negroes in the old Confederacy had been beaten, burned out of their houses, and lynched since the close of the Civil War. But white paranoia increased as the gulf between “African” and “American” narrowed, and as it dawned on the defeated Southern nation that its ex-slaves formed a majority in the population. As Negroes ascended to theU.S. Senate and House of Representatives, white vengeance coalesced under the robes of the Ku Klux Klan. President Grant sent federal troops to occupy vast regions of the South, and blood-resentment and terror turned the region into a midnight of the spirit. A different set of discontents prevailed north of the Mason-Dixon Line, where new machines, mushrooming cities, proliferating railroads, and astounding new forms of communication were transforming daily life. The mid-1870s witnessed a second industrial revolution, propelled by the chilly acquisitive genius of the new capitalists John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and others.
With hyper-mechanization, hyper-capitalism, and hyper-urbanization came hyper-anxieties. Alcoholism increased, and divorce, and suicides. Even the Virginia City fathers found it necessary to enact anti-opium laws. The new science of neurology identified a new malady, “American nervousness,” and linked it to the accelerating national race for power, money, and status. Sources of “American nervousness” were postulated: the press, steam power, the telegraph, the sciences, and—in particular—“the increased mental activity of women.”1 Perhaps not coincidentally, many male American go-getters began to look upon the affliction as a badge of honor, a kind of masculine war wound. Here in force was the Gilded Age.
Art and literature would soon catch up with these upheavals, thanks in no small part to Howells, whose criticisms continued to legitimize social realism and devalue the “polite” novel. At the same time, the disruptions awakened a more visceral appetite among Americans: for nostalgia and sentimentality, as sanctuary from the violent energies of the nation. Gilded Age longed for Golden Age, and the lost Edenic innocence of the child. These nostalgic yearnings formed the context for the warm reception that awaited Mark Twain’s evocations of his antebellum river dreams in the Atlantic, and the boy’s book that was soon to follow.
No one was as transported by “Old Times on the Mississippi” as the author himself, except possibly Howells, whose own childhood had been privileged yet constricted, and dogged by bullies. The process of writing the series catapulted Sam back into the “river book” idea that had called to him for so many years; he was mentally organizing a grand expedition down the river almost before the leaves were off his boots from that walk in the woods with Twichell. Like his boyhood self in Hannibal spinning adventures out of dreams, the grown man envisioned leading a coterie of comrades on the quest. “I have a notion of going west about May 1, to make a lagging journey down the Mississippi,” he told Redpath, “dining pilots & pumping stuff out of them for a book…Would like you to do the trip both for me & with me…& talk, & lie, & have a good time.”2 Then he began pestering Howells, who had more or less asked for it. At the Atlantic dinner, the portly little editor had blurted to Clemens that the two should travel downriver to New Orleans in the spring with their wives. Clemens pounced on the idea like a bulldog on a flung stick. “We’ll leave for N.O., Feb. 15,” he declared.3
Who would have made a more ideal sidekick for Mark Twain? With his stewardship of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Howells had begun the gorgeous tapestry that would interweave his informed sensibilities with Twain’s raw gifts, to the enrichment of the nation and the deep soul-comfort of the two men. Howells understood that Mark Twain’s incantatory river reverie spoke to the American ache for its lost arcadian universe, while at the same time offering an unparalleled example of the emerging American realism. He guided the author through the series’s conceptual stages. “[S]tick to actual fact and character in the thing, and give all things in detail,” he encouraged his writer as Mark Twain prepared the second installment. “All that belongs to the old river life is novel and is now mostly historical. Don’t write at any supposed Atlantic audience, but yarn it off as if into my sympathetic ear.”4 A few weeks later: “This number is extraordinarily good. I’ve just been reading it to my wife, who’s delighted with it.”5 By May, when Mark Twain turned in his seventh and last installment, Howells was still cheerleading: “This is capital—I shall hate to have you stop!”6
Howells could get starchy on one issue: profanity. He let exactly one “hell” get through in the first installment, then clamped down. Here, of course, he had plenty of backup—his wife Elinor, Olivia Clemens, and just about everybody else in New England, with Mother Fairbanks standing by in Cleveland as a final reinforcement. “I’ve just been reading [the second installment] to Mrs. Howells…and she has enjoyed it every word—but the profane words,” Howells wrote to Mark Twain with surpassing tact. “These she thinks could be better taken for granted; and in fact I think the sagacious reader could infer them.”7 This particular query got Sam in hot water with Livy, who had opened the letter. “She lit into the study with danger in her eye & this demand on her tongue,” Mark Twain mock-wailed to his editor: “ ‘Where is this profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?’ ”8 Whatever it was, it did not survive. “I have noticed that a little judicious profanity helps out an otherwise ineffectual sketch or poem remarkably,” the former Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope joked to Howells,9 but, typically, he made no real resistance.
Mark Twain depended on Howells. “Cut it, scarify it, reject it—handle it with entire freedom,” he’d invited in the cover letter to the first installment.10 He proved as deferential as his word: “Your amendment was good. As soon as I saw the watchman in print I perceived that he was lame & artificial. I…couldn’t get Mrs. Clemens to approve of him at all.”11 In a note with installment No. 2, he was positively giddy: “Say—I am as prompt as a clock, if I only know the day a thing is wanted—otherwise I am a natural procrastinaturalist. Tell me what day & date you want Nos. 3 & 4, & I will tackle & revise them & they’ll be there to the minute.”12
Howells cared about “Old Times” for several reasons. He hoped the series would rescue the Atlantic’s drooping sales figures. The quasi-official organ of Brahmin discourse was in trouble. Circulation, after a climb to 50,000 copies a month by 1869, had started to plummet: to 35,000 in 1870, then to fewer than 21,000 in 1874, and falling. Smart new illustrated numbers out of New York, such as Harper’s and Scribner’s, each selling around 100,000 copies a month, were modernizing the magazine world. The Atlantic’s new publisher, the self-made go-getter from Vermont, Henry Oscar Houghton, had begun to mutter about new writers, new topics—and new advertising. (Howells later made his proto-Babbitt Silas Lapham a self-made go-getter from Vermont. Coincidence? Maybe.) Howells, shocked and anxious, sa
w Mark Twain as a heaven-sent solution: a writer at once popular among the proletarians, and profound.
Mark Twain’s renown had reached a pinnacle matched by no other popular culture figure until Will Rogers half a century later. An index of it was the letter he received from Phineas Taylor Barnum, whom Mark Twain had met at the Horace Greeley dinner in 1872. P. T. Barnum had not yet merged with James A. Bailey to form the mega-circus known as “The Greatest Show on Earth,” but already his Hippodrome was the crowning extravagance in an age of extravagant public amusements: magic shows, puppet shows, Wild West shows, “moving panoramas” that unwound from one spool onto another, wax museums, professional baseball games. A hundred twenty-five railroad cars moved his great show around the country: two 800-by-400-foot tents; 1,200 employees; 750 horses; assorted camels, elephants, ostriches, and other beasts; wardrobes totaling $70,000 in value; two concert bands. His many “scenes” included an Indian camp in which scores of braves, squaws and papooses sat in wigwams, danced war dances, hunted real buffalo, raced their ponies, and then were “surprised” by attacking Mexicans, which ignited “such a scene of savage strife and warfare as is never seen except upon our wild western borders.”13 This is not even to mention the elephant races, ostrich races, monkey races, and the other attractions that required a capitalization of nearly a million dollars. As if his day job were not fulfilling enough, Barnum was running for mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut; he would win the election in April.
Barnum wrote to Mark Twain asking for a little boost, publicitywise. A plug in one of his pieces. “Such an article in Harpers Weekly would be immense…”14 He enclosed some free passes. Mark Twain cordially turned him down.
HE ALSO rejected a highly prestigious invitation from Hurd & Houghton: to contribute the first work in a series of books aimed at elevating the status of American writers to match that of the Europeans. Mark Twain didn’t see enough money in it. He may have had status anxiety, but he was no fool.
The Mark Twain magic was not powerful enough to erase Howells’s circulation woes. It may have added to them: as soon as each new “Old Times” installment appeared, newspapers around the country reprinted it for their own, far larger readerships, taking advantage of lax copyright laws and enforcement: “the sales of the Atlantic Monthly were not advanced one single copy, so far as we could make out,” Howells ruefully recalled.15 Clemens, predictably, was more than rueful. This was but one of several brush fires that were driving him crazy: unauthorized use of his sketches and excerpts from books proliferated in America and England, and he sued or fired off threatening letters with each new discovery. “[I give] you fair warning that if a single line of mine appears in one of your books I will assuredly stop that book with an injunction,” he wrote to one aspiring scavenger, who scavenged him anyway.16 He had a U.S. marshal halt a pirated performance of The Gilded Age in Salt Lake City.
MARK TWAIN’S Mississippi River reminiscences worked on Howells in a way scarcely expressible in business or editorial terms. They reawakened his own memories of boyhood—or rather, his memories of what that boyhood should have been like, if only somebody like Sammy could have been around to help him live it. At thirty-eight, Howells gave the impression that he’d been born with his droopy mustache and a stiff collar.* Already a fortress of American letters, he was first and foremost a responsible man: responsible husband and father, responsible critic, responsible editor, and responsible reader: he elevated the careers of Henry James, Emile Zola, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Frank Norris, Benito Perez Galdos, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, besides Mark Twain. Even the hundred-odd volumes he completed, including more than fifty novels, bore the stamp of self-imposed obligation. He assigned himself and his contemporaries the task of discovering the American soul, as it was revealed not through tales of adventure and romance, but within the details of the ordinary life, parsed for its psychological revelations. Two misfortunes debilitated this project: Henry James did it better; and Howells crippled his own legacy with one colossally badly chosen phrase: American writers, he declared in the 1890s, should concern themselves with “the smiling aspects of life.” He meant to promote a contrast to the death-obsessed Russian novelists, but his detractors seized on the remark as revealing a fatally insipid sensibility. Instead of the lasting honor he deserved for steering the post–Civil War revitalization of American letters, he was saddled with the legacy of America’s pioneering suburban sage.
Like Sammy, Howells was a product of small-town life in the interior: he was born in Martinsville (later Martins Ferry), across the Ohio River from West Virginia, and spent his boyhood in Hamilton, north of Cincinnati. Like Sammy, he was enthralled with steamboating as a lad. Like Sam, Howells married a brainy but physically frail woman who became an invalid. Like Sam, he lost a beloved daughter. Unlike Sam, Howells had a fairly lousy boyhood. He did not “emerge” from it as much as escape from it, by the skin of his teeth, with a bloody nose and rocks whizzing around his head, his eyes smarting from a cloud of pencil shavings blown into them.
Now Howells found himself with the chance to tag along with the author of the greatest boyhood ever lived; to play hooky from his life and escape on a steamboat down to New Orleans with the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Sadly for Howells, responsibility intruded, and the dream remained only a dream. He quickly felt the gravitational tug of Planet Elinor, and began a long glum struggle to extricate himself from his proposal. “I don’t give it up yet, and don’t you,” he advised Sam a couple of days after the invitation,17 but he may already have resigned himself. He begged off the trip in mid-January, pleading a prior promise to take Elinor on a visit to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “I must be a man for once in my life, and say No, when I’d inexpressibly rather say Yes.”18 “We mustn’t give up the New Orleans trip,” Sam wheedled. “Mrs. Clemens would gladly go if her strength would permit, but can’t Mrs. Howells go anyway? I think she would find it very pleasant. I know she would…You just persuade her.”19 He kept at it: “Mind you try hard, on the 15th, to say you will go to New Orleans. If Mrs. Howells will consent to go, too, I will make a pleasant young lady neighbor of ours go also, so she can have respectable as well as talented company.”20
Sam continued foraging for other recruits in case this persuasion failed. “[Howells] is not sure, now, whether he can go or not,” he wrote to Osgood, stretching the truth, “but I wish you would go. Think of the gaudy times you & Howells & I would have on such a bender!”21 Osgood, no sprite himself, begged off. The business part of this letter contained bad news for Sam’s old friend. Clemens had led Osgood to hope that he could acquire the newest Mark Twain manuscript, a collection of eighty-one periodical sketches dating to 1863. But Elisha Bliss produced a four-year-old contract guaranteeing his company the rights to such a work. Clemens agreed that the contract was binding, and Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old went into production at the American Publishing Company for publication in July.
Osgood would have his turn.
SAM’S BLIZZARD of personal correspondence scarcely ever abated regardless of his growing authorial obligations. (He once even began a letter, “My Dear Clemens,” but that was a mistake.) Letters fascinated him; he seemed to regard them almost as living things, wisps of human character caught on paper. Learning of the “queer letters” that poured in to Barnum, he begged the showman to send him examples, and devoured them on their arrival, and begged for more. Barnum obliged.
It is an admirable lot of letters. Headless mice, four-legged hens, human-handed sacred bulls, “professional” Gypsies…deformed human beings anxious to trade on their horrors, school-teachers who can’t spell,—it is a perfect feast of queer literature! Again I beseech you, don’t burn a single specimen, but remember that all are wanted & possess value in the eyes of your friend
Saml. L. Clemens22
No one knows how many letters he wrote beyond the twelve thousand accounted for at the Mark Twain Project. Many valuable ones have been los
t, such as hundreds to Jane that Mark Twain ordered burned in 1904. The letters reveal every shade of emotion. Few of them open a wider window on his antic side than the ones addressed to Howells. Grinding through revisions of Tom Sawyer in the upstairs billiard room, Mark Twain in January could find time to riff on a photograph that William and Elinor had sent to him, of themselves.
I can perceive…that Mr Howells is feeling as I so often feel, viz: “Well no doubt I am in the wrong, though I do not know where or how or why—but anyway it will be safest to look meek, & walk circumspectly for a while, & not discuss the thing.”
Then Sam aimed a teasing barb at Elinor herself—and in doing so offered a pitch-perfect send-up of Livy’s diction.
And you look exactly as Mrs. Clemens does just after she has said, “Indeed, I do not wonder that you can frame no reply: for you know only too well that your conduct admits of no excuse, palliation or argument—none!”23