Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Clemens soon gave up on his Mississippi fantasy, but only for a few months—or so he hoped. “I’ve put off the Miss River trip till June, & shall write a new book meantime,” he notified Bliss.24 The “new book” being more than half-written by now, Mark Twain seemed to be gearing up for another of his patented sprints to the final page. The sprint lasted into summer, interrupted by social and family distractions, one of which involved a familiar relative and a familiar issue. “Hoping that the Tennessee Land is now in hell, please pay the enclosed bill,” he directed Orion along with a payment for services to the latest agent hired (futilely) to dump the property.25 A couple of weeks later, he deflected a new land-investment scheme from Orion—purchase of the Stotts family’s Keokuk farm—with an explanation that revealed the ongoing drain of the new Nook Farm house: “We are under too heavy an expense to be venturing upon outlays that amount to much…We look for the bills, tomorrow, for the furniture of a guest room, our bedroom, the study, & odds & ends in the other rooms. These cannot fall short of $5000; & we are purposing to pay off the $16000 which we still owe on our ground, & thus free ourselves of debt.”26

  Visitors in fact formed a constant stream in and out of the Clemens household, as they would through all the Nook Farm years, from family and friends to P. T. Barnum, minus his circus. Dinner guests usually ended up agog at the improvisational theater Clemens liked to create: he would arise from the table and go pacing about the room, waving a handkerchief and discharging torrents of talk; or he would attack the piano and pound out jubilees, or croon spirituals and the songs of riverboatmen to himself in a far corner as if oblivious of the company; or he would pull on some worn cowskin slippers and hobble around in his “crippled colored uncle” breakdown; or work the edges in some other way that would finally get Livy to cry, “Oh, Youth!”

  Despite the household hubbub, Mark Twain tore along on the book, filling the billiard room with a blue haze of cigar smoke as he scribbled. “I wrote 4000 words yesterday,” he boasted to Howells on March 16.27 A month later, he reported to Mary Fairbanks that “[w]e have determined to try to sweat it out, here in Hartford, this summer, & not go away at all. That is Livy’s idea, not mine; for I can write ten chapters in Elmira where I can write one here. I work at work here, but I don’t accomplish anything worth speaking of.” He added, “I mean to try to go down the Mississippi river in May or June…”28 Yet Sam was already absorbed in a new dream adventure. Another figure from his Virginia City past had reemerged, via a letter: William Wright, the “Dan De Quille” of Territorial Enterprise renown. Now Sam was trying to conjure De Quille across the continent and into his present life, as he had conjured Joe Goodman four years earlier.

  Life had not been easy for De Quille, who had never quite recovered from the shock of returning to the newspaper from his 1862 vacation in the East to discover that a “Mark Twain” had claimed his pride of place as the writing star of the territory. By the time the Wild Humorist left the Pacific Slope in 1866, the erstwhile literary man was a serious drunk, a barroom fistfighter, a patron of whorehouses, and a hack. Joe Goodman tolerated him until 1869, and then fired him; then rehired him; and for several years, De Quille wavered between a literary comeback and delerium tremens. He pulled himself together at the beginning of 1873 to produce for Goodman a series of pointillist sketches about life in the mines, and began gathering material for a planned “work of merit”: a history of the Comstock Lode. This was the project that led De Quille to seek his old adversary’s advice in the early spring of 1875. Should he offer the Comstock manuscript as a “pamphlet” to a San Francisco publisher? Or was there any chance that Sam could help him find a better house back east?

  “Meddle with no Western publisher,” Sam commanded by telegram the day he received De Quille’s letter, March 29. “Make bargains of no kind until you get my letters.”29 Then, in a long missive begun later that day and finished nearly a week later, Sam whisked De Quille into one of his favorite realms, the paranormal. He’d known in advance the contents of De Quille’s incoming letter before even breaking the seal. Why? Because less than five days earlier, he had written to De Quille suggesting that he write this very book! “My mind suggested it to his mind,” he’d told Livy.30 The explanation? Mesmeric currents. Having checked the postmarks, Clemens realized he had the direction of influence reversed.

  So it was your mesmeric current that had flowed across the mountains & deserts three thousand miles & acted upon me, instead of mine flowing westward & acting upon you. So you were the originator of the idea.31

  These currents had established three things, Sam went on. Namely:

  1st Mesmeric sympathies can flash themselves 3000 miles within the space of 12 hours—possibly instantly…

  2d They come clear through, & don’t have to be repeated at way stations between, like land telegraphy.

  3d They travel from west to east, not from east to west.

  However, this point on No. 3 is not well taken, because there isn’t any proof that they don’t travel westwardly upon occasion.32

  One can fairly imagine Dan De Quille reaching for a good stiff jolt of something as he tried to absorb all this. He’d just wanted a little advice on a book. But Sam wanted metaphysics, and, by the way, had taken it upon himself to run De Quille’s business and literary interests, whether De Quille liked it or not. “I want you, about August, to canvas Virginia & Gold Hill yourself,”33 he instructed—“canvas,” as in “sign up miners to buy this book that I’m going to teach you how to write.” “Reserve other Nevada camps for yourself, too—that is, be General Agent for the whole State, & sublet to canvassers at 40 per cent off…”34 After several thoughts about retail pricing, Sam shifted to the literary agenda. Dan De Quille was about to become one of the few men ever to experience a writing lesson from Mark Twain.

  Dan, there are more ways than one of writing a book; & your way is not the right one. You see, the winning card is to nail a man’s interest with Chapter 1, & never let up on him for an instant…That can’t be done with detached sketches; but I’ll show you how to make a man read every one of those sketches, under the stupid impression that they are mere accidental incidents that have dropped in on you unawares in the course of your narrative…It isn’t any more trouble to write that book than it is to report an inquest.35

  Oh, and one more thing. “Drop your reporting & come here, right away. Whatever money you need, get it off Joe, or telegraph me. Come right along at once.”36 It seemed as though Sam were speaking through Colonel Sellers.

  Here you shall stop at the best hotel, & every morning I will walk down…bring you to my house & we will grind literature all day long in the same room; then I’ll escort you half way home again. Sundays we will smoke & lie. When you need money you will know where to get it…there’s a most noble divan in my study to stretch your bones on when you get tired. Besides, when it comes to building a book I can show you a trick or two which I don’t teach to everybody, I can tell you!37

  And in a culminating brainstorm that assumed, boylike, that any passing impulse could be turned into reality: “Bring Joe along with you.”38

  With that off his chest, Sam got back to his own manuscript.

  After all the months away from Tom Sawyer, returning to it had the effect of mounting a still-unbroken horse. In which direction would it gallop off? Manhood or boyhood? In July, Howells advised him toward the former choice. “I really feel very much interested in your making that your chief work,” he urged Mark Twain; “you wont have such another chance; don’t waste it on a boy, and don’t hurry the writing for the sake of making a book.”39 Mark Twain, though, had reached a contrary decision. He would not send Tom out into the world for a Battle of Life in Many Lands. He would conclude the tale while his hero was still an un-driveling boy. Whether this would make Tom Sawyer a “boy’s book,” like Aldrich’s had been, or a book for grown-ups—that issue remained murky. Nor did his choice of direction guarantee that the novel was under control. Scholarly an
alyses of his writing process show that through the rest of the story’s construction, Mark Twain continued to struggle with organizing the plotline, shuffling and reshuffling episodes, even revisiting the first half of the manuscript to foreshadow certain plot twists that had come to him. He breezed past any further crippling plot dilemmas. The incidents and voices flowed again: Tom returns to the island, the three friends slip back into town to observe their own funerals from the church gallery and then march down to revel in the villagers’ joy that they are still alive; Tom and Becky resume their rocky romance; Tom has his famous stint with the Cadets of Temperance; the boys slip matches and tobacco to the jailed Muff Potter, accused of Dr. Robinson’s murder (a faint but unmistakable echo of Sammy’s role in the jailhouse burning of the drunken tramp); Tom heroically fingers Injun Joe at Potter’s trial; Tom and Huck discover the villain’s buried treasure; the great children’s picnic scene plays itself out, ending with Tom and Becky lost in the cave where Injun Joe is hiding out; Tom leads Becky to freedom and the townsmen seal the cave with Joe inside; Tom produces the treasure’s gold coins, which the grown-ups invest for him and Huck; and the novel ends with Huck warily facing “sivilization” at the Widow Douglas’s hands, but still plotting one more midnight rendezvous with Tom.

  WHILE CLEMENS smoked and scribbled in his billiard room–study, working toward a November delivery date, Livy worked at holding the vast Nook Farm premises together. This included the challenge of overseeing the revolving and ever-bumptious household staff. That staff now included nurses for both Susy and the baby Clara; a cook, and a coachman. Among the most vivid figures was Mara McLaughlin, the last of the five wet nurses who augmented Livy’s thin supply of milk in breast-feeding Clara. Judging from Mark Twain’s unpublished late-life sketch, it was a wonder that Mara’s nourishment didn’t spur Clara to join a railroad crew in later life.

  She stood six feet in her stockings…she had the martial port & stride of a grenadier…She was as independent as the flag…she had the appetite of a crocodile, the stomach of a cellar, & the digestion of a quartz-mill…she devoured anything & everything she could get her hands on, shoveling into her person fiendish combinations of fresh pork, lemon pie, boiled cabbage, ice cream, green apples, pickled tripe, raw turnips, & washing the whole cargo down with freshets of coffee, tea, brandy, whisky, turpentine, kerosene…she smoked pipes, cigars, cigarettes, she whooped like a Pawnee & swore like a demon; & then she would go upstairs loaded as described & perfectly delight the baby with a bouquet which ought to have killed it at thirty yards…40

  In a later reminiscence, Mark Twain was kind enough to add that “[i]n the shortest month of the year she drank two hundred and fifty-eight pints of my beer, without invitation, leaving only forty-two for me. I think it was the dryest month I ever spent since I first became a theoretical teetotaler.”41

  The staffing situation stabilized considerably with the chance arrival, that spring, of a former slave and Union army aide, who remained as the Clemens butler for sixteen years. George Griffin “was an accident,” Sam remembered. “He came to wash some windows, & remained half a generation.”42 Griffin was an intelligent and forceful man, politically opinionated but graced with a sense of diplomacy: he softened Clemens’s tirades as he relayed the gist of his employer’s opinions to others, and served as the peacemaker among the hired help. Clemens deeply admired the man, and probably transported some of his strength of character to the persona of Jim. It was Livy, the daughter of abolitionists, who showed less tolerance for such Griffin habits as speaking man-to-man with dinner guests and probing them about political issues. As Paine tells it, her disapproval of him led her to fire him once—only to find him standing at the breakfast-table the following morning.

  “George,” she said, “didn’t I discharge you yesterday?”

  “Yes, Mis’ Clemens, but I knew you couldn’t get along without me, so I thought I’d better stay awhile.”43

  IN MID-APRIL, Sam and Joe Twichell traveled to Brooklyn to attend a critical session of Henry Ward Beecher’s adultery trial. Beecher’s scheduled cross-examination by Theodore Tilton’s attorney William Fullerton, a moment expected to produce shocking testimony, drew ten times as many spectators as the trial room could hold. A New York Tribune editor recognized Clemens, and escorted him and Twichell through the packed premises to the newspaper’s reserved seats adjacent to the judge’s desk. The Tribune reported the event, and even the rival Sun noted the great man’s privileged access: “Mark Twain shambled in loose of coat and joints and got a seat near the plaintiff’s table.”44

  It was Twichell, not Mark Twain, who captured the high pitch of drama in the day’s proceedings. In his journal, the clergyman wrote:

  The excitement was such as to be painful. It was very trying to me to see Mr. B. subject to such questioning. He appeared well—innocent—unafraid—at ease…He was a little as though speaking to an audience.

  I was immensely drawn out to him, and wished for his sake that I was a better man—good enough to sit there and pray for him…

  At the close of the p.m. session when the Court adjourned I saw Mr Beecher shake hands with…the opposing counsel, and (being very near) heard him say to him, “Sometime I’ll tell you all about it,” or that substantially…45

  Dan De Quille, gaunt beneath his trademark wispy goatee, materialized in Hartford on May 27, luggage in hand, as he had been instructed. (He traveled by train rather than mesmeric current, and couldn’t quite manage to deliver Joe Goodman.) He took a room at the Union Hall Hotel on Farmington Avenue, and, just as Goodman had done in 1871 at Quarry Farm, spent his days ensconced with Sam, writing. The two old friends shared a makeshift study in the loft over the Clemens’s stable, where they could work and smoke in seclusion. “[H]is stable is as fine as most houses,” the guest marveled to his sister.46 A day or so after De Quille arrived, Clemens took him and the writer Joaquin Miller, who’d stopped over after a visit to Europe, to Elisha Bliss’s offices. It was probably on this visit that De Quille and Bliss reached a publishing agreement for the book that became famous as The Big Bonanza.

  DE QUILLE’S presence apparently didn’t distract Mark Twain from his sprint to the finish line with Tom Sawyer. Neither did Livy’s illness; she lay abed through the last week of June. Sam did find time to look after her nutritional needs, in his way. “I have taught Livy at last to drink a bottle of beer every night,” he reported to his abstinence-minded sister, “& all in good time I shall teach the children to do the same. If it is wrong, then, (as the Arabs say,) ‘On my head be it!’ ”47

  Howells received portentous news in a letter dated July 5.

  I have finished the story & didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but autobiographically—like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person. If I went on, now, & took him into manhood, he would just be like all the one-horse men in literature & the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. It is not a boy’s book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.48

  Mark Twain’s slightly overwrought insistence on this point possibly arose from the “postpartum” malaise that many authors report on completion of a work. It likely also reflected a shift in his thinking from art to business. He would like to see it serialized in the Atlantic, he allowed to Howells—who had been angling hard for just that—“but I doubt if it would pay the publishers to buy the privilege, or me to sell it.” This was all about competition with Bret Harte, who had just finished Gabriel Conroy and sold serial rights to Scribner’s Monthly for $6,500—Sam had the figure right at the tip of his fingers.* Clemens doubted he could pull down the same serial fee from the Atlantic. By implication, if he couldn’t outsell Harte, he would not be humiliated by accepting a lesser fee.

  Then, having dashed his friend’s acquisition hopes, Sam hit Howells up for a favor. It involved that confounded nagging aesthetic part.

  I wish you would promise
to read the MS of Tom Sawyer some time, & see if you don’t really decide that I am right in closing with him as a boy—& point out the most glaring defects for me. It is a tremendous favor to ask…But the thing has been so many months in my mind that it seems a relief to snake it out. I don’t know any other person whose judgment I could venture to take fully & entirely.49

  Just before this request to Howells, Clemens had alluded almost absentmindedly to an idea he’d been mulling for a new boy’s book.

  By & by I shall take a boy of twelve & run him on through life (in the first person) but not Tom Sawyer—he would not be a good character for it.50

  Mark Twain continued to revise The Adventures of Tom Sawyer through the summer and fall. He found time to knock off a piece for the October Atlantic, apparently unironic and wisely unsigned, that modestly proposed a change in the suffrage laws. Titled “The Curious Republic of Gondour,” the essay argued, in essence, that universal suffrage was fine—but why not allot bonus voting privileges on an escalating scale based on extent of education and property holding.

  At the end of July, as Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old was being published, Sam and his family fled the heat of Hartford for a vacation resort near Newport, Rhode Island. They invited De Quille along for a week. There they promenaded in white linens, heard a lecture by the great naturalist Alexander Agassiz, and took tea with the poet Julia Ward Howe. Sam went bowling by candlelight on a decrepit single alley on the premises, in rarefied company: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Unitarian minister, essayist, icon of abolitionists, and a youthful confidant of Emerson and Lowell and Holmes.

  Back at Nook Farm, still bedeviled by his household expenses, Sam finally turned loose of the manuscript, shipping it off to Bliss on November 5, with a recommendation that True Williams be assigned the illustrations. Immediately, he began scheming for ways to wring more profit from it. Remembering that the stage version of The Gilded Age had been a cash cow, he shipped an “amanuensis” copy of the novel down to Howells in Boston, along with instructions for the Atlantic editor, who may or may not have had other obligations to burden him: