Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  [D]ramatize it if you perceive that you can, & take…half of the first $6,000 which I receive for its representation on the stage. You could alter the plot entirely, if you chose…I have my eye upon two young girls who can play “Tom” & “Huck.”*…Come—can’t you tackle this in the odd hours of your vacation?—or later, if you prefer.51

  Howells stood his ground on this one. It was a very pleasant proposal. “But I couldn’t do it, and if I could, it wouldn’t be a favor to dramatize your story.”52 Still, shipping Howells the amanuensis copy brought its rewards.

  I finished reading Tom Sawyer a week ago, sitting up till one A.M., to get to the end, simply because it was impossible to leave off. It’s altogether the best boy’s story I ever read. It will be an immense success. But I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy’s story.53

  And then the great arbiter of American letters blurted his famous confession.

  The adventures are enchanting. I wish I had been on that island. The treasure-hunting, the loss in the cave—it’s all exciting and splendid.54

  Howells did permit himself one critical thought. “I don’t seem to think I liked the last chapter. I believe I would cut that.”55

  Mark Twain agreed on all counts. “Mrs. Clemens decides with you that the book should issue as a book for boys, pure & simple,” he wrote back, “—& so do I. It is surely the correct idea.”56 He added: “Something told me that the book was done when I got to that point—& so the strong temptation to put Huck’s life at the widow’s into detail…was resisted.”57

  No copies of that “last chapter” have been recovered; Mark Twain replaced the “last” chapter with the familiar two-paragraph “Conclusion” (“So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly the history of a boy, it must stop here…”58) Some scholars have speculated that it contained the seeds of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” More carefully inductive analysis has concluded that Mark Twain had Chapter 35—the present ending—in mind when he spoke of the book being done, and not the omitted chapter. His decision to resist developing Huck’s life had already been made. Thus the missing chapter is likely nothing more than further musing on why the narrative “must stop here.”59

  A couple of weeks after receiving Howells’s praise for Tom Sawyer, Sam “afflicted” the editor with his newfangled toy, the typewriter, as he’d threatened to do for months, sending it by way of Frank Bliss. Howells’s internationally respected intellect proved no match for the machine; he was practically devoured by it.

  “Of course it doesn’t work,” he wailed to Clemens.

  [I]f I can persuade some of the letters to get up against the ribbon they wont get down again without digital assistance. The treadle refuses to have any part or parcel in the performance; and I don’t know how to get the roller to turn with the paper. Nevertheless, I have begun several letters to My d ar lemans, as it prefers to spell your respected name…60

  SAMUEL CLEMENS had spent much of 1875, his fortieth year, absorbed in adult concerns. Yet in certain ways, this year had also restored him powerfully to his youthful past. He and Howells had begun to encounter each other as playful boys-in-mufti; and Livy indulged his dinner-table hijinx as the irrepressible “Youth.” As the year ended, Sam, nearly disabled with dysentery, found in it some comic relief, as it were. “Question:” he scrawled to the Reverend Mr. Twichell, “If a Congress of Presbyterians is a PRESBYtery, what is a Congress of dissenters?”61 This may have been the ancestor of Woody Allen’s quip about Dissent and Commentary magazines. On November 27, her thirtieth birthday, Sam composed a prose poem for Livy that reinvoked the passion of his love letters of seven years earlier. “You are dearer to me today, my child, than you were upon the last anniversary of this birth-day,” he wrote;

  you were dearer then than you were a year before—you have grown more & more dear from the first of those anniversaries…Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries…trusting & believing that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.62

  And then on Christmas morning, he outdid himself, with a fanciful letter to the elder daughter, not yet quite four, whom he already worshipped—a letter that almost unconsciously surrenders to its own childlike conceits as it progresses.

  Palace of St. Nicholas,

  In the Moon,

  Christmas Morning.

  My Dear Susie Clemens:

  I have received & read all the letters which you & your little sister have written me by the hand of your mother & your nurses; & I have also read those which you little people have written me with your own hands—for although you did not use any characters that are in grown people’s alphabets, you used the character which all children, in all lands on earth & in the twinkling stars use…[Thus] I can read your & your baby sister’s jagged & fantastic marks without any trouble at all.

  He continued,

  You will find that I made no mistakes about the things which you & the baby ordered…I went down your chimney at midnight when you were asleep, & delivered them all, myself—& kissed both of you…

  He reported that in the case of a couple of orders, he had run out of stock:

  Our last lot of kitchen furniture for dolls had just gone to a very poor little child in the North Star, away up in the cold country above the Big Dipper. Your mama can show you that star, & you will say, “Little Snow Flake (for that is the child’s name,) I’m glad you got that furniture, for you need it more than I.”

  He confessed difficulty in deciphering “a word or two in your mama’s letter,” and promised to stop by the house at 9 a.m. Christmas morning to inquire about it.

  But I must not see anybody, & I must not speak to anybody but you. When the kitchen door-bell rings, George must be blindfolded & sent to open the door…Then you must go to the nursery & stand on a chair or the nurse’s bed, & put your ear to the speaking tube that leads down to the kitchen, & when I whistle through it, you must speak in the tube & say, “Welcome, Santa Claus!” [Then, when I leave] You must say, “Good bye, good old Santa Claus, & thank you very much—& please tell that little Snow Flake I will look at her star to-night & she must look down here…”

  He added an instruction that hinted of the preoccupation many fathers feel in relation to their children.

  If my boot should leave a stain on the marble, George must not holystone it away. Leave it there always in memory of my visit…

  Your loving

  Santa Claus,

  Whom people sometimes call “The Man in the Moon.”63

  * One surviving photo of him as a youth gives the lie to this impression. He is eighteen, clean-shaven, his dark hair cut at page-boy length on the sides and combed into a pompadour on top. Head tilted, gazing into the camera with smoldering eyes, he looks like nothing so much as a pop star from the 1970s.

  * Gabriel Conroy in fact was destined to be a disastrous flop in hardcover sales.

  * Casting girls in boys’ roles to enhance the image of youthful freshness was a common convention of the 19th-century theater. Stage and screen versions of Peter Pan have featured women in the title role for a century—from Nina Boucicault in 1904 through Cathy Rigby in 1999.

  32

  “It Befell Yt One Did Breake Wind…”

  (1876)

  America celebrated its Centennial in 1876—banners, polished brass, parades in all the cities and towns, the Eagle rampant, talons filled with thunderbolts—but Samuel Clemens seemed hardly to notice. The national boundaries had shrunk for this onetime wanderer, down to the precincts of New York and Boston and the parlors of Hartford. Clemens was a bill-paying burgher now, a society host, a celebrity. Happy as a husband and father, he seemed suspended between his successful past and an uncertain future. Could he sustain his rise, inconceivable a decade earlier, from obscurity to preeminence in America? Or would he realize the late-night fear he’d confessed to Stoddard?—lose the power of interesting an audience, become unable to write, die in the poorhouse?

  A lot depended on the wor
k now inching its way toward publication, this departure from sketch and chronicle into fiction, without the support of a partner. He braced for the final revisions of Tom Sawyer in January, motivated by the assumption that Elisha Bliss would have the book on the market right away. Still weakened with dysentery, he regarded the task as “dreary, & hateful.”1 He felt numbed to the novel that had been on his mind for five years. He had worked and reworked it until he could no longer judge its aesthetic worth; it was a property now, and he hungered to see it return some capital. Clemens should have known his publisher better. Bliss was not even close to a production run.

  “I want you to take my new book to England,” he instructed Moncure Conway, in early January, “& have it published there by some one…before it is issued here.”2 Conway, who had helped Sam guide Livy blindfolded to Shakespeare’s gravesite two and a half years earlier, was Clemens’s informal literary agent in England. A Southern cleric who had dared preach abolitionism before the Civil War, he had taken up residence in London, where he was pastor to a Unitarian church, and also a biographer, novelist, and pamphleteer. In January 1876 he had just finished a lecture tour in America and was about to return to his adopted country. He agreed to take with him the amanuensis copy of the manuscript, to which Clemens had transferred almost all of Howells’s suggestions.

  Clemens was cheered by the superb gallery of illustrations that arrived from True Williams. “Rattling good” pictures, he told Howells, “—some of them very dainty.” He added, “Poor devil, what a genius he has & how he does murder it with rum.”3 Clemens hardly exaggerated. Working from the text and his imagination, the self-taught and self-destructive Williams contributed 159 drawings, from cartoonish thumbnails to the introductory full-page rendering of Tom that presented him in an almost pre-Raphaelite aura: wreathed in curls, with full lips and unfocused upcast eyes. The god-boy half-reclines against the trunk of a brookside tree, a wide-brimmed hat pushed back on his head, feet bare, ankles crossed, a fishing pole lightly depending from his left hand. This image, far more idealized than Mark Twain’s own affectionate word-portraits, helped establish Tom Sawyer as the iconic American boy for generations of readers even before they turned to the famous opening one-word sentence, “Tom!”

  More portentous in literary terms, Williams struck a visual introduction to a far humbler boy on page 64, this one ragged and half-grinning, his hat brim torn, his patched trousers pulled nearly to his chin, a dead cat dangling from his hand: Huckleberry Finn.

  On the day he planned to commence the hated drudgery of revisions, Clemens plucked a package from the usual onslaught of daily mail and unwrapped it to behold salvation: there was the amanuensis copy he’d sent to Howells, now marked throughout with the Atlantic editor’s own penciled emendations. His work had been done for him! “This was splendid, & swept away all labor,” he exulted to his patron. “Instead of reading the MS, I simply hunted out the pencil marks & made the emendations which they suggested.”4 These included the reduction of Tom’s battle with the new boy in Chapter 1 to a couple of paragraphs interspersed by the famous “I-can-lick-you” / “I’d-like-to-see-you-

  try-it” routine; the reduction of the Superintendent’s smarmy Sunday-school speech to a brief paragraph, and the taming of “various obscenities”—except for one, which had somehow slipped past Howells, Livy, and “her aunt & her mother”: Huck Finn’s complaint in chapter 35 that at the Widow Douglas’s house, “they comb me all to hell.” Clemens confessed to Howells that he’d been glad at first that no one had flagged it; but now, given his intention to aim the book toward girls and boys, he wondered at its propriety. Did Howells?

  Howells made an immediate stand for literary propriety.

  I’d have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn’t notice it because the locution was so familiar to my Western sense, and so exactly the thing that Huck would say.5

  Mark Twain changed “hell” to “thunder.”

  Howells made another diving goal-line interception: he persuaded Clemens to radically modify the “Anatomy book” section in Chapter 22. Seizing a chance, Becky riffles through this “mysterious book,” which the schoolmaster Dobbins pulls from his desk drawer every day and absorbs himself in. As she stands looking at the frontispiece—“a human figure, stark naked”6—Tom startles her from behind, and she tears the page.

  At this point in the finished chapter, the focus turns to Tom’s chivalry as he takes the blame for the ripped frontispiece, earns a whipping, and saves Becky’s reputation. The chapter may have been headed elsewhere before Howells intervened: although Mark Twain gives Dobbins the fig leaf, as it were, of respectability—noting that he’d once aspired to be a doctor—Howells’s alarm suggests that his absorption in the Anatomy figure (gender undisclosed) may have exceeded the strictly morphological.

  THESE EDITS were also made in the copy Moncure Conway would carry with him. Conway secured an agreement with the British firm of Chatto & Windus to publish an edition of the book in June. They would become Mark Twain’s standard English publisher for the rest of his career.

  Where was Bliss? In mid-March, Clemens still assumed that his publisher was preparing the presses and the subscription canvassers—but he was sensing trouble. “It is going to rush you too tight to do your canvassing & issue ‘Tom’ the middle of April, isn’t it?” he queried “Friend Bliss” on March 19th. “If so, you better clap on your canvassers at once but not publish till the middle of May. Drop me a line about this at once…”7 As April began, he still held out hope for a May publication. “A week from now the Atlantic will come out with a mighty handsome notice of the book, by Howells,” he wrote to Conway on April 9, “…but the book won’t issue till 2 or even 4 weeks later.”8 His awareness of the lag between Howells’s review and the new publication date embarrassed Clemens, and he struggled to ease the impact of the bad news. “Bliss made a failure in the matter of getting Tom Sawyer ready on time,” he hedged to the editor in late April, when the issue was in the mail to its subscribers, “—the engravers assisting, as usual.”9 He’d visited the publisher to find out the extent of the delay, Clemens went on, “& found that the man had not even put a canvasser on or issued an advertisement yet—in fact that the electrotypes would not all be done for a month! But of course the main trouble was the fact that no canvassing had been done—because a subscription harvest is before publication, (not after, when people have discovered how bad one’s book is).”10 Then, with artful nonchalance, he spilled most of the rest of the beans: “When I observed that my Sketches [New and Old] had dropped from a sale of 6 or 7000 a month down to 1200 a month, I said ‘this ain’t no time to be publishing books; therefore, let Tom lay still till autumn, Mr. Bliss, & make a holiday book of him to beguile the young people withal.’ ”11 Nine months would separate the review from the publication.

  The delay produced one further bit of misfortune. In June, a Canadian band of brigands, Belford Brothers, snatched a copy of the Chatto & Windus edition and rushed an unauthorized version of the book into print. By summer’s end, some hundred thousand copies at seventy-five cents each had crossed the border and reached American bookstores, a devastating drain on the novel’s tardy legitimate sales.

  HOWELLS’S UNSIGNED, warmhearted review of Tom Sawyer was all that Sam could have wished for—except timely. The ever-pragmatic author saw the notice as a preemptive weapon: “It is a splendid notice, & will embolden weak-kneed journalistic admirers to speak out, & will modify or shut up the unfriendly.”12 The rave came at a time when it could only help sales of the Canadian edition. Still, it struck some notes that ratified the novel’s place at the forefront of postwar American fiction, and mitigated Howells’s compromised stance as Mark Twain’s literary advisor, de facto editor, and reviewer. Howells began with a bow (and oh-so-subtle dismissal) to his and Mark Twain’s friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich: he remarked pleasantly on how the 1869 Story of a Bad Boy depicted its New England hero as “more or less part of a settled order of things,�
�� hemmed in by “the traditions of an established civilization.”13 Then he shifted to a full-bore celebration of Mark Twain’s creation.

  Mr. Clemens, on the contrary, has taken the boy of the Southwest for the hero of his new book, and has presented him with a fidelity to circumstance which loses no charm by being realistic in the highest degree, and which gives incomparably the best picture of life in that region as yet known to fiction.14

  The review went on to make clear that the “best picture” Howells had in mind was of something even greater: the best picture of childhood yet written by an American.

  [T]hroughout there is scrupulous regard for the boy’s point of view in reference to his surroundings and himself, which shows how rapidly Mr. Clemens has grown as an artist…

  The story is a wonderful study of the boy-mind, which inhabits a world quite distinct from that in which he is bodily present with his elders, and in this lies its great charm and its universality, for boy nature, however human nature varies, is the same everywhere.15

  Howells was announcing to his educated readers two cornerstones of the American realistic aesthetic a-borning: (1) the fresh, bold, colloquial Western voice now taking its rightful place beside “polite,” Augustan, Eastern letters, and (2) the use of a new psychological realism that would soon leave all the Aldriches (and the Holmeses and the Longfellows and the Whittiers) in the swirling American dust.

  SAM WAS not through scheming. On June 24, he wrote to Bliss in his capacity as a board member of American Publishing Company to propose a shift in management philosophy: the company should sell two-thirds of its copyrights, auction off its newly acquired offices and printing presses, move back into “cheap quarters” again, and limit its publishing output to one or two books at a time. Clemens gave Bliss the benefit of his reasoning. “If the directors will cut the business down two-thirds, & the expenses one half, I think it will be an advantage to all concerned,” he wrote, “& I feel persuaded that I shall sell more books.”16 More books than Bret Harte, may have been part of the implied subtext.