Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Two months after his praise of Mark Twain’s psychological realism, Howells published an extraordinary experiment by Mark Twain in psychological surrealism, of a type that the author would revisit and refine over the rest of his life. (“Please correct it mercilessly,” he pleaded, typically, in his cover letter.)17 Mark Twain had earlier read it to a gathering in the Clemens household of the Monday Evening Club. This group of Hartford intellectuals, writers, and clerics (including Twichell) had been convening fortnightly since its founding in 1869. At each meeting, one member of the club would read from a scholarly, political, or philosophical paper, which would be dissected by the others. The group had elected Mark Twain a member in 1873, even before he moved his family into Nook Farm, and for the next decade he contributed a paper every couple of years or so. This one figured to bring the Victorian gents upright in their horse-hair sofas. Mark Twain had given it a carefully ambiguous title: “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” In fact, the sketch described a dark fantasy encounter between the narrator and a household-invading dwarf. The dwarf turned out to be the narrator’s conscience—wrenched into visibility through an inadvertent wish voiced by its owner.

  The shocking element in the piece was its self-lacerating autobiographical dimension. The creature’s resemblance to its victim, in “mean form,” looks, clothes, and attitude, virtually insists that the reader understand it as a Twainian “double.” As the dwarf-conscience mimics his owner’s bad habits and inventories his bad behavior, it becomes obvious that Mark Twain is holding himself up to a kind of public tribunal. The narrator has turned a tramp away from his door with a cruel lie (tramps were frequent visitors to the great Clemens house); rebuffed a young woman who’d asked him to read her manuscript; raged at his young children. “In truth,” the dwarf rails, “you are always consistent, always yourself, always an ass.”18 The narrator bristles at the dwarf’s “exasperating drawl,” and seethes that “there is nothing I am quite so sensitive about as a mocking imitation of my drawling infirmity of speech.”19

  This public, if partial, purging of Samuel Clemens’s guilt, along with the “doubling” device that he used as his cleansing agent, are examples of why psychoanalysis has formed a template for examinations of his life. Perhaps it is moot to point out that the narrator’s resolution of the dwarf problem—tearing the little bugger to bits and throwing his remains into the fire, then celebrating his freedom from conscience by murdering thirty-eight people, burning a house, swindling a widow and otherwise ringmastering the “Carnival of Crime in Connecticut”—are all acts of imagination, and did not happen in real life. “Carnival of Crime” seems to have gone over rather well with the Monday Evening Club: one of its clerical members offered Mark Twain his pulpit to deliver it as a sermon. Howells published it in the June Atlantic.

  With time on his hands, Sam foraged for ways to keep himself amused. He took up with a troupe of amateur Hartford actors, and on April 26 he made his theatrical stage debut in the role of Peter Spyuk in The Loan of a Lover. (On the following night, he seems to have given his farewell performance.) He managed to recite every one of his character’s written lines—many of them rewritten by him—and spontaneously contributed several more during the performances, free of charge, which had the rest of the cast members groping for their cues; the audience loved it, and Mark Twain had fun. He cooked up another (doomed) nutty literary scheme and dragooned Howells into it—Howells, who had begun writing theatrical farces between serious novels to subsidize his own heavy household bills. This one would be a “skeleton novelette,” or perhaps a “blindfold novelette,” in which a dozen or so famous writers would each work up a short story based on a plot outline common to all of them—“A Murder a Mystery & a Marriage” being the general idea. The results would be serialized in the Atlantic. Mark Twain envisioned Howells, Harte, Aldrich, Holmes—hell, whomever they could coax into the game. In the event, the only contribution ever written was Mark Twain’s; it started out well but the ending was jumbled and somehow worked in a swipe at Jules Verne. The Atlantic waited a judicious 125 years before publishing it in the fall of 2001.*

  “I…began another boys’ book—more to be at work than anything else,” he casually notified Howells in August from the Crane farm. “I have written 400 pages on it—therefore it is very nearly half done. It is Huck Finn’s Autobiography. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, & may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.”20

  Quarry Farm worked its soothing spell on the family. Livy, suffering from early rheumatism and a sore throat, relaxed in the cool breezes at her sister’s hilltop household. She wrote letters about how Susy and Clara, now four and two, “are grown fat and hearty feeding chickens & ducks twice a day, and are keenly alive to all the farm interests.”21 Susy was already developing her renowned aphoristic skill. When Sam sent into Elmira for “a vast pair of shoes with a most villainous pattern,”22 as he admitted to Howells, Susie gave them an “ew, gross” sort of once-over but wore them anyway. At prayer time that night, when Livy cued her with the usual prompt, “Now Susie—think about God,” the child responded, “Mamma, I can’t, with these shoes.”23

  The getaway reawakened Mark Twain’s lyric voice.

  The farm is perfectly delightful, this season. It is as quiet & peaceful as a South-sea island. Some of the sun-sets which we have witnessed from this commanding eminence were marvelous. One evening a rainbow spanned an entire range of hills with its mighty arch, & from a black hub resting upon the hill-top in the exact centre, black rays diverged upward in perfect regularity to the rainbow’s arch & created a very strongly defined & altogether the most majestic, magnificent, & startling half-sunk wagon wheel you can imagine.24

  QUARRY FARM offered intellectual as well as sensory pleasures. Theodore and Susan Crane were socially progressive Congregationalists and read widely in literature; their circle of friends echoed the enlightened intensity of Nook Farm. (Just down the steep hill lay the Elmira Water Cure sanitarium, run by the pioneering woman physician Rachel Gleason and her husband.) Household servants were welcomed as equals in the evening conversations on the front porch; children—the Clemens girls and their Langdon cousins—were accepted at the dining table, and ran about the premises free from “seen-but-not-heard” restraints. The Cranes constructed a playhouse for the girls, a scaled-down variation on their father’s gazebo.

  Clemens’s reverie drifted in several directions in the summer of 1876. He’d begun to think of visiting England, but the old fountains of the deep were a-churn as well. Stories from several sources were flowing together: stories, story fragments, elements of stories; or perhaps one meta-story so disparate in its elements that it would have to be dammed off, over the next few years, and channeled into separate books. The Mississippi River was calling him again. The Mississippi coursed through those four hundred pages of that new, imperiled boy’s book.

  Reveries of boyhood nearly always put him in mind of Will Bowen—which was not always great news for Will Bowen. How Sam happened to feel about his boyhood friend in those moments depended on how he was feeling about himself. This summer, he rounded mercilessly on Bowen, who evidently had made the innocent mistake of sending a nostalgia-leavened letter. Clemens’s first draft of a reply was a cannonade from the outset.

  Damnation, (if you will allow the expression,) get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls…

  You are petting & pitying & admiring yourself over your years of patient endeavor…& your good fight against misfortune & disaster…O, relegate all that to the days of callow adolescence, where it belongs…27

  Responding to another Bowen blunder—a complaint about his finances—Clemens angrily disclosed his own well-shrouded anxieties.

  Have you a monopoly of possible misfortune & beggary? I think not. Every demi-year threatens me—& most of the people that I know. Then why think & talk about it…?

  As to the pas
t, there is one good thing about it, & that is, that it is the past, & we don’t have to see it again…Each day that is added to the past is but an old boot added to a pile of rubbish…If you can find valuables in your pile, lucky boy you—that is all.28

  The tone borders on the brutal, but Clemens’s message is heartfelt: “You need a dose of salts, & I am trying to give it to you.”29 In fact he tossed this screed away after finishing it. As he later told his friend Jacob Burrough, “I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter & saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugar-coat the anguish & make it a little more endurable; & I asked him to write & thank me honestly for doing him the best & kindliest favor that any friend ever had done him—but he hasn’t done it yet.”30 He added, revealingly:

  There is one thing which I can’t stand, & won’t stand, from many people. That is, sham sentimentality…the sort that makes up the Original Poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals in ‘the happy days of yore,’ ‘the sweet yet melancholy past,’ with its ‘blighted hopes’ & its ‘vanished dreams’—& all that sort of drivel.31

  This was a far different Sam Clemens than the dreamy bridegroom who in 1870 had serenaded Bowen about those breaking-up fountains, the old faces peering out of the mists. In the six intervening years, Mark Twain had peered deeply back at those old faces and listened to their voices; and what he saw and heard had sharpened his edge. In Tom Sawyer, and to a far greater degree in the Huck Finn manuscript now underway, he had abolished sentimentality as a legitimate pet conceit of American literature, and replaced it with what a later writer* called, “The Cruel Radiance of What Is.”

  HOWELLS WAS the one correspondent who almost never felt the sting of Clemens’s bad moods. One of Sam’s greatest pleasures throughout that fretful period was exchanging letters with the august Boston editor. The two men wrote constantly through the late 1870s; were always inviting each other for a visit, usually in a mock-wheedling tone (“[W]on’t you & Mrs. Howells come down Saturday the 22d, & remain to the Club† on Monday night? We always have a rattling good time at the Club, & we do want you to come, ever so much. Will you? Now say you will”32). Sometimes the invitee actually had time to accept (“My dear Clemens…Your visit was a perfect ovation for us: we never enjoy anything so much as those visits of yours. The smoke and the Scotch and the late hours almost kill us; but we…say what a glorious time it was, and air the library…”33). More often, a glum demurral came back (“I shall not be able to come down to Hartford this Saturday, but I am getting the better of my literary misery, and you may depend upon seeing me very soon”34).

  They gossiped about other writers—Mark Twain accused Bret Harte of imitating Dickens—they issued literary commands (“Why don’t you come out with a letter, or speech, or something, for [Rutherford B.] Hayes?”35 “Write a drama, Howells.”36); they inflated their influence on the tides of history (“You know I wrote the Life of Lincoln which elected him.”37); they kept up the conceit that their demure, cerebral wives were dangerous shrews (“Consound my cats—as Mrs. Clemens says when roused to ferocity”38); they mock-scolded each other (“Oh, come, now, I won’t stand this!”39); they told each other to “Look here,” and “See here.” Howells, who otherwise bore the weight of Western letters on his small shoulders, adopted an unbuttoned voice for these letters. He sounded like a dignified man doing his best to seem jaunty; to seem less like a Victorian gent than like a Victorian guy.

  I wrote you a long and affectionate letter just before you left Hartford, and you replied with a postal card; on which instantly forgetting all the past kindnesses between us, I dropped you. You may not have known it but I did. Now I find I can’t very well go on without hearing from you, and I wish you would give me your news—what you are doing, thinking, saying.40

  THE WRAITH that had once been Bret Harte showed up at Nook Farm shortly after the Clemenses returned there from Elmira in early October. He brought with him an idea for a return to glory, and he wanted Mark Twain to be his partner in it. Harte’s fabulous clothes were now gone shiny, his early good looks gone haggard. He was badly in debt (he owed Clemens money), often drunk in public, delinquent at scheduled appearances, shunned by the Boston literati who’d welcomed him east a lifetime ago (he never had fulfilled that spectacular $10,000 contract presented him by Fields), groping for the creative magic that had once seemed his birthright. Yet he clung to the remains of the ironic hauteur that so unnerved and irritated Sam. He clung also, in a kind of death grip, to the bit of racially ambiguous doggerel that had skyrocketed him to Eastern fame in 1870: “Plain Language from Truthful James.” The doggerel clung to him in return, like a personal demon. Harte regretted the day he had conceived the Heathen Chinee, Ah Sin, and his idiotic verse tale. He regretted it even more as it swelled to a kind of cultural shorthand for Everybigot’s view of the grasping “John Chinaman,”* the polar opposite of the writer’s intention. But now, Harte was desperate, and he needed to haul out the Chinee for one more payday.

  Harte had taken the train up from New York, where he had already strip-mined his reputation by mounting a problematic melodrama called Two Men of Sandy Bar. The play showed flashes of Harte’s old skills and passion for brotherhood. Its characters, drawn from Harte’s earlier fiction, brought to the stage some of his genius for Western setting and character; but the load of “ideas” they were obliged to carry—Social Justice, Loyalty, Redemption—drained their charm and slowed the action to a four-hour crawl. Things were brightened only by the brief appearance of a chop-chopping Chinese laundryman named Hop Sing, brought shamelessly to life by the popular actor Charles Thomas Parsloe, who convulsed audiences with such flights of language as “Me plentee washee shirtee…he no pay washee”).41

  The critics had no likee, and Harte had reacted with helpless fury; but he’d perked up when someone suggested that he write a new play built around Parsloe’s “Chinaman.” Aware that Sam had seen the play and found it entertaining, Harte proposed a collaboration: the two would insert the Ah Sin brand name into the boilerplate “Chinee” role, give Parsloe license to go chop-chopping around the stage to his heart’s content, and throw in some supporting characters from Mark Twain’s literary attic, notably the colorful Scotty Briggs from “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral” in Roughing It. Sam Clemens, infallible business visionary, saw the genius of this at once. Two famous authors combining two of their best-loved characters: why, as Colonel Sellers himself might say, “there’s millions in it!” The two playwrights would “divide the swag,” as Sam confidently phrased it to Howells.42 He signed on to the collaboration. Harte went back to New York to work on an outline, and Mark Twain threw himself into six days of concentrated work on his own version. In November, Harte returned to the Clemens household at Nook Farm to join Twain in fusing the two drafts into a single script.

  AS HE worked at the new boy’s book, and waited for Tom Sawyer to appear, and pored through his English history volumes, Mark Twain channeled his edginess into a couple of new hobbies in the election year of 1876: politics and pornography. (As he might have added: “But I repeat myself.”) Porn was a flourishing if unacknowledged commodity in those days—the Victorian Secret, the suppressed dark twin to “polite” literature. Venus had been donning her furs and whipping up on poor old Leo Sacher-Masoch since 1870, and The Marchioness’s Amorous Pastimes was followed intently by many Victorian gents, especially when the little Guardian of Purity was busy flipping through Godey’s Lady’s Book. The sublimely named Lady Pokingham, never far from a convenient keyhole, was another star of the genre. Purveyors with printing presses, especially in Europe, were nudging pornography toward a clandestine mass-market status. Mark Twain’s contributions to the genre—a few lewd poems, some dirty jokes in his notebook, the sketch 1601, and a mock-serious lecture to the Stomach Club in Paris on masturbation—showed a connoisseur’s familiarity with the preoccupations and the lingo of porn, what Howells dryly referred to as his “Elizabethan breadth of parlance”; but the pla
yfulness in them obviates any possibility that he was writing for purposes other than a good ribald hoot. In 1601: Conversation As It Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors, he created a hysterical underground masterpiece.

  The sketch was a by-product of Mark Twain’s immersion in English history and its linguistic forms—in particular, those of Samuel Pepys, whose 17th-century diary he was reading. It has more in common with his own zany “The Lick House Ball” than with The Lustful Turk. Mark Twain wrote it for an audience of one, his man’s-man Christian pal Joe Twichell, whose threshold of obscenity was the Civil War. Mark Twain’s brainstorm was to portray an imaginary conversation among several deities of the age: Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Lady Alice Dilberry, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, and some others. The twist, as they say in Burbank, is that as we join the conversation, it has turned to farting.

  The following excerpt is more intelligible if one converts “ye” to “the,” “yt” to “that,” and most of the effs to esses. (The speaker is the queen’s elderly cupbearer.)

  In ye heat of ye talke it befell yt one did breake wind, yielding an exceding mighty & diftrefsfull stink, whereat all did laffe full fore, and the[n]:

  Ye Queene. Verily in mine eight and fixty yeeres have I not heard ye fellow to this fart…Prithee, lette ye author confeffe ye offfpring. Wil my Lady Alice teftify?