by Ron Powers
Lady Alice. Good your grace, an’ I hadde room for such a thunderguft within mine auncient bowels, ’tis not in reafon I coulde difcharge ye same & live to thanck God for yt Hee did chufe handmayd so humble whereby to shew his power…
Ye Queene. O’ God’s naym, who hath favoured us? Hath it come to pafs yt a fart fhall fart itfelfe?…What faith ye worfhipful Mafter Shaxpur?
Shaxpur. In ye grete hand of God I ftand, & so proclaim my innocence. Tho’gh ye finlefs hofts of Heav’n hadde foretold ye coming of ys moft defolating breath,…yet hadde not I believed it; but hadde sayd ye pit itfelf hath furnifhed forth ye stink & Heav’n’s artillery hath shook ye globe in admiration of it.43
It goes on like that for a while, until Sir Walter Raleigh ’fesses up and then delivers an encore “of fuch a godleffe & rocke-fhivering blaft yt all were fain to ftop their ears, & following it did come fo denfe & foul a ftink yt that which went before did feeme a poor & trifling thing befide it.”44 The company then proceeds blithely on to matters more explicitly sexual, and from there to Lutheranism and Rubens.
Twichell and Sam would read 1601 aloud to each other during their walks in the woods, and fall on the ground gasping for breath. Twichell found himself too weak in spirit to resist passing the sketch around to everyone whose discretion he could trust. A copy found its way into the hands of John Hay, who had it set in type. It was redone on expensive linen, though not under Mark Twain’s name. As its cult status grew through the decades, even the parsonlike Paine was forced to admit that the sketch was a classic, and to hope that standards of decorum in future years would relax enough to give the essay “shelter and setting among the more conventional writings of Mark Twain.”45
If Paine only knew.
AS FOR politics: in the late autumn of 1876, Mark Twain became one of the first popular-culture celebrities to lend his support to a presidential candidate, helping to launch a tradition that led, over the decades, from Babe Ruth to Whoopi Goldberg. At Howells’s urging, he announced himself a supporter of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, the former governor of Ohio (and cousin of Elinor Howells) in Hayes’s campaign against Samuel J. Tilden to succeed the retiring two-term president Ulysses S. Grant. Tilden was a high-strung lawyer and Democratic Party insider who had opposed radical Reconstruction, but was an enemy of Boss Tweed and other corrupt machine men. Grant was preparing to quit the White House after eight years of political battle as consumptive in its own way as had been the Civil War. He had been prepared for the presidency in the same way he had been prepared for real estate sales in St. Louis: hardly at all. The Hero of the Republic had been tarnished by the factional politics of Reconstruction, and by the treacheries and frauds of the presumed friends he had appointed into his administration. These were the mistakes of an antebellum Northern gentleman who never understood the cold, utilitarian new society birthed in part by his battlefield victories.
The scandals—Crédit Mobilier, Whiskey Ring, Belknap, Black Friday, Delinquent Tax—would draw history’s gaze from Grant’s social and policy achievements. As Frank Scaturro and other rehabilitative scholars have pointed out, these included the president’s firm but humane stewardship of the old Confederacy (he sent federal troops into South Carolina to crush the Ku Klux Klan, triggering a crisis of constitutional authority; but the Amnesty Act of 1872 reinstated citizenship and voting rights to all Southerners except Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee); civil rights initiatives including the underenforced Civil Rights Act of 1875 (his initiative to turn American Indians into Methodists and Presbyterians was somewhat less visionary); his reduction of the national debt by $435 million and his cutting of taxes by $300 million; his leadership in establishing principles of international arbitration that anticipated the United Nations; and ironically his pioneering efforts at civil service reform.
A larger irony found Grant’s progressive racial policies under attack by insurgents within his own party who called themselves Liberal Republicans. These reformers, focusing more on Reconstruction’s corrupt excess than on its aims, and glossing over their own embedded racism, fought to end the system’s problematic domination of the South, and turned the administration’s scandals into a bludgeon against the president. Confronted with opportunism and greed, and with the rot of exploitation rampant in the capital, Grant found himself, near the end of his presidency, living inside The Gilded Age.
HOWELLS, ARDENTLY for Hayes, was rekindling the magic he’d worked on behalf of Lincoln—a campaign biography. (It sold a whopping two thousand copies.) Mark Twain, who’d never been politically active, responded artfully to his friend’s first overture: “When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.”46 A loose translation of that might come out as, “Alienate half my readership? Do you think I’m nuts?”
Soon, though, he awoke to the deeper satisfactions of the great stage of public affairs: patronage and the opportunities for mischief. In one of his “Look-here-Howells” letters, Clemens instructed his friend to badger Hayes for a consulship for Charles Warren Stoddard. As for mischief, it took him no time at all to concoct an attack ad: “A miniature volume, with a page the size of a postage stamp, with this title-page: ‘What Mr. Tilden Has Done for His Country.’ ”47
His one known campaign speech for Hayes, delivered in Hartford, fell a little short of divine oratory—the Boston Transcript later opined that “somebody should have led him from the platform by the ear.”48 Clemens in turn had some harsh words for Tilden’s rhetoric in a letter to a friend that was excerpted in the Hartford Courant.
If Mr. Hayes wanted to say “Accidents happen in even the best regulated families,” he would say “Accidents will happen in even the best regulated families,” & you would know what he meant; but Mr. Tilden would probably say:—“It is believed by many honest & right-feeling, but possibly mistaken men—though more or less might be weightily said both for & against the proposition—that infelicitous conjunctions of cause and effect will eventuate even in fireside circles accustomed to the most exact, exhaustive, elaborate, and unsufruct systems of domestic dominion.”49
The criticism retains an oddly contemporary feel.
Despite Clemens’s and Howells’s intervention, the initial election returns on November 7 indicated a narrow victory for Tilden. Sam, by now thoroughly Republicanized, received the early returns with escalating anxiety and he took refuge in Christian devotion. He dashed off a telegram to Howells advising that “I love to steal a while away from every cumbering care / and while returns come in today lift up my voice & swear.”50
If the one-legged, wife’s-lover-shooting Civil War hero Daniel Sickles had not gone to the theater on election night, and hobbled past Republican headquarters in New York on the way home, Samuel Tilden would probably have been sworn in as president the following January. Scanning the state-by-state tickers more intently than the traumatized party workers in the office, Joe Twichell’s old field commander realized that Hayes, though lagging in the popular tally, still had a chance to win in the Electoral College by one vote if certain states—namely, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—held for the Republicans. He fired off telegrams to party leaders in those states over the signature of Zachariah Chandler, the party’s national chairman, who was just then taken drunk. The state operatives mobilized their forces. With both candidates short of the electoral minimum, Republicans in the three critical states did their patriotic duty, sabotaged enough Democratic ballots to tilt the electoral vote to Hayes, and stood fast for several weeks. A commission was appointed to investigate, and ultimately a deal was struck: the Republican candidate would be the victor, but federal troops enforcing Reconstruction would be pulled out of the South. Reconstruction died and the Republican Party continued to thrive. Such an extra-electoral outcome, of course, was an extreme anomaly of the constitutional system, and bore no possibility of ever happening again.
THEADVENTURESof Tom Sawyer was finally published i
n December 1876. The reviews were mostly genial; reflective of the culture’s preoccupations and norms; clueless as to the novel’s prospects for becoming a permanent American classic—and too late to help very much with sales. The reviews typically reprised the plot, inventoried the main character’s traits (“Tom is a reckless, daredevil fellow, ready to hazard life for an adventure any time…”51); speculated as to how much of the story was autobiographical; praised True Williams’s illustrations, and gave the novel credit for moving past the moralizing and “morbid sentimentality” of past books in the genre. The New York Times endorsed the novel’s humor and its departure from the “one monotonous key” that had usually suffocated books for children: “A child was supposed to be a vessel which was to be constantly filled up. Facts and morals had to be taken like bitter droughts or acrid pills.”52 Yet the Times had reservations about the downsides of this liberation—timeless reservations, in retrospect. Exposure to inappropriate content was one of them: “[I]t is not desirable that in real life we should familiarize our children with those of their age who are lawless or dare-devils.”53 Not to mention all the gratuitous violence, such as the graveyard knifing of Muff Potter by Injun Joe, an example of “ugly realism.” The Times reviewer actually touched on substance abuse in his summarizing metaphor: “A sprinkling of salt in mental food is both natural and wholesome; any cravings for the contents of the castors, the cayenne and the mustard, by children, should not be gratified.”54 Just, in other words, Say No to Tom.
Among the more thoughtful commentators was Moncure D. Conway. His unsigned review in the London Examiner was among the very few to anticipate the universality of Mark Twain’s characters and story, even in a world that had already accelerated well beyond Tom Sawyer’s time frame. “With the Eastern Question upon us,” Conway wrote, “and crowned heads arrayed on the political stage, it may be with some surprise that we find our interest demanded in…humble folk whose complications occur in a St. Petersburg situated on the Missouri [sic] river.” He added another thought rarely voiced among critics in Mark Twain’s lifetime, Chesterton being a notable exception.
[A] great deal of Mark Twain’s humour consists in the serious—or even at times the severe—style in which he narrates his stories and portrays his scenes, as one who feels that the universal laws are playing through the very slightest of them.55
The novel sold only 15,000 copies in its opening weeks, and after a year, sales still languished at around 27,000, a third the pace of Roughing It. The book would not begin to sell briskly until 1885, when it became linked in the public mind with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It has never been out of print since first publication. The saturation of the illegitimate Canadian edition was mostly to blame for the poor sales; but Clemens in his bitterness blamed Bret Harte. It was Harte’s Gabriel Conroy (5,000 in sales) that had clogged up American Publishing’s marketing efforts on Tom Sawyer’s behalf, Clemens made himself believe. He barely tolerated his Ah Sin collaborator, who remained boozily underfoot in the Clemens household in the closing weeks of 1876.
“IF I can make a living out of plays, I shall never write another book,” he advised Moncure Conway as Christmas approached. He had convinced himself that copyright law would never protect him; and there was no point in emptying out his soul for the profit of Canadian thieves. First he had made The Gilded Age. That was for practice. Now he would make Ah Sin.
* In 1906, Howells resurrected Mark Twain’s idea and proposed a collaboration under the title, The Whole Family, a novel to be serialized in Harper’s Bazaar by twelve authors, each contributing a chapter about a separate character. Among the authors chosen were Howells, Henry James, and four women named “Mary,” who averaged 1.25 middle names apiece. Howells assigned himself to write Chapter 1, a chaste and decorous effort concerning “The Father.” He offered Mark Twain the more comical chapter, “The School-Boy,” but Twain, who was struggling with his epileptic daughter Jean and brooding over such topics as “What Is Man?”, was no longer in the mood. Other complications ensued. As if in answer to the question, “How many authors does it take to screw up a story?” Henry James wrote a chapter twice as long as anyone else’s and pouted at the suggestion of cutting it; one of the Marys, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, read Howells’s chapter, grew irritated at its take on women, more or less seized control over the entire manuscript, sexed it up in ways that scandalized Howells, and the editor of Harper’s, another emancipated woman named Elizabeth Jordan, let Freeman have her way. Plans to publish the novel in book form were put on hold until the Ungar Publishing Company of New York took it on in 1986, after everyone’s feelings had cooled somewhat.
* James Agee, in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”
† Inferentially, the Monday Evening Club.
* A good example of this is the following news item in a December edition of the 1874 Boston Transcript, as quoted by Gary Scharnhorst (“ ‘Ways That Are Dark’ ”): “Our civilization is not a failure, and the Caucasian is not played out at Ruby Hill, Nevada. A heathen Chinee over there, having been impudent enough to accost Nick Garland, an honest miner, and suggest that it was high time his wash bill was paid, Mr. Garland promptly rose up and slew the heathen. Much sympathy for Mr. Garland is expressed, and there is talk at Ruby of getting up some kind of a testimonial to him. The heathen are not popular in the mines.”
33
God’s Fool
(1877)
In 1877, devotees of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer who wrote the author asking about a possible sequel received copies of what may have been the first celebrity form letter in the annals of literature. Or perhaps it was the great-great-grandfather of the recorded phone message.
I HAVE THE HONOR TO REPLY TO YOUR LETTER JUST RECEIVED, THAT IT IS MY PURPOSE TO WRITE A CONTINUATION OF TOM SAWYER’S HISTORY, BUT I AM NOT ABLE AT THIS TIME TO DETERMINE WHEN I SHALL BEGIN THE WORK.
YOU WILL EXCUSE THIS PRINTED FORM, IN CONSIDERATION OF THE FACT THAT THE INQUIRY WHICH YOU HAVE MADE RECURS WITH SUFFICIENT FREQUENCY TO WARRANT THIS METHOD OF REPLYING.1
Mark Twain had another boilerplate reply printed up—this one for the folks who were by now sending him their manuscripts. It announced
Dr. Sir or Madam:
Experience has not taught me very much; still it has taught me that it is not wise to criticise a piece of literature, except to an enemy of the person who wrote it; then, if you praise it, that enemy admires you for your honest manliness, & if you dispraise it he admires you for your sound judgment.2
This was Mark Twain’s firewall against the gathering tribe of dreamers that William Saroyan in the next century would gently damn as “magnificent nobodies”: the clerks and the station agents “just daring to set their feet upon the literary field,” as one letter-writer put it, and the Civil War veterans and the foreign stamp dealers who saw themselves as “budding authors in the humorous style”; all the ardent bards of the republic who wanted this common-man-made-good to bless their own home-baked novels and memoirs and “views” and “observations,” and who wrote to him in their beautiful swirling 19th-century cursive scripts that so often outshone their talent.
“I send you herewith an index of some writings composed by myself, which, I flatter myself, if properly edited and put upon the market, will prove remunerative.”3
“Do you think you could find time to look over say 400 pages M.S.S. written. Something out of the treadmill style of the latter day novels?”4
Mark Twain wrote on the envelope: “An absurd request.” He later estimated to Mary Fairbanks that over a two-week period in 1879, five separate strangers, from different parts of the country, asked him to read their book manuscripts and use his influence to get them published. “These MS, combined, aggregated 11,000 pages.”5 No form letter could answer the full volume and variety of correspondence that flowed into the house on Farmington Avenue. The letters came from around the nation and the world. Many were merely addressed “Mark Twain, Hartford, Connecticut”; one envelope arrived wi
th only his sketched silhouette to identify the recipient. “I have a badgered, harassed feeling, a good part of the time,” Sam eventually confessed to his mother. “It comes mainly of business responsibilities…& the persecution of kindly letters from well-meaning strangers—to whom I must be rudely silent or else put in the biggest half of my time bothering over answers.”6
The National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers wondered if he would send them some of the books he’d written (he did). Most entreaties were individual.
“Gracious Sir;
“You are rich. To lose $10.00 would not make you miserable.
“I am poor. To gain $10.00 would not make me miserable.
“Please send me $10.00 (ten dollars)…”7
“I thought that you might take pity up on me. The closing exercises of our school comes April 20, and I have a thesis to write—Subject, ‘Boys’…Will you please write to me, giving your opinion of boys?”8
“Please, sir; don’t smile scornfully behind your mustache (if you have one), and then toss this into the waste-basket,” instructed a “young authoress from Wisconsin.” “You see I want your photograph.” And then the floodgates opened.
…I know you will be too kind-hearted to refuse me. How do I know? This way—Once you were poor now you are rich. Once you were obscure now you are famous. How did you come so? By working and fighting. Was the world kind to you, did it reach out a helping hand when you were down? No! It fought you every step of the way, and growls at your feet now, ready to tear you in pieces and devour you the moment you show sign of weakness…9
Is there the slightest probability of your writing and publishing any other books. “Innocents Abroad” [“]Roughing It” & “The Gilded Age” have about up-set our youngest brother…a youth of seventeen, now six feet two in his stocking-feet…If you contemplate issuing any more books like these…please let us know, in due time in order that we may get him out of the way—send him to Patagonia or some other region where access to them will be impossible…[H]e has since read them [your works] forty times, and then re-read them backwards and cross-ways. He has literally read them to pieces…To cap the climax he has begun writing a book of his own, and takes yours for his models…10