Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  FINALLY, MARK Twain hired a secretary, Miss Fanny Hesse, to allow him to dictate his replies.

  The letters flowing to Mark Twain from all these strangers—including the many that he filed away under the brusque scrawl, “From an ass”—were perhaps more numinous than he was capable of recognizing under the circumstances. The category that they largely pioneered, fan mail, would not find its name until the movie-star era of the 20th century; but the impulse that prompted them—their almost palpable yearning—was similar. This was a hunger for a kind of faith, or a godhead that represented faith. The mid-1870s saw religious faith, particularly Christian Protestant faith, suffering a crisis of authority and influence. The war and its root causes had fractured the Presbyterian Church and its aura of certitude. Darwin’s discoveries were transferring power in the universe from God to nature in ways that beggared Emerson’s metaphors of the individual divine. The emerging America of rails and electricity, the America whose densely packed cities were already draining off the old farm-and-village culture and the pieties that sustained it—all these contributed to a kind of psychic loneliness never before experienced on such a scale.

  In nearly all precincts beyond the Deep South, “faith” was being redefined by the concerns of the moment: liberal Protestants such as Joe Twichell and the Beechers promoted their programs of social justice. Social Darwinism promoted its fantasies of human perfectibility, oblivious to the attractions such notions might hold for a totalitarian state. Heresy trials traumatized many Northern congregations. Caught in the swirl of this maelstrom, individuals seeking a personal connection with the divine turned their attention from the whipping gales of “theology” and toward more graspable icons. This was the true birth of the celebrity culture. The celebrity that many of them fastened on was the same mesmeric figure who had arisen as a god of the lecture platform in San Francisco in 1866, the same who had often betrayed the wish that he could be a preacher of the Gospel but for a lack of the necessary stock in trade—religion. Now this figure had restored Americans to a vision of their receding Eden, and had given them a fictive boy who seemed to ratify Ralph Waldo Emerson’s haunting aphorism, in “Nature,” that “[i]nnocence is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to Paradise.”11

  SAM CLEMENS strained against the limitations on his unceasing drive to get things done. Aware of his descent along the “downward slope” from forty, he brimmed with plans and projects, and was not shy about interrupting the lives of others to help him carry them out. As with Whitelaw Reid, his presumption could be breathtaking—a holdover, perhaps, from his riverboat days. “By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands,” he recalled once. “It ‘gravels’ me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.” Not even the great Howells, before whom all literati trembled, was exempt. There was that matter of the consulship lobbying for Charles Warren Stoddard—followed a couple of weeks later by another request for a “favor”: “You will have the words ‘Ah Sin, a Drama,’ printed in the middle of a notepaper page, & send the same to me, with bill.”12 (The printed title page was needed to help Clemens comply with copyright requirements.) Now, in January, he fretted to a friend, “Harte hasn’t come yet—so the play isn’t licked into shape—consequently I haven’t demanded Howells’s presence. (He is to come when the play is ready to be read & criticised.)”13

  He issued orders to Moncure Conway in England to hire a lawyer at his expense to prosecute the Canadian pirate Belford on behalf of Chatto, on the theory that the British copyright for Tom Sawyer stood in Chatto’s name. To Frank Bliss, he decreed, “You may send me that Bret Harte piece of paper to keep as evidence of his indebtedness to me.”14 He had a command performance in mind for the travel writer whose fame he’d eclipsed, Bayard Taylor: to “entertain” his young girls’ Saturday Morning Club with a talk on the morning after Taylor’s upcoming lecture in Hartford. “Your N.Y. train doesn’t leave here till afternoon. I hope you can & will.”15 And he informed Pamela that he had “found the right school” for Sammy: the St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, “the best preparatory school for boys in this country.”16 Only one figure dared challenge his will. “Mr Clemens grows more and more determined to go to Germany next Summer,” Livy wrote to her mother, “—I combat it and say the farm next Summer and Germany a year from next Summer if we have money enough—I don’t know who will come out ahead but I think I shall.”17

  Harte finally arrived. His visit dealt the final blow to the touchy friendship. In spite of his annoyance at Harte’s priggishness and condescension, Clemens had done what he could over the years to arrest his onetime mentor’s slide into dissipation and debt. Now, he guarded his household against what he saw as Harte’s vulgarizing presence. He kept Harte quarantined up on the third floor during most of the day, where the visitor hunched over a table and attacked the script’s broad contours while Sam prowled the billiard table, blue smoke billowing from his cigar, supplying dialogue for the characters as Harte called for it. He sensed the futility of it all. He wrote to Pamela, whose son Sammy had arrived at the house for a visit, that he was no company for Sammy or anybody else because he “was in a smouldering rage, the whole time, over the precious days & weeks of time which Bret Harte was losing for me.”18

  Mealtime brought the monster out of his lair. When Harte and Clemens descended the stairs to join Livy, Sammy and the girls at table, tensions surfaced. Livy was weakened by rheumatism and diphtheria that summer, and was treating Susy’s own diphtheria when she was able. Sam, protective of his wife in the calmest circumstances, gritted his teeth as Harte aimed supercilious jibes at the house, its furniture and decorations, and—dangerously—toward Livy herself. The actual degree of Harte’s offenses is open to question: Harte repeatedly expressed affection toward Susy and Clara in letters to Sam, giving them pet names and inquiring after them. As for Livy, he seems respectful of her in every bit of independent evidence that survives. On the other hand, Harte was a problem drinker now, and may have trailed whiskey fumes downstairs. And Harte seemed incapable of discarding the epicene, insinuating veneer—the over-the-top dress, gestures, and put-downs—that had always contradicted his essential humanitarian beliefs. Clemens held his temper until the end of the visit, heating it to furnace temperatures. “[F]or Mrs. Clemens’s sake I endured it all until the last day,” Sam recalled in old age.19 On that day, over luncheon, Harte uttered what sounded to Sam like an impertinence to Olivia Langdon Clemens. Back in the billiard room, Sam pounced.

  [Y]ou are a shabby husband to [Mrs. Harte] and you often speak sarcastically, not to say sneeringly, of her…but your privilege ends there; you must spare Mrs. Clemens.

  Sam then got a few other things off his chest.

  …you have made sarcastic remarks about the furniture of the bedroom, and about the tableware, and about the servants, and about the carriage and the sleigh, and the coachman’s livery…[T]his does not become you; you are barred from these criticisms by your situation and circumstances…[Y]ou are a loafer and an idler and you go clothed in rags…You have lived in the Jersey woods and marshes and have supported yourself as do the other tramps; you have confessed it without a blush…20

  How much of that tirade was actually delivered, and how much was added on in reverie, is unclear. (Some of it may have been delivered via a letter, now lost.) But the explosion discharged years of pent-up resentments. Sam Clemens may have at last struck a psychic parity with Bret Harte by delivering it, but their friendship never recovered. In his reminiscences, Mark Twain savaged Harte as “an invertebrate without a country,” bereft of the higher passions; bereft of feeling, in fact, “for the reason that he had no machinery to feel with.”21 Oh—and no conscience.

  THE PLAY that lurched into being out of this dysfunctional alliance scarcely survived its birth scars. Its brief life traced a downward spiral of popularity. It pivot
ed on mistaken identity (one of Mark Twain’s favorite devices) and assumed names. It was set in territory that both men knew well, the California mining camps. The main characters were the rugged champion liar Bill Plunket, and a fussily dressed mining engineer named York. As Margaret Duckett has pointed out, these two bore interesting resemblances to Mark Twain and Bret Harte.22 A malapropistic mother and her practical daughter supplied heavy-handed comic scenes (neither Livy nor Anna Harte could bear them). Charles Thomas Parsloe as Ah Sin had all the good lines, spouting Chinese pidgin English and bamboozling the miners with his Oriental trickery while he tried to solve a murder. Or something.

  Ah Sin was scheduled to open at the National Theater in Washington for a week’s trial run on May 7, 1877. Mark Twain joined the cast in rehearsal at Ford’s Theater in Baltimore, taking a suite in Guy’s Hotel on Monument Square. It was here that he began his campaign to wrest control of the production from his partner—really, to purge the play of his partner’s imprint and identity, to the extent possible. He dominated rehearsals. Prowling the wings and the proscenium, he peppered the actors with directions. He scribbled off daily revisions, although Harte disapproved of them, and for good reason: they were moving the title character ever-farther away from the nuanced Chinese of Harte’s humane California sketches, and toward the baser but box-office-friendly “Heathen Chinee.”

  In his spare time, he visited the state prison (Heaven for climate, Hell for society), and was also drawn to the city’s famous “automated” house known as Alexandroffsky, whose owner, the railroad baron Thomas DeKay Winans,* gave him a tour of the onrushing technological dream world that he worshipped. He saw a gas heating system regulated by a thermostat and a rudimentary air-conditioning system; tables and chairs that revolved at the turn of a knob; a steam engine that drove machinery fifty yards distant; a skating rink; a new kind of carriage wheel. He absorbed it all as thoroughly as he absorbed spoken language or the lower Mississippi River, and he poured it all out again in a thirty-two-page letter to Livy that inventoried nearly every device. What he could not adequately describe, he sketched. “Automatic deviltries,”23 he called them.

  Mark Twain’s coldest ploy in his anti-Harte campaign was to lure Parsloe into an alliance that excluded Harte—who, after all, had conceived the role that figured to make the actor famous. Soon Parsloe was echoing Mark’s complaints about Harte’s intrusiveness and general inconvenience. Despite these backstage tensions, Ah Sin: A Drama delighted audience and critics in its premiere, particularly the Hop Sing-type shenanigans. Harte assumed the play was a hit, but Mark Twain was still not satisfied. He spent a week re-revising the script, again without bothering to consult his co-writer. Again, Harte hated what his partner had done. But now he was outnumbered; Parsloe sided with Mark Twain.

  BY THE end of the Washington tryout, Clemens had worn himself out mentally and physically. He’d anticipated this for weeks. Sometime in April, he had approached Joe Twichell in Hartford and invited him on an ocean cruise to Bermuda. Susan Crane journeyed to Hartford to stay with Livy. Clemens and Twichell left New Haven for the first leg of their ten-day adventure on May 16; a nighttime boat trip down to New York. They embarked there the next day for the island in the wide Sargasso Sea. “First actual pleasure trip I ever took,”24 Sam remarked in his notebook. A primary subject of Sam’s notes was the Reverend Mr. Twichell. The rugged Christian and Civil War veteran may have been a commanding presence in the pulpit at Hartford, but away from his habitat, he revealed his naïveté in matters of the world. He yakked on with strangers like a yokel, and took literally certain unfamiliar terms (“Do they make arrows of the arrowroot?”25). Soon Clemens was identifying Twichell by a rather uncomradely notebook pseudonym.

  Fool Walked to ship, got a bot. of beer, drew cork, but couldn’t succeed in carrying it home. It kept foaming up & had to keep stopping to drink off surplus. Finished & threw bottle away.26

  Something in the soup which the fool recognized—ah, it’s hellfire.27

  The friends took a pair of rooms at a boardinghouse in Hamilton. They strolled the island and admired the shimmering white houses, the brightly colored birds, the red pomegranate blossoms and the fine calla lilies, a bride and her bridegroom. Sam ruminated on a stage adaptation for the English-historical novel that was already well advanced in his mind, and which he had already titled: The Prince and the Pauper. The two returned home on May 27. A week later Sam swept his wife and children off to Quarry Farm for a respite before Ah Sin’s New York opening. Sam used his share of the “respite” to write an account of the Bermuda trip for Howells at the Atlantic: “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion.” In the four installments serialized from October 1877 through January 1878, “the fool” modeled on Twichell undergoes another name change. He becomes the Ass. Twichell, apparently, maintained a Christian forbearance. Perhaps he reminded himself that it was an ass who’d carried a certain religious figure into Jerusalem.

  The travelogue finished, Mark Twain kept busy in his hilltop study by dashing off a new play: Cap’n Simon Wheeler, The Amateur Detective. “Simon Wheeler” was the narrator of the “Jumping Frog” tale, but the two characters were not similar. Clemens was now so deeply theater-struck that he toyed with the idea of giving up book writing to become a playwright. He estimated to Howells that the “Wheeler” play could earn him fifty thousand dollars. After all, he’d spent an entire six and a half days writing it.

  He returned to New York on July 15, as Ah Sin was moving into rehearsal at August in Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theater. (Playbills around the city were trumpeting the play, its co-authors, and its cast of internationally acclaimed actors.) Bret Harte was absent: looking for work in Washington, and thoroughly disgusted with his collaborator in any case. Clemens again seized control of “that dreadful play.”28 He whipped the cast through four-hour “coaching” sessions inside the sweltering theater, shaping the production toward his vision. In off-hours he canvassed the theatrical demimonde, trying to sell Cap’n Simon Wheeler to some backer or producer. He was unsuccessful; the play was never mounted.

  On opening night, July 31, Mark Twain stepped to the footlights after the performance, dressed in the blinding white linen that would become his signature garb a quarter-century later—and delivered another strangely denigrating curtain speech. He attacked the play’s “lack of invention” and “didacticism”29 and even dropped the word “plagiarism”—all daggers aimed at Harte. Then, grotesquely, he went on to suggest that Ah Sin, as enacted by Parsloe, was an “illustration,” perfectly portrayed, of the Chinaman, who “is going to become a very frequent spectacle all over America, by and by, and a difficult political problem, too.”30

  Back at Quarry Farm, Livy fretted about her husband and his corrosive temper. (Sam had sensed her anxiety the day of his departure: “Cheer up!” he’d instructed her from the city.)31 She knew her husband’s rage at Harte, and seems to have sensed something like this in the making. In a letter that he probably received on the day of the opening, she had tried to deflect him from it. “Youth I want to caution you about one thing, don’t say harsh things about Mr. Harte,” she wrote, “don’t talk against Mr. Harte to people, it is so much better that you be reticent about him…We are so desperately happy…and he is so miserable, we can easily afford to be magnanimus toward him…be careful my darling…”32 But Mark Twain did not know the meaning of magnanimus.

  Clemens’s “spectacle/difficult political problem” remark—so at odds with his typical sympathy for any downtrodden class—seems to have emboldened the real bigotry of some critics, who took his remarks as license to savage the character Ah Sin as though he were a living avatar of the Yellow Peril. “Ah Sin is a contemptible thief and an imperturbable liar,” fulminated the New York World.33 “[A] typical Chinaman,” declared the Times.34 The play’s box-office business soon took a downturn from which it never recovered.

  Back in Elmira as August began, confident that Ah Sin was a success, Sam and the family settled into the
dreamy rhythms of life at Quarry Farm. (He’d convinced himself that only Harte’s name on the playbill held it back from being a runaway hit.) Many years later Clara retained an elegiac image of two figures

  engaged in lively conversation. Aunt Sue was picking flowers, and my father had joined her before starting his day’s work. His lovely gray hair was shining in the sunlight and his arms, greatly agitated by his thoughts, made life dangerous for Aunt Sue…I am certain now that the subject of their talk was…the undying topic of religion.35

  Aunt Sue had a strong faith in God, Clara recalled, and as “Father” pressed his attack on the Christian faith, “Her lovely, silver laugh tinkled into the air from the flowery path…”36

  Livy, conserving her limited strength, usually stayed on the porch through the day, but always with someone to talk to. Unless one watched her closely during a dark mood, Clara maintained, “one could not discover it.”37 Of an evening, at the farmhouse, Sam would read to the family from his day’s work, or play chess with Theodore Crane while Livy read stories to the children. Or everyone would gather on the porch to hear the tales told by Auntie Cord. Barouches came and went during these summer days, bringing women in short-brim hats trimmed with bright ribbons and scalloped day dresses over petticoats; their menfolk more cautious than Sam in their dark frock coats and small bow ties. Near sunset one afternoon a carriage departing with Charley’s wife Ida, and their daughter and a nursemaid began speeding uncontrollably. Sam described the scene: