Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The next moment I had my long coveted desire: I saw a raft wrecked. It hit the pier in the center and went all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches struck by lightning.40

  This was not the first raft that Mark Twain had “seen” wrecked. He’d wrecked another one in the unfinished boy’s novel back home; wrecked it in the final pages before he set the manuscript aside and nearly burned it, out of ideas. Huck Finn and Jim, having unknowingly drifted past Cairo, Illinois, and into slave territory in the night, find their wooden craft suddenly in the path of an upriver Mississippi steamboat. “There was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the engines, a pow-wow of cussing, and whistling of steam—and as Jim went overboard on one side and I on the other, she come smashing through the raft and tore it to tooth-picks and splinters.”41

  A psychically revived Mark Twain, in Germany, engaged his river saga once more. Justin Kaplan has suggested that in tackling the raft-destruction theme in parody, the writer was defusing old anxieties about the river, and thus ready to pick up his great novel in progress once again. (Kaplan has even gone to the trouble of tracking down the etymology of “Heidelberg,” discovering that the name is a telescoping of the German “Heidelbeereberg,” which, as Mark Twain presumably discovered as well, means “Huckleberry Mountain.”)42

  Clemens and Twichell continued their excellent “pedestrian” adventure, touring Germany, Switzerland, and their Alpine glaciers and passes by train, steamboat, donkey cart and, occasionally, on foot. Sam marveled at gorges and glaciers and the sun shining on green ice, and clucked in his notes about the reverend’s lack of the self-denial spirit after they’d watched a small girl narrowly avoid falling into a rocky chasm: “He continually expresses gratitude that that child was not killed—never caring a cent for my feelings & my loss of such a literary plum hanging ready to fall into my mouth.”43 Twichell was struck by the boyishness of Sam’s enthusiasms, especially around running water. “There is nothing that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream,” he reported to his wife Harmony. “—To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture.”44 Twichell himself tossed a piece of driftwood into a river, and beheld Clemens “running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy.”45 Sam detected new signals of “mental telegraphy” between himself and Joe; Twichell remarked on a book’s passage moments after Sam had read it; Joe suggested checking for a telegram an instant before Sam was to use the same words; during a mountain hike, Twichell reminisced to Clemens about an old, lost friend—only to encounter the very man as they rounded a turn in the cliff. Sam poured the raw materials of each day’s adventures into his notebooks to await transformation in A Tramp Abroad.

  Mental telegraphy was one thing; the Christian faith was another; and on one of their hikes (as Paine records) Sam was moved to tell his friend what Twichell no doubt suspected all along: he could not accept the divinity of the Bible. The two, says Paine, never spoke of the topic again.

  Joseph Twichell said farewell to the Clemenses in Geneva and departed for America on September 9. The Clemens entourage reached Venice, where Mark Twain enjoyed a flurry of recognition from American travelers and expatriate artists, and Livy hit the stores, stocking up on furniture, mirrors, tapestries, Venetian glass, and brass plates for the Hartford house. Then to Florence, and Rome; and finally, back northward and across the border into Germany. In the drizzle and fog of mid-November, they arrived at the dark and chilly hotel on the Karlstrasse in Munich where they would spend the winter while Sam completed A Tramp Abroad. Among the hotel’s few gestures to conviviality, Sam discovered as he drifted toward sleep on the first night, was a cuckoo clock.

  On December 1, 1878, the day after his forty-third birthday, Sam wrote to his mother, “I broke the back of life yesterday & started down-hill toward old age.”46 He signed a letter to Olivia Langdon, “Your now middle-aged son, Saml.”47 Middle age was, to be sure, more freighted in those times. From Geneva a few weeks earlier, Sam had written affectionately to Bayard Taylor, “One of these days I am going to whet up my German again, & take a run to Berlin, & have a talk with you in that fine old tongue.”48 On December 14, concerned by newspaper reports that the literary adventurer-turned-diplomat had been ill, he wrote again: the Clemenses were “heartily glad to hear that you are coming happily out of it,” he said, and renewed his promise to “run over to Berlin in the spring.”49 Five days later, the father of American travel literature was dead at fifty-three.

  Through the drizzly weather of early 1879, Mark Twain struggled along on A Tramp Abroad, a book whose purpose he never quite defined for himself, and to which he never fully surrendered himself, despite a prodigious amount of draft writing. (He had destroyed some four hundred pages of the considerable writing he’d done in Heidelberg—leaving him, as he told Joe Twichell, with only nine hundred pages—half his projected total.) Perhaps he had warmed to Bayard Taylor partly out of a belated respect for the challenges of the genre. This manuscript was not exactly “travel,” in the sense of rigorous reportage evoking authentic surrogate experience. Nor did it promise to be what one might comfortably call “literature.” Thus it hardly promised to live up to the implication in its title, as a sequel to and co-equal of The Innocents Abroad. It was mainly set-piece horsing around, with the “Harris” passages providing a godsend of material. A crazy quilt of dropped-in anecdotes, some of them uproarious, as in the tale that begins Chapter 3, “Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn,” and the almost equally clever setup for it at the end of Chapter 2, which introduces the miner-narrator Jim Baker and his point that blue jays are “just as much a human as you be”: “A jay hasn’t got any more principle than a Congressman,”50 and, “a jay can out-swear any gentleman in the mines. You think a cat can swear. Well, a cat can; but you give a blue-jay a subject that calls for his reserve-powers, and where is your cat?”51

  Here is a sliver of Mark Twain at his best. Many of his contemporaries, Joel Chandler Harris, for example, found success with animal stories by giving their animals amusing human attributes. As the blue-jay yarn shows, Mark Twain’s animal stories rise above the genre partly by virtue of his uncanny ability to make a fictive animal seem simultaneously humanlike (except for its superior sense of humor), and like the real animal. Thus,

  He cocked his head to one side, shut one eye and put the other one to the hole, like a ’possum looking down a jug; then he glanced up with his bright eyes, gave a wink or two with his wings—which signifies gratification, you understand,—and says, “It looks like a hole, it’s located like a hole,—blamed if I don’t believe it is a hole!”52

  But such flights of inspiration were the exception to this manuscript, and Mark Twain seemed to understand it. The euphoric energy surge that marked the family’s arrival at Heidelberg was long gone. Life began again to weigh on him: middle age, the wetness of the German weather, the endlessness of his writing task, the d—d cuckoo clocks. He found himself looking ahead from the book at hand, pining to get back at Ned Wakeman and his voyage to Heaven. “I hate travel, & I hate hotels, & I hate the opera, & I hate the Old Masters,” he vented to Howells.53 (“Hate” had by now become a fairly reflexive usage by Clemens as a gauge of his feelings.) This may have struck his friend as a passing snit, coming as it did from the connoisseur of fine hostelries, the apostle of move! but Sam Clemens meant it this time. He made some forty voyages during the rest of his life, he later calculated; and he resented every last one of them.

  Through his blackest moods, however—and this one was far from his blackest—Sam Clemens could never conceive of turning his wrath directly upon his closest ally and friend. His reserves of kindliness illuminated his reaction to an installment in the Atlantic of Howells’s novel in progress, The Lady of the Aroostook, which deals with a young American girl’s first encounter with Europe.

  If your literature has not struck perfection now we are not able to see what is lacking. It is all such truth—truth to the life; ever
ywhere your pen falls it leaves a photograph…only you see people & their ways & their insides & outsides as they are, & make them talk as they do talk. I think you are the very greatest artist in these tremendous mysteries that ever lived.54

  As if intuiting that the world might think differently—that Howells’s embrace of psychological realism would not find acceptance with an American readership—he added:

  Possibly you will not be a fully accepted classic until you have been dead a hundred years,—it is the fate of the Shakespeares & of all genuine prophets…In that day I shall still be in the Cyclopedias, too,—thus: “Mark Twain; history & occupation unknown—but he was personally acquainted with Howells.”55

  A lovely grace note (privately, Mark Twain believed that the explorer Henry M. Stanley was the only living man who would likely be remembered a century later)56—but of course, the reverse of history’s verdict. In this same year of 1879, the true enduring genius of “these tremendous mysteries” came out with his first masterpiece, which also treated a young American girl’s initiation to Europe: Henry James published Daisy Miller.

  WHEN ALL other subjects in Mark Twain’s inventory grew stale—when nothing else could inspire him to creative passion—there was always one standby. “I have just received this letter from Orion,” he gloated to Howells in February—“take care of it, for it is worth preserving. I got as far as 9 pages in my answer to it, when Mrs. Clemens shut down on it, & said it was cruel…I thought that I was writing a very kind letter.”57 Orion’s latest crime against humanity was an imagined lecture series, in which he apparently meant to speak up for the Christian religion against the rising tide of Darwinian scientists and rationalists who were assailing it. (Howells did not preserve his offending letter to Sam.) Sam’s abusive response to his brother was matched in its unwholesome energy only by his eagerness to let Howells in on his schadenfreude. “Did you ever see the grotesquely absurd & the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together?” he asked. “You must put him in a book or a play right away…You might die at any moment, & your very greatest work would be lost to the world.”58

  Clemens then laid out a ten-point bill of particulars, roasting and damning his brother, variously, for switching his religious denominations, trying to write a burlesque of Paradise Lost, failing at agriculture, failing as a lawyer, and other offenses. Seemingly helpless to control his rage, his syntax slackening as he wrote, Sam abruptly switched his vitriol to the unoffending Mollie.

  And then his wife is the only woman who could have so rounded & perfected Orion’s character. She was a bald-headed old maid. She was poor & taboo; she wanted position & clothes, oh, so badly; she had the snaffle on this ass before he knew what he was about…She is saturated to the marrow with the most malignant form of Presbyterianism…59

  This defamation continued, in a rising pitch of free-associating bile, for some four hundred words. It ranks among the ugliest outbursts of Samuel Clemens’s life, especially given its Cain-like onslaught against an overmatched sibling.

  THE CLEMENSES gave up dreary Munich for Paris in late February, and discovered that it rained in the City of Light as well. They put up at a drab pension, the Normandy Hotel on rue de l’Echelle, where they were soon tracked down by the usual horde of European and American intellectuals. Sam took refuge in a studio in the Montmartre that he’d hired from a painter friend and dug into his writing chores again. “I’ve been having a dismal time for months over this confounded book,” he admitted to Mary Fairbanks in March.60 He’d had a setback a few weeks earlier: when he’d reached page 900 he’d celebrated the book’s halfway mark, on the strength of several 30-page-a-day weeks—only to realize later that he’d been writing only 65 or 70 words a page instead of the hundred he’d assumed. In the next eight days before leaving Munich, he’d cranked it up and churned out 400 pages, “& so brought my work close up to half way.”61 He had allowed himself one day off in that spurt, a Sunday, and had used it to write sixty letters.

  He reported to Frank Bliss in May that he hoped to have the book finished by the end of July, but his progress in Paris was hindered by rheumatism and dysentery, which kept him in bed for much of five weeks. The “racket and thunder” in the streets drove him crazy until he and Livy moved their beds to the other side of the apartment.

  Unwelcome noise was still on his mind in late May when he knocked off a satiric letter to the New York Evening Post announcing for the presidency: appalled by the recent muckraking of candidates’ lives, “I am going to own up in advance to all the wickedness I have done…”62 For example, “I admit that I treed a rheumatic grandfather of mine in the winter of 1850…I ran him out of the front door in his nightshirt at the point of a shotgun, & caused him to bowl up a maple tree, where he remained all night, while I emptied shot into his legs. I did this because he snored. I will do it again if I ever have another grandfather.”63 His acutely tuned ear, such an asset in his literature, continued to torment him in his daily life. “How rich & strong & musical these voices are,” he observed of some peddlers outside his window, “—& how some bore into your head & through it—& what long distances they can be heard. What vast sounds some of them are!”64 And, “Dropping the g’s—everybody.”65

  In May, Henry rose up again from his dreamy depths. Sam’s mind turned once again to the séance with James Vincent Mansfield he had attended in New York in early 1872. His notebook bore the entry

  A Talk with the departed.

  To Henry, (through medium Mansfield)—Pray try the other place; it is better to be less comfortable you don’t seem to have much intellect left, but even that is worth saving, & a change might help.66

  At around the same time, Sam Clemens revisited his “Autobiography of a Damned Fool” fantasy, but with an infinitely darker twist. “The Autobiography of a Coward,” he wrote in his notebook. “Make him hideously but unconsciously base & pitiful & contemptible.”67

  He reached page 2,041 of the “Tramp” manuscript by the end of that month despite all the distraction, and wishfully hoped to return to America in August, with the book to be published in the fall. He lobbied Frank Bliss on behalf of a young American illustrator named Walter F. Brown, who was in Paris studying painting, and sent the publisher thirty-five drawings by Brown and one by the heretofore obscure illustrator Mark Twain. “(I am making part of the illustrations for it myself.),” he’d earlier boasted to Mary Fairbanks.68 Hartford tugged at him; tugged at them all. “We are mighty hungry,” Sam wrote to Twichell, carefully softening the frustration he’d earlier vented to Howells; “—we want to get home & get something to eat.”69 Fried chicken and hot biscuits may have been part of the attraction, but another part was surely economic: Sam totaled their cash and credit-letter outlay in Paris from March through May, and found that it was four thousand dollars. Europe, it seemed, was cheaper than America only if you spent less money there.

  IN LATE May, Sam responded to Orion’s latest crisis, a certain contretemps with his Presbyterian brethren, with unusual gentleness.

  Never mind the Excommunication. If you made a square deal & told your honest thought in the lecture, I wouldn’t care a damn what people say…I judge you wrote a good lecture. I am bound to say you showed a deal of moral courage to deliver it.70

  Orion had been dismissed from his church after delivering a lecture that seemed to support the agnostic views of the pro-Darwinist Robert Green Ingersoll. Orion’s talk, titled “Man the Architect of Our Religion,” had proved too much for the good churchmen of Keokuk.

  Sam closed his letter to his brother with the information, “We leave here in a month.” He was optimistic by more than three months.

  “FRANCE HAS neither winter nor summer nor morals,” he complained,71 and, “A Frenchman’s home is where another man’s wife is,”72 and, “The nation of the filthy-minded”; and to prove it, he copied smutty passages about hands on naked thighs from French matchboxes into his notebook. Before long, he got to feeling a little French himself—at le
ast on paper. In the early summer he reported to Joe Twichell, slyly setting up a bit of pun-filled naughtiness, that a friend of his had recently visited Victor Hugo and the philosopher Ernest Renan,

  & had a good time with both of those old cocks, but I didn’t go—my French ain’t limber enough. I can build up pretty stately French sentences, but the producing of an erection of this sort is not my best hold—I make it too hard & stiff—& so tall that only a seaman [sic] could climb it, or a monkey [sic]—but the latter would have to “tend to business” couldn’t carry his nuts up in his hands, or any other provender…73

  Sexual self-reliance—a virtue left oddly unexamined by Emerson—seemed much on his mind. He fell in with some American expatriates who’d formed a hale-fellow group called the Stomach Club. At one of their dinners, he unburdened himself on the topic, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism.” While not quite up to the aesthetic standards of 1601, this disquisition had its moments. He mock-quoted a long list of historic figures such as Homer, Caesar, and Queen Elizabeth on the subject, and proceeded to a rather stilted series of witticisms along the lines of, “as an amusement it is too fleeting; as an occupation it is too wearing; as a public exhibition there is no money in it.”74

  THE CLEMENS entourage returned to America on September 3, 1879, aboard the S.S. Gallia out of Liverpool. They brought twenty-two freight packages—not counting the crockery, carved furniture, and other goods they’d shipped to America. In light of another financial downturn at McIntyre Coal, this haul began to seem regretfully extravagant. Among Sam’s souvenirs was a permanent loathing of all things Gallic (here again, he was an American ahead of his time). “French are the connecting link between man & the monkey,” he’d jotted down,75 and, “Trivial Americans go to Paris when they die,”76 and, when he couldn’t think of anything else, “French women poke your eye with umbrella.”77 They had been away from America for seventeen months. Susy had turned five, and then six on the Continent; Clara, three and then four. Livy had turned pregnant again. Mark Twain’s hair had begun to turn gray. His travel manuscript was still unfinished. “I shall finish it here, after the MS comes back to me,” he told Frank Bliss from Elmira. “There is nearly matter enough, but I shall probably strike out as well as add.”78 He didn’t finish it in Elmira. The family spent a week there, then visited Sam’s in-laws in Fredonia, before reopening the house on Farmington Avenue in Hartford. (They rehired George, but scaled back on the overall staff because of their new financial anxieties.) And Mark Twain bent over his manuscript yet again.