Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  IN EARLY October, as he was preparing to turn his still-unfinished work over to Bliss, Mark Twain got word of a great ceremonial event scheduled for the following month in Chicago: a reunion of the Army of the Tennessee, at which the honored guest would be its former commander and the former president, Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was hoping to rebuild his tattered political image for another run at the presidency in 1880. Clemens was one of fifteen prominent Americans invited to speak at a banquet for the general that would conclude several days of festivities. He accepted, and then got cold feet. At month’s end he notified the committee chairman that he would have to withdraw. Perhaps his stated reason—a book being rushed to production—was the real one. Perhaps the memory of the banquet catastrophe two years earlier played its chilling part. Several days later, Clemens mysteriously reversed himself. An idea had struck him; an idea laden with risk, but too tantalizing to resist. He wired the chairman saying that he would honor the invitation after all—provided that he could decline the toast subject assigned to him in favor of one of his own choosing. He swept A Tramp Abroad to one side, and began working on his after-dinner speech.

  Sam arrived by train in Chicago on November 10, checked in at the Palmer House, and then walked seventy-nine miles around the lakeside city, by his estimation, taking in the “costly dwellings,” the landmarks, and especially the street decorations for the imminent extravaganza. The clean boulevards, the bunting, the streamers, the bronze eagles, the undulating national banners in their purities of red, white, and blue—these were the accoutrements of a city and a Union headed full-thrust toward something powerful, and only half-imaginable. Clemens had seen Chicago a sodden cinder in 1871. Now it was a city resurgent; half a million strong, double that in a decade, a coming prairie empire of skyscrapers and livestock. The warrior awaiting its toasts was the embodiment of American military might and one of the greatest generals in history. At the center of the ceremonies would be this small fugitive from a band of Southern irregulars who but for a weakening of will might have fought against this general in the village of his birth. Samuel Clemens’s exuberant letters to Livy amount to a time-capsule preservation of that moment in time. On Tuesday, November 11, he slept through the morning, and then awoke and passed into the living dream world of the great occasion. A parade of eighty thousand Union veterans was forming in the central city, and an equally massive crowd had gathered to view it—in the streets, at windows, and on the roofs of buildings. Clemens joined some dignitaries on the review platform atop two stories of scaffolding; he was studying the vast prairie of humanity, when it suddenly erupted into a volcanic cheer. Another figure had emerged onto the platform behind him.

  Gen. Grant bowed to the people two or three times, then approached my side of the platform & the mayor pulled me forward & introduced me…The General said a word or so—I replied, & then said, “But I’ll step back, General, I don’t want to interrupt your speech.”

  “But I’m not going to make any—stay where you are—I’ll get you to make it for me.”79

  Then William Tecumseh Sherman joined the platform dignitaries, and then the parade passed beneath them.

  When the head of the procession passed it was grand to see [General Philip] Sheridan, in his military cloak & his plumed chapeau, sitting as erect & rigid as a statue on his immense black horse…And the crowd roared again.80

  At Haverley’s Theatre the following night, Mark Twain sat on the stage among thirty or so military demigods—Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, and others—as the Army of the Tennessee received the guest of honor, and Sherman made a speech. As was true at the 1868 reception in Washington, Mark Twain could not take his eyes off Grant. He memorized, and later disgorged to Livy, the details of the general’s physical presence—how he sat “facing the house, with his right leg crossed over his left & his right boot-sole tilted up at an angle, & his left hand & arm reposing on the arm of his chair…”81 Clemens found it remarkable that Grant—the same Grant who had superintended the great slaughters at the Wilderness and Cold Harbor—could remain impassive in the face of the applause. Grant

  was under a tremendous & ceaseless bombardment of praise & gratulation, but…he never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant, during 30 minutes! You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy. Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping & blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose & roared & yelled & stamped & clapped an entire minute…Gen. Sherman stepped to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent respectfully down & whispered in his ear. Then Grant got up & bowed, & the storm of applause swelled into a hurricane.82

  The reunion’s crowning event, the Grand Banquet, took place on Thursday night, November 13, in the bunting-draped Palmer House banquet hall. Five hundred male civic and military leaders, magnificent in their bristling sideburns and polished brass buttons, marched into the hotel through a crowd of onlookers—nearly all of them women. Waiters raced around dispensing food that rivaled the Whittier dinner fare: bluepoint oysters; roast fillet of beef larded with mushrooms; breasts of duck covered with currant jelly; cake; fruits; Roquefort and English cheeses—all accompanied by elegant wines and champagnes. There was even celery.83 At 10:45 p.m., the cutlery was cleared, the brandy poured, and the toasts began. Mark Twain was to be the last among the fifteen speakers, a tribute to his renown. He had been the last speaker at the Boston affair as well, and for the same reason. The circumstances, in fact, might have been elements from a nightmare: Sam, trapped in a reenactment of his most traumatic humiliation.

  As the first toast was announced, Mark Twain rose from his chair and hurried virtually unnoticed toward the rear of the room. A military brass band was assembled there, and he climbed the bandstand steps for a view of the entire panorama. He watched as orator after orator arose to invoke the Defenders of Humanity who received the Sword of Rebellion and rolled the Stone from the Sepulcher of Progress; the Soldiers of the Republic who were grander than the Greek and nobler than the Roman; who shed their Blood until one Flag floated over the Republic without a Master and without a Slave. Somewhere amid the toasts, a battle flag punctured with bullet holes was unfurled. As the old soldiers erupted in applause, General Grant himself stepped into view; the brass band broke into “Marching Through Georgia”; and the banquet hall thundered with shouts and the singing voices of weeping men.

  It was getting on past 2 o’clock on Friday morning, the banqueteers into their sixth hour of indigestion, when the penultimate dignitary, General Thomas C. Fletcher, completed his sonorous response “To Woman” (“The fires were kept by them bright upon the Altar of Home…”84). This was the toast that Mark Twain had shrewdly turned down in favor of his own choice. The general resumed his seat to mild applause, Mark Twain’s name was called, and the small Marion Ranger who’d run away from the Civil War shuffled his way toward the front of the room, and captured the Army of the Tennessee, its generals and not least of all, its commander.

  “Babies.” That was the topic Mark Twain had asked permission to address, instead of “Women.” It was an extraordinary leap of intuition, and an even greater act of nerve. If it worked—if its final sentence worked—he would upend the hours of brass-plated solemnity that preceded him with an audacious comic counterpoint. If it didn’t, there was always that miner’s cabin back in California.

  Laughter greeted his first casual sentences; it grew boisterous and swelled into shouts, roars, and convulsive screams as he progressed, never once deviating from his legendary “long talk” and dead pan. “I like that,” he began offhandedly, with a nod to the previous remarks. “We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.”85 He draped a figurative arm around the shoulders of the veterans. “You soldiers all know that when that little fellow arrived at family headquarters, you had to hand in your resignation. He too
k entire command…You had to execute his order whether it was possible or not.”86 He paid homage to their valor, and braided it seamlessly with the domesticity they had yearned for as fighting men. “You could face the death-storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted your nose, you had to take it.”87 (Here a roar erupted.) He slyly flattered the manly young stalwarts they once had been.

  If the baby proposed to take a walk at his usual hour, two o’clock in the morning…Oh! you were under good discipline…you not only prattled undignified baby-talk, but even tuned up your martial voices and tried to sing!—Rock-a-by Baby in the tree top, for instance. What a spectacle for an Army of Tennessee!88

  After joshing along in that vein a little longer, Mark Twain began to shift the thrusts of his witticisms toward their ultimate target.

  Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve…as sacred things, if we could know which ones they are. In one of these cradles the unconscious Farragut of the future is at this moment teething…

  He enumerated several other imaginary cradles. Then…

  And in still one more cradle, somewhere under the flag, the future illustrious commander-in-chief of the American armies…

  Just murmurs of laughter here. The audience was still with him, but it seemed to sense the audacity to come.

  …is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind at this moment to trying to find out some way to get his big toe into his mouth…

  This drew a surprised laugh—enough to fortify him as he went on to “…an achievement which, meaning no disrespect, the illustrious guest of this evening turned his entire attention to some fifty-six years ago…”

  Now all laughter ceased and a “shuddering silence” replaced it, as Mark Twain later recalled, “for this was apparently carrying the matter too far.”89 He boldly risked one of his patented pauses, “to let this silence sink well home,”90 and then he turned toward the general to unleash his “snapper.”

  And if the child is but a prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.91

  “The house came down with a crash,” he scribbled to Livy sometime after 5 a.m., still delirious from two and a half hours of wild congratulation from everyone who could manage to touch him.

  Bless your soul, ’twas immense. I never was so proud in my life. Lots & lots of people—hundreds, I might say—told me my speech was the triumph of the evening…even the policemen…captured me in the halls & shook hands, & scores of army officers…General Pope came to hunt me up…Gen. Schofield, & other historic men, paid their compliments.92

  And there was the matter of the only listener who mattered.

  And do you know, Gen. Grant sat through fourteen speeches like a graven image, but I fetched him! I broke him up, utterly! He told me he laughed till the tears came & every bone in his body ached. (And do you know, the biggest part of the success…lay in the fact that the audience saw that for once in his life he had been knocked out of his iron serenity.)93

  * Later, in his Paris notebook, Clemens expanded his critique: “Communism is idiotcy [sic]. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it—it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner’s hands & the Communist would be poor again.” (N&J, vol. 2, p. 302.)

  35

  “A Personal Hatred for Humbug”

  (1880)

  On the ballast of his triumph at the Grant banquet, Samuel Clemens closed out the 1870s with a flourish of self-redemption. He returned to Boston and faced the same assemblage of literary demigods that had witnessed his fall from grace (as he believed) two years earlier. At an almost identical celebration—a breakfast honoring Oliver Wendell Holmes on his seventieth birthday, with the eyes of Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier on him once again—Mark Twain delivered a graceful toast that aimed to heal whatever bad feelings might still have existed. Sam insisted that Howells read over his remarks in advance this time, just to be certain that no boozy trampsages were lurking between any lines; and at the breakfast on the morning of the 3rd he delivered what amounted to a layered and gently humorous atonement to Holmes. Clemens’s toast was an apology of a different sort—for unconsciously plagiarizing Holmes’s dedication to Songs in Many Keys, in his own dedication of The Innocents Abroad.* Everyone present understood the deeper message, and Mark Twain left Boston with a renewed sense of acceptance. He returned to a Yuletide season at Nook Farm, a dress rehearsal for the overheated decade that lay just ahead. Livy was frantically completing the restoration of the Farmington Avenue house, uncrating the last of the European furniture, bric-a-brac, and crockery and distributing it among the rooms. At the same time, she was decorating for Christmas and launching her seasonal charitable rounds. “Christmastide” was to become a major production in the Clemens household, with Livy shouldering most of the duties. Clara remembered the “royal” preparations: the prodigious buying and wrapping of presents for the family, the staff, friends abroad, the poor children of Hartford, “for the sick and insane.”1 On Christmas Eve, Livy would recite “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” to the girls, and then Sam, in a cotton Santa Claus beard, would burst into the room, gather his daughters, and tell them stories about his experiences on his journey around the world.

  Weak, as usual, from exertion and her pregnancy, Livy was headed for another collapse, which she forestalled until the early New Year. On Sam’s forty-fourth birthday she wrote to her mother,

  I told Mr Clemens the other day, that in this day women must be everything they must keep up with all the current literature, they must know all about art, they must help in one or two benevolent societies—they must be perfect Mothers—they must be perfect housekeepers & graceful gracious hostesses, they must know how to give perfect dinners, they must go and visit all the people in the town where they live, they must always be ready to recieve their acquaintances—they must dress themselves & their children becomingly and above all they must make their houses “charming” & so on without end—then if they are not studying something their case is a hopeless one.2

  Sam acknowledged his wife’s overexertion in his inimitable style. “Livy wants Sue & Mother to excuse her from writing, because she is ‘gutting the house.’ I wish to God she wouldn’t use such language.”3

  Livy struggled to maintain her “perfection” as she and Sam waded into a round of swank social display: hosting dinner parties for a succession of famous visitors; joining a thousand guests at a reception given by the widow of Samuel Colt, inventor of the repeating firearm, at Armsmear, the family’s mansion on the edge of Hartford. Sam, who’d practically memorized the “automated house” in Baltimore, could not have helped envying Samuel Colt’s legacy as he surveyed the mansion and grounds. Colt had produced a world-changing mechanical device that in turn produced fabulous wealth. Writing, as Tom Sawyer might have remarked, wasn’t shucks to inventing.

  Certainly not these days. He wasn’t quite as finished with the d—d A Tramp Abroad as he’d told Howells. Elisha Bliss was back in control of Mark Twain’s publishing. He’d regained publishing rights to A Tramp after Frank conceded that he was over his head in his new venture; both Mark Twain and Frank returned rather gratefully to the old swindler’s company. Elisha, far more exacting than his son, imposed a 2,600-page count on his author. Sam filled the Farmington Avenue house with fresh bursts of cigar smoke and profanity with every new page, and drove his exhausted wife a little closer to the edge. He needed 300 pages to make Bliss’s quota; wrote 600; tore up 312 of those; and moaned to Howells he’d poured a total of 4,000 pages into the infernal manuscript. He might have been writing through Groundhog Day, had not a Nook Farm neighbor alerted him that his wife was on the verge of collapse. Mary Beecher Perkins, a sister of Henry, burst into the billiard room on Jan
uary 7, 1880, and scolded Sam that giving lip service to his wife’s need for rest was no longer enough: “[I]t is time to use force; she must have a change; take her home & leave the children here.”4 That very day, Clemens thrust the final 288 pages at Bliss in the American Publishing office (he’d been about to tear those up when Mary Perkins interrupted him), and set out for the Hartford train station, the bundled-up Livy leaning on his shoulder. They remained at the Langdon house three weeks, Livy carefully nursed by her mother.

  The American Publishing Company, functioning at maximum speed and efficiency for a change, sent A Tramp Abroad to its subscription salesmen around the country on March 13, just two months after receiving the final pages from Mark Twain. It sold some 62,000 copies through 1880, respectable but well off the pace of Roughing It and The Gilded Age, to say nothing of The Innocents Abroad. Clemens blamed the Canadians for “working us heavy harm.”5 But he now regarded the press as a nemesis equal to the pirates. “I am glad no big newspaper has had a chance to give it a black eye with a left-handed notice,” he told Elisha Bliss, “for…I see distinct evidence that if the Gilded Age had been kept away from the newspapers…its early sale would not have been ‘knocked.’ ”6