Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Reviews ranged from bad to worse. Howells, predictably, kept his dangerous left hook well away from Mark Twain’s eyes in the Atlantic in May 1880. His lone power punch was the observation that “Mr. Clemens” went on a little too long about climbing the Riffelberg—“we would rather have another appendix in its place.”7 He conceded, “The appendixes are all admirable…”8 Howells’s criticism never lacked profundity, and this critique offered its underappreciated share. Howells found something in the book’s “humor” that the other critics had failed to notice, or else misidentified as “studied” or “straining”: specifically, a current that flowed just below the surface of Mark Twain’s jibes at European manners, languages, bloody folkways, and twittering cuckoo clocks, and his fellow American travelers. It was an undercurrent of rage. Howells made a prophetic link here: it was precisely this rage, he argued, that conferred revisionist greatness on Mr. Clemens’s humor: separated it categorically from that of the derivative “school” rapidly forming in Mark Twain’s wake—forming so rapidly that “sober-minded people are beginning to…question whether we are not in danger of degenerating into a nation of wits.”9 Unlike these imitators, Howells asserted, Mark Twain did not simply seek to amuse. (This distinction applied equally to Mr. Holmes and his generation of refined aphorists, though Howells was too polite to say so.) Mark Twain’s laughter was a seamless extension of his anger.

  It may be claiming more than a humorist could wish to assert that he is always in earnest; but this strikes us as the paradoxical charm of Mr. Clemens’s best humor. Its wildest extravagance [springs from] a deep feeling, a wrath with some folly which disquiets him worse than other men, a personal hatred for some humbug or pretension that embitters him beyond anything but laughter…At the bottom of his heart he has often the grimness of a reformer; his wit is turned by preference not upon [the trivial]…but upon things that are out of joint, that are unfair or…ignoble, and cry out to his love of justice or discipline.10

  These insights, offered by a contemporary who knew both his subject and the received cultural assumptions that his subject was revising, seem at least to hold their own against the counterorthodoxy that took hold after Mark Twain’s death: that his humor, and anger, amounted to character deformations, and worked fatally against his higher literary potential. To the contrary, Howells shouted into this approaching wind: these qualities, far from restrictive, were liberating—both to Clemens and to a still-nascent America whose native personality Clemens was helping it to realize.

  AMERICA, STRUGGLING toward that personality, shrugged off more layers of its provincial heritage and reached new levels of gentrified sophistication as the 1880s began. “Evolution” had mostly lost its power to shock, and had become a template for all sorts of transforming energy short of “revolution.” Infinite progress, infinite wealth, the control of nature, and the perfectibility of man were commonplace aspirations. In 1880, urban industrial workers surpassed farmers for the first time in the American population. The first pay telephone was installed in a New Haven bank. Broadway was lit by electricity and the Great White Way blazed in the night; and Thomas Edison redirected his captured currents from the vacuum bulb to the electric chair. No one relished it more than Mark Twain, the provincial town boy turned Eastern squire. Free at last from the dead weight of the European travel book, he felt reenergized, ready for new exploits; hungry, and in fact anxious, to claim his slice of the American capitalist pie. And with good reason: he had a wife, two children (with a third on the way), a social image, and a growing house to feed.

  Inventions? He knew a thing or two about inventions. Did he not hold the patent for the Adjustable and Detachable Garment Strap? (All right; no sales, but a patent.) Had his Self-Pasting Scrapbook not captured the fancy of the twenty-five thousand?

  “I got up a kind of marvelous invention the other day, & I could make a mighty fortune out of it…” he boasted to Pamela in late February.11 He had purchased four-fifths of a product patent, he told Orion, and had even dreamed up an improving application for it on his own “which I think will utterly annihilate & sweep out of existence one of the minor industries of civilization, & take its place…”12 The invention was Kaolatype, a clay-based method that promised to speed up the production of engraved illustrations, which were increasingly demanded by the book-reading public. Dan Slote, the “sinner” whose larking wisecracks were preserved in The Innocents Abroad, owned the patent, and alerted his famous Quaker City shipmate to the opportunity. Sam should have been wary: Slote, Woodman & Company, which had published Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook, failed in July 1878, shortly after receiving a $5,000 loan from Clemens. It later reorganized as Daniel Slote & Company. Clemens snapped up 800 of his friend’s 1,000 shares as soon as Slote contacted him. The cost was $20,000, which Sam paid in cash, buying him the presidency of Kaolatype, the company. Sam proposed to adapt Kaolatype to incorporate brass molds that could stamp out book covers. It was a pretty good idea, and worked—briefly. An even better idea was halftone photoengraving, introduced by Frederic Ives six years later, which made any manual process obsolete, and doomed Kaolatype, and led indirectly to the lithographic dynasty of another Ives, James, and his partner Nathaniel Currier.

  Kaolatype was for practice. In a notebook entry for 1881, at the middle of a series of fragmentary musings concerning the Kaola process, Sam jotted:

  Get K base & clay & have Page experiment.13

  “K” obviously refers to Kaola. “Page” is the first known reference by Clemens to the aspiring inventor trying to improve a technology allied to engraving: typesetting. “Page” was just then pocketing the first trickle of the hundreds of thousands of dollars he would receive in investments from Clemens over the next fourteen years—the lifeblood of Mark Twain’s fortune. Clemens met the thirty-two-year-old James William Paige (whose name he consistently misspelled, in a kind of Freudian typo) sometime in 1880, through a Hartford jeweler named Dwight Buell. During cigars and conversation in Sam’s billiard room one evening, Buell told his host about a fellow right there in Hartford who was working on a machine that could set type as fast as four men working at once—could set entire words instead of mere letters—and whose speed was bound to double, perhaps triple, as its inventor perfected the design. Clemens understood the implications instantly: a worldwide revolution in publishing efficiency; the first breakthrough in the technology since Gutenberg; an end to the aggregate centuries, eons, of finger-produced, line-by-line, em-by-em sliding of molded-lead alphabet characters into the composing stick by legions of weary, underpaid men and boys such as Orion and Sammy Clemens, and Will Howells, and Ben Franklin. Millions in it. Millions.

  Clemens believed a machine like that was impossible. He bought $2,000 in stock via Buell on the spot anyway. Within days, he visited the inventor in his shop (in the Samuel Colt arms factory, as irony would have it) and watched the skeletal apparatus do a rudimentary version of its stuff. He laid down $3,000 more. “It is here,” as he ruefully recalled in 1901, “that the music begins.”14

  James Paige was but one denizen in the crowded Eden of machine-worshipping dreamers for whom the Industrial Age was a kind of Genesis: schoolteachers and shop owners who brainstormed away in thousands of sheds and cellars and attics, frowning over their calipers, marking down the arrows and equation marks along the path to Eureka! Of these, hundreds were tinkering at contraptions similar to Paige’s, and several had already secured patents. The marketable automatic typesetter was the yet undiscovered Comstock Lode of gadgetry. A Rochester native, “a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man” in Paine’s description,15 Paige had been summoned to Hartford three years earlier by the Farnham Type-Setting Company, which had bought the patent to a promising but flawed machine in North Carolina, and wanted somebody who could fix it. Paige said he could. Of all the people who believed him, no one believed him longer or with more irrational passion than Samuel Clemens, who was helpless before the inventor’s mesmeric, poetic blandishments of immi
nent success and wealth, even as the years bled on and Sam’s and Livy’s fortunes bled white. Perhaps it was an overwhelming obsession-compulsion; perhaps it was uncontrollable money lust. Or perhaps for the first time in his life, Samuel Clemens had run into someone as dreamy as he was, and as transcendently unconcerned about the boundary where fact ended and fiction began: perhaps, in the end, the Paige typesetting machine was simply the best tall tale he’d ever heard.

  At about this same time, Mark Twain rediscovered his zest for writing—a felicitous rediscovery, given that he was otherwise sowing the seeds of his financial ruin. His notebook (Number 19, now, among those preserved) shows him snatching idea fragments out of the air and pinning them like butterflies in amber: he thought of licorice drops and pincushions;16 the superiority of 29th Street hotels above all others in New York; and “Whoopjamboreehoo” and “Blatherskite” and “Flapdoodle High-daddy.”17 He roughed out some new jokes.

  (In Methodist class-meeting.)

  He—What was your first notable Christian experience, after you became reconciled to God?

  She—I had a miscarriage.

  (Pretend this happened somewhere.)18

  In March, he told Howells of a larger game afoot: “I take so much pleasure in my story that I am loth to hurry, not wanting to get it done.”19 He was not referring to the Huckleberry Finn saga, although he had quietly picked it up again that month after more than three years of neglect. No, this one was prettier, more charming, the sort of novel one wrote after reading a lot of other books. A novel with footnotes! (Not even Holmes wrote novels with footnotes.) “Did I ever tell you the plot of it? It begins…seventeen & a half hours before Henry VIII death, by the swapping of clothes and places, between the prince of Wales & a pauper boy of the same age & countenance…”20 Here it was, the first direct allusion by Mark Twain to his central, and infinitely suggestive cluster of literary obsessions: identities switched and mistaken, twins and twinning, stolen birthrights, impostors, pretenders, false claimants. As America shrugged off its provincial heritage, Mark Twain acted to shrug off his, by essaying a mannered novel about a poor boy of the 16th century who shrugs off his low-down status and walks on the royal side, for a while.

  Princes and paupers had been opposing one another in Mark Twain’s imagination at least since that cryptic remark from wild Washoe in 1864—“We have lived like paupers that we might give like princes.” While opening his soul to Britain and its heraldic history in 1873, he’d been absorbed by the sensational London trial of a fat eccentric who claimed to be the elegant Roger Charles Tichborne, young heir to a baronetcy who had gone missing at sea two decades earlier. The case bulged with allegations of false identities, false names, and other fantastical perfidies, and the claimant was finally judged to be an Austrian butcher seeking to shrug off his proletarian past. Coincidentally, Clemens had been receiving occasional letters from a distant cousin who billed himself “the Rightful Earl of Durham.” Finally, Mark Twain’s absorption in things British had led him to English history and historical drama: the great meditative tomes of William E. H. Lecky and J. A. Froude; parts of David Hume; Shakespeare, always Shakespeare, whose works he knew nearly as well as he knew the Bible. In 1876 he’d come upon The Little Duke, by Charlotte M. Yonge, which covered the boyhood of the Duke of Normandy. The setting was France, but the genteel tone and emphasis on moral education struck him as exactly the sort of thing that a polite fellow from an elite Hartford literary neighborhood would want to publish.

  Imagine this fact—I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise out of her, [but this time] my mill doesn’t grind fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir.21

  And not only Mrs. Clemens. The daughters were nine and seven now. Susy, who had inherited her father’s acuteness of noticing as well as his temper, was already surpassing him as a creature of elite society. Perhaps it was the buzz at the Saturday Morning Club that her Papa was a “humorist,” accompanied by a little refined eye-rolling, that had made her an early lobbyist for the Polite side of Papa (although she couldn’t suppress an atavistic thrill at his occasional descent into slang). Reading draft chapters to his pregnant wife and daughters by the fireplace had seldom drawn more gratifying feedback. As he worked, his mail brought more evidence of a high-end desire for uplift from Mark Twain: a Hartford minister requested something with a sober character; and from a lakeside cabin in Ohio, a hideaway that Sam on a visit had dubbed the Lodge of Fair Banks, issued a prescription-request for a new book “that would give you the fresh enjoyment of surprising the public…The time has come for your best book…your best contribution to American literature.”22

  IN THE transport of all this bookish romance, Samuel Clemens idly opened a letter from the mail one March day, and was stunned to find himself reconnected with the enduring romantic crush of his young manhood. The inspiration for the “platonic sweetheart” of his dreams, Laura Wright, had reemerged into his waking life—at a remove of sixteen hundred miles. The letter, crafted with sturdily rounded penmanship, was from a twelve-year-old schoolboy in Dallas named David Watt Bowser. “Wattie,” as he signed himself, was writing “Dear Mr. Twain” to ask his help in a class assignment. Nothing unusual there; such requests poured in all the time. It was the name of Wattie’s teacher that had Sam staring as if he’d seen a ghost.

  Wattie opened in a jovial, between-us-men-of-

  the-world tone.

  At school we were required to select some man among the living great ones, (a live dog is better than a dead lion, you know), with whom we would exchange places, and I selected you. My reasons for so doing, you will see in my composition, if you do not throw both articles in the fire, before you have read even this far…23

  Wattie elaborated his “reasons for so doing” in his enclosed composition: “First, because he is so Jolly; I imagine him to be a funny man…who always keeps every body laughing and who is happy as the Man in the Moon looks”; second, because “he” is worth millions; third, because “he” has a beautiful wife and children, and “Fourth—Because I have been an agent* for his book, (‘A Tramp Abroad’) and because he has everything a man could have.”24 The letter continued:

  A few of us boys thought it would be a “lark” to send our compositions to our favorites, and ask them if they would be willing to change with us, and if their fame, riches, honors, and glory had made them perfectly happy—in fact to ask them if they would “Be a boy again.”25

  Wattie had some specific questions: “When you were a little boy did you think you would be a great man, or were you like Tom Sawyer? I like Tom splendidly, but his teacher did not make him wish and try to be great as ours does.” He added a bit of shrewd buttering up—“I do not think Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Whittier &c. can stand a joke like you, so I feel surer than the other boys, that I will have a line in return.” He signed off “With profound Respect”—and then added his thunderclap of a postscript.

  O! I forgot to tell you that our principal used to know you, when you were a little boy and she was a little girl, but I expect you have forgotten her, it was so long ago.26

  The principal’s name was printed on the report card. She doubled as Wattie’s teacher. Her name was Laura M. Dake—née Wright.

  “A line in return”? Wattie could hardly have been prepared for the outpouring of calculated soulfulness that came churning back from Hartford to Dallas. Would Mark Twain be a boy again? Well, without any “modifying stipulations,” no, but…

  Would I live it over again under certain conditions? Certainly I would! The main condition would be, that I should emerge from boyhood as a “cub pilot” on a Mississippi boat, & that I should by & by become a pilot, & remain one. The minor conditions would be these: Summer always; the magnolias at Rifle Point always in bloom, so that the dreamy twilight should have the added charm of their perfume; the oleanders…always in bloom, likewise; the sugar cane always green…27


  And his boat, Mark Twain told Wattie, would be a big and dignified freight boat, never in a hurry, and her crew “should never change, nor ever die…”

  And in addition, I should require to be notorious among speakers of the English tongue…And when strangers were introduced I should have them repeat “Mr. Clemens?” doubtfully, & with the rising inflection—& when they were informed that I was the celebrated “Master Pilot of the Mississippi,” & immediately took me by the hand & wrung it with effusion, & exclaimed, “O, I know that name very well!” I should feel a pleasurable emotion trickling down my spine & know I had not lived in vain.28

  It was a bravura, not to say scenery-chewing, performance—intended, almost beyond any doubt, as much for the principal/teacher reading over Wattie’s shoulder as for the boy himself. Lest there be any misunderstanding along those lines, Mark Twain added the faux afterthought toward the end,

  No indeed, I have not forgotten your principal at all. She was a very little girl, with a very large spirit, a long memory, a wise head, a great appetite for books…with grave ways, & inclined to introspection—an unusual girl. How long ago it was! Another flight backward like this, & I shall begin to realize that I am cheating the cemetery.29

  Mark Twain and Wattie exchanged ten letters over the ensuing months, the boy ardent, the author indulgent and a little distracted. Wattie poured out his kidhood enthusiasms: “I like plucky heroes better than martyrs, don’t you?” “I am looking anxiously forward to the next book.” “Sometime since, I sent you a horned frog, and hope it went through all right.” Mark Twain replied with guarded forbearance: “Many thanks for the photograph & the pretty pictures.” “I was very glad you got the gold medal.” “My boy, I clear forgot about that frog, because he came when I was in Canada…The gardener hunted for him every day or two, & three days ago he found him.”30 But this was only the “surface” correspondence. On a subtler level, two long-ago innocent sweethearts were communing with each other through the innocent medium of a boy. One of Wattie’s letters passed along the information that Mrs. Dake was pleased with Mark Twain’s renown, “for she remembers you as the best friend of her youth.”31 The schoolteacher may also have influenced Wattie to report that she had cautioned one of her young female students against adopting a “hard-to-get” attitude with boys, because she might suffer the same fate “as a romantic girl she once knew did.” “This girl had some wild ideas about ‘being too lightly won’ &c., and when her Prince really came she said ‘no.’ She thought he would come back and ‘take her in a whirlwind’—but he went his way and she never saw him again.”32