Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Laura Dake herself did not write to Clemens during the Wattie Bowser correspondence, but she apparently talked up the connection among her friends. In the second week of May, a letter arrived at Nook Farm from a forty-four-year-old man named Thomas H. Murray, who lived in McKinney, Texas, thirty-two miles from Dallas. (Murray was Wattie Bowser’s uncle, according to his letter of May 26.) It confirms that young Sam Clemens did indeed pay a courting visit to Laura at her hometown in Missouri after meeting her aboard the John J. Roe.

  Dear Sir: I remember a young man, (and often have I thought of him,) bearing your honored name. I met him at Warsaw, Mo., before the war, “fighting for his Wright’s.” I was then chief clerk of the Missouri Legislature—he, a sailor on the Father of Waters. We met at Judge Wright’s: he, courting Laura; I, eating Brandy peaches with the Mother.

  “Art thou the man?” If yes, then I rejoice that my boy-hood friend has kept his light burning on top of the bushel-measure, and mankind have had pleasure thereat.33

  Clemens responded promptly:

  I remember you well, & most pleasantly, too. Do you remember the night journey in the stage coach? I ask because last year, in…Germany, I came across a particularly seedy old fellow…who said he was along, that night…& that the horses ran away & were making for a precipice when he seized the reins & saved our lives—then he stuck me for ten dollars. I paid him, though I intimated that I thought he charged rather high. The truth is, I did not believe [him]…Do you remember that man?…34

  Five years later, Samuel Clemens still had not completely cooled down. He brooded about Laura in a notebook entry: “May 26 ’85.—This date, 1858, parted from L, who said ‘We shall meet again 30 years from now.’ ”*35 The “L” was characteristic: the writer always kept Laura’s identity deeply camouflaged during Olivia’s lifetime, an indication that he felt guilt over his obsessive memories.

  IT WAS during the bright false spring of 1880, while the Grant testimonial applause still roared in his reverie, while his investing prospects seemed to promise endless wealth, and while his ornate book in progress seemed to point him toward a literary earldom unimaginable even a year earlier—it was in this season of hope unbounded that Samuel Clemens cast his darkest spell on his brother Orion. At fifty-five, Orion remained ineffectual, a locus of Sam’s perpetual pity, guilt, scorn, and perhaps dread. He and Mollie depended on Sam’s stipends for their livelihood in Keokuk; he begged for Sam’s instructions and approval; he accepted Sam’s most lacerating upbraidings without complaint, and he cheered every new triumph of Sam’s with enthusiasm. “Another Ten Strike for the family! Let me shake hands with you across the continent,” he exulted on reading the newspaper reports of Mark Twain’s toast at Chicago.36 He had been laboring for the weeks following his excommunication on a foredoomed book seeking to prove that morality and religion are independent of each other—largely on the strength of one encouraging letter from Sam. Sam responded to his brother’s warmth by inviting Orion and Mollie to Hartford for a February visit, sending them the money to cover travel expenses. The visit went well. Not long after returning to Keokuk, Orion opened a letter from Sam that contained one of the stranger literary suggestions ever to issue from a gentleman writer of the East. Sam was writing, he told Orion,

  to suggest to you to write two books which it has long been my purpose to write, but I judge they are so far down on my docket that I shan’t get to them in this life.

  I think the subjects are perfectly new. One is “The Autobiography of a Coward,” & the other “Confessions of a Life that was a Failure.”

  My plan was simple—to take the absolute facts of my own life & tell them simply & without ornament or flourish, exactly as they occurred, with this difference, that I would turn every courageous action…into a cowardly one, & every success into a failure. You can do this, but only in one way; you must banish all idea of an audience—for few men can straitly & squarely confess shameful things to others—you must tell your story to yourself…you must not use your own name, for that would keep you from telling shameful things, too.37

  Even better, Sam went on,

  would be to tell the story of an abject coward who is unconscious that he is a coward; & to tell the story of an unsuccessful man who is blissfully unaware that he was unsuccessful & does not imagine the reader sees he was unsuccessful.

  …Tackle one of these books, & simply tell your story to yourself, laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing…If the book is well done, there’s a market for it. There is no market, yet, for the one you are now writing—it should wait.

  Then, the bland sign-off—“Love to Molly & all.”38

  Mark Twain had proposed the prototype of the 20th century’s defining cash-cow genre, the confessional memoir. He was suggesting that his brother, in the depths of his helpless abasement, abase himself a little further, for cash. “The Autobiography of a Coward,” of course, was the idea that Mark Twain had jotted to himself in Paris the previous year. He’d fled to Europe in part to make himself invisible after the Whittier dinner embarrassment—an absquatulation that, like his departure from Virginia City on the eve of that famous near-duel, might qualify as an act of cowardice. Now, having erased his humiliation with the bold strokes in Chicago and Boston, Mark Twain threw the idea at Orion, like a cudgel. And Orion accepted it. As his brother’s earnest chapters began arriving at Nook Farm, Sam responded with what seemed respectful encouragement.

  I have stolen part of my Sunday holiday & have read your chapters. I like them very much.39

  And later,

  It is a model autobiography.

  Continue to develop your own character in the same gradual, inconspicuous & apparently unconscious way. The reader, up to this time, may have his doubts…but he can’t say decidedly, “This writer is not such a simpleton as he has been letting on to be.” Keep him in that state of mind. If, when you shall have finished, the reader shall say, “The man is an ass, but I really don’t know whether HE knows it or not,” your work will be a triumph.40

  His tone was entirely different as he recounted the project to Howells.

  He started in—& I think the result is killingly entertaining; in parts absolutely delicious. I’m going to mail you 100 pages or so of the MS. Read it; keep his secret; & tell me, if, after surplusage has been weeded out…you’ll buy the stuff for the Atlantic at the ordinary rates for anonymous matter from unknown writers.41

  Howells never bought “the stuff.” This was the manuscript that wrung his heart and left him feeling haggard after he’d finished it—the manuscript that elicited his warning that the writer’s soul was laid too bare; and his plea not to let anyone else even see the passages about the autopsy of Marshall Clemens. “The Autobiography of a Coward” (or “Confessions of a Failed Business Man,” or whatever Orion chose to call it) was never published in any form. Sam kept the manuscript for several years, and ultimately showed it to Albert Bigelow Paine, who conferred on Orion, by then years dead, the kindness of losing it.

  THE YEAR 1880 saw a profusion of European art that would make obsolete the Twainian barbs about petrified reverence for the Old Masters. Vincent Van Gogh took up painting in that year, and Monet painted Sunset on the Seine in Winter, and the sculptor Rodin turned out The Thinker, and Renoir began his riverscape masterpiece, Luncheon of the Boating Party. In America, artistic expression lagged behind postwar industry and capitalism. The ranking literary event was Ben Hur, by the former Civil War general Lew Wallace, a novel about the origins of Christianity that ended with a chariot race. In California, the poet Joaquin Miller published Utopia, and the British novelist Robert Louis Stevenson arrived with his new wife at an abandoned mining camp above Napa Valley, not far west of Washoe, where he worked on Treasure Island.

  America’s most important transition from past to future was political. At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in June, Ulysses S. Grant lost his bid for a third term, as the nomination went to the log cabin–born Ohio governor Jam
es A. Garfield after thirty-five ballots. Garfield had been a congressman and a Civil War general. Chester A. Arthur was nominated for vice president. Grant had toured every former Confederate state in the months leading up to the convention, preaching the virtues of Republicanism as the country’s national party, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number; and scoring the Democrats as a sectionalist party, intent only on preserving the “solid South.” He was cordially received there, but at Chicago his message of conciliation was muted by memories of the scandals that had diminished his two terms in the 1870s. Grant, who had been treated like a royal emissary during his world tour, being received by Queen Victoria and emperors in Siam and Japan, now retired to private life to face years of business failure, obscurity, and financial anxiety. He had made the principled decision to resign his army commission, and the salary that went with it, when he first ran for president in 1868. He and his wife Julia lived for a while on the income from a quarter-million-dollar fund assembled by his friends; but in time, the securities in which the fund was invested went under and the Grants faced destitution.

  On July 26, 1880, at the Langdon house in Elmira, Livy gave birth to Jane Lampton Clemens, the last of the children she and Sam would have. The seven-pound baby was known forever afterward as Jean. Sam stayed anxiously at Livy’s bedside during her labor—she had remained thin throughout her pregnancy—but the delivery passed without a crisis, and she began to recover after a few days. Sam wrote a letter “from” Jean to his mother in Fredonia, and reported to Howells a week later that “[t]he new baby is thoroughly satisfactory, as far as it goes; but we did hope it was going to be twins.”42

  At around that time, Clemens opened a letter from a subscription publisher in Philadelphia named George Gebbie and found a book proposal that he liked immediately: an anthology of American humor, to be edited by Mark Twain. He invited Howells to share the editorial work (but not necessarily the authorial credit) with him and Howells accepted with delight, consigning himself to nearly a decade of intermittent distraction.

  Grant, campaigning for Garfield, made a stop at Hartford on October 16, and once again Samuel Clemens was waiting to ambush him with laughter. He labored through three drafts of a three-paragraph welcoming speech that he delivered at Bushnell Park before a great crowd of his fellow citizens. Ornate and celebratory until its second-to-last sentence, Twain’s humor detonated on the widely known fact that the government had not acted to restore the former president’s army commission and pension.

  “Your country stands ready from this day forth,” Sam concluded, to testify her measureless love and pride and gratitude toward you in every conceivable [pause] inexpensive way.43

  At the word “inexpensive,” the crowd erupted, and the general, Sam declared in a letter to Howells, “came near laughing his entire head off.”44

  ON OCTOBER 24, Sam began a letter to Orion with the curt announcement that “Bliss is dead.” His next sentence read, “The aspect of the balance-sheet is enlightening.”45 The man who had recruited the humorist-lecturer Mark Twain into subscription book publishing, issued the titles that elevated him to a pinnacle of American literature and perhaps bilked him of a few thousand dollars, had died of heart failure nearly a month earlier, just as Mark Twain was completing The Prince and the Pauper. Frank Bliss, also in poor health, succeeded his father as manager of American Publishing. In that same month Livy Clemens hired a new maid, the twenty-four-year-old Katy Leary, a daughter of Irish immigrants. Leary would remain with the family for thirty years, looking after them, attending their deaths, until Clara remained the only survivor; and then Katy Leary assisted with the birth of Clara’s daughter Nina.

  Finally finished with a draft of The Prince and the Pauper, Sam sent it off to Howells. Howells suggested tightening certain descriptive passages, but his verdict to Clemens was, “marvelously good…all the infernal clumsiness and cruelties of the law—are incomparable.”46 This referred to the acutely described scenes in the second half of the novel, as young Prince Edward VI, accidentally cast into a poor boy’s identity, roams the English countryside, running afoul of draconian British law. Howells restated to Clemens the perception at the core of his Tramp Abroad review: “It is such a book as I would expect from you, knowing what a bottom of fury there is to your fun…”47

  Mark Twain revised the text (in proof) generally along Howells’s recommendations, and returned it to his publisher. His publisher was no longer American Publishing. Elisha Bliss had swindled him, he believed, and the company would pay the price.

  James Osgood had longed to issue Mark Twain’s books at least since 1872, when he’d nearly won the rights to Sketches, New and Old. (In 1877 he’d managed to get out a small Mark Twain collection that included the masterful title pieces, A True Story, and the Recent Carnival of Crime.) A handsome fellow with amused eyes, he was a natural scholar—he’d learned Latin at age three and entered college at twelve—who loved literature, and he venerated literary men, but when it came to the business of literature, his name, for the most part, might as well have been “Clemens.” (After a few years of working with Clemens, his name might as well have been “Mud.”) A partner at Ticknor & Fields before he turned thirty, Osgood had befriended Charles Dickens during Dickens’s American tour of 1867, when Sam Clemens and Olivia Langdon heard him read on their first “date.” It was Osgood who brought Dickens’s works to American readers, and it was Osgood who made the house a home to Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Whittier, and Thoreau, whose works he published in beautifully produced editions.

  Marketplace savvy, however, was not his strong suit. He got caught up in the rapid reshuffling of Boston publishing houses in the post–Civil War years when Ticknor & Fields dissolved in 1870, and he joined up with George Ticknor’s son Benjamin and renamed the firm James R. Osgood & Co. His big brainstorm there was to hand that $10,000 advance to Bret Harte. Then, when bad luck struck the business, in the form of fires and contagious horse diseases that slowed down book shipment, he overreacted by slashing the prices of his books, which cut the royalties to stars such as Longfellow, which made those stars mad. Then he began selling off the printing plates of some classics by the likes of Dickens and Thackeray. James R. Osgood & Co. dissolved in 1878, but Osgood and Oscar Houghton quickly formed Houghton, Osgood & Co. That firm managed only one profitable book, Howells’s The Lady of the Aroostook. Osgood and Houghton argued and split up in 1880; Osgood rounded up some other partners including his brother Edward, and started a new James R. Osgood & Co. (Houghton did a little better, founding Houghton, Mifflin.) In the autumn of 1880, the restored magnate found himself on the receiving end of jovial challenges to billiards at the house on Farmington Avenue, and of the much-coveted Twainian folksy invite.

  …Now look here, Mrs. Clemens & I require that you bide in this shanty while in Hartford…[T]elegraph me what train you’ll arrive by, & I will waltz down after you with private carriage, & will throw an amount of style around you that will make you say, yourself, that you wouldn’t trade places with a stud-horse.48

  Clemens was trolling Osgood as his new publisher—“a thing which I do not want the Am. Pub. Co. to suspect for some months yet,” he confided to Orion; he wanted to retain access to American Publishing’s suspect ledgers for as long as possible.49 By the end of the year, Osgood and Mark Twain reached a quiet contractual agreement: Osgood would publish The Prince and the Pauper, but on terms that made Mark Twain more a co-equal investor than a conventional client. Osgood, the genial and beneficent man of letters, was about to learn just how cruel the publishing business could be, even as he learned the definition of the phrase, “vengeful scrutiny.”

  * Both dedications read, “To My Most Patient Reader and Most Charitable Critic, MY AGED MOTHER, This Volume is Affectionately Inscribed.”

  * Inferentially, a door-to-door subscription salesboy.

  * If, as records show, the Pennsylvania docked at New Orleans on May 16, Twain is probably in error in this dating by a week or
so.

  36

  “A Powerful Good Time”

  (1881–82)

  Now, the business of Mark Twain was business. Within a decade he would come to detest that word and spit it out like a sibilant oath, but he could never conquer his addiction to “business’s” narcotic allures. He played the role of publishing mastermind; he brainstormed grandly; he threw money into get-rich schemes and renovations of the great house, and bad money after the good; he went looking for ways to sue the various liars and frauds and swindlers he thought had betrayed his faith in them, much as the Christian God had.

  His unorthodox arrangement with James Osgood* presaged an era in which “book” generally was synonymous with “consumer product” in his thinking. He worked up enthusiasm for novelty ideas cooked up by friends in the trade—an encyclopedia of American humor, a spoof on books of etiquette. He combed the ledgers of the American Publishing Company, inventorying discrepancies in assets and liabilities, preparatory to siccing his attorney Charles Perkins on the company. (Perkins eventually talked him out of any litigation.) His speculative investments accelerated, and careered toward their various brick walls. In 1881, by his own accounting, Samuel Clemens threw $14,500 into an engineering company, $10,600 into the Crown Point Iron Co., another $5,000 into Mr. Paige’s typesetter, $4,500 in stock investments, and $3,000 into Kaolatype. This was apart from the $10,000 he committed to production costs for The Prince and the Pauper: the best paper stock, the most ornate illustrations, the most lavishly produced book cover.1 The opulence was at least as much his wife’s idea as his own. Livy was insisting on elegance in the book that would establish her husband’s “polite” bona fides, Sam informed his sister, “even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher’s profits and mine too.”2