Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The other, and related, element was the boys. Their very centrality in the novel certified that Mark Twain’s creative imagination, however battered by his financial, societal, and domestic distractions, would never shrivel beyond an inextinguishable core. While it is true that the boyish spirits of Tom Canty and young Prince Edward are heavily muffled under the novel’s artifices, flashes show through now and again—as when each draws on an instinctual moral decency when prevailing “etiquette” would require a brutal action; or when the rustic Tom confesses that while playing the Prince, he used the Great Seal for cracking nuts. Almost outside the author’s awareness, the boys press against the implausible set pieces, the appliqué of Victorian pieties and their own assigned brittle dialogue. Each, in his way, is fighting for survival—not so much against the enemies inside the pages, as against their author’s worst instincts.

  ON APRIL 17, 1882, Samuel Langhorne Clemens set aside the burdens of a middle-aged Connecticut businessman and headed west to the replenishing river of his youth. With two companions, he boarded a train in New York for Indianapolis, changed there for St. Louis, and arrived at 8 p.m.,* when the Mississippi still was faintly visible in the cloudy twilight. The ensuing thirty-three days and 33,000 miles would comprise the most essential sojourn of his creative life: a tour of his old steamboating circuit from St. Louis to New Orleans, and then upriver, with a three-day stop in Hannibal before arriving at St. Paul, Minnesota, about 235 miles south of the Mississippi’s headwaters. Two of his most enduring books would issue from this sojourn.

  His companions were James Osgood and a thirty-seven-year-old ex-Hartford schoolteacher named Roswell Phelps. Clemens had signed a contract a week earlier with Osgood to produce a book about the Mississippi—the project he had begun thinking about in San Francisco. Once again, he would invest in the book and function effectively as publisher, with Osgood responsible mainly for distribution. Once again, Clemens ignored warning signs: this arrangement had depressed sales of The Prince and the Pauper, owing largely to Osgood’s unfamiliarity with the antiquated subscription-sales process, which Sam stubbornly clung to. A fifth of the novel’s initial 25,000 copies remained unsold for several years, before it finally emerged as a popular favorite. Phelps would be the author’s “stenographic secretary,” on constant alert for pithy remarks by Clemens, which he would record in shorthand for use as writing notes. (Phelps had wanted to know whether “typewriting is a disideratum”; if so, he “must proceed at once to acquire that occult science.”)27

  The sunny-spirited Osgood had a more immediate function: as a stand-in for the absent William Dean Howells. Clemens’s eight-year dream of sweeping Howells along to the realm of his boyhood had finally run aground: Howells lay recovering in Boston from a deathly illness made worse by overwork and anxieties over Winifred’s own fragile health. “I am sorry that Osgood is with you on this Mississippi trip,” he’d written Clemens with bluff jocularity. “I foresee that it will be a contemptible half-success instead of the illustrious and colossal failure we could have made it.” And then, all pretenses down: “—Ah, how I should like to be with Osgood and you!”28

  Clemens chose a good moment to step outside the pressurized world he’d been creating for himself. His prevailing anxieties had steamed toward rage since the year began. The new burglar alarm didn’t work; or rather, it worked too well. His stocks were floundering. Copyright threats continued to bedevil him. The Fredonia Watch Company turned out to be fraudulent. Through it all, Clemens had managed to gather up an olio of his sketches, stories, and speeches for a quick Osgood book. He sent the title piece, a wild burlesque of detectives and detective fiction called “The Stolen White Elephant,” to the publisher in late March. He included the terse instruction: “Submit this to Howells first.”29 Again, the presumption on his old friend beggared belief. Howells, ailing and overextended, now scraped along with his family in a Boston boardinghouse as he struggled to write the final 400 pages of A Modern Instance, having just revised the previous 1,466. Yet he read, without complaint and without a fee from his wealthy protégé, not only the title sketch but twenty-seven other pieces, recommending eighteen for the collection—some eighty thousand words.30 Osgood hustled it all into a June printing.

  Clemens’s state of mind as 1882 began was illustrated by a new vendetta that consumed him through January. He was glad to share this with Howells, free of charge. He began by complaining that “there are times when swearing cannot meet the emergency.” He went on, “About three weeks ago, a sensitive friend [possibly George Warner, Charles’s brother31 ]…intimated that the N.Y. Tribune was engaged in a kind of crusade against me…it made me very angry.”32 What Clemens learned—or thought he learned—was that since Reid’s return from Europe, “the Tribune had been flinging sneers & brutalities at me,” apparently almost daily over a period of two months. “Angry” hardly covered it. Every vengeful instinct in Mark Twain clicked on to full alert. He spent three weeks filling his notebook with notes for what he intended to be a book-length character assassination of Reid, couched as a “biography.” He conceived that Thomas Nast would illustrate it. “Grant calls him Outlaw Reid,” ran one entry, and it got worse: “Chased after all the rich girls in California.” “I do not begin with his boyhood, which is of no consequence—nor with his manhood, which has never existed.” “Reid is Guiteau with the courage left out.”33 And then it reached rock bottom.

  He could not lie. He said, “Alas, I have no nuts.” Pity but he had made those sweet & simple words his motto, through life—his charm against sin, his protection against all tamperings with the truth. I have no nuts! How many & many a time they might have saved him from evil doing…I have no nuts!34

  The polite patrons of The Prince and the Pauper, it seemed, were in for a shock.

  In the throes of this rage, the diatribe shifted into something else. Mark Twain made a mental conversion of the sort essential to his art, and deeply characteristic of it. His intoxication with words detached his aim from retribution, and built on the act of creation itself, and became its own reward. He described it to Howells:

  As my labors grew, so also grew my fascination. Malice & malignity faded out of me—or maybe I drove them out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool who wrote it. I got thoroughly in love with this work; for I saw that I was going to write a book which the very devils & angels themselves would delight to read…35

  Devils and angels, maybe, but not Livy. She watched Sam’s day-and-night mobilization with silent distress, until she hit on the perfect defusing tactic: she suggested that it might be a good idea to find out whether the rumors of Reid’s campaign were true. Clemens hadn’t thought of that. He dispatched Charlie Webster to New York to pore through every edition of the paper since the end of October. He himself subscribed to the Tribune and ransacked it daily. At the end of January, he sheepishly itemized the results to Howells: one unfriendly criticism of The Prince and the Pauper (reprinted from the Atheneum) and a couple of other references to him that not even he could construe as malicious. The Reid screed had lost its raison d’être. “Confound it, I could have earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble.”36 The Whitelaw Reid “biography” never saw the light of day.

  He hurried to Boston on April 14 to give a talk on mental telegraphy, and then joined Howells and Aldrich in a visit to the dying Emerson in Concord. There, he somehow managed to disgrace himself one final time (or thought he did) in the Sage’s presence. He confessed it to Livy, perhaps embroidering again in his word-intoxicated way. He paid for it via her “measureless scorn & almost measureless vituperation,” he wrote to Howells. But then, he deserved it. Or so he thought. His actions (never described) were

  Brutalities & stupidities & crimes…[I]t makes me wish, in the bottom of my broken heart, that this might be a lesson to me…But oh, hell, there is no hope for a person who is built like me;—because there is no cure, no cure.37

  On that happy note, he lit out f
or the river.

  IN ST. Louis on April 20, he and Osgood and Phelps stepped aboard the Gold Dust and felt it slide into the current at five o’clock in the afternoon—sliding, in a sense, into the wish that he had outlined to Wattie Bowser. The following day, he exulted to Livy, “I am in solitary possession of the pilot house.” The day after that, he found “steering a steamboat [is] as familiar as if I had never ceased from it.” He soon gave the wheel back, and returned to “having a powerful good time & picking up & setting down volumes of literary stuff.”38 Even the meals excited him: “Soup & fish & two kinds of meat and several kinds of Pie!”39

  The oleander was in bloom.

  The packet stopped at Cairo, on the southern tip of Illinois, and then crossed into the former Confederacy. The passengers toured Memphis on the 23rd, and on the following day the Gold Dust passed the site of Napoleon, Arkansas. Napoleon was the town when he’d received false hope in a newspaper that Henry’s life had been spared in the Pennsylvania explosion. Now Napoleon no longer existed; the river had consumed it. Ralph Waldo Emerson died on April 28. The next day, the Gold Dust docked in New Orleans, where Clemens’s party lingered a week.

  He grew playful again, and observant. Loafers kept both hands in their pockets at railway stations west of New York, he’d noticed, and goatees were everywhere, a fact that he somehow tied to the belief in biblical inerrancy.40 St. Louis was now a domed and steepled metropolis, its streets lighted at night by Mr. Edison’s electrical bulb. Electric lights necklaced the river now. He found them enchanting at first: “Let artist make picture of boat at country landing with electric light glaring on trees & white houses.”41 He excepted the “government” lights to assist pilots: “This is too much.”42 He tried hiding his imposing identity under a series of aliases, signing himself into hotels as “C. L. Samuel” and “S. L. Samuel,” and was always delighted when the ruse failed to work. His pilot-wheel stint had occurred after he “ascended to the hurricane deck and cast a longing glance toward the pilot-house.”43 The pilot, he wrote, sized him up and told him a series of outrageous river lies; and then spoke his true name and offered him the great wheel—“Trying to play yourself for a stranger and an innocent!—why, I knew you before you had spoken seven words.”44 Or so he claimed in Life on the Mississippi. He’d started thinking up ways to improve on the reality of the trip well before it began, and jotted down the best ones: “Let pilots tell me all sorts of lies & give me all sorts of taffy, thinking me to be green.”45 He’d planned other elements of this book before departure, preeminent among them the accounting of Henry, and their last days together, and the skein of events that seemed to prefigure his death.

  Tell now in full, the events preceding & following the Pennsylvania’s explosion: the fight with Brown; the boat steaming down Bend of 103 with nobody at the wheel—the white-aproned servants & passengers in deck approving the fight—the prophetic talk on the levee between Henry & me that night in N.O. before Pa. sailed on her fatal voyage.46

  A couple of lines below that entry he jotted an instruction to himself: “Leave out that wonderful dream.”47 This referred to the premonitory dream of seeing Henry’s corpse in its metal casket, garlanded with white roses. He withheld that detail until his autobiographical dictations, to spare his mother the shock of learning it. Once on the river, he added: “Make exhaustive picture of pilot Brown & his snarling ways & meanness.”48

  TWENTY-ONE YEARS had changed not only the cities, towns, and illumination along the Mississippi; they had changed the Mississippi itself. Hat Island was gone. Goose Island was gone. Two Sisters Island was gone. A whole cluster of islands around Cairo were missing. “The river is so thoroughly changed that I can’t bring it back to mind even when the changes have been pointed out to me. It is like a man pointing out to me a place in the sky where a cloud has been.”49 He sadly marked the most dramatic change, the accelerating extinction of the steamboat itself. By the early 1880s, railroads had vitiated steamboat trade. The great stern-wheelers and side-wheelers no longer lay with their noses against the wharf, he observed, like sardines in a box, but end to end. He noticed the name on one survivor as it lay in the mouth of a tributary: Mark Twain.

  As always, he homed in on the language around him: “The r ignored, South. S. says b’fo’ the waw. N.Y.r. says lawr for law.”50 He homed in on Southern culture as well, and his years in the East had sharpened his contempt for its chivalric affectations: “South still in the sophomoric (gush) period. All speech there is flowery & gushy—pulpit, law, literature, it is all so.”51 Sometimes he heard in that speech a ripe hypocrisy: “Was told that South they don’t keep negro mistresses as much as befo’ the waw.”52 Conversely, he was happy to reencounter the particular music of Southern Negro speech, and he filled several notebook pages with overheard conversations (“What a splendid moon!” “Laws bless you, honey you ought to seen dat moon befo’ de waw”53). And then there was the speech of the pilots—speech that was fated soon to be a dead language. With Phelps’s stenographic help, he harvested a colorful inventory of their yarns, river lore, varieties of swearing, and jargon, all essential to the foundation of the book he would soon write.

  TWO DECADES’ worth of fraught and freighted exile washed away from him and left him clearheaded again, receptive to wonder. On deck at four o’clock with the early watch at Kentucky Bend on April 25, he took in a spectacle he had too long ignored, the planetary roll from darkness to morning light. He consecrated the tableau in a dictation to Phelps.

  Birds singing here at sunrise, foliage green in the distance…walls of forest near at hand paling gradually with the distance and vanishing…The first blush of the rising sun out on the overflow, was pink, then purple; and the reflections in the water still beautiful.54

  Later that day he fleshed the images into sentences, embellishing his dictated thoughts into a letter for Livy.

  It was fascinating to see the day steal gradually upon this vast silent world; & when the edge of the shorn sun pushed itself above the line of forest, the marvels of shifting light & shade & color & dappled reflections, that followed, were bewitching to see…& the remote, shadowy, vanishing distances, away down the glistening highway under the horizon! and the riot of the singing birds!—it was all worth getting up for, I tell you.55

  Here was descriptive prose writing that easily eclipsed his rhapsodies from the hill atop Quarry Farm, and his limning of Heidelberg from the bird-cage room of his mountainside hotel. Here was joy of being transfused into words. In 1880, Mark Twain had composed a draft of the famous “sunrise” passage that begins Chapter 19 in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was this moment, perhaps, that led him to meticulously revise that draft in 1883 and 1884, adding certain sounds (bullfrogs “cluttering”) and aromas (dead fish on the ground); the likely use of a small log cabin on the far side of the river; the elaboration of meaning found in a streak on the water. Harold Bloom has called the finished passage “the most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by an American.”56

  Civilization constricted Mark Twain as badly as it did Huck, and the river liberated him equally. Perhaps he had not been far wrong in his answer to Wattie Bowser. Perhaps he really should have remained a river pilot in summer always, on a freight boat never in a hurry, with a crew that would never die.

  NEW ORLEANS opened itself to Mark Twain. He was in demand at dinner parties, Sunday-school classes, cockfights, and mule races. He got to know two of the South’s most prominent young writers, with whom he’d corresponded from Hartford: the tiny ex-Confederate cavalryman George Washington Cable, whose sympathetic novels of Creole and Negro life had won him a following, and the excruciatingly shy Joel Chandler Harris, creator of “Uncle Remus,” who’d traveled from Atlanta to meet Mark Twain, but didn’t have much to say. On May 3, Sam enjoyed a reunion with his old mentor Horace Bixby, now the captain of the 300-foot, 2,300-ton City of Baton Rouge, a splendid new steamboat for the Anchor Line, with its six bridal chambers and nickel-plated bell pull; and one of the
last of its dimensions to be built. The reporters who by now clustered in Mark Twain’s wake recorded the moment when he and the old pilot met and embraced. He took a sightseeing tour aboard a tug with Bixby, and when Clemens’s party disembarked upriver on May 6, it was aboard the Baton Rouge. He would never see the Mississippi south of St. Louis again.

  In the domed and steepled metropolis, he tossed off a couple of farewell hot scotches with Bixby and also said good-bye to Osgood, who entrained for the East and the demands of business. And then, with Phelps in tow, Sam Clemens reversed an itinerary that he had followed twenty-nine springs ago: he boarded an overnight packet from St. Louis to Hannibal.

  HE HAD thought about reentering his boyhood hometown incognito.* Whether he followed through on that hardly mattered; he arrived on a Sunday morning, when everyone was asleep, and Hannibal had become a town of mysterious strangers anyway: girls with familiar faces who turned out to be the daughters of the girls he knew; clerks and shopkeepers from someplace else. “Many of the people I once knew in Hannibal are now in heaven,” he mused while standing on Holliday’s Hill.† “Some, I trust, are in the other place.”57 Hannibal had grown to a city of fifteen thousand people, with paved streets and a hundred-thousand-dollar castle of a depot at the convergence of six railroad lines. The railroads struck Sam Clemens as a violation.