Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The romance of boating is gone, now. In Hannibal the steamboatman is no longer a god. The youth don’t talk river slang any more. Their pride is apparently railways—which they take a peculiar vanity in reducing to initials (“C B & Q”)—an affectation which prevails all over the west. They roll these initials as a sweet morsel under the tongue.58

  It would be several years yet before Clemens comprehended the identity of the man who’d brought the railroads to Hannibal, igniting its prosperity: Marshall Clemens, who’d led the drive to charter the first line, the Hannibal & St. Joseph, in 1846, then died before it was built.

  “Alas!” he wrote in his notebook,

  everything was changed in Hannibal—but when I reached third or fourth sts the tears burst forth, for I recognized the mud. It, at least, was the same—the same old mud—the mud that Annie McDonald got stuck in.59

  His three days there struck a deep chord. He looked down from the hill and visualized the old Hannibal imprinted on the new one, the vanished houses restored. He saw “Lem Hackett” drowned again, and Dutchy, and watched as the tramp burned in the fire started with the match Sammy had given him, and he talked in his sleep again as Henry listened in. The four biographical chapters in the second half of Life on the Mississippi, and the similar sections in his autobiographical dictations, are largely the product of this brief stay, in which he imagined for a while that all his life since the Hannibal days had been nothing but a dream.

  THE REST of the trip was anticlimactic. Clemens left Hannibal on May 17 on the Minneapolis for his first tour of the upper river. He traveled alone, Phelps having headed back for Hartford from Hannibal. He praised “this amazing region, bristling with great towns,” and ticked off their names—Muscatine, Winona, Moline, Rock Island, La Crosse, and so on—but it was perfunctory. Osgood rejoined him at Davenport, Iowa. The two arrived at the “Siamese twins” of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, to find the weather still wintry. Clemens walked around St. Paul in the cold and reminded himself, “Tell some big yarns about blizzards.”60 And that was how it ended. He and Osgood left St. Paul by train on Monday, May 22, and arrived at New York two days later. Clemens caught a connection to Hartford, and found his world pretty much as he’d left it. Soon after he arrived, the baby Jean fell gravely ill with scarlet fever, and then Susy was stricken. Charles Webster, who had been rooting in the American Publishing Company’s records, reported that the company had concealed the news of three stock dividends over nine years; but the amount of the swindle was so low, about $2,000, that Clemens decided against litigation.

  He reopened the manuscript of Life on the Mississippi in Hartford, and continued writing it inside his hilltop gazebo at Quarry Farm when the family went there in July. He wrote Howells,

  I never had such a fight over a book in my life before…I started Osgood to editing it before I had finished writing it. As a consequence, large areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder, and I have the burden of these unfilled gaps harassing me and the thought of the broken continuity of the work…61

  The most exhilarating adventure of his life was irrevocably behind him now, as was the joyful state of mind that had accompanied it. Mark Twain was once more enmeshed in the duties and the anxieties of the grown-up that Sam Clemens had become—but with one important difference. The book now assuming its contours, and, even more, the overlapping opus to follow, were to make permanent, revitalizing contributions to American literature, and to the American dream.

  * Under the terms, Clemens would underwrite production and publication costs for his books with Osgood, and would receive all profits, except for a 7½ percent royalty fee for the publisher. He retained copyright ownership, as he had not been able to do with Bliss.

  * Mark Twain recorded in his Notebook 19 that from July 1879 to July 1880, The Innocents Abroad had sold 3,182 copies; Roughing It, 2,466; The Gilded Age, 1,700; Tom Sawyer, 3,186, Sketches, New and Old, 1,518. From March to July 1880, A Tramp Abroad had sold 47,563. N & J, vol. 2, p. 428.

  * In Life on the Mississippi, Twain gives the arrival time as ten o’clock at night.

  * He noted in Life on the Mississippi (Chapter 53) that he had glimpsed the town fifteen years earlier, and six years before that, “but both were so brief that they hardly counted.”

  † He calls it “Holiday’s Hill” in Life on the Mississippi.

  37

  “All Right, Then…”

  (1882–83)

  In the Century magazine of September 1882, William Dean Howells published one of the earliest “appreciations” of Mark Twain’s literature. The essay lifted its sights from a particular work and assessed its subject’s influence on his culture, aiming to lift one of the persistent dead weights from Mark Twain’s reputation: the old Calvinist jeremiad that as a mere “humorist,” Mark Twain was categorically second-rate. Howells didn’t stint on comparisons. Just as Shakespeare was the first to make poetry all poetical, he argued, “Mark Twain was the first to make humor all humorous…There is nothing lost in literary attitude, in labored dictionary funning, in affected quaintness, in dreary dramatization, in artificial ‘dialect’; Mark Twain’s humor is as simple in form and as direct as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant.”1

  He pointed out the strain of authentic social criticism that separated Mark Twain from the “merely facetious,” such as Josh Billings and the late Artemus Ward: “[T]he innumerable characters sketched by Mark Twain are actualities, however caricatured—and, usually, they are not so very much caricatured…there is no drawing from casts.”2 And Howells dwelt once again on the quality that he, alone among all contemporary critics, seemed able to discern: the anger. Or, as he put it in this context, “the indignant sense of right and wrong…an ardent hate of meanness and injustice.”3

  Howells put his finger on several key elements. Mark Twain, and his voice, were self-made, direct, and morally fired. Clemens lived life firsthand, and spoke truth as he saw and experienced it. The essay gratified Sam (he read it before publication), and probably worked as a corrective to all the mandates for “polite literature” the writer had been hearing. What it did not convey was the enormous strain of putting words on paper.

  Writing his great river adventure proved a good deal more of a strain than living it. Mark Twain returned to Hartford with a skimpier supply of material than he’d expected. His New Orleans gallivanting had cut deeply into the time he’d planned to invest in the memories of riverboat pilots. The “explosion” of his incognito status had deprived him of a useful literary device: a narrator who was a fictionalized version of himself. His celebrityhood had colored his experiences along the river, and this worked against the mock-biographical set pieces of the sort he’d used in A Tramp Abroad. Finally, most of the people he’d solicited for informational books and clippings up and down the river did not bother to send him anything. Thus, the composition of Life on the Mississippi was going to be a long night of navigation, with limited charts.

  He was bogged down, distracted by lumbago and the onset of rheumatism. His narrative lacked a center. He remained outwardly nonchalant: “I will finish the book at no particular date; [and] will not hurry it…”4 he wrote to Howells. Yet his frantic search for supplemental text gives the lie to this pose. He instructed Osgood to hire a “cheap expert to…collect local histories of Mississippi towns & a lot of other books relating to the river.”5 Osgood sent him twenty-five volumes. Then he asked for more. The boundaries of “genre” disintegrated as he raided and scavenged. After a while, so did the boundaries between original art and found art. The volume of borrowed material that Mark Twain poured into the second half of Life on the Mississippi exposed him to charges, then and afterward, of “padding” his book, or shifting, in Paine’s phrase, “from art to industry.” There may be truth to this. A related criticism is that Mark Twain’s “voice,” so strong at the outset, disappears under this generic onslaught. That, too, is true, as far as it goes.

  But that is not the
whole story. A conversion had occurred. At some point—perhaps at the sight of the steamboat that rebuked him with his pen name—Sam Clemens discarded his old promise to Livy of writing a “standard work” on the Mississippi. Writing again overtook intention, and “standard” no longer answered. Personal reportage, factual citations from other works—these were inadequate to the Homeric urgencies now building in Mark Twain’s mind. The Mississippi as he’d known it was disappearing; reduced and violated by the governmental snag boats “pulling the river’s teeth”;6 by the West Point engineers straightening its lawless contours with wing dams and dikes and then clear-cutting its shoreline and paving it with stones; and by the leeching effect of the railroads. The “progress” that Samuel Clemens embraced as a businessman-investor was a betrayal of what remained of Sammy’s faith. Against the sterilizing tide, Mark Twain needed to build a bulwark: a life on the Mississippi as permanent as words could make it. New Orleans coffins needed to be in this accounting, and Indian myths; the arcana of lost river cities and towns; the confessions of dying men and the intimation of buried treasure; murderous family feuds; hymns to heroic pilots at the wheel of their burning boats; the overheard shoptalk of traveling salesmen; the lingering thunder of the Civil War and the legends of Grant; Sammy a boy again; Henry, alive.

  Mark Twain tries to condemn the violations he’d witnessed via a fictional surrogate, the steamboat mate “Uncle Mumford,” who alludes to Ecclesiastes 7: 13 (“Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?”7). But even Scripture proves insufficient to the enormity of the violation. In retracing the assemblage of Life on the Mississippi, one can sense Mark Twain pounding against the limitations of narrative, and pinning his hopes on an accretion of word-sculptures not too unlike the Constructivist art that would spread through Russia, Germany, and France in the early 20th century. (Life on the Mississippi was a big hit in Germany.) He appears to be doing his best, against all hope and reason, to defeat what James Cox has called “the lie that language can’t help telling,”8 and conjure on the page a meta-Mississippi, forever sweeping up the damned human race on its mile-wide tide, its “Life” protean and everlasting. He appears to have succeeded.

  HIS WORKADAY temperament, in the midst of all this mythifying, remained reliably frazzled with quotidian concerns. In July, the Independent Watch Company proved fraudulent, and Orion tried to persuade his brother that Webster had been a part of the con. The notion wrenched him. He’d entrusted Annie Moffett’s husband with more and more authority in his business affairs—even with managing the Tennessee land. Clemens wrestled with his hair-trigger suspicions, and convinced himself that Webster was honest; and indeed, Webster, with goading from Clemens, pressured his former associates to make good on Sam’s and Pamela’s investments.

  The annual getaways to Sue and Theodore Crane’s hilltop Arcadia nearly always restored Clemens, but this summer of 1882, even Quarry Farm had its limits. The multiplying pressures sent him to the guest-room bed each night with a throbbing head and little patience for Livy’s conversation. Yet he worked on, adding to the pastiche now with chapters left over from A Tramp Abroad. Creative attention to his manuscript alternated with hardheaded strategizing for its commercial success. Osgood had not met Sam’s standards with sales of The Prince and the Pauper and The Stolen White Elephant; and so on this one Clemens would take no chances. Ominously, the author sent Charles Webster to visit Osgood in mid-October: “I would like him to take pretty full charge of the matter of running the book, if this will disadvantage you in no way.”9 Technically, Webster was assigned to run Osgood’s subscription operations in New York, supervising the outlying agencies and their salesmen. In fact, as Osgood was slow to grasp, this was the first step toward Webster’s replacement of Osgood as Mark Twain’s publisher. The supreme commander, however, remained Mark Twain, who had mastered every detail of the making and selling of books. Or so he thought.

  At Nook Farm in October, Mark Twain calculated that he still lacked thirty thousand words of a complete manuscript. Weakened by his ailments, bedridden at times, he nonetheless closed the gap as only he could. “I am going to write all day and two thirds of the night, until the thing is done,” he vowed to Howells, “or break down at it.”10 That very day, he reported, he’d worked from 9 a.m. until an hour after midnight, churning out 9,500 words (“mainly stolen from books, tho’ credit given”11), reducing the load by a third. “I have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be writing. It is ten days work, and unless something breaks, it will be finished in five.”12 It proved more than ten days’ work. Meanwhile, Mark Twain sent Osgood a large section of the unfinished manuscript for editing. This was not a great idea: Osgood’s copy-slashes reflected an inability to accept the book’s quirky personality. “[L]arge areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder,” the author railed, “and I have the burden of these unfilled gaps harassing me and the thought of the broken continuity of the work.”13 Some of the excised matter was disposable, such as two chapters by other travel writers. But Osgood’s tin ear caused real damage as well. Overly focused on shaping a safe, conventional book of travel information, the editor slashed out sections that contained—as Everett Emerson has noted—the best of Mark Twain’s literary personality: tall tales, vernacular narrators, pungent criticism of decaying Southern culture.*

  As Sam struggled through December to finish the manuscript, Orion found a few new ways to drive him crazy. He’d hatched a plan for Sam to invest in the installation of electric lights in Keokuk. Orion would manage the deal, thus guaranteeing its success. Sam responded with restraint—Orion’s restraint. He demanded that his brother sign a pledge swearing to abstain from business and literary proposals to Sam through 1884; to stop asking Sam’s advice about these things; and also to stop lecturing. Orion, who seems to have been losing his tenuous grip on reality by then, meekly complied.

  On January 6, 1883, still writing and revising but nearing the end, Mark Twain informed Osgood that he expected a print run of 50,000 copies. “We must give Webster all the thunder-and-lightning circulars and advertising enginery that is needful. We must sell 100,000 copies of the book in 12 months, and shan’t want him complaining that we are parties in the fault if the sale falls short of it.”14 Osgood did not grasp the obsessive importance Clemens attached to canvassing, or signing up subscriptions in advance of publication. He would suffer for this lapse.

  A week or so later, Life on the Mississippi was finished. Osgood prepared to publish it in May. Mark Twain warned him that once set in type, the book would still require vetting by the supreme commander’s supreme commander. Mrs. Clemens “…will not let a line of the proof go from here till she has read it and possibly damned it.”15 He scarcely seemed to notice that his helpmeet, who rarely drew a healthful breath, had fallen victim to diphtheria. “[She] is still proportioned like the tongs,” he confided to Howells, “but she is pulling up, now, & by & by will get some cushions on her, I reckon. I hope so, anyway—it’s been like sleeping with a bed full of baskets.”16

  Building a dam across this particular Mississippi would have probably daunted the entire corps of West Point engineers; its sixty chapters flow off in every which direction. The first 216 of its 593 pages (not counting appendices) consist mainly of Mark Twain’s luminous “Old Times on the Mississippi” that Howells had serialized in the Atlantic in 1875. For many readers and scholars, this self-contained sentimental masterwork remains the heart and soul of the larger volume. Mark Twain broke each of the seven published essays in two, prefacing them with three newly written chapters. The first two of these, deceptively businesslike in their recitation of fact (and “petrified” fact*), lull the reader into expecting the “standard” tome that Sam had promised to Livy: the river’s length in miles, varying depth, propensity to change its channels; Indian lore; historical utility to de Soto, La Salle, Jolliet, and so on.

  Chapter 3 bumps things abruptly into Twainland. In a genre shape-shift with
out known precedent in literature, Mark Twain casually announces that he will leave off the dry recitation “and throw in, in its place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, for the past five or six years…”17 What follows is the classic “Raft Chapter” that he’d written for the still-unfinished Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The transplant gives readers a glimpse, through Huck’s eyes, of the lusty life of the ex-keelboatmen, deck hands on what replaced keelboats, the large lumber rafts, their brawling, tall tales, and song. (The “song” begins—who’d have guessed it?—“There was a woman in our towdn / In our towdn did dwed’l.”) From there on, the narrative pinballs: the “Old Times” section ensues, capped off by three new chapters covering the operatic story of Henry and his fate aboard the Pennsylvania. Then comes the famous flash-transition: the single-page chapter that distills in twenty lines “the twenty-one slow-drifting years”18 between the author’s leaving the Mississippi and his 1882 return—a finger-snap of rhetoric that replicates the mood of Sam’s joyful reawakening aboard the Gold Dust.† Then the great collage unfolds.

  LIFE ONthe Mississippi was issued on May 17, 1883, and once again, the reviewers were overmatched. Here again, conventional literature had not developed a language to encompass Mark Twain’s innovations and complexities. The gentlemen of the press generally liked the book, but most of them chose to comment on it strictly from within the old familiar context of its utilitarian value. The Chicago Tribune found that it “imparts a great deal of useful information, and…is much more than a mere ‘funny’ book.”19 It remained, as usual, for Howells to grasp the essence of the matter. Writing many years later, and not referring specifically to Life on the Mississippi, Howells identified the cast of mind that alone could make such a book possible.