Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  So far as I know, Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or the thing that may be about to follow…He would take whatever offered itself to his hand out of that mystical chaos, that divine ragbag, which we call the mind, and leave the reader to look after relevancies and sequences for himself.20

  A phrase from the Hartford Times’s review, that the book is “by no means all devoted to fun,” could be applied to James R. Osgood’s life in the summer of 1883. The initial sales of Life on the Mississippi languished at 30,000 copies. Agents had stopped going door-to-door and were unloading copies in bookstores. More than 10,000 copies lay printed but unbound. Clemens was enraged. Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and A Tramp Abroad each (eventually) climbed past 100,000 copies sold, a figure that Sam had come to regard as nearly an entitlement. He blamed Osgood for having failed to secure the massive prepublication subscriptions necessary for his idea of success. His “big-sale-always-before-issue” theory was cockeyed, as even Charlie Webster had dared suggest. A study of the American Publishing Company’s ledgers convinced Webster that Bliss’s salesmen had never reached 40,000 in advance sales, as Clemens had assumed. Sam was unpersuaded: he lit into Osgood for having mismanaged the book. The letter, which does not survive, may have hinted at profiteering.

  Osgood was stunned by this tongue-lashing. The lifelong lover of words; the scrupulous steward of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Howells, Dickens, and James; the man who had agreed to rescue Mark Twain from Bliss, then submitted to an ancillary role in Mark Twain’s business designs, encouraged Mark Twain to revive his river-journey dream, and then accompanied him most of the way, now found himself branded as the cause of Mark Twain’s “failure” (if sales of 30,000 could be called a “failure”). The former Ticknor & Fields man strained for the language of literary gentlemen in defense of himself, and wrote a classic publisher’s self-defense.

  We are deeply conscious of having done everything which anybody could have done for this book. We…had more trouble and anxiety in connection with it than any book we ever had to do with. So far from being a source of undue profit to us, we have done the business at an unprecedentedly low commission. If it is a failure it is not due to lack of intelligent, conscientious and energetic effort on our part.21

  Osgood’s response made Clemens regret his outburst—for once. He replied with a rare apology (“I am sorry I made that remark, since it hurts you”22), but within a few lines he was railing again, about “the failure of a book which could not have failed if you had listened to me.” The Prince and the Pauper and Life on the Mississippi were the only books of his that had ever failed, he went on, neglecting The Stolen White Elephant, “—but this second one is so nearly [unbearable] that it is not a calming subject for me to talk upon.”23 He maintained that Osgood’s failures had cost him fifty thousand dollars, given that (in his opinion) the book should have sold 80,000 copies initially instead of the 30,000. He ended the business relationship, committing himself even more deeply to self-publishing, and leaned on Osgood to accept a lesser share of the river book’s receipts than the agreed-on 7½ percent. Osgood knuckled under.

  Clemens at least spared this affable, well-intentioned man the curse of his lingering vindictiveness. He favored Osgood with that most prized of Twainian invitations: “I have invented a new game of billiards, and I want you to stop over with us, next time you are passing Hartford, and try it on.”24 He even mailed the decorous publisher a copy of 1601 (“if it is for a lady you are to assume the authorship of it yourself”25). But Osgood never regained his self-assurance. His firm went bankrupt in 1885; he held various book-related jobs; made a brief comeback by publishing a Thomas Hardy novel in 1891 (Tess of the D’Urbervilles) and then died the next year at fifty-six.

  There was one ancillary failure that Samuel Clemens could not blame on Osgood: the final failure of Kaolatype. Life on the Mississippi contained some 310 illustrations, and the artists who drew them—the prestigious landscape painter Henry Garrett; John J. Harley, who did most of the work; and A. B. Shute—refused to allow their work to be reproduced by the process. Clemens cut his losses on Kaolatype soon afterward.

  “I HAVE been an utterly free person for a month or two,” Clemens happily informed Howells on March 1, as his finished book was being set in type. “I do not believe I ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed…the absence of the chains of slavery as I do this time. I have nothing to do…I belong to nobody.” He added, “Of course the highest pleasure to be got out of freedom…is labor. Therefore I labor.”26

  His labors sprawled across a wide swatch of ideas; his mind, freed from its one great chore, had typically grown voracious again. He dithered in new stock transactions that would cost him several thousand dollars. He sketched out an idea for replacing the forthcoming Statue of Liberty (excavation work was just beginning on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor) with a statue of Adam: “What have we done for Adam? Nothing. What has Adam done for us? Everything.”27 He started writing a long burlesque, “1002d Arabian Night,” that turned out to be so bad that even Howells eventually had to ward him off. “I don’t mean to say that there were not extremely killing things in it; but on the whole it was not your best or your second-best; and…it skirts a certain kind of fun which you can’t afford to indulge in…”28 The “certain kind of fun” involved getting Scheherazade into bed with King Shahriyar. He and Howells began scheming toward collaboration on a play that would exploit the popularity of Mark Twain’s great stage character and the national mania for discovery; its title was Colonel Sellers as a Scientist.

  Inspired by his efforts to teach history to Susy and Clara, he filled page upon page of his notebook with an idea for a new “history” game, a “Memory-Improver” with 4,000 Historical Facts. Children would advance along a marked outdoor space by correctly naming kings, presidents, battles, plagues, revolutions, “Memorable Earthquakes,” and so on. He proposed three “trumps”—Judas Iscariot, Guiteau, and Whitelaw Reid. “[W]ho gets either, loses 3 points. It is called being smirched.”29 He described his brainchild to Joe Twichell, and Twichell thoughtlessly repeated the description in the Hartford Courant, a tacit invitation for others to pirate the scheme. Clemens seethed, but spared his old hiking chum the friendship death penalty.

  HIS MOST significant labor was the completion of the other great story that his river journey had reawakened in him. Finally, after seven years of approaching and avoiding Huckleberry Finn, he was fully invested in the fugitive boy and his tale. To Jane, in May, he declared, “I haven’t had such booming working-days for many years. I am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way…This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie.”30 On July 20 he bragged to Howells from Elmira, “I wrote 4000 words to-day & I touch 3000 & upwards pretty often…It’s a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer.”31 On September 1, 1883, Mark Twain notified James Osgood and his new British publisher Andrew Chatto in London that he was finished.

  His burst of energy—695 handwritten pages in six weeks—was all the more astonishing given the sourness that had dampened the early, interrupted stages of the manuscript; as when he’d told Howells in the summer of 1876 that “I like it only tolerably well…& may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.”32 His attitude had changed at some point in the years since he’d conceived the novel’s metafictive opening sentences: “You will not know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, & he told the truth, mainly.”33 Now, with the river again fresh in his imagination, and his jilted-lover’s anger whetted by the profanation of his childhood Eden, Mark Twain finished the book at near stream-of-consciousness speed. The pace of his output would suggest little time for the meditative pauses that most writers require before producing a section, or even a word. Revision
would come later, but the wildly complex grand scheme—the “evasion” chapters—form the conclusion to Huckleberry Finn seems never to have produced a moment of doubt.

  This flow had required years to gain its momentum. Mark Twain breezed through the first 446 pages inside his gazebo at Quarry Farm before turning away from it in the late summer of 1876. The story to that point betrayed little more ambition than to divert young readers. The urchin Huck, rich on his share of the treasure that he and Tom discovered in the previous book, and in the throes of being “sivilized” in St. Petersburg, is kidnapped by his monstrous “Pap” and spirited to a cabin on the opposite shore of the Mississippi. (In his anti-“guvment” speech and angry-white-guy attitude, Pap is the book’s most recognizable character by today’s standards.) Huck escapes by faking evidence of his own death and slips off to Jackson’s Island, where he encounters Jim, on the run after learning that his owner, Miss Watson, intends to sell him down the river. By Chapter 11 the two are off on their raft, co-fugitives from the brutal order of the world ashore. They’re hoping to make it to Cairo, at the tip of Illinois, where the Ohio River merges with the Mississippi, and leave the raft there, heading up the Ohio for safety in the free states or Canada. But they drift past that village in the fog and awaken to find themselves in the South, where Jim faces certain capture, or worse.

  That was where Mark Twain suspended the novel: in mid-chapter, with Huck wandering on shore, separated from Jim after the raft is smashed by a steamboat. He is on the verge of witnessing an episode of such gruesome depravity and symbolic power that it will change the novel’s fundamental purpose for being a novel, abolishing the “boy’s adventure” motif and launching the development of a dark national vision.

  Huck is welcomed into an imposing household of an aristocratic gentleman, Colonel Grangerford. He worshipfully (and hilariously) records the décor fashioned by the Colonel’s wife and daughter. He limns the crockery cats and dogs, the fake oranges and grapes on the table, and the table’s “beautiful” oilcloth, with its painted spread eagle and fancy border. “It come all the way from Philadelphia, they said.”34 He drinks in the painting of a young woman “leaning pensive on a tombstone,”35 over the caption, “Shall I Never See Thee More Alas,”36 and is moved by the daughter’s “very good poetry,” an ode to one Stephen Dowling Bots, dead from a fall down a well. (“No whooping-cough did rack his frame, / Nor measles drear, with spots; / Not these impared the sacred name / Of Stephen Dowling Bots…”)37 “If Emme-line Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain’t no telling what she could a done by and by.”38 The merciless chronicler of the Lick House Ball is back, disguised as a credulous rube. It is wonderful set-piece satire. But when Mark Twain returned to the story four years later, the function of this scene deepened, as the same family that surrounded itself with this kitschy Americana emerged as capable of another American pursuit, blood violence.

  The other subplot that enlarged and drove the book to immortality—slavery and its enabler, the dehumanization of Negroes—had been introduced, but still hung at the edges of the narrative. Jim, deceptively innocuous, appeared little more than a sympathetic minstrel-darky, bursting with laughable superstitions and speaking a generic blackface dialect.

  Mark Twain had suspended the book with Huck’s question (“What’s a feud?”) unanswered at the end of that summer, and returned to Hartford with new projects in mind. The Rutherford Hayes campaign absorbed him. He began outlining his Tudor romance before heading for Europe in 1878. He finished A Tramp Abroad, and then worked at Prince and the Pauper through the first months of 1880, while the Huck manuscript lay neglected. But not unused. The deep imaginings of boyhood adventure—of boyhood—that Mark Twain had invested in the river tale transmigrated to the court of King Edward VI. The Huck Finn a-borning infused the costume-tale prince and pauper with their essential connection to the human heart.

  The two manuscripts were linked in a more explicit way: revealingly, Clemens made a “verbal agreement” with James Osgood in 1880 in which both novels would be published under the same cover.39 Livy quashed this idea, insisting that Prince and the Pauper be issued free from contamination by its rough-edged cousin. But the very fact that Mark Twain envisioned the coupling shows that retooling himself as a polite Victorian was never a serious option of his. He would not be sivilized.

  Mark Twain revisited Huckleberry Finn for 216 pages in March 1880, while taking a break from Prince and the Pauper, and stayed with it through June. His shift from manuscript to manuscript was accompanied by a more important shift: from one writing provenance to another. This shift preserved his literary greatness. Turning away from the artificiality of Prince, he opened himself again to the wellspring of personal memory, inseminated by his imagination. He stormed back into what is now Chapter 18 armed with his deep knowledge of violence on the Mississippi River—and, by only the slightest extension, in America. Huck’s brief respite amid the domestic torpor of the Grangerford farm is interrupted by gunfire: a reeruption of the family’s bloody feud with the equally “high-toned” Shepherdson clan that lives a few miles upstream. Before Huck can escape the premises and rejoin Jim on the raft, he has seen his new friend Buck try to ambush a Shepherdson from behind a bush. A few days later he looks on in disbelief as the two warring families assemble in a common church, fully armed, to hear a sermon about brotherly love. Then he is eyewitness to the slaughter of Buck and his cousin Joe by four Shepherdsons who fire mercilessly into the boys as they try to escape by swimming in the Mississippi. The complacent décor of the Grangerford house, merely funny a few pages earlier, now stands revealed as ghastly evidence of a diseased culture’s pretentions to gentility. (Luckily for Samuel Clemens’s own pretentions, the Mississippi didn’t flow through Hartford.)

  This fictional vendetta had authentic origins: the so-called Darnell-Watson feud in the vicinity of a Kentucky landing named “Compromise” in the late 1850s and ’60s. Clemens claimed in later life to have nearly been an eyewitness to one of its episodes. Scholarly research supports the claim, making allowances for “nearly.”40 In August 1859 the young Sam witnessed a “row” at the landing at Compromise from aboard a Memphis packet. A month later, he was a co-pilot on a boat that steamed upriver past the same site, three days after the “row” was reignited with deadly results: a grisly struggle involving pistols, the butt of a shotgun, and bare hands that left one man drowned in the river and his enemy gravely wounded by bullets. This was but the latest face-off in a vendetta that left several men dead over many years. Sam assimilated the details from eyewitnesses, and learned of the feud’s larger contours from the father of a fourteen-year-old boy who had been killed. Newspaper accounts added to his understanding. Mark Twain’s imagination took over from there, as it always did with vivid real-life events. He tried out a version of it in Simon Wheeler, Detective, abandoned in 1878. By 1880, when he returned to Huckleberry Finn, he had conflated and shaped these events into story, and invested them with the power of metaphor.

  The novel reaches its apogee with the “feud” chapters and their aftermath. Huck, reunited with Jim, admires the greatest sunrise in Western literature a few pages later, the river Eden counterpointing the fallen world onshore. They encounter another set of civilized predators, the fraudulent King and the Duke, who board the raft and direct it to Bricksville, Arkansas. After the comedy of the Duke’s sideshow mangling of Shakespeare, a new macabre mood shift follows: the gunning down of addled Boggs by Colonel Sherburn, yet another specimen of Southern gentility. Mark Twain sketches a version of the consequences: “Well, by-and-by somebody said Sherburn ought to be lynched. In about a minute everybody was saying it; so away they went, mad and yelling, and snatching down every clothes-line they come to, to do the hanging with.”41 But “they was too late. Sherburn’s friends had got him away, long ago.”42

  Not quite. Beneath that tentative chapter ending, Mark Twain, his contempt for the South apparently ripening by the minute, pencil
s a note to himself: “No, let them lynch him.”43

  And then Mark Twain returned again to The Prince and the Pauper. Soon after that, he became preoccupied with the Paige device, and Kaolatype, and the birth of Jean, and investments in the house. Worldly matters beset him until the spring of 1882, when he walked away from all of it and revisited the great Mississippi of his youth, filling his tank with river water. In June 1883, Mark Twain was ready at last to throw himself into the labyrinthine finale of Huckleberry Finn.

  The lynch mob storms Sherburn’s house, only to be stared down by the Colonel with his double-barrel shotgun. He flays them all as pitiful cowards; the crowd washes back and then bolts in all directions; and then—with Boggs’s body still cooling in the drugstore—Huck takes in the circus.

  Deep in Arkansas, Jim is captured and held prisoner at the Phelps farm. It is at this point, perhaps, that Mark Twain’s despised nights in the opera houses of Heidelberg pay their dividends: Huck, alone inside the wigwam on the raft, begins the Wagnerian aria that many believe to be the moral center of the novel. He debates with himself what to do; rationalizes that his social, even Christian duty requires him to write a letter to Miss Watson telling her of her property’s whereabouts; regrets his lifelong apostasy; tries to pray his sins away; finds himself mute because he knows the prayer is false:

  I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowd it was a lie…You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.44