by Ron Powers
Surmounting his role as Bob Cratchit to Clemens’s Ebeneezer Scrooge, Webster performed admirably in the early production stages of Huckleberry Finn. He hunted for a printing firm after negotiations with Frank Bliss at American Publishing broke down, and settled on J. J. Little and Company of New York. Bargaining shrewdly with two paper companies, he nailed a favorable contract for printing and binding. It was Webster who persuaded Mark Twain to omit the “raft episode” that he had earlier smouched for Life on the Mississippi, to lighten the bulk of Huck Finn. Mark Twain miraculously offered no objections.
Mark Twain’s temper had to rear its head sooner or later, and it did so sooner, during the search for the novel’s illustrators. Illustrations were always of critical importance. The author’s first choice probably would have been True Williams. But as Williams’s alcoholism grew worse, he became less reliable, and surly—Mark Twain once called him the greatest combination of hog and angel he’d ever seen.2 He had managed some forty illustrations for A Tramp Abroad, and then faded away: he moved to Chicago and eventually worked for Mark Twain’s arch-nemesis, the Canadian publishing pirate Alexander Belford.3 Webster’s search for a replacement devolved on Edward Windsor Kemble, a twenty-three-year-old Californian and son of the founder of the Alta California. He was drawing cartoons for Life magazine and the New York Graphic when he came to Webster’s attention. Kemble’s work was more angular and less embellished than Williams’s, but it conveyed movement, character, and raw power. “Kemble will do the work for $1200,00,” Webster notified his boss from New York in April, shortly before Webster & Co. was announced, and then headed for Hartford with samples of the artist’s work. Sam and Livy accompanied Webster back to New York—Livy needed to shop. Webster had bargained Kemble down to $1,000, but that feat did not excuse him for a serious faux-pas during the train ride. Webster tried to pin Clemens down on a publication date for Huckleberry Finn, for Kemble’s benefit. The author held his tongue for Livy’s sake; but a few days later, a scalding letter arrived at Webster’s new office on Broadway:
Here is a question which has been settled not less than 30 times, & always in the same way…This is the answer—& it has never received any other. The book is to be issued when a big edition has been sold—& NOT BEFORE.
Now write it up, somewhere, & keep it in mind; & let us consider that question settled, & answered, & done with…
Write it up, & don’t forget it any more.4
A couple of weeks after his chastisement, Charles Webster received another directive from the boss: “Yes, I want Howells to have carte blanche in making corrections.”5 Once again, the congenitally swamped Howells had offered to put his own concerns aside and serve as unpaid, uncredited editor of a Mark Twain manuscript. (Besides his array of novels in progress, he had just sprinted through two weeks of writing a libretto, A Sea-Change, to be performed to the music of George Henschel, while also trying to find a manufacturer for some grape shears his father had invented.)
Howells had made an unfortunate word choice in that offer: “proofs.” He was referring to the typewritten version of Mark Twain’s manuscript, and his intent was to give it his usual editorial once-over for broad issues of usage, tone, and coherence. (“Typescript” had not yet entered the language.) Clemens understood him to mean he would read the printers’ galley proofs, a far more painstaking chore and one that Sam hated, given that it meant scanning each sentence and each word for typographical errors. Hardly believing this windfall, Sam gushed,
It took my breath away, & I haven’t recovered it yet, entirely…Now if you mean it, old man—if you are in earnest—proceed, in God’s name, & be by me forever blest.6
Howells serenely replied:
It is all perfectly true about the generosity…[I]t seems as if I were glad of the notion of being of use to you; and I shall have the pleasure of admiring a piece of work I like under a microscope.7
Howells corrected Clemens’s misunderstanding at a meeting in Boston, and shortly afterward bent to his carte-blanche endeavors. At least he thought he’d corrected that misunderstanding.
Clemens reviewed the book illustrations carefully as Webster rushed them up from New York in batches from Kemble’s drawing board. He was aware that this new book would take his readers into disturbingly unexpected territory—bloody violence, racial ugliness—and that the drawings could either reinforce or relieve some of the textual tension. He was not pleased with Kemble’s early efforts. One of the objectionable pieces was the cover drawing of Huck. Clemens complained that “the boy’s mouth is a trifle more Irishy than necessary,”8 a reference to Huck’s long upper lip. Kemble redrew it. A more general objection was that Kemble had dashed the drawings off; Clemens found several of them “careless & bad,”9 and sent them back to the artist with instructions to soften the faces; make them less “forbidding & repulsive.”10 In some of his revisions, Kemble may have gone too far in the opposite direction: Jim, especially in the early chapters, has the pop-eyed, slack-mouthed look of a minstrel darky.
Clemens’s general complaints about the drawings are quite telling. “Some of the pictures are good, but none of them are very very good,” he complained to Webster. “The faces are generally ugly, & wrenched into over-expression amounting sometimes to distortion…. Reduction will modify them, no doubt, but it can hardly make them pleasant folk to look at. An artist shouldn’t follow a book too literally, perhaps? If this is the necessary result…. The pictures will do—they will just barely do—& that is the best I can say for them…. Huck Finn is an exceedingly good-hearted boy, & should carry a good & good-looking face.”11 Webster bore down on the artist, who coughed up thirty-four new drawings in early June. These Clemens pronounced “most rattling good. They please me exceedingly.”12 Working under deadline pressure and sometimes without benefit of a text, Kemble produced 175 drawings for Huckleberry Finn.
HOWELLS FINISHED his editorial vetting in the third week of May, and Webster signaled J. J. Little and Company to commence typesetting for an order of 30,000 books. Clemens consented to this, but remained obsessed with his own magic number. “Begin your canvass early, and drive it; for if, by the 5th of December, we have 40,000 orders, we will publish on the 15th…[L]et’s never allow ourselves to think of issuing with any less than 40,000 while there’s the ghost of a show to get them.”13 Money had become an urgent need again, his usual expenditures increased by recent investments in the publishing company. In June, Howells diffidently requested a check for $2,000 to compensate his editorial work on Mark Twain’s Library of Humor; Clemens, pleading “losses, ill luck, & botched businesses,” turned him down.14 When Howells repeated the request a discrete year and a half later, Clemens again complained that he was strapped, this time because of Grant’s book: “do you need & must you require that $2,000 now?”15 He sent the check after six weeks, when his cash flow improved.
In the spring of 1884 he began to dream of a rollicking adventure that was sure to make money for himself, Howells, and some other close friends. The idea tapped into the Gilded Age’s taste for grand gesture and the ever-accelerating American fascination with celebrityhood. The scheme was to reintroduce the icon that had materialized on the San Francisco stage in October 1866, and effloresced into the Vandal of the lecture circuit. The Vandal was retired now, but Clemens’s brainstorm was to bring him back, in spirit if not in name; round up Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and George Washington Cable to perform with him; rent a private railroad car; and go “gadding around the country,” delivering readings from their work to audiences in sequence each night: a kind of literary proto–rock ’n’ roll revue. Howells and Aldrich loved the idea, but soon accepted reality: their careers and families would never permit it. Cable was a different story. The tiny Southerner adored Sam Clemens. He’d signaled his adulation in a whimsical way, organizing a scheme among 150 of Mark Twain’s literary friends to send him requests for autographs, the letters to arrive simultaneously on April Fool’s Day. Clemens, notoriously thin-skinned abo
ut jokes at his expense, elected to be amused, and the friendship solidified. With Cable on board for the fall tour, Clemens scaled back on the rented-train-car idea, but hired a manager and gave the project a flashy marquee name: the Twins of Genius Tour.
He spent a distracted summer waiting for the tour, and the novel, to happen. He writhed through some sessions in the dentist’s chair. Along with Joe Twichell, he tried to master the fashionable new high-wheeled bicycle, with bruising results: his German instructor remarked to him that he could fall off a bicycle in more ways than the man who had invented it.16 Clemens later maintained that he had invented all the new bicycle profanity that had since come into general use.17
ON THE morning of June 2, 1884, Ulysses S. Grant wandered into the pantry of his summer oceanside cottage at Long Branch, New Jersey, where his wife Julia was laying out some fruit. Grant picked up a peach, bit into it, and screamed. He had never experienced pain like that which flared in his throat. In a minute things seemed all right again, but as the weeks went on, he felt it again. And again. His wife consulted a doctor.
ENSCONCED AT Quarry Farm with Livy and the children, Clemens sat for a bust sculpted by Karl Gerhardt, a young Hartford mechanic who had studied in Paris under Mark Twain’s sponsorship. A photograph of the bust was included as a second frontispiece in Huckleberry Finn. He started writing a new Tom and Huck vehicle, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians. He thought up new tasks for Charles Webster: look for someone to fix the Clemens furnace in Hartford, round up some books about the West (for the new book), find a manufacturer for Susy’s game, get ready to market yet another Mark Twain invention (a portable calendar), negotiate a contract with a business manager for the reading tour, negotiate production rights with John T. Raymond to get the Sellers play up and running, and organize the sales force for Huckleberry Finn.
One matter for which Clemens did not have room in his schedule was Huckleberry Finn, or anything that even looked like it might force him to think about it. Clemens typically wanted his latest literary offspring out of the house and earning a paycheck immediately. It was hardly surprising, then, that when Webster sent a shipment of typeset galleys up to Elmira in August for proofreading—parts of Chapters 26 through 30—Sam made it only as far as opening the package before he flung the whole bundle down to Boston, and Howells.
I have no doubt I am doing a most criminal & outrageous thing—for I am sending you these infernal Huck Finn proofs—but the very last vestige of my patience has gone to the devil, & I cannot bear the sight of another slip of them. My hair turns white with rage, at sight of the mere outside of the package…
Blackguard me if you want to—I deserve it.18
Well…Howells had offered to read the proofs. Hadn’t he?
To Webster, Clemens explained that “Howells will maybe return it to you to be read—in which case you may send it to me again, & I will get my profanity together & tackle it.”19 Howells didn’t return it to Webster, of course. He had intended to relax in Kennebunkport, Maine, in August, but he agreed to take the work along with him, gallantly observing, “If I had written half as good a book as Huck Finn, I shouldn’t ask anything better than to read the proofs; even as it is I don’t.”20 Eventually, Clemens accepted his plight, and burrowed into a stack of proofs himself.
Back in Hartford in September, the Clemens family experienced a horrific foretaste of the emerging American urban life: Susy and Clara, wandering down Farmington Avenue by themselves, were confronted by a drunken thug who drew a gun on them. The man was captured and jailed, but escaped and fled.
At around the same time, Clemens assented to a far happier, more significant connection with modern times: a stylish New York magazine, a forerunner of the sophisticated periodicals that would flourish in the first half of the 20th century, had been pressing Clemens all summer for extensive serialization rights to Huckleberry Finn. In September, Clemens said yes to a version of this request. The magazine was the Century, in its third year of evolvement from the old Scribner’s Monthly. Its editor, the forty-year-old Richard Watson Gilder, embodied the national trend away from romantic sentiment toward a worldly sort of cosmopolitan knowledge. (Gilder named the magazine after the Century Club, of which he was a member.) Gunslinger-angular and clean-shaven except for an eagle’s-wing mustache, Gilder was a soldier-sonneteer turned broker of cultural opinion. He’d fought against Lee at Gettysburg. After the war he’d stolen away the sweetheart of the painter Winslow Homer, Helena de Kay, with his romantic poems, and married her. Then, at the helm of his new and sophisticated publication, Gilder unfurled his gifts as a visionary editor. The magazine covered science, religion, political trends, and nuance (“The Lack of Earnestness in Today’s Politicians”); travel, architecture (“Old Public Buildings in America”); education, and law, and soon built a circulation of 180,000 a month, dwarfing the Atlantic’s reach. Its greatest contribution, though, proved to be in the realm of letters. American literature had gone adrift in the immediate postwar years, the Transcendentalists aged or dead, commerce and industry dominating the nation’s attention. Britain had recaptured its ancient literary predominance. Gilder almost single-handedly led a resurgence, showcasing the most vital of American writers. In early 1884 the Century was serializing two classics-to-be, Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Henry James’s The Bostonians.
Mark Twain had given Gilder proofs of the book in the spring, hoping to sell a short excerpt. Gilder at once recognized the radically new native voice. Diametrically the opposite of Jamesian eloquence, it radiated, in its very homespun ardency, a new sort of American truth. Gilder tried to coax Mark Twain into allowing him to print most of Huckleberry Finn before publication. The urbane editor tried a folksy approach: “Take a long pull & a strong pull & a pull altogether & listen to what I have to say, & don’t get wrothy till you get through.” Webster & Company would need to delay publication for a few months for this to be possible; but Gilder argued strongly that such exposure in the influential magazine would increase book sales. “In naming a price,” he wrote to Clemens, “please remember that you have the largest audience of any English writer above ground…[D]on’t name a price so high” (as to nullify the magazine’s profits).21
Mark Twain resisted this flattery. Years of seeing his book sales undercut by pirates had hardened his conviction that if most of the novel appeared in print before publication, the market would only dry up. He consented to allow Gilder a single episode. Gilder pressed for more. They reached a compromise: the Century published three installments, beginning in December 1884 with the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud section. Gilder himself edited the selections from pages of unbound book type. He edited on the side of caution: though assuring Clemens that “I have a pretty ‘robustuous taste,’ ”22 he understood that Mark Twain’s unprecedented use of vernacular pushed against the limits of public tolerance. Many of his changes were excisions that bowed to prevailing disapproval of bad grammar, slang, and even indirect references to sex.
While negotiating for Mark Twain’s literature, Gilder was also spearheading a bold new concept in social journalism. His editors canvassed former Union and Confederate military officers, asking them to contribute essays of personal reminiscence for a series to be called “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War”—the essays later to be collected in a book. So far, the generals had remained aloof and unavailable. Gilder and his gifted associate editor, the poet and future diplomat Robert Underwood Johnson, believed that Union officers, at least, would change their minds if their beloved old commander in chief could be induced to break the ice. Johnson called on Ulysses S. Grant at Long Branch in June. The former president, his painful throat cancer yet undiagnosed, admitted to his visitor that he and his family had never recovered from the bankruptcy of Grant & Ward, and that he felt his honor had been fatally tarnished. When Johnson offered him the chance to repair both these problems by publishing in the Century, Grant demurred at first: he was no writer. Johnson named a fee: $500 for four war-r
elated pieces—a total of $40,000 by today’s standards. This was hardly a fortune, but Grant understood that he needed every penny he could make. He decided that he might be able to write a little bit after all. Already he was thinking like a writer.
RICHARD GILDER had significant backup in patrolling the pages of Huckleberry Finn for affronts to public taste. Howells of course was on the case, and Livy was giving the book her most acute attention—taking her pen to sections after Clemens had read them aloud at Quarry Farm. Susy, beautiful and precocious at twelve, noted these sessions carefully, and recorded them, with occasional spelling innovations her father would later cherish.
Papa read “Huckleberry Finn” to us in manuscript just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mamma to expergate, while he went off up to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mamma while she was looking the manuscript over and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down leaves of the pages which meant, that some delightfully dreadful part must be scratched out. And I remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was dreadful…and oh with what dispare we saw mamma turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would be almost spoiled without it.23
Clemens answered this by insisting that the “expergated” passages were ones that he dropped into the text with just that function in mind; he never expected them to survive.
Mark Twain was not the only person interested in smuggling shockworthy material into Huckleberry Finn. In November, as presses were starting to roll toward a January publication, a workman happened to glance at one of Kemble’s picture proofs and spotted a potentially ruinous bit of graffiti. Some slyboots in the printing pressroom had etched a few strokes into the illustration’s engraved plate—the depiction of Uncle Silas braced in front of Huck, his pelvis thrust out in a posture of sternness.24 The added strokes made it appear as though Uncle Silas’s pelvis wasn’t the only thing that was out, and they lent an entirely different meaning to the smiling, sidelong glance of Mrs. Phelps. Another crisis for Charles Webster. Alerted by telegram while making a nationwide canvass of book agents—probably in San Francisco—Webster acted decisively and on his own: he fired back a telegram ordering the presses stopped and the plate destroyed, and required salesmen to return the offending image by cutting it out of their properties. Webster managed to cauterize the damage at 250 copies, a fraction of the 30,000 set to be printed, saving reprint costs that he estimated at $25,000. Several New York newspapers covered the story. Then it was all promptly forgotten—no big thing.