Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  ADVENTURES OFHuckleberry Finn was published in Canada by Dawson Brothers and in London by Chatto & Windus on the same date, December 10, 1884. Both editions were authorized. Charles Webster & Company published it in America on February 18, 1885. The initial run fell 10,000 short of Clemens’s “magical” figure of 40,000, but brisk sales obliged Webster to make up that deficit almost immediately, and he ordered another 10,000 in March. The first edition ran for six years, and the book continued to sell after that—worldwide and into the 20th and 21st centuries, exceeding the 20 million mark in the 1990s. The early reaction was sophisticated and enthusiastic, ratifying Gilder’s instincts. William Ernest Henley in the London Athenaeum, which had often treated Mark Twain harshly, applauded the writer’s turn away from pretentious “fine writing” and toward the “real creations” that were Jim and Huck.25 “The skill with which the character of Huck Finn is maintained is marvelous,” declared the rising American critic Brander Matthews in the London Saturday Review, adding that Huck’s natural voice erased the need for “scenes which would have afforded the ordinary writer matter for endless moral and political and sociological disquisition…”26 The hometown Hartford Courant, probably in the person of Charles Dudley Warner, praised the author’s “picture of a people, of a geographical region, of a life that is new in the world.”27

  An intense conversation developed in the press over this transitional American novel. It began slowly, because not many copies had been sent to reviewers. At the end of January Clemens had ordered Webster to hold back: “What we want is a favorable review, by an authority—then immediately distribute the book among the press.”28 Now, indecision gnawed at him. As the publication date bore down, he reversed himself: send copies to the big New York dailies, and if the reviews looked good, only if they looked good, “then send out your 300 press copies over the land.”29 In the next breath: “how in hell we overlooked that unspeakably important detail [sending copies to magazines], utterly beats my time.”30 An exasperated Webster pointed out that “you told me in the start that press notices hurt the last book before it was out & that this year we would send none until the book was out.”31

  It was about then that the public conversation over Huckleberry Finn took a sharp turn, a turn toward denunciation that has laced debate over the book ever since. The Puritan scowl that Mark Twain seemed to have melted over his fifteen years in the East abruptly hardened again. In an unconscious rebuke to Mark Twain’s 1865 embrace of “literature of a low order—i.e. humorous,” the New York World’s headline scolded, “ ‘Humor’ of a Very Low Order—Wit and Literary Ability Wasted on a Pitiable Exhibition of Irreverence and Vulgarity.” Below that, the critic ended the suspense as to how he felt about the book:

  “—[W]hat can be said of a man of Mr. Clemens’s wit, ability and position deliberately imposing upon an unoffending public a piece of careless hack-work in which a few good things are dropped amid a mass of rubbish…”32

  The Boston Advertiser sputtered about “coarseness and bad taste.”33 The San Francisco papers were divided. The Bulletin took literalism to the extreme, scolding Mark Twain for “telling his juvenile readers that there are some lies in his book—that most people lie, and that it is not very bad after all.”34 The Chronicle disagreed, praising the revealing power of the book’s dialect: “Mark Twain may be called the Edison of our literature. There is no limit to his inventive genius…”35 Onto this combustible pile, the lighted match was tossed in mid-March 1885: the Concord, Massachusetts, Public Library announced that it would withhold the novel from its patrons because of its coarseness of language and questionable morals. Suddenly the press was fascinated with the book—not so much as literature but rather as a litmus test of civic standards. The library’s decision made headlines around the country. The far-off St. Louis Globe-Democrat, from Clemens’s home state, sent a reporter to interview the board’s committee members. One told him,

  While I do not wish to state it as my opinion that the book is absolutely immoral in its tone…it contains but very little humor, and that little is of a very coarse type…I regard it as the veriest trash.

  Another committeeman remarked,

  It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade of morality,…and all through its pages there is a systematic use of bad grammar and an employment of rough, coarse, inelegant expressions…The whole book is of a class that is more profitable for the slums than it is for respectable people, and it is trash of the veriest sort.36

  Clemens’s first reaction was to laugh it off. “[The library committee] have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country,”37 he told Webster, and predicted that the expulsion would be good for 25,000 sales. Even without the “puff,” Huckleberry Finn was enjoying the best start of any new Mark Twain book in the previous ten years, 39,000 as of March 14, Charles Webster reported. Ten days later the number would climb to 43,500. Sam’s financial problems were apparently over. Indeed, there were indications that he was on the verge of a fortune. One set of glad tidings came by way of James Paige. His long-awaited typesetter was perfected, the inventor claimed in April. (He had made similar claims in April 1881 and in February and March of 1883.) It awaited expert testing, the final formality before taking it to the manufacturing level! Paige would sell all rights to the machine to the stockholders for $350,000 and royalties on each machine manufactured. Models in eight sizes would be sold at $5,000 each. Clemens would realize $250,000 in cash or stock under the complicated terms. Even better: “Three years from now I calculate to have about 1000 of those machines hired out in this country at $2,500,000.”38 It seemed as though Samuel Clemens’s long-standing faith in the machine and its godlike powers was at last to be fulfilled. Charles Webster was instructed to summon experts, capitalists, and press to Hartford for a viewing. The viewing proved…inconclusive. Paige serenely took the machine apart and started over.

  Clemens remained unfazed. A company was needed! With European subsidiaries! Millions in it! In the summer of 1885 he joined into a working partnership with William Hamersley, the Hartford lawyer who was president of Farnham typesetting, and prowled the offices and elite clubs of New York millionaires, including Jay Gould and his son, looking for investors. He had little luck. The businessmen, well aware of all the competing designs out there, had no reason to believe that the Paige was the best of them. A lot of smart money, in fact, was quietly moving toward a workshop in Brooklyn. There, a thirty-one-year-old German-born inventor, Ottmar Mergenthaler, a former watch-maker’s apprentice, had formulated a highly rational approach to the setting of type: a machine operated via a keyboard, derived from the new typewriter. It set molds for typefaced characters along a line; hot lead was poured into the molds, and the resulting type was transferred to a galley tray: an early prototype for mass production. (The Paige also had a keyboard, but it was designed ponderously to set type by entire syllables and words—the product of “an analytical study of the language, covering all subjects,” as an engineer connected with the project admiringly recalled it in 1916.39 The Mergenthaler simply summoned molds for individual letters, fast.) Among the enthusiastic backers of this more promising machine was a syndicate headed by Whitelaw Reid.

  Samuel Clemens chose to ignore Mergenthaler’s device, convincing himself that it was hopelessly flawed, and scribbling down the Paige’s tiniest advantages: “This type-setter does not get drunk…He does not join the Printer’s Union…”40

  THE OTHER happy development touched even deeper chords of Clemens’s psychology and personal history, and consummated a dream of three years. It concerned Ulysses Grant. Grant had exceeded Gilder’s hopes with the first draft of his Shiloh essay. His untutored prose writing displayed all the cognitive strengths that had made him a great general. Unadorned and rather flat in the early draft stages, it nonetheless surged forward along a terse, logical, comprehensive narrative line. Richard Gilder dispatched Robert Underwood Johnson to Long Branch to guide the ailing former pre
sident in revising the effort, hoping to extract from him some traces of anecdote, character development, and personal feeling. Once again, Grant astonished. As Mark Perry has illustrated, the old soldier proved a writer nearly as adept in his factual way as the dreamy writer-to-be he’d once menaced in Missouri. Grant rewrote the article completely, pouring in vignettes of sound and sight: the shock of musketry, a general losing his hat in the confusion of battle, Grant’s own sword scabbard shattered by a ball. The great swell of interest in his published articles (the Shiloh issue sold 220,000 copies, Mark Twain remembered) led Gilder and Roswell Smith, the Century Company’s president, to quickly open talks with Grant about expanding his memories into a book. Grant, who knew by this time that his days were numbered, found that he enjoyed writing—enjoyed it as much as he could write through his worsening throat pain. By the end of the summer he and the Century had reached a verbal agreement to produce a memoir. All that was lacking was his signature on a contract.41 Enter Mark Twain.

  Clemens looked in on the general several times in October and November of 1884, at the house on 66th Street in New York where the Grant family had repaired after the summer in Long Branch. Grant was deteriorating. He kept his throat wrapped in a shawl and wore a knit cap pulled tightly over his head, but managed to write each day, with research help from his son Fred and editorial suggestions from Adam Badeau, a wartime aide who had written a three-volume account of the general’s military career. The pain kept the dying man awake at night. A trusted doctor, George Frederick Schrady, came up with a suggestion for calming him down: “Pretend you are a boy again.”42

  Although he deeply desired to publish Grant’s memoirs, Clemens seems to have restrained himself on the topic at first during these visits; it was enough to spend time with the public idol of his life, who had now become an old friend. He dropped his reticence in the first week of November, shortly before he left on his reading tour with Cable. In another of the unlikely coincidences that peppered his life, Clemens was walking toward his hotel after lecturing on a foggy night in New York, when two figures stepped into his path from out of a doorway and fell to talking as they walked ahead of him.

  I heard one of them say, “Do you know General Grant has actually determined to write his memoirs and publish them? He has said so today, in so many words.”43

  Mark Twain pretended in his autobiographical dictations that the two figures were strangers, and that this was how he learned of Grant’s intentions. This was not so; but the truth was eerie enough: one of the men was Gilder; and over dinner at his house a few nights later, Clemens listened with studied fascination as the editor laid out the details of the proposed contract. Privately, he felt contempt for the miserly terms—as he saw them—that the Century Company (parent to the magazine) offered to Grant: royalties of only 10 percent, and not a penny in advance. Through his indignation, he saw that Century, complacent in its ignorance of book-publishing realities, had made a bad miscalculation: if handled correctly, the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant were almost certain to be a worldwide bonanza, and Gilder’s people had made their lowball offer with no thought that someone else might gladly top it. Clemens was in Grant’s library the following morning. As he later told it, the general had taken up his pen to sign the Century contract when Sam intervened. He urged Grant to ink in 20 percent as the royalty rate, and added, “Better still, put seventy-five percent of the net returns in its place.”44 Grant was incredulous: no publisher would pay for a book on that scale, and besides, he had said he’d sign the contract; his honor required that he follow through. Clemens countered that buried in the Century contract was an “offensive detail”: part of Grant’s 10 percent would be withheld for “clerk hire, house rent, sweeping out the offices, or some such nonsense as that.”45 Grant should have three-fourths of the profits, with no deductions, Clemens declared, adding that Frank Bliss’s American Publishing Company would doubtless jump at this chance.

  Grant was beginning to understand the scale of what Clemens was talking about. Julia was faced with penury if Grant died in his present financial condition. Clemens extracted Grant’s promise to wait twenty-four hours before making a decision. On the following day, Mark Twain took Grant like Grant took Richmond. Switching from his feint toward American Publishing, he suddenly proposed: “Give me the book on the terms which I have already suggested that you make with the Century people”—in other words, either a 20 percent royalty or 75 percent of the profits.46 (He wrote in a $10,000 advance, but Grant rejected it on principle.) His own profitability was assured, he believed, even on these terms: he would sell Grant’s book by subscription, rather than over the counter as Century had intended, and the revenues would be incomparable. Grant pondered for several weeks, but hardly any doubt remained. On February 21, 1885, Mark Twain arrived in New York for his fourth-last performance on the “Twins of Genius” tour. He paid Grant a house call, and the thin and ravaged general confirmed his decision: “I mean you shall have the book—I have about made up my mind to that…”47 Now Mark Twain had topped even his “victory” over Grant at the Chicago reunion banquet (“I shook him up like dynamite…I had measured this unconquerable conqueror…I knew I could lick him”). This was a victory that not even Robert E. Lee had been able to achieve: soon, the greatest general since Napoleon would pick up a pen and sign an agreement on his—Mark Twain’s—terms.

  What with the Paige typesetter, Huckleberry Finn, and Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, the former printer’s apprentice from Hannibal, Missouri, now bestrode the realms of technology, literature, and history in the legacy of a great general. Mark Twain appeared, at that moment in mid-March, indomitable, a god of his century. He had no way of knowing that his greatest work was now behind him, and that the fortune churning his way would be ground to dust in the Paige machine’s malfunctioning parts. In his final quarter-century, life would never again be quite as sweet for Samuel Langhorne Clemens as it was at this moment, as he surveyed the American continent like the pilot of a steamboat looking out on an endless national banner.

  CRITICAL COMMENTARY about Huckleberry Finn continued undiminished, until it became an essential subgenre of American letters. To trace the constantly mutating concerns of the novel’s reviewers from the moment of publication onward is to watch the novel itself effloresce in the exact patterns of the nation’s shifting ideals and anxieties. Huckleberry Finn is the Vandal of American literature: castigated as “trash” of varying categories; banned periodically; yet constantly reemerging to seduce the respectable folk; to break the rules and defy anyone to make something of it; to flaunt its capricious shifts of tone and mood and plot; to blow its outlaw jazz riffs of spoken language; and, finally, to stand immutable as a moral touchstone of the American saga by its simple offer to go to hell.

  Concern over its “coarse” language and its antisocial protagonist—a lying, uncouth piece of white trash who couldn’t spell—prevailed as a critical norm until the early 20th century. Then, the menace of an armed and destabilized world prompted critics to see in the novel the exaltation of the unconquerable American soul. H. L. Mencken in 1913 declared it “a truly stupendous piece of work, perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English,” and its author “the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the blood royal.”48 Waldo Frank in 1919 asserted, “Huckleberry Finn is the American epic hero. Greece had Ulysses. [Huck] expresses…the movement of the American soul through all the sultry climaxes of the Nineteenth Century.”49

  Hardly anybody seemed to notice the wayward ending for half a century, until Bernard DeVoto declared in 1932 that the final chapters were “far below the accomplishment of what has gone before,” theorizing that Mark Twain’s lack of formal training made him unable to grasp that they were “a defacement of his purer work.”50 In the same year, Hemingway agreed, in the breath following his “All-modern-literature-comes-from-one-book” declaration: “If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the
real end. The rest is just cheating.”51

  These objections were recast two decades later under the new intellectual rubric of literary theory. Leo Marx, in a landmark 1953 essay, interrogated the “evasion” chapters in relation to the rest of Huckleberry Finn, and concluded that they jeopardized the novel’s significance. Rebutting the approval of the ending implicitly conferred by T. S. Eliot (“a masterpiece”52) and Lionel Trilling (“one of the world’s great books”53), Marx held that it was in fact a disaster. Tom Sawyer’s grotesque and unnecessary contrivances to free Jim countervene the “coil of meaning” developed up to that point: a quest for freedom and dignity withheld by a corrupted social order. The hard-won stature that Jim has gained during the downriver voyage is discarded: suddenly he is a compliant darky, childishly enduring Tom Sawyer’s manic torments. Similarly, Huck loses the moral consciousness that the river crises instilled in him. “The unhappy truth about the ending of Huckleberry Finn,” Marx wrote, “is that the author, having revealed the tawdry nature of the culture of the great valley, yielded to its essential complacency.”54