Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Charles Webster, at thirty-six, began to suffer headaches. He had been prey to attacks of nerves ever since his boyhood accident with a gun; but they were nothing like this. The headaches intensified into the excruciating flashes of facial pain known as neuralgia. Annie Moffett’s husband, who just a few years earlier had been an eager young small-town businessman, now found himself a hollowed-out publishing mogul, a public figure and a private wreck. In August, Webster solicited the advice of a fellow sufferer, Thomas Kilby Smith, a former Union officer now employed at the New York Star. Visiting Webster at the publishing company’s offices, Smith was so horrified at Webster’s agony that he quickly left, and framed his advice in a quickly jotted letter.

  The evidence of suffering was so apparent in your countenance just now that I could not bear to add to your pain by the sound of my voice and so curtailed my call. You asked me for the suggestion of remedy for neuralgia…Its symptom is exacerbation, acute pain of nerve…Few have suffered…as you are suffering now…52

  Smith suggested a remedy “that may appear silly & irrational”: some fresh lemon juice squeezed into “an ordinary goblet” two-thirds full of boiling water. “After a few mornings you will crave it as a drunkard craves his cocktail.”53 Webster’s neuralgia persisted, and periods of bed rest at home began to supplant his visits to the company’s offices. Fred Hall filled the vacuum.

  MARK TWAIN’S literary impulses continued to lie moribund as 1887 began. He’d scarcely touched the novel about the Hartford time-traveler to the Arthurian court for nearly a year. In November, he’d rationalized his paralysis to Mary Fairbanks.

  I expect to write three chapters a year for thirty years; then the book will be done…It is to be my holiday amusement for six days every summer the rest of my life. Of course I do not expect to publish it…54

  The wells were pumped dry, and this time they were not filling up. He needed a thunderbolt. It arrived from across the Atlantic Ocean in the form of an essay ridiculing the literary competence of his idol General Grant. The author was the arbiter-priest of British high culture, Matthew Arnold. Arnold reviewed Personal Memoirs in the February 1887 Murray’s, a British periodical, and “found a language all astray in its use of will and shall, should and would.” Grant had further disgraced himself by speaking of “having badly whipped the enemy.” Arnold pronounced Grant’s language “without charm and without high breeding,”55 as if it were some sort of naïve domestic burgundy.* In fact, Arnold respected Grant, preferring him to Lincoln. (“I hardly know anyone so selbst-standig,” he purred to his nephew.)56 The review of Memoirs was mostly positive, but it carried a subtext of cultural disdain. When the Boston publisher Cupples, Upham & Co. reprinted it in the same month, that disdain overpowered the praise in the judgment of many American readers, most especially Mark Twain, whose outrage jolted him back to eloquence. On the evidence, his fury may well have reignited his literary energies. It wasn’t just Ulysses S. Grant whom Arnold had patronized, it was the nation Grant embodied and had saved from dissolution; the nation whose raw energies and brass-band strut toward Progress resonated with Mark Twain’s energies and optimism. The nation whose own voice Mark Twain had done so much to legitimize.

  Mark Twain took it upon him selbst to restore Grant’s standig. On April 27, 1887, he lashed back at Arnold in a speech before the Army and Navy Club of New York. He assailed the great Briton on his own ground of high diction and grammatical correctness—a shocking audacity in the America of that time. “Lately a great and honored author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding fault with General Grant’s English,” Mark Twain began as the audience gleefully stirred. “That would be fair enough, maybe, if the examples of imperfect English averaged more instances to the page in General Grant’s book than they do in Arnold’s criticism on the book—but they do not.” Laughter, cheers, and “tumultous” applause57 swelled as Mark Twain gave the belletrist a dose of his own medicine, mockingly reciting one of Arnold’s own convoluted passages:

  “Meade suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately under him Sherman, who had been serving with Grant in the West. He begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the service. Grant assured him that he had not thought of moving him, and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed, he adds,” etc.

  The hall erupted as Mark Twain sprang his “snapper”:

  To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read it four times would make him drunk.58

  Declaring that, “microscopic motes” aside, Grant’s book was a literary masterpiece, Mark Twain rolled out a little jackleg eloquence of his own:

  [W]hen we think of General Grant our pulses quicken and his grammar vanishes; we only remember that this is the simple soldier who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts. What do we care for grammar when we think of those thunderous phrases, “Unconditional and immediate surrender,” “I propose to move immediately upon your works,” “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer”…59

  QUARRY FARM’S breezes must have seemed especially welcoming when the Clemens family arrived there for their annual hiatus in late June—they had nicknamed the place “Rest-&-Be-Thankful” by now. Mark Twain was writing again, and with his old headlong avidity. Actually, with something more than his old headlong avidity. His pen warmed up by the Arnold attack, he reopened the Connecticut Yankee manuscript. Work consumed him as it had in the old days, and any interruptions were unwelcome. Impelled to New York and Hartford for a week on publishing house matters in July, he lamented to Mollie Clemens, “If I could buy said week & remain at work here, I could afford to pay $3,000 for it.”60 What he had begun three years earlier as a one-note satire on British feudalism—a kind of Prince and the Pauper with attitude—he now reconceived as a fantastical sampling of all the personal preoccupations, societal absurdities, national passions, topical themes, technological curios, consumer products, and personalities historical and present that had claimed Mark Twain’s overheated consciousness the past several years.

  Tolstoyan realism? Jamesian structure? Howellsean fidelity to the nuances of the daily life-as-lived? No; none of it: the Vandal was back, lashing himself this way and that across the stage, laying down licks that nobody had ever dreamed of: a head-conked factory superintendent waking up in medieval England; knights on bicycles; kings in armor playing baseball; King Arthur in peasant drag; a nobleman doing bad stand-up comedy; magical Merlin’s tower dynamited; a medieval hermit’s cave converted into a telephone office; a sexy offstage fifteen-year-old telephone operator named Puss Flanagan (Mark Twain reserved a special place in Hell, right beside monarchy, for the telephone); a soap factory that befouls the air of Camelot. All leading up to a grand finale that would blow the lid off the place. Yet there was more to this volcanic work in progress than the comic-therapeutic indulgence that these elements suggest. Surging through them, and expressed mostly by the maddening chameleon that was Hank Morgan, ran a high brash laudation of democracy, American style. Ignited by Arnold, the Vandal was finishing the job he’d begun on Old Europe two decades earlier, this time busting up the stage a little, knocking over some amps. Roll over, Lord Byron, and tell Jane Austen the news.

  * Alessandro Moreschi: The Last Castrato, Complete Vatican Recordings, available on Opal. The recordings were recovered from archival cylinder wax by laser technicians at the Belfer Audio Laboratory at Syracuse University. Pope Leo can be heard on the eighteenth cut.

  * With apologies to the late James Thurber.

  40

  “I Have Fed So Full on Sorrows…”

  (1887–90)

  As Mark Twain regained his writerly chops, Charles Webster & Company continued to lose not only money but a sense of direction. Its literary standards had not deteriora
ted altogether: Clemens rejected a memoir by one Paul Boynton that recounted the author’s adventures paddling around the world’s streams and rivers while wearing a rubber suit. He resisted (though he was tempted) even after Boynton offered to excite the media by swimming a hundred miles at sea on the day of publication. Once again, Clemens turned to that “big, stupid, laborious piece of work,” The Library of Humor.

  In August 1887, Clemens swallowed his pride and begged Webster to put the humor book into the publishing pipeline ahead of other titles, and without waiting for illustrations—a sign of his desperation to get anything out there under his name, and to get cash back from it. “I want relief of mind; the fun, which was abounding in the Yankee at Arthur’s Court…has slumped into funereal seriousness…I work seven hours a day, and am in such a taut strung and excitable condition that everything that can worry me, does it; and I get up and spend from 1 o’clock till 3 A.M. pretty regularly ever night, thinking—not pleasantly.”1 Despite his anxieties, Mark Twain kept up this regimen through the summer, and even predicted completion of “the Yankee” by November 15. By autumn, though, his business/financial concerns had overpowered him again, and the wells ran dry. A terse September entry in his notebook signaled that Webster had ignored, or at least argued successfully against his plea: “Lib. Of Humor postponed till next year.”2 Webster’s rejection was only one flake in a blizzard of distracting messages: bad financial news from the publishing house, and endless progress reports (if “progress” was the word) from Franklin Whitmore at Paige’s shop at Pratt & Whitney in Hartford. Typical of those reports’ usefulness was the information that Pratt & Whitney’s rental and production bill for August came to $1,567.23.3

  At the end of December, it was Webster’s turn to complain to Clemens about life’s burdens. “I am not whining but I have actually ruined my health by the hard work which I did” on Grants Memoirs, he wrote to his boss—adding that he was “willing to make some arrangement to retire from the firm.”4 This was the opening that Clemens had longed for. “Webster ill and about ready to resign,” he jotted across the letter’s envelope.5 Six weeks later, the mission was accomplished:

  Feb. 16, 1888. On the 13th we at last got Webster to retire from business…till April 1, 1889, & try to get back his health. How long he has been a lunatic I do not know; but several facts suggest that it began in the summer or very early in the fall of ’85 [during preparation of Grant’s Memoirs].6

  Webster never returned to the company, although—despite his employer’s hostility—he wanted to. When he signaled his readiness to come back the following November, Clemens and Hall maneuvered against him; Hall bought out Webster’s share in the company for twelve thousand dollars. Webster, a shell of himself, spent the remaining two years of his life in Fredonia. His son Samuel recalled that he was elected president of the village there, and created a museum of some sort on the top floor of his house, and amused himself in other quiet ways.

  He built a cupola on the house, with a revolving top, and installed a telescope. The most exciting thing I ever saw through it was a fire in Canada, across Lake Erie. He also made some wonderful ship models, perfect in every detail.7

  Testimony to the damage that Samuel Clemens’s fearful temperament inflicted on his family and in-laws is rare, and carefully expressed. Livy almost never spoke of it to others. His daughters may or may not have lived in terror of his temper, but they wrote of it with studied humor and philosophical detachment. (Clara, who survived the longest, became a watchful protector of her father’s “beloved humorist” legacy.) Orion seems never to have complained to anyone about his brother’s abusiveness. To this scant evidence, Samuel Charles Webster adds a sliver of perspective—both conscious and unconscious—and also an insight or two of singular incisiveness. His book, Mark Twain, Business Man, traces his father’s tortured relationship with Samuel Clemens mostly through letters that passed between the author and his factotum, flavored here and there by the recollections of Annie Moffett Webster, his mother and Clemens’s niece. When Samuel Webster speaks with his own voice, he seems to be articulating the unspoken treaties accepted by these others: an irreducible forgiving love, despite the pain endured, in recompense for the ecstasies that Mark Twain’s company conferred. “He was always very nice to us,” Samuel Webster writes, “and the most entertaining man I ever met. He never scrupled to damn anybody, and I never thought he suppressed anything.”8 A little further on, Sam Webster reached about as deeply into Mark Twain’s psyche as anyone ever tried to do.

  Uncle Sam liked public approval as well as anyone, but he never let public opinion rule him…He knew his faults as well as anyone, but he was used to them and didn’t want to lose them. He did have a strong conscience that worried him at times until he had proved to his own satisfaction that other people were to blame for his sins, but as a rule he let his character alone, and it may have been just as well. If he had worked too hard to improve it he probably would have lost his humor. You never read about a saint who had much humor.9

  SAMUEL WEBSTER’S sister had a different view altogether. Jean Webster, born in 1876, watched her father suffer and decline under Mark Twain’s punishing wrath; she was fifteen when Webster died. The wrath she developed toward Mark Twain rivaled his own. After graduating from Vassar, she became a socialist, a suffragette, and writer of great force, a counter-Twain in her themes and intentions. She produced a succession of novels whose female protagonists, daughters of weak and inattentive fathers, forged bold and independent relationships with men. Her most famous, Daddy Longlegs (1911), was translated into eighteen languages and adapted three times to the movies, the last a defanged version starring Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire. Jean Webster died in 1916 on the morning after the birth of her daughter, apparently from an infection caused by the male obstetrician’s dirty hands.10

  Among Charles Webster’s last executive decisions at the company which bore his name was to put The Library of Humor into production. The book was finally issued in February 1888, with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog” as its lead piece. It featured illustrations by E. W. Kemble, and rib-ticklers from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, and Bret Harte among others.

  The poor boy who’d sensed an “aristocratic taint” in his humble hometown of Hannibal struggled now to preserve the aristocrat status he had built for himself in wealth and letters. His writing energies may have ebbed again, but Mark Twain remained a conspicuously public man. In the early months of 1888 he traveled frequently to New York and Washington—giving speeches and readings, accepting honorary awards, meeting with potential investors, lobbying Congress for copyright protections—and always managing to get his name in the papers, or enjoy an interlude with another lion of the century. He talked to money people about the Paige machine at the Lamb’s Club, and hobnobbed with the actress Eileen Terry at Delmonico’s.

  EVEN AS he tipped his hat to the world and promenaded among the elite of the Gilded Age, his democratic instincts tugged him in the opposite direction, as they always had. The roots of this dual allegiance were deep and complex: in Hannibal, the aristocrats (such as they were) coexisted with “people of unclassified family, people of no family.” Nobody put on airs; everybody knew everybody and was affable to everybody; yet “the class lines were quite clearly drawn.” Yet, “It was a little democracy which was fully of liberty, equality and Fourth of July…” Yet “you perceived that the aristocratic taint was there.” Yet “nobody found fault with the fact or ever stopped to reflect that its presence was an inconsistency.”11 Samuel Clemens personified that inconsistency. His nineteen-room Hartford house, furnished and ornamented with the treasures of two continents; his compulsive inventing and investments; his international courtship of statesmen, capitalists, and other men of power—all of this flourished alongside his unquenchable thrall to the primal, exposed humanity of Tom Blankenship, Uncle Dan’l, Thomas Paine, the rough poets of Washoe, the educated South Carolina Negro in Venice, Mary Cord at Quarry Farm, Fr
ederick Douglass, the citizen-soldier Grant, and so many others, including the boy Sammy. Howells, the gentleman of letters with the Haymarket rifle fire ringing in his imagination, trod a parallel tightrope. “Theoretical socialists, and practical aristocrats” was his eventual, rueful description of himself and Clemens.

  But now the winds of the Industrial Age were blowing strong, and on them was the manly, true scent of the worker, the rising scourge of decadent monarchs. Mark Twain had been honing his new fanfare for the common man over the past couple of years, as the draft pages of Connecticut Yankee testified. His ardor welled up from many sources: his esteem for the tinkerer-hero Paige; his exposure to eloquent typographical union speakers during his copyright lobbying in Washington; his contempt for Matthew Arnold’s perfumed defamations. His new god, the Machine, cast its politicizing spell: Clemens began to believe in the “Machine Culture’s” promise to release the energies and skills of the oppressed. In papers read to the Monday Evening Club, and in his new book manuscript, he portrayed labor as a noble movement; the trained mechanic as cultural hero; the workingman as “the rightful sovereign of this world,”12 America as the successor to Europe in human enlightenment, and the progress-driven 19th century itself as “the only century worth living in since time itself was invented,” thanks to “the creation of men not college-bred.”13 It certainly did not hurt that these new rightful sovereigns were at once creating democracy and wealth.

  He tried out his new political voice on Howells; and Howells, himself stirred by Tolstoy and by the efforts of the radical “Son of the Steppes,” Sergey Mikhaylovich Kravchinsky, to overthrow the czar of Russia, did all he could to ratify that voice. “The thing which has made Labor great & powerful is labor-saving machinery,” Sam declared to Howells in March 1888, going on to argue an imperative that the laborer himself shed his Luddite fear of machines and embrace their liberating potential: “Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men—& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million.”14 From his new residence on West 9th Street in New York, Howells greeted Clemens’s passions “with thrills almost amounting to yells of satisfaction.”15