by Ron Powers
I love you, & I am sorry for every time I have ever hurt you; but God Almighty knows I should keep on hurting you just the same, if I were around; for I am built so, being made merely in the image of God, but not otherwise resembling him enough to be mistaken for him by anybody but a very near-sighted person.34
HE HURRIED back to Elmira after a week or so, where proofs of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court were starting to arrive from New York. Here was Mark Twain’s first chance to review his wild pastiche of a novel since he’d finished it three months earlier. He found himself exhilarated by the unbuttoned audacity of it, and a little nonplussed. Sticking it to the British monarchy and the Church didn’t bother him; hell, that was half the point, and he put Chatto & Windus on notice that a Brit-baiting manuscript was soon to be on its way across the Atlantic, and that it had better be printed in London word for word. His American readership was another matter. He understood that Connecticut Yankee far exceeded The Innocents Abroad as a manifesto against the tyranny of America’s cultural fatherland. Where The Innocents had been an impertinent dig, Connecticut Yankee was a full Oedipal revolt (and the Dark Twin of The Prince and the Pauper, which it resembled in some ways). As he pored over the proofs, Mark Twain tried to judge the more unbridled scenes and passages against the limitations of his public’s tolerance. He thought of someone who might be able to help him.
“I’ve got to get you to read the book,” he declared to Howells on August 5. “If Mrs. Clemens could have sat down & read the book herself, I could have got you off, maybe, but she has not had an hour’s use of her eyes for reading since she had the pink-eye six months ago. So she is afraid I have left coarsenesses which ought to be rooted out, & blasts of opinion which are so strongly worded as to repel instead of persuade.”35
Howells’s reply to Sam, written on August 10, was typical of him:
You know it will be purely a pleasure to me to read your proofs. So far as the service I may be is concerned, that I gladly owe you for many generous acts…next time try to ask something of me that I don’t want to do.36
Two weeks later, Clemens put forth the second stage of his request: “If you should be moved to speak of my book in The Study, I shall be glad & proud—& the sooner it gets in, the better for the book…”37 Then he added a curiously offhanded revelation: “I don’t think I’ll send out any other press copy…I don’t care to have them [the critics] paw the book at all. It’s my swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently, & I wish to pass the cemetery unclodded.”38 If Howells was startled to learn that this was to be Mark Twain’s last book, he kept it to himself. Instead, he issued Clemens a series of bulletins describing his delight in reading it: On September 19: “Last night I started on your book, and it sank naturally into my dreams. It’s charming, original, wonderful…and sound to the core in morals.”39 On October 17: “This last batch, about the King’s and the Boss’s adventures, is all good; and it’s every kind of a delightful book. I suppose the Church will get after you…”40 On October 27: “The book is glorious—simply noble. What masses of virgin truth never touched in print before!”41 On November 10, publication day: “Last night, I read your last chapter. As Stedman says of the whole book, it’s Titanic.”42 (The New York literary figure Edmund C. Stedman had been asked to read the book in manuscript.)
Howells’s “Editor’s Study” review in the January 1890 Harper’s Monthly, which set the general tone for American criticism, was more than an endorsement; it was a benediction. The paladin of “realism” gave his blessing to Mark Twain’s explosions and gaudy fabulizings; they produced a comic masterpiece of wrath and pathos and human affirmation, on the scale of Cervantes in Don Quixote. “[The novel] is always true to human nature, the only truth possible, the only truth essential, to fiction.”43
Here he is to the full the humorist…but he is very much more, and his strong, indignant, often infuriate hate of injustice, and his love of equality, burn hot through the manifold adventures and experiences of this tale…At every moment the scene amuses, but it is all the time an object-lesson in democracy. It makes us glad of our republic and our epoch…44
The British press, unsurprisingly, was for the most part infuriated. And not nearly so respectful of Howells. “Deplorable,” pronounced the Spectator, and scolded “Mr. Howells” for being “in raptures over this sorry performance.”45 L. F. Austin in the London New Review likewise turned his wrath on “Mr. W. D. Howells” for legitimizing this “huge Colossus of a joke,” and implying that “we are to crawl respectfully between its legs and acknowledge its monumental services to the human race.”46 The reading public, whose tastes he had been at such pains to avoid offending, did not fall in love with Connecticut Yankee. Despite his hand-rubbing hopes that it would be a “100-ton” book,47 the novel sold only 24,000 copies in its first six months, less than half the figure Clemens regarded as minimally successful. It managed only 32,000 sales by the end of 1890, despite the circulation of four hundred sales prospectuses and thousands of circulars, and then declined into marginal status—though it has remained in print continuously ever since. What profits it did generate were in large part offset by expensive production costs. The novel fell victim to the decline of subscription publishing’s effectiveness, but also perhaps to the darkness of its concluding vision. Rapid mass slaughter on a battlefield: who would want to spend time thinking about a preposterous thing like that?
IT DIDN’T matter. Mark Twain was going to retire from literature anyway. The Paige would soon virtually print money for him and all who invested in it. The steady sale to newspapers of rival typesetters (the Mergenthaler was in use by papers in Chicago, New York, and Louisville, and had typeset a book) did not faze him. This faith was about to change. A letter from Franklin Whitmore in Hartford arrived at Quarry Farm in mid-August: the machine was on the blink again, and James Paige had taken it apart again. “…[Q]uite a number of things to fix & to apply,” Whitmore explained to him. “You will have to take Mr. Paige’s word…”48 The new target date was September 1. Clemens demanded daily reports. When Paige alerted him two weeks after the target date that the machine was ready for testing, Sam, who had petitioned the likes of Jay Gould and Andrew Carnegie for stock investments, turned to his own family. He hit up Susan Crane in June 1889 for a five-hundredths share. Facing a bill of $6,000 due to Pratt & Whitney on September 20, he tried to sell Charles Langdon some royalty rights in return for the necessary funds; Langdon turned him down. (A repayment check of $15,000 from J. Langdon & Company—on a loan by Livy—got him out of that jam.) He calculated obsessively in his notebooks: bar graphs, royalty projections, cost comparisons, cents per em, ems per hour, hours per year. He began to record his complaints against Franklin Whitmore, a dangerous storm warning.
Paige’s latest blandishments turned him almost pathetically jolly. “After patiently & contentedly spending more than $3,000 a month on it for 44 consecutive months, I’ve got it done at last, & it’s a daisy!” Sam exulted to Howells. “You & I have imagined that we knew how to set type—we shabby poor bunglers…Come & see this sublime magician of iron & steel work his enchantments…Come!”49 Howells couldn’t make it. In November he urged Joe Goodman, now living in Fresno, California, to “run over here,” inspect the machine, and then look up some fellows who’d struck it rich in the Comstock mines. Goodman’s assignment was to raise $100,000 in investments, on a 10 percent commission. Goodman indeed “ran over” across the continent, and then spent fourteen months hauling himself from California to New York to Washington and back, in a quest that grew incrementally more hopeless, until he exploded in frustration that he was “going round hat in hand and begging pennies!”50 Goodman’s mission was more urgent than he knew. In November 1889, Clemens had signed another reckless contract with Paige: for a fee of $160,000, plus $25,000 a year until the patents expired, Clemens would own all rights to the typesetter. Clemens had nothing like $160,000. But he was absolutely confident he could raise it, as soon as all thos
e investors saw that wonderful machine in action.
But the machine wasn’t…ready. Not yet. Not quite. Paige always seemed to have one more improvement in mind, one more modification. Meanwhile, Samuel and Livy Clemens’s fortune, which at one time had financed a luxurious house in Hartford with its Tiffany appointments, large staff, and expenditures of $30,000 a year; “birdcage” hotel suites above the Rhine; mirrors and tapestries and carvings from Venice; $4,000 shopping sprees in Paris; generous charity donations at Christmas—this fortune was all but gone. Clemens had sunk $150,000 of it into the Paige quicksand alone. In March 1890, Clemens was reduced to the embarrassment of asking his Paige partner and lawyer, William Hamersley, for a loan so that he could meet Paige’s latest expense bill. Hamersley sent him $2,500 on April 3, with the warning that this would be his last payout in the venture; moreover, it was a personal loan payable by July 1. Clemens was unable to meet the deadline.
Nothing was going right. The theater had blossomed as a new source of perpetual wealth with the success of Colonel Sellers, but since then, nothing bearing Mark Twain’s famous name had achieved anything but calamity and litigation: no novel adaptations, no original works. A dramatization of The Prince and the Pauper was half-strangled by lawsuits and injunctions before the first curtain, and struggled on with a bad script and a cute child actress for a few weeks before succumbing. Sam commisioned Connecticut Yankee to a playwright friend, who produced a script so awful that Clemens could barely endure reading it. Nor would there be a respite at Quarry Farm this summer. Susan Crane closed the farmhouse after her husband’s death and took up residence in Elmira, where she lived for a few years before returning to the farm. Through the late winter, the Clemenses had contemplated an open-ended sojourn in England and on the Continent—a concession to overwhelming pressures of finance and health. The American dollar’s tremendous purchasing power in Europe was no longer an amusing curiosity, but a survival resource: they could no longer afford the upkeep of the Hartford house and the social productions for which the house was designed. This pitch of living had sapped more than money: Livy, after nearly fifteen years as a perpetual hostess for nine of every twelve months, was suffering heart strain. Her doctors believed the European mineral baths would restore her health—and Sam’s increasing rheumatism, too, for that matter. (Mineral baths were something like the prescription drugs of the Gilded Age. The Catskills were a popular destination for them, as was a small town near Detroit called Mount Clemens.)
Clemens went so far as to book staterooms for June 4 aboard the City of New York. He canceled these, but as late as May was still contemplating a departure in July. Europe ultimately proved impractical in this time of continual business obligation. (“Youth don’t let the thought of Europe worry you one bit because we will give all that up,” an equally worried Livy wrote to him in early May, during one of his frantic trips to recruit investors. “I want to see you happy much more than I want any thing else even the childrens lessons. Oh darling it goes to my very heart to see you worried.”)51
Instead, in July the family rented a cottage in a colony of wealthy friends, the Onteora Club near Tannersville, New York, in the Catskills. It was a light-hearted retreat, on its surface: Sam and his daughters starred in the nightly rounds of charades, Sam served as starter for the “burlesque races” on the Fourth of July, and Sam charmed the assemblage by the fireside at night with renditions of “The Golden Arm.” But anxiety was always just a telegram away: Sam had to interrupt his idyll several times for trips back to Hartford, New York, and Washington.
A double barrel of anxiety arrived on August 14, when he and Livy received simultaneous bad news. Both their mothers had fallen seriously ill. Livy and the children boarded a train from Tannersville for Elmira to be at Olivia Langdon’s bedside. Sam, in Washington, learned that Jane had suffered a stroke. He set his work agenda aside and made the long rail journey west to Keokuk, hoping to reach his mother before she died. Instead, she rallied enough that Sam felt safe to return east. He rejoined Livy and the girls at Onteora at month’s end.
Susy began her college career in early October, and was immediately afflicted with homesickness. “The last time I saw her was a week ago on the platform at Bryn Mawr,” Clemens told Pamela in a letter. “Our train was moving away, & she was drifting collegeward afoot, her figure blurred & dim in the rain & fog, & she was crying.”52 There was to be one further leave-taking of Susy on a railroad platform.
On October 27, Jane Clemens died. She was eighty-seven. Her funeral was at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Hannibal, where she was buried under a large tree, beside the graves of John Marshall and Henry Clemens. Sam endured a twenty-four-hour railroad journey, including an eight-hour delay in Chicago, to attend the funeral; he left again for Hartford that evening.
Olivia Langdon survived her August crisis, but in late November, word reached Sam and Livy at Nook Farm that she too was near death. They entrained for Elmira, leaving the younger daughters with the housekeepers. Clemens had scarcely time to recover from the trip before a shocking message arrived from Hartford: Jean, who had recently turned ten, had been stricken with a severe illness. Undiagnosed at the time, it may have been the onset of the epilepsy that began to ravage her at around sixteen, and shortened her life. Caught between two crises, Clemens hurried back home with Susy (who had left Bryn Mawr and rejoined her family) and Clara. On November 27, on the eve of Olivia Langdon’s death at age eighty, he unburdened himself to Howells.
I ought to be there [at the Langdon house]…but Jean pleads to be not wholly forsaken; so, when the death-telegram falls, I think I shall stay with Jean & send Susy & Clara to their mother.
I have fed so full on sorrows, these last weeks that I seem to have become hardened to them—benumbed.53
A month later, Clemens wrote to Fred Hall: “Merry Xmas to you!—and I wish to God I could have one myself before I die.”54
41
“We Are Skimming Along Like Paupers…”
(1891–June 1893)
Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—& crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, & scans always every face for Tom & Becky &c.
Tom comes, at last, 60 from wandering the world & tends Huck, & together they talk the old times; both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful is under the mould. They die together.1
These notes for a new novel, probably from February or March 1891, offer as clear a report from the depths of Clemens’s soul as the use of language permits. The work—never begun, or at least no fragment of which survives—would render decrepit and then kill off the two characters most closely drawn from his formative self; it would reprise his native ground, the seedbed of his literature, as a rotting wasteland. The fountains of the deep were closing over.
Life had bludgeoned Samuel Clemens, but it had not defeated him. As his debts accumulated beyond control, and his business enterprises careered toward ruin, he fought against oblivion with every tool he could think of. He set himself the goal of raising seventy-five thousand dollars by the end of the year. He resurrected his history game, patented in 1885 and dormant since, and assigned Fred Hall to make a mockup of it so that it could be sold to a merchandiser. Now it was the “Memory-Builder,” “A Game For acquiring & retaining all sorts of Facts & Dates.”2 Taking one more squeeze of his onetime cash-cow character, he launched into a novelization of Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, writing nine thousand words of satirical farce in February. When writing-arm ailments grew too painful to bear, he sought help from technology.
My right arm is nearly disabled by rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book & sell 100,000 copies of it—no, I mean a million—next fall. I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don’t have to yell. I write 2,000 words a day; I think I can dictate twice as many.3
He needed someone to test the procedure for him, and called on—who else?—Howells.
Won’t you drop in at the Boylston Building (New Engla
nd Phonograph Co.), & talk into a phonograph in an ordinary conversation-voice & see if another person (who didn’t hear you do it) can take the words from the thing without difficulty & repeat them to you.4
And if the thing worked, would the Dean of American Letters kindly see about rental terms? Oh—including enough cylinders to carry 175,000 words. Howells complied. His report of the experience evokes the dawn of recorded sound.
I talked your letter into a fonograf in my usual tone, at my usual gait of speech. Then the fonograf man talked his answer at his wonted swing and swell. Then we took the cylinder to a type-setter in the next room, and she put the hooks into her ears, and wrote the whole out…I think that if you have the cheek to dictate the story into the fonograf, all the rest is perfectly easy.5
Clemens rented one of Mr. Edison’s new machines; an agent of the New England Phonograph Company set it up in early March when the Howellses were visiting. Mark Twain filled some four dozen wax cylinders with dictation (as he estimated to Howells), but gradually gave it up: “you can’t write literature with it, because it hasn’t any ideas & it hasn’t any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk…but is just…as grave & unsmiling as the devil.”6 None of these cylinders containing his voice or Howells’s has been recovered. Embedded in the lost wax grooves are—to say nothing of the voice itself—treasures of Mark Twain’s profanity: he found dictation so awkward and irritating that “I not only curse and swear all the time I am dictating, but am impatient and dissatisfied because God has given me only one tongue to curse and swear with.”7
He steeled himself again to the pain of hand composition, switching to his untrained left hand from time to time, and sprinted to the finish on May 2, at sixty-six thousand words. The story was sold to the McClure syndicate for $12,000 and serialized in several newspapers. Webster & Company published it in hardcover the following year as The American Claimant. Sam had written to Orion during its composition that he woke up in the night “laughing at its ridiculous situations.”8 Hardly anyone else saw the humor. The novel, uneven and forced, sold poorly. His notebook jottings continued their wage calculations, and cost calculations, imagined accusations and chewing-outs, dark ruminations in German—interspersed with flashes from the artist’s troubled, free-associating mind.