Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Letters to a Dog.

  About Man, & explaining his Ways.9

  There are really no rational people but the suicides.10

  So long as an insane patient’s hair remains dry & harsh & refuses to relent, his case is not curable. Examine Darwin again about this.11

  WEBSTER & COMPANY languished in desperate straits. Its four titles published in 1890 included a biography of “the Father of Ovariotomy.” In the spring of 1891, despite a loan by Livy of $10,000, the firm owed $25,000 to the Mount Morris Bank alone. Clemens tried and failed to round up some cash. Fred Hall staved off disaster by prevailing on his own friends for $15,000, but Hall estimated that the company would soon have to borrow $100,000 more. The situation at Pratt & Whitney was, if possible, worse. One of Clemens’s prime prospects as an investor was the wealthy Nevada senator John P. Jones, a tough Westerner with a beard like a dagger. Sam and Joe Goodman had known Jones in Washoe days, when he was making a small mining fortune at Gold Hill. At Goodman’s urging, Jones had come to Hartford and observed the Paige during a rare moment of functionality the previous year, and then made a modest investment. Clemens pounced on that gesture, and began pressuring Jones to join him in forming a stock company for the machine. As the mid-February date for another testing drew near, Paige dove into the machine’s workings yet again. Sam, already in a rage, opened a letter from Jones on February 11 and was thunderstruck to read that the senator was backing out. The Paige simply had no credibility in the financial world: every other investor Jones knew was backing the Mergenthaler. Sam exploded. He wrote a savage letter to Jones that went unmailed, and fulminated to Goodman that the man was “a penny-worshipping humbug & shuffler.”12 He began now to look for a way to unload all his interests in the typesetter. From that day, he never paid another bill sent him by Paige.

  A notebook entry: “Paige the Microbe.”13

  SUSY CLEMENS, at Bryn Mawr, remained somewhat insulated from her family’s anxieties. Freshly nineteen, high-strung, articulate, and temperamental, she was turning into a replica of her father even as she modified her girlhood veneration of him and struggled to attain her own identity as “Olivia” (her given name). This identity was propelling her toward singing and acting—not exactly what her Victorian parents, who’d shelled out quite a bit for piano tutors, had in mind. (Clara was toeing the line, with five-hour practices each day on piano and violin.) Thin and blonde now, Susy held the stage well—like her father. She’d inspired a school production of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Iolanthe, with herself in the lead role of Phyllis. And she had formed a strong, deeply emotional friendship with a classmate named Louise Sheffield Brownell, an intellectual girl who was the head of the student government. The two women kept up an intense correspondence and occasionally met until Susy’s death. Louise Brownell later studied at Oxford and Leipzig, taught English literature at Cornell, eventually married, and bore four children, one of whom—Olivia—became the wife of the writer James Agee.

  Sam found that he could hardly bear the estrangement from his favorite daughter; his distress led Livy to dryly remark that he would have delivered her laundry if he’d been able. In late March, he forged a pretext for visiting her: an invitation from the president of Bryn Mawr, which he had promoted, to deliver a lecture. Susy, her parental radar sweeping the horizon, sensed trouble. She felt it arriving in the form of “The Golden Arm.” Her thirteen-year-old’s delight when the women of Vassar “jumped as one man” at his rendition was supplanted by the dread of how déclassé it would surely seem to her sophisticated friends. Upon her father’s arrival, she implored him not to tell the story. Sam promised her that he would not. And then he did. Susy sat in disbelief in the college chapel when Mark Twain launched into it as the finishing flourish of his talk. Shocked and humiliated, she ran from the chapel, found an empty classroom across the hall, threw herself into a chair, and wept over her father’s betrayal. When Mark Twain traced her to the classroom, he apologized—but offered a curiously tortured excuse. The reigning American master of the platform explained that he had grown tongue-tied on stage by the sound of Susy’s voice in his head, asking him not to tell the story. To quiet her voice and clear his head, he told it.

  Susy left Bryn Mawr and returned home in April, underweight and overwrought. On the 26th of that same month, Charles Webster died in Fredonia at age thirty-nine. Sam refused to attend the funeral, offering Annie Webster the fig-leaf excuse of rheumatism, and sent Orion in his place. Susy’s reasons for leaving school remain unclear—the “Golden Arm” incident may or may not have been a factor—but her life was about to change in any case. Within the month, her mother and father decided to follow through on their impulse of the previous year: close down the Hartford house, suspend their lives in America, and remove to Europe. Less than a month after that decision, the Clemenses were on their way. Sam chose not to announce his plans to his old sponsor, editor, booster, “fonograf” tester, and friend of unflagging loyalty. Perhaps he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Upon reading about Mark Twain’s planned exodus, though, Howells suppressed whatever personal affront he might have felt beneath his ingrained civility.

  The papers say you are going to Europe for your few remaining years. I hope this is not ill health or ill luck that is taking you, but I am so worried about where to place myself here for the summer, that I almost wish I was sick or sorry enough to go to Europe, too.14

  Clemens’s reply to Howells opened on the impersonal note of one of his form letters to his reading public: “For her health’s sake Mrs. Clemens must try some baths somewhere, & this it is that has determined us to go to Europe.” He tried a wan joke—“Come, get ‘sick or sorry enough’ & join us”—and then lapsed back into his tone of lifeless resignation.

  I don’t know how long we shall be in Europe…I’m going to do whatever the others desire…Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to see except heaven & hell, & I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of those.15

  SAM AND Livy would not live in America again for nine years. They would never live in the house on Farmington Avenue again. Both Sam and Livy may have had some inkling of this truth as they set about the chores involved in closing the house down—including dismissing some of the servants, among them the beloved George Griffin and the driver Patrick McAleer. (Katy Leary accompanied the family to Europe, as did Susan Crane.) Paine, who heard it firsthand, writes that on the day of departure, Livy was the last to leave the house. “She was looking into the rooms, bidding a kind of silent good-by to the home she had made and to all its memories.”16 It was true. In her restrained way, Livy hinted at her anguish to a friend: “I am so truly fond of my home and I love so tenderly my Hartford friends that I cannot bear to think of leaving them.”17 Sam’s list of house-closing reminders to himself has the cadence of a requiem.

  Stop street sprinkling.

  And electric lights.

  And publications.

  And clubs, 3 yrs.

  And pensions.18

  Stop the telephone.19

  And, interspersed within the list: “Hall, geben Sie mir Geld”20 (“Hall, give me money”).

  At age seventeen, Clara Clemens was old enough to understand the leave-taking for what it was. She later wrote:

  We adored our home and friends. We had to leave so much treasured beauty behind that we could not look forward with any pleasure to life abroad. We all regarded this break in a hitherto smooth flow of harmonious existence as something resembling a tragedy.21

  On June 6, 1891, the Clemenses embarked across the Atlantic on the French liner La Gascogne, a steamship “about the same length as the City of New York.”22 The ocean was calm, the skies above it spectacular. Sam played the epicure to the extent possible: the smoking quarters were good, the breakfasts delicious, and the rooms had an “[e]lectric stateroom light, all night.”23 He noted “[t]he loneliness of a ship at 4 a. m.”24 and Susy, still her father’s daughter, remarked of some F
rench passengers, “Their gesticulations are so out of proportion to what they are saying.”25 Arriving at Le Havre eight days later, they decamped in Paris for four days, and moved on to Geneva, where they found lodging for Susan Crane, Katy Leary, and the daughters. Then Sam and Livy, the bon vivants of London eighteen years earlier, hauled their tired and aching bodies to Aix-les-Bains, across the Swiss border at the foot of the French Alps, where they sank into the pungent sulfuric baths every day for five weeks.

  It may or may not have helped. Mineral waters held no power to heal Livy’s heart condition, but at least she enjoyed some extended rest, and maybe a little relief from the headaches that now plagued her. As for Clemens, he managed to neutralize whatever therapy the waters brought his arm by immediately overworking it again. He’d accepted a contract with the McClure syndicate and the New York Sun, brokered by Fred Hall, to write six letters from Europe at a thousand dollars each—a rather poignant echo of his Alta California arrangement of twenty-four years earlier. (The Illustrated London News eventually got hold of them and printed all but one for free.)

  They visited Bayreuth, with its festival opera house built for Richard Wagner, and Livy, who previously had shown no sadistic tendencies toward her husband, reserved seats for nineteen performances of Wagner’s works. (Mark Twain struck back with a McClure’s sketch, “At the Shrine of St. Wagner’s.” It seemed to give him even more grim satisfaction than “Aix, the Paradise of the Rheumatics.”) On to the waters at Marienbad in August. (The slightly lame “Marienbad—a Health Factory,” came of this.) Then, the rails again: Germany, Switzerland, revisiting sites from the Tramp Abroad days, recalling the alpine hikes with Joe Twichell as “Harris.” At Heidelberg they were able to stay a few nights in their old “birdcage” apartment in the mountainside Schloss Hotel. Heidelberg was interchangeable with Hell now as far as he was concerned; and his sore-armed writing included too many deadly-gray letters back to Fred Hall dealing with debts, royalties, commissions, and printing plans.

  He contemplated a new book of travel, and imagined recycling his agreed-on six letters for McClure in a slim volume that would sell for twenty-five cents, but eventually gave those ideas up. In September, he managed one whimsical/sentimental gesture. With the family ensconced in a hotel in Lausanne, on the shores of what is now Lake Geneva, he engaged a flat-bottom raftlike boat, its pilot, and the pilot’s friend for a ten-day drift of two hundred-odd miles on the Rhone River from Lake Bourget northward to Arles. He filled 174 pages with notes on the way, in a kind of communion with the notebook itself, conjuring several fictional characters; but he couldn’t think of anything for them to do. His mind drifted to old times—old times when he was forty-two. “[A] pedestrian tour in Europe doesn’t begin with a raft voyage for hilarity & mild adventure,” he wrote to Joe Twichell; “…In fact, there’s nothing that’s so lovely.”26 Across the years, a boy’s voice from Chapter 19 of Huckleberry Finn echoed, “It’s lovely to live on a raft.” Huck stirred in Mark Twain’s mind, and began to awaken.

  Susy was thinking of her friend Louise. “If I could only look in on you!” she wrote on October 2. “We would sleep together tonight…” A few days later, from Lucerne: “My darling, I do love you so and I feel so separated from you. If you were here I would kiss you hard on that little place that tastes so good just on the right side of your nose.” On the last day of October, she concluded a letter to “Louise beloved,”

  I love you night and day with all my might. You are so sweet, dear, so lovely lovely! Goodby my darling, Your Olivia.

  I have to go out soon and this is hurried. Oh, Louise if I could only see you! I am so afraid—

  Don’t forget me!27

  Despite the obvious sexual ardor that radiates from these lines, Susy and Louise Brownell seem to have been suspended, at Bryn Mawr, in an ambiguous adolescent state between physical and emotional love. Two years after this, in response to an apparently needy missive from Louise, Susy would write, “…for you know dear love that altho’ there is a great possibility of intimacy between us, we have never really been intimate yet. We will be some day when it comes natural…”28

  Loneliness, as much as erotic need, flavors these letters. Whether that loneliness was traceable to an emotional estrangement from her parents can never be known, yet as Papa’s adored little girls matured into women, the Man in the Moon began to reveal a dark side. That dark side surfaced when the Clemens entourage relocated at Marienbad in October, and Livy and Susan Crane traveled on to Berlin to find apartment rooms for the winter, taking Susy with them. Under the sole supervision of her father for a few days, Clara, a striking, dark-haired young woman, but still shy and self-conscious, found herself invited to a military ball. Sam consented to escort her. With Katy in tow, Clara hurriedly shopped for her first gown—a necessarily cheap one. In a small shop, Katy nudged her toward a “most insignificant-looking pink frock, so slightly décolleté that I blushed with shame.”29 She bought it anyway. On the night of the ball, Father and Clara arrived “shamefully early,” but soon Clara was whirling around with young men in gaudy uniforms. After a couple of hours, Sam took her back to the hotel. The next morning, one of the officers who’d danced with her announced himself at the Clemens rooms. Flattered and panicked, Clara sent for her father. Sam appeared. He looked the young soldier up and down. A silence ensued.

  Oh dear! I was more embarrassed than ever! Even the officer began to wriggle in his chair. Father’s gray eyes could take on a lofty expression that would make a mastodon shrink to a mouse. First the officer lost a grip on his tongue, then his smile faded, and at last his proud military bearing wilted—pitifully. Then he departed.30

  Later, when Sam noticed Clara and the same young man exchanging glances in the hotel dining room, he took her upstairs and locked her in the suite for several days. Katy brought her meals.

  When at last Mother arrived she found a lackadaisical daughter in one room and a fiercely irritated Father in another. She brought us together and listened to our vibrating stories…I expected Mother to pour out words of indignant condemnation, when to my amazement, she burst with peals of laughter till her cheeks were bathed in tears.31

  The suitor of long ago whose own references nearly proved ruinous was not about to let his daughters be swayed by any silver-tongued devils.

  In the fall of that year, the Clemenses passed near the village of Domrémy-la-Pucelle, where Joan of Arc was born in 1412. Sam had been fascinated with Joan of Arc’s story since that fluttering page from a book about her may or may not have caught his eye in 1849 and drew him into his abiding interest in history and medieval literature. More broadly, she was an icon of the century and a repository for its tortuously shifting view of womankind: a virginal innocent devoted to the hearthside and the spinning wheel, she was also a leading figurehead for women in the military as she took command of her nation’s armies at age seventeen, led them to a rout of the occupying British, ended the Hundred Years’ War, and forged the liberation of France. Later she was burned at the stake as a heretic, a fate that perhaps served to temper male anxiety about her menace as a role model. International interest in the French heroine had been rekindled in the 1840s with the discovery and publication of the manuscripts describing her heresy trial and her nearly superhuman gifts of courage, conviction, modesty, and unschooled wisdom. New histories, biographies, plays, and paintings about her life were circulating or in production. Construction of a basilica had begun only ten years earlier on the spot near the village where the peasant girl had begun to hear her heavenly voices. As had happened when George Cable handed him a copy of Malory’s romances, an idea began to consolidate in Mark Twain’s mind. He began to devour books about her life.

  In Berlin in 1892, ensconced at the luxury Hotel Royal, the Clemenses decided they could afford a new German tutor for Livy, a governess for Jean, and piano lessons at the estimable Mrs. Willard’s school for Clara, who attracted a circle of aspiring young musical artists. Susy remained withdrawn, passiv
e. It soon became clear that Mark Twain was a revered author in the great city: the bookstores featured his translated books, and he was recognized on the street (though some people mistook him for a famous historian named Theodor Mommsen). The American legation opened up Berlin society for the family. The new emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, invited Clemens for a palace visit in mid-January. When the author returned his regrets (he was bedridden with the flu, and spent his twenty-second wedding anniversary, February 2, flat on his back), the emperor commanded a cousin of Sam’s, the former St. Louisan Mollie Clemens von Versen, to arrange a dinner at her home and that of her husband, a general. Mark Twain sat at the right hand of the emperor who would preside over Germany during its defeat in World War I. Wilhelm held forth at great length in English, allowing rejoinders now and then. Sam, accustomed to dominating table talk at the Hartford house, seized on one of these pauses to deliver a lengthy opinion of his own, and the emperor was a little huffy about it afterward. At least that was what it seemed like to Sam. Years later the kaiser wondered why Mark Twain hadn’t spoken up more.

  The attention Papa received in restaurants fascinated Clara and Susy, especially the oglers who clustered within a couple of yards from the table to watch him eat. “At first we pretended to be indifferent,” Clara wrote, “…but at last my sister and I confessed to each other that it must be queer to belong to a family in which no one was distinguished or famous.”32 This was the first real exposure for Jean, now eleven, to her father’s international celebrity-hood. “[I]f it keeps on like this,” she told him, “there won’t be anybody for you to get acquainted with but God.”33 Clemens, of course, was far too modest to take such a notion seriously. He did, however, make an entry in his notebook: “I would like to be Emperor awhile.”34