Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  CLEMENS ADMIRED Berlin; one of his better letters for McClure described it as “The German Chicago.” But as spring arrived and his influenza lingered, Clemens fled the chilly, damp city with Livy while the rest of the family stayed on. The two repaired to Menton, in the south of France, for a while, and then meandered through Italy, visiting Pisa, Rome (where the others joined them for a month), and Florence, which brought Susy alive. She found a voice teacher she admired, and Clara resumed piano lessons. Clara grew ever more self-possessed. Frankly, she was turning into the sort of young libertine who might fold her shawl carefully upon entering a room. When reports reached the family that she had been the only female diner in a room (the von Versens’) with forty officers, Sam was staggered. “We want you to be a lady,—a lady above reproach,” he wrote to her, “—a lady always…never hoydenish…”35

  The family rented a hillside house near the city, the Villa Viviani, two centuries old and capacious and cheap, and soon encountered old friends among the many Americans who passed through there—Robert Underwood Johnson among them. Sam met the philosopher William James, and managed to keep quiet on the relative merits of his brother’s novels and John Bunyan’s heaven. Back in the States, Webster & Company issued a slim collection of Mark Twain sketches in April. Titled Merry Tales, it was distinguished mostly by the lead piece, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” The book, almost entirely a Fred Hall production—he even thought up its title, which Mark Twain hated—was part of a larger Hall brainstorm: a series of books (branded “Fiction, Fact and Fancy”) cheaply printed and sold for seventy-five cents to a mass audience, in hopes of striking a new cash vein in the marketplace. A similar product, The £ 1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories, was in the works for 1893. Neither collection received much critical attention, and neither sold well.

  After a month in Florence, and a trek through the alpine splendors of Italy and Switzerland, the Clemenses settled in for the summer at a hotel in the spa city of Bad Nauheim, Germany. There, in the hotel dining room, Sam and Oscar Wilde spotted and greeted each other; Clara later remembered the carnation as large as a baby sunflower in Wilde’s lapel, and the colored shoes on his feet. In early June, lacking any inspirational book ideas, Sam began noodling around on the theme of twins and their plight that had amused and unsettled him for most of his life. Just months earlier he had caught an exhibition of Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci, Italian brothers conjoined at the rib cage with separate sets of arms but only one set of legs. The original “Siamese twins,” Chang and Eng, who shared only a fused liver, had fascinated him years earlier as stars of Barnum’s circus. (They had died in 1874, after fathering twenty-two children between them, as it were.) As he lolled in the Bad Nauheim baths, he thought of one twin sober while the other drank; of both twins in love with the same woman; the twins fighting with each other; one’s shoes hurt the other’s feet—the possibilities for fun were infinite.

  SUCH POSSIBILITIES were considerably less than infinite back at Charles Webster & Company in New York. There, the overmatched Hall struggled to keep the moribund firm on life support. Hall had no real expertise with the paleolithic subscription method, which his boss clung to in defiance of all reason. More damaging, Hall continued to list the warehouses that were full of unpaid-for books as assets, instead of writing them off as liabilities. And Mark Twain’s Fact and Date Game was turning out to be a turkey.

  Samuel Clemens had departed America having invested a cumulative $74,087.35 in Webster & Company. He not only received no revenue from his own books in 1891—all royalties, interest, and other profits being shoveled back into the maw—he and Livy could not pay the interest on their investments into it; by year’s end, the company owed Sam $79,341.79. Meanwhile, Hall had no choice but to keep running up the obligation to Mount Morris Bank. Of the $30,000-plus total, $6,781.99 was payable personally by Clemens. For his part, Clemens foolishly made himself believe that sales of The American Claimant at $1 a copy would bring in a new fortune.

  With never-say-die bravado, Hall was gearing up Webster & Company to issue more than thirty titles in 1892, but many of these fell under the “Fiction, Fact, and Fancy” rubric, which was going nowhere, not even on the ballast of Alexander Filippi’s One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs and One Hundred Ways of Cooking Fish. Paddles and Politics Down the Danube, and A Perplexed Philosopher: Being an Examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Various Utterances on the Land Question similarly failed to walk off the shelves. To its credit, the house also published volumes from Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, and the Boss.

  Clemens needed to arrest the drift of the publishing house as best he could. And he’d received a new siren call from James W. Paige. Paige had actually accomplished something: he’d persuaded some Chicago investors to capitalize a factory to produce an initial fifty models of the soon-to-be-perfected typesetter. This news prompted Clemens to suspend plans to sell off his royalties for cash, pending a personal look at this operation. On March 22 he boarded the steamship Lahn for a two-week visit to the United States, having alerted Fred Hall to help him avoid reporters on arriving in New York. His arm was better and the adulation of the passengers cheered him up: he reigned as the life of the party on this first of eight Atlantic crossings in the ensuing two years, each more desperate than the last, as he tried to save the entrepreneurial career he never should have begun.

  Among the first people he looked up was William Dean Howells. The two men dined at the Hotel Glenham in New York, repairing a friendship that had atrophied even before Clemens’s departure for Europe: this was their first encounter in two years, and their correspondence had all but stopped. In that time, Howells had moved to New York, “and brought the literary center of the country” with him, in the words of Edwin Cady. He had assumed the editorship of Cosmopolitan in 1891; and, just weeks earlier, had ceased the “Editor’s Study” column at Harper’s. He had published two novels in 1890, the influential A Hazard of New Fortunes and The Shadow of a Dream, as well as his own long-deferred childhood memoir, A Boy’s Town. The two meant to connect again before Sam departed for Europe, but somehow it fell through.

  Socially, his trip was pleasant. He was the houseguest in New York of Dr. Clarence C. Rice, whom Clemens knew through the Players Club. Rice was a sort of nose-and-throat specialist to the stars; his patients included Enrico Caruso, Edwin Booth, and Lillian Russell. Besides Howells, he dined with Mary Mapes Dodge, the St. Nicholas Magazine editor; Rudyard Kipling; and Andrew Carnegie, whose millions he was still trying to tap for his various disasters—now he wanted Carnegie to buy out Webster & Company. Carnegie’s response pretty much summed up the business results of Clemens’s transatlantic trip. His sole bequest to the author was one smug little aphorism: “Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket.” Mark Twain, frugal now, eventually recycled it into Puddn’head Wilson’s calendar.

  His last chore was the eight hundred-mile trip to Chicago. There, weakened by his cold, he immediately fell into bed at the Great Northern Hotel and remained there for eleven days, missing the World’s Columbian Exposition with its unveilings of the Pledge of Allegiance, Aunt Jemimah pancake syrup, Dvoá’s New World Symphony, ragtime, and Juicy Fruit gum. Paige, again sensing a doomsday moment, hurried to the hotel and delivered a bravura performance at Clemens’s bedside: promises, assurances, injured dignity, and

  even more tears than usual…he could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. When he is present I always believe him; I can’t help it. When he is gone away all the belief evaporates. He is a most daring and majestic liar.36

  The fact was that Paige had put himself mindlessly at loggerheads with both the Connecticut/New York and the Chicago investors in a ploy to control the proposed manufacturing company. His timing could not have been worse: a financial panic was sweeping through America, the ugly hangover of the Gilded Age. Crooked accountants, corrupt stockbrokers, working-class rebellion—all of these fed the hysteria. Businesses closed, workers were laid
off; six hundred banks went under. Money was tight everywhere. Sam returned to New York, tried to sell an option on his royalties to the machine, and failed. He sailed back to Bad Nauheim with the Paige tied to him like an anchor. There, he worked. The pain in his rheumatic arm had receded for a while, and he discovered, as on awakening from a bad dream—or bad reality—that Tom and Huck were alive and well in his imagination: not sixty, not dead, but boys still, awaiting, with Jim, their cues for adventure from the old Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. On August 5—soon after he enjoyed a hotel-garden conversation with Queen Victoria’s hard-living eldest son, the Prince of Wales, “Edward the Conqueror” (later King Edward VII)—he turned his most famous characters loose in a new novel, with the working title, The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He informed Hall on the 10th that he’d written 12,000 words of it, “using the main episode” of a story he’d abandoned,

  telling it through the lips of Huck Finn…I have started Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer (still 15 years old) &…Jim around the world in a stray balloon, with Huck as narrator, & somewhere after the end of that great voyage he will work in the said episode and then nobody will suspect that a whole book has been written and the globe circumnavigated merely to get episode in an effective (& at the same time apparently unintentional) way…

  It is a story for boys, of course, & I think it will interest any boy between 8 years & 80.37

  He finished a 40,000-word draft less than four weeks later. Now it was Tom Sawyer Abroad, and if it sold well, he told Hall, it would be the first of a new line. As he worked, the family flowed and ebbed around him. Susan Crane returned to America in August 1892, Susy accompanying her through Switzerland. Clara went back to her piano tutor in Berlin, and planned to spend the winter there, against her desiccated mother’s wishes. Jean seemed at a loss for enthusiasms; she was now a sullen and uncommunicative girl. Sam’s muse was on a hot-air balloon ride of its own. He alerted Fred Hall that yet a new novel was swimming along: “It is the howling farce I told you I had begun a while back…I have written about 20,000 words on it…It is clear out of the common order…I don’t think it resembles anything in literature.”38 He could say that again.

  September arrived, and the Clemenses left chilly Bad Nauheim to reclaim the boxy, fortress-like Villa Viviani near Florence, with its green masonry façades and greener window shutters. En route, they stopped for four days at Frankfurt so that doctors could examine Livy. “I have been driving this pen hard,” Sam wrote to Susan Crane during a layover in Lucerne on September 18. He’d finished 280 pages of what he was now calling Tom Sawyer Abroad, he told her, “then took up ‘Twins’ again, destroyed the last half of the manuscript and re-wrote it in another form, and am going to…finish it in Florence.”39

  The Gothic house proved conducive to gothic thoughts. In an impulsive gesture he never fully explained, Clemens briefly matched the strange terrain inside his head with strangeness on the outside. Clara was visiting from piano studies in Berlin. On the stormy night before her departure, as thunder boomed and lightning strobe-lit the stairwells and the ancient family portraits on the walls, she sat talking with Susy in one of the bedrooms, when Susy startled her by giving “a little stifled cry.”

  Turning to look, I observed that she had blushed to the roots of her hair and way down her neck. Following the direction of her eyes, I saw Father standing in the door…40

  It was a “Golden Arm” moment. He had shaved his skull smooth.

  MARK TWAIN completed Tom Sawyer Abroad with rapid efficiency; the ending, in fact, amounted to a screeching halt. The story, pure pulp, traces the exploits of the three principals as they waft from St. Louis to North Africa in a hot-air balloon piloted by a crazy inventor (Clemens is stealing a book from his own Paige, in this respect) known as the Professor; they encounter spine-tingling crises along the way. Mark Twain quickly sold the 34,000-word work to the children’s journal St. Nicholas Magazine, through Fred Hall, and it did bring in some quick cash—five thousand dollars for serial rights. Impatient as usual with editing details, and with no Howells handy, he allowed Mary Mapes Dodge, the magazine’s editor, to trim and revise the text at her discretion. He never imagined that her discretion would include writing new and sanitized text to replace the slang and naughtiness that she’d removed. He stormed into the editor’s office, declaring, “Any editor to whom I submit my manuscripts has an undisputed right to delete anything to which he objects, but God Almighty Himself has no right to put words in my mouth that I never used!”41 The deletions and changes stood, but the substituted words were evidently removed. Dan Beard reported that he was obliged to put shoes on the drawings of his characters.

  Chatto & Windus published the hardcover edition in April 1894 (with Dodge’s dodges still intact), and Webster & Company issued it four days later—its last act as a publishing company. Wacky in a forced sort of way, Jules-Verne-ish in its fantastical balloon-centered antics, the book is at once boylike and redolent of desperation. Mark Twain was frankly writing for commerce now, first and foremost; niceties of plot and plausibility mattered even less to him than they had before. The three main characters talk to one another in set-piece dialogue that anticipates situation comedy, as when Jim, confused over time changes in zones around the world, argues that “De Lord” wouldn’t “scriminate ’twixt”42 his children by—well, by putting them in different time zones. One can almost sense a laugh-track cue as Jim’s dimwitted confusion deepens—and perhaps the quiet snap of a race card played:

  Mars Tom talkin’ sich talk as dat—Choosday in one place en Monday in t’other, bofe in de same day!…How you gwine to got two days inter one day…can’t git two niggers inter one nigger-skin, kin you?43

  With this unsuccessful book and a later collection titled, after its lead entry, Tom Sawyer, Detective, Mark Twain was trying to cash in on a popular new trend in books for young people: the series, or a string of novels featuring the same hero. Horatio Alger was the reigning master of the form, with Ragged Dick and Tattered Tom returning to action again and again. But these were dime-novel figures, unabashedly commercial at their very inception. Mark Twain sought to recycle characters he had created for specific, stand-alone works, exploiting their popularity among relatively serious reviewers and readers. The results were painful, almost amateurish. Among the few literary gifts Mark Twain lacked was the ability to write good bad literature.

  Far more fruitfully, the twins now overtook Mark Twain’s imagination, and the more he wrote, the more their tale changed its shape. As autumn deepened at the villa, he threw away more pages, dashed off and discarded revisions and more revisions. What ultimately resulted, and then re-resulted, defies concise description.

  For several weeks it progressed as pure farce, cheerfully indifferent to probability, its structure a patchwork of ready-to-hand devices, few of which related to one another. The twins were Italians named Angelo and Luigi Capello, and shared a single lower body, as did Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci, and one day they just sent a letter to Aunt Patsy Cooper in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, an obscure river hamlet not utterly dissimilar from Hannibal, asking for room and board, as conjoined Italian twins are wont to do. After the locals get over the shock of seeing a pair of well-dressed, well-spoken continentals strolling about town on one pair of legs, the tale tends toward the surreal. More accurately, it tends toward a series of twin-jokes. One sings hymns, the other, bawdy songs; one likes to attend prohibition meetings, the other favors horse races and fandangos. To complicate things a little, control of the legs passes from one to the other for a week at a time. The mechanism? A “mysterious law of our being.”44 As if to allay any lingering suspicions of “realism,” Luigi announces that he is a few months older than Angelo. Eventually there arrives a plot device—Luigi kicks the rakehell Tom Driscoll at an anti-temperance meeting. A trial for assault and battery is scheduled; Luigi engages a new young lawyer named David Wilson who wins on a technicality (no one can really testify for sure which twin did the kicking); th
ere is a duel, with one of the twins wounded; there is a lynching, with one of the twins hanged; as for the other—but never mind; the story just ends.

  Or did it? Out of the corner of his eye, Mark Twain had noticed something about that new young lawyer at the story’s margin. Out of that glimpse, a new novel was conceived: the dissimilar twin of the one just finished, and born a few months later. “I finished ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’ night before last,” he wrote to Fred Hall on December 12, estimating some sixty to eighty thousand words. “The last third of it suits me to a dot.” And then, almost as an afterthought:

  I begin, today, to entirely re-cast and re-write the first two-thirds—new plan, with two minor characters made very prominent, one major character dropped out, and the Twins subordinated to a minor but not insignificant place.

  The minor character will now become the chiefest, and I will name the story after him—“Pudd’nhead Wilson.”45

  This new arrival rose from a deeper place. It was fed by its author’s interest in topical events of the day, but also by what remained of his artist’s muse. Its “chiefest character” turned out not to be Pudd’nhead Wilson, but a profound, near-Shakespearean figure who would rank among Mark Twain’s greatest creations, but who had no antecedent in his previous novels. Her gestative force was probably Mary Ann Cord, the former slave who mesmerized Clemens at Quarry Farm with her plainsong saga of forced separation from her youngest son and eventual reunion with him. Her name was Roxana.