by Ron Powers
The American newspapers that reached the Clemenses at Villa Viviani in 1892 were full of reportage about the most significant legal test to arise from the ruins of Reconstruction: the lawsuit filed against the East Louisiana Railroad by a New Orleans man named Homer Plessy, contending that he had been illegally jailed for trying to board a railroad car in that city. The car was for “whites only,” and Plessy was one-eighth Negro. The case was making its way toward the Supreme Court, which, in 1892, would decide against Plessy, establishing a hated precedent by declaring the plaintiff had access to “separate but equal” means of transportation. Mark Twain vented his contempt for this genetic bean-counting and the racial injustice it represented in his portrayal of Roxana.
Another current topic, dear to Samuel Clemens’s detective-loving soul, was the science of “fingerprinting” for forensic purposes. Sir Francis Galton, a British scientist, published a book that year proposing that every human being’s fingerprints were unique to that person, and thus a means for establishing identity. These topical elements, accompanied by a succession of new characters, progressively elbowed their way into Mark Twain’s farce. He tried for a while to keep both story lines active, and ultimately failed, in the process doing great formal damage to the finished work. Pudd’nhead Wilson is an unfinished jumble of several colliding plots and half-plots, featuring a major character (Tom Driscoll) whose persona shifts unintentionally between Negro and white, because Mark Twain did not revise him consistently with previous drafts. Yet the jumble comprises its own shrewd integrity: it expresses the existentialist doubt that had beset Samuel Clemens for years, and flickered into some of his earlier works. The doubt concerned human identity, the chance that only dreams were “real,” and reality the real “dream.” With Pudd’nhead Wilson, that doubt gained permanent primacy in his work.
The setting remains Dawson’s Landing in the antebellum years. Prince and the Pauper–like, it opens on June 5, 1853, quite possibly the day that Sam Clemens left Hannibal on the downriver packet, with the births of two unrelated boys: one rich, one poor. In this tale, the poor boy is also a Negro slave, given that he is born to Roxana—a white woman to all appearances, but condemned by her one-sixteenth Negro blood to a lifetime of slavery. The mother of the white baby, Mrs. Driscoll, soon dies, leaving Roxana, her servant, to look after both infants. Determined that her flesh and blood never suffer the bondage that is her lot, Roxana switches the two babies in their cradles.
Roxana’s decision becomes her fate: her son Chambers, now being raised as “Tom Driscoll,” grows up as the epitome of the spoiled Southern squire, a sadistic monster and wastrel who treats her horribly. The real Tom, known now as “Chambers,” turns out to be gentle and unoffending, but is abused with impunity by Tom. Over the plot’s twenty-three-year period, Roxana—although absent from the narrative for long stretches, as though her creator did not fully recognize her power on the page—endures her deepening skein of thwarted hope and degradation with spirit, willpower, wisdom, and flights of eloquence, until she is at the end broken by the revelation of her deceit.
Her story is obscured by the author’s other frantic plotlines. Pudd’nhead Wilson is a narrative traffic jam. The title character appears only at the beginning and at the end, when his use of “fingerprinting”—nonexistent in that time—helps solve the central mystery. There are many stock send-ups of small-town quaintness; and the Italian twins, separated into two people now, take up a lot of space. Yet when Roxana’s voice breaks through the confusion, it lifts the novel to a higher purpose, as in the scene in which she finally gathers her outrage and compels the tyrannizing Tom, under threat of damaging disclosure, to kneel before her. “You can’t mean it,” Tom protests, to which the “heir of two centuries of unatoned insult and outrage”46 thunders,
I’ll let you know mighty quick whether I means it or not! You call me names, en as good as spit on me when I comes here po’ en ornery en ’umble, to praise you for bein’ growed up so fine en handsome, en tell you how I used to nuss you en tend you en watch you when you ’uz sick en had n’t no mother but me in de whole worl’…en you call me names—names, dad blame you! Yassir, I gives you jes one chance mo’, and dat’s now, en it las’ on’y half a second—you hear?47
Thus the infinitely layered Mark Twain, who can still indulge himself in throwaway “darky” humor with Jim in the balloon, speaks through a slave woman to rebuke an America in the lingering throes of its racial dilemma. Roxana, his first fully believable female character, was his last character of enduring significance. With one exception (“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”) he would never approach literary greatness again.
“My book is type-writered and ready for print,” he announced to Fred Hall on February 3, 1893.48 He sent the 82,500-word manuscript about three weeks later. That proved premature. Obliged to sail again for America in March on financial business, he put the brakes on its publication schedule. It needed more work. It was July 30, 1893, before he was finally able to declare to Hall,
This time “Pudd’nhead Wilson” is a success!…I have pulled the twins apart and made two individuals of them…they are mere flitting shadows, now…The whole story is centered on the murder and the trial…49
He identified three characters who now “stand up high” as the principals: “Pudd’nhead, ‘Tom’ Driscoll and his nigger mother Roxana; none of the others are important…”50 With book publication several months away, he sold serial rights to the Century, which published it in seven installments beginning in December 1893.
HE MAY have regarded his new novel as a success, but there was precious little else in his life that remotely qualified as such. Household money was drying up even in dirt-cheap Florence, siphoned across the Atlantic to pay bills. In June he fretted over the delay of the $500 monthly draft from Fred Hall: “We are skimming along like paupers, and a day can embarrass us.”51 At age fifty-seven, having tried to strike it rich for more than thirty years, he finally grasped that he was not a businessman—“I am by nature and disposition unfitted for it”52—and pleaded with Hall to help him get out. He estimated his and Livy’s indebtedness at $175,000. Figuring wishfully, he estimated that with stock and cash assets, plus the copyright and engraving-plate value of the Library of American Literature, he owned property worth $250,000, and maybe more. Might a publishing firm—say, Harper or Appleton or Putnam—pay him $200,000 for his debts and his two-thirds interest in the firm? To Fred Hall, he pleaded: “Please advise with me and suggest alterations and emendations of the above scheme, for I need that sort of help…
“Get me out of business!”53
But Fred Hall couldn’t get him out of business. Nothing under Sam or Fred’s control could reverse the free fall. They needed a savior.
42
Savior
(1893–94)
Henry Huttleston Rogers was not your garden-variety Gilded Age cutthroat piratical plutocrat and multi-multi-millionaire; he was larger and more rapacious than that, and more interesting. Oil was his game, and gas, and railroads, and insurance, and copper, and pipelines for transporting oil across the country; he invented the pipeline. He played the inside game of business pretty well, too: as a young oilman back in 1872, he’d boldly stood up to the great John D. Rockefeller, who was collecting refineries in large Eastern cities and moving in on Rogers’s own smaller one. Rogers couldn’t prevent the takeover, but two years later, when Rockefeller organized the Standard Oil Company, Rogers joined him and quickly rose to vice president and director. By 1893 he’d amassed a hundred million dollars. He was Colonel Sellers without the buffoonery, Tom Sawyer grown to Alpha Malehood, Silas Lapham with talent and vision and a Visigoth’s disdain for fair play. He’d come up by the classic route of his century’s industry captains: small-town boyhood (he was born in Massachusetts in 1840), grocery clerk, newspaper boy, a fortune-seeker at twenty-one drawn to the newly burgeoning oil business in Pennsylvania. A refinery company executive at twenty-six; then to Standard Oil and a ri
sing reputation as a tycoon to be feared and avoided. “Hell Hound Rogers,” he was called (always at a safe distance); a butcher, a shark, a man without remorse.
But there was also the civilized Rogers: brilliant conversationalist, wit, mesmerizing charmer. He sailed yachts and went to the fights with the boys. He liked to hang expensive windowpane suits on his tall frame, over crisp white shirts with wingtip collars. His blue eyes, wavy hair parted in the middle, his double-scythe mustache and strong nose and chin—all these features made him attractive even to some who loathed the predator in him. And there was the civic-minded Rogers, the patron of art and reader of literature, the builder of schools and libraries, benefactor to Booker T. Washington and sponsor of Helen Keller at Radcliffe. And Rogers, the devoted husband and father. This was the Rogers whom Samuel Clemens, no stranger to layered personas, preferred to recognize after Rogers gusted into his life in September 1893, and rescued him from financial catastrophe.
Rogers was a perfect avatar of the 1890s. With Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and a few others, he bestrode a decade that hurled the United States from the populist creativity of raw postwar industrialism—the twenty-odd years in which Everyman might parlay his better mousetrap (or typesetting machine) into a fortune—and toward a brutally efficient top-down organization of capital, and capital assets, and human assets. It was the dawn of imperialism, mass-marketing, and the corporation. It was the dawn of time present.
ROGERS AND Clemens met by chance after Sam returned to the States on September 7, 1893. Clara came along this time, to give him horseshoe-pitching companionship on the voyage, and then to travel on by herself to Elmira. Despite the financial crises that spurred this second crossing and his night-pacing levels of stress, he had managed some productive work during the summer, which included a move from the villa to a drab health spa in Franzensbad, Germany called the Krankenheil. (As Sam and Clara traveled, Livy now closed things down at Franzensbad and, dodging a cholera scare sprinkled about Europe, removed to Paris, which would be the family’s European headquarters for the winter.) He’d finished revisions on Pudd’n head Wilson in July and August, and added the famous “calendar” of aphorisms. The Joan of Arc story had consumed him for months now, and he read several accounts of her life, pushing himself through the French-language texts, then experimenting with various beginnings—five of them, by his later count. “Papa is progressing finely with his ‘Joan of Arc’ which promises to be his loveliest book,” Susy wrote to Clara in Berlin. “The character of Joan is pure and perfect to a miraculous degree. Hearing the M.S. read aloud is an up-lifting and revealing hour to us all. Many of Joan’s words and sayings are historically correct and Papa cries when he reads them.”1 Susy could not know it, but her father was writing this novel for her, and, in certain idealizing ways, about her.
Mark Twain also developed several sketches and essays, the most striking of which was “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” a white-hot excoriation of a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s abandoned young wife written by Edward Dowden. In sixteen thousand bristling words, Mark Twain denounced Dowden for tarring the deceased Harriet with implications that her infidelity had spurred Shelley to take up with Mary Godwin. This essay, in the opinion of one present-day editor, “foreshadowed truly modern thinking about trophy wives and displaced homemakers.”2 The North American Review published it over three installments in 1894.
All of this, plus about half a million dollars, would get him out of trouble. When he disembarked at New York Harbor, wracked with a severe bronchial cough, he was in a near-panic. Mount Morris Bank no longer accepted Webster & Company’s paper. Only Charley Langdon’s generosity (he endorsed notes totaling $21,000 in August) averted a foreclosure, and the permanent loss of $110,000 owed to Sam and $60,000 to Livy. The Library of American Literature, which the house had effectively stopped trying to sell, remained a money-devouring white elephant.
As Clara headed to Elmira, Sam entrained for Hartford, where he tried to find someone to advance him a few thousand dollars to cover notes that were due in days. No luck. He wrote to Susan Crane, begging for a $5,000 loan—“for the boat was sinking.”3 He dashed back to New York and Dr. Rice’s hospitality on 19th Street, sapped by his lingering cold. To cure it and get some sleep that first night, he “went to bed before dark and drank almost a whole bottle of whisky, and got up perfectly well.”4 The wellness wouldn’t last: After Sue Crane, scrambling heroically, notified him she had scraped up the money, Fred Hall pierced that balloon: he “said it wouldn’t save us for it was $8,000 we wanted, not $5,000.”5 He and Hall called on every Wall Street bank and broker they could think of, but found no one willing to part with a single investment dollar. “When I fell on the bed at 8 that evening,” he wrote to Livy, “ruin seemed inevitable, but I was physically so exhausted that mental misery had no chance & I was asleep in a moment.”6
Clemens and Rogers met on a mid-September evening as Clemens stood with Dr. Rice in the lobby of the Murray Hill Hotel. Rice, acquainted with the Standard Oil man, made the introductions, and the three sat down for drinks. Within minutes the author and the industrial titan had been friends since God knew when. Sam was his witty self, but was delighted to find that Rogers could match him, mot for mot and story for story. Better than that, Rogers disclosed that he’d been a big fan since catching one of Mark Twain’s “Sandwich Islands” lectures a long time ago.
As the laughter subsided and the three got up to leave, Rice mentioned to Rogers that Mark Twain’s finances were a little disheveled. Rogers set up a meeting. At 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 16, Clemens and Fred Hall arrived at 26 Broadway, took the elevator to the eleventh floor, and passed through a series of warrens until they stepped into Rogers’s inner chamber: a mahogany-trimmed apartment with bronze bulls and bears and yacht models scattered about, its walls festooned with framed letters from the likes of Lincoln and Grant. From this setting the Statue of Liberty, visible from the window, looked like a paperweight.7 They were shown in by the terrifying Katharine I. Harrison, the mogul’s six-foot secretary whose pitiless stare as she shooed away most visitors had earned her the nickname on Wall Street, “the Sphinx.” Rogers listened as Clemens and Hall described the cash-eating oppression of the Library of American Literature, and then made it disappear with a wave of his hand: he instructed his son-in-law to buy it from Webster & Company for $50,000. At mention of their ravenous creditors, Rogers produced $4,000 with a few pen strokes—not a loan, exactly; an investment in Webster, more or less. Who was counting? “In six minutes,” an awestruck Sam reported to Livy, “we had the check & our worries were over till the 28th.”8
Clemens was transformed; giddy with hope; silly with infatuation for his new friend. He took to showing up at the financier’s office, sweeping past the Sphinx without resistance, drinking the great man in as he wheeled and dealt. He rushed pell-mell to Rogers’s 57th Street town house early one evening to report a conversation with a royalty holder’s spokesman; nearly ran into the mogul and his wife as they left the premises for a dinner; and ended up stuck with two of their teenaged children. Rogers delighted Clemens by treating him with bluff hail-fellow humor, the sort that Howells always reached for but never quite managed to pull off. In late September, Clemens, regaining his savoir faire, moved out of Dr. Rice’s house and into a room at the exclusive Players Club on Gramercy Park. The two played billiards and poker and smoked cigars together, and joked about egg-sucking grandmothers, and eventually developed the running joke that Clemens was an incorrigible thief of household objects, and Rogers his perpetually outraged victim. (Clemens at one point ’fessed up to purloining two books, Rogers’s brown slippers, and a ham.)
Rogers trained his vision on the Paige typesetter fiasco. In early November Rogers materialized in Paige’s Chicago shop to inspect the machine and the people around it. He returned to New York with a good working knowledge of the contraption’s design, and its problems. He’d also made a quick, sharp study of the organizationa
l dysfunction, and now he began to kick it back to normal. With Sam looking on, Rogers hammered out a new proposed contract that would organize the feuding factions into a single entity, the Paige Compositor Manufacturing Company, with coherent plans for stock and royalty distribution and a manufacturing plan. It required a concession from the Chicago people that sent money Sam’s way, as well as Paige’s. It stipulated options for Sam to the tune of $240,000 cash or $500,000 in stock. The “carrot” here was Rogers’s personal involvement as an investor. Paige refused to give an inch; he responded with counterproposals. He was playing on fear: the chance that he would walk away entirely might force Clemens and Rogers to cave in. The inventor had met his match in any war of nerves. As telegrams poured in from the Chicago moneymen urging him to accept Paige’s terms, Rogers thrilled his new protégé with the tough-guy assurance that “Mr. Paige must accept our terms.”9 Rogers made it more fun by letting Clemens in on his strategic schemes, offering inside tips and chuckling with Sam over plans for hardballing the Windy City “braves.” To watch Rogers in action “is better than a circus,” Sam assured Livy.10
He took a connoisseur’s interest in the extraordinary intuition, the acute feel for human character and its limits, that were among the capitalist’s greatest weapons, along with his coolness and command of detail. He watched as Rogers efficiently vaporized the Connecticut men’s pretensions to inflated assets: “he stripped away all the rubbish & laid bare the fact that their whole gaudy property consisted of just $276,000 & no more!” Sam wrote to Livy on December 9. “Then he said, ‘Now we know where we stand, gentlemen. I am prepared to listen to a proposition from you to furnish capital.’ ”11 The spokesman proposed fifty cents on the dollar, and Rogers suggested adjournment until the next morning. “Along the street he said, ‘They ask 50, & would be glad to get 12…I know exactly what it is worth, to a farthing.’ ”12 Then he unspooled a complicated little scam in which Clemens, by faking a “conspiracy” against Rogers, could squeeze the Connecticut Company for some more stock. On December 21, Rogers returned to Chicago, this time with Clemens along, lolling in the titan’s private railroad car stocked with liquor and cigars. The two schemed on how to bamboozle their adversaries into trading their royalties for stock in the company, thus increasing the value of Sam’s royalties. Rogers presented his terms; Paige remained noncommittal. Back in New York, the waiting game resumed, with telegrams bearing proposals and counterproposals burning the wires in both directions.