Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  If nothing else, Mark Twain’s friendship with Rogers produced what is perhaps the most quoted of all his lightning ripostes. Repetition has given it countless variations; the locale has ranged from Hartford to New York to New Bedford, and probably beyond. The interlocutor’s gender and status vary. It most likely occurred during a dinner given for Mark Twain and Rogers at the Princess Hotel in Bermuda in 1906. One of the guests drew the author aside and murmured, “Your friend Rogers is a good fellow. It’s a pity his money is tainted.”

  “It’s twice tainted,” agreed Mark Twain—“tain’t yours, and tain’t mine.”42

  43

  Thunder-Stroke

  (1895–96)

  On a chilly day toward the end of March 1895, Samuel Clemens stepped through the doorway of the nineteen-room house at 351 Farmington Avenue in Hartford, where he and Livy had commenced their lives as social royalty nearly twenty-one years earlier. He was back in America, traveling alone, to arrange details of the odyssey he had conceived to repay his creditors. He hadn’t wanted to go near the salmon-colored house with its Gothic spires when he arrived in town, he wrote to Livy, or see any of their old friends.

  But as soon as I entered this front door I was siezed with a furious desire to have us all in this house again & right away, & never go outside the grounds any more forever—certainly never again to Europe.1

  The old life swept before him like a panorama; and he ached to come home.

  How ugly, tasteless, repulsive, are all the domestic interiors I have ever seen in Europe compared with the perfect taste of this ground floor, with its delicious dream of harmonious color, & its all-pervading spirit of peace & serenity & deep contentment…It is the loveliest home that ever was.2

  He realized that over time, he’d grown oblivious to the house’s claims on his soul: claims contained in the furniture and draperies and statuary and appointments that he and Livy had traveled so many countries and spent so many thousands of dollars to assemble.

  …I had wholly forgotten its olden aspect. And so, when I stepped in at the front door & was suddenly confronted by all its richness & beauty minus wraps & concealments, it almost took my breath away.3

  Every rug, picture, ornament, and chair was in its place—woundingly so.

  [T]he place was bewitchingly bright & splendid & homelike & natural, & it seemed as if I had burst awake out of a hellish dream, & had never been away, & that you would come drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after you.4

  But Livy would never again descend those stairs. The house was inhabited now by John Day and his wife Alice, a daughter of Isabella Hooker, who had leased it from the Clemenses for a vitally necessary two hundred dollars a month. The young Sam Clemens had attended their wedding with Olivia Langdon on June 17, 1869. When Alice Hooker Day tried to say something about the rocking chair that had once belonged to Livy’s mother, Olivia Lewis Langdon, she broke down and wept.

  SAM HAD disclosed the essence of the plan in a letter to Henry Rogers early in February. It was “(take a breath and stand by for a surge)—to go around the world on a lecture trip.”5 Pridefully, he insisted to Rogers that the trip was not for money, “but to get Mrs. Clemens and myself away from the phantoms and out of the heavy nervous strain for a few months.”6

  It most certainly was for money. Why else did he plan to flog himself and his wife westward on a yearlong itinerary that would take them across oceans and unfamiliar land to a hundred cities in Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Ceylon, India, South Africa, and the British Isles, and then (as his plans then called for) on a finishing kick around several American cities in the East? He had come to dread “the platform.” (He’d appeared at Madison Square Garden with James Whitcomb Riley in February 1894, for the money; and it had not gone well.) He didn’t even have a lecture prepared. This was quite an extravagant way of catching a little rest and relaxation. But it was a good way—probably the only way—of recouping that $100,000 debt of honor.

  He gave the game away a little further on in the same letter, calculating some of his expenses against some projected revenues (he said his friend Harry M. Stanley thought he would net $15,000 in Australia and Cape Town alone), and remarking that the tour would aid in sales of the anticipated uniform edition of his works. To clear the decks, he had pushed Tom Sawyer, Detective, to its conclusion in January, and then, writing in great clusters of copy, sometimes fifteen hundred words in a day, he wrapped up Joan of Arc. He read aloud of the heroine’s persecution and deepening peril each night to the family, with Susy frequently excusing herself to get a handkerchief for weeping. “To-night Joan of Arc was burned at the stake,”7 she wrote in her diary after listening to the novel’s conclusion. Mark Twain chose a curious way of characterizing his own feelings upon finishing the manuscript: in a note to himself, he evoked the simile of a death-watch that had finally concluded.

  Do you know the shock? I mean when you come at your regular hour into the sickroom where you have watched for months and find the medicine-bottles all gone, the night-table removed, the bed stripped…the room cold, stark, vacant—& you catch your breath & realize what has happened.

  Do you know that shock?8

  As he contemplated the “desolation” of the now-absent manuscript, it occurred to him that if he were to write another book, “I must restore the aids to lingering dissolution to their wonted places & nurse another patient through & send it forth for the last rites, with many or few to assist there, as that may happen; & that I will do.”9 Sailing to New York, he finalized travel details. The agent James B. Pond, who’d put together Mark Twain and George Washington Cable’s “Twins of Genius” tour a decade earlier, was arranging the American lecture bookings. Pond and his wife would accompany the Clemenses as far as the West Coast. The respected Australian lecture agent Carlyle Greenwood Smythe, who had booked the remainder of the tour, would join them in Sydney and travel with them the rest of the way. Clara, fearing boredom in the States, had invited herself on the journey. Susy and Jean would stay behind in Elmira, under Katy Leary’s care. Susy, who disliked ocean sailing, would pursue voice training. Jean would enroll at the Elmira Ladies Seminary.

  Clemens looked up Howells in New York, and the two of them joined a soiree at the writer Laurence Hutton’s house on a Sunday afternoon, where Henry Rogers introduced them to the fourteen-year-old Helen Keller. A few days later, the blind and deaf young woman recounted to Mary Mapes Dodge that “Mr. Clemens told us many entertaining stories, & made us laugh till we cried.” She decided that “Mark Twain” was an appropriate nom de plume for him, “because it has a funny & quaint sound that goes well with his amusing writings, & its nautical significance suggests the deep & beautiful things he has written.”10 He headed back across the Atlantic on March 27 aboard the SS Paris, paused in London to preside as guest of honor at a dinner given him by Sir Henry Stanley, and then went on to Paris to collect his family. There, he finished reading the proofs of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and sent them to Harper’s. The magazine had already begun publishing the yearlong serialization in the April number, under the name “Sieur Louis de Conte.” The entourage sailed for New York on May 11, and arrived on the 18th. They entrained to Elmira after a few days in the city, to make final preparations for their mid-July departure on the world tour.

  The final weeks weren’t easy. Livy’s health had improved dramatically for the first time in years, but Sam was attacked by gout, and also by the bacterial skin infection known as a boil, or carbuncle. (“I could have done without it,” he confided to Rogers, “for I do not care for jewelry.”)11 The swelling on his left leg produced pain that required bandaging and sent him to bed at the Quarry Hill farmhouse, where he remained for forty-four days, as he later claimed. He tried to work three lecture/readings into shape, but was distracted by demands from Webster & Company’s creditors; a couple of these missives arrived in the form of subpoenas. The second one, from a bookbinder, terrified Livy by ordering her t
o appear before the Supreme Court of New York. In mid-June Frank Bliss offered Clemens ten thousand dollars to write a book on his round-the-world trip. Sam made no promises, but decided to write such a book. He was contractually committed to the Century to produce a series of magazine articles (as Livy discovered), and railed when the editors insulted him with an astonishing breach of tact.

  The Century people actually proposed that I sign a contract to be funny in those 12 articles. That was pure insanity. Why, it makes me shudder every time I think of those articles. I don’t think I could ever write one of them without being under the solemnizing blight of that disgusting recollection.12

  As the departure date grew near, he bombarded Rogers with so many queries for bankruptcy details that he acknowledged his intrusions with a rueful joke: “Look here, don’t you think you’d better let somebody else run the Standard Oil a week or two till you’ve finished up these matters of mine?”13 He decided on his own to travel to New York and settle the bookbinder’s claim of $5,046.83. Livy did not have to testify, but she was humiliated by the New York Times’s coverage of the hearing on July 11 and 12, which noted that Mr. Clemens, made “ill through worrying over his business affairs,” had traveled from Elmira in the care of a nurse.14 He tried out one of his new lecture readings on seven hundred young inmates at the Randalls Island House of Refuge. The subject was a comic take on the moral regeneration of mankind. The miscreants were not charmed. “Oh, but wasn’t it a comical defeat…. Deliveringa grown-folks’ lecture to a sucking-bottle nursery!” he lamented to Rogers.15 He threw the lecture away and wrote a revision. He tried one last dress rehearsal, this one in Elmira early on the same Sunday evening that he began his epic trek west. Again his audience was boys—inmates at the Elmira reformatory—and these slightly older hoodlums treated him a little better. Afterward, the Clemenses and the Ponds took carriages through the hot night to the railroad station, where, at 10:30 p.m. on July 14, 1895, the five boarded a train for Cleveland, the first leg of a journey that for Sam, Livy, and Clara would cover one year, and fifty-three thousand miles. As the locomotive hissed steam and began its roll down the tracks, Sam gazed through the glass at his receding eldest daughter, luminous on the platform under the electric lights. Susy smiled and waved. “She was brimming with life & the joy of it,” Clemens told Howells a year later. “That is what I saw; & it was what her mother saw through her tears.”16

  VIEWED IN retrospect, the year 1895 was the true beginning of the 20th century. Motion pictures were invented, and the x-ray. Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. Babe Ruth was born. Scientists in Sweden and America began to warn against what would one day be called global warming. More ominously, the “Jewish question,” stirred up in Austria and Germany, was transmigrating to France. Anti-Semitism, one year after the Dreyfus trial, was reinforced by a primitive interpretation of evolutionist theory, “social Darwinism,” and its even uglier stepchild, “racial purity.” A reckoning beyond Hank Morgan’s dreams gathered force.

  In South Africa, the discovery of gold in the Transvaal spurred passions toward an outbreak of the second Boer War. In Cuba, revolutionaries arose against the Spanish colonialists. Spain sent a hundred thousand troops to put down the rebellion; the United States sided with the rebels and the USS Maine steamed toward Havana. Mark Twain was marching into the path of this gathering hurricane. His global itinerary, and his European residences through the rest of the 1890s, projected him along the most critical fault lines of empire, imperialism, slavery, colonial rule, the tyranny of the landed over the dispossessed. (The very fact that he was able to lecture around the world in his own language and be understood, he owed to the British Empire and its four hundred million subjects.) The assaults on these institutions and the revised view of humanity the assaults represented would hasten the long-delayed maturity of his political voice, and inspire the strongest writing of the rest of his life.

  The expedition got off to a sweat-soaked start in Cleveland on the night of July 15. A capacity crowd of 2,600 marinated in 90-degree temperatures inside the Music Hall. Mark Twain sweltered in the wings as a flute-and-violin ensemble labored away for forty minutes, with many encores. When he finally took the stage, he saw to his horror that two hundred newsboys had been seated behind him (he later boosted the number to five hundred). Every one of them had Tom Sawyer’s patience for a stuffy grown-up occasion. He exited the stage with a third of his readings undelivered. “Why, with their scufflings and horse-play and noise, it was just a menagerie,”17 he fumed. Imagine! Boys!

  They departed Cleveland the next evening for a voyage across the Great Lakes on the luxury steamship Northland, with its spacious promenade decks, and Clemens’s mood improved. He watched the summer cottages slip by as the ship approached Port Huron, linking lakes Erie and Huron, and noted the “summer-dressed young people” waving flags and handkerchiefs. They were waving for Mark Twain. He noted the “rich browns and greens of the rush-grown far-reaching flat lands…the sinking sun throwing a crinkled broad carpet of gold on the water.”18 They steamed north on Lake Huron, Sam roughing out a second lecture. Mark Twain made appearances at Sault Ste. Marie on the Canadian border, and then in Mackinac. Westward then on Lake Superior to the Minnesota shore. He spoke in St. Paul and Minneapolis and Winnipeg. His lecturing prowess was back. The crowds loved him; few in these regions had ever laid eyes on anyone this famous; but even if they had, this was Mark Twain. Trains carried people from as far as two hundred miles away to hear him in towns along the northern Great Plains on a line to Vancouver. Clara found herself hypnotized by his effect on audiences.

  Father knew the full value of a pause and had the courage to make a long one when required for a big effect. And his inimitable drawling speech, which he often lost in private life, greatly increased the humorous effect on the stage. People in the house, including men, got hysterical. Cries that resembled the cries of pain could often be heard…

  It always seemed to me the greatest possible achievement to make a house rock with mirth. And I believe that Mark Twain was often elated by it himself. His cheeks and eyes glowed with color that resembled tinted sparks.19

  Clemens flourished in the adulation; but he had imagined a more personal triumph on this tour: a return to San Francisco, which he’d last seen half his lifetime ago. He’d been disappointed when Pond ruled it out: the gate prospects in the California city were bad, Pond insisted; people in that city took vacations in August.

  Clemens set aside his share of the gate money, roughly $200 out of the average $500 a stop, for delivery back to Henry Rogers. It totaled something over $5,000 by the time he reached the West Coast and mailed it off in a lump sum. He and Livy wanted their creditors paid incrementally as the money came in, but Rogers refused; he prudently banked it and let it accumulate interest.

  In Butte, Montana, on August 1, expecting miners, Clemens encountered a “Beautiful audience. Compact, intellectual and dressed in perfect taste.”20 He read to them for an hour and a half, throwing in the Frog, the Old Ram, the Watermelon, and the Golden Arm. The house was packed to the roof at Portland, and he found the twenty-five-cent patrons in the gallery “as intelligent and responsive as the others.”21 Overflow crowds turned out in Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle. Word of Mark Twain’s debt-paying mission had spread through the newspapers, heightening the air of drama at each of his appearances. Hardscrabble farmers and grocery clerks pressed their dollars at him; he gently refused most of these, but recorded the figures at every house to the penny. James Pond had one of the new Kodak cameras, and he took pictures of these gaunt, staring strangers, presaging Walker Evans. Bands played Mark Twain into town, and people waved hats and handkerchiefs. At Victoria, British Columbia, the governor-general, his wife, and son came to hear him, the boy in Highland costume. The band played “God Save the Queen,” which Sam enjoyed. Reporters flocked to him, and he indulged them. A “young boy” came to interview him and “asked me in strict detail precisely the questions which I have answ
ered so many million times already.”22 These included “First visit? Where do you go from here? Have you had good houses? Have you enjoyed the trip? Are you going to write a book about the voyage? What will be the character of it?”23 To this last, he confessed he was “tempted to say hydrophobia, seamanship and agriculture.”24

  Back East, the “Joan of Arc” serialization in Harper’s had captured wide attention. Many readers and newsmen, recognizing the distinctive comic touches in it, figured out who the author was. Clemens directed Harper & Brothers to put his name on their forthcoming hardcover edition. Later he changed his mind, but he would change it again. In Elmira, Susy was fighting depression. She suffered her father’s predisposition to guilt and self-blame. “I am often deeply cast down with the thought of how I have failed to be what I should have been to you all,” she wrote. “But perhaps I shall have a chance to try again.”25 In her pining for Louise Brownell, Susy had sometimes felt suffocated within the family circle; but as the summer of 1895 went on, she ached to rejoin it: “You brilliant, experienced, adorable people, to whom I belong…”26

  The Clemenses arrived at Vancouver on August 10, and bade farewell to the Ponds, who returned east. Sam and Livy’s voyage to Australia was delayed a week after their ship, a weather-beaten little mail steamer called the RMS Warramoo, stumbled across a reef on its way into port. (“Fortunately we did not know until later,” Clara recorded, “that the steamer even after repairs was not seaworthy and would have gone down in a storm.”)27 Mark Twain shoehorned some local readings onto his schedule. In reaction to rumors, and after prodding from Rogers, he signed a statement declaring that he was not lecturing for his own benefit, but to pay off his creditors—even though, strictly speaking, he didn’t have to: “The law recognizes no mortgage on a man’s brain…but I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than a hundred cents on the dollar, and its debts never outlaw.”28