Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  December 8, 1898, saw the passing of Mother Bear. Mary Fairbanks died at seventy in Providence, Rhode Island. Her fortunes had slipped in the years following her protégé’s rise to fame: in 1879, her husband Abel declared bankruptcy after a Twainish spell of ill-chosen investments. The couple had moved to Omaha and then to Newton, Massachusetts. Abel had died four years earlier.

  The end of the year found Samuel Clemens turning his thoughts back to the old friends who still remained—Howells and Twichell foremost among them—and to the idea of coming back home. He and the family were living splendidly in Vienna, having left the Metropole in May 1898 for a stay at a villa in Vienna Woods before taking apartments in the elegant Hotel Krantz on Neuer Markt. The stream of royalty, intellectuals, and reporters had not diminished, and the reporters who could not get to him in person queried him by mail. Petitioned from London for his opinion on the Russian czar’s proposal for world disarmament, Mark Twain did not hesitate: “The Czar is ready to disarm,” he answered; “I am ready to disarm. Collect the others, it should not be much of a task now.”61 Yet underneath the surface glamour beat the heart of an aging man yearning once more to move.

  “Our project is to go home next autumn if we find we can afford to live in New York,”62 he told Howells. A few months later, reading an installment of Howells’s new novel, Their Silver Wedding Journey, in Harper’s, Clemens detected a Wordsworthian strain: “I seem to get furtive & fleeting glimpses which I take to be the weariness & indolence of age; indifference to sights & things once brisk with interest; tasteless stale stuff which used to be champagne…”63 He quickly added, “But maybe that is your art,”64 although the unwritten corollary to that thought was, “…and maybe not.” He could have been describing himself—but then, these two old friends had much to recognize in each other. Both had suffered bereavements of a beloved daughter; both viewed the world with increasing disgust—Howells’s Utopian optimism having long since receded before a sense of cultural emptiness and what he called “the subtle fiend of advertising.”65 In the 1890s, Howells joined Mark Twain in reaching back into his boyhood, and in inventorying his dream life (The Shadow of a Dream, “True, I Talk of Dreams”). And both were getting old. In February the portly Howells had suffered the indignity of struggling to get a pair of rubbers on his feet after dining with Rudyard Kipling, who dropped to one knee to help.

  Like Clemens, Howells had enjoyed a productive decade. In the 1890s, as his biographer Kenneth Lynn notes,66 he produced ten novels, three novellas, two children’s books, four volumes of memoirs, and twelve plays, in addition to a wide array of criticism, sketches, and social essays. At the same time, he quietly endured a drumroll of criticism hostile to his social radicalism that coexisted, infuriatingly, with the growing perception that he was fatally suburban in his literary tastes. Henry James, who had benefited from Howells’s esteem and championing, emitted a large groan at his sponsor’s new magazine position:

  But what, my dear Howells, is the Cosmopolitan—and why—oh, why (let me be not odious!) are you hanging again round your neck the chain and emblems of bondage?…67

  Helen Gurley Brown herself would never draw that caliber of artillery fire.

  As the 19th century approached its close, Clemens and Howells, who together had done so much to define it in letters, began to recognize anew the rare value of their friendship and the lightness it brought to each of them. “You are the greatest man of your sort that ever lived, and there is no use saying anything else,” Howells had blurted in a letter several months earlier;68 and, a year after that, “I want to get a chance somehow to write a paper about you, and set myself before posterity as a friend who valued you aright in your own time.”69 Clemens returned the affection in his inimitable way. “…I am glad you have corralled Howells,” he wrote to James Pond, on learning that Howells had retained the agent for a lecture tour. “He’s a most sinful man, and I always knew God would send him to the platform if he didn’t behave.”70

  COMFORT AND celebrityhood aside, reasons for the Clemenses to remain in Vienna were rapidly evaporating. The doctors there were helpless to slow the symptoms of Jean’s epilepsy. Clara had given up her piano tutelage under Leschetizky shortly after the family moved into the Krantz. Her hands were simply too small to cover the octaves required for true preeminence in the concert world. She had an exceptional voice, though, and now planned for a career as a concert singer.

  An intriguing doctor named Heinrick Kellgren was reputed to produce miracles by a process known as “Swedish Movement Therapy” in Sanna, Sweden. New York could offer many distinguished voice teachers. It was time for the Clemenses’ European exile to wind down, and in May 1899, the long meandering homeward trek began. Among Mark Twain’s last acts in Vienna was a courtesy visit to Franz Josef, whose long rule as emperor would extend through the opening years of World War I, triggered partly by the assassination of his nephew, the Archduke Ferdinand. The interview apparently went well; Mark Twain proposed to the emperor a plan to eliminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a couple of minutes, and said he thought that Jan Szczepanik could handle the details.

  A crowd followed the family to the railroad station. Their itinerary took them through Prague, then Cologne, and then to London, where Mark Twain allowed himself to be lionized for a few days. They arrived at Sanna in early July, where Kellgren’s treatments revitalized Jean enough that her parents returned with her to London to check her in at the movement’s institute there. The family remained with her in London for another full year. Finally, on October 6, 1900, Samuel Clemens, Olivia, Clara, Jean, and Katy Leary stepped aboard the steamship Minnehaha and headed westward across the Atlantic to reenter American life after an absence of nearly a decade. Walking down the gangplank at New York Harbor nine days later, Mark Twain was greeted by a welcoming uproar from his countrymen so adulatory and so sustained that it must have felt to him as if he were awakening from a long, storm-tossed voyage that had in fact been a dream.

  * Clemens consistently misspelled the name as “Kellar.”

  * The American Indian, extrapolating from Mark Twain’s writings on the subject.

  45

  Sitting in Darkness

  (1900–1905)

  The horde of reporters and friends who greeted him at the dockside on October 15, 1900, formed the first tendrils of a human cloud that swirled about him for the rest of his life. The newspapers heralded his return as that of a prophet, or something larger than a prophet; the soul of the nation personified. MARK TWAIN HOME AGAIN, the newspaper headlines trumpeted the day after his arrival, and, MARK TWAIN COMES HOME, and MARK TWAIN IN AMERICA AGAIN, and MARK TWAIN HOME, AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST. The Herald noted the “smile of good-natured fun on his lips…as he came down the gangplank.” The Press picked up on his joking response to a question about his citizenship and blared, MARK TWAIN WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT. The Sun correspondent pleaded, “Tell us some of the incidents of your tour of the world.” (“There aren’t any except what I put in my book,” Mark Twain deadpanned, “and there weren’t enough of them to go ’round.”) The man from the Mail and Express shouted out to him the inevitable comparison to Sir Walter Scott. (“Nice, but purely personal.”) The Chicago Tribune, noting that his entourage was among the last to disembark, quoted him as assuring some friends, “No, I didn’t get off on the other side of the boat.”1

  Reporters caressed his presence in New York for days, getting all verklempt over his ruddy cheeks, his pink hands, the bristles on his mustache, his shoe blacking, his starched linen. The World editor ordered his interviewer to “have him tell what he thinks about the bay, the Statue of Liberty, the policemen, the manners of the people, the hotels, the cabs, bootblacks, fashions, the theatres and everything else that has interested him in New York”2—creating an “ask Mark about…” shtick for a century’s worth of Mark Twain imitators in white suits and white wigs. The resulting scoop was headlined MY IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA. The Herald man, clearly a vetera
n of the celeb scene, observed that “he has a trick of bending his knees and throwing back his head, as if in preparation for a good story. It is equivalent to one of President Lincoln’s ‘That reminds me.’ ”3

  He went to the Yale-Princeton football game with a party of Princeton professors—and a reporter at his elbow. “He quickly mastered the main principles of the game,” the correspondent informed his readers. “…[W]hen Mattis…dropped a pretty goal from the field Mr. Clemens laughed loudly, clapped his hands, and exclaimed: ‘That’s good! That’s good! Perhaps Princeton will win after all.’ ” At the ten-minute halftime, “with the figures standing 11 for Yale and 5 for Princeton, Mr. Clemens was one of the most eager of the mathematicians figuring how Princeton might yet pull the game out of the fire.” Princeton didn’t, but the reporter recorded the author’s color commentary on the first pigskin game he’d ever seen.

  “I should think they’d break every bone they ever had!”

  “Those Yale men must be made of granite, like the rocks of Connecticut!”

  “Those young Elis are too beefy and brawny for the Tigers!”

  “Well, say, this beats croquet. There’s more go about it!”

  “The country is safe when its young men show such pluck and determination as are here in evidence today.”4

  AMERICA HAD missed him. America had found something missing in itself when he was away, it almost seemed. What was it that America needed from him so badly?

  His round-the-world tour and repayment of his debts had established him as a national hero and moral exemplar; that was part of it. Yet some of the questions shouted to him on October 15 at New York Harbor could not be written off as celebrity by play. Anxiety seeped out of them. “Mr. Clemens, have you had time to give any thought to the grave question of imperialism?”5 asked the Herald man. Several reporters wondered how he was doing on the rumored autobiography whose revelations were said to be so portentous that they would not be published until a hundred years after his death. A follow-up question to his throwaway “citizenship” joke went, “Then you haven’t made up your mind about the Presidency?”6 These were peculiar concerns to be directed at a “humorist.” But then these were peculiar times, times in which all sorts of comfortable assumptions were being suspended or violently overturned. America, that stately brass-eagle-and-bunting leviathan, had just clawed an imperial power (Spain) off the surface of a tiny offshore island (Cuba) in the name of freedom and self-determination; now America was slashing at the overmatched victims of that same power, in a farther-off war in the Philippines—this time in the role of imperialist. How did the one action beget the other? The leading voices of the day saw no discontinuity. The editorial pages, most of Congress, the clergy, the captains of industry*—all of these bellowed the necessity and virtue of this war (not to mention the tasty business-growth prospects that flowed from the necessity and the virtue). The relation between words and truth grew difficult to sort out: what seemed self-evidently wrong only years, months, earlier, was suddenly trumpeted as a self-evident right. The language itself, like Hamlet’s time, seemed out of joint.

  The explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor that was said to justify the American invasion of Cuba—was it really caused by a Spanish torpedo, that 19th-century ballistic missile? Or was it (as many U.S. naval officers insisted) the result of a combustion in the ship’s coal bunkers? It was impossible for the average person to tell. But the dominant news outlets had no doubt. MAINE BLOWN UP BY TORPEDO, screamed the banner headlines in the Hearst papers on February 17, 1898. Was the nation’s “honor” at stake, as the papers were maintaining? Did it mean something, as the Humboldt Times pointed out on April 12, that on this date thirty-seven years ago to the day Fort Sumter had been bombarded, starting the Civil War?7 (The Times’s point seemed to be that it would be nice if some bombarding were going on today.)

  Strident calls for more force, more expansion, rose up from the halls and pulpits of American public power. The Republican president McKinley, running for reelection against the anti-imperialist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, was not a rabid expansionist (contrary to the second man on the ticket, Theodore Roosevelt), but he had approved the annexations, bringing a new phrase into popularity: “manifest destiny.” McKinley was en route to victory by the largest margin in presidential history.

  The real bombast came from congressional firebrands such as Senators “Jingo Jim” Blaine of Maine and Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, who raved about following the flag and pitching the tents of liberty westward. Beveridge noticed that the hand gripping the Stars and Stripes was God’s. The Protestant clergy had noticed the same thing. The Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, a friend of Roosevelt’s, proclaimed the “Anglo-Saxon” race the great race of history, incomparably superior to people in tropical lands—say, the Philippines. God had thus deputized the Anglo-Saxons to share the joys of superior civilization with inferior races, whether the latter liked it or not.

  James M. King, a Methodist minister in New York, was less delicate.

  Christianized Anglo-Saxon blood, with its love of liberty, its thrift, its intense and persistent energy and personal independence, is the regnant force in this country…God is using the Anglo-Saxon to conquer the world for Christ by dispossessing feeble races, and assimilating and molding others.8

  Adjusted to the heat level of a later time, this thought might read: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.”

  Something very close to that, of course, took place. Progressive-minded Americans were in shock over the results of their nation’s “liberating” invasion of the Spanish-controlled Philippine Islands that lay more than seven thousand miles west of the California coast. After quickly crushing the Spanish navy and land forces, the United States had brushed aside the nationalist First Philippine Republic—in whose interests it had purportedly launched its attacks—and claimed annexation for itself at the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, paying Spain $20 million dollars for all the territories it had “rescued” from foreign dominion. (Among the American “peace” commissioners at Paris was Mark Twain’s old friend Whitelaw Reid.) The Filipino revolutionaries, who took a jaundiced view of McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation,” proceeded to declare war on the United States in February 1899. By the time the benevolence died down in July 1902, Filipino losses would total twenty thousand soldiers and more than two hundred thousand civilians, against 4,200 Americans dead.

  DISSENT FROM the war or criticism of its aftermath carried a price. The dissenter was likely to be branded as nothing more than a damned anti-imperialist, and that was the next thing to being a damned traitor. “There is no reasonable doubt about that,” Fred C. Chamberlain would fulminate in the afterglow of victory. “Their work cost the lives of hundreds of American soldiers,—stabbed in the back as they stood out there on the firing line, by their own countrymen…All up and down this great country the Anti-Imperialists made speeches of sympathy for the men who were shooting at our own soldiers.”9 And who were the Anti-Imperialists? They were the damn Masons, the damn women’s assemblies, the damn Democrats, the damn inflammatory magazine Farm and Home. Not to mention the damn Anti-Imperialist League. This last was the outgrowth of that “Peace Appeal to Labor,” signed in April by William Dean Howells and several of his friends. These activists, who included Andrew Carnegie and William James, founded the League in October 1899. It went approximately nowhere. The League shared the problem of most who dared speak up in opposition to this onslaught of passionate intensity: a lack of—if not conviction, then at least declamatory power.

  The progressive Nation of March 24, 1899, cleared its throat and sent forth a mighty whisper of opposition to the jingo firestorm: “Have we a course of war so clear, so loftily imperative that all the hideousness of carnage and the fearful blow to civic progress must be hazarded in order to vindicate humanity and righteousness?”10 This was hardly a match for Rudyard Kipling’s heavy-thumping
verse screed “The White Man’s Burden,” in the February 12 McClure’s. Kipling, who had knelt to help Howells with his rubbers, was kneeling no more. With elephantine condescension toward the “sullen, silent peoples / Half devil and half child” in the crosshairs of Anglo-style enlightenment, he exhorted the long-suffering master race to “[s]end forth the best ye breed” and rescue the disgusting little wogs from their own abysmal stabs at civilization.11

  MARK TWAIN’S position on the Philippine war, when it finally coalesced, beggared the Democrats’ timidity and the Republicans’ bombast. It quickly blossomed into the representative, and prophetic, voice of principled American dissent. It defined the public work of his last ten years. Yet it did not stand alongside his literary legacy for many decades after his death, and for good reason. When his posthumous protectors (chiefly Clara and Paine) resumed the work that had ultimately defeated Mary Fairbanks, Livy, Susy, and others during his lifetime—the work of de-Vandalizing him, propping him up in the perfumed costume of a polite National Uncle—his social justice essays suffered the same fate as did his more extreme screeds against religion and mankind: deemphasis, obfuscation, and outright suppression.

  “I am an anti-imperialist,” Mark Twain told the reporters at dockside. “I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”12 He had said exactly the same thing to reporters in London on the day he boarded the Minnehaha. His comments were widely published. In their cadences and compressed clarity, they offered a clue as to why America was so glad to see him again. In contrast to the wild sloganeering, fact-twisting, and question-begging of the yellow press, congressmen, and the clergy, his thoughts could not have been more cogently stated. Here was a demonstration of what Howells maintained—at just about this time—was his most liberating literary strength, his “single-minded use of words, which he employs as Grant did to express the plain, straight meaning their common acceptance has given them…He writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it.”13