Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside: then all that ink and labor are wasted, because I can’t print the result. I have just finished an article of this kind, and it satisfies me entirely [“As Concerns Interpreting the Deity”]. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for me and the family. I will leave it behind, and utter it from the grave. There is free speech there, and no harm to the family.30

  IN PRIVATE for Sam, the new 20th century—“a stranger to me,” he’d warily jotted in his notebook—promised to be a long, gentle Arcadian dream, if the summer of 1901 was any evidence. In June, Clemens ensconced his family in a “little bijou” of a log cabin at the edge of Lower Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, where they swam and boated and went for walks in the woods, and watched the “beautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels…take tea at 5 p.m. (not uninvited)” at the outdoors table where Jean sat typing her father’s manuscripts.31 Sam worked on his indulgently silly send-up of the Sherlock Holmes genre, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” for Harper’s Magazine, and decided that all the squirrels were named Blennerhasset.32 In August, Sam broke away to join Henry Rogers’s seagoing stag party aboard the tycoon’s 227-foot steam yacht the Kanawha, said to be the fastest on American waters with a top speed of twenty-two knots an hour. (Clemens always managed to stifle his anti-imperialist sentiments in Rogers’s company.) They cruised from port to port in Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia; playing poker and smoking large cigars and the stroking of large mustaches was the order of most days. Sam’s old class anxieties had arisen in the form of suspicions that he snored at nights. When he asked his companions about it at breakfast one morning, the men assured him that it was no problem, he reported to Livy:

  [T]hey often lay awake hours to listen, and Mr. Rogers said it infused him so with comfortableness that he tried to keep himself awake by turning over and over in bed so as to get more of it…Colonel Payne said he was always sorry when the night was over and he knew he had to wait all day before he could have some more…This is very different from the way I am treated at home, where there is no appreciation of what a person does.33

  The new century gave a little hint of its darkness on September 6, 1901, when a baby-faced anarchist named Leon Czolgosz excused his way past fifty bodyguards at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo and pumped two bullets into President McKinley, who gasped out, “Be easy with him boys,” and died eight days later. Theodore Roosevelt, racing pell-mell to Washington from his own family getaway at Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, was sworn into the office at age forty-three. Five weeks later, the new president and hero of San Juan Hill attended the bicentennial ceremonies of his alma mater, Yale University, where he heard a great cheer go up—for Mark Twain. The author, who with Howells was awarded an honorary degree—his second—from Yale had just strolled into the hall. Roosevelt clenched his famous imperialistic teeth and muttered, within the author’s hearing, that he would like to see the likes of Mark Twain skinned alive.34 Clemens and Howells enjoyed calling each other “Doc” for a while.

  Sam and Livy had been searching for a house that would recapture some of the grandeur of the mansion in Hartford. A month after the Yale ceremonies they moved into a three-story Greek Revival house in Riverdale, a mostly forested city north of Manhattan. Sam had leased it from the owner, William Henry Appleton, for three thousand dollars a year. Called Wave Hill, the house sat on high land above the Hudson River, its spacious back lawn giving a view of the New Jersey palisades to the west. A summer visitor at Wave Hill in 1870 and 1871, with his parents, was Theodore Roosevelt, who later claimed he had learned his love of nature there. Sam relished the strong winds that blew across the Hudson and through the trees; he built an ornate tree parlor in the branches of a chestnut on the lawn. Here, despite Livy’s diminished health, they commenced a scaled-down version of the entertaining that had illuminated so many evenings across the years at Nook Farm. The Howellses were among the frequent guests, “on something like the sweet old terms,”35 and also Henry Huttleston and Emilie Rogers. A few months later, the Clemenses placed the Nook Farm house on the market.

  SAM’S PROSPERITY increased in 1902, the year that Bret Harte and Thomas Nast died. He calculated that he earned $60,000 from combined sales of his books, and $100,000 altogether.36 He became a regular aboard Henry Rogers’s yacht, exploring the Caribbean with him in April. In that month, Clara traveled to Paris to reconnect with Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Mark Twain’s renown took on surrealistic proportions: Howells noticed that railroad conductors would hold up the scheduled departure of trains if the great man needed to use the gentleman’s room at the station. His notebook aphorisms poured forth with Wildean panache: “To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.”37

  In May of that year Samuel Clemens reentered his boyhood universe of Hannibal, Missouri, for the last time, and in his honor, Hannibal improvised a transformation—to the extent possible, working without advance notification—back to its own antebellum youth; a white town, drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning. He arrived by train from St. Louis on Thursday, May 29, 1902, on a journey begun in New York and destined for the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he was to receive an honorary degree. The hundred-mile detour north to Hannibal was an impulsive decision, and a self-conscious one: he invited a young book reviewer from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, named Robertus Love, to accompany him. Love followed the author around the town for parts of four days, and filed several captivating dispatches about the excitement and pageantry that swirled about the visit.

  Clemens and Love stepped off the train in the balmy late afternoon to behold what had become a thoroughly modern little city of 12,500 people. Railroads had brought prosperity to Hannibal, a legacy of John Marshall Clemens’s efforts of more than half a century earlier. Its factories sent shoes and cement out across the nation. Right-angled redbrick buildings housed its downtown businesses, buildings that would remain in use a century hence. The streets were filled with scurrying people interested in making money. Few of them had time to think or care much about the silent moving waters of the Mississippi on the far side of the tracks. The two checked in at the Windsor Hotel, a block from the station. Love, alert for “color,” didn’t have to wait long. The desk clerk, a man named Will Sutton, recognized the famous guest and spoke up: “Mr. Clemens, I was born close to your birthplace at Florida, and have been in the house where you were born, often.” “I was not born often—only once,” Sam deadpanned back; “but I’m glad to see you, all the same.”38

  Word spread fast that Mark Twain was back in town, as Mark Twain clearly hoped it would. The leading citizens improvised a publicity and welcoming schedule. (“If we had known he was aboard that train,” exclaimed one of them, “the Union Depot platform would not have been big enough to hold the chairmen of committees.”)39 The next morning some townsfolk asked him if he could confirm that the small white house at 206 Hill Street was in fact the one where he had lived for a time in the 1840s. He could and did, and posed for a famous photograph in front of it, wearing a pearl-gray suit. He accepted a carriage ride from a wealthy widow, Helen Garth, through the hilly greening woodlands south of town to Mount Olivet Cemetery, where John Marshall and Jane and Orion and Henry lay side by side under the same tree.

  Back in town a mob had collected at the Farmers and Merchants Bank, where a reception had been thrown together. Mark Twain scanned the faces of the old men who squeezed through the door to get a look at him; he recognized a few. “How are you doing, Eddie?” he asked a man named Pierce, who replied, “Like yourself, Sam. Like a cow’s tail going down.”40 Another fellow identified himself as Lippincott and tried to get Mark Twain to remember how they used to play marbles together, but the author couldn’t make that connection. After a while, he went off to visit the First Presbyterian Church on North Fourth Street where he�
�d first learned about his own sure damnation.

  By Friday afternoon, Hannibal had figured out how to turn itself into a Mark Twain theme center, a talent that it retained. “Today Hannibal is full of Huck Finns, Tom Sawyers and Beckys,” Love wrote. “There are more ‘originals’ of [them] than one would expect to meet in a staid old town with 23 respectable Sunday schools and a Salvation Army.”41 That evening, some smart proto-publicists staged a great media event: they sat Mark Twain/Sam Clemens/Tom Sawyer down to dinner at Helen Garth’s mansion with the object of his long-ago somersaults, Laura Frazier/Laura Hawkins/Becky Thatcher, now the matron for the Home of the Friendless in Hannibal. Sam improvised decently. “Gee whiz,” he cried out, “—it seems like I ain’t seen you in 50 years, Laura.”42 He distributed diplomas that night to the high school graduating class of 1902; after a class delegation presented him with a silver spoon, he froze their grins with the tale of how he tried to contract measles from Will Bowen. “I was very near to death,” he told them, “and I have never had such a good opportunity to die. Sometimes I think I should have embraced the opportunity, thereby escaping many unpleasant things.”43

  The following night, his last ever in Hannibal, the sorrow escaped completely. As five hundred guests of the Labinnah Club (“Hannibal” spelled backwards) watched in disbelief, he faltered in his comic address and gave way to convulsive sobs. “A moment before,” Love wrote, “the scores of beautiful girls and matrons, handsomely gowned, and the clubmen and their friends had been laughing heartily at the flashes of Mark Twain’s characteristic wit.”44 Then, just after a remark that “had everyone helpless with mirth,” came the deluge. Mark Twain’s head dropped and his shoulders heaved. “He mumbled something that was not understood, and at last he looked up into the now tense, sympathetic faces of his auditors.”

  “I realize that this must be my last visit to Hannibal,” he said to the people who were looking at him, “and in bidding you hail I also bid you farewell.”45

  The next morning, a Sunday, he walked with a Baptist minister ahead of a throng to the railroad station, where he posed for photographers in his gray suit and homburg, a spray of flowers in his fist. As he strolled in the sunlight, an ancient specter materialized from the depths of the crowd, sepulchral as the ghost in “The Golden Arm.” It was deaf Tom Nash, who shrieked out: “Same damned fools, Sam!”46 Then the train engine released its ghostly clouds of steam, and by the time the steam had evaporated, Sam Clemens was gone.

  AN INFINITELY more heartbreaking farewell soon threatened. On August 12, 1902, in the midst of a summer holiday with Sam and Jean at York Harbor, Maine, Livy found herself unable to breathe. Her heart beat wildly, and she and Sam both believed that she was dying. Sam telephoned a doctor, who arrived in half an hour. Livy survived, but remained weak through September 20, when she suffered a relapse. Henry Rogers had brought the couple to York Harbor aboard his yacht, but a return home via the ocean was unthinkable, and Clemens arranged to transport her by a private railroad car on October 13. Back in Riverdale, doctors diagnosed her condition as heart disease. Her daily care now became an overriding concern. Clara suspended her singing career at twenty-eight, and became her mother’s unofficial nurse, to the extent possible—the doctor summoned from Boston insisted that family members stay out of the sick woman’s bedroom. The steadfast Katy Leary did what she could. Jean, twenty-two, became the household’s second invalid when she was felled by pneumonia in December.

  Clemens decided that everyone could use some reinforcement from the outside. In early November he hired a thirty-four-year-old woman named Isabel Van Kleek Lyon to serve as Livy’s secretary and help out as needed. The Clemenses had vaguely known Isabel Lyon for about twelve years—she had worked as a governess for their Nook Farm neighbors the Franklin G. Whitmores. An attractive, dark-haired, mercurial woman, given to self-dramatizing poses and actions, she’d boldly sat in on a hand of whist one night when Sam and Livy were guests at the Whitmores’, a gesture that shocked and interested Sam. She was destined to haunt the author’s final years as an intriguer in his literary, financial, and personal affairs, and to be seen by Clemens and Clara as a sinister presence in the household; even as a romantic temptress after Livy’s death, in the view of some biographers.

  To be near his wife, Clemens wound down and at last suspended the glittering social and public appearance schedule he’d enjoyed in New York—near, but not next to her. “When we are serene & happy old married folk,” he’d assured her in the innocent bliss of 1869, “we will sit together…all the long pleasant evenings, & let the great world toil & struggle & nurse its pet ambitions…”47 It wasn’t working out that way. For great stretches in the months between Livy’s attack at York Harbor and her death, doctors did their best to keep Sam away from her. They feared that his intense personality would wear her down. The separation only added to the couple’s agony. Desperate for contact, Sam began writing short notes to Livy, which he pushed under the door. He described the landscape outside: “Livy, dear…the sea has come ashore. Water, blown by the wind in crinkling curves & long lines, is frozen white, & a stretch of it up the slope of the grassy hill gives the aspect of a section of green sea with wimpling white-caps chasing each other over it.”48 He told her small details about Clara and Jean, and reminded her of the emperor’s backyard in Vienna. He signed himself “Y,” for Youth.

  Sam resumed his polemic writing as well. He returned to an assault on Mary Baker Eddy that he’d begun in Vienna, circumstances having made her concept of “healing” even more of a monstrous joke to him. Bit by bit, sentence by sentence, with deconstructive focus as mercilessly charged as any that would be trained on him, he picked apart her use of language, and, through this conduit, the foundation of her claim to intellectual legitimacy. (Fenimore Cooper got off easy, by comparison.) He pointed to her obsessively control-minded bylaws for her church (a thinly disguised trust, in his view), as evidence of her insatiable will to power: “It is odd and strange, to see intelligent and educated people among us worshipping this self-seeking and remorseless tyrant as a God.”49 He inventoried her rhetorical self-contradictions and garbled syntax: “It is evident that whenever, under the inspiration of the Deity, she turns out a book, she is always allowed to do some of the preface. I wonder why that is? It always mars the work.”50 Ultimately, he indicted her promotion of “divine healing” as irresponsible and dangerous, and predicted that Christian Science would grow in spurious influence until it rivaled the papacy: just another form of imperialism.

  As with his other imperialist writings, he encountered squeamishness from his publishers. The North American Review gamely published a four-part series of these essays beginning in December 1902, but Harper & Brothers, after accepting the assembled writings for publication in book form, withheld it from the market until 1907, by which time it had blended in with other criticisms of the church.

  JEAN’S PNEUMONIA, and Sam’s efforts to hide that bad news from Livy, increased tensions in the Riverdale household. The under-the-door love letters continued (“Good morning, dear heart, & thank you for your dear greeting. I think of you all the time…”51 Livy remained gravely weak through the first six months of 1903, but in July, the doctors approved her wish to visit Elmira and Quarry Farm. There, she and Sam spent long hours on the farmhouse porch, Livy supine, Sam at her side. Clara, depleted, stayed behind in Riverdale. Late in the summer Livy began to think fondly of Florence, with its sunlit terraces and balmy tranquillity. She remembered the happy winter at the Villa Viviani eleven years earlier. She wanted to go there. Sam began making plans.

  There was no longer a central locale, really, to keep the family in America. Clemens had finally sold the Hartford house in May 1903. The buyer represented yet another of Sam Clemens’s remarkable interloopings with history. He was Richard M. Bissell, the president of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company and a Yale graduate. His son, Richard M. Bissell Jr., became a friend of Prescott Bush and an aide of Allen Dulles at the CIA; he i
s said to have managed plans for the next invasion of Cuba after the one in 1898, and the training of would-be Fidel Castro assassins between 1959 and 1961.52 The Bissell family lived there until 1917, then rented the house to a boys’ school for four years before unloading it to a developer who wanted to tear it down and use the property to expand his complex, known as Mark Twain Apartments. The Friends of Hartford prevented this by buying the house in 1927; its first floor later became the Mark Twain Branch of the Hartford Public Library; then the house was partitioned for and rented as private apartments through the 1960s. In 1963 it was designated a National Historic Landmark, and the long restoration of its original furnishings and appearance began. It now stands as a central tourist attraction in Hartford.

  Clemens traveled to New York in late September to make arrangements for an October sailing. From the Grosvenor Hotel he sent his wife a tender, reflective letter, apparently unprompted by anything in particular, that addressed their mutual understanding of the onrushing inevitability.

  Dear, dear sweetheart, I have been thinking & examining, & searching & analyzing, for many days, & am vexed to find that I more believe in the immortality of the soul than misbelieve in it.53

  Surpassingly tender and compassionate, it was almost certainly a white lie. “One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul,” he’d scrawled in his notebook not long before this, “is that myriads have believed in it. They also believed the world was flat.”54 A truer statement of his feelings probably lay in lines that he had written to her thirty-four years earlier, during his courtship days, from Hartford: “Livy, you are so interwoven with the very fibres of my being that if I were to lose you it seems to me that to lose memory & reason at the same time would be a blessing to me.”55