Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  His white lie worked. “I am truly thankful that you ‘more believe in the immortality of the soul…’ ” Livy wrote back. “An immortality already begun seems to make it worthwhile to train oneself. However you don’t need to ‘bother about’ it, ‘it’ will ‘take care of itself.’ ”56 She added a request for some Buffalo Lythia water.

  The Clemenses boarded the steamship Princess Irene on October 24 and departed New York for Genoa. In the entourage besides the parents and their two daughters were Katy Leary, a nurse named Margaret Sherry, Isabel Lyon, and Miss Lyon’s mother. What awaited them was a grotesque travesty of Livy’s fond Florence fantasy. Their residence, which Sam had rented without firsthand knowledge, was a fifty-room Renaissance palace called the Villa di Quarto. The owner, and their on-premises landlady, was a sour Italian-American woman, the Countess Massiglia. Livy’s condition was not the countess’s problem; she seemed spitefully interested in creating obstacles for her tenants: shutting off all water inside the building, terminating the telephone service, insisting that the gates be kept locked despite the problems this presented for Livy’s doctors. Sam lost no time hurling lawsuits at her. Even the weather was inhospitable—a chilly, overcast winter soon set in, deepening the cheerless mood. The new year, 1904, arrived hung in black crepe: word arrived by cablegram in January that Mollie Clemens had died at Keokuk at the age of sixty-nine, having survived Orion by six years.

  Livy’s pulse fibrillated in late February, “and there was a collapse.”57 In early April, she struggled for breath for more than an hour. “Clara was in there. Jean and I listened at the door.”58 Livy’s Italian doctors continued to enforce limitations on Sam’s bedside visits: two minutes a day. The couple continued to suffer for it. Livy and Sam, who years ago had called out the pain of separation from each other by letters across continents and oceans, endured the exquisite torture of separation by a wall. Sometimes Sam broke the rules, slipping unnoticed into the room. “She’d put her arms around his neck the first thing,” Katy Leary recalled, “and he’d hold her soft, and give her one of them tender kisses…It was a love that was more than earthly love—it was heavenly.”59

  The end came at a little after 9 p.m. on Sunday, June 5, 1904. Livy had been sitting propped against the pillows on her bed, supported by Katy Leary, and talking, and then she was gone. She was fifty-seven. Her final illness had lasted twenty-two months.

  Sam described it to his oldest friend the next day.

  Last night at 9:20 I entered Mrs. Clemens’s room to say the usual good-night—& she was dead! tho’ no one knew it. She had been cheerfully talking, a moment before. She was sitting up in bed—she had not lain down for months—& Katie & the nurse were supporting her…I bent over her & looked in her face, & I think I spoke—I was surprised and troubled that she did not notice me. Then we understood, & our hearts broke…

  …I am tired & old; I wish I were with Livy.60

  The Clemens party sailed from Naples to America on June 28. Livy’s funeral was on July 14 in Elmira, where she was buried in the family plot. Her husband would be required to linger for six more years, as the Great Dark gathered, and Halley’s Comet rounded in its orbit toward Earth again.

  * Henry Rogers did not join the public debate, but he had made his general views clear to Clemens in a letter written in 1896, during McKinley’s first presidential campaign, which he supported: “The truth is that politicians have been running the country for a good many years, and it is quite time that some business sense should be exercised, and I have the feeling that we are on the right track” (MTHHR, p. 248).

  Chapter the Last

  Mark Twain ended his Adventures of Tom Sawyer with a

  CONCLUSION

  So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man…

  Soon endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a man, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of an old man. Which is to say, the history of every old man. Which is to say, a history that depends for much of its nourishment to readers on the extract of pathos.

  He aged, and he died. Death and loss and the embarrassment of his own failing body haunted his final years, and sometimes “despair,” a word that has often been draped over his life after Livy like a shroud. As with many old men of means, he was prey to loneliness and deep brooding, and to conspiracies among the people he’d drawn close to him, and he was witness to the sordid struggles among these same people for the rights to his soul. Unlike most old men, he was the most conspicuous person on the planet1—his own estimation, but likely true—and he enjoyed the planet’s ongoing adulation of him. Like most old men with a skill, he employed what he had left of it; he wrote a lot, and some of it was pretty good.

  After Elmira, Clemens and his daughters took a summer residence at Tyringham, in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Sam made several trips to New York, hunting for a winter residence. His temporary residence in the city was a suite of rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel, in an area that Henry James had made famous with his novel, Washington Square. He ran into Henry James at Deal Beach, New Jersey, where Clemens was visiting George Harvey in late August.2 Clara, undone since her mother’s death, had briefly entered a sanitarium. Now, disoriented in Massachusetts, she left Jean with Isabel Lyon and came to the city, along with Katy Leary, and stayed at the home of a friend.

  Jean had suffered a seizure in Italy after Livy’s death, but seemed to be recovering. On July 31, she went on a moonlight horseback ride with some friends near the village of Lee, about five miles down the road from Tyringham. A trolley* frightened her horse, which bolted into its path and was killed. Jean, knocked unconscious, suffered bruises on most of her body. “Jean is at the summer home in Berkshire Hills, crippled,” Sam noted in his journal.3 While he was recovering from this shock, his sister Pamela died on August 31 at Greenwich, Connecticut, two weeks short of her seventy-seventh birthday.

  In September 1904, Clemens rented a rather Gothic house at 21 Fifth Avenue, three blocks north of Washington Square. Clara helped decorate the rooms, choosing lavender wallpaper for her music room,4 and the family—what remained of it—took possession in November. Jean’s accident had reactivated Clara’s mounting hysteria, and it all boiled over late that month. She checked into a private sanitarium in New York; and, from there, to another in Connecticut. She was estranged from her father for nearly a year. (“Never well since June 5,” Clemens wrote of her.)5 Clemens, bedridden by bronchitis, turned back to his writing. He produced “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” a sarcasm occasioned by a bloody reprisal of Russian workers, in January 1905, and then turned to King Leopold’s Soliloquy and “The War Prayer.”

  It was in early 1906, after his seventieth birthday, that Mark Twain began to organize what he called his “Aquarium,” a brainstorm that gave him a good deal of posthumous grief, and a little heat from Clara in his lifetime. The club consisted of young—very young—girls, whom he called his “Angelfish,” after a species he had admired in Bermuda. The girls, whom he encountered in various social situations, ranged in age roughly from ten to fourteen, and by the time of his death, he’d “collected” more than a dozen of them. He invited them to visit him at his house, along with their mothers; he corresponded with them—more than three hundred letters were exchanged—and eventually formalized the club with wholesome rules for membership. When Clara returned from Europe in September 1908 and discovered the club’s existence, she sensed scandal in the offing and made her father sharply curtail his activities. Despite a number of pokes in the ribs by Mark Twain chroniclers over the years—if you thought he was kinky in Virginia City, wait’ll you hear about Bermuda!—the loneliness and the yearning for the lost Man-in-the-Moon days with his own little girls seems self-evidently to have been his impetus. Karen Lystra put to rest most of the heavy breathing with her 2004 study, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s
Final Years. (The “intimacy” alluded to is located elsewhere.)

  IN MAY 1906 Mark Twain returned to the dark, profound themes that had gnawed at him over the past quarter-century, themes that he had thrashed out in a dozen papers, stories, essays, and fragments: the themes of God’s cynical indifference to Man; of Man’s own deterministic corruption; and the dual, dreamlike nature of identity. “What Is Man?” published anonymously in 1906, attempts to consummate all these scattered efforts in a Socratic-like dialogue between an Old Man (representing the fatalistic view) and a Young Man (representing doomed idealism). Flawed as philosophy, the work succeeds as the testament of a man hungry for reconciliation with the perpetual Messiah, and oversated with the knowledge that he will never return to Paradise. He launched into the feverish “3,000 Years Among the Microbes,” a novel fragment written from the viewpoint of a cholera microbe. His Adam-and-Eve explorations continued with “A Humane Word from Satan,” in April; “A Monument to Adam,” in July; and Eve’s Diary in December. Eve’s Diary was published in book form in June 1906. A fond tribute to William Dean Howells appeared in July. And then there was the monumental discharge of his final self-reckoning: the oracular mass of dictated verbiage that overwhelmed three successive editors, and remains to this day, nearly a hundred years hence, formally insoluble to orderly minds, a Vandal of the genre. This was the autobiography.

  The Autobiography of course is the essence of Mark Twain’s oeuvre; extract it and you are left with a couple of pamphlets and a story about a saint. (Joan of Arc would be canonized in 1920.) Having fictionalized the facts of his life and factualized its fictions for forty-odd years, he now addressed himself to setting the record straight, in the Twainian sense of “straight.” Howells’s remark that “he was not enslaved to consecutiveness”6 never had better evidence. Nor has any Lacanian notion that truth is impossible to “say,” yet through this very impossibility it holds on to the real.

  The activating agent to this outpouring (and the first person to misuse it) was Albert Bigelow Paine. Paine insinuated his way into Mark Twain’s life by stages. The photographic-supplies salesman turned children’s book writer turned magazine editor turned biographer was forty when he first met the author at a dinner in New York in 1901. He was starstruck, having read Mark Twain as a boy; and he was a little main chance–struck as well. He reintroduced himself at the seventieth-birthday gala thrown for the author by Colonel Harvey at Delmonico’s on December 5, 1905; he dropped the name “Joan of Arc” to get Mark Twain’s attention. (Paine would publish his own Joan of Arc biography in 1925.)

  In January, on hearing from a mutual friend that Mark Twain had liked his biography of Thomas Nast, published in 1904, Paine obtained permission to call at 21 Fifth Avenue. He found the great man lounging in bed. Bed was where Clemens had spent a great deal of time for some years now, but this bed was special: the great bed of carved oak that he and Livy had bought in Venice, and installed in the Hartford house, the bed where they reclined with their pillows at its foot so they could admire the carved cherubs on the posts at its head. Now, after nearly fifteen years, Samuel Clemens had it back again, and he virtually lived in it, the sole tenant. Paine entered the room to find him propped on some pillows, surrounded by cigars and letters and manuscripts. After some small talk, Paine got to the purpose of his visit: he held out the hope that he might someday undertake a book about Mark Twain.

  “When would you like to begin?”7 Clemens asked him. Paine never forgot the moment: he’d caught his reflection in a mirror behind the oaken bed just as Clemens posed the question, and it felt to him as though he were having a dream. He regathered his wits enough to be back a few days later with a stenographer. Thus began the 242 dictating sessions extending through April 1909. Combined with some meandering thoughts he’d spoken to Isabel Lyon in Florence during Livy’s illness, the transcripts encompassed 2,500 pages.8 No one has better encapsulated the author’s methodology than Mark Twain himself. It is a design that would have caused the Transcendentalists to pull their hair, but one that would resonate with Sigmund Freud, the Cubists, and other cognitive reshapers of the new century.

  Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.9

  Colonel Harvey, who’d read and liked some excerpts that Mark Twain sent him, began running installments of these transcripts in the North American Review on September 7, 1906. They totaled twenty-five through December 1907, but represented only a small fraction of the whole. (Harvey’s offer of thirty thousand dollars accelerated Mark Twain’s “hundred-years-hence” timetable a little bit.)

  Paine harvested his exclusive access to this material in two main ways. One was for the agreed-on purpose, his 1,587-page, three-volume Mark Twain: A Biography, which he brought out in 1912. The other was a disheveled two-volume edition of the Autobiography in 1924, using a fraction of the dictations and throwing in an assortment of notes and fragments dating from 1870. Typically, he left out material that he thought would shock the public or tarnish his subject’s image. Bernard De Voto’s Mark Twain in Eruption in 1940 published large sections of the dictations passed over by Paine. De Voto’s organization was superior to his predecessor’s, but his choices were also protective, as he tried to save his subject from his own emotional outbursts, and suppressed the feud with Bret Harte. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider and published in 1959—obviously with vetting by Clara Clemens Samossoud—is also selective and arbitrary; but it is the least bowdlerized and the most chronologically coherent of the three—in that it rearranged Mark Twain’s own impressionistic approach.

  Paine attached himself to Mark Twain. From January 1906 on, he was a fixture in the Clemens household. He exploited the enthusiasm that he shared with Sam for billiards, and hung in gamely for the endless sessions that often continued far into the night. The reward was constant access to his subject. During one of these, Clemens confessed a disturbing dream that echoed an obsession he’d shared with Charles Warren Stoddard in London back in 1873: “There is never a month passes…that I do not dream of being in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living…[U]sually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is Selma bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night.”10

  As his involvement deepened, Paine expanded his purview. In 1906, he talked Clemens into buying a 248-acre tract in Redding, Connecticut, near land that Paine had purchased for his own retirement house. Clemens engaged John Mead Howells, the son of his old friend and now a leading architect (his firm later designed the Chicago Tribune building) to build him a two-story Italianate villa with eighteen rooms. He financed the house partly with the thirty thousand that Colonel Harvey paid him for the autobiographical chapters, though it ended up costing twice that amount. Clemens called it “Stormfield,” after the fictional ship’s captain modeled on Edgar Wakeman, who’d raced comets through space for years in Mark Twain’s imagination. Wakeman would finally emerge onto the page in the short book, Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, serialized and later published by Harper’s beginning in 1909. Clemens moved into the house sight unseen in June 1908, and loved it.

  Paine, meanwhile, was waging an internal power struggle with the fiercely protective, and perhaps emotionally involved, Isabel Lyon for possession of Mark Twain’s legacy. Lyon gained an ally with the arrival of a young British entrepreneur named Ralph Ashcroft, who’d met Clemens as a treasurer of the Plasmon company in 1903, and who eventually became his business manager. Ashcroft advised Clemens to register “Mark Twain” as a trademark for copyright protection purposes, and in 1908 helped form the Mark Twain Company. Ashcroft and Lyon, who mar
ried in 1909, gained power-of-attorney rights from Clemens, but after some ugly behind-the-scenes feuding with Clara Clemens, Sam turned them both out of the household and canceled their legal authority. While all this was going on, Paine formed an alliance of his own with Clara (nonromantic; he was a Victorian husband and father) that led to his appointment as Mark Twain’s literary executor, a position that he nearly redefined as “literary executioner”: with the approval of Clara, whose acute observations of her father had congealed into sentimental protectiveness, Paine did his best to gentrify the Vandal’s posthumous image. He edited passages from Mark Twain manuscripts and added some of his own without scholarly accounting. He published deeply abridged volumes of Mark Twain letters. His biography, while generally accurate and unimpeachably sourced, is ultimately a fawning deification.

  MARK TWAIN’S public life continued on its grand scale. He dined at the White House in 1905 with Theodore Roosevelt, all differences forgiven, or ignored. In 1906, he gave memorable testimony before a congressional committee on copyrighting, clad in one of the white serge suits he was now wearing in public almost exclusively. In 1907 he did not receive the Nobel Prize for literature—Rudyard Kipling did—but in June of that year he traveled to England for a tribute that meant even more to him, an honorary degree from Oxford University. He cherished the red Oxford gown he was given, and wore it whenever he felt like it, which was often. He bound up an old wound, sort of, in February 1908, agreeing to speak at a dinner in honor of Whitelaw Reid, now ambassador to Great Britain. He offered a mild, amiable joke—“I knew John Hay when I had no white hairs in my head and more hair than Reid has now”11—and allowed as how Reid and Hay (dead two years) “have regulated troubles of nations and conferred peace upon mankind.” (He hastened to add that he himself was the “principal moral force” in those international movements.)12