Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  Clemens was detoured from his grand plan, however, and went to work as an apprentice steamboat pilot, eventually getting his license. It was a job he loved. The stint ended with the advent of the Civil War, and it had been marked by tragedy. Clemens had convinced his younger brother Henry to join him in steamboat work, and Henry died in 1858 when the steamboat he was working on exploded. Clemens never forgave himself for his brother’s death. Adding to his horror and guilt, he’d had a dream, not long before Henry died, in which he saw his brother lying in a metal casket.

  In the summer of 1861, at his brother Orion’s insistence, Clemens had headed west by stagecoach, hoping to strike it rich in Nevada’s silver rush. He failed as a prospector. A job as a mill laborer didn’t work out, either. One day Clemens asked his boss for a raise, naming the figure of $400,000 a month in his request. He was promptly fired.

  His next move brought better luck, if modest pay: he was hired as a reporter, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, by the Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada. Well liked and clearly talented, Clemens soon upped his wages to six dollars a day. “Everybody knows me,” he boasted in a letter to his mother, “& I fare like a prince wherever I go, be it on this side of the mountains or the other. And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory.”

  “Mark Twain” made his debut on February 3, 1863, launched in an Enterprise column with the line, “I feel very much as if I had just awakened out of a long sleep.” It was signed, “Yours, dreamily, Mark Twain.” Two years later, while living in San Francisco, Twain became an official success: his short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the Saturday Press in New York. It was reprinted all over the country (later retitled as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”) and won him nationwide acclaim. “The foremost among the merry gentlemen of the California press, as far as we have been able to judge,” wrote one New York critic, “is one who signs himself ‘Mark Twain.’ He is, we believe, quite a young man, and has not written a great deal. Perhaps, if he will husband his resources and not kill with overwork the mental goose that has given us these golden eggs, he may one day rank among the brightest of our wits.”

  It was obvious from the start, even in his slightest pieces, that down to his marrow Twain was a writer: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning,” he once noted.

  As Clemens’s career as a newspaper reporter took off, he used his Twain pseudonym irregularly, but eventually it supplanted his real name. He slipped into Twain as if into an elegant new pair of shoes. Some of his friends began calling him “Mark,” and his letters home were signed that way, too. As Twain’s biographer Ron Powers has noted, even early correspondence displayed the young man’s knack for embellishment: “His indifference to the boundary between fact and fantasy became a hallmark of his literature, and later, of his consciousness.” At the age of twenty-eight, the transformation was complete: Clemens was a buried man. The sobriquet stuck, and everything published subsequently would appear under this alter ego. “Mark Twain” gave Clemens a kind of solid self-confidence he had never known as a boy. At one point he even joked that an “independent Double” was going around causing the kind of mischief that Sam Clemens wouldn’t dream of attempting: “It gets intoxicated—I do not. It steals horses—I do not. It imposes on theatre managers—I never do. It lies—I never do.” He was a restless lover of reinvention, and his new name allowed him to step into a role that he had conjured, and that he alone controlled.

  When his book The Innocents Abroad was published in 1869, it was an instant hit. But his 1867 story collection, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, had been a huge flop, and Twain said he hoped that every remaining copy would be burned. Even so, his public lectures had already made him a much-adored entertainer, with packed houses, and audiences hanging on his every word and rewarding his droll performances with roaring applause and standing ovations. (Powers has described Twain as “the nation’s first rock star.”) He charmed everyone he met. For the most part, he was able to repress his darker side and the grudges he held against those perceived to be his enemies. Yet he was gripped by bouts of depression and suicidal impulses, and often craved public validation as a means of steadying himself again. Periods of idleness threatened his equilibrium. Even in good times, though, he could be unpredictable, acting like a petulant prima donna: yelling at hotel employees in cities he visited; canceling lectures at the last minute; smashing a window shutter with his fists over a scheduling glitch; angrily throwing his shirts out a window.

  He became a husband at thirty-five, marrying Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Elmira, New York. Her skeptical father asked his future son-in-law for references, one of whom reported, “I would rather bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow.” However difficult Clemens could be (which was very), and however frequent his absences from home, he and his wife were utterly devoted to each other until her death left him a widower.

  The couple met on New Year’s Eve 1867, through her family, and spent the evening in Manhattan attending a reading by Charles Dickens. Their courtship lasted seventeen months. Marrying into money left Clemens conflicted—after all, he had humble beginnings and claimed to hate the rich. (He would mock the nation’s culture of materialism and greed in 1874’s The Gilded Age.) Yet Mark Twain had boundless ambition and extravagant tastes. It seems fair to assume that even as he commissioned the ostentatious Gothic Revival mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, where he would settle with Olivia (known as Livy), some part of him must have burned with self-loathing. Louis Comfort Tiffany and Company designed part of the interior, which included custom stained-glass windows, polished marble floors, ornate brasswork, a carved oak Venetian bed, a mantelpiece from a Scottish castle, a billiards room, and modern conveniences such as central heating and flush toilets. In all, there were nineteen rooms and seven bathrooms. Although Twain would experience his greatest literary success while in that residence, it was also where he would experience ravaging losses. (Eventually, beset by financial ruin, he would be forced to sell the house.) In Buffalo, New York, he and Livy had already suffered the death of their first child, who died of diphtheria at eighteen months old. In Hartford, where the couple would spend the next twenty years, they raised three girls—Susy, Clara, and Jean—who venerated and feared their mercurial father. Harriet Beecher Stowe was the family’s next-door neighbor, though she lived in a much more modest brick house.

  Twain’s admirers included Charles Darwin, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and George Bernard Shaw. Twain would rarely admit to reading other writers, but he liked Shaw, whom he praised as “quite destitute of affectation.” Shaw wrote a letter to Twain in 1907, mentioning that he’d met William Morris, an “incurable Huckfinomaniac.” He addressed the letter to “My dear Mark Twain—not to say Dr Clemens (though I have always regarded Clemens as mere raw material—might have been your brother or your uncle).” A year later, Thomas Edison remarked, “An American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.” Nietzsche recommended The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to friends.

  At the height of his fame, Twain was bombarded by fan mail, including manuscripts from aspiring writers who wanted his opinion of their work and assistance with publication. Letters poured in from around the world, some addressed simply to “Mark Twain, Hartford, Connecticut.” Some asked for money. He filed away many letters under the heading, “From an ass.” He wrote to his mother, “I have a badgered, harassed feeling, a good part of the time.” Yet he was paradoxical as ever: even though he often checked into hotels incognito, using a variety of aliases including “S. L. Samuel” and “C. L. Samuel,” he was always thrilled to be recognized. Sometimes he wou
ld actually strut up and down busy streets in Manhattan, just as church services were ending and crowds were pouring out, so that he could bask in the sight of heads excitedly turning toward the great celebrity in their midst.

  Once Twain was asked why the fame of many other humorists had been so ephemeral. “Because they were merely humorists,” he replied. “Humorists of the ‘mere’ sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration. Often it is merely an odd trick of speech or of spelling . . . and presently the fashion passes and the fame along with it.” Restless and ambitious all his life, Twain knew that to secure his legacy, his output had to transcend “mere” comic sketches and journalism. His reputation would ultimately rest on two masterpieces: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876 when the author was forty-one; and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published nearly a decade later. Ernest Hemingway claimed that all of American literature was derived from from the latter novel, calling it “the best book we’ve ever had. There was nothing before. There’s been nothing as good since.” The playwright Arthur Miller once said of Twain in an interview, “He wrote as though there had been no literature before him.”

  Twain, a popular writer, was also one hell of a trickster. As the scholar John Seelye notes of Tom Sawyer in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Huckleberry Finn, Tom is “a prankster from the start,” not unlike the author himself, who adored practical jokes. “Where Huck Finn seems to be a projection of something mysterious deeply hidden in Mark Twain’s psyche, Tom Sawyer is clearly an active agent of the author,” Seelye writes.

  Swindler, con man, histrionic showman: Tom represents, at least on the surface, the essential Twain. Huck goes deeper; he evinces both halves of the author’s troubled psyche (Clemens/Twain), with all its contradictions, anxieties, and follies. But as Twain grew older, his private, Clemensesque qualities floated disruptively to the surface, threatening the impish, rambunctious public man he had become. The blithe, witty charmer was far more mercurial than his admiring public ever knew, and struggled (often painfully) to manage the two worlds and selves he inhabited. When he was drunk, however, his carefully constructed mask came undone. As one friend observed, “He was always afraid of dying in the poorhouse. The burden of his woe was that he would grow old and lose the power of interesting an audience, and become unable to write, and then what would become of him?” The more Clemens drank, the worse it got; there was no Twainian joviality or playful wit to accompany his alcohol consumption. Instead, his friend said, he would “grow more and more gloomy and blue until he fairly wept at the misery of his own future.”

  In April 1894, the world’s most famous author declared bankruptcy. The wealth he’d amassed could not match his debts, and he’d had to embark upon a grueling round-the-world tour to repay creditors and become solvent again. Like his late father, Clemens had an almost manic relationship to money and had invested his considerable earnings dreadfully. He’d backed failed gadgets and fraudulent schemes, founded a money-losing publishing company, and patented a few unsuccessful inventions of his own, at great expense. Among them was an adjustable elastic waist strap for men that could be buttoned onto the back of a pair of trousers to keep them from falling down.

  Foolishly, even though he was among the first Americans to have a telephone at home, he had declined to invest in Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. He wasn’t convinced that the telephone had much of a future. Twain himself acknowledged his gift for squandering his fortune. “Now here is a queer fact,” he wrote, “I am one of the wealthiest grandees in America—one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact—and yet if you asked me to lend you a couple of dollars I should have to ask you to take my note instead.” Even he must have appreciated the perverse irony of having succumbed to the Gilded Age—a lifestyle that he so despised.

  Having brought his family to the brink of ruin, Clemens would endure greater tragedies in subsequent years. He lost several friends and relatives. His daughter Susy died in 1896; Livy died of heart failure in 1904, at the age of fifty-eight; and his daughter Jean died in 1909.

  These catastrophic events left him lonely, bitter, brokenhearted, vindictive, and paranoid. Sam Clemens depended on Mark Twain to keep going, but the gentle, irreverent humor in his work gave way to a more cynical, dyspeptic edge. (He took to calling his famous white uniform his “don’tcareadam suits,” and boasted that they made him the most conspicuous man alive.) Although he’d always abhorred critics, he had previously displayed tolerance toward what he regarded as a necessary evil. “I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value,” he wrote. “However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.” Now, however, he was inclined to be far more bilious. If it’s true that Clemens and Twain were polar opposites within the same deeply divided man, then it seems there was little actual Twain left in him at the end.

  His insecurity often overwhelmed him, and his corrosive obsessions—success, wealth, fame—revealed a volatility that baffled even him. The “periodical and sudden changes of mood in me,” he once wrote, “from deep melancholy to half-insane tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life.” He loved playing billiards, which provided yet another excuse for his explosive temper to manifest itself. “When his game was going badly,” Albert Bigelow Paine wrote in his 1912 Twain biography, “his language sometimes became violent and he was likely to become critical of his opponent. Then reaction would set in, and remorse.”

  Today, Mark Twain is still viewed as the mythic “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” as Ron Powers has described him. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized.” Yet a more comprehensive version of Twain emerged in 2010 with the publication of the first installment of his rambling three-volume autobiography. It presents Twain raw and uncensored; he instructed that his unedited recollections be withheld from the public for one hundred years after his death. (As ever, what a brilliant marketing ploy.) He dictated most of the 500,000-word manuscript to a stenographer during the four years before he died, then postponed its publication for a century to preserve his genial reputation and legacy. The strategy worked. Among towering American literary figures, Twain remains essentially unknowable. As one contemporary journalist aptly put it, he’s “still a mystery, a riddle wrapped in an enigma shrouded in a white suit.”

  The biographer Justin Kaplan—whose 1966 account of Twain won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—has spoken of the author’s dark moods, which are more fully revealed in the new Autobiography. The private Twain evinced a side filled with “rage and resentment . . . where he wants to get even, to settle scores with people whom he really despises. He loved invective,” Kaplan noted in an interview. For instance, after having stayed in 1904 with his family in Florence, Italy (where Livy would die), Twain unleashed his fury against the rather unaccommodating countess who owned the villa they’d rented. He characterized her as “excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward.” A lawyer and fellow investor who betrayed him was attacked as having “the pride of a tramp, the courage of a rabbit, the moral sense of a wax figure, the sex of a tapeworm.” And Twain’s secretary and household manager, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, with whom he had a close, tempestuous relationship for the last several years of his life, was in the end an object of obsessive condemnation. In a letter to his daughter Clara, Twain fumed that Isabel was “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction & always getting disappointed, poor child.”

  In the years before his death in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910, Twain was at his most miserable, full of malice and sadness and vitriol. His health
was terrible, too, no doubt owing to his having smoked forty cigars a day for most of his life. Toward the end, he spent much of his time in bed.

  Facing his own mortality, he hoped for reconciliation. “I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead,” he once wrote, “and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.” Not long before drifting off to sleep for the last time, he mumbled something about “dual personalities.” He died in his carved oak bed, with his daughter Clara at his side. Two days later, a letter appeared in the New York Times.

  To the Editor:

  I wish to draw your attention to a peculiar coincidence.

  Mark Twain, born Nov. 30, 1835.

  Last perihelion of Halley’s comet, Nov. 10, 1835.

  Mark Twain died, April 21, 1910.

  Perihelion of Halley’s comet, April 20, 1910.