To keep him company until that midnight came he hired the poet, essayist, and rolling stone from San Francisco, Charles Warren Stoddard. They breakfasted on chops at twelve-thirty and went for long walks in the afternoon. Evenings before dinner Clemens sat at the piano and sang the Negro jubilees he had first heard as a boy, which never failed to move him. At eight o’clock he appeared on stage, moving close to the footlights to warm his toes and, in Stoddard’s description, “rubbing his hands in the manner of Lady Macbeth and bowing repeatedly”—all part of the lounging informality, the mock-solemn manner, the quiet, droning monotone which captivated English critics and audiences. After the lecture the two Americans returned to their rooms to smoke, sit by the fire, drink whiskey cocktails, and talk until two or three in the morning about the trial of the Tichborne Claimant (which so fascinated Clemens that he put Stoddard to work pasting up newspaper clippings which eventually filled six large scrapbooks), about shared days in San Francisco, and about Hannibal and the river. “I could have written his biography at the end of the season,” Stoddard said.
On his last night in Liverpool, despite the closeness of the long-awaited reunion with Livy, and despite his triumphs as lecturer and literary celebrity in England, Clemens was far from elated. As he talked to Stoddard his voice was lower than usual, pitched in a minor key. “He sank into a sea of forebodings,” as if he felt that in returning to his own country he was leaving the best of times behind him. Looking at Stoddard from beneath his plumed eyebrows, and in a solemn voice, he recited, “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.”
CHAPTER NINE
“Busiest white man in America”
I
ON a bright winter day in March 1874, Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich and his wife, and James R. Osgood started out on a visit to Nook Farm. They took the morning train from Boston to Springfield. In a characteristic gesture of Nook Farm hospitality, Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner, their hosts, met them there and rode with them the rest of the way to Hartford. At the Hartford station they found waiting the Clemens carriage, driven by a liveried coachman and the Clemens butler as footman. This equipage was one of many evidences of an almost magical prosperity that these visitors, accustomed to a more frugal tradition, observed with wonderment during two days and nights at Nook Farm. They drove past the site on Farmington Avenue where Clemens’ new house was going up. At dinner at the Warners’ the first night the heavy scent of flowers in the conservatory and the plash of a fountain surrounded by lilies seemed to transform winter into summer.
While the Aldriches were dressing for breakfast the next morning Clemens rapped on their door and, in a voice lacking in its usual gentleness, said, “Aldrich, come out. I want to speak to you.” Lilian Aldrich, wrapped in her kimono, put her ear to the door and listened in horror as Clemens complained about the noises they had made in their bedroom. “Our bedroom is directly under yours, and poor Livy and her headache …” (Livy’s delicate health was well known; she was also entering her sixth month of pregnancy.) “Do try to move more quietly, though Livy would rather suffer than have you give up your game on her account.” Battered and subdued, the Aldrich couple crept timidly downstairs, where they found Livy pouring coffee from a silver urn. “I have no headache,” she explained with some puzzlement after they had apologized. And as for those disgraceful noises, “We have not heard a sound. If you had shouted we should not have known it, for our rooms are in another wing of the house.” “Come to your breakfast, Aldrich, and don’t talk all day,” Clemens broke in, and then, in an equally bewildering turnabout, he pronounced grace, having already, to his satisfaction, begun to pay back Mrs. Aldrich for that evening in Boston. Later on, in December, as part of his implicit warfare of egos with Aldrich himself, he answered Aldrich’s request for a photograph by sending him one each day for two weeks; on New Year’s Day Aldrich’s mail included twenty photographs of Mark Twain in separate envelopes.
Their last night in Hartford, the Aldriches and the other Boston visitors saw another aspect of their extraordinary host. After dinner, with a log fire blazing in the red-curtained drawing room, he sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Golden Slippers,” “Go Down, Moses” (he sang them in Florence, thirty years later, the night Livy died). He swayed gently as he stood; his voice was low and soft, a whisper of wind in the trees; his eyes were closed, and he smiled strangely. Thorough the sadness and exultation of these songs which he had known since boyhood, he transported himself far from the circle of polite letters and from the New England snowscape, and he found it difficult to come back. He wanted to go for a walk. They had run out of ale, and though he could call on the servants to run errands for him, he put on his winter costume of sealskin cap and sealskin coat and low evening slippers and left for the village. (In present-day Hartford he could have bought his ale by walking a few blocks down Farmington Avenue to the Mark Twain Package Store.) He tried the whiskey at the saloon where he bought the ale. He came back excited, hilarious, distinctly overheated. His feet were wet, and somewhere along the route he had thrown away his sealskin cap. This time the butler was sent out to look for it, while Clemens changed from his evening slippers into something considerably odder for Hartford, white cowskin moccasins with the hair on the outside. And, in a crowning act of confident alienation from his guests, he twisted his body into the likeness of a crippled uncle or a Negro at a hoedown and danced strange dances for them. Howells always remembered that evening, the joy and disoriented surprise of the guests, Livy’s first reaction of dismay and “her low, despairing cry of, ‘Oh, Youth!’”
“The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston authors,” Howells said, “was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription publishing.” He described for them the army of agents that was busy selling his books by the thousands all over the country. “It sells right along just like the Bible,” he said about The Innocents Abroad, and he lectured them on the folly of publishing books the way Boston was accustomed to publishing books: “Anything but subscription publication is printing for private circulation.” He tried to talk them into a three-man collaboration that would earn them all, he said, a fortune in the subscription market. And in the weeks after, he kept up his barrage, offered to negotiate contracts for them with Elisha Bliss, urged them to buy and settle at Nook Farm. “You can do your work just as well here as in Cambridge, can’t you?” By the end of the visit Howells had been so infected by Clemens’ visions of opulence that he found it difficult to follow his usual thrifty practice of walking in order to save carfare.
II
“I am the busiest white man in America—and much the happiest,” Clemens had written to Mary Fairbanks two weeks before that visit; he told her that he was writing “two admirable books,” had finished one five-act play (which had only a single visible character on stage) and was planning another, and was also preparing “several volumes of my sketches” and writing new material for them. That summer he dramatized The Gilded Age and saw it successfully produced in New York. Within the next two years he finished Tom Sawyer and began Huckleberry Finn, became a regular contributor to the Atlantic, and published in the magazine a sevenpart series which was to be the heart of Life on the Mississippi. In 1875 he brought out a collection of sketches which included “The Jumping Frog” in English, French, and retranslated English, and in 1877 he made the first notes for The Prince and the Pauper. The exuberant variety of his energies and interests during the most productive years of his life seemed also to reflect his country and his times. He was humorist, novelist, short-story writer, social historian, dramatist, journalist, occasional lecturer and frequent dinner speaker, inventor, entrepreneur, all-night raconteur and billiard player, lavish host, devoted family man.
He was also, as his enterprises multiplied, more and more subject to fits of litigation. Within two months alone in 1874 he sued or thought of suing: a dramatist named Gilbert B. Densmore for putting on in San Francisco an unauthorized versi
on of The Gilded Age (Densmore, as it turned out, did him a service by proving the stage possibilities of the book); some “swindler” in Dubuque; and the New York Post because they said he had paid for a complimentary dinner in his own honor, and this was libel. His feeling that newspapers in general, and Reid’s Tribune in particular, passed up no opportunity to make him look like a fool was well on its way to becoming an obsession. “Everything goes wrong and I’m in a never-ending state of harassment,” he complained to Orion in May 1874, and although he said that everybody was getting a touch of his venom these days, it was Orion who was his main target. After informing Sam that Bliss had cheated him on Roughing It, Orion had come to an angry parting of the ways with his employer in March 1872. Orion and Mollie were back in Keokuk, trying to raise chickens on a farm Sam had bought for them. Instead of ideas for new inventions Orion was now getting from Sam angry sermons that Sam might just as well have addressed to himself. “You are aging and it is high time to give over dreaming and buckle down to the simplicities and the realities of life,” he scolded Orion, and he told him to live and buy cheaply, to “banish the American sham of ‘Keeping up appearances.’” “Nobody can dress as Mollie does and look like anything but a fool, on a chicken farm.” But, Sam concluded, there was no point to encouraging Orion in anything: as a writer he was getting worse and worse (all the same, Sam had told him to write his autobiography and to ghost-write a book for Captain Wakeman) ; as a lawyer he would probably exercise the judgment of a child of ten; and as a minister he would change his religion too fast to make sense to anybody.
The decisive pressure on Orion, who was nearly fifty, came from his seventy-one-year-old mother. Jane Clemens reminded him that an oath she had once extracted from Sam not to play cards or drink whiskey on the river had turned out to be the saving of Sam. Writing in a faltering hand from Fredonia at the end of 1873, she now demanded a solemn oath from Orion:
This oath is that you will not let one single word come from your mouth or even one thought come in your mind about an invention of any kind. My dear son promise this to your aged mother this may be my last request my dear son don’t make any excuse…. Sam give his whole attion to his book writing and managemen. But the secret with you is Orion is you work with your pen but your mind is not on it … your mind for years has been on nothing but the invention [his flying machine].
On the envelope Orion noted, “Mother wants me to swear against invention.” Years later, after Orion’s death, when the letter came into Sam’s hands, he too noted, “Orion’s mother urges Orion to swear off inventing and”—a final, interpolated irony—“devote his whole time to writing.” Orion complained that he was being bullied out of his flying machine. When he did give it up and accept his mother’s demands, even Sam was sad: “I grieve over the laying aside of the flying machine as if it were my own broken idol.”
Sam’s signature on the pledge would have been just as good as Orion’s. During the 18705 his entrepreneurial and other nonliterary activities took on an increasing pace, and, at the same time that he was encouraging Orion to buckle down to the simplicities, his own scale of living was committing him to expenditures which after a while he found “something almost ghastly.” Through Frank Fuller he became interested in a number of profitless enterprises. He passed up two opportunities, one to place $300,000 worth of railroad bonds in Hartford (Fuller sold them instead to a consortium of “bloody Britishers”), the other to buy up the patent on a modified scheme of penny postage which Fuller was certain “would take like wild fire.” But two vetoes were all Clemens was capable of. By 1877 Fuller had succeeded in getting him hopelessly involved with two inventions by an alcoholic bird of passage named Bowers: a “domestic still” for desalinating water and an improved steam generator for tugboats. Soon Clemens himself was supervising the work on a prototype machine at the Colt arms factory in Hartford. But something—a coil or a nipple or a crank—always went wrong, and Bowers went off on one lost weekend after another. Finally Bowers borrowed some money from his backers and disappeared, taking his schemes with him. But by this time, his principal victim remembered years later, “I had become an enthusiast on steam and I took some stock in a Hartford company which proposed to make and sell and revolutionize everything with a new kind of steam pulley. The steam pulley pulled thirty-two thousand dollars out of my pocket in sixteen months, then went to pieces, and I was alone in the world again, without an occupation.”
In Baltimore in April 1877 Clemens was to have a prevision of the world of machinery out of which would come the Paige typesetter’s eighteen thousand separate parts and the mechanisms with which the Connecticut Yankee destroyed feudal England. After being shown through Alexandroffsky, the semi-automated house of the millionaire railroad engineer Thomas De Kay Winans, Clemens rushed back to his room at Guy’s Hotel on Monument Square and, in order to preserve every detail of “this wondrous establishment,” wrote a thirty-two-page account for Livy. He described a dining table that revolved on a pivot; a glassed-in porch, seating two hundred people, that was heated by self-regulating machinery and lighted by one hundred gas lamps; andirons, invented by Winans, which prevented logs from rolling forward; a water-driven device for regulating heat and humidity in the house; a basement wilderness of water tanks, pipes, chains, weights, pulleys, springs, knobs, cranks, and trapdoors. The main saloon, where Captain Nemo of the Nautilus would have felt at home, contained two pipe organs run by water power; in another room, which was sixty feet high, Winans was building a really big organ with the aid of a machine he himself had invented to compute the relationship of length, pitch, and aperture in each of the mammoth organ pipes. In the quietest corner of his workshop Winans raised brook trout from eggs in a series of glass funnels. The central marvel was Winans’ bedroom, which housed workbenches, tools, a steam engine, pipes and fittings, a scale that showed weight on a dial, and all sorts of “automatic deviltries.” Above the owner’s bed, hanging thick about his nose when he lay on his back, was a curtain of strings by which he regulated heat, humidity, ventilation, and various signaling devices. After a long hard day, when most of the marvelous machinery in the house was stilled and even the steam engine in the bedroom had gasped to a stop, Winans pulled a string which released a board on his door and uncovered the word “ASLEEP.”
III
In April 1874, after an alarm of miscarriage, Clemens took Livy to Elmira, where, on June 8, in the Langdon house on Main Street, she gave birth to their second daughter, Clara, the only one of their children who would survive him. Soon afterward they moved to Quarry Farm, high above the city, and he settled down to a summer of work. A hundred yards from the farmhouse, his sister-in-law Susan Crane had built a study for him, a single octagonal room with six large windows, a little one cut through the chimney above the mantelpiece, and a wide door facing the valley. The furniture consisted of a sofa, a round writing table, and a couple of chairs. On hot days, he said, “I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of hurricanes, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of.” Each morning after a breakfast of steak and coffee he climbed up the hillside to his study, and, without stopping for lunch, he worked steadily through the day until dinnertime. Like a pilothouse, which it resembled, the octagonal room offered a commanding view; he could see city and countryside, storms sweeping down the valley, flashes of lightning over the distant blue hills. Everything lay below the study and beyond. The writer Mark Twain worked in the same solitary, untouchable splendor as Sam Clemens the pilot. He was isolated—from Livy, children, servants, the entire domestic context. He was “remote from all noises.”
Four days after his marriage, with Livy asleep upstairs in their bedroom, he had felt “the old days” trooping by “in their old glory again,” had remembered incident after incident of his schooldays in Hannibal. Now, during the summer of 1874 the fountains of his great deep were broken up again (his favored metaphor for the unlocking of memory), he rained reminiscen
ces again, he translated nostalgia into fiction and Hannibal into “the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg” (which is nonetheless, literally and in the glory he assigns to it, heaven), and he began Tom Sawyer.
He began it with no clear idea of where it would end. On the first page of his manuscript, at some point during the summer, he wrote an outline which reflected a plan to carry the story far past boyhood:
I, Boyhood & youth; 2 y & early manh; 3 the Battle of Life in many lands; 4 (age 37 to [40?],) return & meet grown babies & toothless old drivelers who were’ the grandees of his boyhood. The Adored unknown a [illegible] faded old maid & full of rasping, puritanical vinegar piety.
As he went on with the manuscript, his marginal notes—reminders to himself of episodes to be used later on in the narrative—were more in the vein of his February 1870 letter to Will Bowen: “Rolling the rock,” “Candy pull,” “Becky had the measles,” “Cadets of Temp.,” “Learning to smoke,” “Burying pet cat or bird.” Following the direction he had set for himself in The Gilded Age, he was purifying the past of the present. “The Battle of Life in many lands” and the disenchantments summed up by the “faded old maid” were to be among the subjects of his Autobiography. “Boyhood and youth” were the prime subjects of his fiction.
Clemens’ characteristic method of improvising from chapter to chapter, of letting the story shape itself, had its pitfalls. One day’s failure of invention coupled with the absence of an over-all plan could mean that his books came to a dead stop, sometimes for years. Early in September, after having written about four hundred pages of manuscript, he conceded that “that day’s chapter was a failure, in conception, moral truth to nature, and execution—enough blemish to impair the excellence of almost any chapter—and so I must burn up the day’s work and do it all over again. It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry.” Thirty years later he remembered this crisis as teaching him his great lesson, a basic tenet of his faith in himself as a writer: “When the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time.” On September 4, 1874, with this lesson implicit if not completely demonstrated, he announced with no trace of concern, “So I knocked off, and went to playing billiards for a change.”
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 25