Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  The climax of this patriotic celebration was a midday banquet at Allyn Hall. Mark Twain sat at the main table with the eminences of Connecticut and Massachusetts and the commanders of the Ancients and the Putnam Phalanx. The martial strains of Mr. D. W. Reeves’s American Band of Providence were followed by the clash of cutlery. Then came the speeches. Commander Stevenson tended the thanks of the Ancients. And then Major Brown of the Phalanx said he was unaccustomed to speaking in public. And then Judge-Advocate Barber delivered a rousing patriotic and historical oration in the course of which he re-created the battle of Bunker Hill, the thundering cannon, the crack of musketry, the charges and repulses, the desperate hand-to-hand struggle, and the voice of Israel Putnam crying out above the noises of battle, “Make a stand here; in God’s name form, and give them one shot more!” (Applause.) And then Governor Hubbard recalled how the men of Massachusetts and the men of Connecticut had always been brothers in arms: “The grim earth has drank richly of their common blood—in the Indian Wars, in the French War, in the Revolutionary War, in the Mexican War, and finally in the greater war which shook for four years, as with a rending earthquake, the foundations of the republic.” And then General Banks said that in the War of the Rebellion he found no more courageous and vigilant supporters of the Union flag than the sons of Connecticut. And then, and then, and then.

  Toward the end of this Pentecostal rite of self-congratulation, Northern brotherhood, and inflamed patriotism, Mark Twain spoke. “If you fight as well as you feed, God protect the enemy,” he remarked as he began his account of what he called a forgotten chapter in the military history of the United States and of the Southern Confederacy: his own career as a rebel soldier (“I find myself in a minority here”) who signed up because war seemed a lark and who deserted after two weeks because he discovered it was a bore. In a sense, it had taken him sixteen years to prepare this speech. What he had learned in the sixteen years was how to turn the “damned humiliating” past into a comic weapon.

  “Mark Twain’s speech at the ‘Ancients’ is rather flat reading,” the Boston Evening Transcript reported the next day, “but they say it was full of sparkle as it was delivered,” and without a doubt the frequent “bursts of laughter” which interrupted the speaker had a nervous quality. Mark Twain told these warriors of Connecticut and Massachusetts that for him it had all been like a camping trip at first. But then the rats and the mosquitoes and even the horses started biting; the rain fell, his feet were wet all the time; there were not enough umbrellas to go around, and the Worcestershire sauce gave out; insubordination was the only order of the day (“Who was your nigger last year?” the orderly sergeant answered a command) and military discipline was unknown; boredom set in. “Then Ben Tupper lost patience. Said he, ‘War ain’t what it’s cracked up to be; I’m going home if I can’t ever get a chance to sit down. Why do these people keep us a-humping around so? Blame their skins, do they think this is an excursion?’” Worst of all, there were reports the enemy was in the vicinity and meant business:

  There was mutiny and dissatisfaction all around, and of course here came the enemy pestering us again—as much as two hours before breakfast, too, when nobody wanted to turn out, of course. This was a little too much. The whole command felt insulted. I sent an aid to the brigadier, and asked him to assign us a district where there wasn’t so much bother going on. The history of our campaign was laid before him, but instead of being touched by it, what did he do? He sent back an indignant message.

  Brigadier Tom Harris (“Why, knew him when he wasn’t nothing but a darn telegraph operator”) threatened them, in fact, with court martial. But contrary to the code which Judge-Advocate Barber and Governor Hubbard and General Banks and all the others were glorifying, Mark Twain’s band of volunteers, instead of saying, This is war, said, To hell with it. The brigade disbanded and tramped off home, deserters, but safe. “We were the first men that went into the service in Missouri; we were the first that went out of it anywhere.” Like Huck Finn, Mark Twain said to himself, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” and as the readers of Roughing It knew, he spent the war years far from cannon and battlefields: as Orion’s secretary in Nevada, he was at least the symbolic beneficiary of Federal patronage, and then he went on to mine for silver, work as a journalist, and in general have a pretty good time.

  Rebel, deserter, slacker—he had been all these, but by his confession in such bold, ironic terms he is free from punishment and also free to channel his accumulated anger and contempt. He has become the humorist as rational coward, Falstaff declaring that “Honor is a mere scutcheon.” He rejects war because war is boring, uncomfortable, and dangerous. He makes an offensive weapon out of the sort of experience the veterans of the Ancients and the Phalanx would normally find shameful. Against the background of the flatulent and bloodthirsty oratory that preceded it, his speech was implicit insult and explicit deflation of the hallowed martial values—What was the war all about, anyway? he seems to be asking—but he contained his satire within a convention his audience was powerless to reject: “I ask you to fill your glasses and drink with me to the reverend memory of the Orderly Sergeant and those other neglected and forgotten heroes, my foot-sore and travel-stained paladins, who were first in war, first in peace, and were not idle in the interval that lay between.”

  For years afterward Clemens continued to work over this speech, the germ of his darker and more extended account of his military service in the December 1885 Century, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” But the speech he gave in Boston on December 17, 1877, at the dinner in honor of Whittier’s seventieth birthday was one that he added, for a while, to the long list of mea maxima culpas that ran back to his boyhood. “That disastrous cataclysm,” he noted thirty years later on a copy of the seating plan for the Hotel Brunswick’s dining room. After the chablis and the claret, the Mumm’s Dry and the Roederer Imperial, Clemens faced toward the honored guests at the head of the U-shaped table and told a long—to some, interminable—story within a story. In 1864, he said, when the name Mark Twain was beginning to be known in Nevada and California, he stopped off at a miner’s cabin in the Sierra foothills and introduced himself. The miner said Twain was “the fourth literary man that has been here in twenty-four hours,” and told him a story about three boozy and rough-looking tramps—“Consound the lot!”—who had stopped off the evening before and said they were Emerson (“a seedy little bit of a chap”), Holmes (“fat as a balloon”), and Longfellow (“built like a prize-fighter”). They took over the cabin, gorged themselves on the miner’s bacon, beans, and whiskey, played cards with a greasy deck and cheated, and at seven the next morning left with the miner’s only pair of boots. “I’m going to move,” the miner says to Mr. Twain. “I ain’t suited to a littery atmosphere.”

  I said to the miner, “Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were impostors.”

  The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while; then said he, “Ah! impostors, were they? Are you?”

  During the performance the three “gracious singers,” according to Howells, were to be seen in various attitudes of removal from reality: Mr. Longfellow looked puzzled, Dr. Holmes was busy writing on his menu, and Mr. Emerson was in one of his chronic senile trances. The expression of interest on the other faces, Clemens remembered, “turned to a sort of black frost.” Howells stared down at his plate; once he looked up out of his embarrassment to see Clemens “standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his joke dead on his hands.” Afterward Howells could manage only a gasp. There was a heavy silence, “weighing many tons to the square inch,” and it was “broken only by the hysterical and bloodcurdling laughter of a single guest whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.” “Well, Mark,” Warner said, “you’re a funny fellow.” That night, having been convinced by himself and by Howells that this speech, so gaily conceived,
was fundamentally an insult and a “hideous mistake,” Clemens tossed sleeplessly in his bed, and his agony of shame and remorse, aggravated by some newspaper references to his “offense against good taste,” lasted for months. Tacitly acknowledging the satiric drift and content of his speech, he, like Howells, persisted in exaggerating the dimensions of the scandal. In actuality, the speech had been greeted with a fair amount of laughter; Emerson, it is true, had been in a trance, but Whittier, Longfellow, and Holmes had shown some polite amusement; and the evening had not broken up in paralyzed horror, but had gone on as planned, speeches and all, for at least an hour more.

  Ten days after his speech, with Howells’ consent, Clemens wrote a formal letter of apology to Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes. Two points run through it: his own continuing mortification as well as Livy’s (“As to my wife’s distress, it is not to be measured…. We do not talk about this misfortune—it scorches”) and his certainty that his original or at least his conscious impulse had been innocent: “I do not ask you to forgive what I did that night, for it is not forgivable; I simply had it at heart to ask you to believe that I am only heedlessly a savage, not premeditatedly.” The dwarf conscience, he seemed to be saying, had no right to tear at him for being “only heedlessly a savage.” He made the point again in a speech of amends two years later at an Atlantic breakfast celebrating Holmes’s seventieth birthday. This time Howells read over the speech beforehand, approved it, and then emphasized the penitent nature of the occasion by his introduction: “We will now listen to a few words of truthfulness and soberness from Mark Twain.” And quite simply and directly Clemens told how he had inadvertently plagiarized the dedication of The Innocents Abroad from Holmes and, when he discovered this a few years after the book was published, had written a letter of apology; pleasantly and forgivingly Holmes wrote back to say “he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves.” “I am rather glad I committed the crime,” Clemens said at the end, “for the sake of the letter.” The parallel with the Whittier disaster was clear enough. One of the tramps borrowed Holmes’s poetry and identity, Mark Twain stole his dedication from Holmes. If plagiarism deserved forgiveness because it had been committed “unconsciously,” then an insult offered “heedlessly” deserved equally to be forgiven.

  But along with such explicit and implicit admissions of insult and wrongdoing Clemens could present an entirely different stance. “I am sincerely sorry if it in any wise hurt those great poets’ feelings—I never wanted to do that,” he told Mary Fairbanks in February 1878, not much more than a month after his letter of apology. “But nobody has ever convinced me that that speech was not a good one—for me; far above my average, considerably. I could as easily have substituted the names of Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Ben Jonson.” (Shakespeare and Beaumont, it is worth noting, participate in the taboo fireside conversation in 1601.) “But my purpose was clean, my conscience clear, and I saw no need of it. Why anybody should think three poets insulted because three fantastic tramps choose to personate them and use their language, passes my comprehension. Nast says it is very much the best speech and the most humorous situation I have contrived.” And in 1906, having again blinded himself to the content of the evening, he wondered what had been the matter with that audience at the Hotel Brunswick—“It is amazing, it is incredible, that they didn’t shout with laughter, and those deities the loudest of them all.” By then, after wrestling long with the enigma of dual personality, he might have recognized that his speech about three tramps was the kind of speech his “dream self” (another “impostor”) would give. Clemens’ performance that evening in Boston, Howells wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, “was like an effect of demoniacal possession.” The demons were to be increasingly with him and to lead him even farther away from benign entertainment and toward highly complex and conflictive comic molds. His “hideous mistake,” though he did not know it, was really a portal of discovery.

  * In his revision notes in the manuscript of Tom Sawyer Howells asked Clemens to shorten his account of Becky Thatcher looking at the “stark naked” human figures depicted in the schoolmaster’s copy of “Professor Somebody’s” anatomy textbook. He also marked as objectionable a phrase in Chapter Five about a vagrant poodle dog who wandered into church, absent-mindedly sat down on a fierce black beetle, let out a “wild yelp of agony,” and “went sailing up the aisle, his tail shut down like a hasp.” “Awfully good but a little too dirty,” Howells said, and Clemens deleted the last seven words of the description. The simile of the dog’s tail might have been suggested to Clemens by an entirely unobjectionable source, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s novel Elsie Venner (1861): in Chapter Three the schoolmaster kicks a “yallah dog,” who then goes “bundling out of the open schoolhouse-door with a most pitiable yelp, and his stump of a tail shut down as close as his owner ever shut the short, stubbed blade of his jack-knife.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “The free air of Europe”

  I

  ON APRIL 11, 1878, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel L. Clemens of Hartford and their two children—Susy, six, and Clara, going on four—sailed from New York, Europe-bound, on the steamship Holsatia. With them were Clara Spaulding, an Elmira friend who had accompanied Livy to England five years earlier; a nursemaid, Rosina Hay, who was to give the children instruction in German; and the Clemenses’ butler, George Griffin, who came along as valet and baggage agent. From time to time this sizable party was supplemented by cicerones and couriers.

  Neither in itinerary nor in scale of living did Clemens and his family depart much from the conventional pattern of well-to-do Americans. They landed at Hamburg, visited Hanover and Frankfurt, and spent most of the summer in Heidelberg. At the beginning of August Twichell arrived from America, his passage and expenses paid by Clemens, who counted on him to help in gathering material and adventures for a European travel book. The two went off on the “tramp abroad” of the book’s title, a walking tour—by rail, carriage, and boat, as it turned out—through the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps to Lausanne and Geneva. After a month and a half of sightseeing, shopping, and visiting the American colonies in Venice, Florence, and Rome, the Clemenses settled for the winter in Munich, where, in a rented workroom at 45 Nymphenstrasse, Clemens struggled with the book. In February they moved to Paris; they stayed there until July, then went to London by way of Belgium and Holland. On August 23, 1879, they left Liverpool on the Gallia, and they reached New York on September 3. They were gone a little over sixteen months.

  The tourist looks ahead of him, anticipating a different landscape and a change of heart; the expatriate looks also behind him, fearfully or in anger, and measures where he has gone against where he has been. Although he observed most of the conventions of the family grand tour, Clemens himself, disillusioned, pressured, and, he believed, made soft and self-complacent by ten years of celebrity in the East, became for part of his stay abroad a self-exile from his homeland. A voyage was a dreamless sleep, a stupor, he said when he went to Bermuda. As he prepared to leave for Europe he felt that to go abroad was to die, to escape from the living. “I know you will refrain from saying harsh things because they can’t hurt me, since I am out of reach and cannot hear them,” he wrote in his notebook, addressing his own country. “That is why we say no harsh things of the dead.” To go abroad was to leave behind the sting of the Whittier dinner, the failures of Tom Sawyer and Ah Sin, and certain portents of declining creativity: between September 1877 and March 1880 Mark Twain published only one book, called Punch, Brothers, Punch!, and this little collection of reprinted sketches was designed primarily to promote his scrapbook, a book with no writing in it at all.

  “Life has come to be a very serious matter with me,” Sam wrote to his mother two months before sailing. “It comes mainly of business responsibilities and annoyances, and the persecution of kindly letters from well-meaning strangers.” He was the victim of his own success and fame; he felt hounde
d by autograph hunters, and life in the house in Hartford, with its ever-mounting expenses and stream of visitors, was swallowing him up. “I want to find a German village where nobody knows my name or speaks any English, and shut myself up in a closet two miles from the hotel and work every day without interruption,” he told Mary Fairbanks in March 1878. A little over a year later, however, he was writing to her not from a German village, but from Paris. Now he said, “We are in Europe mainly to cut down our expenses.” He did not explain that in none of the places where he had tried to settle down had he been able to work at all satisfactorily on his new book and thereby escape what seemed a web of futility.

  Disgusted by the mishandling of Tom Sawyer and convinced that his publisher was out to fleece him, Clemens signed a contract with Elisha Bliss’s son, Frank, a month before sailing. The younger Bliss, working secretly at first, planned his own publishing house and as a start was raiding his father’s. But the ghost of Riley walked again (as it does in Chapter Twenty-six of A Tramp Abroad). Alerted to Frank’s raid, Elisha Bliss reminded Clemens that the old Riley contract of 1870 was still unfulfilled: under its terms Clemens owed Bliss a book-length manuscript and the two thousand dollars that Riley had got as an advance. Frank Bliss stepped in between his father and Clemens to point out that conditions of the Riley contract had been satisfied by Tom Sawyer, and for a while Clemens seemed to be winning his freedom. Eventually, however, Frank failed to raise enough money to start the new house and Elisha Bliss reclaimed his valuable but discontented author, who found himself trying to finish a book which he did not want to write and which was to be published by a house he no longer liked nor trusted. His only victory was in getting Elisha Bliss to agree “not to publish any other new book within nine months from the time of publication of my new book.” Remembering the lesson of Tom Sawyer, he was determined that A Tramp Abroad should not be an orphan. He was equally determined that it should not be an outlaw, and, to make sure that he would offend no one at home, he wrote a pointed reminder to himself to put all criticisms of America in the mouth of a foreigner.