Clemens examined his relation to Grant not only in his notes and his autobiographical accounts but also, implicitly, in the only extended writing he did during his year as Grant’s publisher. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” his characteristically anti-heroic contribution to the Century’s “Battles and Leaders” series, was, in a way, an answer to the question of why a former Confederate irregular should be publishing, and ostensibly making a good deal of money doing so, the Personal Memoirs of the commander of all the Union armies. The speech Clemens gave in Hartford in 1877, his first public account of his military service, ended with the footsore paladins disbanding in disgust, having realized that rain, corncribs, and retreat were not what they had had in mind when they signed up to be soldiers. Early in 1885, at the urging of Robert Underwood Johnson of the Century, Clemens started to rework his speech into a long article, ran into trouble, and found that he was too busy and would have to put it off until August at Quarry Farm. He finished the article in November, and it was published in the December issue. In the intervening eight or nine months its character changed radically: a comic adventure became a dark and troubled reading of his experience of war. “Such a bloody bit of heartache in it,” Howells was to remark. The change is clearly connected with Clemens’ careful reading of Grant’s manuscript and proofs, with conversations between the two in April and May, and with Grant’s death on July 23, an event loaded with real and symbolic meaning for Clemens.
During the spring, Grant—and his family—read an early draft of “A Campaign That Failed.” In conversation afterward Grant elaborated on his already-written account of his service as colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Volunteers in July 1861 in the vicinity of Florida, Missouri, Mark Twain’s birthplace and the scene of his military service. Grant said this had been his first independent command of the Civil War; the responsibility had terrified him at first; then his fright had left him for good. Grant and Clemens, it turned out as they compared notes, had come within a few weeks and a few miles of facing each other as enemies in the field. Clemens immediately began to play with this discrepancy in time and distance. In a notebook entry which he made soon after one of these talks it became a difference of “a day or two.” “How near he came to playing the devil with his future publisher,” Clemens wrote, and in conversation with Grant he said that if he had known the identity of the Union colonel who was pursuing the Marion Rangers he would have turned and attacked instead of retreating. Finally in the published version of “A Campaign That Failed” he wrote, “I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown as I was myself.”
Intrigued by this fantasy of facing Grant in battle, Clemens tentatively titled the article “My Campaign against Grant.” For a while he planned to put aside the article and in its place to give the Century a chapter from a novel he hoped to write that summer; the novel was to take Tom, Huck, and Jim through his Missouri campaign, at the end of which Tom would be accosted by a Union officer named U. S. Grant. Clemens soon put the novel aside and went back to the article. All this went on at a time when he was busy with his publishing venture and when, as he said, “It kills me” to write. It is not too much to say that this persistence reflects the intensity and complexity of his feelings toward Grant. Several levels of relationship can be suggested: the Rebel son and the punishing figure of power and authority (who, as President, later assumed a more explicitly paternal office); the parallel and ironic relationships of anti-hero (“I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating”) to hero, and humorist to victim (in his 1879 speech at Chicago Clemens set an ambush for Grant; “I knew I could lick him,” he said, “I shook him up like dynamite”). And, reversing these relationships, the former Rebel son, now reconstructed, had become, as publisher, the strong and benevolent figure who rescues the Grant family from poverty.
By the time Clemens finished writing “A Campaign That Failed,” his decision to desert was no longer based on boredom and discontent. It was directly related to a new episode, almost surely invented, which compressed a number of symbolic situations into an apparently simple narrative and which was also consistent with some of the recurrent motifs in his experience and memory: bitter remorse and guilt; the direct witnessing of violence (“I saw him die,” he wrote, in his Autobiography, of a killing in Hannibal, “I saw the red life gush from his breast”); discovery and horror (the post-mortem, the corpse on the floor of his father’s office). “It is curious and dreadful to sit up this way and talk cheerful nonsense to General Grant,” Clemens said after one of many talks about their common war experience, and he added, with a meaning his article was to underscore, “and he under sentence of death with that cancer.”
Toward the end of “A Campaign That Failed” Clemens says that he and the fifteen other Marion Rangers received a warning one night that the enemy was in the vicinity. Excited and terrified, they hide in the corncrib where they usually sleep and look out through the cracks at where the forest path emerges into veiled moonlight. They hear muffled hoofbeats, and a dreamlike figure comes out of the forest darkness. “It could have been made of smoke, its mass had so little sharpness of outline.” It is a man on horseback, and as he rides toward the corncrib he too is “under sentence of death.” The narrator is almost paralyzed with fright, but he manages to fire off his gun (the only time during the campaign that he fires it in combat). The man falls to the ground on his back, his arms stretched to the side, mouth open, chest heaving. His white shirtfront is splattered with blood. He is dressed in civilian clothes, and he is unarmed.
The narrator’s first feeling is one of “surprised gratification.” But then: “The thought shot through me that I was a murderer, that I had killed a man, a man who had never done me any harm. That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow.” In sudden remorse he would give up his own life to undo what he has done. The stranger, he imagines, gives him “a reproachful look out of his shadowy eyes” and, dying, mutters “like a dreamer in his sleep” about his wife and child. And all the narrator will ever know about his victim is that “he was a stranger in the country,” a description which fits into the dreamlike ambience of the episode and which also suggests that the victim is related to all the other “strangers” who populate Mark Twain’s fiction. And having read with special interest Grant’s own account of service around Florida, Missouri, Clemens borrowed enough details to suggest that in a number of covert ways the “stranger” is also Grant himself.
One of Grant’s worries when he received his orders to go to Missouri had to do with his wife and child; he arranged to ship his eleven-year-old son back to Mrs. Grant in Galena. When Grant appeared in Cairo to take command of the district of southeast Missouri the officer in charge “looked a little as if he would like to have someone identify me,” Grant says. Not only was Grant a stranger in the country at that point, but he was also wearing civilian clothes; as he explains, his brigadier’s uniform had not yet arrived from the tailor in New York. Later on, at the battle of Belmont, Grant was wearing “a soldier’s overcoat” when he galloped past a detachment of Confederate troops hidden in “a dense forest.” As he learned later, a Confederate officer recognized him despite the private’s overcoat and said to his men, “There is a Yankee; you may try your marksmanship on him as you wish.” (The question of “marksmanship,” quite aside from the accidental pun, becomes a crucial one at the end of “A Campaign That Failed.”) No one fired at Grant then. However, soon after galloping his horse over a single plank onto the Union steamer that was waiting in the river, he had “a narrow escape.” He lay down to rest in the cabin adjoining the pilothouse—a familiar enough setting for Mark Twain—but he heard the sound of gunfire and got up to go on deck. “I had scarcely left when a musket ball entered the room, struck the head of the sofa, passed through it and lodged in the foot.” If he had not fought the futile battle of Belmont, Grant says at the end of his account, he might have lost three thousand men. “Then I should have
been culpable indeed.”
Second Lieutenant Clemens is overwhelmed by culpability, and he looks for absolution. Other Marion Rangers had fired at the same moment—“There were six shots fired at once but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my heated imagination had magnified my one shot into a volley”; any one of the others could be the real murderer. But even though he has now made the killing completely ambiguous,
morbid thoughts clung to me against reason, for at bottom I did not believe I had touched that man. The law of probabilities decreed me guiltless of his blood for in all my small experience with guns I had never hit anything I had tried to hit and I knew I had done my best to hit him. Yet there was no solace in the thought. Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing.
The killing of strangers, the taking of unoffending lives, now seems to him not only “a wanton thing,” but also “an epitome of war,” and he turns from nightmare to self-ridicule in order to shift his burden of guilt: “It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped for this awful business, that war was intended for men and I for a child’s nurse” (an entertainer of children and also precisely the role in which he claimed responsibility for the death of his infant son Langdon). “I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham soldiership while I could save some remnant of self-respect.” “My campaign was spoiled,” he says. “My Campaign against Grant” has become, by an ironic questioning and reversal of the terms of success, “A Campaign That Failed.”
V
Mark Twain delighted in figuring the precise dimensions of the gigantic success he was to have with Grant’s book. In May 1885 he predicted—conservatively, as it turned out—a sale of 300,000 sets (600,000 books), a profit of $200,000 for his publishing house, and royalties to the Grant family of over $400,000 (or, as he translated it, seventeen tons of silver coin at twelve dollars a pound). Howells imagined him smoking and swearing in “wild excitement” as he kept count of the twenty presses and the seven binderies that worked day and night to meet the demand. The firm was in debt to the banks, his personal money was so tied up in the venture that he was feeling squeezed again, yet he was far from being worried. “I am merely a starving beggar standing outside the door of plenty,” he was to tell Howells in October,“—obstructed by a Yale time-lock which is set for Jan. 1st.” As the months ticked away and Grant, at Mount McGregor, New York, slipped slowly from life, Clemens’ mood climbed higher and higher. He was giddy with the anticipation of a hundred other successes, all of which, without a pang to him, overshadowed his own writing. Among the grandiose schemes was one which he discussed that summer with Grant and Jesse Grant, and by letter with Leland Stanford; it involved getting from the Sultan of Turkey the charter to build a railroad between Constantinople and the Persian Gulf.
Clemens’ domestic idyl, which he celebrated publicly but kept closed to all but the intimates of the Nook Farm circle, was still undisturbed. Livy, nearing forty, was in good health, still beautiful. She was adored, it seemed, by everyone who knew her. Visitors were struck by her luminous dark eyes, broad white forehead, and gleaming smile, by the grace with which she wore gowns of blue and red silk, by the unruffled and commanding way she was able to run a gracious and opulent household and also be mother and companion to three children, whom she tutored at home and trained to simple pleasures and few pretenses. They were always to be carefully chaperoned, they were to be kept ignorant as long as possible of ball gowns and coquetry, and despite their wealth Livy intended all three to go to the public high school in Hartford. On a June evening the Clemens family had an early dinner together out on the veranda. Then they went for a twilight drive around the city. Their carriage was still the one Jervis Langdon had given as a wedding gift; it was driven by the same coachman whose brass buttons and livery overcoat Clemens had admired during his first married days in Buffalo. After the children had been put to bed, visitors drifted along the worn path that led from the Warner house to the conservatory door. Charles and George Warner arrived with their wives, then President Smith of Trinity College and others—enough for two tables of whist. Afterward there was ice cream and a long evening of talk and funny stories, “of which latter Mr. Clemens was full,” Livy wrote in her diary. (To Twichell and to many others he had become “the Prince of Raconteurs”; after such an evening at Farmington Avenue, Howells remarked in pleasure and wonderment, “There is certainly no one else alive who can equal it.”) Later that week, there was another informal evening of whist, ice cream, and talk. Friday nights Livy played cards with the two Warner wives while Clemens had his weekly stag billiard session on the third floor and the lager flowed. But even such quiet happiness as Clemens enjoyed at Farmington Avenue he insisted on measuring in terms of the material riches that were about to pour in on him. “What a profitable return,” he wrote to Livy on the sixteenth anniversary of their engagement, “from the invested capital of a single word.” “I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity,” he said one evening. “It seems that whatever I touch turns to gold.”
On August 8 Clemens stood for five hours at the windows of his publishing house on Union Square in New York and watched the Grant funeral procession passing along Fourteenth Street toward Fifth Avenue, on its way to the temporary tomb of brick trimmed with bluestone and granite that stood open at Riverside Park. Swathings of black drapery covered marble and brownstone fronts; the streets were lined with mourning-hung portraits of the dead hero. Forty thousand men in uniform marched behind the catafalque drawn by twenty-four black horses. In sign of union, old opponents Sherman and Johnston, Sheridan and Buckner, walked side by side as pallbearers. A President and two ex-Presidents rode in the cortege. Two days earlier Clemens had sat with Sherman at the Lotos Club and talked with him about Grant. “He was a man—all over—rounded and complete,” Sherman said; but, for him as well as for Clemens, neither of them possessing a shred of religion, Grant was also more than a man. Now, as the sounds of muffled drums and muted brass came to him from the street below, Clemens might have been hearing the strange music which in Plutarch signified that the god Hercules was forsaking Antony. For with Grant’s death the period of Mark Twain’s brief flowering—five years—began to end. “Our faces are toward the sunset,” he told Livy later that year. He was fifty years old.
* “I wish you were here, to let me tell you about Gerhardt and the Nathan Hale Statue,” Clemens told Howells on December 7, 1885. “A 14-months’ history and the funniest in the whole history of art.” Gerhardt had spent months sulking in his studio while the committee in charge of awarding the commission for an equestrian statue in the State Capitol at Hartford demanded formal assurance from him that the $5,000 price included the horse.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Yankee and the Machine
I
AT THE AGE OF THIRTEEN, SUSY CLEMENS, a fascinated observer of her father’s moods and fluctuations, began to write his “biography.” “Mama and I have been troubled of late,” she wrote in February 1886, “because Papa since he has been publishing Gen. Grant’s book has seemed to forget his own books and work entirely.” Susy was also troubled, briefly, by a remark he made to her. His arm around her waist, slowly pacing in the library during the time of intimate talk that he saved at the end of the day for her, his oldest and clearly his favorite, he said he expected to write only one more book. “Then he was ready to give up work altogether, die or do anything. He said that he had written more than he had ever expected.” Thinking about this, and about “the proofs of past years,” Susy decided after a while that there was really nothing to worry about. He had said things like this before and then gone back to writing.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 40