Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  For years Whitelaw Reid had been a majority stockholder in the Mergenthaler syndicate and had encouraged the inventor to experiment with his machine in the Tribune’s composing room. When the machine vindicated his patience and backing, it was Reid who had the satisfaction of coining the name “Linotype.” On July 3, 1886, the first of the Tribune’s battery of twelve Linotype machines set a part of the day’s issue. Soon after came The Tribune Book of Open Air Sports, the first book printed from machine-composed type. And it was clear that even though it was still in an early stage, the Linotype, unlike Paige’s machine, could function continuously and reliably. A printing invention as important as the rotary press had finally been proved workable after half a century of trial and failure. But even this development did not shake Clemens’ confidence. Hearing that the Linotype machine had worn out a $1,500 set of typecasting matrices within a month, he concluded that it was little better than “a costly luxury” which was also, he was pleased to hear, occasionally plagued by faulty alignment. Even two years later, when an observer at the Tribune told him that an improved Mergenthaler machine was now giving reliable service without expensive wear on its matrices, he was still positive that it was “just a racehorse” and consequently “can’t run no competition with a railroad.” His own machine was rarely together in one place for more than a week at a time, but he planned a series of public contests, handicapped at one Paige machine versus two Mergenthaler machines, to be witnessed by assorted financiers, newspaper owners, and the government printer.

  Years later Clemens told Albert Bigelow Paine that the Mergenthaler promoters had offered to exchange a half interest in their venture for a half interest in his and that, full of scorn and confidence at the time, he did not even bother to say no but “only smiled.” Paine would have done well to smile, too. Among all the hundreds of Mark Twain’s business memoranda concerning the machine there is not a glimmer of evidence that the offer was ever made. This ironic, rueful tall story told on himself has a family resemblance to his claim that he once turned down a chance to buy a whole hatful of stock in Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention, the telephone, for only five hundred dollars. He may simply have been telescoping a hope and an actuality. In October 1894, just two months before Paige’s machine failed its final test, he said he hoped that “some day the Mergenthaler people will come and want to hitch teams with us.” The actuality was that in 1897 the Mergenthaler Company bought out Paige’s prototype machines and all his rights and patents for twenty thousand dollars, just to clear the decks.

  For all his hubris at the time Clemens had the growing feeling that the mire was sucking at his boots. Even when he wanted to write, he told Whitmore, he found that all his energies had been eaten up by the machine. During most of 1886 and 1887 the combined expense of Paige’s salary and the bills at Pratt and Whitney averaged about two thousand dollars a month; then the Pratt and Whitney bills went up enough to bring the monthly drain to three thousand dollars. By December 1887, the typesetter had already cost Clemens about fifty thousand dollars, which was twenty thousand dollars more than Paige’s top estimate, and it was feeding strong and fast. “We go on and on, but the typesetter goes on forever—at $3,000 a month,” Sam complained to Pamela. He apologized for being able to afford only five dollars each as a Christmas present for Orion, Mollie, and Jane Clemens in Keokuk. The predictions went on and on, too—finished by April, finished by May, finished by August, finished in eighty-five days. The old familiar money pinch was on again, and with it came the feeling that he was once again a beggar standing outside the house of plenty. His fortune and Livy’s, he began to say, was “interred” in the “eternal machine.” There are two times a man should not speculate, he soon noted privately: “When he can afford it, and when he can’t.”

  III

  Passing through St. Paul, Minnesota, at the end of June 1886, on his way to visit his mother and Orion, Clemens impressed a local reporter as the sort of grandee who customarily traveled by private Pullman with his family and servants. Dressed in alligator slippers, a light-gray suit, and a pearl-colored high hat, Mr. Clemens said that his friend Mark Twain had little time for writing these days because he was really in the publishing business. His firm, he went on to say, had so many books under contract—enough for four years—that even if Mark Twain did get around to writing a book, some other house would have to publish it.

  Charles L. Webster and Company did, in fact, have an ambitious program, and, despite all his grumblings, it was Clemens who had the commanding voice in the partnership, who was responsible for most of the books the firm took on (over Webster’s blunt veto he insisted on making the neighborly gesture of publishing the Reverend N. J. Burton’s Yale lectures on preaching), and who, unwilling to share top billing in his own house with any of the vast number of literary men he knew, remained the firm’s only major literary author.* The list was by and large a mishmash of undistinguished books by or about famous people, frank attempts at celebrity publishing on the pattern of the Grant book: King Kalakaua’s collection of Hawaiian legends; memoirs by Sherman, Sheridan, and McClellan; The Genesis of the Civil War, by Major General Samuel Wylie Crawford, who was at Sumter when the shooting began; Elizabeth Custer’s book about General George Armstrong Custer and Almira Hancock’s book about General Winfield Scott Hancock, the hero of Gettysburg; “Sunset” Cox’s Diversions of a Diplomat in Turkey; and two books which epitomize the firm’s style and fortunes—Father Bernard O’Reilly’s Life of Pope Leo XIII (“the greatest book of the age,” Webster and Company trumpeted, written with the Pope’s “Encouragement, Approbation, and Blessing”) and Henry Ward Beecher’s Autobiography.

  When Clemens talked with the St. Paul reporter he was still savoring the triumph of having signed up what he would always call “the Pope’s book.” He believed every Catholic in Christendom would have to buy a copy as a religious duty. Even Twichell, who should have known better but didn’t—he too had an awesomely exaggerated idea of the power of the Pope—was taken in by this categorical logic. “The issue of this book will be the greatest event in the way of book publishing that ever occurred,” he wrote in his diary, “and it seems certain M.T. will make a vast amount of money by it.” (Some years afterward he added the comment, “Proved quite otherwise in the event.”) Clemens had told Livy, who had been hesitant about buying some new furniture, that they could now afford a thousand new sofas out of their future bank account, and he planned a presentation copy for the Pope with a solid-gold binding by Tiffany. In July a hired carriage with a plumed footman delivered Charley Webster at the Vatican for a private audience with his Holiness, who infallibly knew how many copies Grant’s book had sold and professed amazement when Charley assured him that his biography was guaranteed a minimum sale of 100,000 copies. Charley returned with a rosary blessed by the Pope that caused so much excitement at Farmington Avenue that Clemens said he would not take a thousand dollars for it. (In fact he wanted to buy three more through Father O’Reilly.) But although Clemens was sure the promotional literature was good enough to sell a Chocktaw Bible, The Life of Pope Leo XIII, published in 1887, did not bring in a golden harvest of the faithful and in fact fell considerably short of Charley’s promised minimum of 100,000 copies. “The failure was incredible to Clemens,” Howells recalled. “His sanguine soul was utterly confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so exuberantly jubilant.”

  Other books, too, plotted a declining course for Mark Twain’s publishing house. In January 1887 Henry Ward Beecher, who twenty years earlier had advised Sam Clemens to hold out for a royalty contract with Bliss on The Innocents Abroad, took a five-thousand-dollar advance to write his autobiography. Clemens’ enthusiasm went up the more he thought about the book, and he predicted a profit of $350,000 if only Beecher “heaves in just enough piousness.” Three weeks after this chicken-counting Beecher was dead at seventy-three of a cerebral hemorrhage and Clemens was left with an unfinished manuscript and a paper loss which he esti
mated at $100,000 and maybe more. Along with Beecher’s death came the discovery that the firm’s bookkeeper and cashier, F. M. Scott, had made off with about twenty-five thousand dollars. Clemens assured Orion that this was a trifling “momentary annoyance”—“a thing which slips out of one’s mind of its own accord”—compared with the Beecher loss; still even though the bookkeeper turned himself in and paid back a third of the money, Clemens became the avenging fury, impatient at Charley for urging leniency. Hire a detective to find out where Scott hid the greenbacks, he instructed Charley; sell Scott’s house in New Jersey for eleven thousand dollars and keep the money; and, finally, make sure that Scott gets five years in Sing Sing—which he did. Soon enough Charley himself was to feel the force of his uncle’s implacability.

  The Paige typesetter, for all the fiscal monkeyshines and anxieties that surrounded it, was still a creature of poetry, a marvel in steel. The publishing house, Clemens increasingly felt, was merely an act of commerce and a corporate trap which compelled him to assume the liabilities but share the profits. He made a choice between the two. He began to use the publishing house as a private bank to finance the machine; he drew off the profits, demanded more, and left the firm undercapitalized, overexpanded, and fatally committed to publishing a ten-volume Library of American Literature without the money to manufacture it. When he felt hopelessly whipsawed by publishing reverses and Paige’s delays, he cast a baleful eye on Charley Webster and chose him as the first human sacrifice to placate the machine god. In his rage against Webster he summed up his doubts that the machine could ever be finished or the firm rescued from a course “straight down hill, towards sure destruction.”

  Webster was vulnerable and accessible. He had his share of vanity and self-importance: at thirty-four he was head of a publishing house that bore his name, he associated with the powerful and famous, and he was proud of it. He was also cruelly overworked. Years of running fool’s errands for Uncle Sam and Aunt Livy, when he should have been tending strictly to business, began to tell on his command of details and on his health. By the summer of 1887, after the double fiasco of the Beecher manuscript and the embezzlement—both of which Clemens blamed him for—he was suffering from acute neuralgia and blinding headaches; he was as irascible as his uncle. The year before, he and Clemens had taken in a new partner, Fred Hall; at the end of 1888 Webster sold his interest to Hall for a mere twelve thousand dollars, retired permanently from business, and, bearing a photograph inscribed “with the affectionate regards of S. L. Clemens,” went back to Fredonia. There he spent his days building ships’ models, assembling a museum on the top floor of his house, and scanning the landscape with a telescope from a cupola with a revolving roof. On occasion he appeared in the streets wearing the uniform—complete with sword, tricorn hat, blue tunic, gold epaulets, and white cashmere pants—of a Knight of the Order of Pius, an honor bestowed upon him by Leo XIII (which provoked from his uncle the comment that if Charley Webster deserved to be a Papal Knight, Mark Twain deserved to be an archangel). The village newspaper referred to him as “Sir Charles.”

  When Webster died, in April 1891, only forty years old, Clemens absented himself from the funeral and sent Orion in his place, but his wrath, which had followed Charley to the mild eccentricity of his Fredonia retirement, followed him to the grave, and then beyond that, a persistence reflecting Clemens’ own struggle and failure. The charges hardly varied in their shrillness: incompetence, wastefulness, glory-grabbing, stupidity, ignorance, greed, arrogance, dishonesty. “Not a man but a hog,” Clemens told Pamela (who was Charley’s mother-in-law) in July 1889. “I have never hated any creature,” he told Orion at the same time, “with a one hundred thousandth fraction of the hatred which I bear that human louse.” That hatred never abated; until his own dying day Clemens with stern Presbyterian logic held Webster responsible for every terrible thing that happened, including bankruptcy and the deaths of Susy and Livy. Charley, it seems clear, was in actuality less than a villain but considerably more than a scapegoat. He became the chief actor in one of those demented fantasies which Clemens increasingly relied on to preserve his own sanity, a fictional character supporting a fabric of bearable reality.*

  At the end of 1888, however, with Charley out of the business, it seemed that the machine was finally about to be perfected, as though all along he had been the real and symbolic obstruction. In July Clemens said the machine (and the book) would be finished in August. On October 3 he said there were twenty-one full working days to go. He was about to pay ten thousand dollars to Pratt and Whitney, the last such bill, he was sure, and the last lean Christmas. Even Jean, eight years old, had learned to measure her simplest needs against the machine’s. She told a maid to put off buying a box of shoe polish—“The machine isn’t done,” she explained. Livy’s brother-in-law Theodore Crane was an invalid at Farmington Avenue, paralyzed on one side after a stroke that September, slowly dying, and needing care night and day. Hoping to escape from the gloom and confusions of his overburdened household, Clemens moved his workroom to Twichell’s house, only to discover that the usual noise of the Twichell children was nearly drowned out by an army of carpenters hammering away at a new ceiling directly beneath his feet. Still, in this boiler-factory setting he managed to turn out eighty pages of A Connecticut Yankee in a week. He was as determined as ever to finish the book the day Paige finished the machine. But the strain was beginning to tell. “Don’t imagine that I am on my way to the poorhouse, for I am not,” he raged at Orion, who had provoked him with a letter about petty economies, “or that I am uncomfortable or unhappy—for I never am.” Even on December 29, when he hopefully drafted a New Year’s greeting for Livy which he planned to set on the machine, he was prepared for delays and more delays: he spoke of the possibility that it would be finished in a few days, but he added, “We never prophesy any more.”

  “Machine O.K.,” Paige telegraphed to him in New York on January 2. “Come and see it work.” Three days later, a date that Clemens noted for history—“Saturday, January 5, 1889, 12:20 P.M.”—he scrawled in block letters, “EUREKA!” and jubilantly underlined the word. “I have seen a line of movable type, spaced and justified by machinery! This is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done,” he wrote, and he signed the statement. A few hours later, writing to Orion, he went on to describe “the immense historical birth” at which every one of the six men present seemed “dizzy, stupefied,” “stunned,” drunk although they had had nothing to drink. The machine even made a perverse demonstration of its powers, for just when it seemed that the marvel was misbehaving and might have to be taken apart all over again, Paige discovered the trouble. “We are fools,” he said, “the machine isn’t.” Its superfine intelligence—which went along with its unviably fastidious nature—had simply been making allowance for an invisible speck of dirt on one of the types. But even in this demonstration the future of the delicate machine was foretold. While Clemens was writing his account and Livy was celebrating downstairs—and two weeks later, when a newspaper as far away as London announced that Mark Twain’s “patient toil” had at last been “crowned with success”—Paige was taking it apart once more. His purpose, as his backer believed, was to work the stiffness out of its joints and make it as smooth and supple as a human muscle. The same story, already nine years old, was beginning all over again. No more experiments, Clemens was soon protesting in his notebook; they must get it finished by July. He told Orion he was sorry they had ever taken the machine apart; it had been good enough as it was, and besides, now that the work and the bills at Pratt and Whitney had resumed, he was cramped for money, and expected to be for some time. Never mind, he added wearily. “All good things arrive unto them that wait—and don’t die in the meantime.”

  IV

  For all practical purposes the machine was never finished. Still, supported by a faith in homeopathic magic and also spurred on by the need for money, Clemens managed to finish A Connecticut Ya
nkee in May 1889, four and a half years after reading Morte d’Arthur and making his first note:

  Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the middle ages. Have the notions and habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can’t scratch. Cold in the head—can’t blow—can’t get at handkerchief, can’t use iron sleeve. Iron gets red hot in the sun—leaks in the rain, gets white with frost and freezes me solid in winter. Suffer from lice and fleas. Make disagreeable clatter when I enter church. Can’t dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down, can’t get up.

  But over the years this comic idea changed its course and headed away from burlesque and toward an apocalyptic conclusion in which chivalric England and Hank Morgan’s American technology—failures both, as the author had come to see them—destroy each other. Writing this book, Mark Twain was in effect acting out his own disintegration, measuring the failure of a precarious equilibrium. In response not to a traumatic reversal but to a steady erosion of belief, his center ceased to hold, and for the rest of his life his imaginative energies would be scattered and baffled.

  By the early part of 1886, when he was writing the first three chapters, the comic idea had already taken on grim overtones. At the same time that he planned for Hank Morgan to do battle armed with a hay fork instead of a lance, Mark Twain also planned a conflict with the supreme medieval authority. “Country placed under an interdict,” he noted, anticipating his account (not written until 1888 or 1889) of a desolate and muted England, punished by the Church for accepting Morgan’s ideas. From the very start, the dream about knight-errantry was joined in Mark Twain’s mind by the idea of a great battle, at first between crusaders and a modern expeditionary force fitted out with ironclad warships, observation balloons, torpedoes, hundred-ton cannon, and Gatling guns (“labor-saving machinery” which, like the Yankee himself, was the product of Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company of Hartford). In other early notes for the book the Yankee, like Mark Twain yearning for Hannibal as it was around 1846, yearns for an Arcadian past which “exists” only in his dream, a pre-Boss Camelot (poverty, slavery, and ignorance forgotten for the moment) as drowsing and idyllic—“sleeping in a valley by a winding river”—as that other fictive town, St. Petersburg. Caught between dream and reality, between past and present, the Yankee has arrived at the impossible position of needing to return to a place which never existed—or no longer exists, because he destroyed it himself.