Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Visiting Hannibal in January 1885, just when he was under the spell of Malory, Clemens had felt himself swept under by “infinite great deeps of pathos,” by waves of helpless longing for a lost Eden and his boyhood there. His distance from the receding past was symbolized for him by the pathetic figure of his “cradle-mate, baby-mate, little boy-mate,” Tom Nash, deaf and dumb now as he had been for almost forty years, since the night he went skating with Sam and fell into the river. Sam’s mother too, with whom he spent “a beautiful evening” of reminiscence, was increasingly dislocated from the present; she was eighty-two now and would live to eighty-seven. “Poor old Ma,” he noted, “asking in haste for news about people who have been dead forty, fifty, and sixty years.” Like Jane Clemens, sinking so far and fast into anility that soon she would have to ask Orion what relation Sam was to her, the Yankee, even as first conceived, has lost the power and desire to shake off his dream. “He mourns his lost land—has come to England and revisited it, but it is all so changed and become old, so old—and it was so fresh and new, so virgin before.” Thus Clemens outlined the frame story surrounding Hank Morgan’s yellowed palimpsest, and he supplied the only possible ending: “He has lost all interest in life—is found dead next morning—suicide.”

  The implications were too unpleasant to face up to directly, and neither Clemens (at first) nor those on whom he tried out the idea acknowledged that it might lead to something other than a splendidly funny book. “That notion of yours about the Hartford man waking up in King Arthur’s time is capital,” Howells said in January 1886, after the story had been talked to him; and even in 1908, when he was reading the book for at least the second time, Howells still called it “the most delightful, truest, most humane, sweetest fancy that ever was.” The book also seemed pure fun to a group to whom Clemens read the first three chapters and outlined the rest on November 11, 1886, at Governor’s Island in New York; this group was the members and guests of the Military Services Institution, fittingly enough for the subject matter a society dedicated to the promotion of the military interests of the United States. The final battle had reached the tadpole stage: under contract from King Arthur, the Yankee (then known as “Sir Robert Smith of Camelot”) undertakes to kill off at a tournament fifteen kings and acres of hostile knights. Squadron after squadron they charge, while from behind an electrified barbed-wire fence he mows them down with the inevitable Gatling gun. Having done this, knocked the ogres out of commission and abolished both courtly love and armor, Sir Bob is able to put the kingdom on a strictly business basis: Arthur’s knights set themselves up as a stock exchange, and the going rate for a seat at the Round Table reaches thirty thousand dollars.

  In the audience were two men with experience to judge this mingling of fantasy and laissez-faire capitalism: General Sherman, destroyer of the cotton kingdom, and his millionaire brother John, Hayes’s Secretary of the Treasury and, later, sponsor of the Anti-Trust Act. Neither Sherman appears to have left any recorded comment even though the Yankee had just re-enacted one of the General’s favorite lessons. “In all history,” Sherman had warned a Southern friend in 1860, “no nation of mere agriculturalists ever made successful war against a nation of mechanics.” But from Cleveland, where a newspaper synopsis of the entertainment reached her, came words of alarm from Mary Fairbanks, asserting her role of censor and mentor to her fifty-one-year-old protégé, who still addressed her as “mother” and signed himself “Sand.” Predictably, she was afraid he was about to commit a crime of cultural lese majesty against King Arthur and that body of Arthurian legend and association hallowed by time, Thomas Malory, and, lately, the Poet Laureate’s Idylls of the King. Clemens’ attempt to set her mind at rest reflects some of his own tangled, mutually exclusive aims, still so obscure to him that he seems to be playing the fool. Now, as at the Whittier fiasco, it was possible for him to entertain a demon and not suspect it.

  “The story isn’t a satire peculiarly,” he wrote to her five days after his Governor’s Island performance, “it is more especially a contrast” of “daily life” in Arthur’s time and now. He had no intention of smirching or belittling any of Malory’s “great and beautiful characters,” and he went on to explain—in a literary-lofty-sentimental vocabulary that he favored when dealing with women in general and Mrs. Fairbanks in particular—that Galahad (“the divinest spectre”) will still gallop through “the mists and twilights of Dreamland,” Arthur still keep his “sweetness and purity,” and Launcelot (his unmentionable passion for Guinevere unmentioned) still be the sternest of enemies and the kindest of friends. He was determined, he said, that the disruption of the Round Table and the final battle—“the Battle of the Broken Hearts, it might be called”—should lose none of their “pathos and tears” through his handling.

  Writing a book which, as far as it preaches anything, preaches irreverence, the guillotine, a reign of terror, and a kind of generalized despair, he still believes that he is writing a blameless, instructive tale for women and children. Nowhere in this long letter does he make a single mention of the Yankee. Also to demonstrate his high seriousness Clemens told Mrs. Fairbanks that he was writing “for posterity only; my posterity: my great grandchildren. It is to be my holiday amusement for six days every summer the rest of my life. Of course I do not expect to publish it; nor indeed any other book …” Along with this image of a writer who, presumably rolling in money from the typesetter, could afford to retire from the market place, he left her with a final, reassuring glimpse of cultural orthodoxy: he was now reader to a dozen or so ladies who met every Wednesday in his billiard room—the favored theater for his repertory of identities—to hear him explicate the poetry of Robert Browning. (“I can read Browning,” he liked to say, “so Browning himself can understand it.”)

  The following April Clemens appeared before another military group, the Union Veterans’ Association of Maryland, and gave an abbreviated version of “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” In the retelling he made an important change which relates his Civil War experience directly to his book in progress and suggests that the unresolved tensions of his uncomfortable role as a Confederate irregular and deserter were now being translated into the major conflicts of the book itself. The turning point of “A Campaign That Failed” had been the moonlight shooting of the unarmed, unidentified soldier thought to be the vanguard of a pursuing Union force. In Mark Twain’s Baltimore speech the killing of this solitary stranger becomes just another hyperbolic joke: “So began and ended the only battle in the history of the world where the opposing force was utterly exterminated, swept from the face of the earth—to the last man.” Having demonstrated that he (like the Yankee) is invincible in battle, Second Lieutenant Clemens, in awe of his own powers, decides to withdraw to civilian life, let the Confederacy collapse, and allow the Union to survive—a wise decision, he told the Baltimore veterans, because the United States in 1887 was the “one sole country nameable in history or tradition where a man is a man and manhood the only royalty.”

  To a great extent Hank Morgan is Mark Twain. Both are showmen who love gaudy effects. But this, as Clemens said in criticism of a stage version of the Yankee, is only “his rude animal side, his circus side.” For the Yankee, like Mark Twain, is also “a natural gentleman,” with a “good heart” and “high intent.” Both combine idealism and nostalgia with shrewd practicality and devotion to profit. Their revolutionary, humanitarian zeal is tempered and at times defeated by their despairing view of human nature. By an ironic reversal, the Rebel soldier’s historic battle with the Yankee scout has the symbolic content of the Connecticut Yankee’s battle with the enemies of his “republic.” Having made the connection in terms of his own experience, Mark Twain went on to explore in his book a number of implicit parallels between Arthur’s England and the American South: slavery; an agrarian economy which came into armed conflict with an industrial economy; a chivalric code which, Clemens said, was secondhand Walter Scott and kept the South mawkish, a
dolescent, verbose, and addicted to leatherheaded anachronisms like duels and tournaments. In both frameworks a civil war destroys the old order, and the Yankee has as acute a sense of loss as Mark Twain did. In the course of writing A Connecticut Yankee, Mark Twain compelled his original matrix (not a stable one to begin with) of a “contrast” rather than a “satire” to accept and contain a remarkable range of conflict and anger. Finally the matrix burst. He pronounced a curse on both parts of the “contrast” and ended his battle of ancients and moderns with a double defeat.

  “It is a perfect day indeed,” he wrote to Orion’s wife on a Sunday in July 1887. From his study at Quarry Farm he looked out, in enormous contentment, over the purple shaded valley. Livy was resting, the children had gone for a walk in the woods, his cats were sleeping nearby. Later, at the piano, he sang—“Go Down, Moses,” “Gospel Train,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Die Wacht am Rhein,” “Die Lorelei”—and then he read late into the night. Yet the sixteen chapters he wrote during what began as a “perfect” summer trace a pattern of mounting anxiety, bitterness, and invective; all his experience, his business involvements as well as his reading of history, pointed to a single conclusion and a single mood. Early in July he had been too occupied with the typesetter to get started. Later that month, just as he hit his stride again, he had to stop for a week to wrestle with the machine in Hartford and the publishing house in New York. Webster, now nearly incapacitated by neuralgia, was less and less able to deal with the mounting anarchy of too many titles and too little capital to publish them with, and the outlook was gloomy.

  Working seven hours a day on his book, Clemens was tense and anxious, unable to sleep at night. He sat up late, smoking and thinking—“not pleasantly.” “I want relief of mind,” he complained to Charley after one of these bad nights; in the deepest depressions of his Buffalo year he had felt the same urgency. “The fun, which was abounding in the Yankee at Arthur’s Court up to three days ago, has slumped into funereal sadness, and this will not do—it will not answer at all. The very title of the book requires fun, and it must be furnished. But it can’t be done, I see, while this cloud hangs over the workshop.” Two weeks later his mood, characteristically, had turned around completely: now he was proudly writing “an uncommonly bully book” which would sell twice as many copies as Huckleberry Finn, and for a while he even deluded himself into believing he could finish it by November. By this time, though, the machine and the publishing house were in the saddle again and riding him hard. “This kind of rush is why parties write no books,” he said with a minimum of regret, as if relieved not to have to follow the Yankee in the direction he had taken. Mired deeper and deeper in business, he took up the manuscript again the following summer too late, as he told Andrew Chatto, to finish even in 1888; and it was partly his urgent need for money that compelled him to keep on against extraordinary distractions during the winter and spring of 1889 in Hartford—the social season and therefore the equivalent for him of working a night shift—and write the final chapters in May, five months too late, for all his determination to celebrate the apparent perfection of the machine.

  During all this time the abounding “fun” never wholly returned. A Connecticut Yankee contains episodes as richly comic and satirical as anything he ever wrote, but they are more and more frequently, finally compulsively, presented in terms of havoc. It was apparent to Clemens himself that he was passing through some crisis of ebbing faith in the Great Century, a “negative conversion” that he could hardly help but dramatize in the final chapter of his book. “The change,” he declared to Howells (in a flash of self-illumination totally absent from his letter to Mary Fairbanks), “is in me—in my vision of the evidences.”

  When he said this in August 1887, he had just been rereading Carlyle’s French Revolution, and he recognized that “life and environment” had made him “a Sansculotte!—And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat”—calling for death to all ancient forms of authority: monarchy, aristocracy, the Catholic Church. None of these posed much of a threat to him or to America in the 1880s. Like Arthur’s England, their remoteness made them permissible scapegoats for an anger whose real objects were much closer to home. True, modern Europe offered him few “evidences” that it was any better than it ever had been; European morals, as he read over and over again in Lecky, had scarcely been improved by social or material progress. Clemens hated the French more than ever; their sexual code, and their incapacity for independent thought and action seemed what they had been in the days of Saint-Simon, whose Memoirs, along with Lecky’s History, he often read at night. Matthew Arnold’s celebrated strictures on American civilization enraged him when they were published in 1888,* because they seemed merely to demonstrate that the English were as servile, conformist, and brutalized as they had been in the darkest ages, their national character combining the primary traits of the dog and the lion (so far behind him had he now left that Anglomania which had distressed his friends fifteen years earlier). Almost monthly, from 1887 on, in lectures and in articles in the Century, the traveler George Kennan described the savagery of life under the Czar. His accounts of Siberian slave labor, which Clemens borrowed from in A Connecticut Yankee, shed in the contrast a wanly charitable light on slavery even as it had been in England and the United States. “If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite,” Clemens exclaimed in a voice thick with emotion after hearing Kennan lecture in Boston, “then thank God for dynamite!”

  Yet what the Yankee dynamites is not only the old chivalric and autocratic order—Europe, symbolically—but also all the apparatus of the “new deal”† that he tried to impose on what he bitterly acknowledges is “human muck.” “All our noble civilization factories went up in the air and disappeared,” he says. “We could not afford to let the enemy turn our own weapons against us.” And it becomes clear that the apparatus of enlightenment and progress introduced by the Yankee is in some way a “weapon” which destroys its beneficiaries as well as its enemies. The busy factories hidden all over England, he says, are like a “serene volcano, standing innocent with its motionless summit in the blue sky, and giving no hint of the rising hell in its bowels.” Throughout the book there are similar metaphors which suggest that Clemens, for all his expressed enthusiasm for what he called “machine culture,”* nursed the covert belief that the machine was a destructive force. For him and for many of his contemporaries the most familiar epitome of the two-facedness of the machine was the steam locomotive tearing and shrieking its way through the heart of the American Eden (and destroying two of his most cherished idyls, river steamboating and the self-sufficing agricultural life he remembered at his Uncle John Quarles’s farm). Clemens’ concurrent experience with Paige’s typesetter confirmed his worst fears. The very names the Yankee gives to his institutions—“civilization factories” and, a dehumanizing pun, “man factories”—suggest not the fervent brotherhood of Whitman’s utopian democracy but instead a bleak, industrial collectivism, the nightmare society of a monolithic state ruled by the Boss.

  Working through a crisis of belief in fictional terms, Clemens found himself unable, either ideologically or emotionally, to cope with the historical extremes that lay on either side of his pastoral, drowsing Hannibal. Out of desperation and bafflement he chose the way of the anarch. The final combat, more a massacre along the lines of Little Bighorn than a “Battle of the Broken Hearts,” is a gruesome practical joke. Virtuoso of dynamite, electricity, pent-up water, and the Gatling gun, the Yankee surveys twenty-five thousand dead lying on the field (for reasons of taste Clemens suppressed a reference to four million pounds of human meat). In a moment of tragic overconfidence he declares, “We fifty-four”—Clemens’ age in 1889—“were masters of England!” But he is actually trapped within three walls of dead men, he is the victim of his own victory. Wounded and apparently dying, he has only one place to go: backward into the cave. He is carried there by his band of boys—Sam Clemens has come back to Han
nibal for good. Having already rejected all the values and both the “contrasts” of the book, the Yankee makes a further withdrawal, as Clemens himself was shortly to do, into the dream.

  By an ironic accident, Livy, her husband’s vigilant editor, had a severe case of pinkeye during the spring, and even in August, when the proofs of A Connecticut Yankee were nearly ready, she was still forbidden by her doctor to use her eyes for reading or writing. She insisted that Clemens ask Howells to read the proofs. “She is afraid I have left coarsenesses which ought to be rooted out, and blasts of opinion which are so strongly worded as to repel instead of persuade,” Clemens explained to Howells. For once, despite their remarkable rapport, the two might have been talking to each other across the Grand Canyon. “Last night I started on your book, and it sank naturally into my dreams,” Howells wrote from Cambridge on September 19, 1889. “It’s charming, original, wonderful—good in fancy, and sound to the core in morals.” And from Hartford three days later answered a man who knew that in the course of writing the Yankee his demons had been loosed and could never be kenneled again: “Well, my book is written—let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn’t be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can’t ever be said. And besides, they would require a library—and a pen warmed up in hell.”