V
Under the terms of a new agreement signed in December 1889, Clemens undertook to manufacture the typesetting machine and to pay Paige about $160,000 plus $25,000 a year for seventeen years. In return Paige assigned all rights in the machine. Clemens’ stake in the venture, which included not only the enormous profits he reckoned on but also the $150,000 or so which he had been paying out with increasing hardship since 1885, thus became, in what proved to be a catastrophic gamble, altogether contingent on his success as a promoter. The smooth-talking Paige, whom he always believed at the moment of talking, no matter what evidence there was to the contrary, once assured him they could dispose of the English patent rights for ten million, and Clemens assumed a universal supply of eager money. Far from worrying about his obligations under the new contract with Paige, he was confident that from now on negotiations ought to be quite simple. “It will not be necessary for the capitalist to arrive at terms with anyone but me,” he said. And, the entrepreneurial logic went on, once he had one major capitalist in tow, the smaller ones would not be hard to find.
That summer Charley Langdon no longer the playful cub of the Quaker City but a toughened money manager who looked with anguish on the uses to which Livy’s shrinking patrimony were being put, flatly turned down his brother-in-law’s offer to sell a one per cent interest in the company for $25,000. “The stock is either worth ten times that or it is worth nothing,” Clemens reassured himself after this was followed by comparable rejections; “maybe the latter, although I think otherwise.” Nor would Charley even give the company a loan secured by guaranteed royalties, which took precedence over dividends. John Marshall Clemens’ “heavy curse of prospective wealth” was once again laid upon his son, the Tennessee land this time compacted into the shape of a brass-and-steel machine. By all his calculations Clemens was about to be gargantuanly rich, utopianly rich. The owner of a historic American fortune, he would never again have to write, much less lecture, for money. He was absolutely certain that he could sell 350 machines in New York City alone right away, and that this sale would breed a minimum sale of two thousand a year for the life of the patent and earn for the company an annual profit of at least twenty million dollars, with other millions pouring in each year from Europe. What he needed was the money to build the first 350 machines (he assumed that Paige’s prototype was about to be perfected momentarily). Yet for months he could scarcely raise a dollar; even an old friend and fellow promoter like Frank Fuller backed away although Clemens assured him a return of fifteen hundred per cent on his investment. His own resources nearly exhausted, he frankly acknowledged that he was in a desperately tight corner. That December he again apologized for being able to send only five dollars each for Christmas trifles for his mother, Orion, and Mollie, “The machine still has its grip on our purse.” But as always he kept his eye fixed on the glorious future. Surely, he reasoned, Andrew Carnegie or the Standard Oil Trust would want to come in with him.
In fact, however, there was never much for an investor to see. For all their money calculations, Clemens and Paige were also reluctant to expose their gleaming model of perfection to the scrutiny and the probably corruptive touch of the market place. The machine was so obsessively tinkered with and “improved” that it was rarely in working order. It had been taken down in January 1889, right after its triumphant demonstration, and it stayed in pieces until the summer. Clemens insisted that there be no new experiments, but, beguiled as much by his own dreams of perfection as by Paige’s, he easily relented: the machine was taken down again so that Paige could install a device to keep the keys from jamming. By the time it was put together again in September, Charley Langdon, who might have been convinced by a demonstration, had left for a year abroad. Sometime during the year the machine was kept in commission long enough to set all that Clemens had written since 1884, or ever would write, of his adventure novel about Tom and Huck out West among the Indians; the twenty-three galleys are a double monument to an unfinishable book and an unfinishable machine. Throughout its life span the typesetter again and again showed the same character defects—grimly traceable to its two parents—of a foolish virgin and an overprotected child, precocious but accident-prone. In November, even though it was already “as perfect as a watch,” it was taken down again, this time with Clemens’ approval. This was to be the last polishing, he and Paige believed, which would eliminate “even the triflingest defect” and make the prodigy “perfecter than a watch,” “letter perfect.” Such rapt phrases were about to become epitaphs for the enterprise.
Clemens finally pinned all his hopes on John Percival Jones, the millionaire Senator from Gold Hill, Nevada. He had recently re-established contact with Jones through Joe Goodman. Fifteen years earlier, the solicitations had flowed in the opposite direction: using Goodman as middleman, Jones had persuaded Clemens to become a stockholder and director in the Hartford Accident Insurance Company, incorporated in June 1874; Clemens’ publicity value to the new company was so great that Jones offered to indemnify him against loss on his investment and Clemens assumed his responsibilities gleefully. “There is nothing more beneficent than accident insurance,” he said in a speech which the company later issued as an advertising pamphlet.
I have seen an entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon of a broken leg. I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in their eyes, to bless this beneficent institution. In all my experience of life, I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a freshly mutilated man’s face when he feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right.
The company foundered after about a year and a half; $23,000 of Clemens’ money appeared to be going down with it despite Jones’s promises, and during a period of confusion and alarm Clemens listed him as “that lying thief U.S. Senator Jno P. Jones.” But Jones finally made good on his pledge—the villain, it turned out, was Jones’s brother-in-law, G. B. Lester, secretary and director of the company—and the anger was forgotten. Now Clemens was ready and eager for new dealings. Jones had sailed around the Horn to California in 1849 in search of wealth. He had found it in Virginia City during eight months in 1872 when he watched his shares in the Crown Point Mine rocket from two dollars to $1,800. He could be expected to have the appetite for another big bonanza and also the cash and influence to find ways to feed it.
At the end of February 1890, when the machine was in a brief and rare state of readiness for a demonstration, Jones (“my capitalist,” Sam wrote to Orion) was delayed on business somewhere. Paige took advantage of the delay to work on a new improvement in the machine, an air blast to blow motes off the types. “News today that some vast capitalists want to come and talk business with us,” Clemens wrote to Goodman on April 18. “We have appointed next Thursday—the final touch, the air-blast, will be in then.” Clemens began to count on Thursday for his liberation from worry and want; he had extracted a fifty-thousand-dollar pledge from a banker in Elmira which was contingent on Jones’s decision. Jones and his group arrived from New York around noon. Clemens met them at the station and drove them to Farmington Avenue. There he fed them a dinner calculated to make them grateful and happy, plied them with Roman punch, champagne, brandy, and his best stories, and then loaded them into the family carriage. At the Pratt and Whitney machine shop they found that Paige had miscalculated his time. The air blast was ready, but the machine was not. What was on display instead of the mechanical marvel Clemens had promised over dinner was a crazy tangle of gears, keys, cams, wheels, springs, cogs, levers, and other hardware. The Senator and his consortium marched out in disgust and headed for the first train back to New York. After this disaster, a psychologically predetermined “accident” in which his own motives figured quite as much as Paige’s, Clemens began to sink into what Livy recognized as a serious depression. “I don’t believe you ought to feel quite as desperate as you do,” she wrote to him at the beginning of May, when he was in New Yor
k trying to raise money. “Things are not quite as desperate as they appear to you.”
During the summer Clemens and Goodman pursued Jones in Washington and by some miracle of persistence and persuasion got him to come back to Hartford. This time the machine worked, and Jones was impressed. He bought a five-thousand-dollar share of Clemens’ anticipated royalties and, more important, on August 13 he acquired a six-month option to organize a parent company to make and market the machine. Soon it was Jones who seemed to have Paige’s old job of issuing constant assurances. Jones said he intended to start raising money in December and January (his option was to run out in February), when the machine would be ready to be moved to New York for a demonstration, and, he went on, he anticipated no difficulty whatsoever, provided Paige and the machine, both still financed by Clemens, did their part. And not only Jones was behind the machine, but John Mackay as well. “Do everything you can for Sam and his machine,” Mackay told John Russell Young of the New York Herald. The Comstock millionaires had come around; now Clemens could bring in the smaller fish, all the way down from the Elmira banker, who resumed paying his fifty-thousand-dollar pledge, to assorted relatives and friends, including the Shakespearean actor Sir Henry Irving and his manager, Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Even the news of competing machines—Mergenthaler’s Linotype at the New York Tribune and John Rogers’ compositor at the New York World—still failed to temper Clemens’ restored enthusiasm, but struck him, by some surreal logic, as further proof that Paige’s wonder (“a perfect machine at last,” Clemens was saying in October) had nothing to fear. The only problem for him was to keep Paige and his mechanics at Pratt and Whitney going through the winter; he had begun to borrow—$10,000 from Livy’s mother, $2,500 from Hamersley. Still, he told Orion, he was “feeling reasonably comfortable.”
All the conditions were now ripe for that entrepreneurial tragedy of aspiration and credulity in which, as he said, “a million men would see themselves as in a mirror.” In the Yankee’s image, the volcano was about to pour out its hellfire.
At the end of December Paige and his assistant Davis were still tinkering, still promising that within an hour or a day or a week the machine would be permanently blemishless—“the hoary old song,” Clemens wrote in his notebook on December 20, “that has been sung to weariness in my ears by these frauds and liars!”
“Dear Mr. Clemens,” Paige wrote on January 2, 1891, “The cast iron lever which owing to the poor quality of the iron broke the other day, and the cast iron part accidentally broken by Mr. Parker, have both been replaced by new, substantial, and durable steel parts, and the machine has run since that time without bruising, breaking, or damaging a type of any sort and gives promise of working continuously without delays of any kind. This is the best New Year’s greeting that I can send you.” And it was now time, he was soon saying almost daily, for Jones and his consortium to exercise their option before it was too late.
In Washington Clemens waited impatiently for two days, mainly reading Cymbeline and Anatole France’s recent novel The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard in his hotel room, before Jones consented to talk to him. On a Thursday morning less than a month before the deadline, Jones gave him a grudging few minutes, told him he was too busy with Senate affairs, and rushed him out. Suddenly sick with worry, Clemens went back to Hartford and began bombarding Jones with letters that grew more and more shrill and desperate in their claims. The machine would pay about $55,000,000 a year to begin with and therefore, Clemens argued, “we are offering hundred-dollar bills at a penny apiece”; the machine filled a more urgent need than the telephone or the telegraph; “We occupy the field utterly and permanently,” without competition from Mergenthaler or anyone. Jones would not answer. From Paige came harsher reminders that the option would run out, “absolutely,” February 13. Livy was away visiting Susy at Bryn Mawr, and Clemens, alone in the house which he could no longer afford, paced and figured and waited. Late one evening, expecting the worst, he told Paige not to expect another dollar from him. On February 11 Jones finally telegraphed; it was impossible for him to do anything, he said, a letter would explain. But when it arrived on the thirteenth his letter added to this flat refusal only a transparent contradiction: he and other prudent men of substance felt that conditions in the money market were not at the moment favorable for such a venture; moreover, he said, a number of these same men of substance already had large investments in Mergenthaler’s Linotype.
“For a whole year you have breathed the word of promise to my ear to break it to my hope at last,” Clemens started to write. “It is stupefying, it is unbelievable.”
VI
A week or so later Clemens was able to return to a more nearly normal idiom. Jones, he wrote to Goodman, was nothing but a fraud, a “penny-worshipping humbug and shuffler,” “really a very good sage-brush imitation of the Deity.” On February 20 he noted that it had been two weeks since he had seen Paige or the machine and that during that time—while Livy, a victim of the disaster as much as of the fatigues of her trip to Bryn Mawr, was once again confined to her bed—he had been hard at work on the history game he invented at Quarry Farm and on the first chapters of a novel about Colonel Sellers. Implicitly, in both of these projects he recognized a therapeutic as well as a commercial value. Five days later he gave Orion further news (horribly premature) of his apparent withdrawal from a deep addiction. “I’ve shook the machine and never wish to see it or hear it mentioned again. It is superb, it is perfect, it can do ten men’s work. It is worth billions; and when the pig-headed lunatic, its inventor, dies, it will instantly be capitalized and make the Clemens children rich.” Soon after, he surrendered his contract with Paige. “I am out in the cold,” he told Goodman, but back at work again. For the first time in twenty years, he was compelled to be a full-time writer, and a platform performer too, if necessary; to rebuild his wasted fortunes he planned to do enough work in the next three months alone to earn $75,000.
The vital signs seemed to be reappearing. Still, it soon became clear that he and the machine had not really let go of each other, that he had not even begun to grasp the extent of his involvement, and that meanwhile some corrosive process of change, prefigured and rehearsed in the Yankee, had taken place in his vision and morale as a writer. He finished a new novel, The American Claimant, and he found it so hilarious as he wrote it that he would wake up in the middle of the night laughing. (In Buffalo during the dark autumn of 1870 he had had the same near-hysterical response to his “map” of the fortifications of Paris.) But this farce about Colonel Sellers, now not only an inventor but the claimant to the earldom of Rossmore, is a negligible book. At the same time he was making a note for another novel, which he never wrote but which is another index of his real mood in the spring of 1891: Huck and Tom, both sixty, come back from wandering the world, talk about old times and mourn all the good things that are now gone, and agree that life for each of them has been a failure. “They die together.”
Mark Twain’s body too, as well as his imagination, was rebelling against the present in a significantly selective way. Forced back to writing for a livelihood, he found that his right hand was almost crippled by rheumatism. During the spring it spread from his fingers all the way up to his shoulder—“Every pen-stroke gives me the lockjaw.” His usual handwriting, remarkably clear and even, became angular, cramped, and irregular. He tried for a while to dictate to the wax cylinders of a phonograph that Howells rented for him from a company in Boston. Later in the year, when he was in Europe trying to grind out travel journalism and also taking the cure for his rheumatism at Aix-les-Bains, he painfully taught himself to write with his left hand; all the symbolic meaning the act usually carries is relevant. But the same spring, when every time he picked up a pen the pain shot through his arm, this lifelong exponent of non-exercise—he said his biceps had the tone of an oyster wrapped in an old rag—was learning how to ride a bicycle. Evenings, with Jean running alongside, he wrenched and wobbled down his driveway ont
o Farmington Avenue, his ailing right hand clamped to the handlebar, and he discovered new ways to fall off. He was pretty well battered up with bicycling, he told Livy, but he was making progress and was satisfied. Somehow his rheumatism stopped hurting when he didn’t have to write.
Over the past five years he had become fretful and unpredictable with his children, more and more difficult to understand. “Yesterday a thunderstroke fell on me,” he had written to Howells in 1886. “I found that all their lives my children have been afraid of me! have stood all their days in uneasy dread of my sharp tongue and uncertain temper.” Even after discounting this for his customary self-accusation, enough truth remains. “How he would be affected by this or that no one could ever foresee,” Clara wrote after his death. She still remembered that as children she and her sisters were often terrified of being left alone with him. He was charming and entertaining with them, told endless stories and invented games and romps, but his mood might shift without warning from light to dark, his brow suddenly cloud over, and he would speak to them in anger or with autocratic severity. As they grew up they saw in him a Victorian sternness. He seemed determined to keep them away from men. Clara also remembered disturbing inadvertencies, seeming moments of demonic possession. She was in a rest home recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by Livy’s death when Jean was hurt in a riding accident and, according to the newspapers, crushed. Clemens telephoned to Clara’s doctors to keep the papers away from her—he himself would come and gently tell her about the accident. When he arrived he showed her the headlines nonetheless, and then he gave her his own highly colored and needlessly suspenseful account (Jean’s injuries, it turned out, were minor). “The dear man certainly intended to spare me a shock,” Clara said years later about this display of mingled concern and cruelty, “and some strange spirit led him into contrary behavior.”
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 44