Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Read online

  Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

  A BIOGRAPHY

  JUSTIN KAPLAN

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS

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  Copyright © 1966 by Justin Kaplan. Previously unpublished material controlled by the Mark Twain Company © 1966 by the Mark Twain Company.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2006

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Designed by Eve Metz

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  11 13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Touchstone edition as follows:

  Kaplan, Justin.

  Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.

  (A Touchstone book)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910—Biography.

  2. Authors, American—19th century—Biography.

  I. Title. II. Title: Mister Clemens and Mark Twain.

  PS1331.K33 1983 818′.408 [B] 82-19597

  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-74807-4

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2931-9

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  For permission to quote previously unpublished material by Samuel L. Clemens and his family, the author is indebted to Thomas G. Chamberlain and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, Trustees of the Estate of Samuel L. Clemens and of the Trust under the Will of Clara Clemens Samossoud. The author is also indebted to the following publishers and author’s representatives for permission to quote from:

  The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider. Harper & Brothers, 1959. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  “Dear Master Wattie: The Mark Twain-David Watt Bowser Letters.” Southwest Review, Spring, 1960. Reprinted by permission of the Southwest Review and the Mark Twain Company.

  Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain, edited by Bernard DeVoto. Harper & Row, 1962. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  The Love Letters of Mark Twain, edited by Dixon Wecter. Copyright 1947, 1949 by The Mark Twain Company. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  Mark Twain, A Biography by Albert Bigelow Paine. Harper & Brothers, 1912. Reprinted by permission of Harper and Row, Publishers.

  Mark Twain, Business Man, edited by Samuel C. Webster. Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown, 1946. Copyright 1944, 1946 by The Mark Twain Company. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Samuel C. Webster.

  Mark Twain at Work by Bernard De Voto. Harvard University Press, 1942. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.

  Mark Twain-Howells Letters, edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson. Harvard University Press, 1960. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press, The Mark Twain Company, and William White Howells.

  Mark Twain in Eruption, edited by Bernard DeVoto. Harper & Brothers, 1940. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, edited by Dixon Wecter. Huntington Library, 1949. Reprinted by permission of Huntington Library Publications and The Mark Twain Company.

  Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 2 Vols., edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. Harper & Brothers, 1924. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  Mark Twain’s Letters, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. Copyright 1917 by The Mark Twain Company; renewed 1945 by Clara Clemens Samossoud. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  Mark Twain’s Letters to Will Bowen, edited by Theodore Hornberger. University of Texas Press, 1941. Reprinted by permission of Theodore Hornberger and The Mark Twain Company.

  Mark Twain’s Notebook, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. Copyright 1935 by The Mark Twain Company; renewed 1963 by Louise Paine Moore. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  Memories of a Hostess by M. A. DeWolfe Howe. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922. Reprinted by permission of Mark DeWolfe Howe.

  My Mark Twain by William Dean Howells. Harper & Brothers, 1910. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  The Writings of Mark Twain, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. Harper & Brothers, 1922-1925. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.

  FOR ANNE BERNAYS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. “A roving commission”

  2. “The tide of a great popular movement”

  3. “The fortune of my life”

  4. “I do not live backwards”

  5. “Little Sammy in Fairy Land”

  6. “A popular author’s death rattle”

  7. “I did not know I was a lion”

  8. “Era of incredible rottenness”

  9. “Busiest white man in America”

  10. Spirits of ’76

  11. “The free air of Europe”

  12. “Everything a man could have”

  13. “Our great Century”

  14. The Yankee and the Machine

  15. “Get me out of business!”

  16. “Never quite sane in the night”

  17. “Whited sepulchre”

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Photographs

  PREFACE

  THIS BIOGRAPHY BEGINS when its subject is already thirty-one and a journalist in San Francisco. A few words to explain this abruptness may be in order. Samuel Clemens’ early years—which cover his childhood along the Mississippi, his careers as printer’s apprentice, itinerant typesetter, river pilot, Confederate irregular, Western prospector and newspaper reporter—were both his basic endowment in raw experience and his favorite subject. He was always his own biographer, and the books he wrote about these years are incomparably the best possible accounts, even if they may not always be the truest (and it is possible to argue that Clemens’ omissions and reshapings in themselves suggest a kind of truth). But the central drama of his mature literary life was his discovery of the usable past. He began to make this discovery in his early and middle thirties—a classic watershed age for self-redefinition—as he explored the literary and psychological options of a new, created identity called Mark Twain. And this usable past, imaginatively transformed into literature, was to occupy him for the rest of his life. Moreover, the terms and directions of his discovery were dictated not only from within but also by his exuberant response to the three or four decades of American life after the Civil War. Near the beginning of this period, Mark Twain named it the Gilded Age, and to a remarkable degree his life is a function of his involvement. The way in which he first sighted the challenges and rewards of his period, grappled with them, and derived from them fulfillment as well as crushing disillusionments, is, I believe, an integral story which may also make us question some of the stereotypes of the Gilded Age.

  Albert Bigelow Paine began his authorized biography of Mark Twain in 1906, while his subject was still living. The book is monumental and indispensable, and any latter-day biographer is grateful for firsthand knowledge that Paine alone had. The price he paid for this knowledge was a certain sacrifice of perspective in time—a full one third of his book covers the relatively barren period between 1900 and 1910—and in materials. Since 1912, when Paine’s book was published, an immense scholarly as well as critical l
iterature about Mark Twain has sprung up. Some of this literature now makes the biographer’s job in part one of synthesis. Another area of it, newly published primary materials—for example, the two volumes of Mark Twain-William Dean Howells correspondence published in 1960—comes with such a richness and scrupulosity of supporting information that part of the biographer’s job is already done for him. I hope that the Notes at the back of this book will show the extent of my debt to the work of others.

  Through the liberality of Paine’s successors as literary editors, the vast treasurehouse of Mark Twain’s papers has been opened to scrutiny. Among these papers, now at the University of California at Berkeley, are copies of material from other collections, including the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature at the University of Virginia. To Henry Nash Smith, former editor of the Mark Twain Papers, and to Frederick Anderson, their present editor, I wish to express my thanks not only for access to the collection but also for innumerable kindnesses and courtesies over the past six years. For permission to consult other manuscript materials by Mark Twain and his circle, and for help along the way, I am also indebted to Dr. John Gordan and Mrs. Lola Sladitz at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, to Donald Gallup of the American Literature Collection of the Yale University Library, and to the curators of the manuscript collections of the Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library, The New-York Historical Society, and the Houghton Library at Harvard.

  For encouragement and invigoration I shall always be grateful to James M. Cox and Howard Mumford Jones. Dr. Peter H. Knapp and Professor Roland Boyden jogged the writing of this book by kindly inviting me to try out, in a preliminary form, some of the chapters and ideas in talks at, respectively, the Division of Psychiatry of Boston University School of Medicine and Marlboro College in Vermont. It is a pleasure to thank old friends in publishing: Herbert M. Alexander, who suggested this book; M. Lincoln Schuster, who encouraged it; and Joseph Barnes, who saw it through. From the start I have benefited from my wife Anne’s gifts as storyteller and judgment as editor.

  —J.K.

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  December 1965

  Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

  CHAPTER ONE

  “A roving commission”

  I

  IN 1866 PEOPLE IN A HURRY to go East from California still retraced the route of the Forty-niners. They went by ship from San Francisco down the coast of Mexico to San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua, crossed the Isthmus jungle by mule, wagon, and boat, and at Greytown, on the eastern side, they took passage in another ship for New York. If spared storm, engine breakdown, epidemic, and quarantine, they reached their destination in a little under four weeks. By 1869 the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific would be joined at Promontory Point in Utah, and on the new road the traveler would be able to ride, dine, and sleep his way in a Pullman Palace Car from San Francisco to New York in ten days. The continent would be spanned by rail, and this triumph of engineering and venture capitalism would signal a change in the face and character of the nation, the speeding of the frontier’s end, and the exposure of the Crédit Mobilier, that massive scandal which, like the trial of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher on the charge of committing adultery with a parishioner, was a symptom of what would soon be called the Gilded Age. Standing on the deck of the sidewheeler America of the Opposition Line as it left San Francisco at noonday in bright sunlight on December 15, 1866, Sam Clemens, just turned thirty-one, was facing eastward toward his future and leaving the frontiers which nurtured him, which he celebrated and eventually symbolized.

  Diffidently and erratically, already past the age when others have chosen their vocation, he was beginning to choose his. For over four years he had been a journalist in Nevada and California, with a brief assignment in the Sandwich Islands, and the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” on its way to becoming an identity in itself, was already famous in the West. In 1865, on the advice of Artemus Ward, he had sent to New York a flawless story about the Calaveras mining camps. It was published in the Saturday Press on November 18, and soon after, by way of newspaper exchanges, it was reprinted all over the country; even so, Clemens soon found out, it was the frog that was celebrated, not its author. His most powerful ambitions, he wrote to his older brother, Orion (the Clemenses accented the first syllable of the name), three weeks before this taste of national success, had been to be a preacher or a river pilot. He had given up on the first because he lacked “the necessary stock in trade—i.e., religion.” He had succeeded at the second, and it was the outbreak of the Civil War, not his choice, that had cut his career short. Now he felt he had “a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order—i.e., humorous.” His vocation, though so far he lacked the education and training for it, was “to excite the laughter of God’s creatures,” and he was going to work at it. He wanted to strike a bargain with Orion, who had passed the zenith of his career after serving as secretary and sometimes acting governor of the Nevada Territory and was now embarked on thirty years of drift and vacillation: Sam would apply himself to exciting the laughter of God’s creatures if Orion would apply himself to any one rational pursuit. “You had better shove this in the stove,” he said at the end, in ironic reference to the seriousness of his call: “I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ and ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.” In other ways, too, his vocation was becoming clear to him. During the autumn months before he sailed for New York he gave a humorous lecture about the Sandwich Islands. After a seizure of stage fright so intense that he felt he saw the face of death, he discovered a new area of triumph. He could dominate his audience, make it laugh and respond at his will. With his shuffling entrance, solemn face, and attenuated delivery he could not escape comparison with Artemus Ward, the prince of platform entertainers and his mentor, but he was developing a style and presence all his own that captivated audiences in San Francisco and Sacramento, Grass Valley, Red Dog, You Bet, and Gold Hill.

  At the end of his farewell lecture in San Francisco he spoke about the California of the future as a promised land. Now, as unofficial publicist, he carried in his cabin on the America evidences of the Pacific Slope Golconda—specimens of quartz, fruits of miraculous size and quality, the wines which were soon to be so popular in the East that French wines were sometimes relabeled as California. He had a sheaf of letters of introduction to Eastern clergymen, Beecher among them, to politicians and editors, to solid citizens who might sponsor him if he decided to lecture. He was the shipboard celebrity, and as Mark Twain his name headed the list of cabin passengers. He was leaving behind him, he wrote to his mother in St. Louis, “more friends than any newspaperman that ever sailed out of the Golden Gate. The reason I mention this with so much pride is because our fraternity generally leave none but enemies here when they go.” He craved affection and admiration, found them in the laughter and astonishment of his lecture audience, and they came to be the basic conditions he needed in order to be creative and happy. But despite his growing sense of vocation and his growing fame, at thirty-one—more than half a man’s life expectancy then—he had made no real commitment to place, social goal, or identity. He belonged to a professional group that came and went and seldom rooted. He had been a wanderer on and off since 1853; his home was in his valise. His haunts were saloons and police courts, the morgue, and the stage doors of San Francisco’s flourishing theaters. He moved among a subculture of reporters, entertainers, actors, theater managers, acrobats, ladies of the chorus, prospectors, and short-term promoters. As he was to tell his future mother-in-law, he was “a man of convivial ways and not averse to social drinking.” This was an understatement: he had been Artemus Ward’s companion on a marathon bender in Virginia City, and according to some in the West the name Mark Twain had more to do with marking up drinks on credit than it did with the Mississippi. Life on the Coast was full of queer vicissitudes, he said, and his own life there was no exception. One moment he lived
high on oysters, salmon, cold fowl, and champagne at “heaven on the half shell,” the Occidental Hotel; the next moment he was out of work, in debt, even in jail, having too pointedly commented on the brutalities of the San Francisco police. One night early in 1866 he put a pistol to his head. “Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed,” he reflected more than forty years later, “but I was never ashamed of having tried.” At one low point a local editor described him in print as a “Bohemian from the sage-brush” who was a jailbird, bailjumper, deadbeat, and alcoholic. Sam Clemens, the editor insinuated, had been rolled in a whorehouse and probably had a venereal disease; in any case, he concluded, Sam would not be missed in the city by the Golden Gate. Even for an era of scurrilous journalism this was a frightful attack, and Sam’s answer was to depart, in silence, for the Hawaiian Islands. Such was the history that later caught up with him, and seriously threatened his chances, when he invaded the staidness of Elmira, New York, and asked for the hand of Olivia Langdon.

  Now, scarcely two years before his first visit to Elmira, marriage and equilibrium seemed equally remote. In California he had been melancholy and restless, alternately idle and desperately industrious. His jokes and hoaxes were often strident and brassy, betraying raw nerve endings whipped by guilt about his family and by an oppressive sense of obligation to them. The youngest of the surviving Clemenses and once his mother’s despair, Sam was now the hope of the family. A crippled household—his sixty-three-year-old mother, Jane, a widow since 1847, his widowed sister, Pamela Moffett, and Orion—depended on him more and more to rescue them from a long pattern of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Before, in his letters to them he had always been “Sam.” Now, from time to time, he signed himself “Mark,” token not only of his celebrity, which might reflect itself on them, but also of his independence. Still he missed them, and a small part of his purpose in going East was to end a separation of close to six years. With a traveling-correspondent’s commission from the Alta California of San Francisco to supply weekly letters at twenty dollars each, he had first planned to sail for Peking on the January mail boat, to stay in China for a while, and then to go around the world to the Paris Exposition. He postponed the China trip, even though he was certain he was throwing away a fortune by not going. He wanted to see the States again. He now planned to go to New York, visit his family in St. Louis, then travel around the world by way of France, Italy, India, China, and Japan, and return to San Francisco. His plan was casual and changeable, but as the America carried him toward the East it carried him toward the lasting commitments of his life.