Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 12
Soon after he returned from California he signed on with James Redpath, the pioneer among lyceum booking agents, for a tour in the East and the Midwest. They arranged for him to open in Cleveland, where, through Mary Fairbanks, he was guaranteed the support and goodwill of her husband’s Herald. “I would like you to write the first critique on this lecture,” he told her. It was on the basis of such first reviews that most lyceum committees would decide whether they wanted him. His Cleveland lecture on November 17 before an audience of twelve hundred was a triumph. It had far-reaching effects not only on his own career but on the lyceum system itself, which regarded a humorist as a dubious experiment in programing. “Made a splendid hit last night and am the ‘lion’ today,” he reported to his family, and to Twichell he wrote, “Congratulations to me, for lo! the child is born.” The comic messiah then moved on to Pittsburgh, where on November 19 he played against Fanny Kemble, who was on her farewell reading tour, and he savored another triumph: he drew a standing-room audience of over fifteen hundred to her mere two hundred. Almost anything he wanted seemed within his grasp now, one victory could be parlayed into another, and after he gave the third lecture of his tour in Elmira on November 23 he made a suggestive linkage of courtship and career, even of love and Livy’s history of invalidism. “She felt the first faint symptom Sunday,” he told Mary Fairbanks, “and the lecture Monday night brought the disease to the surface. She isn’t my sister any more.”
Clemens was a child of the Gilded Age. At no earlier time in America would he have found conditions so favorable for his talent to flower and be richly rewarded. Just as the subscription publishing system, long committed to works of piety, patriotism, and history, welcomed a humorous writer, now the lyceum circuit, long committed to cultural and educational discourse, welcomed a humorous lecturer. In its New England origins the lyceum system had been random, local, personal, and high-minded, founded, as Edward Everett Hale recalled, on the implicit faith that “the kingdom of heaven was to be brought in by teaching people what were the relations of acids to alkalies, and what was the derivation of the word ‘cord-wainer.’” In small towns without any other communal entertainment the lecture also became an important social occasion on which young men and women could mingle in a semidarkened hall. The typical lecturer—Emerson or Bronson Alcott or Thoreau—made his own precarious arrangements by letter and was resigned to accidents of time, travel, lodging, and even payment. In town after town, keeping pace with the advance of the railroad, the lyceum took its place along with the church, the schoolhouse, and the jail as part of the social order. But with the end of the war and the nation’s spring westward the system was strained beyond its capabilities. With proliferation came confusion and waste, and inevitably the postwar process of rationalizing was forced on the lyceums for their survival. By joining Redpath, Clemens allied himself with a system which had the same relationship to the old lyceum circuit as, in his own terms, subscription publishing had to trade publishing. (And, to complete the cycle, when Clemens became his own publisher in the 1880s he also became an entrepreneur in the field of authors’ readings.)
Redpath’s Boston Lyceum Bureau, founded in 1868, had among its clients that first year Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher, and, at an average fee of a hundred dollars a lecture (of which the Bureau took ten per cent), Mark Twain. In return for its commission, the Bureau circularized its clients, made bookings, and arranged sensible itineraries. The Bureau also collected the money and thus, it was hoped, established uniform prices and eliminated the lecturer’s traditional morning-after haggle with the lyceum committee. To the lyceums, in turn, the Bureau offered a complete and balanced course of speakers shaped to fit the local taste and budget and to meet the local competition.
Redpath, a reformer who had fought alongside John Brown in Kansas and was active on behalf of Negro causes, believed in the cultural and educational function of the lyceum system, and he also believed that his Bureau would help restore to the system some of the Hellenic dedication of its origins in Millbury, Massachusetts, in 1826. But he had a sure sense of the make-up and taste of the postwar audience, and in order to keep this audience he was willing to make concessions which eventually speeded a process of radical change in the old system. Before and during the Civil War the lyceums opened their platforms to political and reform subjects as well as to education, and after the war popular issues such as women’s rights began to dominate the programs. The lyceum became a stump and a town hall instead of a temple of the Muses. The stars of the system continued to fill houses and earn as much as five hundred dollars an evening, but the smaller performers could compete neither with them nor with the free-lance humorists and pure entertainers who were becoming popular. Many lyceums were ending the year with a deficit; the “house emptiers” (as Mark Twain later called the small-fry performers) were losing more money than the “house fillers” could bring in. And there seemed to be a general coarsening of effects and appeals. One star, John B. Gough, a reformed alcoholic who nightly for years acted out the agonies of his alcoholic period in his temperance talk, was thought by some to be more dedicated to melodrama than to reform. A lecture system that in that one year offered hall room to Henry Ward Beecher talking about “The Ministry of Wealth” and Thomas Wentworth Higginson talking about “The Natural Aristocracy of the Dollar” had come a long way down from Emerson and Thoreau.
Redpath insisted that only enlightened variety could save the lyceums from extinction, that they would have to demonstrate their willingness to please every taste in the course of a season, and he chose his clients to cover a broad cultural range. He continued to offer the standard lyceum fare of clergymen, professors, and lay philosophers like Henry James, Sr., who expounded Carlyle for fifty dollars a night. Frederick Douglass, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among others, satisfied the appetite for topical subjects. Redpath had transitional attractions and novelties such as Paul Du Chaillu, the African explorer, and the Ottoman consul general in New York, the Honorable C. Oscanyan, who put on native costumes, chanted the cry of the muezzin, and performed the genuflexions of Moslem worship. Redpath had a stable of moderately inexpensive dramatic readers and musicians. Finally, in managing Mark Twain, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, the leading platform humorists of the day, he conferred on them a new if shaky status, and, having carried the system all the way from education to pure entertainment, he saw the nerve center of the lyceums move from the lectern to the box office.
“I could have cleared ten thousand dollars this lecture season if I had entered the field before the various lecture courses were filled,” Clemens wrote to his mother less than a month after his Cleveland success. “As it is, I shall not clear more than $2,000, if so much.” Having started late, he had to follow a cat’s-cradle route that took him back and forth between the East and the Midwest, with occasional visits to Elmira, and Redpath’s ten per cent of the gross of five thousand dollars was a modest item in comparison with Clemens’ heavy traveling and living expenses. Even so, his first season opened a lucrative profession to him; invitations for the coming year poured in, and ten thousand dollars began to seem only a minimum profit. He had proved to the lyceums that he could be a draw for generally serious-minded people, and he proved to himself that he could meet and manipulate those standards of Eastern propriety and decorum which had worried him as recently as July 1868. The triumphs of his first season, during which he was recognized as Artemus Ward’s successor, also inspired him with a fanatic dedication to study and polish his performances, work and rework his materials, search out dead spots, experiment with subtle changes in timing and emphasis. The once casual lecturer now learned to make his platform art a subtle and varied medium of delight.
In January 1870, during his second season as a lecturer, Clemens was to tell Livy about an experience he had with a full house in Utica. He walked on stage and said nothing, stood there patient and silent, for as long as he dared, and then, in a moment of exu
ltant power, he realized that he could mesmerize an audience by the sheer force of his presence, could manipulate them at his will. He heard a sudden avalanche of applause and laughter, a welcome which he had earned by silence and bravado and which satisfied a fierce craving in him. “No man will dare more than I to get it,” he wrote to Livy. “An audience captured in that way belongs to the speaker, body and soul, for the rest of the evening. Therefore, isn’t it worth the taking of some perilous chances on?” He felt that he had mastered his craft and, as he later told his friend Riley, learned “dead-sure tricks of the platform” by which he was able, “absolutely,” to “vanquish” his audience. He learned, as Dr. Holmes already had, that a popular lecture must contain nothing that five hundred impatient people could not all understand in a flash; the American, Josh Billings said, “works, eats, and haw-haws on a canter.” “I used to play with the pause as other children play with a toy,” Clemens recalled, and he claimed that he could measure the moment of silence with the precision of “Pratt and Whitney’s ingenious machine” that was supposed to be sensitive to variations of one five-millionth of an inch. The pause preceded the “nubs,” “points,” and “snappers” that he fired off like Roman candles, dehiscent and gaudy, and that not only captured his audiences but subjected them to nothing less than an act of aggression. “The suspense grows bigger—bigger and bigger—your breath stops—then your heart”—he was describing the dentist’s drill, but he might have been talking about his lecture art instead. “Then with lightning suddenness the ‘nub’ is sprung and the spindle drives into the raw nerve! The most brilliant surprises of the stage are pale and artificial compared with this.”
The victories of Clemens’ first seasons also left him with moments of loathing. At such moments he remembered the grime and rattling of long trips on wilderness railroads, sprints by steamboat, stage and carriage, lost sleep, lost baggage, lost engagements when rivers froze and roads were blocked by snow. He remembered shivering wayside breakfasts, gray meals of lard, fried pork, and pies with unspeakable contents. The worst lecture halls were gloomy with candlelight, were either swept by numbing drafts or were so hot and airless that audience and speaker were cyanotically groggy, and everything sounded stupid. Worst of all, for a humorist, were the churches. “People are afraid to laugh in a church,” Clemens told Redpath. “They can’t be made to do it in any possible way.” After a day’s journey and a night’s work on the platform he might find himself in a cold room in a country caravansary where the stove smoked all night long and there was no light to read by and hardly any service. But even such lodgings, he discovered early, were preferable to some private houses where the host talked late into the night, served breakfast at the crack of dawn, and said smoking was not allowed. He remembered being driven around in open buggies during the day to see the customary sights of small towns, and feeling after a while that “all towns are alike—all have the same stupid trivialities to show,” and that he was tired to death of being chattered at, pestered, introduced stupidly or while the audience was still coming in, and forced to talk and perform when he felt harassed, tired, and lonely. He suddenly felt revolted by the same lecture given too many times in too few weeks and by an audience which, for one reason or another, withheld sympathy and response. “These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul,” Holmes wrote about his own experience. “They are what kill the lecturer.” And finally there were reviews which rankled for days, the comments of small-town editors who berated Mark Twain for his mumbling and his drawl, for his “sing-song snuffling tone,” for being a humorist and not a moralist, and who told him to quit lecturing altogether.
“My nerves, and my whole physical economy, are shattered with the wear and tear of traveling, lecturing, ten thousand petty annoyances and vexations and an unusual loss of sleep,” he complained to Livy during his second lecture tour. “When things get to going wrong they keep it up.” In January 1869, at precisely the same point in his first tour, he had the same overwhelming feeling of nemesis and of nerves strained to breaking. In Iowa City, where his lecture was reviewed as a vulgar comic humbug not worth two cents to hear again, he fell on the ice as he was stepping into an omnibus and landed with all his weight on his left hip. The manager of the hotel there made the mistake of waking him at nine in the morning and was greeted with screaming and cursing. Later, after an hour’s vain attempt to go back to sleep again, Clemens tried to ring for some coffee, and when he could find no bell in his room he summoned the manager by renewed screaming and cursing and slamming the door. The manager found him half naked, abusive, out of control, and trying to kick the door off its hinges. The next day Clemens wrote to Livy about this tantrum and told her that he not only regretted it but had even written a note of apology. By this time, however, the editor of the local paper had reviewed the circumstances in print and suggested that this grotesque fracas was a truer illustration of the American Vandal than any the lecture had afforded; and as for the lecturer, “He is the only one engaged for the course whose personal character was unknown.” It was a cruel jab. Clemens was still on trial with the Langdons, still, quite apart from his success on the lecture circuit, trying hard to establish his character as a Christian and a reliable citizen, and he had reason to be anxious about his progress.
III
Both Mary Fairbanks and Charley Langdon assured Livy’s mother that “a great change” had “taken place in Mr. Clemens,” that he was motivated by “higher and better purposes” and had “entered upon a new manner of life.” But Mrs. Langdon also believed in the backward glance. A few days after Clemens’ secret engagement to Livy, while, unsuspectingly, he was telling his sister Pamela that the Langdons were not much interested in his past, only in his future, Livy’s mother rolled up her anxieties and perturbations into one stupendous question which she fired off at Mary Fairbanks:
From what standard of conduct, from what habitual life, did this change, or improvement, or reformation, commence? Does this change, so desirably commenced, make of an immoral man a moral man, as the world looks at men? or—does this change make … one, who has been entirely a man of the world, different in this regard, that he resolutely aims to enter upon a new, because a Christian life?
Such were the terms of a character investigation which was as remarkable for its naïveté as for the amount of sheer discredit it collected.
Mrs. Fairbanks, however, came through, and on December 24—he marked the holiday by swearing off hard liquor and keeping his pledge for at least a year—Clemens acknowledged her “cordial, whole-hearted endorsement.” “For that, and for your whole saving letter, I shall be always, always grateful to you…. There is no way in which I shall not prove your judgment perfect.” And, as if to demonstrate his new character, he took advantage of a lecture layover in Lansing, Michigan, to write for her an unabashedly purple passage about the Nativity: “Eighteen hundred and sixty-nine years ago, the stars were shedding a purer lustre above the barren hills of Bethlehem—and possibly flowers were being charmed to life in the dismal plain where the Shepherds watched their flocks….” Mark Twain, the traveler with the honest eye who remembered Bethlehem as an appalling slum full of lepers, yielded to the devotional sentimentalist and saw the little town in “the soft, unreal semblance that Poetry and Tradition give to the things they hallow.” The angels sang and their music floated by: “It is more real than ever.”
It was not much in the way of writing, but it moved Mrs. Fairbanks. She was relieved that her protégé was on the road up, and, without consulting him, she determined to publish his conversion to the world by publishing his letter in the Herald. In disregard of privacy, professional propriety, and his reputation as a writer, she would have gone ahead with this meddlesome project if he had not arrived in Cleveland a few days later, just in time to stop her. He was thoroughly jolted out of his devotional mood, barely able to disguise his horror and irritation. Yet under pressure from her he agreed to rework the Be
thlehem extracts—“Their reverent spirit is more to my credit than my customary productions,” he wrote to Livy—and allowed her to publish them after all. By this time he was under pressure from Livy as well: he would let the letter be published for Livy’s sake, he explained to Mary Fairbanks. “Poor girl, anybody who could convince her that I was not a humorist would secure her eternal gratitude. She thinks a humorist is something pretty awful.” And Livy was grateful to Mrs. Fairbanks for raising the issue of the Christmas letter to begin with. “I want the public, who know him now only as ‘the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope,’ to know something of his deeper, larger nature,” she wrote on January 15. “I remember being quite incensed by a lady’s asking, ‘Is there anything of Mr. Clemens except his humor?’”
Not many of Mrs. Langdon’s searches for the real truth about Mr. Clemens ended on such an affirmative note as his Christmas letter. At her request he had given the Langdons a list of people who might be able to tell them whether he had been an immoral man or just a worldly one. This list eventually included some Nevada politicians, a variety of Western journalists, the proprietor of the Occidental Hotel, and Bret Harte’s employer, Robert B. Swain, described by Clemens as “the Schuyler Colfax of the Pacific Coast”—“He don’t know much about me himself, maybe, … but he ought to know a good deal through his Secretary, Frank B. Harte (editor of the Overland Monthly and the finest writer out there) for we have been very intimate for several years.” It was a curiously random, even self-defeating list. Forgetting that he had included, at least indirectly, Harte and also Joe Goodman, who in 1862 had hired him for the Territorial Enterprise, Clemens later said that he had left out close friends because he knew they would lie for him. In most cases the Langdons were writing to people they knew not at all to ask their opinions of a man scarcely known to any of them.