Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Read online

  While this ponderous inquiry was going on, Clemens took a number of firm, defensive stances. What counted for him, he said over and over again, was his present and his future. He was willing to admit, and he was prepared for supporting testimony from his references, that “much of my conduct on the Pacific Coast was not of a character to recommend me to the respectful regard of a high eastern civilization, but”—having established a deferential, slightly barbed polarity of standards, he now becomes surprisingly tentative—“it was not considered blameworthy there, perhaps.” “I know of nothing in my past career that I would conceal from your parents, howsoever I might blush to speak the words,” he told Livy in January, and he went on to defend himself against the charge that he was a vagabond and bohemian by nature, unable ever to settle down and support a family. “It is my strong conviction that, married to you, I would never desire to roam again while I lived.” He complained to Mary Fairbanks that the thought of tearing Livy away from her parents and her home made him feel “like a monstrous sort of highwayman”—Mr. Langdon, it had been hinted, might wither away out of loneliness and melancholy. Was Clemens perhaps a fortune hunter with his eye on the quarter million or so that Livy would inherit? “As far as I am concerned,” Clemens told her mother, “Mr. Langdon can cut her off with a shilling—or the half of it.” And as a final rejoinder in the matter of reliable “references,” he argued that only five people at the most had ever known him at all well and that he felt in entire sympathy with only two of them. One of the two was his dead brother Henry; the other was Livy.

  During January his letters of reference began to come in. They were shockingly bad and, he told his friend Charles Warren Stoddard eight months later, they “came within an ace of breaking off my marriage.” “Clemens is a humbug,” a San Francisco clergyman named Stebbins reported, “a man who has talent, no doubt, but will make a trivial use of it.” A San Francisco bank cashier who had once been a Sunday-school superintendent in Elmira predicted that Clemens “would fill a drunkard’s grave.” The alarms sounded loud in the Langdon house, and as Livy reported the returns to him he felt a kind of hopeless fury. “I do not live backwards,” he pleaded. “God does not ask of the returning sinner what he has been.” And yet the past was pursuing him. He still had visions of married happiness with Livy, intimations of the bay window and the grate in the living room, “flowers, and pictures, and books (which we will read together),” and, however perturbed her parents were, Livy’s own faith in him and her love were not seriously shaken. But she had been made to suffer, he felt; she was being punished for his past, and the guilt was on him.

  Long before the appalling reports came in he had felt restive and resentful under the Langdons’ scrutiny. On November 28, in his first letter to Livy after their provisional engagement, he declared with some ferocity and exasperation, “I have been through the world’s ‘mill’ … and I know it, through and through and from back to back—its follies, its frauds and its vanities—all by personal experience and not through dainty theories culled from nice moral books in luxurious parlors where temptation never comes.” The parlor was, of course, the one at 21 Main Street with Livy’s commonplace book and her collection of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Pulpit pamphlets, with its abundant facts and symbols of the protected life, with its verdant hush and perfume of prosperity. Clemens’ experience was something he had to justify, but it was also his endowment, as others were recognizing. A few days before his provisional engagement he had been the subject of a significant conversation in a Boston salon. Annie Adams Fields, the wife of the eminent publisher James T. Fields, wrote in her diary for November 20, 1868: “Parton thinks it would be possible to make the Atlantic Monthly far more popular. He suggests a writer named Mark Twain be engaged, and more articles connected with life than with literature.”

  In the end Clemens’ refusal to deny his past was rewarded by Jervis Langdon’s bluff declaration of faith. “What kind of people are these? Haven’t you a friend in the world?” Langdon asked after reading the letters. “Apparently not,” was the answer. As Clemens remembered the episode in his autobiography, Langdon said, “I’ll be your friend myself. Take the girl. I know you better than they do.” On February 4, 1869, a half year after his first visit to Elmira, Clemens and Livy were formally engaged. He had come with a plain gold engagement ring which Mary Fairbanks helped him buy in Cleveland.

  “It may be a good while before we are married,” he wrote to his mother the next day, “for I am not rich enough to give her a comfortable home right away, and I don’t want anybody’s help.” A week after his engagement he was back at work, lecturing in the Midwest, but dreaming, as he told Livy, of “peace, and quiet—rest, and seclusion” in his future home with her. “The long siege is over, and I may rest at last,” he wrote on March 4, after his final lecture in Lockport, New York. In that industrial town on the Erie Canal he had an encounter with his boyhood. A Mr. Bennett, who once ran the Sunday school in Hannibal, called on him; in one of those episodes of recollection that were to become more and more frequent and sustained, the preacher’s voice brought back for Clemens “trooping phantoms of the past,” dead and forgotten faces, voices, songs.

  With Livy he had begun to take on a new tone of confidence, protectiveness, affectionate mockery. “The ring continuing to be ‘the largest piece of furniture in the house’ is a burst of humor worthy of your affianced husband,” he told her “Livy, you dear little Gravity.” He began to poke a little fun at the inner workings of the Langdon coal monopoly. He admitted to her that he did not like Isabella Beecher Hooker and her husband, that he resented them for acting high and mighty with him, and that they would be at best only acquaintances of his, never friends. Nevertheless, he confessed that one evening in March he had had “a good time” at the Hookers’. Isabella, who eventually became a spiritualist, was now going through another phase of heterodox enthusiasm and believed that she was Jesus’ sister. That evening she expounded her theology, in particular her ideas about Christ preaching in Purgatory, and she became so insistent and troublesome that Twichell was afraid Clemens’ faith would be shaken—or so Clemens claimed, but it may have been merely his way of externalizing the discomfort of the pledges he had made both to Christianity and to the Hartford social order. Soon he was even teasing Livy about her adored pastor, Isabella’s brother Thomas K. Beecher. He suggested that Beecher was miserly and selfish in his solitary pleasures and that his love for Mrs. Beecher was, even in its charged moments, merely brotherly. (Beecher himself compared his wife to “a steam engine.”)

  He took charge of Livy’s reading, offered to mark and cut up his copy of Gulliver’s Travels so that it would be fit for her eyes, and in the same spirit of wanting to protect her from coarseness and indelicacy he scolded himself for having let her read Don Quixote before he had gone at it with pencil and scissors: “I had rather you read fifty jumping Frogs’ than one Don Quixote”* Their favorite book in common was The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Livy adored it, they were both delighted by the little doctor’s wit, and for Clemens at that point Holmes stood at the pinnacle of literary culture. Clemens marked his copy of the book for Livy and used it as a courting book, and after they were married they kept it in a green tin box along with their love letters. In its margins in March 1869 he tested out the final title of his book: “The Innocents Abroad—or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress”—arrived at, after more than a year’s search, because (as he told Bliss) it would be “easiest understood by farmers and everybody” and because, with “The New Pilgrim’s Progress” merely as a subtitle, hardly anyone could take offense at his reference to a “consecrated book.” How many roots one puts down over the years, Holmes had written. “We will plant them again, Livy,” Clemens wrote in the margin. At midnight, in his room in the Langdon house, a sentence by Holmes about women’s voices made him think about his own funeral; he wished they would sing “Even Me.” The wind wailed, he was reminded of being at sea, sadness came upon him, and he
thought about what Holmes had called the one “splendid, unfulfilled promise” every man makes to himself when he is young and fails to keep in his age. On the last page of their courting book Clemens wrote, “Livy, Livy, Livy, Livy, Livy, je vous aime. M’aimez vous?”

  * “Layin’ on o’ hands is my best holt—for cancer, and paralysis, and sich things,” says the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn. When Clemens wrote this, more than twenty years had passed since Livy’s own “cure”; still, she probably did not enjoy the pointed allusion. In his autobiography Clemens recalled that his mother used to go to a “faith doctor” named Mrs. Utterback. “Her specialty was toothache. She would lay her hand on the patient’s jaw and say, ‘Believe!’ and the cure was prompt.”

  * “It pains me to think of your reading that book just as it stands. I have thought of it with regret time and again. If you haven’t finished it, Livy, don’t do it. You are as pure as snow, and I would have you always so—untainted, untouched even by the impure thoughts of others.” “It is no reading matter for girls. I had quite forgotten the many coarse and in themselves nauseating passages when I sent it to you. No doubt it achieves its aim in a remarkable manner, yet even this is somewhat remote from my princess.” Both passages are about Don Quixote. The first is Samuel Clemens writing to Livy in March 1869; the second is another eminent Victorian, Sigmund Freud, writing to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, in August 1883.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Little Sammy in Fairy Land”

  I

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER his formal engagement to Livy, Clemens filled some idle time in New York by sitting in on a meeting of Jervis Langdon and some of his managers in a room at the St. Nicholas Hotel. Having been accepted into the family, he was now being given a close look at the workings of the thriving family business. For about an hour Langdon and his managers talked about coal, a “very thrilling subject,” Clemens told Livy in a letter, “my blood curdled in my veins.” He became interested only when they reached a relatively small item on the agenda. The landlord of one of Langdon’s valuable employees in Buffalo was going to raise the man’s rent; this employee, who had a large family, had put in for a salary raise to help him make up the difference. If he did not get it he would have to move out. Langdon’s Buffalo manager, J. D. F. Slee, argued conclusively against the salary raise. “It is plain enough to any noodle that that family has got to be reconstructed,” Clemens reported sardonically. “Therefore, the salary will remain just as it is, and Mr. Slee will proceed to cut down the Captain’s family to fit it. Business is business, you know.” (In 1905, in “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” Clemens was still savoring the bitter honey of that phrase. “I have nothing against widows as a class,” Leopold says in defense of slavery, “but business is business, and I’ve got to live, haven’t I, even if it does cause inconvenience to somebody here and there?”) Clemens’ comment on the exploitative rigors of the family coal business—the first of several such comments, increasingly bitter—was as much a love bite as a protest. In the year of wonders that included his engagement, a successful lecture tour, and the publication of The Innocents Abroad, he was already troubled by the implications of his probationary membership-by-marriage in the minor plutocracy.

  In the March issue of Packard’s Monthly he published an article called “Open Letter to Commodore Vanderbilt.” It was one of the few pieces of even occasional writing he had produced since he finished his book. He was as disgusted by the fact that Vanderbilt had become something of a popular hero as he was by Vanderbilt himself, and his disgust reached its firing point at the time of his engagement to Livy. As she would have preferred, he wrote as an embattled moralist instead of a humorist, although he seems to have been too angry to write as well as he could. “Go and surprise the whole country by doing something right,” he scolded the seventy-five-year-old Commodore. “I don’t remember ever reading anything about you which you oughtn’t be ashamed of.” In Vanderbilt and his wealth Clemens saw greed, social irresponsibility, and a moral lesson: “How unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant.” It was a lesson he himself was to study all his life; even now he was aware that there might be a price for tacitly pledging himself to the Langdon scale of living as well as to Livy. Wealth, he went on, consists in being satisfied with what one has, not in having a great deal and always wanting more:

  I am just about rich enough to buy the least valuable horse in your stable, perhaps, but I cannot sincerely and honestly take an oath that I need any more now. And so I am rich. But you! You have got seventy millions, and you need five hundred millions, and are really suffering for it. Your poverty is something appalling.

  In his later years, looking back on his boyhood in Hannibal, Clemens said that the California gold rush was the watershed dividing an age of high morality and lofty impulses from an age of money lust, hardness, and cynicism.* The gold rush, he was writing even in 1869, had taken an entire generation, “the very pick and choice of the world’s glorious ones,” and sacrificed it “upon the altar of the golden calf—the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward.” In his nostalgically simplified view of history, the Golden Age of his boyhood was followed by an age which cared about gold only, and then by a Gilded Age, to whose squalid values (he attributed them to Jay Gould) money gave a specious luster. In “The Revised Catechism,” published in the New York Tribune on September 27, 1871, he summed up the bitter credo of the age:

  What is the chief end of man?—to get rich. In what way?—dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one only and true? Money is God. Gold and Greenbacks and Stock—father, son, and the ghost of same—three persons in one; these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme: and William Tweed is his prophet.

  The code he detested was also, in part, the one he lived by. He wanted to get rich, not just get along. Money was Clemens’ dream, Howells said, “and he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream.” Behind the dream lay the memory of his father’s bankruptcy and the poverty of his childhood; when he himself went into bankruptcy in 1894, the dream was shattered and the family cycle had completed itself. It is hard to think of another writer so obsessed in his life and work by the lure, the rustle and chink and heft of money. Silver is the Holy Grail of Roughing It. All but a few of the characters in The Gilded Age worship the golden calf; to possess money is to be religiously possessed; and money is the main character of that book in the same way God is the main character of the Old Testament. Money corrupts Hadleyburg; the Mysterious Stranger poisons Eseldorf with it. Mark Twain wrote about a stolen white elephant, a £1,000,000 bank note, a $30,000 bequest. He sent one friend, J. H. Riley, to South Africa to gather material for a book about the diamond fields, and he encouraged another, Dan De Quille, to write the history of the Comstock Lode.

  To know money was to eat of the forbidden tree. When the news of the strike at Sutter’s Mill reached Hannibal and some of the villagers packed up to swell the rush, Sam Clemens was thirteen years old but already beginning to make his living as a printer. He was on the edge of adolescence and torn between the strict Calvinism of his background and the easy vice that flourished along the river. It was by no accident of memory that he was to name Laura Hawkins of The Gilded Age after Laura Hawkins of Hannibal, his boyhood sweetheart (and also his model for Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer). The fictional Laura is a strikingly beautiful, warmhearted, idealized girl; she is seduced and abandoned by a Confederate officer (the real-life Laura married a former Confederate Army doctor); and, a changed woman, she then uses her beauty and her intelligence, along with bribery and blackmail, in the relentless pursuit of money. The loss of sexual innocence, by Mark Twain’s standards, was the equivalent of a total collapse of morality; by a process of displacement, money plays the role of sex in his work. He was notoriously reticent about depicting mature sexual and emotional relationships, but he did write a kind of pornography of the dolla
r.

  During the year or so after his engagement Clemens was only intermittently troubled by the moral ambiguities of wealth and power. As part owner of the Buffalo Express, he was to enter into a touchy and vulnerable relationship with the family coal business. Only three weeks after he joined the paper he complained to Livy: “Day before yesterday there was a sneaking little communication in one of the other papers wondering why the Express has become so docile and quiet about the great coal monopoly question,” and he was enraged when one of “those anti-monopoly thieves” wanted the Express to publish a letter urging coal for the people at $5.50 a ton. Grimly echoing his own “business is business” mockery, he asked: “Do they suppose we print a paper for the fun of it?” That same summer Clemens was using his influence with Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune on Langdon’s behalf. Langdon claimed that he was owed $500,000 by the city of Memphis for a paving contract he had underwritten, and while Clemens expressed his disbelief that the money could ever be collected, he was willing to use whatever power he had. He exacted from Reid an editorial citing Langdon’s difficulties in Memphis and urging the protection of Northern investments in the South. “The old gentleman is highly gratified,” Clemens wrote to Reid on the day the editorial appeared (the old gentleman had apparently not been perturbed by an attack on the coal monopolies in an adjacent column). “I hope to be able to do a favor for you some time in case you will do me the honor to ask one”—this was the discourse of men of influence and power. Eleven days later he reported to Reid that Langdon was sufficiently encouraged by the editorial to plan a suit in the Federal courts.