Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Read online

  As much of a measure of his changes of mood during this period was a book that was never written. He planned it in a cyclone of enthusiasm which had the same intensity as his despair. The South African diamond rush was on, and during the fall of 1870 news of spectacular finds came to America. Stories that had not been heard since 1849 were being told again. According to the New York Sun, three poor Capetown fishermen sold all their tackle, went out to the diamond fields, and returned with fifty thousand dollars in stones; a farmer who had gone out to the diamond fields but found nothing decided to give up, sold his walking stick for a shilling, and then stumbled over stones that brought him a fortune. Here was a dream world that also had actuality, and Clemens, placer miner and discoverer of a “gold mine” on the Bosporus, responded to it characteristically. The diamond rush, he told Bliss at the end of November, was a subject “brimful of fame and fortune for both author and publisher,” and he wanted to write a book about it, immediately, but without going to South Africa. He planned to send a proxy there to spend three months gathering impressions and information. When the proxy returned, Clemens would take over his notes and write a book under the name Mark Twain, as if he had actually been to the diamond fields. He had already figured out how in his preface to the book he would justify this deception: hadn’t Daniel Defoe, after all, sent out Robinson Crusoe to find out about life on a solitary island? By February 1872, as Clemens planned it, Bliss would be able to publish a book that would “sweep the world like a besom of destruction.” “Expeditious is the word and I don’t want any timidity or hesitancy now,” he informed Bliss. What had fired such enthusiasm and impatience was his certainty that he had found “the best man in America” to go to South Africa and do the job.

  The hero, and victim, of this infallible scheme was James Henry Riley, Clemens’ drinking and talking companion from newspaper days in San Francisco and Washington. Riley was a kind of flesh-and-blood Doppel-gänger of the unregenerated Clemens, and their careers and personalities ran somewhat parallel. Riley left home in Philadelphia to dig for gold in California, Mexico, and Central America. He edited a newspaper in Alaska, and as a journalist he came to San Francisco, where for a while he was out of a job. In Roughing It Clemens wrote about his first impressions of the seedy and forlorn Riley in San Francisco: “He was full of hope, pluck, and philosophy; he was well read and a man of cultivated taste; he had a bright wit and was a master of satire; his kindliness and his generous spirit made him royal in my eyes and changed his curbstone seat to a throne and his damaged hat to a crown.” Riley was almost always broke; when Clemens visited Washington in July he made Riley the gift of a new suit of clothes. Riley was a marathon talker, charming, ironical, deceptively solemn, “the most entertaining company I ever saw,” Clemens wrote about him in the Express after Riley had passed through Buffalo, a bright interlude in a bleak existence. In that admiring sketch he recalled an exchange at Riley’s boardinghouse in Washington. The landlady told Riley about an old Negro cook next door who had fallen asleep over her red-hot stove and was burned to death, and Riley, without a smile or a moment’s hesitation, pronounced the epitaph, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

  Settled for the winter in Washington as correspondent for the Alta California and clerk to a Congressional committee on mines and mining, Riley suddenly became the target of a barrage of solicitations from Buffalo. He was as fired up about diamonds as Clemens. The night before one of Clemens’ glowing descriptions of the project reached him Riley had dreamed about digging in South Africa and finding stones of unparalleled size and brilliancy. He was eager to go over as Clemens’ proxy, he said, and in the enthusiasm of the moment he put aside his habitual modesty and announced that he actually was something of an expert on precious stones, having learned all about them from a Brazilian diamond miner he once knew in California. But he had his commitments to honor; he would not be able to leave before the end of the Congressional session.

  Clemens blasted Riley loose from his hesitations with a document full of manic reasoning. “This thing is the pet scheme of my life,” Clemens declared, and he outlined his terms. He would pay Riley’s passage to and from the diamond fields, along with expenses of a hundred dollars a month for the three months. Whatever diamonds Riley found up to five thousand dollars’ worth were his; anything over five thousand dollars he would have to split with his sponsor. Clemens had thought of everything: a penalty of five thousand dollars in advance for every month Riley, presumably busy shoveling in the diamonds, overstayed the three months; a salary of fifty dollars a month and board during the time Riley would live with him “till I have pumped you dry”; manifolding notebooks to yield one copy of the field notes for each of them; and a number of security injunctions, including a blackout of private letters, designed to keep the expedition “secret” so that it could be “a frightfully celebrated one six months afterwards, not only here but in every language in civilized Europe.”

  The benefits to Riley, Clemens reasoned, would be a fortune in diamonds picked up in three months, and later on, after personal coaching, another fortune from lecturing. All in all, Riley’s earnings during the next five years might come to fifty thousand dollars in diamonds and fifty thousand dollars in lecture fees, from this project alone, and in his ecstatic state Clemens envisioned other books written in the same way. Riley would go off to “some quaint country,” return with his impressions, “fill me up,” and another besom of destruction would be ready to sweep the world. In the winter of 1870, fifteen years before he took on in loving combat that mechanical marvel the Paige typesetting machine, he felt like a rural tinker with a box of gears, pulleys, and pendulums under his bed who thinks he has discovered perpetual motion.

  “There isn’t a leak in the scheme,” he proclaimed. Here was a surefire way not only of scooping up a fortune in diamonds but also of rationalizing literary production, of industrializing it, in fact, in order to turn out, like so many gold bars stamped “Mark Twain,” an endless stream of sequels to The Innocents Abroad. What this scheme lacked in respect for the working of his own talent (and in recognition of the unpredictable), it made up for in a kind of technological grandeur. Instead of the pick and shovel with which he had dug out his ores—and which he now held with faltering hands—Mark Twain was going to be foreman of a steam-driven, smoke-and-fire-belching, roaring and clanking earth delver and rock crusher.

  “Will get ready to go,” Riley telegraphed on December 5. The next day Bliss mailed from Hartford to Buffalo the contract which he and Clemens, confident of their man, had all the while been negotiating. After a brief visit to his mother in Philadelphia, Riley went back to Washington to pack up, and on January 7, not a day too soon for Clemens, he sailed for England, having kept his mission so secret that even his brother knew only that this was some sort of business trip to Europe. The voyage gave him time enough to study his copy of The Innocents Abroad, and he began to gather the kind of random impression and fact that would be suitable for a travel book by Mark Twain. “I don’t drink ‘spirits’ but will take a small glass of brandy”: he noted this “nice distinction” made in an overheard conversation. In London he equipped himself with a traveling suit, a six-dollar pair of walking shoes “that the Wandering Jew couldn’t wear out,” and a haversack. Along with the rumor that some Americans were planning to charter a clipper ship for the trip to South Africa, he sent Clemens an installment of travel notes and news about fresh discoveries in the Kimberley region that made the project seem more alluring than ever in Buffalo. “Your letters have been just as satisfactory as letters can be,” Clemens wrote to him at the beginning of March 1871, maintaining his enthusiasm even in the face of Livy’s continuing illness, his fear that the rise of Bret Harte meant his own decline, and his decision to leave Buffalo, city of cold winds and hard luck.

  Riley had his first adventure sooner than he wanted. The steamship Gambia out of Dartmouth ran aground on a sandspit 250 miles north of Capetown and stuck fast there, pounded by
the surf and taking four feet of water in her forward hold. Thirty-nine days after leaving England, Riley, still shaken by this episode, was in Capetown. “Your correspondent wouldn’t repeat (with the risks) another such a voyage at sea for one hundred thousand dollars,” he wrote. Clemens’ blithe greeting, “Give my love to the niggers,” left America just as Riley left Capetown on his way to the interior. In East London he auctioned off his excess baggage and set off on the four-hundred-mile journey by ox-cart on rough roads that crossed mountains, rocky plains, and a desert plateau before reaching the diamond fields. There he was soon absorbed into an army of prospectors, more than ten thousand of them, that had been drawn by diamond fever from all the countries of the earth. He emerged three months later, not a dollar or a diamond richer, the joint owner with Clemens of some worthless mining claims. Another Orion in a way, he also came back with an idea for a crushing and sifting machine that he never got around to patenting. Riley was back in London by August, but by then Clemens had returned to Roughing It, and the great diamond book no longer had the same red-hot urgency. “Let the diamond fever swell and sweat,” he told Riley, and he put off work on their book. “We’ll try to catch it at the right moment.”

  Riley was at loose ends through the winter. He worked a little on his machine, thought of lobbying for the post of United States minister to the diamond republics, but mainly he waited for Clemens. The book that Bliss published in February 1872 was not the diamond book but Roughing It, and Clemens, anxious about its reception and back on the lecture circuit, was still in no mood for collaboration. In January he had put off working with Riley until March, and with this cushion of two months against the reality of the project he painted a rosy if vague picture. “I shall employ a good, appreciative, genial phonographic reporter who can listen first-rate, and enjoy, and even throw in a word now and then,” he promised, blind to the fact that what he and Riley, both tireless talkers, least needed was a third collaborator. “Then we’ll all light our cigars every morning, and with your notes before you, we’ll talk and yearn, and laugh and weep over your adventures, and the said reporter shall take it all down.” He confidently expected to have Riley “pumped dry” in a week or so of such work.

  In May 1872 the book remained just as much an intention as it had been the August before, and though the diamond fever swelled and sweated, Riley now had a more serious condition to deal with. At a distance of about forty years from the event, Clemens supplied his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine with the curious information that on the way back from Africa Riley had wounded himself with a fork while eating and had got blood poisoning. On May 16, 1872, Riley, back in his mother’s house in Philadelphia and having already been treated by nine physicians, told Clemens he was engaged in “a simple contest between Cancer and Constitution.” “Come see me as soon as you can,” he pleaded, and he closed with what surely must have been intended, and received, as veiled recrimination: “Wishing myself as I was this time one year ago, and hoping you are quite well with all your cares and troubles.” Clemens went to Philadelphia a few days later and encouraged Riley to spend the summer months talking his material to a stenographer, but it was clear, as Bliss was quickly informed, that there was no hope for Riley and only the meagerest hope for the book. A month later Clemens and Bliss signed a new contract which acknowledged the probability that the diamond book could never be written and applied the advance already paid against the earnings from a future book by Mark Twain.

  Langdon Clemens, the sickly child born in November 1870, the month the Riley book was born, died in June 1872, the month that Howells review of Roughing It appeared in the Atlantic and helped prove to Mark Twain that he had survived his crisis as a writer. On September 17, after a summer of homeopathic medicine, electrogalvanic treatment, and clover tea, Riley, now possessed of the terminal eminence of J. Henry Riley, consul general for the Orange Free State, died in Philadelphia. He was the final fatality of this dark period, the last in a series of casualties that began with Jervis Langdon, included the infant Langdon Clemens, and very nearly included Livy, a proxy voyager who, like the victims in Clemens late fantasies, pointlessly sailed the hot ocean.

  More than twenty years later, when Clemens himself was in South Africa lecturing his way out of bankruptcy, he relived the life and death of Riley. He wanted to write a story about the mining claims Riley had bought; perhaps, he speculated, he was the true owner of the Kimberley mines. In East London he met a man who had bought at auction Riley’s copy of The Innocents Abroad, and he held it in his hand and examined it. “Given to Riley by me—as stated in Riley’s hand in pencil at top of fly-leaf,” he wrote in his notebook. “It was of the earliest edition.” And when, in Following the Equator, he wrote about his own visit to the diamond mines, which were now yielding to De Beers about ten or twelve thousand pounds’ worth of stones a day, he used an image which sums up the delusions and futilities of the Riley scheme: “Nothing is so beautiful as a rose diamond with the light playing through it, except that uncostly thing which is just like it—wavy sea-water with the sunlight playing through it and striking a white-sand bottom.” At the time of Riley’s death Clemens was in England enjoying a triumph as lecturer, and he wrote to Livy, inadvertently echoing Riley’s joke about the dead cook: “Poor old faithful Riley is dead. It seems too bad.” Even the paid death notice in the Philadelphia papers was a better epitaph for this wanderer: “New York, Washington, Ohio, California, London, and South Africa papers please copy.”

  III

  “Do you know who is the most celebrated man in America today—the man whose name is on every single tongue from one end of the continent to the other?” Clemens wrote to Riley in March 1871. “It is Bret Harte. And the poem called the ‘Heathen Chinee’ did it for him.” The previous year Osgood and Company, publishers of the Atlantic, had brought out a collection of Harte’s stories under the title The Luck of Roaring Camp. They were having only a modest success with it until a sixty-line poem called “Plain Language from Truthful James” but soon known on every street corner in the country as “The Heathen Chinee” appeared in the September 1870 issue of the Overland Monthly. Harte later let it be known that he wrote the poem in an idle moment for his amusement, discarded it, and fished it out of the trash basket only because the magazine was running short of copy at press time. The poem had an incredible vogue, and for reasons that are almost impossible to discover—one can describe the environment of a fad but not its cause—it created the sort of periodic short-lived national hysteria associated in the nineteenth century with streetcar and obituary poetry and in the twentieth with the hula hoop and the Beatles. Harte’s dialect poem about a childlike and bland Oriental who euchres two outraged Western cardsharks “created an explosion of delight whose reverberations reached the last confines of Christendom,” Clemens recalled in 1906. (By then he had convinced himself, contrary to all the facts, that until “The Heathen Chinee” was published Harte’s name had been “obscure” to the point of “invisibility.”) At a time when Clemens had reached what seemed like bottom, Harte’s new fame made The Luck of Roaring Camp one of the best sellers of the decade and brought him a number of offers, including, among others that he declined, a chair in English literature at the University of California. With an air less of taking than of conferring an honor, Bret Harte was to accept from the Atlantic—which did not publish anything by Mark Twain until 1874—an unprecedented offer: ten thousand dollars for the exclusive rights in at least twelve poems or sketches for one year commencing March 1, 1871.

  That February Bret Harte left San Francisco with his wife and two small children and traveled East—no outsider as Mark Twain had been four years earlier, but a conqueror. His journey by train was a rite in a national hero cult. The telegraph wires carried almost hourly reports of his trip. For many of his contemporaries, including Clemens and Howells, the approach of this prodigy was an event which they compared with Halley’s comet, the Viceroy of India touring his domain, or the progress of a
prince. His demeanor and appearance were princely. Far from being the rough-clad miner some of his readers thought he would be, he was impeccably tailored and barbered. He was aloof, ironical, deferential to no one, and he was to shock Howells, the pilgrim from Columbus, Ohio, by making fun of the way Emerson held his cigar and by suggesting to James Russell Lowell that he avoid overliterary phrasing in his poetry. The list of New England literati who feted him on his arrival in Boston and Cambridge worked in him not awe but a certain tempered amusement. “Why, you couldn’t stand on your front porch and fire off your revolver without bringing down a two-volumer,” he remarked to Howells. Like any princeling, he insisted on protocol and precedence. In Chicago, it quickly became known across the country, he had shunned a banquet arranged in his honor, because no carriage had been sent to call for him at the station. When Harte arrived in Boston, Howells, his host on behalf of the Atlantic, was careful to meet him at the station in the handsomest hack the Cambridge liveries could offer, and he was rewarded by a cordial handclasp from Harte and by his voice and laughter which Howells found “the most winning in the world.” Eight years later Howells recalled that visit for President Rutherford Hayes: “He spent a week with us in Cambridge when he first came East—and we all liked him. He was late about appointments, but that is a common fault. After he went away, he began to contract debts, and was arrested for debt in Boston. (I saw this.)”