Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 19

  In Clemens’ later years, when his feelings about Bret Harte—and Harte’s chronic borrowings and debts—had turned into a barely controllable obsession, he looked back on that princely progress eastward and felt that the train might just as well have carried Harte’s corpse; his best work was already behind him and “he had lived all of his life that was worth living.” At the time, though, he was impressed by Harte’s success and, in striking contrast to what he later said about him, both generous and circumspect. “Indeed Harte does soar, and I am glad of it, notwithstanding he and I are ‘off’ these many months,” he told Webb, and to Thomas Bailey Aldrich he freely acknowledged his debt to the patient trimming and schooling Harte had given him. But at the same time it was impossible for him not to believe that Harte’s rise meant his own eclipse or that the tide had already turned against him.

  Even in an area of demonstrated mastery like the literary hoax Clemens now encountered frustration and failure. Hoping to stir up fresh publicity for The Innocents Abroad, he wrote a review of his own book, attributed it to the London Saturday Review, and published it in the December 1870 issue of the Galaxy. Even this “spasm of humorous possession” was not without self-hatred; the psychologist might not have to speculate for long about the state of mind of a man who, as Clemens did in this review, builds his joke on a statement of “the insolence, the impertinence, the presumption, the mendacity, and, above all, the majestic ignorance of this author.” What Clemens intended as a spoof of the way a stolid, solemn, and literal-minded English reviewer would react to the humor and misinformation in The Innocents Abroad backfired entirely. The hoax was altogether too successful. The piece was accepted not only as a genuine review from an English literary journal but, despite Clemens’ increasingly outraged assertions that he wrote it himself, as a joke on him. “Mark Twain has been taken in,” the Cincinnati Enquirer said. In answer he accused the editors of “a pitiful, deliberate falsehood” and ended up offering to pay five hundred dollars to anyone who could produce a copy of the Saturday Review with that piece in it. The unpleasant outcome of his hoax now seemed to him only further evidence that he was living in a hostile world, for he claimed that the newspapers had turned against him. He thanked White-law Reid for suppressing a snub and a slur in the Tribune: “I guess that emanated from some bummer who owes me borrowed money and can’t forgive the offense.” But when he complained about such incidents to Mary Fairbanks he recognized implications which were far more disturbing than this: “I am pegging away at my book, but it will have no success. The papers have found at last the courage to pull me down off my pedestal—and that is simply a popular author’s death rattle.”

  Several publishers, he said bitterly, had asked him to write a volume of poetry in the style of “The Heathen Chinee”; instead of answering these letters he burned them. Even John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary and eventually Secretary of State, was feeling the pinch of Harte’s rise. His own Pike County Ballads had brought him literary celebrity, but on January 9, 1871, from the security of his post as second in command to White-law Reid, he complained to Clemens of being accused of “plagiarism B.H.” And six days later the bitter charge of “plagiarism B.H.” fell on Clemens himself from the Atlantic’s sister magazine, Every Saturday. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the editor of this weekly, was, as he was fond of saying, “not genuine Boston” but only “Boston plated”; still, he represented those New England literary values which awed Clemens quite as much as they amused Bret Harte. A year or so earlier Clemens had found nothing to admire in Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy; now he found a great deal to protest in a paragraph Aldrich had written in the magazine attributing to Clemens the authorship of “a feeble imitation” of Harte’s poem which had appeared in the Express. “Will you please correct your mis-statement, inasmuch as I did not write the rhymes referred to, nor have anything whatever to do with suggesting, inspiring, or producing them. They were the work of a writer who has for years signed himself ‘Hy. Slocum,’” Clemens wrote on January 15, and he concluded: “I am not in the imitation business.” A week later, feeling that he had been carried away by his anger of the moment, he asked Aldrich not to print the note. But it was too late, as he learned from Aldrich; 42,000 copies of the magazine had already been printed with Clemens’ angry denial and an editorial apology by Aldrich headed, “Mark Twain Says He Didn’t Do It.” It was Clemens’ turn to apologize for “bombastic pow-wow” written in heat. “Who would find out that I am a natural fool if I always kept cool and never let nature come to the surface?” All the same there is a repeated cry of anguish: “But it is hard to be accused of plagiarism,” and, more specifically, “But I did hate to be accused of plagiarizing Bret Harte.”

  On March 6, 1871, Bret Harte formally accepted the Atlantic’s prestigious offer of ten thousand dollars. This was only a few weeks after Sheldon and Company in New York brought out the little book which Mark Twain would eventually destroy and try to forget. The peaks of the one writer’s career had a way of coinciding with the troughs of the other’s; a year after The Innocents Abroad was published Harte’s star had risen and Clemens was afraid that nothing he could write could ever reestablish him. But occasionally there seemed a trickle of hope, a sign that the hard winter was ending, a return of belief that the cycle of wave and trough would continue to his eventual benefit. He planned to stay “shady and quiet till Bret Harte simmers down a little,” he wrote to Orion in March, “and then I mean to go up head again and stay there.”

  IV

  Clemens eventually came to believe that the supreme law was the law of one’s nature—the tiger could be nothing else than a killer—and that consequently there was no such thing as freedom of choice. His own mode of decision was neither discursive nor analytical. His richest choices as man and writer came from deep imperatives of his sensibility; his determinism to the contrary, these choices take on a special dignity both because they were inescapable and because they were evolved in such adversity. During the spring of 1871 he was in the grip of circumstances profoundly disfavoring to any creation. But he managed to make a lasting commitment to his vocation as a writer, even though over the next ten years he was to have considerable difficulty in deciding just what kind of writer he was and whom he was writing for.

  In the same letter in which he told Orion of his resolution to “go up head again,” he explained his feeling about “seeing my hated nom de plume (for I do loathe the very sight of it) in print again every month.” He had hoped at the start that the Galaxy would give him an outlet for writing which was too good for the Express. All too soon, though, his monthly quota of ten double-columned pages turned into a depressing chore. The bitter and angry tone of much of his writing for the magazine, the savagery and undisguised indignation in his satire, gave the lie to the myth of the genial humorist and expressed not only his personal unhappiness but his unrest in the established social order. He attacked the Reverend T. De Witt Talmage, a fashionable Brooklyn preacher who abhorred the smell of the workingman; he attacked another clergyman who refused to bury an actor from his church; and, continuing to assert a position of sympathy with the outsiders and victims of society, he wrote a series of pieces, too crammed with atrocities to be ironical, about the plight of Chinese immigrants. His Saturday Review hoax backfired. Jervis Langdon’s death curtailed his contribution to one issue, Livy’s illness forced him to miss another entirely. He quit the Galaxy with the April 1871 issue. “For the last eight months, with hardly any interval, I have had for my fellows and comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet all the time been under contract to furnish ‘humorous’ matter once a month for this magazine,” he explained in his valedictory. “Some of the ‘humor’ I have written during this period could have been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity of the occasion.” Instead of being “a monthly humorist in a
cheerless time” he was going to write a book and would “write but little for periodicals hereafter.”

  Besides the Express there remained one other encumbrance to his liberty. Through a certain delicate politicking with both parties Sam had got Orion a job in Hartford with Bliss as editor of The American Publisher. This was ostensibly an illustrated literary monthly, but it was really a self-sustaining house organ whose function was to publicize Bliss’s list and his stable of authors. Orion, who had been encouraged by Sam to show neither diffidence nor lack of confidence in his dealings with Bliss, found that his duties included what he said were girlish chores, like addressing wrappers. Bliss was not above a little exploitation; but, after all, Orion had plans for doing some writing on Bliss’s time and also hoped to use Bliss to promote his inventions. Orion’s main responsibility, he learned from Bliss at the start, was to make sure that his brother, a pillar of the publishing house, would not only remain one despite competing offers but would be a pillar of the magazine as well. At a cost of $1,300 a year for Orion’s salary, and with the knowledge that he had got Clemens in his debt by rescuing Orion from unemployment, Bliss could feel he had bought a thrifty insurance policy on a valuable property.

  In the midst of his other troubles and harassments Clemens soon found himself hounded by his own brother. Bliss would pay Sam five thousand dollars to write exclusively for the magazine and to let him publish all Sam’s books, Orion would urge. At a time when he regretted his experience with the Galaxy and was despairing of ever writing another book, Clemens was infuriated by such propositions, and he was even more infuriated when his position was misunderstood. Early in March Orion naïvely told him how enthusiastic they all were about prospects for the magazine, now that they had an exclusive call on Mark Twain, and he added, “We must have something from you, or we run the risk of going to the dickens.” A few days later, Orion, who was sometimes tactless as well as absent-minded, wrote in an even more exasperating role: he had finished a story for children, and he wanted his brother’s professional judgment of the manuscript.

  The result was a series of violent explosions from Buffalo. “There isn’t enough money between Hell and Hartford to hire me to write once a month, for any periodical,” Sam wrote, and he insisted angrily that Orion run a paragraph in the magazine to the effect that Mark Twain would doubtless appear less frequently than any other contributor. And Orion might just as well have thrown his own manuscript in the fire; Sam berated him for it, confessed that he had “no love for children’s literature,” and ended on a note he was to sound again and again: “I am and have been for weeks buried under beetling Alps of trouble. I am simply half-crazy—that is the truth. And I wish I was the other half.” To Bliss himself on March 17, with the sounds of packing and his baby son crying in the background, Clemens wrote: “You do not know what it is to be in a state of absolute frenzy—desperation. I had rather die twice over than repeat the last six months of my life.” He went on:

  Do you know that for seven months I have not had my natural rest but have been a night and day sicknurse to my wife?—and am still—and shall continue to be for two or three weeks longer—yet must turn in now to write a damned humorous article for the Publisher, promised it—promised it when I thought that the vials of hellfire bottled up for my benefit must be about emptied. By the living God I don’t believe they ever will be emptied…. If I ever get out of this infernal damnable? chaos I am whirling in at home, I will go to work and amply and fully and freely fulfill some of the promises I have been making to you—but I don’t dare! Bliss—I don’t dare! I believe that if that baby goes on crying three more hours this way I will butt my frantic brains out and try to get some peace.

  But if peace had gone something else had managed to survive the dreadful winter, and at this moment of utter bottom Clemens was able to state the terms of his eventual survival: “I want to get clear away from all hamperings, all harassments. I am going to shut myself up in a farm-house alone, on top of an Elmira hill, and write—on my book.”

  He loathed Buffalo. What he remembered now was not the night he was tricked into entering the gaslit fairyland on Delaware Avenue but instead months of illness, death, drudgery, failure. On March 2 he put up for sale his two ties to the city, the house and his interest in the Express, both reflections not only of Jervis Langdon’s beneficence but of Jervis Langdon’s aspirations for him. He prepared to move Livy to Quarry Farm, her sister’s summer home high above Elmira, and finish his book. Afterward he planned to move to Hartford, and already he was asking Orion to find him a storage place for his ten or twelve thousand dollars’ worth of furniture. “It will not be needed by us for at least two years—I mean to take my time in building a house and build it right—even if it does cost 25 per cent more.” Ironically, it was Livy’s inheritance from her father that helped give such definiteness and amplitude to his plans to set up as a man of letters in the land of steady habits. And inseparable from his decision to leave Buffalo was a new burst of interest in Roughing It. Two days after he advertised his house for sale he told Orion he had decided to rewrite one of his characters from the first chapter on. “It’s no fool of a job, I can tell you, but the book will be greatly bettered by it.” The character he rewrote was that of the narrator himself, Mark Twain, telling in part the story of his progress from tenderfoot to toughened veteran.

  At Quarry Farm that April Clemens and Livy were experiencing a parallel convalescence. After three or four bedridden months Livy was able to walk a few steps at a time supported by a chair. Clemens’ support was Joe Goodman, the former Enterprise editor, who came to stay with him and, filling the role vacated by Bret Harte and soon to be filled by Howells, read over the manuscript. There were days of relapse in which Clemens despaired of the book and believed he was hearing “a popular author’s death rattle,” but, spurred on by Goodman’s praise, he was writing with increasing confidence and exuberance.

  On April 20 he sent Bliss a chapter for the American Publisher. “By all odds it is the finest piece of writing I ever did. Consequently I want the people to know that it is from the book.” What he enclosed was Chapter Eight, the account of the pony-express rider, “a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance.” “There was no idling time for a pony-rider on duty,” Clemens wrote; he was ready at all times to leap into his saddle and ride through Indian country carrying his slim packets of letters “written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf.” Like the Mississippi River pilot, he was alone in his authority. His horse was “born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman,” and his manner was lordly; he burst past the stagecoach and acknowledged the whoops and hurrahs of ordinary men with

  a wave of the rider’s hand, but no reply…. So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe.

  In some unconscious, unerring way Clemens was summing up his restored pride in himself as a writer and his dazzled wonderment at the workings of his imagination.

  By the middle of May he was bettering his best pace on The Innocents Abroad. Writing “with a red-hot interest,” as he told Bliss, he could turn out thirty pages a day or more, sometimes fifty or sixty. He smoked at full blast once again. “Nothing grieves me now, nothing bothers me or gets my attention—I don’t think of anything but the book,” and he was no longer afraid he could not equal his first success. “A bully book,” “a starchy book,” one that would sell: he was willing to bet that no one who started it could put it down before the end. And along with this complete swing in mood came evidence that his reputation had survived its crisis; he was flooded with offers for books and almanacs, articles and lectures. “The reaction is beginning and my stock is looking up.”

  More than a year and a half earlier, on October 16, 1869, Clemens published in the Express the first in the series of travel
letters that were intended to be written with the help of Professor Ford. It was entirely Clemens’ work, a description of Mono Lake in California which he later used almost unchanged in Chapter Thirty-eight of Roughing It. It was meant to be the setting for an episode which he had in mind but which he did not publish at the time; that episode appears as the next chapter in the book, written when his stock had begun to look up again. He described Mono Lake in the Express on October 16 as a “solemn, silent, sailless sea” of corrosive waters which were nearly pure lye. This Dead Sea is surrounded by a “lifeless, treeless, hideous desert.” There are only two seasons, “the breaking up of one winter and the beginning of the next.” The lake supports no life except a sort of worm which looks like a piece of white thread. Its shores are outlined by a belt of flies an inch deep and six feet wide. “The ducks eat the flies—the flies eat the worms—the Indians eat all three—the wildcats eat the Indians—the white folks eat the wildcats—and thus all things are lovely.” These images of corrosive waters and of a brute order of nature are premonitory of the images that obsessed the despairing Mark Twain in his sixties: a drop of water turns, under the glare of the microscope lamp, into a hot, brassy sea where the monsters feed on each other and where the people on derelict ships go mad.