Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Read online

  Something that happened to Clemens in Buffalo about a month and a half before he published the Express piece appears to have triggered both his recollection of Mono Lake and the episode with which he later connected it. He had gone rowing with two friends on Lake Erie; a storm broke, they were caught in a “heavy sea,” and they nearly capsized. He reported this adventure to Livy on August 25. As extended in Roughing It, Mono Lake becomes the setting for a similar episode, which Clemens invests with powerful psychological overtones. His account has both the simplicity and the intensity of nightmare; its tone is like that of no other passage in the book, and it is difficult not to believe that the episode corresponds to a conflict within Clemens himself.

  The narrator and Calvin Higbie (to whom Roughing It is dedicated) set out one morning to row to one of the barren lava islands in the middle of the lake:

  We had often longed to do this, but had been deterred by the fear of storms; for they were frequent, and severe enough to capsize an ordinary rowboat like ours without great difficulty—and once capsized, death would ensue in spite of the bravest swimming, for that venomous water would eat a man’s eyes out like fire, and burn him out inside, too, if he shipped a sea.

  They reach the island, and while they are there, having found not the fresh water they wanted but only “solitude, ashes, and a heartbreaking silence,” the wind rises and a storm begins. They rush back to the shore and discover their boat has been blown away. Eventually they see it tossing about in a heavy sea fifty yards away. Their last hope now is that the wind will blow the boat close to a jutting point so that they can jump in. The moment arrives, and it is Higbie, not the narrator, who with a great spring lands in the stern of the boat and retrieves it. After a stormy and difficult passage across the lake, when they are only a few yards from shore, they capsize. But the turning point in the episode, the revelation which makes the capsizing at the end an ironical accident, is something that Higbie tells the narrator after his leap into the boat: he hadn’t cared whether the boat was within jumping distance or not—he had made up his mind that if he missed he would close his eyes and mouth to the corrosive waters and swim the eight or ten yards. The narrator reacts to this with the same intensity with which Clemens, after the darkest year of his life, realized that his talent was unscathed and his vocation clear: “Imbecile that I was, I had not thought of that. It was only a long swim that could be fatal.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I did not know I was a lion”

  I

  HOWELLS FOUND IT remarkable that none of the California writers who burst on the literary scene after the Civil War wanted to go back there; some of them even seemed to hate California, as if their frontier image of it was the only one they could accept. Bret Harte came East, to Boston, Newport, and New York; debt drove him to take a consular post in Prussia; and he spent the last twenty years of his life in England, an exile. Joaquin Miller, the bearded poet of the Sierras, headed for England wearing his sombrero and chaps; he was taken up by William Michael Rossetti and his circle, and when Clemens met him in London in 1873 Miller said he was engaged to the daughter of a baronet. During Clemens’ 1873-74 lecture season in London he hired as his private secretary and companion yet another Californian far from the scene of his first literary celebrity, Charles Warren Stoddard. And Mark Twain, having fled Buffalo after only a year, was to revisit Hannibal a number of times but California not even once. In none of these places could his developing needs be met.

  “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,” Henry James said. “It needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.” In literary values James and Clemens were antipathetic: James regarded Clemens’ work as that of a buffoon and vulgarian, while Clemens, though he included James among the “big literary fish,” said of his work, at least as it was represented by The Bostonians, “I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that.” But Clemens no less than James needed “a complex social machinery” to set him in motion. In Nook Farm, a tiny, coherent, and influential community nesting in the larger structure of Hartford, he achieved a crucial balance of inner imperatives and outer pressures that led to the most productive period of his life.

  Midway in values as well as distance between New York’s commerce and Boston’s official culture, Hartford in 1871 was a spacious and pleasant city of about fifty thousand people. It was made prosperous by its booming insurance companies, which had proved their stability once and for all by virtually rebuilding Chicago after the great fire, by its silk and leather industries, by the skilled mechanics at its factories and machine shops, by its publishing and printing establishments, and by an appalling output of arms and munitions: peaceable Hartford supplied the Colt revolver, the Sharps rifle, and the Gatling gun to the nation and the world. The poor and the idle were not lacking in the city, though visitors had trouble finding them at first. Soon after he moved to Hartford, Mark Twain was lecturing for the benefit of Father Hawley’s strenuous missions to the poor and the alcoholic, and Christmas would find the family sleigh, driven by Patrick McAleer, making the rounds of the needy to deliver baskets which Livy had loaded with turkeys, oranges, canned peas, raisins, and nuts. But despite these challenges to the social conscience the fact remained that Hartford, if its wealth were averaged among its citizens, was the most affluent of American cities.

  What brought Mark Twain to Hartford was not its downtown but a small settlement on what was then the western extremity of the city. Twenty years earlier the lawyer John Hooker, husband of the formidable Isabella Beecher and descendant of Thomas Hooker, who had led a march from Cambridge Common in 1636 and founded Hartford, bought a one-hundred acre tract of wooded land known as Nook Farm. John Hooker was a sagacious real-estate developer; he was also careful in choosing his neighbors. As he sold off the land parcel by parcel and saw ample and gracious houses going up among the trees, he had the double reward of realizing a profit on his investment and of building a community of relatives and closely linked friends. Hooker’s distinguished brother-in-law, Francis Gillette, United States Senator, abolitionist, and temperance reformer, built and lived at Nook Farm. Gillette’s son, William, encouraged by Mark Twain, moved on to an acting career capped by the role of Sherlock Holmes; the Senator’s daughter, Lilly, married George Warner and lived at Nook Farm. So did Isabella’s sisters Mary, with her husband Thomas Perkins, a lawyer, and Harriet, with her husband Calvin Stowe, educator and Bible exegete and in appearance something of an eccentric: Professor Stowe’s nose, ravaged by a disease, was like a cauliflower, his long white beard hung down on his chest, and, Clemens recalled, he looked like Santa Claus on the loose. Among others at Nook Farm were the coeditors of the Hartford Courant: Joseph Hawley, major general of volunteers during the war, and after it governor of Connecticut, Congressman, and Senator; and George Warner’s brother, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain’s next-door neighbor and his collaborator on The Gilded Age. Nook Farm was as staunchly committed to liberal Congregationalism as it was to the Republican party. In 1864 the group had raised most of the $100,000 it would eventually cost to build the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, a spired edifice of Portland stone a few blocks away from the property limits of Nook Farm. Mark Twain called it “the Church of the Holy Speculators.” Its minister was his friend Joseph Twichell.

  In the fall of 1871, when Clemens rented the Hooker house on Forest Street, where he had once been a guest, and moved in with Livy, who was pregnant again, the white-faced and sickly infant Langdon, and their coachman, cook, and housemaid, he was at the pleasant and enveloping center of the Beecher network. A few years later, when the Beecher scandal was playing to a national audience from the center ring, the threads began to ravel. At the moment, though, for Livy, whose closest friend was Isabella’s daughter, Alice Day, and even for Clemens, who had reached something of an accommodation with Isabella, the Hooker-Beecher world was home, welcoming, and so familiar that soon after they were settled on Forest Stre
et Livy said, “You’d know this house was built by a Beecher. It’s so queer.”

  Clemens achieved a remarkable degree of community and identification with his Nook Farm neighbors. For the first time since his boyhood in Hannibal he was part of the fabric of a stable society, and although he turned a bitter eye on practically every American phenomenon of his time he rarely questioned his life in Hartford. Nook Farm was an enclave walled off from a demoralized nation. He shared the group’s faith in a dynamic aristocracy, their high responsibility, their earnest idealism, and their intellectual dedication. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dudley Warner were among the few American authors who made from their work a living comparable to that of a modest merchant prince, and they welcomed Mark Twain all the more warmly because he shared their sense of professionalism in writing and showed promise of becoming the most successful practitioner of them all.

  Clemens also shared their gregariousness, their taste for entertaining each other and any eminence who happened to be passing through Hartford, whether it was Charles Kingsley, Henry Stanley, Matthew Arnold, or a Hindu Christian prelate named Protap Chunder Mazoomdar. Visitors to Nook Farm like William Dean Howells were overwhelmed by the boundless fellowship and informality. The Warners and the Clemenses, Howells wrote to a friend in Ohio, “live very near each other, in a sort of suburban grove, and their neighbors are the Stowes and the Hookers, and a great many delightful people. They go in and out of each other’s houses without ringing, and nobody gets more than the first syllable of his first name—they call their minister Joe Twichell.” The price of all this sociability, which was supplemented by teas and musicales, by billiards, discussion groups, and whist drives, was high, in energy as well as money. Mark Twain the professional writer could work full time only during the three or four summer months he spent away from Hartford in the relative isolation of his sister-in-law’s farm above Elmira. The rest of the year he thought of as enforced vacation. The Nook Farm residents tended to build as well as entertain on a scale beyond their incomes. They were always, symbolically at least, a little overdrawn at the bank. Mark Twain carried their cautious prodigality to a dimension of spectacular opulence unknown to American writers before him. When he built his own house there, that eccentric, willful, and eye-catching whatnot, $70,000 worth of turrets and balconies housing $21,000 worth of furniture and perched on a five-acre $31,000 tract of land, Nook Farm received from its newest member its gaudiest landmark, and eventually, instead of merely going into debt, Clemens went into bankruptcy.

  In the fall of 1871, three years before he moved into what Howells was to call “the stately mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence,” Clemens was in moderate financial difficulties. The price of fleeing Buffalo for the life of a man of letters in Hartford was considerable. His interest in the Express brought him ten thousand dollars less than he had paid for it, and the elegant brownstone house on Delaware Avenue also went at a distressed figure. Sales of The Innocents Abroad, which had waltzed him out of debt once before, were dwindling toward an average of only thirty-five hundred copies a year. Roughing It, for which Clemens had hopes that the book would never live up to, would not be published until February 1872. Early the previous summer, sizing up his situation, he had decided to return to the lecture circuit, his one sure source of quick money. “Without really intending to go into the lecture field, I wrote a lecture yesterday just for amusement to see how the subject would work up,” he told Redpath with more than a trace of disingenuousness, “but now that I have read it I like it so much that I want to deliver it.” Two weeks after this first announcement he told Redpath that he had already discarded this first lecture in favor of a second and then a third, with which he finally did open his season in October in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; this last was a series of reminiscences of “some uncommonplace characters I have chanced to meet,” including Artemus Ward, the Czar of Russia, and the luckless Riley, back from Africa and biding his time. After a week the reminiscences went out the window. Now Clemens was full of enthusiasm for a talk about Artemus Ward alone, but this turned out to be an uncomfortable choice. It was difficult to be funny in good taste about another humorist recently dead, especially one whose place in popular favor Clemens was claiming; above all it was awkward to have to use another man’s jokes. After seven weeks the Artemus Ward lecture went the way of its predecessors and was replaced by a talk derived from Roughing It. “Am writing a new, tip-top lecture about California and Nevada,” he wrote to Mary Fairbanks in December, “been at it all night—am still at it and pretty nearly dead with fatigue. Shall be studying it in the cars till midnight, and then sleep half the day in Toledo and study the rest. If I am in good condition there, I shall deliver it.” To the usual tribulations of winter traveling had been added the strain of writing, memorizing, and perfecting three separate performances, and when he finally completed what he called “the most detestable lecture campaign that ever was,” this second profession of his, for all the gratification he derived from it, was to be permanently associated in his mind with separation from Livy and with being in debt. The tour had earned him ten or twelve thousand dollars, most of which went to various creditors; he had less than fifteen hundred clear to show for a winter’s work.

  “I do hope that this will be the last season that it will be necessary for you to lecture,” Livy wrote in mid-November. “It is not the way for a husband and wife to live if they can possibly avoid it, is it?” She minded the separation as much as he did, told him that she dreamed about his return, about stroking his hair and putting her hand in his. She hoped he was praying for her, a pathetic reversal of the roles of their courtship. She felt her own faith failing, and she wanted his support. Her feeling toward God, she confessed to him, was “almost perfectly cold,” and she was afraid that if she fell away from belief this time she could never return to it. Far from being a stereotype of pallid gentility or simply a prim and parochial household figure, Olivia Clemens opened to her husband a strong, urgent, and developing nature all too easily misread by others. “His wife is a delicate little beauty, the very flower and perfume of ladylikeness, who simply adores him,” Howells wrote after first meeting her. But it was Livy who made the hardheaded calculations of the income from coal interests and from Clemens’ writing and lecturing that would enable them to settle at Nook Farm. And, she said, if after three or four years they discovered they were living beyond their means, “we will either board or live in a small cottage and keep one servant, will live near the horse cars so that I can get along without a horse and carriage—I can not and I will not think about your being away from me this way every year, it is not half living—if in order to sustain our present mode of living you are obliged to do that, then we will change our mode of living.”

  II

  Over a long midday dinner at Ober’s Restaurant Parisien in Boston early in November 1871 Clemens again encountered his friend and enemy, mentor and nemesis, Bret Harte. They were in Boston for the same purpose, for Harte too was driven by necessity to the lecture platform. The money from the glorious Atlantic contract had gone quickly in Newport and Cohasset, and Harte was already deep in debt, the chronic condition of his existence in the East. At Tremont Temple one night a sheriff sat behind the screen waiting for Harte to finish his talk about the California Argonauts of 1849; with arrest not more than ten feet away, Harte strung out his lecture until help arrived in the form of an advance from his publisher, and he was able to send the sheriff away satisfied. Harte’s standing in New England remained as high as it had been the day Howells welcomed him and took him to dine at the Saturday Club with Agassiz, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Emerson.

  Harte was the guest of honor at Ober’s. Clemens was the newcomer. The others at the table were James T. Fields, recently and prosperously retired as editor of the Atlantic, Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and their host, Ralph Keeler, a proofreader on the magazine but also a writer, who was entertaining far beyond his means in a gesture of amity t
o Harte for having published an article of his in the Overland. Over the beefsteak and mushrooms and the omelet soufflé, which to Howells’ amusement was brought to the table flat and fallen—a symbol of the punctured pretensions of the afternoon—Aldrich quipped away (“Wittiest man in seven centuries,” Clemens was to say of him) and Fields told his celebrated funny stories, including one which Howells recalled years later as “a deliriously blasphemous story about a can of peaches.” Harte took advantage of the easy freedom and fellowship of the dinner to describe Clemens’ pleasure at being a part of this social institution of literary Boston. “Why, fellows,” he said, touching Clemens’ shoulder, “this is the dream of his life,” a sufficiently pointed reminder that while he himself had been admitted to the sanctum by the high priests of the Saturday Club, Clemens was an outsider, and by trade a humorist, a noun which always implied the adjective “mere.” (“I cannot say why Clemens seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as Bret Harte had done,” Howells wrote, “but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so.”) Clemens accepted the gibe in silence. Howells the peacemaker preferred to believe that the glance that flashed out from under Clemens’ feathery eyebrows was one of good-natured appreciation of the fun at his expense, and he summed up in lightly mocking tones the entire occasion with its clever, inconsequential discourse, its good fellowship, and its fallen soufflé: “It was in every way what a Boston literary lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed to Clemens.”

  “We’ve been having a good many dinners together,” Clemens proudly told Elisha Bliss, and he asked Bliss to send copies of The Innocents Abroad, with the author’s compliments, to Howells, Aldrich, and Keeler. But among these dinners was one that never took place. It underscored the fact that between Mark Twain and certain aspects of literary Boston there existed, and would always exist, something less than perfect harmony. Aldrich brought him home unannounced to have dinner at 84 Pinckney Street. From the start Mrs. Aldrich, the former Lilian Woodman of New York, did not take to the arrangement. Her first impression of her husband’s guest—whose name, she later claimed, had been mumbled in the introductions—was that his costume was so eccentric as to be unforgettable in all its details. He wore a sealskin coat and a sealskin hat, both with the fur out, but along with them he wore low black shoes instead of boots. His trousers and socks were yellowish-brown, his coat and waistcoat were gray, and his bow tie was violet. “May and December intermixed,” she called this outfit; it gave her the disturbing impression that he had been too fuddled to dress like any other man. And as she listened to his attenuated drawl and saw him sway slightly as he spoke—mannerisms which strange surroundings exaggerated in him—she decided that he was drunk. In her fastidious allusion, “He had looked upon the cup when it was red.” As Aldrich and Clemens amused each other in a waning way, she sat apart in frosty and silent disapproval, and when the dinner hour arrived and passed without any sign from her that he was to stay, Clemens read her meaning and left unfed.