Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Read online

  Soon after arriving in New York he went to 25 Broadway to call on an old friend from the West. Frank Fuller, whom he had known as the wartime governor of the Utah Territory, was a tireless and enthusiastic experimenter. He had studied medicine under the guidance of Dr. Holmes, practiced dentistry in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, campaigned for Lincoln, organized a regiment, been admitted to the Nevada bar. After the war he accumulated a respectable fortune selling cloth treated with India rubber, excellent for buggy tops, and he found his permanent occupation as president of his own health food company in New York. He was a speculator and a promoter—an honest one—who later, during the 1870s and 1880s, involved or tried to involve Clemens in a number of schemes, including railroad bonds as good as gold and a revolutionary new steam engine for tugboats. He was a successful Orion—gentle and charming as Orion, but with luck. This entrepreneur now proposed that Sam should lecture in New York and promised to make the arrangements and to get him the organized support of the Californians in town. To this glowing proposal Sam’s response was one of cautious assent. He had not come East with any immediate plan to lecture there. His Alta California correspondence and miscellaneous journalism would keep him busy enough, he figured, and his Western friends had warned him he would have to be choicer in his language and more delicate in his humor lest he offend audiences in the East. A book like George Washington Harris’ Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, Western humor at the primitive base, would sell well in California, but, he predicted somewhat incorrectly, “the Eastern people will call it coarse and possibly taboo it.” Before he could entrust his reputation as a lecturer to Eastern audiences he would have to be sure of his timing and approach. “I’ll not do it yet,” he wrote to Orion’s wife. “I won’t do it until I have got my cards stacked to suit me. It is too hazardous a business for a stranger. I am not going to rush headlong in and make a fiasco of the thing when I may possibly make a success of it by going a little slow”—not his customary response to a new venture, but in this case the proper one. He was taking careful aim, and he was going to use his considerable skills as a promoter, his influence as a newspaperman, and his reputation as a humorous writer to stack the cards to suit him. In February he arranged with the New York Weekly, which had a circulation of over 100,000, for the reprinting of the Sandwich Island letters he had written the year before for the Sacramento Union. Part of the return was pure publicity. The editors twice informed their readers that Mark Twain was “about to deliver in this city his great lecture on the Sandwich Islands, which for a series of nights crowded the largest lecture room in San Francisco to suffocation. He cannot help succeeding here.”

  His most precious letter of introduction was to Henry Ward Beecher, minister of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, highly successful lyceum lecturer, and at fifty-four possibly the most celebrated man in the United States. By ten o’clock of any Sunday morning the pews of Beecher’s church were full, the pavement crowded with people trying to get in. Sam managed only a tiny stool in the gallery, jammed into a space about big enough for a spittoon. Beecher knew how to dominate and mesmerize an audience. Not handsome, homely even, he took off his overcoat, broad-brimmed farmer’s hat, and galoshes in full sight of his congregation, and then sat on a plain chair against the wall with the air of a manager who was pleased with a full house but never doubted he would have it. He exploited the contrast between these moments of repose and waiting and the time of illumination when, climbing onto a platform without rail or carpet, he read a few sentences from his manuscript and then abandoned it for an extemporaneous sermon that glittered with illustrations and worldly metaphors. His rich, resonant voice filled every corner of his elegant church, its white seats delicately beaded in brown. “He went marching up and down the stage,” Clemens reported, “sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point.”

  Beecher’s style had been formed at camp meetings and forest revivals in Indiana; he dealt in broad pyrotechnic effects, and he was an apostle of enthusiasm who described himself as a “cordial Christian Darwinist.” But for all this devotion to a muscular Christianity he was high-strung, a sensualist, an over-reactor. He loved flowers and would not find it grotesque that on the first day of his adultery trial his loyal parishioners decorated the courtroom with white flowers, emblems of purity (“like placing wreaths about the open manhole of a sewer,” Godkin wrote in the Nation). He was fascinated by small rare objects, by stuffed hummingbirds and unset gems. He called the stones his “color opiates,” and he carried them with him to gaze at and caress, to soothe him after his Sunday-morning performance left him limp with sweat. At the end the visiting journalist had a nearly overpowering impulse to applaud. Had it not been a church, he “could have started the audience with a single clap of the hands and brought down the house.” Sam Clemens was intoxicated with oratory in an age that adored it and that turned to it for entertainment as well as persuasion, and the pastor of Plymouth Church impressed him more as a showman than as a shepherd. His introduction to Beecher proliferated in a remarkable number of ways; their relationship was crucial for Clemens, but it could never become a friendship. Beecher was more than twenty years older, but aside from this there was something in him that Clemens found antipathetic, a hint of the religious mountebank and hypocrite. At one point Beecher even symbolized for him a flyblown quality of America in the 1870s, good meat that had hung too long. But now Clemens was pleased to be a guest at Beecher’s dinner table, to meet there Beecher’s famous sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, to be the beneficiary of Beecher’s advice on lecturing, publishing, and self-advancement in general. For a brief time he was caught in the strong toil of Beecher’s personality, and for much longer he was caught in a network of Beecher connections he could never escape from and could never altogether enjoy: in Elmira, Beecher’s brother Thomas was spiritual adviser to the Langdon family and married Olivia Langdon and Samuel Clemens; in Hartford there was Harriet, in her prime a phenomenon, in her dotage a nuisance; and also in Hartford there were two other sisters, one of whom, Isabella Hooker, was a snob for whom her neighbor Samuel Clemens remained coarse and a parvenu. The Quaker City voyage, which in a few months would take him abroad and toward fame as a writer, was at least in name sponsored by Beecher and Plymouth Church. (Twenty years later, Mark Twain the publisher figured that Beecher’s death, leaving unfinished a projected autobiography that the house was counting on, was going to cost the company at least $100,000.) “Henry Ward is a brick,” Sam told his mother a year after their first meeting. Into that flat jocular statement one can read his pride at a significant conquest and also the first intimations of boredom.

  His natural social element, though, was not the clergy, not yet the established middle class, certainly not the members of the Century Association. Bohemia in San Francisco had been a transplant from New York, and New York’s Bohemia, in decline since the middle of the war, was in turn a transplant—and some, like Howells, felt it was a shallow-rooted one—from France. Postwar Bohemia in New York was an amorphous thing. It lacked the vital center that Henry Clapp, grown bitter and drinking himself to death, had once supplied at Pfaff’s. It was now chiefly composed of journalists living outside the conventional social order and pursuing an erratic hand-to-mouth existence. Still, “bohemian” describes Clemens’ literary and social coloration during his first months in the East. “That old day when bohemianism was respectable—ah, more than respectable, heroic”: so he would recall this period seventeen years later for a friend who had shared it with him, Edward H. House. House had been a music and drama critic in Boston and a Civil War correspondent for the New York Tribune, and he was now contributing occasional criticism to the paper. They met one morning in January at the Nassau Street office of Charles Henry Webb, poet, columnist, and editor, whom Clemens had known in San Francisco and who was credited by some as having brought New York bohem
ianism, the original, authentic article, to the West Coast. All three of them had singularly restless careers; for them to be in the same room together was a rare intersection in time. House was to have an interlude in Japan as professor of literature, return with a pension from the Emperor Mutsuhito, and become a speculator in theatrical attractions and a play adapter—a profession which in 1890 pitted him against Clemens in an abusive legal contest over stage rights to The Prince and the Pauper. By this time Clemens had decided that his old friend was a scoundrel, thief, “gigantic liar,” and “inconceivable hound.” Webb, after reading Moby Dick at the age of seventeen, had signed on a whaler and sailed four years in the South Seas and the Arctic; later he covered Bull Run for the New York Times and the passing scene for the Sacramento Union and the Golden Era. With Bret Harte he founded and edited the Californian, a distinguished literary journal to which Clemens contributed and which, during its short life, showed that there was real literary vitality on the Pacific Slope. The magazine bankrupted him, as did his mining speculations; his satires on California patriotism proved too uncomfortable for the natives, and if he had not left San Francisco by ship in 1866 he might have left it on a rail not long after. In New York he followed a varied course as makeshift publisher and occasional journalist, writer of light verse, banker and broker, and, something Sam would be in sympathy with, inventor and plunger in patents for a cartridge-loader and several adding and calculating machines. Like Sam, he had red hair and a mustache; he had a lisp to match Sam’s distinctive drawl; he was a bon vivant and a lady killer; and, although he lived until 1905, his best days were already behind him. He too, like House, was to find himself on the other end of a lawsuit from Samuel L. Clemens, who, years later, remembered Webb as “a poor sort of creature, and by nature and training a fraud.” These two, along with Bret Harte, were Clemens’ closest links with bohemianism. He was to repudiate all of them, denounce them as crooks and parasites; their hand-to-mouth, deep-in-debt, quick-improvisation style of living he would find detestable. Bret Harte, as befitted his greater importance to Clemens, was to be repudiated with a venom and vindictiveness time could never moderate.

  Several times during the previous year Clemens had planned to augment his reputation and income by publishing a book. First he considered writing about the Mississippi and his four years as cub and pilot. Now Webb, who had a firm belief in Mark Twain’s rising literary star, proposed to edit a collection which would include the “Jumping Frog” and a number of miscellaneous pieces. For a share of the book’s earnings Webb would do all the work and would contribute his nom de plume, John Paul, with which he already had won something of a following. Webb arranged for Sam to bring the manuscript to George Carleton, an established, aggressive, and inventive publisher who, through low prices and unorthodox advertising, sold Holmes and Victor Hugo to the burgeoning middle classes. When Sam, full of trepidation, called at Carleton’s office on Broadway, meekly explained his way past a clerk, and confronted Carleton with the manuscript, it was not the first time he had given the publisher a chance at the Frog. Carleton was the man to whom the story had been sent originally, in 1865, for inclusion in a book of Artemus Ward’s. Claiming that it had arrived too late, Carleton had sent it on, without enthusiasm, to the Saturday Press. Any number of objections would have run through his mind when he talked to the author: Mark Twain was still a relatively unknown name in the East; the Frog was two years old and could be considered to have jumped himself out, for the story had appeared not only in newspapers and magazines but even in a pirated collection called Beadle’s Dime Book of Fun; many of the other sketches were hardly high enough above the level of humorous journalism to dizzy the beholder; and in any case the book was a miscellany of old material. Carleton rained objections. “Books—look at those shelves,” he said in dismissal. “Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I don’t. Good morning.”

  The shock of this rejection was magnified two months later when Sam learned that Carleton, for all his objections, had taken on a comparable miscellany by Bret Harte. Tell Bret Harte, Clemens wrote to a friend in California—he could have written to Harte himself if he had not been so angry—that his publisher is “a Son of a Bitch who will swindle him. We of Bohemia keep away from Carleton’s.” He could never forget the rejection. Ten years later it was still festering: “Carleton insulted me in Feb. 1867; and so when the day arrives that sees me doing him a civility, I shall feel that I am ready for paradise.” After twenty-one years, during which Carleton was near or at the head of that hate list which Clemens kept and rarely trimmed, he met the publisher in Lucerne and heard from him an apology and a confession: “I refused a book of yours and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century.” Whether the apology was really as perfect as this or whether Clemens was giving the shape of daydream to some fragments of facts, the cycle was complete, the old hurt acknowledged if not redressed. For the moment, though, in the face of what seemed a crushing rejection, Clemens fell back on Webb’s belief in him. They made an oral agreement (something that led to disaster later on): Webb would produce and manufacture the book himself, arrange for the American News Company to distribute it, and pay the author a ten per cent royalty.

  Clemens had approached Carleton with the trepidation of an unknown author. Now he approached another opportunity with the swagger of a toughened journalist. “Prominent Brooklynites,” he reported to his paper, “are getting up a great European pleasure excursion for the coming season, which promises a vast amount of enjoyment.” He was determined and confident that the proprietors of the Alta California would see the trip as he saw it: as a unique kind of voyage which offered him as a journalist the double challenge of observing the sightseers as well as the sights. The Brooklynites were members of Plymouth Church, and the plan had begun with Beecher himself. Having led an expedition to Charleston in 1865 to sanctify the raising of the Union flag over Fort Sumter, he wanted to lead an expedition to the Holy Land, where, in the company of his congregation, he would gather local impressions for a biography of Jesus. The man who organized the trip and was to be master of the vessel was one of Beecher’s Sunday-school superintendents, Captain Charles C. Duncan. Duncan took the germ of an idea—a private group of passengers on a long voyage—cagily sized up the favoring circumstances of postwar travel hunger and the lure of the Paris Exposition, and came up with the grandfather of the modern luxury cruise. Carefully selected on the basis of character and credit, the passengers would use the steamer Quaker City as a traveling home while they visited Europe and the Middle East, following an itinerary which they could change by unanimous vote. Duncan did not mention it with the other attractions in his prospectus, but he shrewdly let it be known that, in addition to Beecher, among the passengers would be the popular actress Maggie Mitchell, General William T. Sherman, and Robert Henry Hendershot, an ephemeral Civil War hero known as “the Drummer Boy of the Rappahannock.”

  In a gay mood heightened by some drinks along the way, Clemens and House paid a visit one morning at the end of February to Duncan’s office on Wall Street. The Sunday-school navigator, standing in for an awesome “Committee on Applications,” greeted them with a certain skepticism. “Allow me to introduce the Reverend Mark Twain,” House said, “who is a clergyman of some distinction, lately arrived from San Francisco,” and he went on to describe this clergyman’s exhausting labors as a missionary in the Sandwich Islands. “My congregation has concluded to start me out traveling for my health,” Clemens said, but he had one or two questions about this particular voyage. Would Mr. Beecher be on board? If so, would he allow the Reverend Mr. Twain, a Baptist, to conduct services from time to time? Mr. Beecher would be on board, Duncan was certain, and would be delighted to give over his pulpit to the new preacher. The next day Clemens returned without House, identified himself correctly for Duncan, and left with him a character reference and a deposit on the price of passage, $1,250.
But ten years later Duncan’s rancor at the boozy hoax that had been played on him came out in a public exchange of scurrilities. Clemens, Duncan said, had stumbled in and filled the office with “the fumes of bad whiskey.” “For a ceaseless, tireless, forty-year advocate of total abstinence the ‘captain’ is a mighty good judge of whiskey at second hand,” Clemens told a reporter, and besides, “I was poor—I couldn’t afford good whiskey. How could I know the ‘captain’ was so particular about the quality of a man’s whiskey?”

  III

  At a “Bal d’Opéra” at the Academy of Music on March 1 Clemens masqueraded in a king’s robes and reeled and roistered through a crowd in which he seemed to encounter some of the figures of his accumulating imagination. He heard a girl dressed as Joan of Arc offer to give the world for a mess of raw oysters; he heard dukes and princes call each other Jim and Joe and ask who was buying the next drink. Two nights later, in a snowstorm, he was finally on his way to St. Louis, eleven hundred miles in fifty-two hours. On the train he talked with a man who had been at Bull Run and in prison camps and who was now within a hundred miles of home for the first time in six years. It was a reminder of his own absence and of the war whose wounds were still open in St. Louis, where friendships, families, and even churches remained divided.

  For him, home was Jane Clemens, his sister Pamela, her two children. Into the widowed household on Chestnut Street, to tell stories and to be scrutinized and lectured, bringing as gifts a crystal necklace and a Hawaiian Bible, came the restless hope of the family, and not in triumph. Years earlier Sam had melodramatically vowed to Orion that he would not come home again, would not look on his mother’s face again or Pamela’s, “until I am a rich man.” He had made a certain name, no fortune. Pamela was always complaining that to run a house for Jane and support her was too great a burden, that Sam did not contribute enough and spent too much on himself. Pamela was a temperance proselytizer, and she wanted him to promise not to make jokes about sacred subjects. Reproach was in the air. Pamela’s pious and melancholy domination was only partly relieved by their mother’s taste for flashing colors and gaudy embroidery, for parades, circuses, funerals, and gossip. All in all Sam’s six-year absence might have been six weeks for the sense of repose his return was giving him. In response to this exposure to the women of his family, a week after he arrived he started contributing to the Missouri Democrat some satirical articles about female suffrage. Give them the vote, he said, and the Missouri ladies would give up housekeeping and wet-nursing in order to run for “State Milliner.”