Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Read online

  Amidst his dutiful reportage—New York for all its promise failed to spark him to any higher level—there are flickering images of a more personal urgency and reality, images of the passing of an older order. The onetime bushwhacker saw Jefferson Davis, three weeks short of fifty-five, standing at midnight on the sidewalk outside the New York Hotel. The man who had been, as Sam Clemens now saw him, “the head, and heart, and soul, of the mightiest rebellion of modern times” went about his business as unheralded as any country merchant visiting town. The live body of the Confederate President was on its way from a Federal prison to twenty-two years of freedom and oblivion. Early in June there arrived from England the dead body of Artemus Ward, on its way to burial in Waterford, Maine, where, as he used to say, he had been born of parents, and where the schoolchildren would soon strew flowers on his grave. At thirty-three, the watershed age, Ward was the victim of tuberculosis, alcohol, and the overwork of pleasing an insatiable public. Long ago his pseudonym had become his identity—Artemus Ward had swallowed up Charles Farrar Browne—and this problem, along with his mantle and following, now passed on to his friend and protégé.

  During the week before the Quaker City sailed, with little left to do but buy cigars and seagoing clothing and put off packing his trunk, Clemens turned against himself. The last six months now seemed to him altogether without point or consistency. As a traveling correspondent he saw himself as a failure: corresponding was “a perfect drag,” his Alta California letters were “the stupidest letters that were ever written from New York,” and he was worried that once he was abroad he would be unable to fulfill his Alta California commission and a commission he had just received from Horace Greeley’s Tribune. Despite his early reports The Celebrated Jumping Frog had been far from a success. Three years later, in the constant process of revising and dramatizing his own history which was to culminate in his autobiography, he told the editor of a biographical compendium that he had expected the book to sell fifty thousand copies and it sold fewer than four thousand. Now he authorized Fuller to collect whatever royalties the book might earn and to send them on to Jane Clemens, even though if she counted on them, she might be reduced to abject poverty. It would never earn anything worth a cent, he told his family, and with a rationalization born of adversity he explained, “I published it simply to advertise myself—not with the hope of making anything out of it.” All winter long he had tried to find a publisher for a book about the Sandwich Islands; even late in May he still had hopes, and he planned to leave Fuller in charge of these royalties as well. But on the eve of sailing he admitted defeat, withdrew the book, and tried to salvage something out of the rejection: “It would be useless to publish it in these dull publishing times.” Shaken but toughened by these two projects, he had developed a cannier and more deliberate view of his career as an author. Sizing up the potential of the Quaker City voyage, he told Mortimer Neal Thomson, a minor humorist who wrote under the name “Philander Q. Doesticks,” that if there was any book matter there he proposed to extract it. He had looked into the economics of subscription publishing, and he made a decision that defined the direction he was to go in and the kind of books he was to write: there was no point to writing and publishing a book, he decided, unless it earned a good deal of money.

  The New York to which he had come with high expectations now seemed “a domed and steepled solitude, where a stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race” and “walks his tedious miles through the same interminable street every day,” homeless, restless, in a state of uneasy excitement but sapped of the capacity for pleasure and curiosity. It had become a Baudelairean city of specter-thronged streets, not Walt Whitman’s million-footed Manhattan, hive of democracy and temple of brotherhood. The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope had to apologize to his California readers for his mood. He has wandered into the wrong vein in summing up New York for them, he says, and he will try again; his repression has spilled over its private confinements. But a day later, in his final letter, he was scarcely improved. He has seen all there is to see, yet there was something missing every time. “I guess that something was the provincial quietness I am used to”: he was trying to joke away an uncomfortable line of self-questioning.

  He returned again and again to this something that was missing, in the letters he wrote to his family before sailing; they are almost the last truly intimate, truly inward letters he was to write to them, the letters of a private personality not yet yoked to a public one. He was maddened by the endless delays of his last torpid week in New York, he told them; he neglected every duty, and his conscience tore at him “like a wild beast.” He had complained bitterly about Orion’s thoughtlessness in sending him on some errand connected with his law practice. “I will have to get even with him for this somehow,” he told Orion’s wife. “He could have had all this attended to by writing to the man instead of to me.” But he also knew he had promised his family he would go to Washington and try to lobby some sort of clerkship for Orion. He had been too busy, he had failed Orion, and he was afraid to ask how Orion’s law practice in Carson City was coming along—he knew the answer. (Characteristically, Orion had been left out of the distribution of offices when Nevada became a state.)

  Six years earlier, from New Orleans, where he was between piloting hitches, Sam had written for Orion an account of a visit to a local fortuneteller, Madame Caprell. The lady’s analysis was so critical that it is likely Sam was simply using her as a mouthpiece for lecturing Orion. “In nearly all respects,” the lady was supposed to have said to him, “you are the best sheep in the flock. Your brother has an excellent mind, but it is not as well balanced as yours. I should call yours the best mind altogether; there is more unswerving strength of will and set purpose and determination and energy in you than in all the balance of your family put together.” As for Orion: “He never does do anything if he can get anybody else to do it for him, which is bad. He never goes steadily on till he attains an object, but nearly always drops it when the battle is half won; he is too visionary—is always flying off on a new hobby.” And since that session with the deltaic sybil Orion’s retreats and hesitations had filled Sam with bafflement, rage, pity, sardonic glee, but mostly guilt: the younger brother had triumphed over the older brother, in the same way that, in a certain sense, he had triumphed over his father and over his brother Henry—scalded to death in a steamboat explosion in 1858—just by outliving them. Clemens felt that he could find peace only in excitement, that only restless moving from place to place could numb his guilt. “My mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and towards you all,” he wrote home. “I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt.”

  The day before he sailed he wrote goodbye to an old Hannibal friend, Will Bowen; they had sat out the long mornings in Dawson’s schoolroom together and later had been pilots together. Clemens’ letter was blithe and overassertive to the point of being truculent, but there were some dark notes. The Quaker City passengers were tiptop, he said; he expected to have a jolly, sociable, homelike time of it for the next five or six months; he was going for fun only and did not expect to work hard at all—he could do his correspondence with his left hand, he said, at least until he got to Egypt. What sobered him was the thought of the return trip, and, thinking that far ahead, he decided that he might ship out again in November, “if I don’t like to land when we get back.” “I have a roving commission,” as he had had for fifteen years as itinerant printer, river pilot, Western miner and journalist. “There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.” Leaving his trunk for the last moment, he set off on what he remembered early the next morning as nine hours of farewell dinners and wine-drinking.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “The tide of a great popular movement”

  I

  EARLY SATURDAY AFTERNOON, June 8, 1867, the steamer and auxiliary sailer Quaker City left her Wall Street pier in a heavy rai
n. The weather turned rough, and she soon dropped anchor off Sandy Hook and waited there until Monday morning, riding out the storm, the Sabbath, and the first prayer meetings. It was clear that the stomachs and devotions of the seventy-five or so passengers would need considerable cosseting, and if the cruise was not quite a funeral excursion without a corpse—Clemens’ epitaph for it when it was all over—neither could it be a picnic on a grand scale with young people playing cards, drinking, and dancing nightly to fiddles, flutes, and a snare drum. Creating the conditions for satire, Clemens had almost deliberately misapprehended the character of the venture from the very start. It was born under the auspices of Beecher and Plymouth Church, and it was headed for Palestine; the passengers had to be able to afford a five-month vacation and, in addition to $1,250 for passage, at least five hundred dollars in gold for expenses on land. By no strange process of natural selection most of the people on board were late-middle-aged, prosperous, pious, and abstinent.

  There were exceptions. Clemens’ roommate, Daniel Slote, was fifteen years older than he, fattish, balding, pampered by his mother and sisters in Brooklyn, and the owner of a commercial stationery firm. Still, he seemed “splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless”; he would share two cases of champagne that an importing house had sent Clemens as a bon-voyage gift. And there were younger men, too, who offered the sort of harmonious diversity Clemens found all too little of on board the Quaker City and on whom, in his correspondence and in The Innocents Abroad, he conferred a certain measure of celebrity. Among them was Charles Langdon, the eighteen-year-old scion of an Elmira coal fortune and brother of the future Mrs. Clemens, sent abroad by his father on this respectable cruise to see the world while keeping out of trouble. Occasionally, in the midst of their chatter, Clemens recalled with affection the robust voice of Captain Wakeman, who, upon hearing the hail “Stop the boat, you old pot-bellied son of a bitch,” gave the order to his mate, “Stop her, John, stop her, some old friend of mine wants to come aboard.” For all of them, even Slote, were boys really, callow and sheltered, tame companions for a man who had been on his own and supporting himself since the age of twelve and who was familiar with all sorts of men and degrees of life. “When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography,” he was to write in Chapter Eighteen of Life on the Mississippi, “I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.”

  He remained as sensitive as ever to those hints of exclusion and disapproval which had vexed his voyage to New York half a year earlier; in response to what he felt to be pretension, sanctimony, snobbery, and pressures to conform, he adopted a satiric and skeptical stance which eased his tensions and angers and shaped his literary materials. Only mean people got seasick, he mused. Even when they were still within the harbor the passengers were lurching past the lashed coops of chickens, geese, and ducks on their way to the rail. He soon became acutely disgusted by the sight of these people leaving the table to vomit and then returning for more dinner. They could eat all they want, he said, mocking the ship’s regulations, “but no swapping false teeth allowed.” He was just as disgusted by a “Frenchy-looking woman” from Washington, D. C., who paid intimate attentions to her black-and-tan terrier, gave it bouquets of flowers, and called it “Little Boy.” He was infuriated by a Dr. William Gibson of Jamestown, Pennsylvania, who, having volunteered his services as collector of facts and specimens to the Department of Agriculture and the Smithsonian, traveled under the thundering title of “Commissioner of the United States of America to Europe, Asia, and Africa.” (Dr. Gibson was as grandiose in death as in life, for in the Jamestown cemetery he lies under a granite monument, ordered by him at a cost of about $100,000, which is sixty-five feet high and topped by a fifteen-foot statue of Hope.) He was infuriated also by a “simple, green, wide-mouthed, horse-laughing young fellow” who was a witless bore; by Dr. Andrews of Albany, a spouter of pretentious misinformation. And, having worked himself into a rage early in the trip, Clemens failed to find amusing even the one fullfledged and spectacular eccentric on board. This was Bloodgood H. Cutter, a Long Island farmer and a compulsive versifier who could commemorate any occasion in doggerel and who during his lifetime published at least twelve hundred broadsides of his own work. For Clemens he was nothing but a bore and an interruption, and in The Innocents Abroad he was written off impatiently as “Poet Lariat,” an honorific which he proudly displayed in 1886 on the title page of his collected works.

  There were only three ordained clergymen on board, but the prevailing atmosphere of piety and steady prayers gave Clemens the lasting impression that the Quaker City carried a shipload of divines. He could get along well enough with the professional clergy. He liked their conversation and their company; he had in common with them an interest in oratory; and one of the closest friends of his Hartford years was to be a clergyman, Joseph Twichell. It was the amateurs who enraged him, including one unsmiling passenger, a candidate “for a vacancy in the Trinity,” who asked Captain Duncan if the expedition would come to a halt on Sundays. They could do as they wished on dry land, he was told, but Duncan couldn’t anchor in the middle of the Atlantic. “There was a little difference of opinion between us—nothing more,” Clemens mildly remarked about these amateurs. “They thought they could have saved Sodom and Gomorrah, and I thought it would have been unwise to risk money upon it.” Consequently, with all but eight or ten of the passengers he was on terms that were at best polite and that became vexed when the touchy issues of Sabbath observance and itinerary came to the arguing point. Forty years later his rage still lay close enough to the surface to be awakened by a photograph of one of the passengers, Stephen Griswold. “Here is the real old familiar Plymouth-Church self-complacency,” Clemens wrote on the frontispiece of Griswold’s book about the Beecher community. “It is the way God looks when He has had a successful season.”

  The passengers who expected to be able to boast that they belonged to Mr. Beecher’s party or General Sherman’s party had been bitterly disappointed. Beecher decided to stay home and write a novel. General Sherman, possibly feeling that in such close quarters peace could be hell, went off to fight the Indians. As Clemens and some others speculated, these and a few other celebrities who defected may just have got tired of being advertised. With them gone, the “only notoriety” the group had was Mark Twain, wrote Miss Julia Newell, a maiden lady from Wisconsin, to her home-town paper. “He is a rather handsome fellow but talks to you with an abominable drawl that is exasperating. Whether he intends to be tunny for the amusement of the party I have not yet ascertained.” Neither she nor most of the others would, in fact, know whether he was amusing them or making fun of them. On the eve of sailing, the passengers had met at the Brooklyn house of Moses S. Beach, proprietor of the New York Sun and a Plymouth Church congregant. As both surviving celebrity and professional speaker, Clemens had made an announcement: “Captain Duncan wishes me to say that passengers for the Quaker City must be on board tomorrow before the tide goes out. What the tide has to do with us or we with the tide is more than I know, but that is what the Captain says.” A mild enough joke, certainly, but when delivered with his strange, attenuated drawl and after the uncertain shuffle which, taken together with it, often laid Clemens open to the suspicion that he was drunk, it was enough to puzzle and even alarm the gentlemen in their unaccustomed swallow-tailed coats and white kid gloves and their ladies dressed en règle in gowns bought for the trip.

  Here, facing him, was a new American middle class trying out its wealth and leisure and about to put its homegrown culture to a kind of test among the monuments of the Old World. This class, by his choice, was to be his central audience. He both entertained and mocked these people; sometimes he alienated them, but often he showed his eagerness to take on their social coloration. He was outraged by their parochialism, but he envied them their sense of rootedness, and they gave him a sense of belonging that delighted him. “I basked in the
happiness of being for once in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement,” he wrote of the middle-class discovery of Europe: basking, drifting—the terms of happy surrender. In that year of the Paris Exposition everyone seemed to him to be going abroad. During the summer, Clemens figured, four or five thousand Americans were leaving for Europe every week. The English tour party had already made such a name for itself that the novelist Charles Lever, serving a sybaritic term as Her Majesty’s consul in La Spezia, was delightedly telling his Italian friends that Thomas Cook’s clients were in reality convicts too depraved to be sent to the Australian colonies. Mr. Cook, he explained, had a secret contract with the Crown to release a few convicts in each Italian city quietly and then move on.

  In a gentler spirit Clemens named his representative tourist “the American Vandal.” Whether vandals or innocents, the Americans who were abroad in force did not represent the first or best society, Clemens acknowledged. They lacked cultivation and education, gilding and filigree and refinement; these culture-curious democrats depended on their Baedekers and Murrays to tell them not only where to go but how to deport themselves. They were capable of vulgarity, the most strident kind of chauvinism and insularity. They were skeptical and impatient; they also responded docilely and with awe if not understanding to high European culture. But this awe did not prevent them from being vandals and desecrators; people who had been accustomed to scribbling their names on the walls of water closets, Clemens said, now scribbled them on Greek ruins. Their sharp trading and acquisitive drive were, when they were abroad, just about equaled by their gullibility; European entrepreneurs, with their hastily contrived American saloons which pretended to serve American drinks and their acres of still-wet Guido Reni canvases for sale, were plucking the American eagle. Clemens felt sympathy for the victims, and despite their unshakable belief in American superiority he found something in them to admire: their “roving, independent, free and easy character.” During the five months of the Quaker City cruise, in close circumstances which put social identities to the test, he had his first prolonged and intimate experience of this new class which exerted its influence on him, helped shape his literary goals and social aspirations. In turn, he felt that the new class, traveling abroad and seeing new lands but unable to sing its own praises or publish its adventures, needed a spokesman. This was his formal justification of the circumstance that for the next two years, through his correspondence, his lecturing, and finally The Innocents Abroad, he achieved fame and considerable wealth by combining the roles of spokesman and satirist. “My audience is dumb, it has no voice in print,” he wrote to Andrew Lang in 1890. “Honestly, I never cared what became of the cultured classes; they could go to the theater and the opera, they had no use for me and the melodeon.”