Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Read online

  He may have been the only spokesman on the ship, but there was no lack of chroniclers. Mrs. Mary Mason Fairbanks, under the anagram Myra, was writing meticulous and unexciting accounts of the trip which were published in her husband’s newspaper, the Cleveland Herald. Fourteen letters by Miss Julia Newell ran in the Gazette of Janesville, Wisconsin. The Reverend Mr. Bullard of Wayland, Massachusetts, had an understanding with a Boston paper, as did the Reverend Mr. Hutchinson with a St. Louis paper and Dr. A. Reeves Jackson, the ship’s surgeon—and, three cautious years later, the husband of Miss Newell—with one in Philadelphia. It had been rumored that Moses Beach had plans to write for his New York Sun, but he may have felt that an account of a luxury cruise was not altogether fitting for a paper he had taken pains to conduct as the voice of the workingman. There were these and other real or intended correspondents, perhaps a dozen in all; there were passengers who kept or intended to keep journals; and there were the letter-writers. “Everyone taking notes,” observed the one professional reporter, who had to honor substantial commitments to the Alta California and the New York Tribune. “Cabin looks like a reporters’ congress.” Inevitably the Quaker City expedition developed a wide following back home.

  II

  To Slote and to the others who preferred poker and alcohol to dominoes and tea Clemens revealed mainly the shifting, ruffled, somewhat truculent surface of his personality. With them he was Mark Twain, satirist and mimic, profane, who joked about genuine Nubian chancres and about Bayard’s motto (“Sans peur et sans culottes”), and who told them that contrary to all reports the ugly women of the Azores were probably virtuous—“Fornication with such cattle would come under the head of the crime without a name.” (Some months earlier he had decided that the big-breasted Nicaraguan girls also were virtuous, according to their lights, but “their lights are a little dim.”) He was no prude, but he did make a finical distinction between the smoking room and the drawing room, and to a few of the women on the Quaker City—Mary Fairbanks, her friend Emily Severance, and Emma Beach, Moses Beach’s seventeen-year-old daughter—he opened himself and exposed the still plastic and uncommitted private personality of Samuel Clemens. In these friendships he gave lasting hostages to the social order.

  Clemens played chess with Emma Beach and carried on a mock flirtation with her. Despite the difference in their ages, he invited her to scold and correct him, an invitation more seriously offered to and accepted by Mary Fairbanks. In comparison with most women of her day, and notably in comparison with the Quaker City ladies, she was highly educated and accomplished. She was an early graduate of Emma Willard’s Female Seminary in Troy, New York, had taught school, could speak French well enough to get along, and was a semiprofessional writer. She was full-faced and had a rounded figure, and she was seven matronly years older than Clemens. She had two children, whom she had left behind in Cleveland in the care of her somewhat spiritless and, as Clemens saw him, exasperating unworthy, and undependable husband, Abel; she was “a Pegasus,” Clemens later said, “harnessed with a dull brute of the field. Mated but not matched.” For thirty-two subsequent years Clemens addressed her as “Mother” and called himself her “Cub” and her “Reformed Prodigal,” and it was in the role of son to mother that he described her to his family as “the most refined, intelligent, and cultivated lady in the ship, and altogether the kindest and the best. She sewed my buttons on, kept my clothes in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarter deck on moonlit promenading evenings, and cured me of several bad habits.” It was as if Sam Clemens had never left home and was still a boy under the thumb of the thin, angular, and incomparably less cultivated Jane Clemens. Mary Fairbanks was the kind of civilizing influence that Huck Finn lit out from, but which Clemens courted for years.

  She had noticed him from the start. He stood out from the others, she said, and not only because of his serious, questioning face, his look of offended innocence, his “drolleries and quaint, odd manners,” and the peculiar indolence and moderateness of his movements. “There is something, I know not what, that interests and attracts,” she said. She noticed that he slouched at the table and that he was “scarcely genteel in his appearance.” A challenge was offered her, and he soon made it an explicit invitation, to work her influence on him, to pass on through maternal suasion the conventions of her class and background. She was shrewd enough to see the promise in him, and at this stage he was scarcely recalcitrant. He teased her, and he continued to swear and drink when he felt like it, but he also tried to open up to her. He was not used to talking about his private self; when he did, he was a little mawkish. “I am like an old burned-out crater,” he declared as they walked together on deck. “The fires of my life are all dead within me.”

  By the time the ship was in the Mediterranean, Mary Fairbanks had become his mentor in manners and morals, even in writing, and, willingly enough, he was surrounded by women in a scene which could have made one of the genre groups by John Rogers that went with the horsehair-upholstered parlor furniture of the time: at the right Mrs. Severance sharpens pencils for him, in the center of the group the author is bent over his writing table; while at his shoulder, a motherly figure molded in marmoreal plaster, leans Mary Fairbanks, scanning his manuscript for vulgarities and vernacularisms, for lack of charity and too much irreverence. “Now these are ready for you to make fun of us,” Emily Severance once said to him, handing him his pencils. “I wish you would write something sober, to be put in the Atlantic Monthly, for instance.” At other times the author stood at the ship’s rail, gloomily tearing his manuscript into tiny pieces. “Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn’t to be printed,” he said, “and, like as not, she is right.” (She had scolded him for writing a passage about how a lady climbing up Vesuvius in a hoopskirt would look to someone just below her on the steep path.) “Mrs. Fairbanks has just destroyed another four hours’ work for me,” he told Emma Beach another time. He was obedient, formative, eager to learn. Without hypocrisy but with a certain willing suspension of identity—the price of which, he would later learn, was anger and a divided heart—he wanted to experiment with her manners and standards, to imitate and possibly assimilate them. In his reliance on her taste, in his apparent submission to her literary standards, were foreshadowed some of the scenes of his life with Olivia Langdon and their children: a writer surrounded by women and seeking their approval.

  In the days before the Quaker City called at Marseilles, Clemens played the role of the studious and reverent tourist with Mrs. Fairbanks and her friends. He was a member of a group which met for serious discussions, its high purposes only a little threatened by the fact that its presiding officer was an ex-alcoholic who had cured himself by becoming a morphine addict. Clemens studied the guidebooks. He read poetry aloud to the ladies. He even talked with confidence and reverence about the Old Masters, the holy of holies among the cultural values of Mrs. Fairbanks. In New York, at the Academy of Design, he had been entranced by academic landscapes and sentimental vistas, but he had balked: “I am glad the old masters are all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner.” When he came to write The Innocents Abroad he would return to this jeering attitude and resign himself to the knowledge that Mrs. Fairbanks thought of him as a heretic in art. But for the moment, during this honeymoon, this period of blending in with the social foliage, he was willing to embrace her symbols of culture and status, even her religion. He dreaded the prayer meetings, but at her urging and scolding he attended them, and he went a step further. One afternoon he had a serious conversation with the Reverend Mr. Bullard, who later confided to another passenger that if Mr. Clemens proved to be not past saving they might see the rebirth of many souls on the voyage. A week later the prodigal himself, a fresh convert, led the evening devotions. This remained the ultimate outpost of his spiritual progress until a year later, when, wooing Olivia Langdon, he underwent a parallel conversion, more fervid but no more permanent than this one. Mrs. Fairbanks was gr
atified by his regeneration to the same degree that a friend from quite another world, Joe Goodman of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, was a few years later to be dumfounded to hear his ex-reporter saying grace at Livy’s dinner table. For many of the other people on board, Mrs. Fairbanks’ influence notwithstanding, he continued to be a dissolute, irreligious, uncouth Westerner, a gambler as well as a drinker. It was a role, she recognized, that he assumed partly out of perversity and in self-defense, the outsider’s aggravated reaction to the already disapproving attitudes of a tightly knit social group. “You don’t know what atrocious things women, and men too gray-haired and old to have their noses pulled, said about me,” he explained to her after the voyage. “And but for your protecting hand I would have given them a screed or two that would have penetrated even their muddy intellects.”

  “Solemnity, decorum, dinner, dominoes, prayers, slander”—so he summed up the routine of shipboard life, which was broken at last by a stop at Horta in the Azores and by a celebration ashore for which the bill for ten people was $21.70, $15.70 of it for wine and cigars.

  III

  Sam Clemens, the Westerner who was to spend nearly a sixth of his life in Europe, an expatriate despite himself, came to Paris with little anticipation. Henry James’s early experience of the glittering city had been so powerful that in later life he claimed to remember that as an infant, waggling his toes under long baby robes, he had seen a tall and glorious column in the Place Vendôme. For him Paris was history For Clemens, whose first cherished memories were of drowsy dogs, ripe watermelons, and ghost stories told on his Uncle John Quarles’s farm, Paris was the present, but it was progress. It was the city of the Emperor Napoleon III, who stood not six feet away from him at the Exposition grounds and who, Clemens decided, must be “the greatest man in the world today.” Hadn’t this ruler re-established France on a solid commercial basis? He had driven straight and broad avenues through the city and paved them with asphalt, believing that without paving stones there could be no barricades, and without barricades no revolutions.

  At the city of the Universal Exposition, where the world came to enjoy the gaslit grandeurs of the Second Empire while celebrating the smiling aspects of the Industrial Revolution, America was represented by her technology as well as her tourists. Field’s transatlantic telegraph, McCormick’s reaping machine, and Howe’s sewing machine were displayed and there were other portents of the American Century: a mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, won a medal for its enlightened paternalism, a piano made in Boston won a commendation from the Abbé Liszt, and the painter Frederick Church was honored for his landscapes in oil. The century pointed forward, and Clemens was impatient with what Paris had to offer of the past.

  He had at his command scraps of French he had taught himself on the river, and he mocked his own fumbling in the tongue as well as the affectations of others: “Quel est votre nom and how the hell do you spell it?” He wondered why so many towns in France, as evidenced by the signs on the railway stations, were called “Côte des Hommes,” an indelicacy which did not survive into The Innocents Abroad. The paintings in the Louvre displayed a cringing spirit, he felt, “A nauseous adulation of princely patrons.” At Versailles his reactions were confined within the drab limits of the observation “Nothing is small—nothing is cheap. The statues are all large.” He saw Notre Dame, the Bois de Boulogne, the Morgue, the poverty of the Faubourg St. Antoine, where “the people live who start the revolutions,” and he came back to his hotel on the Rue de Rivoli which had an elevator but no soap, where the candles did not give enough light to read by, and where the barbers were butchers. As he walked the boulevards and visited the cafés he was excited and pleased at first by what seemed an air of open sexuality and wickedness. He was enchanted by the cancan, by guidebook anecdotes about Louis XV and Pompadour dining naked at Versailles, and like any other tourist he thought he could tell at a glance which were the ladies of the demimonde. The city titillated him, but during the next years, as his commitments to domestic life multiplied, his curiosity and tolerance turned into anger and revulsion. Even by the time The Innocents Abroad was finished Peter Abelard had become something worse than just a romantic humbug—a pedant, a lecherous hypocrite, and “a dastardly seducer.” He became a symbol of what Clemens later described in his notebooks as a country without morals, ruled by prostitutes, and populated by filthy-minded citizens who were the connecting links between man and monkey.

  By August 2, when Clemens arrived in Naples by train from Rome, he had covered nearly twenty-five hundred miles of the Continent in a month, a heroic pace for which American tourists were already celebrated and which gave to their heightened responses to European leisureliness a comic poignancy. The Quaker City lay quarantined in the harbor, and from his hotel ashore Clemens wrote a letter of protest to the English-language paper in Naples: “We have not brought any cholera with us from Leghorn. They would not let us out of the country without paying duty on it.” Making fun of medical fumigations, he gave play to the sort of compost-heap humor that his Western readers had enjoyed but which, he was now being told over and over again by Mary Fairbanks, would not do at all in the East: “Each and every passenger has acquired a distinct and individual odor, and made it his own, and you can recognize any one of them in the dark as far as you can smell him.” During the ten days before the quarantine was lifted he made the predictable trips to Pompeii, to Capri, Ischia, and Procida; he climbed Vesuvius (“I am glad I visited it,” he reported to his paper in California, “partly because it was well worth it, and chiefly because I shall never have to do it again”). He traveled by the guidebook, he was as obedient to it as any other tourist, but (as Bret Harte conceded in a review of The Innocents Abroad), though he was content to see only the sights everybody else saw, he saw them with his own eyes.

  Aboard the Quaker City again, he had a breathing space. Despite the heat of the cabin, the noise of peddlers and musicians, the temptation to visit ashore—the ship was a poor writing desk, he complained—he started to catch up with his newspaper correspondence. He was worried that he had neglected it half the time and botched it the other half. To pay off his debt to the Alta California he spun out his impressions of Naples and Vesuvius in four long letters. He had the need and the opportunity now to consider the experience of the past month, and even while making fun of his fellow-tourists, he began to convert some of their baser attitudes—their outrage at bureaucracy and beggars, at the wealth of the Church, at superstition and the veneration of relics, their raucous irreverence and impatience with the past, their conviction that Europe was a sell, a swindle, a fraud—into a flexible, joyously inconsistent view that was wholly his own. He said the Arno might be a plausible river if it had some water pumped into it. He said that Venice looked as if in a few weeks its flooded alleys would dry up and restore the city to normal. (Some years later General Grant, no humorist and an innocent abroad as well as in peace, remarked “Venice would be a fine city if it were only drained.”) “Is—is he dead?” Clemens would ask, fleeringly, in front of some ancient portrait or bust. These were his way of rejecting the past, the uncomfortable emotions of outsideness and awe, and the father image of Europe, his own way of answering Emerson’s call for Americans to cease listening to the courtly Muses of Europe, to speak their own minds, make their own past.

  But in certain European vistas—the fields of France and the Italian lakes—he also began to find and respond to a tranquility and gentleness that existed for him only in dreams, paintings, and his remembered boyhood and which he bitterly missed in the harsh mountainscapes and alkali deserts of the West; he said he had never seen twilight in California. From the distance of “a league”—the antique unit of measure suggests the mood—he glimpsed Venice reposing in a soft, golden setting, its towers, domes, and steeples “drowsing” in the sunset mist. “Drowsing” was his talismanic word to evoke the landscape of dream. Over Damascus he was to find, from a distance, “a drowsing air of repose” which mad
e it seem like a city visited in sleep, and it was by the same translation of reality into dream that in Tom Sawyer he used “drowsing” to evoke the atmosphere of the schoolroom and in Life on the Mississippi he rendered the Hannibal of his boyhood as “a white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning”; even in The Mysterious Stranger, written late and in bitterness, the town still “drowses” in peace. The word conjured up an image of childhood purified by the years, a state of idyllic innocence which could be recaptured only in the imagination, and the image was as compelling for him as death was for Walt Whitman. These passive, whispering, dreamlike images were the token of their private alienation from the bustling present for which publicly they were often the spokesmen.