Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 8

  The Quakers did get up and howl in the morning. “They can all go to the devil for all I care.” By this time he had worked himself into a towering rage, which was aggravated further by the fact that the Herald had omitted his byline from the article. This score he partly settled over a dinner that night with the editors, who were busily wooing this explosive celebrity to join the staff. Before dinner, though, he went on to flay the Quakers in an even more savage letter to the Alta California. “I’m tired hearing about the ‘mixed’ character of our party on the Quaker City. It was not mixed enough—there were not blackguards enough on board in proportion to the saints—there was not genuine piety enough to offset the hypocrisy.” One hundred and eighteen out of the one hundred and sixty-five prayer meetings had been scandalous and illegal “because four out of the five real Christians on board were too seasick to be present at them, and so there wasn’t a quorum.” If he had to go on such a pleasure excursion again, he said, the captain would be Ned Wakeman and the passengers would be some of the leading citizens of San Francisco, including Bret Harte, journalists and prominent eccentrics. He was not the only one who complained. A day later the Herald published a long anonymous letter (probably by Mrs. Severance’s husband, Solon) describing the cynicism and incompetence of Duncan and his staff and the bitter feuds among the passengers. This writer attributed the trouble to the mixed character of the party, and he predicted that the Quaker City cruise would be the last of its kind.

  In the same issue, the editors of the Herald, still making amends for the missing byline, ventured another prediction: “We are not aware whether Mr. Twain intends giving us a book on this pilgrimage, but we do know that a book written from his own peculiar standpoint, giving an account of the characters and events on board ship and of the scenes which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented sale.” It was as if Clemens had written his own prospectus. That day, while he was on his way to Washington to take up his duties with Senator Stewart and to repair his ruined finances, a publisher in Hartford, in a stiffly formal business letter, took the liberty of writing in the hope that perhaps a book could be compiled from Mark Twain’s travel letters.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “The fortune of my life”

  I

  WHEN SAM CLEMENS LEFT THE WEST at the end of 1866 his fame was chrysalid, local. The editors of his California paper, counting on the sparks that new opportunities would strike against his talents, predicted that his commission for them would give him a world-wide reputation, and eventually they were right. His Alta California letters from abroad were enormously popular in the West, his Herald and Tribune letters in the East. His laughter and irreverence, his vernacular and skeptical accounts of Americans abroad among the holy places of Europe and Palestine, outraged some people, but they surprised and delighted most of his readers and made his venture into travel journalism an astonishing success. And it was a success that had to be measured not by the literary values of Boston but by the values of an avid, newly lettered and newly leisured mass audience, the beneficiaries of democratized culture, which had begun to come into its own just before the war and which shaped the character of the books, magazines, newspapers, and lecture programs of the Gilded Age. The parting blast at the pilgrims in the Herald—so sensational a valedictory that the canny publisher of The Innocents Abroad was to stipulate that it be included in the book—was a rocket sent up to signal not only the end of the voyage but also the arrival of Mark Twain as a national figure.

  In Washington, however, despite his claim that he was lazy, Clemens threw himself into a bewildering tangle of projects and seemed to run on nervous energy flogged by ambition, restlessness, the need for money, and, above all, an indecision about who he was and what he wanted to be. As private secretary to Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada he was expected to perform a few clerkly chores in return for six dollars a day and the leisure to write. Such arrangements were common enough in the city; not far from 224 F Street, where Clemens settled in with Stewart, lived Walt Whitman, a clerk in the Attorney General’s office; and James H. Riley, who was one of Clemens’ closest friends and who later figured in a bizarre and futile collaboration with him, served both as clerk to a Congressional committee on mines and mining and as political correspondent for the Alta. Stewart’s return for taking on this unlikely secretary was the satisfaction of playing Maecenas to a literary celebrity and the use of Clemens’ popularity with the Western press to advance his own reputation. The arrangement lasted barely two months. Over six feet tall, bearded like Moses, and with long flowing hair, Stewart looked like the archetypal frontier Senator, and he was also possessed by augustitude. He was no longer the lawyer and politician Clemens had known in Nevada and satirized as “Bullyragging Bill,” the champion of the “honest miner”; now he was a pillar of state and nation, a rich man who had just sent his family off to Paris for the winter. Consequently he saw Clemens as “disreputable,” “slouching,” “seedy,” “sinister”—these adjectives are from Stewart’s highly colored, inevitably distorted recollections—wearing a battered hat and a frazzled cigar butt, the reverted sagebrush bohemian, now a safe three hundred and fifty miles away from Mother Fairbanks in Cleveland. According to Stewart, Clemens appeared at the apartment on F Street, helped himself freely to whiskey and cigars, took over a hall bedroom, and in the weeks that followed tormented the landlady by lurching drunkenly in the halls and smoking in bed. Clemens could not take either the Senator or the job seriously. Eventually Stewart drew himself to his full height and talked darkly about a thrashing, and Clemens resigned without regret and began to burlesque the whole business in print. In one of these burlesques, “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship,” a private secretary named Mark Twain answers a request from some Nevada constituents for a post office: “Don’t bother about a post-office in your camp. I have your best interests at heart, and feel that it would only be an ornamental folly. What you want is a nice jail, you know—a nice substantial jail and a free school.” Such was the spirit of his brief service.

  Clemens was on the move again: wretched food and shabby furniture, he complained, in five different Washington lodgings within three months. He stayed at Riley’s boardinghouse: later he briefly shared with another newspaperman a room, a whiskey jug, and a scheme for working a minor swindle on provincial newspapers by sending them manifolded copies of correspondence. He had gone back to the marginal life, and in his familiar bohemian role he was enjoying one of his last flings outside the pale of respectability; the enthusiasm with which he now filled the role of tramp journalist was a measure of the enthusiasm with which he would soon fill the role of gentleman, householder, and head of a family. Years later he lamented to Howells the passing of “a life of don’t-care-a-damn in a boarding-house,” and in his Autobiography, that piece of near-fiction he thought of as the most unvarnished personal history ever written, he glorified the freedom of that life, but exaggerated the poverty and minimized the opportunities.

  There were almost too many opportunities. He was Washington correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, he was considering an invitation from James Gordon Bennett the younger to hold the same position for the New York Herald, he had other commissions from papers in the West and the Midwest. These assignments were worth about eight hundred dollars a month to him. He agreed to write occasional articles for the Galaxy, a literary monthly in New York. Frank Fuller pressed him to lecture during the winter, but he refused, turned down eighteen invitations at a hundred dollars each, turned down a proposition from Thomas Nast for a series of joint appearances in which Nast would draw while Clemens talked. He was determined, he told Fuller, to spend the winter building his reputation through the newspapers so it would “stand fire”; if he lectured in the spring he meant to lecture in the big cities and not in Tuttletown, Arkansas, and Baldwinsville, Michigan. But by early December, after only three weeks in Washington, he was already tired of politics and newspaper drudgery, and thinking of a Wester
n lecture tour. “I am good for three nights in San F, one in Sac., two in Va. [Virginia City], and one in Carson—that is all I can swear to. It is all I would attempt on the coast. Maybe we could make it pay two of us—maybe we can’t,” he wrote to Fuller. “But for your overweening pride, we could—for you could keep door and peddle photographs—but not of yourself, for God Almighty’s sake.”

  He had Orion to look out for, too, Orion who now hoped for a clerkship in the Bureau of Patents, the equivalent, if he had ever got the job, of putting a drunkard to work in a distillery. Sam’s lobbying on Orion’s behalf was marked by hypersubtlety, indirection, and the need to create complications in order to put off a distasteful errand. He paid a call on the Secretary of the Interior. “Said nothing about a place for Orion, of course—must get better acquainted first—must see his wife—she is the power behind the thone,” he reported to Jane Clemens and Pamela. His heart was not in it. “I have friends in high places who offer me such things—but it is hard to get them interested in one’s relatives”: a cruel but accurate statement, for even in this city riddled with patronage nothing did come through for Orion. By the end of February 1868, after two and a half months of politicking, Sam claimed that, with a change in administration iminent, Washington was in such a muddle that even if Orion could get a job it would have no permanency. His determination to help evaporated into vague promise (“Sometime in the course of the present century I think they will create a Commissioner of Patents, and then I hope to get a berth for Orion”) and into out-and-out rationalization: “Surely government pap must be nauseating food for a man—a man whom God has enabled to saw wood and be independent.” It was a rationalization meant for his own benefit as well as Orion’s, for he himself was tempted to become a consul or minister abroad, thought once again of going to China that spring as member of a diplomatic mission, and spent three frantic weeks lobbying for an appointment as postmaster of San Francisco. Stephen J. Field, a Forty-niner and a powerful California politician who even as an associate justice of the Supreme Court was still dispensing patronage, first proposed the post to Clemens early in December, but it had just been filled. In February it was vacant again, and Clemens went after it so energetically that after his campaign he was sick in bed, exhausted not only from overwork but also from the strain of a last-minute decision. The California delegation was pledged to him, the Senators were for him, the powers were behind him, and only then he discovered that the salary for this position (which he told Orion, San Franciscans regarded as a pinnacle of glory and public honor) was only four thousand a year. And this discovery was followed by another, surprisingly late for a man who had the subtlety to divine who was the power behind the throne in the Department of the Interior: the job was no sinecure, and the time he would have to give it would interfere with other plans. He explained to Elisha Bliss of Hartford, by this time his baffled and anxious publisher, “I have thrown away that office, when I had it in my grasp, because it was plain enough that I could not be postmaster and write the book too.” Nor could he continue to be a full-time journalist either, he suddenly recognized. In order to write a book he would have to cut his newspaper correspondence to one or two letters a week, a loss of about three hundred dollars a month in income, and he asked Bliss for an advance of a thousand to help him keep writing through the spring. Until these decisions were forced on him, he was capable of continuing to drift between journalism and patronage. He still had no sure sense of identity or vocation. It was only by a wayward and dilatory process that Mark Twain, who had probably the most richly endowed natural talent in American literature, finally gave himself over to writing the book that established his fame.

  II

  The proposal from Elisha Bliss, Jr., secretary and managing director of the American Publishing Company of Hartford, eventually reached Clemens at the Tribune office in Washington on December 1. “We are desirous of obtaining from you a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the East, etc., with such interesting additions as may be proper,” Bliss wrote. “We are perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never failed to give a book an immense circulation. … If you have any thought of writing a book, or could be induced to do so, we should be pleased to see you, and will do so.” The next day Clemens responded with equal directness. “I wrote fifty-two (three) letters for the San Francisco Alta California during the Quaker City excursion, about half of which number have been printed thus far,” he wrote. “I could weed them of their chief faults of construction and inelegancies of expression and make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write.” He was concerned with correctness and propriety; he was less concerned with structure and direction, was willing to follow Bliss’s instructions, “strike out certain letters, and write new ones,” and carpenter his book to the physical exigencies of the standard subscription volume. He asked Bliss to please tell him “when the matter ought to be ready, whether it should have pictures in it or not, and what amount of money” he “might possibly make out of it. The latter clause” he wrote, “has a degree of importance for me which is almost beyond my own comprehension.” (As he explained to Frank Fuller, the question boiled down to “how much bucksheesh”) After the disappointment of The Jumping Frog he had decided not to touch another book unless there was money in it; and in New York, before sailing for Europe, he had talked with Albert Deane Richardson, one of Bliss’s most profitable authors, whose account of his eighteen months in Confederate prisons as a captured Northern journalist, The Secret Service (1865), sold nearly 100,000 copies, and whose travel book Beyond the Mississippi (1866) ended up selling nearly ninety thousand copies in four years. From this conversation and from others, Clemens became convinced that the only way to make a good deal of money from a book was to publish by subscription.

  In stating his goal and choosing Bliss’s publishing company as the way to reach it, Clemens implicitly defined his audience and the character of the books he would write for it. The subscription book, in Bliss’s terms, was the people’s book, and he was soon to advertise Mark Twain as “the people’s author.” Authors whose aspirations were of a different sort and who, while needing money no less than Clemens did, were willing for a while to accept its equivalent in reputation, went to publishers whose books were sold in bookstores. The manuscript they offered to trade publishers was as short or as long as it had to be in order to say what they wanted it to say. These authors felt that such an imprint as that of Ticknor and Fields of Boston (eventually to become Houghton MifHin), the publishers of Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Holmes, was critical accolade in itself. They hoped that this imprint, combined with judicious advertising, would guarantee them reviews, and they also hoped for a modest, though distant, return from their work. Their audience was educated, and it lived in communities big and prosperous enough to support a bookstore.

  The subscription system, which made Mark Twain a rich author and which he later exploited as his own publisher, carried a different set of conditions. The prestige of the imprint was commercial, not literary. Eventually a stockholder and then a director of the American Publishing Company, Clemens boasted that it was the richest, most aggressive house in the country. (Incorporated in 1865, it was far from being the oldest, as Bliss claimed.) The books this and other subscription houses published had to be massive in order to justify their relatively high price ($3.50 and up, depending on the binding) and make the venture worth while for the four principals: the author, the publisher, who went to press only after he was sure of enough orders for him at least to break even; the subscription agent, who went from door to door and kept on talking; and the buyer, who was typically rural, a farmer or small tradesman with little education, for whom bulk was an index of value. But even padded out with steel engravings, decorations of all sorts, elaborate tables of contents, a six-hundred-page book could strain the integrity and imagination of an author who had only a three-hundred-page idea to begin with. It encourag
ed padding (Clemens once remarked that he thought about The Innocents Abroad pretty much as God thinks about the world: “The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both”). It forced the author to write to fit and to fill, and it encouraged Clemens to develop his books on purely linear principles, with episode strung after episode until he reached page 600. It forced him to go on grinding out manuscript long after he lost interest in the subject, and it conditioned him to think of his writing as a measurable commodity, like eggs and corn. About the only advertising the subscription publisher bought was of a help-wanted variety, to recruit his army of selling agents. Consequently, literary editors, who kept an eye on advertising revenues, tended to ignore and resent subscription books as sub-literature and to regard the occasional review copy that came in from the publisher as an arrant attempt to get something for nothing.

  The flourishing subscription system was part of the rationalizing of production and marketing that was going on all over America after the Civil War. “Anything but subscription publishing,” Clemens once told Howells, “is printing for private circulation.” But he was generalizing from his own special experience. “No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’ books,” Howell wrote in 1893, “and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.” Some of the credit for this constructive deception belonged to Bliss, for he departed from his usual editorial practice by inviting a humorist to write a book for him that would eventually keep company on marble-topped mahogany-legged tables with the illustrated family Bible, with Horace Greeley’s American Conflict and James Parton’s People’s Book of Biography, with all the other standard subscription merchandise of moral philosophy, patriotism, and medical advice. In such company The Innocents Abroad was to be, Bret Harte said, “an Indian spring in an alkaline literary desert.”