Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

A Biography

Justin Kaplan

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780671748074
• eBook ISBN: 9781439129319
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

Mark Twain, the American comic genius who portrayed, named, and in part exemplified America's "Gilded Age, " comes alive in Justin Kaplan's extraordinary biography. With brilliant immediacy, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain brings to life a towering literary figure whose dual persona symbolized the emerging American conflict between down-to-earth morality and freewheeling ambition. As Mark Twain, he was the Mississippi riverboat pilot, the satirist with a fiery hatred of pretension, and the author of such classics as Tom Sawyer andHuckleberry Finn. As Mr. Clemens, he was the star who married an heiress, built a palatial estate, threw away fortunes on harebrained financial schemes, and lived the extravagant life that Mark Twain despised. Kaplan effectively portrays the triumphant-tragic man whose achievements and failures, laughter and anger, reflect a crucial generation in our past as well as his own dark, divided, and remarkably contemporary spirit. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain brilliantly conveys this towering literary figure who was himself a symbol of the peculiarly American conflict between moral scrutiny and the drive to succeed. Mr. Clemens lived the Gilded Life that Mark Twain despised. The merging and fragmenting of these and other identities, as the biography unfolds, results in a magnificent projection of the whole man; the great comic spirit; and the exuberant, tragic human being, who, his friend William Dean Howells said, was "sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."

CHAPTER ONE
“A roving commission”

I

IN 1866 PEOPLE IN A HURRY to go East from California still retraced the route of the Forty-niners. They went by ship from San Francisco down the coast of Mexico to San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua, crossed the Isthmus jungle by mule, wagon, and boat, and at Greytown, on the eastern side, they took passage in another ship for New York. If spared storm, engine breakdown, epidemic, and quarantine, they reached their destination in a little under four weeks. By 1869 the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific would be joined at Promontory Point in Utah, and on the new road the traveler would be able to ride, dine, and sleep his way in a Pullman Palace Car from San Francisco to New York in ten days. The continent would be spanned by rail, and this triumph of engineering and venture capitalism would signal a change in the face and character of the nation, the speeding of the frontier’s end, and the exposure of the Crédit Mobilier, that massive scandal which, like the trial of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher on the charge of committing adultery with a parishioner, was a symptom of what would soon be called the Gilded Age. Standing on the deck of the sidewheeler America of the Opposition Line as it left San Francisco at noonday in bright sunlight on December 15, 1866, Sam Clemens, just turned thirty-one, was facing eastward toward his future and leaving the frontiers which nurtured him, which he celebrated and eventually symbolized.

Diffidently and erratically, already past the age when others have chosen their vocation, he was beginning to choose his. For over four years he had been a journalist in Nevada and California, with a brief assignment in the Sandwich Islands, and the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” on its way to becoming an identity in itself, was already famous in the West. In 1865, on the advice of Artemus Ward, he had sent to New York a flawless story about the Calaveras mining camps. It was published in the Saturday Press on November 18, and soon after, by way of newspaper exchanges, it was reprinted all over the country; even so, Clemens soon found out, it was the frog that was celebrated, not its author. His most powerful ambitions, he wrote to his older brother, Orion (the Clemenses accented the first syllable of the name), three weeks before this taste of national success, had been to be a preacher or a river pilot. He had given up on the first because he lacked “the necessary stock in trade—i.e., religion.” He had succeeded at the second, and it was the outbreak of the Civil War, not his choice, that had cut his career short. Now he felt he had “a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order—i.e., humorous.” His vocation, though so far he lacked the education and training for it, was “to excite the laughter of God’s creatures,” and he was going to work at it. He wanted to strike a bargain with Orion, who had passed the zenith of his career after serving as secretary and sometimes acting governor of the Nevada Territory and was now embarked on thirty years of drift and vacillation: Sam would apply himself to exciting the laughter of God’s creatures if Orion would apply himself to any one rational pursuit. “You had better shove this in the stove,” he said at the end, in ironic reference to the seriousness of his call: “I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ and ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.” In other ways, too, his vocation was becoming clear to him. During the autumn months before he sailed for New York he gave a humorous lecture about the Sandwich Islands. After a seizure of stage fright so intense that he felt he saw the face of death, he discovered a new area of triumph. He could dominate his audience, make it laugh and respond at his will. With his shuffling entrance, solemn face, and attenuated delivery he could not escape comparison with Artemus Ward, the prince of platform entertainers and his mentor, but he was developing a style and presence all his own that captivated audiences in San Francisco and Sacramento, Grass Valley, Red Dog, You Bet, and Gold Hill.

At the end of his farewell lecture in San Francisco he spoke about the California of the future as a promised land. Now, as unofficial publicist, he carried in his cabin on the America evidences of the Pacific Slope Golconda—specimens of quartz, fruits of miraculous size and quality, the wines which were soon to be so popular in the East that French wines were sometimes relabeled as California. He had a sheaf of letters of introduction to Eastern clergymen, Beecher among them, to politicians and editors, to solid citizens who might sponsor him if he decided to lecture. He was the shipboard celebrity, and as Mark Twain his name headed the list of cabin passengers. He was leaving behind him, he wrote to his mother in St. Louis, “more friends than any newspaperman that ever sailed out of the Golden Gate. The reason I mention this with so much pride is because our fraternity generally leave none but enemies here when they go.” He craved affection and admiration, found them in the laughter and astonishment of his lecture audience, and they came to be the basic conditions he needed in order to be creative and happy. But despite his growing sense of vocation and his growing fame, at thirty-one—more than half a man’s life expectancy then—he had made no real commitment to place, social goal, or identity. He belonged to a professional group that came and went and seldom rooted. He had been a wanderer on and off since 1853; his home was in his valise. His haunts were saloons and police courts, the morgue, and the stage doors of San Francisco’s flourishing theaters. He moved among a subculture of reporters, entertainers, actors, theater managers, acrobats, ladies of the chorus, prospectors, and short-term promoters. As he was to tell his future mother-in-law, he was “a man of convivial ways and not averse to social drinking.” This was an understatement: he had been Artemus Ward’s companion on a marathon bender in Virginia City, and according to some in the West the name Mark Twain had more to do with marking up drinks on credit than it did with the Mississippi. Life on the Coast was full of queer vicissitudes, he said, and his own life there was no exception. One moment he lived high on oysters, salmon, cold fowl, and champagne at “heaven on the half shell,” the Occidental Hotel; the next moment he was out of work, in debt, even in jail, having too pointedly commented on the brutalities of the San Francisco police. One night early in 1866 he put a pistol to his head. “Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed,” he reflected more than forty years later, “but I was never ashamed of having tried.” At one low point a local editor described him in print as a “Bohemian from the sage-brush” who was a jailbird, bailjumper, deadbeat, and alcoholic. Sam Clemens, the editor insinuated, had been rolled in a whorehouse and probably had a venereal disease; in any case, he concluded, Sam would not be missed in the city by the Golden Gate. Even for an era of scurrilous journalism this was a frightful attack, and Sam’s answer was to depart, in silence, for the Hawaiian Islands. Such was the history that later caught up with him, and seriously threatened his chances, when he invaded the staidness of Elmira, New York, and asked for the hand of Olivia Langdon.

Now, scarcely two years before his first visit to Elmira, marriage and equilibrium seemed equally remote. In California he had been melancholy and restless, alternately idle and desperately industrious. His jokes and hoaxes were often strident and brassy, betraying raw nerve endings whipped by guilt about his family and by an oppressive sense of obligation to them. The youngest of the surviving Clemenses and once his mother’s despair, Sam was now the hope of the family. A crippled household—his sixty-three-year-old mother, Jane, a widow since 1847, his widowed sister, Pamela Moffett, and Orion—depended on him more and more to rescue them from a long pattern of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Before, in his letters to them he had always been “Sam.” Now, from time to time, he signed himself “Mark,” token not only of his celebrity, which might reflect itself on them, but also of his independence. Still he missed them, and a small part of his purpose in going East was to end a separation of close to six years. With a traveling-correspondent’s commission from the Alta California of San Francisco to supply weekly letters at twenty dollars each, he had first planned to sail for Peking on the January mail boat, to stay in China for a while, and then to go around the world to the Paris Exposition. He postponed the China trip, even though he was certain he was throwing away a fortune by not going. He wanted to see the States again. He now planned to go to New York, visit his family in St. Louis, then travel around the world by way of France, Italy, India, China, and Japan, and return to San Francisco. His plan was casual and changeable, but as the America carried him toward the East it carried him toward the lasting commitments of his life.

It was an inauspicious voyage. The first night out great seas broke over the steamer, sweeping away gunwales and timbers and flooding the forward staterooms with enough water to float a case of claret, and the lifeboats were readied. During the calmer days that followed, as they sailed within sight of the Mexican coast, Clemens came to know the captain who brought them through that night, a Connecticut Yankee—he was born in Westport—who by sea had followed the course of American empire westward. Ned Wakeman was already a California folk hero. He had been under piracy charges in 1850 for stealing a paddlewheel steamer from under the sheriff’s nose in New York and sailing her around the Horn. In San Francisco he had served as a vigilante and hanged at least two men. For such services the citizens honored him with a silver speaking trumpet, a breast-pin cluster of nine diamonds, and a gold watch, which, along with a gold anchor and a gold ring, hung from his neck on a massy chain seven feet long. Bearded and big-bellied, he was tattooed from head to foot—with the Goddess of Liberty holding the Stars and Stripes, a clipper ship under full sail, Christ on the Cross, and an assortment of Masonic devices. Wakeman was a blasphemer of remarkable vividness, something of an eccentric theologian, and above all a teller of stories about rats as big and lean as greyhounds, about snakes as long as a ship’s mainmast was high, and about the Monkey Islands, where his first mate counted ninety-seven million monkeys before the pencils wore out and his arm became paralyzed with ciphering. A week out of San Francisco Sam concluded, “I’d rather travel with that portly, hearty, boisterous, good-natured sailor, Captain Ned Wakeman, than with any other man I ever came across.” More than forty years after this voyage, after a few more meetings and many more stories (including a dream of Wakeman’s about sailing to heaven), Wakeman still lived in Mark Twain’s imagination as an archangel. In the story Mark Twain published in 1909 Wakeman on the deck of his storm-beaten ship became Captain Stormfield, who raced comets to heaven like a reckless river pilot, and “Stormfield” was the name of Mark Twain’s villa on top of a hill in Connecticut, his last home.

When Clemens left the America to cross the Isthmus, he left behind, in the heroic, dominating apparition of Wakeman, the only brightness in a depressing voyage which in all other respects resembled the dark fantasy voyages he was to write about in the 1890s, when he was heartbroken and bankrupt. There had been one death already, a child, who was buried at sea. On the overland trip cholera entered the steerage class, and once they boarded the San Francisco at Greytown it spread through the ship and along the entire social scale, from barber to Episcopalian clergyman. Before they reached New York it claimed at least eight lives. “The passengers say we are out of luck,” Clemens wrote in his notebook, plainly frightened, “and that it is a doomed voyage.” He reminded himself to get a list of the dead from the first officer to telegraph to his paper, if they should ever reach port. The engine had begun to break down, there were three failures in three days, and the ship drifted by the hour. The living and the dying were filled with brandy, and for their amusement a drunken monkey, fed a brandy-soaked banana or a square drink, and dressed in black pants and a vest—gift of the ship’s sewing circle—tottered and screeched in the rigging.

Throughout this voyage, even with death so near at hand, the face of gentility frowned on Clemens. A lady all in brown, backbiter, gossip—“damned old meddling moralizing fool”—said he drank too much, was often as drunk as the piper that played before Moses, played cards all night, was coarse and disgusting and clearly not a gentleman. He liked to sing, but the choir group that sang “Marching through Georgia” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” would have none of him. His drawl was unmistakably that of a Southerner. (He would not want to tell them that at the beginning of the war he had got himself sworn in as a Confederate irregular, but had deserted after two weeks of rain and retreat and had gone West for the duration.) On the lake steamer that took him across the Isthmus he had twice been offended by pursers who let other first-cabin passengers and even some from steerage go on deck unchallenged but said to him, “None but first cabin allowed up here. You first cabin?” He was ostentatiously shabby, but he was first cabin and had known celebrity, and he resented the emphatic “you.” Among bohemians he was content to be a bohemian with a suggestion of the roughneck. The ship’s manifest, drawn up by a playful officer, listed him as “Mark Twain, barkeeper, San Francisco,” and he liked that.

But there was another side to his identity, a side which he had kept hidden in the West and which now bitterly minded even petty rejections by these farflung pickets of Eastern gentility. His father, John Marshall Clemens, had been a man of precise and grammatical manners, a lawyer and holder of public office. He was a chronic business failure as farmer, storekeeper, trader, and land speculator, and his wife and children were accustomed to being poor, but still he was known as Judge Clemens, was president of the Library Association and chairman of the Committee on Roads, and was accounted one of the first citizens of Hannibal. Along with pride in his Virginia ancestry he left to his family when he died in 1847 about seventy thousand acres of land in Fentress County, Tennessee, and his widow and children considered themselves prospectively rich. So far the land was good only for potatoes and wild grass, but coal, copper, and iron deposits might be discovered any day now, a new railroad would triple the value of the land, a visionary new purchaser might turn up—with such chimeras Jane, Orion, and Pamela were to occupy themselves long after Sam forswore the whole bitter business. They had been landowners and slaveholders, and among their other grandeurs they claimed a relationship to a Roundhead judge who had sent King Charles I to the block; they also claimed a wondrously exiguous connection with the earls of Durham. They were respectable gentry, poor now, but with hopes, and among these hopes, second only to the Tennessee land, was Sam.

He was, at the very least, already a double creature. He wanted to belong, but he also wanted to laugh from the outside. The Hartford literary gentleman lived inside the sagebrush bohemian. But even outwardly Sam Clemens was far different from any conventional Western journalist and rough. He had been a sickly infant, born two months prematurely, and had barely survived his first two years. He grew up sparely built, small-boned, with narrow sloping shoulders, five feet eight inches tall, a contrast with the brawny miners he knew in Nevada; all his life he liked to elaborate fantasies about small men with unsuspected gigantic strength who were always surprising people with it. His head, like a child’s, seemed too large for his body. He had delicate hands, which quivered when he was stirred, and tapering fingers with pink nails. His mouth, Kipling said, was “as delicate as a woman’s.” He was sensitive about animals, timid about asking questions of strangers, and he was fastidious. When Clemens had been in the East for only a few years, William Dean Howells noticed something about him that was remarkable in an American of the time and especially remarkable in a Westerner: he never pawed, he was no back-slapper or arm-squeezer, he avoided touching other people. He was excitable, easily hurt, desperately hungry for affection and tenderness, often depressed, capable of great rage and greater remorse. He remained, in many ways, a child demanding attention in a nursery which was as large as the world; his wife was to call him “Youth” and “Little Man,” and to Howells he had the heart of a willful boy.

On the last night at sea, off the New Jersey coast, came the last death of this voyage which had been as spectral as any of Mark Twain’s voyage fantasies. The medical report, in order to circumvent quarantine, read “dropsy.” On the morning of January 12, 1867, twenty-seven and a half days out of San Francisco, Clemens breathed in the biting air on the upper deck as his ship passed the snow-covered houses of Staten Island and crushed its way through the ice toward Castle Garden and the city that lay north of it, a forest of church steeples palisaded by masts.

II

To be in New York in 1867 was to be at the scrambling center of American life. Six years of war and peace had made it a city of extremes and contradictions, where the best and the worst, the highest and the lowest, existed side by side in sunshine and shadow, in splendor and squalor. The white marble palace of A. T. Stewart, the merchant prince who vied with William B. Astor for the title of richest man in the city, rose in Italianate grandeur over the shanties behind Fifth Avenue. The old aristocracy, cultivated and traveled, claimed that inflation was crushing them, and they moved into remote new streets uptown to wait for the crash that would bring back the old order. Prosperous crowds and a tremendous traffic of vehicles surged along Broadway, directed by the elite of the police force. But in the Five Points section of the lower East Side, home of ragpickers, prostitutes, new immigrants, and the desperate poor, crime reached a level of such frequency and violence that the police were afraid even to patrol. On Sundays the upright and well-dressed, acceptable in the sight of both Lorenzo Delmonico and the Deity, went to services at Bishop Southgate’s or across the river at Henry Ward Beecher’s in Brooklyn, to be reassured that godliness and prosperity went hand in hand, mostly to see and be seen, the ladies patting their tiny hats which looked like jockey saddles and batter cakes. On Sundays those of New York’s ten thousand saloons that observed the closing laws sent their customers thronging by ferryboat to the doggeries of Hoboken.

New York’s port faced east toward Europe, and the city was shipping center, temple of trade and commerce. Wartime finance had made Wall Street powerful. The city’s population of nearly one and a half million, the largest in the country, supported five major newspapers, some of them with national circulation and influence. Fashion and manners were dictated from Manhattan Island. Its twelve or so theaters and palaces of entertainment—the number subject to change with each fire alarm—were supported, then as ever, by outlanders who could choose among a variety of attractions that included leg shows, melodrama, and Barnum’s Happy Family. The city had already become the printing, publishing, and book-manufacturing center of the nation. It was no Boston; high culture had not flourished in New York. It had a literary tradition of a sort, ranging from Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper to the group led by Walt Whitman and the publisher Henry Clapp that before the war had crowded into Pfaff’s beer cellar under the Broadway pavement near Bleecker Street. But the tradition was miscellaneous, flavored with journalism, never deeply rooted. Both William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, soon to become custodians of the Boston tradition, served briefly in the New York literary world in the 1860s. They were not sorry to leave. “Better fifty years of Boston than a cycle of New York,” said Howells. The city was dedicated to popular culture, but it also originated a few literary and intellectual magazines that conferred almost as much distinction on their contributors as the august Atlantic, if no money at all. The Nation, started by E. L. Godkin three months after Appomattox, was New York in nativity even if, as some claimed, it was mainly Bostonian in spirit. Henry Clapp’s urbane, venturesome, and incurably penniless Saturday Press had just gone broke, but not before publishing Walt Whitman as well as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” A month before Sam Clemens arrived in New York Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published his “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat,” his account of the survivors of the burned clipper ship Hornet. (The following May he was mortified to discover that in the magazine’s annual index he was listed as “Mark Swain.”)

When William Dean Howells came to Boston in 1860, at the age of twenty-three, he was a pilgrim from the Midwest worshiping at the feet of New England’s literary great. It was with a sense of entering another world altogether that this postulant sat through a four-hour dinner in a private room at the Parker House with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had given the Atlantic its name, James T. Fields, its publisher, and James Russell Lowell, its editor in chief. With an informality Howells would never have guessed in Columbus, Ohio, these eminences addressed each other as “James” and “Wendell,” as if they were all still boys together. About the time the coffee came in, the dapper little doctor cast a smiling glance at Howells and, turning to Lowell, said, “Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” For Howells this was intoxication. Even though it was to be six years yet, and by way of a term as American consul in Venice and literary journalist in New York, before he came to the Atlantic as assistant editor (and eleven years before the title of editor in chief, in apostolic succession, would be bestowed upon him), Howells had a sure, unwavering vocation in Boston and in literature. Sam Clemens came to New York not as a pilgrim but as a miner staking out a claim and beginning to work it. His ambitions were not those hallowed in literary Boston. They lay in a still-unmapped area bounded by journalism, humor, entertainment, and popular literature. He was convinced, after only a few months, that he had made the right choice in c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE “A roving commission”
• CHAPTER TWO “The tide of a great popular movement”
• CHAPTER THREE “The fortune of my life”
• CHAPTER FOUR “I do not live backwards”
• CHAPTER FIVE “Little Sammy in Fairy Land”
• CHAPTER SIX “A popular author’s death rattle”
• CHAPTER SEVEN “I did not know I was a lion”
• CHAPTER EIGHT “Era of incredible rottenness”
• CHAPTER NINE “Busiest white man in America”
• CHAPTER TEN Spirits of ’76
• CHAPTER ELEVEN “The free air of Europe”
• CHAPTER TWELVE “Everything a man could have”
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN “Our great Century”
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Yankee and the Machine
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN “Get me out of business ”
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN “Never quite sane in the night”
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN “Whited sepulchre”
• NOTES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR