The Life of Mark Twain Read online

  Though most of Sam’s life is thoroughly documented, the record is incomplete in several significant ways. The biggest biographical blind spot comprises the hundreds of lost articles he contributed to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise between 1862 and 1866. More specifically, as the San Francisco correspondent of the Enterprise between June 1865 and March 1866 Sam sent perhaps 20 letters a month, or a total of about 160 letters, to Washoe, though excerpts from only about one-third of the texts reprinted in other papers have been recovered. In January 1866 Sam reported that he had “burned up a small cart-load” of his sketches clipped from the Enterprise and other papers—the metaphor connotes raw ore—because “they were not worth republishing.” In March 1870 he mentioned his receipt of a “coffin of ‘Enterprise’ files” from his brother Orion that have since disappeared. The fire that destroyed the Virginia City business district in October 1875 burned the proprietary copy of the Territorial Enterprise. A second file of the Enterprise, compiled at a cost of forty thousand dollars and used to document mining titles and afterward donated to the San Francisco Public Library, was destroyed in the fire that followed the San Francisco earthquake in April 1906. As a result, the vast majority of Sam’s contributions to the Enterprise have been lost. A dozen or so travel letters he mailed from Europe to the San Francisco Alta California during the Quaker City voyage vanished in the mail, and hundreds of letters he sent his mother over the decades were destroyed in 1904, apparently at his behest.18 In short, while his life may be reconstructed in extraordinary detail, there are some gaps in the record that may never be filled.

  Then there are the biographies that ignore large swaths of Sam’s epic life because the whole of it cannot be compressed “into a tidy single volume,” as Michael Shelden remarks. Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain opens in 1867, with the author at the age of thirty-one on the eve of his departure for Europe aboard the Quaker City, on the grounds that Sam was “always his own biographer, and the books he wrote about [his early] years are incomparably the best possible accounts” of them—a demonstrably false assumption. Whereas Kaplan begins his biography with the Quaker City voyage, Ron Powers scants the voyage in Mark Twain: A Life (2005). Kaplan, Powers, and Jerome Loving in Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (2010) also give short shrift to the final years of the life. Still other scholars—Hamlin Hill in Mark Twain: God’s Fool (1973); William R. Macnaughton in Mark Twain’s Last Years as a Writer (1979); Karen Lystra in Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years (2006); Shelden in Mark Twain: Man in White; The Grand Adventure of the Final Years (2010); and Laura Skandera-Trombley in Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years (2010)—focus on his final decade. This patchwork approach has prompted Shelden to argue that “in the absence of a longer, less fragmented narrative that covers all major aspects of the life and works, devoted readers will have to put together their own biographical library made up of the many books focusing on various stages and aspects of the story.” Camfield similarly suggests that “perhaps a collection of biographies does the best job of capturing the complexity” of Clemens’s life. The argument is reminiscent of Johnny Cash’s song “One Piece at a Time,” about an autoworker who assembles a grotesque Cadillac entirely from spare parts from different models; that is, it implies that the best Clemens biography might consist of a fuel pump from DeVoto, mud flaps from Powers, airbags from Wecter, a crankshaft from Brooks, a muffler from Paine, and so on. Moreover, some biographers reach wildly different conclusions. Whereas DeVoto insists that Hannibal, Missouri, is “the most important single fact in the life of Samuel Clemens,” DeLancey Ferguson claims that from “a literary standpoint” Sam’s years on the river “were the four most important years of his life,” and Powers asserts that the “steamboat years remained the most hallowed period of his life.” Whereas Dahlia Armon and Walter Blair claim that he “clearly was uncomfortable with unconventional female behavior of any sort,” Jarrod Roark opines that he just as clearly was attracted “to women who contested sexual mores” and “violated the law.” Needless to say, I believe there is a better way: a biography plotted from beginning to end from a single point of view on an expansive canvas. While multivolume biographies of such American authors as Emily Dickinson, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, W. D. Howells, Langston Hughes, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Vladimir Nabokov have appeared in recent years, this life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens is the first multivolume biography of him to appear in over a century—since Paine’s hagiography in 1912—and the first multivolume biography of him ever written without apologetic purpose. “If any American writer deserves a modern scholarly biography of two or three large volumes,” Shelden has observed, “it is Mark Twain.”19

  Still, there is a related question: What is left to be said? Hasn’t the carcass been picked so clean that not a morsel of meat remains on the bones? In fact, no. As Loving has noted, since Kaplan’s biography—which received both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for biography—was published in 1966, “more than five thousand of Mark Twain’s letters have been discovered.” On average, a hundred Clemens letters and a couple of Clemens interviews new to scholarship surface every year. Moreover, in local U.S. newspapers now available online through the National Digital Newspaper Project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, I have located hundreds of new documents relevant to Clemens’s life in Missouri, along the Mississippi River, and in the West, including some of the columns Sam contributed to the Territorial Enterprise that had been presumed lost. I cannot overstate the importance of the new technology in revolutionizing literary studies. When Albert Bigelow Paine published his official biography of Mark Twain, he believed that no issues of the Hannibal Journal for the period when Sam worked for the paper were extant. Today many of those issues are readily available online in digitized format.

  Nevertheless, I readily admit that it is not always possible to drill to the bedrock of biographical facts about Sam Clemens. What exactly prompted his acquaintance Robert Collier to hint that the author was guilty of some unspecified impropriety in Bermuda in 1909?20 It is impossible to know today in the absence of additional documentation. Of course, the lack of corroborating evidence hasn’t prevented some biographers from indulging in silly speculation, such as Andrew Hoffman’s conjecture in Inventing Mark Twain (1997) that Sam and his friend William Wright, aka Dan De Quille, may have had a homosexual relationship when they shared lodgings in Nevada in 1863–64. For Hoffman and others of his ilk, the absence of evidence only betrays the possibility of a cover-up or a conspiracy to conceal the truth. And how can one disprove such a conspiracy without seeming to become a part of it?

  A final cautionary note: I endeavor throughout this work to elide the danger of presentism; that is, to resist the temptation to evaluate Sam’s life by reinventing him as if he was our contemporary. Shelley Fisher Fishkin makes this mistake when she asserts that Clemens “often strikes us as more a creature of our time than of his.” Such a claim begs the truth. It is designed to polish the public reputation of the iconic Mark Twain and render him palatable or politically correct for high school students and visitors to Hannibal and Hartford; these are the very bubbles of pretense he rejoiced in pricking. He embraced some of the petty prejudices that flourished in the milieu of his boyhood for the rest of his life, and he should be viewed in the context of his own time, not ours. While he may have been, as Andrew Levy suggests, “one of the nation’s most progressive voices” on race,21 the statement requires several layers of qualification, including recognition that he harbored an explicable hatred for Indians most of his life, that he never disputed the justice of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 that sanctioned legal segregation in public facilities, and that he never was a proponent of social or economic equality among the races. He was not the avuncular figure at the helm of a supertanker portrayed in television commercia
ls or the co(s)mic hero of a Star Trek episode or even the humorist represented onstage in a white linen suit and fright wig by Mark Twain impersonators. (How many of these actors realize they are mimicking a middle-aged bankrupt circling the globe on a speaking tour to repay his creditors?) He scarcely deserves his modern reputation as a cracker-barrel philosopher with a ready supply of quips and one-liners, a legacy epitomized by such coffee-table compilations of his maxims as Mark Twain: Wit and Wisdom (1935), The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain (1987), and The Quotable Mark Twain: His Essential Aphorisms, Witticisms, and Concise Opinions (1998).

  Until the final decade of his life Sam was first and foremost a professional writer who lectured occasionally to support his habit. He reviled the middlemen and -women of literary production who tried to reinvent him or remake him into a polite man of letters. “If I choose to use the language of the vulgar, the low-flung and the sinful, and such as will shock the ears of the highly civilized,” he declared in the Territorial Enterprise as early as 1864, “I don’t want [anyone] to appoint himself an editorial critic and proceed to tone me down.” Or, as he wrote to Howells in 1887, “high & fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.” Or, as he famously insisted to Andrew Lang two years later, “I have been misjudged from the very first. I have never tried in even one single instance to cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses.”22

  The reader of these volumes should expect no bombshells; I expose no dark secrets in Sam Clemens’s life. The story is compelling enough without any sensational revelations. I hope that the tale I relate will rise or fall entirely on its merits or lack thereof, not because it reads like a course correction to trends in Mark Twain studies. Few authors have enjoyed a more eventful career than he, and even fewer of their lives can be documented in more detail. Sam was one of the most often quoted, photographed, and interviewed Americans of his era. Howells described him as “the Lincoln of our literature” and referred to “the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story” of his life. According to Bruce Michelson, his biography “has become a national literary treasure in its own right; for students of American cultural history, that narrative can be the most compelling and significant story associated with his name.”23 He was extraordinarily fortunate to have been born and raised when and where he was; to have become a Mississippi steamship pilot in the heyday of the profession; to have fled the Civil War for the West at the most propitious moment possible; to have been hired by the Territorial Enterprise on the eve of flush times in Nevada; to have joined the Quaker City voyage, the first organized tour of Europe and the Holy Land; to have launched his career as a public speaker with the rise of celebrity culture, when lectures became less instruction and more entertainment; and to have launched a writing career when publishing in the United States became a growth industry. Sam was repeatedly in the right place at the right time. And at least in the way he told the story, he repeatedly escaped death and marriage until middle age by pure chance. I have tried to narrate his story in the most accurate, verifiable, comprehensive, and interesting manner possible, without “stretchers” or whitewash, and with Sam’s public mask stripped away.

  As usual, I have also depended upon the kindnesses of strangers as well as friends in the compilation of these volumes. I wish to acknowledge in particular the help of Richard Bucci, Victor Fischer, Mandy Gagel, Benjamin Griffin, Robert Hirst, Melissa Martin, Leslie Myrick, Neda Salem, Harriet Elinor Smith, and Bailey Strelow of the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley; Tim Morgan, Barbara Snedecor, Steve Webb, and Mark Woodhouse of the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College; Joe Lane, Frances Lopez, Randy Moorehead, and the other staff in the interlibrary loan office of the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico; Dee Dee Lopez of the Department of English at the University of New Mexico; Rebecca Darby of Doe Library, University of California–Berkeley; Jasmine Esterl, Andrea Kratzer, Günter Leypoldt, and David Westley of the Anglistisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg; and John Bird, Nathan Coleman, Jules Austin Hojnowski, Jerry Loving, Logan MacClyment, Kevin Mac Donnell, Bob Stewart, Gregory Thum, Alan Vetter, Rachelle Weigel, and Harry Wonham. I am also profoundly indebted to Gary Kass, Clair Willcox, Drew Griffith, and Mary S. Conley of the University of Missouri Press, and to copyeditor Brian Bendlin.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  December 28, 2016

  Prologue

  Bombay, India, January 22, 1896

  SAM CLEMENS WAS at both the apex of his international celebrity and the nadir of his personal fortunes, almost $100,000 in debt from ill-fated investments at a time when a thousand dollars a year was a comfortable middle-class income, on an arduous lecture tour around the world at the age of sixty to repay his creditors. After Sam checked into Watson’s Hotel with his wife Livy and daughter Clara, the “burly German” manager came to their rooms with three servants “to see to arranging things” and deliver their luggage. Sam recorded in his journal what happened next:

  A vast glazed door opening upon a balcony needed opening or closing or cleaning or something. A native went at it; seemed to be doing it well enough; but not to the manager’s mind, who didn’t state that fact or explain where the defect was, but briskly gave him a cuff & then an arrogant word of explanation or command. The native took the shameful treatment with meekness, saying nothing, & not showing in his face or manner any resentment.

  Sam was stunned. “I had not seen the like of this for 50 years,” he observed. He was transported in a flash of memory back to his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, and he recalled “the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one’s desires to a slave. I was able to remember that the method seemed to me right & natural in those days, I being born to it & unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim & ashamed for the punisher.” Months later, while writing his final travel book in London, he reflected on the implications of this epiphany:

  For just one second, all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly unconscious of all things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay, and that kneeling native’s smitten cheek was not done tingling yet! Back to boyhood—fifty years; back to age again, another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the globe—all in two seconds by the watch!1

  CHAPTER 1

  Ancestry

  He was well born . . . and that’s worth as much in a man as it is in a horse.

  —Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was descended from a long line of lower-cas(t)e protestants, dissenters, and rapscallions, so it is fair to say that he was to the manner born. According to family tradition, some of his forefathers “were pirates and slavers in Elizabeth’s time. But this is no discredit to them,” he explained in his autobiography, because piracy was “a respectable trade then” and like his character Tom Sawyer he “had desires to be a pirate myself.” Among his ancestors may also have been a certain Gregory Clement, a London merchant, member of Parliament, and one of the judges who in 1649 signed the death warrant for Charles I. Clement was expelled from Parliament three years later for becoming “too publick a Fornicator.” After the Restoration in 1660, Gregory Clement went into hiding but was soon discovered, decapitated, and disemboweled, his lands seized and his head displayed on a pike atop Westminster Hall in Charing Cross. Still, Gregory (or Geoffrey, as Sam mistakenly called him) “did what he could toward reducing the list of crowned shams of his day.” Sam even noted in his journal in 1890, as if in tribute to his Roundhead kinsman, that the “assassination of a crowned head whenever & wherever opportunity offers should be the first article of all subject
s’ religion.” Unfortunately, while Gregory’s son James Clement immigrated to America in 1670, there is no hard evidence that he sired any of Sam’s doggedly middle-class and middlebrow ancestors, the Clemenses of Virginia. Sam was nevertheless convinced that “Clement the martyr-maker was an ancestor of mine” and he always regarded the regicide “with favor, and in fact pride.”1