Now that his death centenary has passed with the publication of
the unexpurgated, 900-page Autobiography of Mark Twain (so
ably
reviewed by Joseph Bottum in a recent issue of TAS),
is there anything left to say about Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain,
that hasn’t been printed by himself, or by a century of critical
opinion?
Having read an earlier edition of the autobiography in
paperback some thirty years ago, I skipped the latest magnum opus,
but being in a Twain mood I recently read Justin Kaplan’s Pulitzer
Prize and National Book Award-winning Mr. Clemens and Mark
Twain (1966). It’s the definitive biography of half a life,
with Kaplan examining Twain on the brink of his career as America’s
first literary celebrity. When the book opens, Twain is 31 and
basking in the glory of the publication of his famous short story
“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
He is certainly a young man on the make. After his western
years of “living out of a valise,” Sam Clemens wants to write
books, get happily hitched to Olivia “Livy” Langdon, and “be
located in life,” as he writes to a friend. All of which he does
after the publication of The Innocents Abroad (1869), his
hilarious account of his first travels in Europe and the Middle
East. Roughing It (1872) follows, as do offers to write
for prestigious newspapers and magazines, such as the Atlantic
Monthly, edited by his friend and literary conscience William
Dean Howells.
Clemens’ increasing wealth and fame allows him to
cultivate the liberal-minded gentry of Hartford, Connecticut, where
he meets such luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe and oversees the
building of a sumptuous mansion for his growing family. Around the
same time he collaborates with a blueblood named Charles Dudley
Warner on The Gilded Age (1873), a satire on one of the
most financially and politically corrupt periods in American
history (our own notwithstanding).
The great paradox of Mark Twain’s life was that while he
never hesitated to use his “pen warmed up in Hell” to attack
plutocrats, he always wanted to be one himself. Like many writers
he suffered from the delusion that his talent also included that of
a shrewd businessman, and this put his family into near penury a
few times.
The small fortune that Twain amassed as the publisher of
the by-then-deceased U.S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs (an
American classic both historic and literary) went down the
financial rat hole of the infamous Paige Typesetter, the Edsel of
19th century printing technology. In an extended bleed from 1880 to
1894, Twain lost $300,000 (the equivalent of $7 million today),
mostly on the Paige Typesetter, which by the 1890s had become
obsolete with the advent of Linotype. At the same time, his
publishing company went broke by publishing one turkey after
another (The Life of Pope Leo XIII) following the success
of the Grant book. And his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn
(1884) didn’t sell well in its first years. Twain went back on the
lucrative lecture circuit — easy money during his salad days, but
a grind that he increasingly hated.
Twain was rescued from financial ruin by one Henry
Huttleston Rogers, who sat on the board of John D. Rockefeller’s
Standard Oil Co. Rogers was a cutthroat businessman, but he was
also a big fan of Mark Twain’s books, which he read to his
children. He personally took over the management of the author’s
finances and brought him once again to solvency, then wealth. Twain
was grateful, writing of Rogers: “He is not only the best friend I
ever had, but is the best man I have ever known.” The friendship
endured until Rogers’ death in 1909, only a year before the
writer’s own passing.
Yet Twain did not share Rogers’ politics. The author was
America’s first limousine liberal (maybe in the 19th century
context we can call him a “phaeton liberal” after the luxury
conveyance of the time). His Rogers friendship — the friendship of
a master satirist to a plutocrat — benefited Twain’s lust for
influential wealth, and seems hypocritical.
Twain’s political views were those of a modern liberal. He
was a supporter of civil rights (as outlined in Huckleberry
Finn, for instance). He was pro-women’s suffrage, and —
despite the Rogers friendship — he supported the national labor
movement. He could definitely be counted among the Gilded Age’s
most prominent reformist voices. His wife Livy was very influential
in this way, as was Howells from his perch at the Atlantic
Monthly (the Atlantic’s editorial stances reflected
and influenced that staunch New England liberalism that is still
present in a more radical, multicultural milieu today). According
to Kaplan, Howells — the utopian socialist — once said of Twain
that he was “a theoretical socialist and a practical aristocrat.”
Twain’s opprobrium for John D. Rockefeller (“Satan, twaddling
sentimental silliness to a Sunday school, could be no burlesque
upon John D. Rockefeller…”) is paradoxical considering his
dealings with Rogers, a Rockefeller man.
Twain in old age (the Letters from the Earth
Twain) is understandably more politically cynical than ever. The
Spanish-American War and particularly its theater in the
Philippines raise his ire: “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed
to having the eagle put its talons on any other land,” Twain told
the New York Herald in 1900. And a typical piece from this
period was his biting “The United States of Lyncherdom,” an attack
on the mindless violence against black people in the Jim Crow
South.
Forty-five years after its publication, Mr. Clemens
and Mark Twain, if not the definitive biography of a life,
remains the best portrait of the public, private and complex
character of our most intrinsically American writer.
