A Chance Meeting, page 7
Now, Twain said in another letter regarding Life on the Mississippi, about the profanity, what do you think? Howells, cautious of his high-brow audience, said perhaps it was worth toning it down a little. He must have laughed out loud when he got back a reply typed on Twain’s new typewriter, which only did capital letters:
MRS. CLEMENS RECEIVED THE MAIL THIS MOR ING [SIC], & THE NEXT MINUTE SHE LIT INTO THE STUDY WITH DANGER IN HER EYE & THIS DEMAND ON HER TONGUE: WHERE IS THE PROFANITY MR. HOWELLS SPEAKS OF? THEN I HAD TO MISERABLY CONFESS THAT I HAD LEFT IT OUT WHEN READING THE MSS. TO HER. NOTHING BUT ALMOST INSPIRED LYING GOT ME OUT OF THIS SCRAPE WITH MY SCALP. DOES YOUR WIFE GIVE YOU RATS, LIKE THIS, WHEN YOU GO A LITTLE ONE-SIDED?
Elinor Mead Howells probably didn’t think of it as giving rats, but she had a strong say in Howells’s life. Elinor Howells and Olivia Clemens were possibly as similar as their husbands: both beautiful and of good eastern families; both having taken a bit of a chance, amply repaid, in the husbands they chose; both very often unwell, unable to travel or go out and required to lie in dark rooms, convalescing; both aware of convention and slightly given to editorializing; and both, it seems, very good company, though Elinor Howells could be garrulous. As Twain once reported to his wife in a letter written from the Howellses’ house, when Elinor entered the room, “dialogue died” and “monologue inherited its assets & continued the business at the old stand.” The two women were friends also, and many of the letters contained little postscripts from them, in language by contrast stilted and formal but conveying genuine pleasure. There were visits of the two couples and of the two families, each with three children. The children often appeared in the letters of their fond fathers. Howells wrote that Johnny had decided to become an outlaw. Twain said that Susy had announced she wanted crooked teeth and glasses like her mother.
Twain made up wonderful stories for his children and was delighted that Susy, the daughter to whom he felt closest, undertook, when she was thirteen and fourteen, to write his biography. Howells’s wife and children turned up again and again in his novels. Twain’s family gave him a way back to his boyhood and, in some sense, Howells’s allowed him not to return to his. William Dean Howells thought Livy Clemens’s nickname for her husband, “Youth,” was perfect; he was always a little envious of how open and available Twain’s river boyhood was. After he got the manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Howells wrote, a little wistfully, “I wish I had been on that island.”
Mark Twain.
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Mark Twain was alert to anecdote, and Howells was his closest companion in the search. In “My Literary Shipyard,” Twain explained that he always had a couple of novels, like big ships, sitting on the ways, waiting for inspiration to strike so that they could be finished, and that was how he kept his stories, too. He found that nothing helped a story along like leaving their house in Connecticut and going up to Boston to see Howells. In one letter, Twain thanked Howells for a recent “fat” visit that had given him “the incident for my ‘mental telegraphy’” and the right character for a parodic Hamlet he was writing and, not least by any means, “a staving good time at your house,” and the acquaintance of a “mighty nice dog.”
“Your visit,” Howells wrote on another occasion, “was a perfect ovation for us: we never enjoy anything so much as those visits of yours. The smoke and the Scotch and the late hours almost kill us; but we look each other in the eyes when [you] are gone, and say what a glorious time it was, and air the library, and begin sleeping and dieting, and longing to have you back again.”
When the revered John Greenleaf Whittier had his seventieth-birthday party, Twain went up to Boston and made a speech in which he managed to lampoon James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Whittier himself, all of them present. This mortified Howells and, briefly, Twain, though Twain came to think it rather funny and often told the story on himself. It’s possible that Howells secretly loved watching the squashing of the old scions of the Boston literary world who had dominated his taste and his life for such a long time. They leaned on each other, Twain and Howells, and the one’s particular talents were often of great service to the other.
Sometimes Howells would feel a little dejected, especially if he was worried that his novels were too quiet to amount to anything, and then Mark Twain would write and buoy him up. Twain was reading Howells’s Indian Summer when he began a letter with the words, “You are really my only author, I am restricted to you; I wouldn’t give a damn for the rest.” He continued:
It is a beautiful story, & makes a body laugh all the time, & cry inside, & feel so old & so forlorn; & gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless regret & build up in him a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, & of being in exile now, & desolate—& lord, no chance to ever get back there again! That is the thing that hurts. Well, you have done it with marvelous facility—& you make all the motives & feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does. I can’t stand George Eliot, & Hawthorne & those people; I see what they are at, a hundred years before they get to it, & they just tire me to death. And as for the Bostonians, I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that.
Yrs Ever
Mark.
James’s The Bostonians and Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham were both being serialized in the Century when Twain wrote this letter. Twain may have been the tiniest bit jealous of Howells’s friendship with James. Twain used to suggest that Howells get James to work on projects with them—like their plan to get twelve authors each to write a short story based on the same plot. Twain and James met a few times, and William James came across Twain in Italy and liked him very much, writing with slight condescension that Twain was “a fine soft-fibered little fellow with the perversest twang and drawl, but very human and good. I should think one might grow very fond of him.” Perhaps Twain’s impatience with The Bostonians was a response to the James family loftiness; possibly he just got bored by the inactivity of its characters. Twain liked a tale to have a certain drift; he was well suited by the episodic Howells, who wrote back to thank Twain for his kind letter, which “did me a world of good.”
Mark Twain read widely—he loved the character portraits of Robert Browning’s poems and the extravagant fabrications of Don Quixote—but he was an inventor and did not want to write in a tradition. He and Howells used to laugh at Twain’s hapless brother, Orion, who was constantly on the brink of discovering some material miracle, but Twain had patenting tendencies of his own. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the first thing Twain had the Yankee do after he had established himself in sixth-century England was to set up a patent office. Twain himself thought up a clasp for babies’ blankets and a self-pasting scrapbook, and he held a number of patents, of which he was quite proud. It was clear to Howells, though, that Twain’s best invention was himself.
Howells once concluded a letter, “My brother Joe has a boy four years old, whose favorite work is Tom Sawyer—‘the fightingest and excitingest parts.’ This fact gave me an idea of fame.” Howells wrote to Twain almost as if he were thinking to himself: “I wonder how long you will last, confound you? Sometimes I think we others will be remembered merely as your friends and correspondents.” It was a little strange to William Dean Howells that his close friend was also one of the most famous people in America and was living his life as a public person under an assumed name. It may, now and again, have felt a little strange to Mark Twain, too. Maybe they both liked the feeling of a private friendship that they had when Howells said “Clemens.”
•
In 1905, William Dean Howells visited Twain’s house Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut. The house had been designed by John Howells, who, following his parents’ interest, had grown up to be a well-regarded architect. Twain could hardly believe that this was the same little Johnny whom he remembered so well at the age of seven. Much had changed: Olivia Clemens had died and Susy Clemens had been killed by spinal meningitis at the age of twenty-four. “It is,” Twain said later of receiving the telegram with news of Susy’s death, “one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live.” Howells felt similarly about the death of his beloved daughter Winifred, who, after an agonizing regime of the rest cures and force-feeding that doctors then recommended for unknown maladies, had passed away at twenty-five; the remaining Howellses were living in New York. It comforted Howells and Twain that the son of one should have made the house of the other. In his memoir My Mark Twain, Howells wrote that he awoke at Stormfield and Twain was already up and pacing around in the halls, calling out Howells’s name, “for the fun of it and I know for the fondness.” Twain had a huge white mane of hair then and a drooping mustache; at home he wore a loose dressing gown and smoked an ever-present cigar.
In 1906, Twain wrote a critical essay on the merits of Howells’s work, in which, along with praising the limpidity and exactness of his friend’s prose, he identified a quality that perhaps he guessed other readers, who had not spent as much time as he had in the company of Howells’s books, might not know to look for. Twain said that the work had “the quality of certain scraps of verse which take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the words being the right words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes their message take hold.” Howells was deeply touched. He sent Twain a letter: “I think round the world, and I find none now living whose praise I could care for more. Perhaps Tolstoy; but I do not love him as I love you.” They did not hold back from each other. Twain replied, “It is lovely of you to say those beautiful things—I don’t know how to thank you enough. But I love you, that I know.”
In 1910, Howells saw Twain on one last visit—they talked of Twain’s butler, an ex-slave, George, and of labor unions, the “sole present help of the weak against the strong,” and of dreams; lately their nightmares had become increasingly preoccupying to them both. “Next,” Howells wrote, bringing it out as simply as he could, “I saw him dead, lying in his coffin.” In that moment, the familiar face was “patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.” Howells wrote eulogies for many of the writers he had known from Atlantic days, bringing them once again before their readers in the clearest, most sympathetic light. He was always the editor among his friends. Though he wrote just a few weeks after Twain’s death, Howells had thought so much about his friend’s immortality that it came to him quite easily how to say it: “Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”
7. MARK TWAIN AND ULYSSES S. GRANT
IT WAS four o’clock in the morning, and Mark Twain had been up almost continuously for five days. He was writing a letter to William Dean Howells and he paused to think back over the details again: Haverley’s Theater in Chicago, the unfurling of the bullet-shredded flag from Vicksburg, the voices of a thousand soldiers singing “When we were marching through Georgia,” and then the officers’ banquet at the Palmer House and the six hours of toasts that ran into the early morning. It had been the greatest reunion of the Army of the Tennessee since its soldiers had entered Atlanta. Twain thought of Ulysses Grant seated with Sherman and Sheridan, who were back now, in 1879, from decimating the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Arapaho, and the Piegan, and in his mind he ran through all the tiresome speeches on “The Ladies” and “The Patriotic People of the United States.” As it got later, the speakers had begun to stand on the table so that they could make themselves heard. Twain thought with satisfaction of how, finally, the fourteenth speaker had sat down, and his own turn had come, and he had climbed, deliberately, amid great cheering, onto the table.
Though he had, in fact, served only a few ignominious weeks in a ragtag volunteer brigade, and though this band had in fact been on the side of the Confederate Army, and though he had, quickly taking the measure of the situation, abandoned all thought of service and fled to Nevada and California for the remainder of the war, it was nevertheless true that no one else could have taken the final slot on the evening’s program if he was in the room. He had been asked in advance to pay homage to “The Ladies” but had telegraphed back saying that “the toast was worn out.” If they didn’t mind, might he suggest a subject of his own? Inspired perhaps by the fact that Philip Sheridan’s wife had just had twins, he had proposed: “The Babies—as they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities.” Though an unusual choice, this had been deemed acceptable by the committee.
When he gave the speech, Twain, with the warm, domestic touch of a father, reminded the officers of how they got their children soothing syrup when the children cried in the night, and of how the “warm, insipid stuff” tasted when they tested it. They started to laugh. “One baby can furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. . . . As long as you are in your right mind don’t you ever pray for twins.” He hoped his audience was with him as he moved into his riskiest lines. He said that after all, Grant, too, had been a baby:
[S]omewhere under the flag, the future illustrious Commander in Chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth—an achievement, which, meaning no disrespect, the illustrious guest of this evening turned his whole attention to some fifty-six years ago.
There was a deep shudder—the audience held its breath to see if Twain would insult Grant in front of his entire army. Twain, relishing the pause, waited, and waited, and then turned to Grant and unleashed his snapper, “And if the child is but the prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”
And Grant, who had sat stoically through six hours of speeches, began to laugh. Then, as Twain told it, the last toastmaker was carried up and down the hall on people’s shoulders while the crowd cheered. “I wish you had gone out there,” Twain wrote to Howells. “Grand times, my boy, grand times. . . . I shook him up like dynamite. . . . [Grant] told me he had shaken hands with 15,000 people that day & come out of it without an ache or pain, but that my truths had racked all the bones of his body apart.”
•
Sometimes when he told the story of the banquet, Mark Twain started with how he had first met Ulysses Grant. During Grant’s presidency, Twain, then the relatively unknown thirty-four-year-old author of Innocents Abroad, had been taken to the White House by a senator of his acquaintance from Nevada and had sat, uncomfortable, before the reticent and beleaguered president, who was at that point presiding over the dismantling of Reconstruction and one of the most corrupt and scandal-ridden cabinets to challenge public opinion in many a long day. Twain had finally ventured, “Mr. President, I am embarrassed. Are you?” Twain always recounted these meetings in military language: Grant “smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast-iron image, and I got away under the smoke of my volley.” As Twain told the story, when they met again in 1879 on the day before the banquet, Grant said to Twain, “I am not embarrassed, are you?” Twain was delighted that Grant remembered. At that time, Grant was the man against whom every other man in America measured himself. Sitting in a room with Grant it was hard not to imagine being Lee.
Grant probably didn’t enjoy these assaults as much as Twain did. The banquet was an orchestrated political event in Grant’s already dubious campaign to win back the presidency after a hiatus of two and a half years. The Grants—with no house of their own, no pension, and no employment suitably prestigious for the man who had won the Civil War and twice been president—had been globe-trotting. American papers ran carefully chosen photographs of the Grants meeting the emperor of Japan and riding up to the pyramids in Egypt. The Grants were marking time until he could run again. Under these circumstances, reminding the country that the military hero had occasionally behaved like a baby and that his presidency had involved a great deal of putting his foot in his mouth was hardly the most helpful gesture for Grant’s campaign. The Republican party eventually nominated James Garfield. When Twain had come down off the euphoria of his private victory, perhaps he felt the insomniac twinges of having been part of a public defeat.
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Some years later, when the two men had become friends and Grant was living in a borrowed house near Fifth Avenue in New York City and working in an office downtown, Twain would visit Grant. On one occasion Twain took Howells along and the three men had a lunch of bacon and beans in Grant’s office. Later still, after Grant had moved to Mount McGregor, near Saratoga Springs, Twain and Grant discovered that they had very nearly met each other long before. In 1861, in the woods of Missouri, when Twain was serving his abbreviated stint with the Marion Rangers, Grant passed through those same woods en route to his first command. This near miss so stimulated Twain’s imagination that he rewrote his earlier account of his misadventures with the Rangers to include a passage where he shot at and killed a horseman who strikingly resembled Grant’s description of himself at that time. Twain originally titled this piece “My Campaign Against Grant.” After Grant died, Twain changed the title to “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”
