A Chance Meeting, page 8
Twain’s sense of his own failure in the Civil War was complicated. He considered war futile and wasteful, and even in the military atmosphere of the 1870s, when war stories were told at every social gathering, he still sometimes thought he was less culpable for having fled the war after failing to kill a single Grant than Grant had been for staying in the war and ordering the deaths of a thousand Twains. At the same time, Twain was never entirely comfortable with having fought, even briefly, for the Confederate side. After the war, among his quiet gestures of personal reparation, Twain petitioned Garfield to allow Frederick Douglass to continue in his position as marshal of the District of Columbia and paid for a Black man to be educated at Yale.
By the 1880s, though, people wanted to stop thinking about the war and, though the army was still fighting wars against Native Americans, the country turned its attention to business. Railroad companies were laying track as fast as they could, and men were growing rich in oil and coal and steel. Very rapidly, a new class of heroes emerged. Grant and Twain both found themselves struggling against the general feeling that war and writing were of much less day-to-day importance than money. Twain occasionally wrote splendid criticism of greed and imperialism—“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” “King Leopold’s Soliloquy”—but he and Grant were also friends with the barons of industry and aspired to be like them. Andrew Carnegie sent Twain barrels of scotch from his own private stock, and Henry Rogers, one of the architects of the Standard Oil trust, used to take Twain traveling across the country in his own private railcar. In 1883, Grant—now past sixty and making a last-ditch effort to provide for his family after he was no longer general, no longer president, and no longer employed—invested all his money in the corrupt investment business that his son ran with two other men. When they subsequently lost all Grant’s money, he went to William Henry Vanderbilt to beg, ashamed, for a loan of $150,000 to bail the company out. The loan, together with his subsequent difficulty paying it off, was another sign to Grant of his own failure.
All his life, Twain cherished a hope that he would be able to join the ranks of millionaires with a profitable invention. He was particularly excited about the potential of a history board game, based on an idea he originally laid out in his driveway. In the initial version of the game, his daughters ran up the drive, calling out names of people, dates, and events—the first girl to the house won. Twain stayed up all night laying out the board game. In the end, though, what bankrupted Twain was not his own inventions but those of other people, in which he believed with touching devoutness and into which he poured a fortune—more than $200,000 of his own money. He invested in Plasmon, a miracle powder for the stomach, and, worse still, in the Paige typesetter, a machine dear to his own printer’s apprentice heart, which was to set type at the rate of eight thousand ems an hour but was beaten out by the more reliable Mergenthaler machine. By then, Twain was living in Europe; it was cheaper than America, and his work was popular there. Many Americans first encountered Twain’s work while abroad—Alfred Stieglitz, who was just then taking up photography, became devoted to reading Twain while studying in Germany in the first half of the 1880s, some years after Twain published his account of traveling in Germany and Switzerland, A Tramp Abroad. By the 1890s, the economy was severely contracting, and Twain was beginning to be afraid that he really was just another out-of-work tramp, like the two and a half million men who couldn’t find jobs in the winter of 1893 and 1894, the winter Twain went bankrupt for the second time.
After this crushing financial blow, Henry Rogers took over the management of Twain’s financial affairs, and a grateful Twain set off on the lucrative lecture circuit to try to pay off his debts. He went to Australia and South Africa; he was with Rudyard Kipling in India. People said that the distractions of his worries and of the traveling necessary to bail himself out were why he never wrote another Huckleberry Finn, though perhaps no one has two Huckleberry Finns to write.
Twain’s business failures came after Grant’s death, but the gambling side of his nature and the oscillations in his wealth were well established at the time they made their only business venture together. Grant was penniless and he was dying of throat cancer. Twain’s publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company, was suffering from swashbuckling mismanagement on the part of both Twain and his nephew, Charles Webster, and was threatening to drain all of Twain’s private resources. Grant had recently written an article on the battle of Vicksburg for Century, and the people there were urging him to write his memoirs, offering him a small but attractive fee. Twain heard about the scheme and announced, rightly, that they were cheating Grant. He suggested to Grant that Webster and Company publish the book and sell it through Twain’s subscription business. After much discussion and persuasion, Grant acquiesced. Twain got his subscription forces mobilized, and Grant, steadily, intelligently, with great clarity and the most astonishing exactitude of memory, wrote his memoirs from beginning to end. With the exception of a small section on his childhood and his work as a quartermaster in the Mexican War, Grant devoted the bulk of the work to the Civil War, “a fearful lesson.” It was a magnificent book, the last evidence of his own worth that Grant felt he could put forward, and, twelve days after they took the final proofs from him, he died.
Twain was getting the proofs, and reading them, and going up to Mount McGregor, where the Grant family had, arduously and ill-advisedly, repaired with Grant to await his death. Grant sometimes received visitors on the porch, and Twain sat with him there. The general was pleased by the attentions of the writer. Grant admired Twain’s work—his favorite book on his trip around the world had been Innocents Abroad—and he wondered how his own writing seemed to Twain. Eventually, someone mentioned this to Twain, who, with fine self-satire, claimed to have been “as much surprised as Columbus’s cook would have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating.” He found an occasion to tell Grant that he had been reading Caesar’s Commentaries:
I placed the two books side by side upon the same high level and I still think that they belonged there. I learned afterward that General Grant was pleased with this verdict. It shows that he was just a man, just a human being, just an author. An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.
Grant continued to worry that his book would not sell. By this point, he could no longer speak, and he penciled small notes to his family and doctors. On one visit, he wrote a line to Twain, anxious about what would happen to his wife and family. Twain was able to reassure him that enough subscriptions had already been sold to give his family two hundred thousand dollars, and he expected to more than double this. Grant “expressed his gratification, with his pencil.” Twain proved unusually accurate in his predictions: the book in fact sold three hundred thousand two-volume sets and returned to Mrs. Grant about $400,000. It did pretty well by Twain’s publishing house, too.
Their joint business victory was a sweet one. For once, they had no need of Rogers or Vanderbilt, railroads, machines, or banks. In the long summer before Grant died, they were just two friends, writing. And the writing became more important than the money; in the writing, they rescued each other. Twain, ever careful of his legacy, worked on his own autobiography for thirty-seven years, and allowed it to be published only posthumously. William Dean Howells said that “one of the highest satisfactions of Clemens’ often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant”; Twain understood quite well what he was giving the general.
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On the day of Grant’s funeral procession, Twain stood, for five hours, at the window of his office in Union Square, watching the men and women and carriages file by. He had not wanted to be part of the public ceremonies. As he stood, perhaps he thought of one of the last times he had seen Grant. They sat on the porch together—Grant, in considerable pain, was very still and impassive, and Twain, a little melancholy, watched him. They were both thinking of the general’s book; Grant penciled a note hoping that he hadn’t forgotten anything. Twain said a few words in reply. He wished he knew how officers spoke of death in their tents, at night, after a battle. He lit a cigar. Someone brought drinks out on the porch. Grant settled his blankets around his shoulders. Evening came on.
8. W.E.B. DU BOIS AND WILLIAM JAMES
W. E. B. DU BOIS gestured for William James to get into the carriage first. Perhaps they were both glad that this was a question of manners, not race: the professor ought to precede the student regardless of which man was Black and which white. William James pulled his heavy, well-tailored overcoat over his tweed jacket, checkered pants, and Italian tie and stepped up into the carriage. W. E. B. Du Bois’s overcoat was a little less thick and perhaps fit him slightly less well; he had neither the means nor the social standing to follow his professor’s sartorial dash and eccentricity, though he had become more dapper now that he had a graduate fellowship and was starting to know the sons and daughters of Boston’s wealthy Black families. In later years, Du Bois would never be seen without a cane, but he did not carry one now. It was 1892. Du Bois was twenty-four; James was fifty.
The driver picked up his reins; the carriage moved off. They sat quietly for a few minutes gazing at the low, thick clouds of the winter Massachusetts sky. They had spent the afternoon visiting the twelve-year-old Helen Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, at the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Roxbury. It seemed everyone in Boston was going to see the little girl and her marvelous adaptation to a world without sight or sound. The visit had probably been James’s idea—he was fascinated by problems of perception—and he would have asked Du Bois along, as he had asked him to meetings of the Harvard Philosophical Club and to various other occasions. James had a great deal of admiration for Du Bois, the son of an absent father and an impoverished mother from the largely white community of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, who had managed to acquire a good high school education and then had made his way to Fisk University, taught school in rural Tennessee, and gotten a scholarship to Harvard, from which he had graduated, two years previously, with an impressive record, honored as one of five students to give commencement addresses. William James did tend to attribute Du Bois’s extraordinary intelligence in part to his being, as James wrote to his brother Henry, not Black but “a mulatto”; still, he did not think his student’s browner skin ought to limit him in any way.
William James, who, alone in the Harvard philosophy department, had never finished a degree himself, had something of a reputation for finding and supporting the students the others called “lame ducks.” Du Bois had been an outsider as an undergraduate and grateful for James’s attention. He later wrote of James that he was one of a group of men, so crucial to Du Bois’s own education—“rebels against convention, unorthodox in religion, poor in money—who for a brief moment held in their hands the culture of the United States, typified it, and pushed it a vast step forward.” Though he might have liked to emulate James, recognizing that a philosophy professorship would be a difficult position from which to work for the uplift of a race, Du Bois had decided to continue his successful line of historical investigation, but he was still close to his former professor. Du Bois was now writing up an early version of what would become a landmark work—among the first to consider the economic aspects of slavery—The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870. James was pleased by the younger man’s urgent practicality; he always liked to hear what Du Bois had to say.
They might have begun their conversation by talking of Anne Sullivan and her devotion to her small charge. William James often expressed his appreciation for maternal strength, particularly that of his own mother. He felt this was a quality shared by his wife, Alice James, who, perpetuating the tangle of James family names, bore the same name as his sister. It interested William James that Helen Keller had clearly become a child to Sullivan, and that at the same time Sullivan’s work, in its investigation of the limits of language, was research. Du Bois later described it as work of “infinite pains and loving sympathy.”
That day, Anne Sullivan might have recounted the story that later Helen Keller often told, of how Sullivan had repeatedly signed into Helen Keller’s hand the letters of the words for things Keller touched, to Keller’s increasing frustration. Then one afternoon, Helen Keller’s hand under a pump, the cold water running down, Sullivan had resolutely seized the little girl’s hand again and signed the letters wa-t-e-r. Keller finally understood that the cold splashing was represented by the signs pressed into her feeling hand.
Perhaps James said to Du Bois that this was yet another particular instance of his general observation, one he would soon include in his Talks to Teachers on Psychology, that faith may precede fact. Du Bois, familiar with his teacher’s train of thought, might have moved immediately to supply the conclusion: that one readies oneself for faith in the forming of habits. It may have been because Henry James, Sr., had so consistently removed his children from any environment in which they might have developed habits of education that William James had a boundless interest in the subject. He observed with pleasure how well Sullivan’s use of a physically signed language bore out his conviction that learning happened over time through contact.
Philosophers and psychologists—who were, at that time, teaching in the same university departments—thought James’s principles insufficiently scientific. For James, contact, shared language, and collective memory were familial—having words and experiences and names in common was what made the James family the James family. Perhaps, watching Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller together, William James thought of his sister Alice, and of the way she always advocated for the education of women, and of how interested she would have been in the story of the little Keller girl.
Du Bois was adept at recognizing the social consequences implied by his professor’s observations. In 1910, about to leave his position at Atlanta University in order to become the editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Du Bois gave a lecture in which he said that “the chief and great method . . . by which a people come into the great social heritage of the modern culture-world . . . is the training which comes primarily from human contact—a contact of those who know with those who are to learn.” At The Crisis, Du Bois would argue that Americans of European and African descent could never become truly educated so long as they were segregated from one another.
In the meantime, James’s practical politics were influenced by those of his former student. Du Bois wrote James letters from Atlanta detailing numbers of lynchings, which horrified James and spurred him to action of his own. Du Bois and James weren’t the only people at the Perkins Institute that day who would go on to protest what Du Bois called “the iniquity and foolishness of the color line.” Almost forty years later, Du Bois wrote a few lines in praise of Helen Keller’s courageous criticism of race relations in her home state of Alabama. “This woman,” he wrote, “who sits in darkness has a spiritual insight clearer than that of the many wide-eyed people who stare uncomprehendingly at this prejudiced world.”
The two men found the child Keller bright and quick. She was glad of new faces for her searching fingers—by this point, she had encountered much of literary New England. When she wrote her autobiography years later, she remembered how she “read from Mark Twain’s lips one or two of his good stories,” and that she could “feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake.” Keller might have been able to distinguish the gathering lines of self-confidence around William James’s mouth, or, in the moist cheek, his shaky health. Even then, Du Bois’s will must have been clear in his jaw.
Du Bois respected the kind of physical courage that Helen Keller had. He was a person of remarkable health and energy who, sometimes, in the ardor and ambition of his great work, failed to have patience with the weakness of a person who stood immediately in front of him; with the physical ailments of his first wife, Nina Du Bois, he had as little to do as possible. William James, who may have spent a period of time at McLean’s, the Belmont, Massachusetts, mental hospital, and who suffered from back pain, eye trouble, heart problems, insomnia, and gout, could, by contrast, be caressingly sympathetic about experiences of fear and illness, or at least the audiences for his public talks and books felt so, though his family remained unconvinced.
In the year before the visit to Helen Keller, William James’s sister Alice had been diagnosed with breast cancer. William had considered returning to Europe to bid her farewell but had instead sent a letter, one that struck the mingled note of sympathy and self-absorption so familiar to Henry and Alice as to be almost reassuring. “Pray,” Alice wrote back decisively, “do not think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born. Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself.”
William James, who did much to legitimize neurotic science, and who also always had a significance for himself, developed a methodology of exhaustive introspection that cherished inconsistency. When he came to a contradiction in his thinking, he often let it stand. His readers and listeners found this honest and helpful, though his family sometimes wished that he would make up his mind. James maintained that a capacity to examine in public one’s interior life, with all its irregularities, was crucial to his profession.
