Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 564
To her influence was presently added that of the Reverend Joe Twitchell of Hartford — henceforth ‘Joe’ to Mark, a muscular Christian of Mark’s own age, a veteran chaplain of the Civil War — and an all-round good fellow. Mark Twain loved him with the love of the sceptic for the man who can believe something, the love of the brilliant man for the slow, of the erratic for the immovable. From now on, ‘Joe,’ in the intervals of preaching and expounding the Bible, undertook to help ‘Livy’ to show Mark Twain what nice people ought to write and what not. When presently there was added the influence of Mr. Howells of the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain enjoyed such all-round support that the wonder is that he ever wrote at all.
Yet let it be noticed that all the basis and background of his work was and remained the Mississippi and the West, and Europe as seen therefrom; from his setting in Elmira, nothing; from his life and surrounding in Buffalo, nothing; from Hartford, nothing. There was as much to see on Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, as on Main Street in Carson City, Nevada; as much of light and shadow in Hartford as in Angel’s Camp. But he had no eyes to see. To get vision he must shut his eyes and look across the prairies and the mountains to the sunset over the Golden Gate. Such was the genesis of Tom Sawyer and Roughing It and Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi and all the splendid work that he wrote in the years that followed his return from Europe. That the love of his wife and the happiness of his home helped him to work is beyond doubt. But to think that she and Joe Twitchell schooled him to write is childish. Mark Twain taught himself to write, just as he had taught himself everything since he was twelve years old.
But if Mark Twain, as a creative genius, wore fetters, it is only fair to remember that they were those of his day and age. This ‘Victorian’ period of the late nineteenth century, for all its splendid courage in the field, its industrial force and its unsurpassed literature, was, in art and morals, a namby-pamby age. Nothing must be said or drawn or written that was not ‘respectable.’ Books, journals and pictures must be suited to a Kensington drawing-room or a Boston boarding-house. ‘Damn’ was a wicked word, and a ‘leg’ was called a ‘limb.’ Characters in books who swore must say, ‘by Heaven!’ or ‘by the Foul Fiend!’ but not ‘Jesus Christ!’ Consider the little clergyman, Lewis Carroll, blinking in the daylight when he emerged from Wonderland into society, and thinking ‘damn’ terribly wicked and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pinafore hopelessly coarse. After all, if ‘Livy’ and ‘Joe’ and Mr. Howells put fetters on Mark Twain’s hand, it was only a chain which most of his contemporaries wore as they worked. Some felt it, but others scarcely knew it was there. Dickens was never bothered by it, for he himself was eminently respectable. What he wanted to denounce and to satirize was the Court of Chancery, the Guardians of the Poor, and the Circumlocution Offices of the British Government. And that is respectable. But he had no wish to satirize God Almighty, to question whether Hell is just and the Bible ‘bunk.’ The things that Mark Twain wanted to write would have horrified Charles Dickens. As the editor of Household Words he could have found no place for them. Hence it was that Mark Twain, as his literary work passed from mere diversion to a great reality, found himself in a dilemma. He wanted to write of things which his loving ‘censors’ told him he mustn’t talk about; and he wanted to use words and phrases which his loving censors told him ‘nice’ people didn’t use. And his faith in their views was as naïve and as touching as the respect of Nigger Jim for white people. In reality he was a giant who towered over their heads. He should have brushed aside their censorship with a kiss and a laugh. The tradition that Howells and the Rev. Twitchell and Mrs. Clemens ‘made’ Mark Twain is sheer nonsense. They did their loving best to ruin his work — and failed; that’s all. By good luck Huckleberry Finn, afterwards excluded from more than one puritanical library, got past the censors, or nearly so. The manuscript was read aloud in the family circle, and the merry laughter of the children disarmed the censorship. In any case, neither Mrs. Clemens nor the other associates seemed to have realized the scope and reach of the book; nor apparently did Mark Twain himself. Even at that, many things were cut out or altered.
As a sample of how the language of the natural Huckleberry Finn was ‘improved’ by Mrs. Clemens, take a passage from the concluding chapter of Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain made Huck say (in speaking of his benefactress, the widow Douglas): ‘She makes me git up at the same time every morning, she makes me wash . . . they comb me all to hell.’ Mrs. Clemens changed this to: ‘They comb me all to thunder.’ In other words, she changed what Huck would have said and must have said, which is exquisite, to a stupid phrase which neither Huck nor anyone else would have said. ‘She guarded his work sacredly,’ said his biographer. She did indeed.
Apart from his studies on Noah’s Ark and God, Mark Twain, in his Buffalo days (1870), brought out a comic autobiography of himself — so funny, or so silly, that he presently bought in and destroyed the plates. This is not the fragmentary ‘Autobiography’ of later years.
The Buffalo life lasted less than two years. Apart from the raptures of honeymoon days, it was not altogether a success. Mark Twain sat uneasily in the luxurious editorial chair that proved more rigid than a stool in Nevada. He sold out his share in the paper, at a loss; henceforth he began to dream of publishing, not editing.
Moreover, the Clemenses took no root in Buffalo, caring little for social life; and the shadow of death fell as on their family when Livy’s father died in August of 1871. The death of a dear friend of his wife in their house itself, the premature arrival of a feeble little son (Langdon Clemens, November 7, 1870), whose days seemed numbered before they were begun, somehow turned the sunlight of the fairy house into gloom.
Mark Twain moved away to Hartford, attracted by the charm of an old-world town, the culture of the environment and companionship of his new friend Joe Twitchell. The cloud of debt that fringed the sunlight of his opulence followed him from Buffalo. To drive it away he took to lecturing, a thing he had already learned to hate. ‘I am not going to lecture any more for ever,’ he had written from Buffalo to Redpath, his manager. ‘Count me out.’ But it was to be a quarter-century yet before he could count himself out of it. Life at Hartford seems to have been, from the beginning, as pleasant and natural as that in Buffalo was gloomy and ill-set. Mark Twain enjoyed the sense of being admitted — even if somewhat reluctantly — to the cultivated life of New England; he enjoyed his association with Twitchell, their endless walks and one-sided conversations. More than all, he appreciated the friendship and sympathy of W. D. Howells, for whose Atlantic Monthly he now became a contributor. His first offering was the article called A True Story (November 1874), to be followed by the papers on Old Times on the Mississippi (January to July 1875), which later became a book, and by many other sketches in the ensuing five years. Mark Twain, wisely or foolishly, took Howells for his mentor; and him at least he never cast aside.
In August of 1872 he made a journey to England, as sudden as the California trip to the Alta ‘thieves.’ This was inspired by the idea of getting after a new pack of thieves — the copyright pirates. For most of his life Mark Twain, like Charles Dickens, was obsessed with the copyright question, for which the present volume has neither space nor interest to spare. For both of them it was like King Charles’s head to Mr. Dick in David Copperfield — it wouldn’t keep out of things. But it worked differently. Dickens came out to America to be entertained like a prince and made a row about copyright. Mark Twain went over to England to make a row about copyright and was entertained like a prince — and forgot about it.
His reception was indeed overwhelming. Here, at last, he was treated at his true worth — as a real author, not as a western ‘cut-up.’ Authors vied to meet him. Dickens, alas! was gone (June 1870), but Tom Hood, Charles Reade, Charles Kingsley and a hundred others vied in doing him reverence. His visit was a series of dinners and entertainments. He had no time to get mad over copyright; no time to write anything or do anything. He did indeed plan a book on England (the Innocents, one recalls, had not visited it), designed to put it in its place. But nothing happened. In November he was back in America, a bigger figure than ever. ‘When I yell again for less than five hundred dollars,’ he had written to Redpath, ‘I’ll be pretty hungry.’ Being hungry presently, he lectured twice in New York at six hundred and fifty dollars a night — a great sum in those days.
His life was too busy and too full to be bothered with lecturing. His new book, Roughing It, that he had begun at Buffalo, had come out (1872). He had invented — or rather recalled — a boy called Tom Sawyer, whose adventures he was trying to shape. He was busy with a book called The Gilded Age, done in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, which appeared in 1873, as imperfect as all collaborations are. But it contains the priceless character of Colonel Sellers, whose impecunious life was illuminated by a rainbow and bounded by a mirage.
More than all was his increasing interest in his home and his family circle. The little boy had faded out of life (June 2, 1872), but the place he might have filled was taken by a garland of little girls who grew up to be the idols of their father’s heart. Susie Clemens, of marvellous and tragic memory, came first (March 1872); then Clara, renamed ‘Bay’ for family purposes, and as the third, Jean (Jane Lampton), born in July 1880. It was as if fate decided to throw to Mark Twain’s lot all that can be given — success, fame, affluence, a loving wife, and a babbling nursery. To frame such happiness, homes must be provided. He acquired two — always since connected with his life and memory. The one was the house at Hartford (on Farmington Avenue), largely designed by himself. Its special feature was the famous billiard-room on the top floor, henceforth its owner’s sanctum. The game of billiards was an abiding passion with Mark Twain, as with so many successful men from the West. The crooked cues and the bounding cushions of the mining camp and the saloon had got in their deadly work. No recovery was possible.
The home at Hartford alternated with a summer home at Quarry Farm, a beautiful hillside country house just outside of Elmira. Mrs. Crane, Livy’s sister, who owned the place, built for Mark a quaint little study with eight sides to it, looking far away in all directions. Mr. Paine compares it to a Mississippi pilot-house — an added attraction for its occupant. Such were the gifts which fortune showered upon Mark Twain — to remove them one by one: for affluence, poverty; for the warmth of love and affection nothing but the cold dignity of despair that knows no consolation that may conquer death.
But as yet all that was far away. Mark Twain was busy and happy beyond the common lot — on the verge (he knew it) of princely opulence — millions; and in his mind a book, a real book, not letters and scraps of journalism, but a book about a boy whom he remembered (better than all the world) called Tom Sawyer. On this boy he pondered like Gibbon over ancient Rome.
Around this boy he had already (in 1872) attempted to construct a play. But in Mark Twain’s crowded, busy, happy and talkative life, with lectures to give, billiards to play, children arriving, and visitors coming and going, it took time to finish things. In fact, another triumphal progress in England intervened before ‘Tom’ came to light. This time Mrs. Clemens accompanied her illustrious husband and could measure for herself the estimate they made of him abroad. From London they went on to Scotland, where a friendship was formed with John Brown (of Rab and his Friends) which was kept warm till that good old man’s death. Most important of all, Mark Twain lectured in London (October 13, 1873). The announcement of the lecture is typically British, very unlike the San Francisco ‘trouble will begin at eight.’ ‘Mr. George Dolby,’ it declared, ‘begs to announce that Mr. Mark Twain will deliver a lecture of a humorous character on Monday evening next and repeat it in the same place on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.’ There is something brutally matter-of-fact in the promise of ‘repeating it in the same place.’
But the lecture and all its repetitions were the wildest of successes. The London press was washed from its moorings in the flood of admiration. Mark Twain became a hero — a legend — a glory. Strange how mankind loves to create heroes — something greater than our poor mean selves — and of the heroes a legend. Such became Mark Twain.
The Clemenses were back in America in January of 1874. Mark Twain got Tom Sawyer finished, and it came out in December of 1876. Its success was immediate, complete and continuous. For such people as remained who had never heard of Mark Twain he was now ‘the man who wrote Tom Sawyer.’
Tom Sawyer is a world-famous book, and the boy Tom a world celebrity. The book did not make Mark Twain’s reputation. That had been done by the Innocents Abroad. But it clinched it. The publication of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer definitely established the position and reputation of Mark Twain as the great American humorist; so much so that few people realized that the book is on a lower plane altogether than the later Huckleberry Finn, which grew out of it. Indeed, Tom Sawyer owes some of its success to its very simplicity. It makes no great demand upon the intellect; anybody can read it. The famous story of how Tom Sawyer was set to whitewash the fence as a punishment, and by pretending that it was a treat got the other boys to pay for the privilege of whitewashing, is as simple and as wide in its appeal as any folk-lore. It is like the mediaeval stories of the ‘smartness’ of Reynard the Fox. It strikes the familiar note of the clever hero who outwits stupidity and defeats brute force. Tom Sawyer was a ‘smart’ boy. Indeed, by a sort of general consensus he is supposed to be the boy, the typical boy, and parents who put the strap to their own Tom Sawyers chuckle with indulgent laughter over the escapades of the imaginary Tom.
But there is more in the book than all that. Its background of the vast moving river and the wilderness, the romance of the steamboat, the gloomy terror of the great cave, though but lightly sketched in the book Tom Sawyer, contains the same appeal — the appealing majesty of nature — which was to become an outstanding feature of the book Huckleberry Finn. Threaded through it is a really exciting story, painted in crude elemental colours. Tom Sawyer and his friend Huckleberry Finn, out on a night exploit, witness the robbing of a corpse from a grave by a young doctor and two hired body-snatchers. The crude details are all there — the graveyard, midnight, moonlight, terror. Of the body-snatchers, one is ‘Indian Joe,’ murderer and ‘bad man,’ the other the village drunkard. There is a quarrel at the graveside. Indian Joe stabs the young doctor dead, and Tom and Huck, having seen more than enough, flee in terror. The murder is fastened on the town drunkard, whose knife is found beside the dead body. Tom and Huck, in deadly fear of Indian Joe, keep an agonized silence. Then at last they speak out in a melodramatic scene at the murder trial of the drunkard. Indian Joe leaps through the court-room window and escapes, a fugitive from the law. He hides in the great cave in the river bluff. Weeks later Tom and a little girl companion Becky, lost in the cave and almost expiring, see the flickering light of a candle and the form of Indian Joe, groping in the darkness. The children are rescued. Only weeks later do they learn that the rescuers have barred and sealed the entrance to the cavern. Tom Sawyer’s exclamation to Becky’s father, ‘Oh, judge, Indian Joe’s in the cave!’ remains in the memory of thousands of readers as one of the sensations of literature.
Yet, all in all, the book is far below Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain, in writing Tom Sawyer, was unconsciously groping his way towards the broader canvas and the fuller meaning of the later book. Tom Sawyer as a book is full of obvious faults. The stage effects are too elementary, too obvious; they belong to the class of the melodrama and the stock villain and the heroine who requested to be ‘unhanded’ — in other words, the regular working apparatus of nineteenth-century popular literature. Tom Sawyer himself may be a ‘smart boy,’ but he runs dangerously close to being a ‘smart Aleck.’ Yet with all its faults the book went round the world and carried the name of Mark Twain into all the languages of civilization.
MARK TWAIN AS A NATIONAL ASSET. 1877-1894
THE PERIOD BETWEEN the publication of Tom Sawyer and the time when he was overwhelmed by financial disaster shows Mark Twain at the height of his success, his literary reputation, his affluence, his domestic happiness. His name had become a household word in America. He had grown to be a sort of national asset. Men quoted his stories, his latest sayings, and much that he never said. His lecture trips were a triumphant progress; his books flooded the country in sales that widened like ripples over a pond. His pictured face, with the shock of hair that turned from red to grey and from grey to white, with the Missouri corn-cob pipe to give it character, was as familiar to the public as those of Washington and Lincoln and Grant. Most of all, he had earned, as he had deserved, the affection of his fellowmen.
Nor was his fame confined within national limits. Mark Twain had become a citizen of the world, and his time in these ensuing years of affluence and achievement was divided between two continents. His reputation in England, his London lectures, his London dinner speeches, the wide sales of his books in Great Britain, may be said to have helped much in renewing the national sympathy of nations that had drifted apart in the ominous days of the Civil War. English people realized that, after all, America was the place that Mark Twain came from; it couldn’t be so rotten.
In explaining of the activities of Mark Twain’s life during his prime, let it be remembered that he was perpetually busy, not only with things that came to completion, but with things that never did, or proved to be failures and were abandoned. A good deal of his time after Tom Sawyer was put into a play called Ah Sin, done in collaboration with his old friend Bret Harte. It was played in the National Theatre at Washington (May 7, 1877), tried out in New York and died of inanition. The only tangible result of the enterprise was to end the friendship of two old friends.
