Delphi complete works of.., p.567
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 567
Mark Twain has paid a full tribute to his brother Orion in his autobiography. Among other things he says:
‘Innumerable were Orion’s projects for paying off his debts to me. These projects extended straight through the succeeding thirty years, but in every case they failed. During all those thirty years Orion’s well-established honesty kept him in offices of trust where other people’s money had to be taken care of, but where no salary was paid. He was treasurer of all the benevolent institutions; he took care of the money and other property of widows and orphans; he never lost a cent for anybody, and never made one for himself.
‘Every time he changed his religion the church of his new faith was glad to get him; made him treasurer at once, and at once he stopped the graft and the leaks in that church.
‘He exhibited a faculty of changing his political complexion that was a marvel to the whole community. One morning he was a Republican, and upon invitation he agreed to make a campaign speech at the Republican mass meeting that night. He prepared the speech. After luncheon he became a Democrat, and agreed to write a score of exciting mottoes to be painted upon the transparencies which the Democrats would carry in their torchlight procession that night. He wrote these shouting Democratic mottoes during the afternoon, and they occupied so much of his time that it was night before he had a chance to change his politics again; so he actually made a rousing Republican campaign speech in the open air while his Democratic transparencies passed by in front of him, to the joy of every witness present.’
May the earth lie lightly on such a man.
In addition to Orion, his sister Pamela meant much in Mark Twain’s life. Her little boy was christened after him as ‘Samuel.’ But it was when his own marriage was blessed with children that Mark Twain’s domestic happiness received its final crown. His first child, it is true (Langdon Clemens, born November 7, 1870), was a delicate child and passed like an early flower (June 2, 1872). But the little girls who followed (Susie, 1872, Clara, 1874, and Jean, 1880), became the delight of their parents’ life. Mrs. Clemens was a model mother — giving the children her time, her care, her teaching, her love, and Mark was an ideal father, romping with the children, playing games with them, acting with them, and spoiling them all he could — a proper division of parental labour. The little Susie, in especial, was a child of exception, destined, it would have seemed, for great things. She wrote a part of a ‘biography’ of her father as quaint and interesting as her father’s own work.
‘Papa,’ she writes, ‘doesn’t like to go to church at all, why, I never understood, until just now. He told us the other day that he couldn’t bear to hear anyone talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired; of course he said this in joke, but no doubt it was founded on truth.’
For the intense happiness of such affections Mark Twain was destined later on to pay the full price. For him each break in the circle must come as a cruel blow, beyond consolation, without hope, cruel, final.
Such a time was approaching.
DISASTER — 1894-1900
IT MIGHT HAVE been thought that throughout the years of literary success Mark Twain was moving up from poverty to a competence, from a competence to wealth, from wealth to affluence. So indeed he thought himself. Books, plays and lectures were bringing in a stream of money, that at times ran in a flood. The colossal success of the Grant Memoirs seemed to open a boundless horizon. Shrewd investment, as the investor saw it, would multiply every dollar that was saved. There was no limit but the sky.
Of course, there was a stream of money going out in the other direction. The beautiful house in Hartford sopped up money as beautiful houses do. When its owner bought some adjacent land from his neighbour, his neighbour ‘stung’ him as adjacent neighbours do. Then there was the cost of entertainment. Mark Twain never wanted to go to other people’s houses, but he wanted everybody to come to his. This is an expensive taste. The dinners, the visits, the company went on without end.
Still, an income that runs to a hundred thousand dollars a year will stand a lot of strain. And Mark Twain carried with him the comfortable feeling that after spending a lot of money — say, twenty or thirty thousand a year — in keeping things going he was still able every year to ‘salt away’ great sums of money that would guarantee the future against disaster. He felt this all the more because he knew that he had a progressive and inventive turn of mind, and was a man who could forecast the money that was going to be made of new inventions, new ideas. For instance, a large slice of his earlier savings went into a ‘steam generator.’ This was a marvellous mechanism calculated to save ninety per cent of the fuel, if it had ever generated anything. It never did. Thirty-two thousand dollars went into a ‘steam pulley’ that didn’t pull, and was followed by twenty-five invested under the sea in a marine telegraph. It never came up. Then there was the ‘Kaolatype’ — a new process of engraving by means of which fifty thousand dollars was placed on a smooth sheet of steel coated with China clay and left there. At times Mark Twain showed what he thought to be his hard-headed business caution. A young man called Graham Bell offered him what he describes as ‘a whole hatful’ of shares in a new ingenious sort of toy called a ‘telephone.’ But he was not to be caught with that.
Meantime ordinary profits had grown to look too small, ordinary gains too paltry. A hundred dollars was only fit to light a cigar with, a thousand too small to save. What was needed was something with ‘millions in it.’ In other words, Mark Twain having invented, or drawn, the character of Colonel Sellers, had turned into Sellers himself; brought up on the ‘Tennessee land’ and the lost earldom of Durham and the Esmeralda mine, he ran true to form and became Colonel Sellers, James Lampton and the Earl of Durham all in one. It was as if a Greek Fate, a Destiny of Necessity, had doomed him for disaster.
All this ran along for years.
But the chief agent in his undoing was a wonderful invention, a ‘machine’ calculated to revolutionize all the trade of printing, publishing and book-making. This was no less than a machine that would set type, would replace the laborious toil of the compositor by the dexterous and unerring work of mechanical power. Mark Twain had been a printer. He saw what this would mean. He realized that the dreamy young inventor James Paige had got hold of something that would turn the world upside down. All that was needed was to link up with Paige a man of keen business sense, a man with practical experience, a man commanding capital and bold enough to use it, in other words himself.
The calculations made were staggering, were super-Sellers. Such a machine (when Paige had it absolutely complete; it takes time to get a big thing like that just right) would be an indispensable necessity for all the newspapers in all the languages in all the world, and for all the magazines and book-printing of all nations everywhere. Multiply these by the circulation of the papers and the sales of the books, and remember that even in its earliest form the machine could work against four men — millions in it? no, billions.
Mark Twain had heard of the machine about 1880, had put in three thousand dollars just for luck; then later more; then determined to limit his stake in it to thirty thousand dollars; then plunged in on a neck-or-nothing contract that could eat up money as fast as he could save it. All through the years of his great success — the days of Huck Finn and General Grant and the Yankee — Paige was tinkering at the machine, perfecting it, and Clemens pouring money down an endless pipe. He never realized that other machines might ‘get there’ first; he saw, as a printer, what a revolution a ‘linotype’ would make; he didn’t see that other revolutionists might step in ahead.
And with that went in these same years the publishing business. Mark Twain by this time was a publisher, the firm of Webster and Company being virtually owned by him, and managed by ‘Charlie’ Webster, a man as visionary as himself and united to his family by marriage with a niece. Any optimism that Mark Twain lacked, Webster supplied. The resounding success of the Grant Memoirs had given the firm a universal éclat. Other war memoirs followed, a whole Library of Humour was planned. As the greatest undertaking of all, the firm brought out, by subscription sale, a magnificent Life of Pope Leo the Thirteenth. Here was an enterprise indeed! As Clemens saw it, this would make the 300,000 copies of the Personal Memoirs of General Grant look like a mere handful. This would be read by every living Roman Catholic; put the number of these at, say, 250,000,000, translate the book into every language, sell it on the average of, say, three dollars, and what do you get? Something pretty substantial! These are not Mark Twain’s words, but they represent his state of mind. Charlie Webster took a run over to Italy and had a talk with the aged Leo. He carried with him a copy of the Grant book — bound in gold it was to be, but Mark Twain’s friends dissuaded him; Webster talked in millions! The poor old pontiff was swept away. He gave his blessing to the work and begged Father O’Reilly, who was to write him up, somewhat pathetically, just to ‘tell the truth, tell the truth.’ As from a pope to a priest these are strong words. ‘We in Italy cannot comprehend such things,’ said Leo to Charlie. Neither they could in America, so it presently seemed. In short, ‘Mark’ and ‘Charlie’ had overlooked the fact that millions and millions of Roman Catholics couldn’t read, and if they did, they wouldn’t read the life of the pope, and that a pope doesn’t have a ‘life’ anyway, and they haven’t got three dollars if he had.
So presently the magnificent Life of Pope Leo dragged along, beside the war memoirs and the humour library, with the increasing deficit of Webster and Company. Then came the hard times, the attempt to raise money in a falling market, the machine, the machine! that never could get down — and then right ahead in plain sight the prospect of disaster, ruin, bankruptcy, like breakers under the bow of a ship.
During these years, 1892, 1893 and 1894, Mark Twain rushed back and forward from Europe to America. He dashed across in June 1892; Paige and Webster recharged him with optimism, and in two weeks he was off again for Europe. Pudd’nhead Wilson was ready to be issued, and The American Claimant was already published; the hard times hit the sales (and in any case the book was not the real thing), but the house kept going. By April of 1893 Mark Twain was back in America, rushing to Chicago to see Paige, then in May, reassured, but devoured with anxiety, off to Genoa. That summer he was back again. The end was getting near.
One friend he found on the brink of his disaster — Henry H. Rogers of the Standard Oil Company. The name of that corporation in those days had an evil sound, but to Mark Twain, H. H. Rogers was and remained one of the noblest men in the world. All his life Rogers had read and admired Mark Twain’s works. He met him now and played for him the part that Mark Twain had played for General Grant. He gathered in his firm hands the tangled threads of the humorist’s enterprises and unravelled the disorder; marked with the eye of business genius the assets that lay in the skein, ready to be rewoven. Then with his back against the wall he faced the creditors, who stood, some reluctant and some ravenous, ready to spring. But even Rogers could not prevent the inevitable. Mark Twain, back in France (May 1894), where his wife remained, returned to America.
Then came the crash. Charles L. Webster and Company went bankrupt on April 18, 1894. Rogers, acting for Mark Twain, got a settlement with the creditors at fifty cents on the dollar for the hundred thousand dollars of debt that carried the firm down. Mark Twain was ruined.
One needs to reflect for a moment to realize the extent of disaster. Mark Twain was almost sixty years old. He must begin all over again. He had thought himself affluent beyond the common lot. He had now nothing; less than nothing. He had supposed that henceforth he could use his pen as he would wish to, writing for writing’s sake — about such things, for example, as the life of Joan of Arc, about which he had dreamed for years. He had thought himself done and finished for ever with lecturing; he must pick up that weary task where he had left it off. Old and tired and wearying already of the world, he must assume the mantle of youth, the mask of merriment. He must pretend to be Mark Twain.
Nothing in his life became him better than the way he faced his adversity. He would have nothing to do with the fifty cents on the dollar; give him time, he would pay it all. When the news of his ruin reached the world there was at once talk of a national subscription to pay his debts. He would not hear of it; not while he could work; to people brought up to rough it on the frontier in the West, public charity was too much like the county poorhouse.
But the public sympathy counted for much. Letters and telegrams flowed in, cheques which he refused to take, but which touched his heart, and letters from some of the creditors waiving their claims indefinitely till he was ready to pay them. Most of all, from his wife, still in France, there came messages of love and encouragement; he wrote back with undaunted courage: ‘A burden has been lifted from me and I am blithe inside . . . except when I think of you, dear heart . . . for I seem to see you grieving and ashamed. There is temporary defeat, but no dishonour; we will march again.’
Oddly enough, in one corner of his mind was one sunlit spot filled with hope. The machine! For even now Rogers, who knew everything, still thought it might work, and Paige was still perfecting it.
So within a few weeks Mark Twain was over again in France with his family, settled down at Étretat on the Normandy coast, filled with new hopes and busy at what he felt was the real work of his life, a presentation of the career of Joan of Arc. At Étretat and at Paris, while his business affairs were being straightened out, Paige continuing his perfecting, and the enthusiastic Major Pond organizing a world lecture tour, he completed his Joan — for which, perhaps, as a child of adversity, he had a greater affection than for any other of his books.
Authors are notoriously perverse creatures. They are apt to repudiate their noblest offspring; Conan Doyle hated to be always thought of as the author of Sherlock Holmes; he felt himself to be a historical novelist, and grew to hate Sherlock. Lord Macaulay thought himself a poet, and Sir Isaac Newton, very probably, imagined himself a humorist. So did Mark Twain turn from the roaring fun of Roughing It and the Innocents to cherish the sorrows of the martyred Joan.
Joan of Arc was finished in Paris in January 1895 (before the lecture tour started), and published as a serial in Harper’s that year. The writer withheld his name, for fear that the signature of ‘Mark Twain’ would give a false turn to the reader. The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc were published as if a translation from an actual memoir written by the Sieur de Conte, a supposed contemporary and companion of the Maid of Orleans. But this thin pretence broke down. Such a literary secret could perhaps be kept in Shakespeare’s time, but not in ours; and in any case the Sieur de Conte, when he philosophizes, talks rather like Nigger Jim. The leading critics and biographers have joined in ranking the book high. In its author’s own opinion, expressed deliberately in writing, it is counted as his greatest work. When it came out as a book he dedicated it proudly to his wile ‘in grateful recognition of her twenty-five years of valued service as my literary adviser and editor.’ It seems presumption to express a contrary opinion. The actual story of Joan of Arc is of course a tragedy of the ages; no imaginable picture can surpass that of a beautiful and inspired girl, saving her country in arms, and dying in the flames of martyrdom. But because Joan is great it doesn’t follow that Mark Twain’s book about Joan is great. One very simple test of a book is whether people read it and whether they read it for its own sake; because they want to read it, or for some other reason, such as the vainglory of culture, the author’s reputation, or by the attraction of the subject which the title professes to treat. Another excellent test of a book is whether the reader finishes it. It may be doubted by the sceptical whether the book Joan of Arc passes these tests. How many have said of it, ‘a sweet thing,’ ‘a beautiful thing,’ and left the beautiful thing unfinished. We recall how Mr. Pickwick listened to a story read out loud at Dingley Dell with his eyes closed as in an ecstasy of appreciation. No doubt he woke up at the end and said, ‘a sweet thing.’
Those of us old enough to recall the appearance of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and the Yankee and such, and the sheer joy of reading them without knowing or caring about critical judgment, cultural value and literary conversation, will remember that there was no such thing with the Joan of Arc book. The comment of the plain reader was, ‘Hell! it isn’t funny!’ What he meant was, it isn’t Mark Twain; of course, it wasn’t meant to be. But unfortunately it is Mark Twain whenever it gets prosy. Mark Twain, in Is Shakespeare Dead?, has scoffed at those who try to write in the words and technique of a trade and calling which they do not know. He shows that Captain Marryat and Richard Dana could write like sailors because they were sailors, and Shakespeare couldn’t because he wasn’t. Mark Twain gets intense fun out of Shakespeare’s Tempest storm, where the captain says, ‘Fall to it, yarely, or we run ourselves to ground; bestir! bestir!’ And the boatswain answers, ‘Heigh! my hearts! Cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! Yare, yare!’ ‘That will do for the present,’ says Mark, in comment, ‘let us yare a little now, for a change.’ But compare the author himself as the Sieur de Conte, when he says of the fighting outside of Orleans: ‘We had a long tough piece of work before us, but we carried it through before night, Joan keeping us hard at it. . . . Everybody was tired out with this long day’s hard work.’ Picturesque, isn’t it? But is this mediaeval hand-to-hand fighting or setting ten thousand ems of type? Pretty exhausting, evidently, this mediaeval combat. A man deserves his supper after it.
