Michael Shelden Read online

  In a candid discussion with his friend and authorized biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine—who later published the details of their talk—Twain confessed that in his old age he wanted to set himself free from gloomy reminders of past sorrows, final partings, and—inevitably—from his own approaching end.

  “I can’t bear to put on black clothes again,” he told Paine. “If we are going to be gay in spirit, why be clad in funeral garments? … When I put on black it reminds me of my funerals. I could be satisfied with white all the year round.”

  A little while later he came back to his biographer and announced, “I have made up my mind not to wear black any more, but white, and let the critics say what they will.”17

  After returning from his first outing in “snow-white”—to use his description—he made much of the fact that everyone else had looked “funereal” as they stood around in ordinary dark suits. “Like delegates to an undertaker’s convention,” he scoffed. “As for black clothes,” he said, “my aversion for them is incurable.”18

  Black clothing brought to mind some of the most painful moments from his intimate life as a father and husband. Three deaths haunted him: first, the sudden passing of his infant son, Langdon, more than thirty years earlier; then, in the 1890s, the death of his favorite daughter—Susy—after a brief illness ended her life at twenty-four; and, finally, the loss of his beloved wife, Olivia—or “Livy,” as he called her—who slowly succumbed to heart disease. Her death took place only two and a half years before he made his grand debut in white. The timing—as always with Twain—was crucial.

  In the aftermath of his wife’s death, he and his two surviving children—Clara and her younger sister, Jean, both adults—dressed in black for an extended period, as was the custom. But Clara took her mourning to an extreme, retiring from the world for several months and wearing not only black dresses, but also heavy black veils. A striking photograph from the period captures her grief-stricken figure swathed in black, looking as lifeless as a statue positioned beside her solemn father. The picture was taken during the return voyage from Italy, where Livy’s effort to regain her health had failed after a stay of eight months. She died on June 5, 1904.

  For a time, this grim atmosphere was all-pervasive, and Twain came to feel that it was suffocating him. Shortly after losing his wife, he lamented, “The world is black today, & I think it will never lighten again.” A few days later he wrote, “In my life there have been 68 Junes—but how vague and colorless 67 of them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one.”19

  As the weeks of mourning turned to months, the dark cloud slowly lifted, and he tried to shun any oppressive thoughts of death. He began to take an active part in society again, seeing old friends, going to small parties, and giving talks in New York. By the end of 1906, he was ready to make a dramatic break from the past. Going to the opposite extreme of Clara’s behavior, he decided to wear only white from head to toe as often as possible. It was a sign of affirmation, a show of faith in what remained of his life.

  Mark Twain’s older surviving daughter, Clara, was so fond of wearing black that her piano teacher in Vienna, Theodor Leschetizky, nicknamed her “Night.”

  As it happened, he didn’t have much time left—only three and a half years. But he would turn this period into one of the most eventful of his life. He would make new friends, create a few enemies, pursue some old dreams, develop fresh ambitions, and stir up trouble by testing the limits of what he could say and do.

  And there would be no lack of drama. In this short period he built a mansion in Redding, Connecticut, survived a burglary by a couple of gun-toting thieves, enjoyed flirtatious friendships with some of the prettiest actresses on Broadway, debated female sexuality with the woman who coined the phrase “the It girl,” helped a group of slum children start a theater, entertained a Texas Ranger, stayed out until four in the morning partying with showgirls and dancing dogs, explored Bermuda, pretended that he had been lost at sea, joked with the king and queen of England on the grounds of Windsor Castle, recited Romantic poetry to society ladies at the Waldorf-Astoria, used his influence to avoid being called for jury duty in the ragtime era’s “Trial of the Century,” taught little girls how to play billiards and cards, published books on heaven and Shakespeare, and almost allowed himself to be swindled out of everything he had.

  On the return voyage from Italy after her mother’s death, Clara was inconsolable and covered herself from head to toe in black. She remained in mourning for many months. Two years later Twain remarked, “When I put on black it reminds me of my funerals. I could be satisfied with white all the year round.”

  And while all these things were happening, he held fast to his stated policy and took every opportunity to make himself conspicuous in white.20

  Among the rich and powerful, he regarded himself as the equal of anyone and often made that clear in this last stage of his life. He picked fights with King Leopold of Belgium and Mary Baker Eddy of the Christian Science church, upstaged Theodore Roosevelt at an international exhibition, talked politics with Winston Churchill at the House of Commons, drank whiskey with Andrew Carnegie, played golf with Woodrow Wilson, and appeared in a film made by Thomas Edison’s company. In the literary world, he gave encouragement to a wide range of writers, sharing ghost stories with the author of Dracula, finding promise in the talents of the young Willa Cather, and forming a bond of mutual admiration with George Bernard Shaw.

  Just before turning seventy-one, he looked ahead and acknowledged the usual worries about what he once called “troubled and foreboding Age.” But he also found reasons to be optimistic, agreeing with a friend’s claim that “the best of life begins at seventy.” He wanted to enjoy his money and fame before it was too late, and he relished the idea of doing exactly as he pleased for the rest of his life. “You have earned your holiday,” he told himself. Instead of fretting over how much time he had left, he decided that he wouldn’t be ruled by the calendar and would concentrate on having fun.21

  He had a long history of dismissing the question of his death with artful, and memorably comic, statements. He was a relatively robust sixty-one when a journalist—Frank Marshall White—asked for his response to a rumor that he was dying. White sent a cable to his New York editor with Twain’s famous comment “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Other press accounts altered this to read, “The reports of my death are grossly exaggerated,” and “grossly” was soon replaced by “greatly” in the more popular version. “Of course I’m dying,” Twain told White, “but I’m not dying any faster than anybody else.” He was amused at how often his initial comment was reprinted and embellished, wryly observing, “It keeps turning up … in the newspapers when people have occasion to discount exaggeration.”22

  He liked to joke about the possibility of preparing his own obituary. It was an idea that he may have taken from the greatest showman of the age, P. T. Barnum, whose dying wish was to see his own obituary printed. To oblige Barnum, the New York Evening Sun famously arranged to publish a “premature” report. “Great and Only Barnum,” the headline said two weeks before he died in 1891. “He Wanted to Read His Obituary; Here It Is.”

  Several years later, Mark Twain went to the trouble of writing a mock letter to the press, politely asking for “access to my standing obituaries, with the privilege—if this is not asking too much—of editing, not their Facts, but their Verdicts.” As an incentive for compliance to his request, he suggested a reward of no small value: “For the best Obituary—one suitable for me to read in public, and calculated to inspire regret—I desire to offer a Prize, consisting of a Portrait of me done entirely in pen and ink without previous instruction.” A few papers responded by printing tongue-in-cheek tributes to the “dead” author. The New York World trumpeted its eulogy with a nice pun on the false assertion in the headline, “Here Lies Mark Twain.”23

  A subversive at heart, Twain loved undercutting easy assumptions—even his own. Which is one reason wh
y he was so fond of exaggeration. It undercuts itself. He jested so often about death that many of his contemporaries stopped taking him seriously on the subject and wondered whether he might outlive most of his generation and die in his late eighties—as his mother had done—or even survive into his nineties and beyond. His admirers couldn’t imagine a world without him. And sometimes he felt that way himself, toying with the notion that his ghostly appearance in white clothes created the impression that he was already beyond death’s reach. “Time is pushing me inexorably along,” he said at the turn of the twentieth century. “I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142.”24

  As long as he planned on being around for a while, it made sense in an odd way to choose a hearing on copyright legislation as the place to reveal his new look. There was an extra incentive for extending his life if he could also extend the life of his books by keeping them under copyright. If Congress agreed to pass a new law guaranteeing protection for at least fifty years after the author’s death, then the longer Twain lived, the longer his work would survive for the benefit of his heirs.

  For years he had been piling up manuscripts to be published only after he was gone. He wanted to entertain posterity by leaving to his heirs the job of issuing new works every decade or so. These were meant to go off like time bombs, each intended to cause a periodic ruckus, keeping his name in the news and his fame alive. Such would prove to be the case when some of the more sensational autobiographical pieces began appearing in the 1930s and 1940s—especially those collected in a volume called, appropriately, Mark Twain in Eruption. These works were enthusiastically received in just the manner the author intended—as defiant protests from the grave. “He said things after his death,” a surprised Theodore Dreiser declared of Twain in 1935, “that he never dared say in his life.”25

  While diligently dictating his autobiography in old age, Twain often paused to consider the amazement with which his manuscripts would be greeted by posterity. Never one to think small, he had no doubt that his vast literary output would continue attracting readers into the next century, and that the demand would always exist for fresh revelations from his manuscript hoard. Speculating in 1906 on what future audiences would say of his unpublished comments on religious bigotry and social hypocrisy, he took a long view. “The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out,” he wrote confidently. “I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals.” (If he managed to continue hovering through the summer of 2008, he would have seen his face adorning the cover of Time, which called him “Our Original Superstar.”)26

  As an author who was used to seeing his works lavishly illustrated, and who appreciated the importance of images, he was aware that his new look made an unforgettable illustration of his own star appeal. The Man in White was not only an entertaining sight, but one that seemed to require comment. He was a cigar-store angel come to life, with a mischievous eye on this world, and a curious one on the next. Such a figure furnished a spectacle that was both comic and tragic, a spirited celebration of life’s rewards and a clown’s lament of his own mortality.

  The full effect may have been lost on contemporaries who thought he was simply trying to amuse them, but he made it clear from the beginning that his decision to adopt a new image was inextricably linked to his unavoidable encounter with death. “I have reached the age where dark clothes have a depressing effect on me,” he told the press in 1906. “Light-colored clothing is more pleasing to the eye and enlivens the spirit. Now, of course, I cannot compel everyone to wear such clothing just for my especial benefit, so I do the next best thing and wear it myself.”27

  Though his literary career was largely at an end, he wanted to use all the creative force remaining in him to put the finishing touches on a life as complex and dazzling as anything in his fiction. As Howells remarked of the final years, “His literature grew less and less and his life more and more.” In many ways Twain was never more alive—and never more perceptive—than in this eventful period that lasted a mere forty months. He turned it into an epic progress, beginning with his appearance in Washington at the end of 1906 and concluding with the world’s parting glimpse of him in April 1910, when the many mourners at his funeral in New York looked down at his open casket and saw Mark Twain still splendidly arrayed in white.28

  STRAINED RELATIONS

  All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can’t get it out.29

  …

  Though Twain’s old age was much sadder than many of his contemporaries would have guessed—especially at the very end—it was also funnier and a lot happier than later generations of critics and biographers have been willing to admit. But the temptation to see the writer’s old age as blighted in one way or another is considerable.

  It is true that much of his writing in his last years is full of rage against the frailties of human nature, the cruelties of life, and the chaos of the universe. Surely, the reasoning goes, the bitter, scathing antagonist of the “damned human race” felt overwhelmed by the darkness of the world, and suffered accordingly. The septuagenarian Twain who is so often portrayed as nothing but an acerbic old cynic is supposed to sound like this: “Isn’t human nature the most consummate sham & lie that was ever invented? Isn’t man a creature to be ashamed of in pretty much all his aspects? Is he really fit for anything but to be stood up on the street corner as a convenience for dogs? Man, ‘Know thyself—& then thou wilt despise thyself, to a dead moral certainty.”

  These would seem to be the words of an American Lear, gnashing his teeth and pulling out his white hair in an old man’s rant. But, no, these are Mark Twain’s words in a letter written to a friend in 1884, when he was still in his forties—at the peak of his powers, in the bloom of health, and surrounded by adoring friends and a loving family in one of the finest houses in the fair city of Hartford, Connecticut.30

  In fact, he was always fond of savagely attacking the moral failings of his fellow humans and of exposing their distorted views of themselves and their world. He didn’t need to wait until old age to discover that humanity wasn’t all it pretended to be. The main thing that changed between middle age and old age was that he became less guarded about sharing his unvarnished opinions, putting them in formal literary pieces intended for eventual publication rather than merely venting his feelings to sympathetic friends in letters or conversations.

  With close companions such as Howells and Joseph Twichell—his Hartford neighbor and family minister—he was accustomed to launching vitriolic outbursts against all kinds of injustice, knowing they would understand that his fierce tirades didn’t represent the sum of his views nor the full measure of his character. At the end of an especially angry letter to Reverend Twichell on the subject of political hypocrisy, he declared, “I have written you to-day, not to do you a service, but to do myself one. There was bile in me. I had to empty it. … I have used you as an equilibrium-restorer more than once in my time, & shall continue, I guess.”31

  Twain’s moods changed frequently, and it is unrealistic to saddle him with one dominant emotion during his final years, when he was as likely to assume the part of the joker as that of the angry prophet. As Clara once observed of her father, he was always a man of many emotions, a “cyclonic warrior one moment—lily-of-the-valley the next.” He could easily shift from merry to morose in the blink of an eye, attacking human folly one minute and penning Valentine’s Day verses to little girls the next. Writing in 1906 to the wife of a close friend, he was in typical form when he shrugged off the fact that he was feeling low and worn out emotionally after a hard night. He explained that it was only a short bout of “a disease I am not much subject to—depression of spirits,” and added, “I am all right, this morning, in all ways.”32

  He was fearless in his ability to delve deep into the shadows of life and to confront the painful truths lurking there. But what sets him apart from so many other writers with a talent for staring into the abyss is his ability to face th
e worst and still find reason to laugh. Sometimes his laughter was derisive, mocking, or weary, but often it was simply an expression of his inexhaustible love of the comic and the absurd. He was never so glum that he couldn’t find some reason to lighten his anger with a joke.

  In our modern eagerness to highlight his darker side, we do him a disservice by pretending that his matchless sense of humor suddenly failed him in his last years. At his best, he was never merely funny. Or merely serious. Rather, he delighted in slyly mixing the two, and loved nothing better than creating confusion between them. When a pious lady approached him and gushed, “How God must love you!” he solemnly replied, “I hope so,” but out of her hearing added in a perfect deadpan, “I guess she hasn’t heard of our strained relations.”33

  If he had been an ordinary man, he might have been crushed by the various disappointments he suffered in a tumultuous life that began in the steam age and ended almost seventy-five years later at the dawn of the aviation age. But modern critics who so easily imagine him crippled by misfortune and blind anger forget how difficult his life had been from the beginning. He survived into his seventies for a reason. He was made of strong stuff, having learned early to cope with adversity in a frontier environment that was demanding and unforgiving.34

  He grew up with two thousand miles of wilderness at his back and the continent’s mightiest river at his feet. As a young steamboat pilot he learned to follow the twists and turns of that river for hundreds of miles, in daylight and in darkness, upstream and down. And he also learned how to take the measure of the many men and women who flocked to the river from all parts of the world. Some came to revel in the freedom of frontier life, some to undermine and corrupt it.