Michael Shelden Read online

  He saw the worst and best in humanity, from the generous residents of Memphis who cared for the brother he lost in an explosion on the river, to the slavers who plied their awful trade in human beings from Missouri to Louisiana. Though he spent half his life in comfort among genteel Easterners, his character was forged in the West among people of exceptional toughness and resourcefulness. They provided him with a view of the world that mixed hard realism with a boisterous love of life.

  He lived at a time when everyone took it for granted that existence was short, and that a good run of luck could end at any moment, wiping out fortunes and destroying whole families. No private empire was safe, no happy family secure. Stupendous success was often merely a prelude to stupendous failure. Swindlers and speculators ruined innocent lives, banks failed, and financial panics put old established firms out of business overnight. Young brides and their infants were swept into early graves by the perils of childbirth. Even in the best towns, epidemics of cholera and typhus and deadly influenza were constant threats.

  In 1876, when his own happiness seemed unthreatened, Twain was well aware that his world could collapse at any moment: “What a curious thing life is. We delve away, through years of hardship, wasting toil, despondency; then comes a little butterfly season of wealth, ease, & clustering honors.—Presto! the wife dies, a daughter marries a spendthrift villain, the heir & hope of the house commits suicide, the laurels fade & fall away. Grand result of a hard-fought, successful career & a blameless life. Piles of money, tottering age, & a broken heart.”35

  He would come to know the pain of such misfortunes, and would complain bitterly of them. Some of his worst fears did, in fact, come true—a fortune lost, a wife and a beloved daughter in their graves, and another child plagued by chronic disease. But to think that these tragedies—hard as they were to bear—were enough to break Mark Twain’s spirit is to misjudge his character completely. Resilient and restless in the best tradition of the West, he did not merely endure old age, but repeatedly demonstrated an ability to rise above its limitations and tragedies, and to seek out pleasures to offset its pains.

  One of his admirers during his last decade—Willa Cather—was flabbergasted when she later encountered Van Wyck Brooks’s argument in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) that the old humorist was a “storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea.” Having known the famous man well enough to be granted an audience while he spent a lazy morning in bed, she believed that if Van Wyck Brooks “had ever seen that old lion in bed telling stories, he never could have written his book.” Cather was right. Twain had the spirit of a lion as well as the roar.36

  THE UNIVERSE OF MARK

  It “gravels” me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.37

  …

  At the height of his glory Mark Twain was a literary giant in a gilded age filled with legendary movers and shakers of all kinds—Carnegie, Edison, Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt. But none of these titans enjoyed the kind of affection that greeted Twain wherever he went. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that, in the first decade of the twentieth century, he was the most famous, and the most beloved, person in America. His image was so familiar that it was regularly featured in advertising for everything from cigars to kitchen stoves. The press eagerly reported even the slightest events in his life. Dockhands cheered him at foreign ports; policemen stopped traffic to let him cross the road; customs agents allowed him to travel without inspection; and postal authorities tracked him down to deliver letters addressed to him by name only. When he entered a restaurant or theater, people would stand up to applaud.

  Long before he left this world, his status as an immortal figure in popular culture seemed assured. His books were classics, and occupied a place of honor in many American homes. His spectacular rise from humble beginnings to national hero was almost as familiar as Abraham Lincoln’s similar story. In fact, after his death, he was praised as the “Lincoln of our literature.”38

  Throughout his last decade he received the deferential treatment worthy of a legend. When he visited the Capitol on his mission to lobby for copyright legislation, he took over the Speaker’s private chamber as his temporary office. The next day he ambled over to the White House, and was promptly taken to see Theodore Roosevelt after casually telling the doorkeeper, “I want the usual thing—I want to see the President.” When he came out a few minutes later, he announced confidently, “The President is one with us on the copyright matter.”39

  In New York, where he kept a leased house on Fifth Avenue, he liked to go out on Sundays when the sidewalks were full of crowds leaving church and stroll along in a cloud of cigar smoke, pausing occasionally to nod regally when someone said hello. If the press accused him of being too proud, he was always ready with a mock response of contrite humility. Told that he had been too familiar in a conversation with King Edward VII, he replied that he had done nothing of the kind: “I was reared in the most exclusive circles of Missouri and I know how to behave.”40

  He enjoyed a pampered existence, lounging in bed for a good part of the day, “propped against snowy pillows” and looking like an emperor in “a handsome silk dressing gown of rich Persian pattern.” It was a family joke that he spent so much time in bed his hair had “assumed the color of his pillow.” His unruly mane prompted one irreverent critic to speculate that Twain’s “principal recreation is not parting his hair.” At whatever hour he chose to get up, he would be disappointed if he found the house empty and would seek out companions. Depending on his mood, he liked the company of cats, impressionable young men, innocent girls, well-bred ladies of various ages, or a few elderly gentlemen whose renown was great, but not nearly as great as his own. If he could find anyone willing to join him in a game of billiards, he was happy to continue playing until midnight and beyond.41

  In an age when many people lived on less than two dollars a day, his income rose to as much as a hundred thousand dollars a year. He was the highest paid writer in America, and it was widely reported that his magazine contributions could earn a dollar a word. In fact, his last contract with Harper & Brothers guaranteed him only a third of that, but it was still a better deal than anyone else could have expected, and he always insisted on a strict word count from his editors, even going so far as to demand that hyphenated words be counted as two. Legend has it that when an admirer enclosed a dollar with a request for his autograph, he replied not with his signature but with the single word “Thanks,” in accordance with his rumored rate.42

  After he was described in the Atlantic Monthly as “Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system, not to say the universe,” he took pleasure in thinking of his name floating somewhere among distant planets. “If we can prove that my fame has reached to Neptune and Uranus, and possibly to some systems a little beyond there, why, that would satisfy me.” When an English journalist asked his opinion of a Russian plan for disarmament, he saw no reason why his powers should not extend to the establishment of world peace. “The Tsar is ready to disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now.”43

  Until his final months, he looked hearty enough to most observers. (Just shy of five foot nine, he weighed a trim 158 pounds.) “You couldn’t never think of him as old,” said a family servant. “Why he used to run upstairs three steps at a time.” As Clara recalled, “He was fundamentally young to the day of his death. … His movements were quick and decided. His laugh was spontaneous and hearty.” Twain himself frequently declared that he always felt young inside. “I am only able to perceive I am old by a mental process,” he said at seventy. “I am altogether unable to feel old in spirit.”44

  He liked to boast that, after having survived a sickly period in his youth, his health improved so much that it had remained exceptionally good ever since. In his forties he wrote, “During the first seven years of my life
I had no health—I may almost say that I lived on allopathic medicine, but since that period I have hardly known what sickness is.” The improvement was so remarkable that even an early addiction to tobacco didn’t cause a relapse. “I began to smoke immoderately when I was eight years old,” he claimed. Smoking cigars, he believed, had proven “to be the best of all inspirations for the pen, and, in my particular case, no sort of detriment to the health.” When his pen was moving at top speed, he could go through twenty or more cigars a day. At such times, he added, “I smoke with all my might, and allow no intervals.”45

  A FIRST-CLASS LIFE

  I know if I was going to be hanged I could get up and make a good showing, and I intend to.46

  …

  The thick haze of his favorite cigar may have left Twain confused about the exact age at which his love affair with tobacco began. But he was right about the sudden break from his early years of sickness. In a matter of months, young Samuel Langhorne Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, had gone from being “a pale, sickly boy who did a great deal more thinking than was good for him” to a constant companion of the most adventurous boys in his little hometown on the Mississippi. No one was more shocked by this change than his mother, Jane Clemens, who doubted from the start that he would survive childhood. Recalling the day of his birth—November 30, 1835—she said, “When I first saw him, I could see no promise in him. … He was a poor looking object to raise.”47

  She knew from hard experience how quickly death could strike in frontier villages where disease spread easily. She lost her husband—John Clemens, a dignified but impecunious country lawyer and storekeeper—to an attack of pneumonia when he was only forty-eight. Three of her seven children fell victim to illness early in life. She never forgot the morning when Margaret, the younger of her two daughters, left for school reciting lines from the day’s lesson—“God is a spirit & they that worship him must worship him in spirit & in truth”—for these were the last words she remembered her daughter saying before sickness overcame the girl. When Margaret arrived home at the end of the day, she was in the grip of a high fever and was put to bed. She lingered for nearly a week, becoming increasingly incoherent and lapsing into a coma from which she never awoke.48

  Such a painful loss might have been a devastating blow to a weaker woman, but Jane was remarkably strong and held the family together through many hardships and tragedies. As young Sam—the sixth of her seven children—observed of her, she was not one to dwell on misfortune, but kept “a sunshiny disposition” until the end of her days. Quick-witted and playful, she was able to banter with her famous son even in old age. When she used to spin tales about his childhood illnesses, he would tease her by raising an eyebrow and inquiring earnestly, “Afraid I wouldn’t live?” And she would tease him back: “No—afraid you would.”49

  Though her memory often failed her in later years, she remained a spirited, engaging character until her death at eighty-seven. Her son admired the way she never let her troubles—not even the pains of age—diminish her love of life. And, no doubt, the pride he felt in her frontier resiliency was also partly a reflection of the pride he felt in his own. “To the very day of her death,” he wrote a month after the event, “she felt a strong interest in the whole world and everything and everybody in it. In all her life she never knew such a thing as a half-hearted interest in affairs and people. … I am certain it was this feature of my mother’s makeup that carried her so far toward ninety.”50

  Only a few years before Twain’s own death, a reporter was sufficiently impressed by his lively manner to declare confidently, “One must see this big, boisterous man, with the red-veined cheeks of health and the little gray-blue eyes sparkling with the light of laughter, half hidden under the drooping bristles of his eyebrows, to appreciate why he can afford to joke even with death. He is 72, and any insurance company, one would hazard, would take him to-day as a ‘first-class life,’ and be glad of the opportunity.”51

  But the rosy surface was deceptive, and Twain couldn’t ignore it. The ill effects of having lived so self-indulgently for so long were unavoidable, though it wasn’t until very late in life that he was forced to face them. His smoking habit left him with a chronic cough, occasional bouts of bronchitis, and a “tobacco heart,” as he called his angina after it began to trouble him. Giving up his cigars—which were so strong most of his friends wouldn’t touch them—was out of the question. “I stopped smoking, about a fortnight,” he wrote in the last year of his life, “because the doctor said smoking would kill me. But I thought it over & resumed. I don’t care for death, & I do care for smoking.” He cared for it so much that he knew he wouldn’t last long if he gave it up. “When I get smoked out—well, it will be a sign!” He was remarkably successful at not allowing his ailments to slow him down. Up until the last few weeks of his life, he remained active.52

  Clara worried that he was living so freely in old age that he might do something dangerous or disgraceful. She feared that after her mother’s death he wouldn’t feel obliged to follow anyone’s opinion but his own. “He frightens me almost to death sometimes,” she confessed. But he wasn’t concerned. As he explained to a fellow septuagenarian, “Before seventy we are merely respected … and have to behave all the time. … After seventy we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don’t have to behave unless we want to.”53

  What follows is the story of Mark Twain’s last great adventure—his bold effort to make “a good showing” in his long farewell to a public that adored him, and to a world whose charms he treasured, but whose failings he never could forgive. With great imagination and verve, he crafted an image that would endure for many decades, and burnished a reputation that would survive the ups and downs of fashion. Rather than a time of bitterness and retreat, as many writers have suggested, his slow exit from a “first-class life” was full of energy and hope, and deserves a close look because it allows us to see Twain in all his unvarnished splendor, living larger than anyone else, and proud of it. “Everybody lives,” he wrote in 1907, “but only Genius lives richly, sumptuously, imperially.”54

  I have chosen to focus on this final period of three and a half years because it seems to capture the essence of the man, giving us a deeper understanding of his extraordinarily complex character and a better appreciation of his genius. His flame burned brightly at the end, and he was intensely conscious of the spectacle, relishing the pleasures of the moment while also eagerly speculating on the afterglow of his legacy. My book is the story of how this consummate showman staged his parting scenes, what he did to perpetuate his fame, and how he made it pay long after he was gone.

  * Some writers go to great lengths to keep the life of Samuel L. Clemens separate from his career as Mark Twain, using the pen name only when referring to the literary figure. But neatly sorting out the many differences between his public and private characters is impossible, and the problem is unnecessarily complicated by constantly switching between two names for the same person. For convenience, I tend to stick with the name by which most readers know him.

  I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever.

  MARK TWAIN

  …

  PART ONE

  …

  BLITHE SPIRIT

  Seated at Clara’s piano, Twain plays a tune for his daughter and her friend, violinist Marie Nichols. The author loved music of many kinds, from Beethoven sonatas to popular songs.

  ONE

  Ragtime on Tap

  Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

  Mark Twain1

  …

  ON THE FINAL NIGHT of 1906 the fog was so heavy in Manhattan that even the powerful new searchlight shining over Times Square could barely penetrate it. Rain had been falling all day, and the sidewalks were full of frustrated revelers huddled under umbrellas. But as midnight approached, the air cleared a little, the moon came out, and the searchlight broke through the clouds
, projecting a glowing “1907” against the black sky. In the distance, factory whistles blared as thousands of partygoers broke into cheers and the restaurants on Broadway dimmed their lights. Crowds poured into Times Square throwing confetti, shaking cowbells, and blowing toy horns.

  A few blocks away—inside the cavernous hall of the New York Electric Music Company—the street celebrations were drowned out by the sound of “Auld Lang Syne” being played on an enormous new device called a Telharmonium. Weighing two hundred tons, and requiring more than two thousand electrical switches to amplify its notes, the organlike instrument was undergoing the first major test of its capability to transmit music through telephone lines to listening stations around town. Though it was a crude effort to do what radio broadcasts would later do much better, the invention was greeted as a great technological breakthrough, and there was talk that it would soon be available to anyone with ordinary telephone service. For its New Year’s Eve demonstration, lines were connected to large megaphones at several cafés and hotels. The only private residence to receive the transmission was Mark Twain’s tall corner house at 21 Fifth Avenue—near Washington Square—where twenty guests were invited to listen to the Telharmonium’s music fill his parlor a few minutes before the stroke of twelve.

  Just before the special equipment began to reverberate with sound, Twain gathered his audience around him, paused dramatically, and then commanded, “Listen.” As if by magic, the music began to pour from the megaphone. The author’s face lit up, and he stepped aside to allow his guests to appreciate this modern wonder. In a letter written the next day, he proudly described the moment: “At 11:55 there was a prepared surprise; lovely music—played on a silent piano of 300 keys at the corner of Broadway a mile and a half away, and sent over the telephone wire to our parlor—the first time this marvelous invention ever uttered its voice in a private house.”