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CHAPTER FOUR

Fumbling, Success, Uncertainty

Repeatedly throughout his career, Mark Twain tried to take advantage of an earlier success by producing a sequel. Sometimes he returned to ideas that had proved unsuccessful. Now, even before he had finished Roughing It, he was making plans for another book, based on much the same scheme as the one that had failed to work earlier in the preparation of the “Around the World” letters for the Buffalo Express. The results this time would be even more disastrous. On December 2,1870, he wrote to John Henry Riley to propose what he described as “the pet scheme of my life.” Just a little earlier he had drawn up an admiring sketch of this same man, “Riley—Newspaper Correspondent,” published in the November Galaxy, where he explained that Riley wrote on assignment in Washington, D.C., for the San Francisco Alta. Now he proposed to send this experienced reporter, a friend of his from his days as a Washington newspaperman, to South Africa, there “to skirmish, prospect, work, travel, & take pretty minute notes, with hand & brain, for 3 months, I paying you a hundred dollars a month for you to live on. (Not more, because sometimes I want you to have to shin like everything for a square meal—for experiences are the kind of book-material I want.)” Riley would then write up his adventures, which might, Clemens thought, include getting rich from diamonds, and Clemens would then edit his report, adding parenthetical remarks as well.

On December 4, the compliant Riley replied by wire: “Long letter rec’d. Plan approved. Will get ready to go,” and on December 6, Riley wrote a letter confirming his acceptance and making further arrangements with Clemens. On that same day, Clemens signed a contract with Elisha Bliss to prepare a book on the subject of “the Diamond Fields of Africa,” based on “notes of adventures &c” prepared by “a proper party,” with the manuscript to contain “matter enough to fill at least 600 printed octavo pages.” The work was to be delivered by March 1, 1872. A fallback clause permitted substitution of another subject by mutual agreement. The trip was financed to the extent of $2,550 by the American Publishing Company.¹ Clemens had told Bliss in November that the book “will have a perfectly beautiful sale” and is “brim-full of fame & fortune for both author [&] publisher.”

To meet their agreement, Riley started promptly, and on March 3,1871, Clemens wrote to him, appreciatively, “Your letters have been just as satisfactory as letters could be, from the day you reached England till you left it.” By October 1871, Riley had completed what turned out to be a truly hazardous journey to South Africa and was back in the United States. But Clemens was unable to see him, he declared in a letter, because of illness in the family and lecture-tour obligations. On January 4, Clemens wrote again, naming early March as the time when they would meet. “I shall be ready for you. I shall employ a good, appreciative, genial phonographic reporter who can listen first rate, & enjoy, & even throw in a word, now & then. Then we’ll light our cigars every morning, & with your notes before you, we’ll talk & yarn & laugh & weep over your adventures, & said reporter shall take it all down.” Clemens wrote again, on March 27, to describe the qualities needed by the stenographer and to report that he anticipated some thirty thousand words of material from Riley’s notes. But the scene so vividly predicted was never to take place. Riley had become ill and could not visit Hartford; he proposed that Clemens visit him in Philadelphia. But they never got together, and in September 1872 Riley died from cancer, reportedly originating from a wound in his mouth caused by a fork while he was eating. Thus ended this unlikely scheme, which had been intended to produce a sequel to Roughing It. Mark Twain’s next effort at a travel book would be only a little more successful. But the author still pursued a second career, that of lecturer. His manager found that he was in great demand and was eager to start Mark Twain on the road again.

When he agreed to go on the lecture circuit in 1871, Mark Twain was sufficiently experienced that he prepared a list of conditions that he expected his manager, James C. Redpath, to meet. These included all travel on main lines with only short hops (but some of his travel was by slow train, and once he went eleven hours without food), the best hotel in town (but some were quite unsatisfactory and occasionally he had to spend the night in a private house); $125 per lecture for all presentations outside New England (but sometimes he made only $100), and no lectures west of St. Louis. In all he gave seventy-six performances in sixteen weeks, from October till February 1872.

During the summer he prepared three presentations, but since he had been away from the lecture platform for twenty months, his first lectures were far from polished. A major difficulty was with his topics. Some of the ones he had prepared were not well received; consequently, he had to prepare new ones while on the road. The title he gave Redpath to announce was “Reminiscences of Some Uncommonplace Characters I Have Chanced to Meet”; apparently he drew extensively from The Innocents Abroad. When this subject failed to please, he devoted a weekend to preparing a lecture on the comic writer and speaker Artemus Ward (whom he had known in Nevada). But again his audiences were dissatisfied, partly because much of what he had to say was already familiar to them. Since he had to read proof on Roughing It while touring, he drew on materials from it and as a result was able to perform much more effectively, though to his disgust on two occasions newspapers published long synopses of his lectures. On the road he was often hounded by local residents who felt that they had a right to talk with the lecturer and sometimes made themselves at home in his hotel room. He was expected to enjoy being shown a town’s sights, often in cold weather. Even though he made over $10,000 from this tour, he had suffered so much from what he called in a February letter to Mrs. Fairbanks “the most detestable lecture campaign that ever was” that he abandoned the American lecture circuit for more than a decade, till November 1884, when he began a tour with George Washington Cable.²

During the 1871–72 tour, Clemens wrote to Olivia frequently, and since his chief enjoyment while on tour was reading, in his letters he tried to provide her with a literary education. The books he recommended had to pass his strict moral sensibility, since for him Olivia’s greatest virtue was her purity. Often he marked up the books so that she knew what he wanted her to attend to but sometimes told her not to read books, such as Tristram Shandy and Gil Bias that might, he wrote, “offend your delicacy.”

Clemens was back in Hartford for the birth of the second of the Clemens children, Olivia Susan (called Susie and later Susy). But in June the first child, Langdon, died. Eighteen months old, he had never been strong. Later Clemens assumed an unwarranted burden of guilt for his son’s death. Perhaps he felt inadequate as a result of his efforts to adapt to the ways of the genteel Langdons, and this feeling was a source of his guilt. Whatever the cause, throughout his life he was to find much to feel guilty about, and being “found out” became a theme in many of his literary works.

Clemens’s scientific reading was reinforcing his religious skepticism. He wrote in his notebook, “Geology. Paleontology, destroyed Genesis” and “Is there any word of God except in geology, paleontology, and astronomy?”³ He was so interested in these subjects that he wrote what he called “A Brace of Brief Lectures on Science,” published in 1871, in which he found a way to show his familiarity with modern sciences, specifically geology and paleontology, as well as his abilities as humorist.⁴ He began to read with care Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871, the year the book was published.⁵

After a summer on the Connecticut coast without much literary productivity—unless, as is possible, he began Tom Sawyer at this time—the writer went to England for his first visit on August 21, 1872. His purposes were twofold. The first was somewhat pressing: to arrange for British publication of his books. He had lost much to pirated editions, and although he had arranged with George Routledge for publication in England of Roughing It, he was eager to establish a continuing arrangement for British copyright. Second, he was interested in looking at the possibility of writing a book about England, one like the Innocents. (This idea had originated with Routledge’s New York agent, Joseph Blamire.) In London he saw the sights and met many famous people, including the writers Charles Reade and Thomas Hood. He was asked to lecture but decided that lecturing should await a return trip, the next year, when he would have Mrs. Clemens with him. “I came here,” he wrote in November to his family, “to take notes for a book. But I haven’t done much but attend dinners & make speeches.” Although he took many notes, he produced little in England and left on November 12. During the winter of 1872–73, he lectured a few times in Hartford and New York and prepared two long articles for the New York Tribune on the Sandwich Islands. He wrote up some English sketches and returned to, or began, Tom Sawyer. That, however, was to be his second novel.

For some time, Mark Twain had been thinking of writing a novel. As early as April 6,1871, he had written to the publisher of the Galaxy, “I begin to think I can get up quite a respectable novel, & I mean to fool away some of my odd hours in the attempt, anyway.” Instead, his first complete novel was begun during the winter of 1872–73 as a “partnership novel” with his Hartford friend and neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner. Working with a more experienced writer was helpful because, as Clemens had explained to Whitelaw Reid, “When a man starts out in a new role, the public always says he is a fool & won’t succeed.” The collaboration was the result of a conversation about the inadequacy of recent novels. His biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, describes the origin in this way:

At the dinner-table one night, with the Warners present, criticisms of novels were offered, with the usual freedom and severity of dinner-table talk. The husbands were inclined to treat rather lightly the novels in which their wives were finding entertainment. The wives naturally retorted that the proper thing for the husbands to do was to furnish the American people with better ones. This was regarded in the nature of a challenge and as such was accepted—mutually accepted: that is to say, in partnership. On the spur of the moment Clemens and Warner agreed that they would do a novel together, that they would begin it immediately.⁶

Warner was a newspaperman and essayist; like Clemens, he had never written a novel. But he was very much a member of the Nook Farm society that the Clemenses were seeking to join.

According to Paine, Mark Twain had in mind from the beginning that the book would be about a character modeled after his mother’s eccentric cousin, James Lampton. The plan was to hatch “the plot day by day,” then each would take a turn in writing. It was, Warner noted, “a novel experiment.”⁷ Next, as Clemens told Mrs. Fairbanks in April, the writers and their wives gathered nightly “to hear Warner & me read our day’s work; & they have done a power of criticizing, but have always been anxious to be on hand at the reading & find out what has happened to the dramatis personae since the previous evening.” The role of the wives is shown by Mark Twain’s comment in the same letter about a vital part of the plot. “My climax chapter is the one accepted by Livy and Susie, & so my heroine, Laura, remains dead.” By the end of April, the book was finished.

The Gilded Age is unduly long (subscription-book length), badly plotted, and uneven. Perhaps the best thing about the book is its title, which supplied a name for the postwar Grant era. Clemens correctly observed in 1883 that the two authors’ “ingredients refused to mix, & the book consisted of two novels—& remained so, incurably & vexatiously, spite of all we could do to make the contents blend.” Because it was a partnership novel, one seldom senses Mark Twain’s literary personality in the telling of the story, although incidents and scenes resemble his earlier work. Nonetheless, Mark Twain’s portion contains interesting elements of autobiography. Many of the events and characters are based on real people he knew or knew of. The first eleven chapters introduce the subject of the “Tennessee Land” that his father, John M. Clemens, purchased before the family moved to Missouri, and it provides as well a version of the adventures of the Clemens family before Sam’s birth. The picture of the fictional Obedstown, Tennessee, and the steamboat scene are effective, but the chief feature of these early chapters is the introduction of Washington Hawkins, a character based on Orion Clemens, and Colonel Sellers, one of the most vivid of Mark Twain’s creations, who was modeled after James Lampton.