1876 (44 page)

“Would you like to meet him, sir?” asked John.

“No.” And I meant “no.” I have never particularly liked the company of professional writers, and certainly this music-hall comedian and newspaper-writing Yahoo is quintessentially the professional. But my “no” coincided with the approach of Twain and the phrase “no go” on his lips seemed to echo me. He was talking to the play’s author, who looked every bit as distracted as playwrights are supposed to look on such occasions.

“Good evening, Mr. Clemens,” said John as Twain suddenly veered in our direction, as if eager for a distraction.

“Why, good evening. Uh ...”

“Apgar, and this is Mr. Charles Schuyler—”

“Charles
Schermerhorn
Schuyler?” I was surprised to note that Twain’s normal voice is not much different from that of any other resident of Hartford, Connecticut. But when he is “in character,” as it were, the voice becomes very Western and yokel-ish; he also has the careful, artful delivery of a professional actor.

“Well, I confess now that this is very like to being an honour, sir, meeting you.” Twain slipped into character as, warmly, he shook my hand. For the record, Twain’s hair is wiry and still fox-red. He is not tall, not stout. The face’s expression is very much sly-Yankee, in the pre-Civil War sense.

“Your confession delights me, Mr. Clemens.” Does one address him as Clemens or Twain? I wondered. Following the usually impeccable Apgar lead, I called him Clemens.

“Always hoped we might get a glimpse of you and your beautiful daughter in Paris but we never did, though we heard tell of you, naturally.” I could see that Twain was idling, hoping to strike the right note.

I was benign as befits a sixty-three-year-old writer of only modest fame in the presence of a world-famous celebrity of thirty-nine.

The playwright muttered something in Twain’s ear and moved away. “Let’s have us a drink at Delmonico’s,” said Twain, plainly relieved at Harte’s departure, “as soon as this—well, accident is over. Old Bret won’t be joining us right away. Says they’re going to rehearse the company right after the show. Sort of like giving a haircut to a corpse. Does no good, but the family feels better for the effort.”

When the play eventually ended, we walked the short distance to Delmonico’s. John and I were not allowed to forget just how privileged we were, for everyone knows Mark Twain; even the hackmen would shout, “Hey, Mark!” as they rattled down Fourteenth Street. Meanwhile, the great man talked what is known as a “blue streak.”

We were greeted by Charles Delmonico, who told us that we were to be amongst the very last to dine at this branch of Delmonico’s “because we’re shutting down for good. Next month we open the place on Madison Square.”

“You hear that?” Twain shook his head theatrically. “Now I ask you, how can you have any kind of tradition in a country where as soon as you get used to a place like this where the food is passable in spite of the Frenchified trimmings, they go and tear it down?”

But Charles Delmonico sang the praises of the family’s new restaurant and invited us all to the grand opening. He then assigned us a table close to the main entrance where, according to Twain, “we can keep an eye on the comings and goings because, let me tell you, it’s a lot more entertaining in here than it is at any of the theatres in this town. Oh, that play!”

Then Twain proceeded to drink the first of several Scotch Old Fashioneds whilst John and I shared a bottle of claret. I listened to him very carefully, in order to be able to record here everything America’s—no, the world’s—idol said.

“And to think that my old friend wrote that thing, or, I reckon, just let it happen to him, like measles. Well, it’s plain no go, that play. And I’m sorry. Old Bret’s had a terrible time, poor man. First he comes East. Which is a fatal mistake—for some people. Then he gets himself this nice contract to write for the
Atlantic Monthly
.
Then promptly forgets how to write like he used to, which is just plain peculiar. Then he goes out lecturing.

“Now, there’s not a word to be said against lecturing, at least not by me, because there’s a whole heap of money to be made at it
if
you’ve got the knack. But old Bret, why, he can’t get up and talk worth a hill of beans. Which is again most peculiar, come to think of it, since he’s a natural-born liar. Anyway, now he’s trying the theatre, which is the gold mine in our trade.

“Not yours, of course, Mr. Schuyler. Oh, I’ve got the greatest respect for your—uh, history-writing. But for us journalists, it’s the lecture hall or trying to please the ladies in the magazines, which is a Christ-awful labour, if you’ll forgive my language. But I have to say that the most or certainly the
easiest
money that I ever did make—and am still making—is from that play they made out of
The Gilded Age
—”

“I saw it, Mr. Clemens.” John is an eager theatregoer. “I thought it most enjoyable, sir. Colonel Sellers is a wonderful character.”

“Glad you did, because if you and a lot of others didn’t enjoy it, why, I wouldn’t be getting those weekly royalties that so delight my soul. Particularly after the bad time I had with the press when the book first came out and the
Chicago Tribune
, may it burn to the ground all over again, said I had written a
hoax
, which, as it developed, as attacks go, was nothing compared to what that bastard Whitelaw Reid did to me in the
Tribune
.
I guess you saw that. But I made him back down just the way I made the
Evening Post
haul water. I reckon you know what the
Post
did to me. Well, maybe you missed that, living in Europe.
They said I had paid out of my own pocket for a testimonial dinner to myself!
Well, I sued and I won. Oh, I tell you that old Bryant is as sanctimonious an old weasel as ever got loose in a hen house.”

This went on for some time. Mark Twain takes very seriously what the press says about him. Obviously this is the price one must pay for his kind of popularity; yet there is not a popular newspaper in the United States which an intelligent man need take seriously on any subject.

But Twain was only beginning to warm up. He reverted again to play-writing and all the money that could be made in the theatre. “Fact, I’ve told Harte I’ll collaborate with him on his next play. We’re going to use that character of his, the Heathen Chinee. Which is what the public is going for in a big way right now, you know, comical Chinese characters. Then there’s some talk they may be doing that new book of mine for the stage.”

“Tom Sawyer?”
To my astonishment, the proper John Apgar was bedazzled by the splendid figure at our table, and knows his career in great detail.

“Yes. I can’t say that the sales have been anything like what I had hoped for. We’ve sold just under twenty-five thousand copies since December—a fraction of what
Innocents Abroad
did in its first year. But if we can get a play out of the book ...”

Twain began a second Old Fashioned and I ordered my usual lobster salad. “Anyway, I told the managers that I see the two boys, Tom and Huck, being played by two really good-looking girls. That’s always popular, you know.” Tom and Huck are, I gather, two characters in the new book.

“But would young women be convincing in the parts?” Yes, John has actually read the book, which I only glanced at. “Surely they are—well,
real
boys in your story.”

“But that’s just a story. The stage is something else again. A gold mine for those who have the gift—not that I personally seem to have it on my own, so far, but you never can tell.”

Until now, Twain the professional writer was living up to my grimmest expectation. But then he shifted to unexpected ground. “I must say I’d like to give up this whole damned thing here and light out with the Madam for Europe. The way you did, Mr. Schuyler. Not Paris, mind you. There’s nothing on this earth anywhere near as absurd as a Frenchman. But England—now, that’s a place where you can really
use
the past they got there ... awful as it is. But if you stay on here, you find you’re obliged to wear yourself out just trying to keep up to the minute.”

“But your last book, sir, was very fine. And that was about the old days, wasn’t it? Your own boyhood.” John was reverent.

“Yes, but it’s not the same thing as all that history they’ve got in Europe. And then, like I said, the sales have been very, very disappointing. No, I’m now interested in the
truly
historical sort of tale.”

I made the mistake of asking him if he’d read Flaubert’s
Salammb
ô
.
“An immoral sort of writer, I believe.” Twain looked stern.

“But a most distinguished style—”

“Mr. Schuyler, if I am forced to read a distinguished writer and suffer in consequences the torments of the damned, I will apply myself to the interminable distinction of our very own Mr. Charles Francis Adams.”

“But I should think that with your great satiric gift”—I laid it on—“you would want to stay here where there is so much absurdity.”

The answer to that was prompt. “Mr. Schuyler, no man can write good satire unless he’s in a good mood. Well, sir, I am in a terrible mood. Which means I can’t satirize anything at the moment.” The blue-grey eyes were as cold and as bright as the ice in the third Old Fashioned, which he held tight in his hand, as though fearful it might escape his clutch. “I want to take a stick, an axe, a club, and smash it all to bits.”

“Smash
what
?”
I had never suspected that at the heart of this beloved popular entertainer there would be so much rage.

“Anything, everything! Look at those congressmen you’ve been writing about! Every last one a thief. You know their motto, don’t you? Addition and division and silence. They are all crooks—and why? Because of universal suffrage. Wicked, ungodly universal suffrage!

“Now, you watch me real close because I am about to foam at the mouth! I always do at this point. How, I ask, can you have any kind of a country when every idiot male of twenty-one or more can vote? And how, I ask you, can anyone with half a mind want to make equal what God has made unequal? I tell you to do that is a wrong and a shame.”

“Then who ought to vote?”

“The rich man ought to have that many more votes than the poor man, based on what he’s been able through his own intelligence and hard work to acquire.”

“But I read somewhere, Mr. Twain—Clemens—that you, like me, had been nearly wiped out when Jay Cooke failed. Do you think that when we lost our money, we should’ve lost the right to vote?”

Twain laughed suddenly, the fierceness quite gone. “Well, since we proved we were two precious fools for getting ourselves caught with our pants down, then I don’t think our votes ought to have been counted—at least not for that year.”

The arrival of Bret Harte and several theatrical-looking personages ended this most sympathetic encounter.

“Hope you enjoy the animals, Mr. Schuyler” were the last words to me of the menagerie’s favourite writer-performer.

A nice paradox: although Mark Twain is himself one of those animals (otherwise, they would not worship him, for nothing truly alien can ever be popular), he hates them for all the right reasons and so must hate himself. Had he the character to be unpopular, he might have been greater than Swift, another Voltaire, a new Rabelais ... I seem to be rather overdoing this but Twain fascinates me. In any case, whatever he might have been, he is, for now at least, hurt Caliban, a monster who has had the ill-luck to see his own face mirrored in the composite looking-glass of a million adoring countrymen. By cunningly playing the fool, Twain has become rich and beloved; he has also come to hate himself, but lacks the courage either to crack the mirror or to change, if he could, that deliberately common face which it so faithfully reflects.

There! That is enough Mark Twain. It does me a world of good to pity
him.

I HAVE BECOME a typewriter. Jamie has linked me inextricably with this loud and uncongenial machine, which I do not play myself but shout above its clatter my rolling periods to a young man who takes them down directly upon the machine.

At first, it is marvellous to see all those words so swiftly become print. But when one looks carefully at the neat pages, one suffers the recurrent nightmare of every author I’ve ever known well enough to exchange nightmares. The new book has arrived from the printers. Eagerly one opens it. Immediately the binding crumbles. The folios separate. Worst of all, words are misspelled, sentences run backward, chaos.

As a result, I drive my typewriter-machinist from draft to draft until each weekly piece is as right as I can make it.

I am fairly open about my allegiance to Governor Tilden as I do my best to counteract the libels of
The New York Times
whilst scrutinizing the long, dim career of Rutherford B. Hayes.

Every other day Denise writes me faithfully from Newport; and Emma adds postscripts (it ought to be the other way round). The pregnancy goes well. Both girls agree that September is an idyllic month at Newport, because, one by one, the magnates are departing; even Ward McAllister has returned to the city, Mystic Rose in his buttonhole. Odd that I have seen neither him nor the Rose. But then my days are busy with journalism, with politicians, with Bigelow.

By happy coincidence, Republican headquarters are here in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and I often see the national chairman of the party, the inscrutable Zach. Chandler in the lobby or in the Amen Corner. We bow to each other, but seldom speak.

Tilden himself spends most of his time in the city (he has not resigned as governor and is much criticized by partisans for holding on to office). He makes occasional trips about the country, as does Hayes. Yesterday (September 21), Tilden received a splendid ovation in Philadelphia, where it was the Centennial Exhibition’s New York Day.

Both candidates are having a difficult time attracting the interest of the people or, perhaps I should say, of the press. Thanks to the unremitting scandals of the Grant regime, all politicians are suspect.

Some weeks ago when Belknap finally came to trial before the Senate, he was duly acquitted on a party vote; yet there was little public indignation. The press prefers (sensibly?) to go on and on about such novelties as the telephone, about such grisly horrors as the last hours of General Custer and his gallant men, eaten raw by Indians.