Back Then (37 page)

There was no point attempting to dislodge Herb's idées fixes—they were, as lawyers say, stipulated. Early in 1959 he hatched a new idea: that I hated my job at Simon and Schuster but was unwilling to face the truth. The truth, I tried to tell him, was not that I hated my job. I hated myself for not loving it more and doing it better and for spending too much time looking out of the window at the crowds outside St. Patrick's and Saks. Instead of doing business with agents and authors I often ate lunch by myself: shad roe and bacon at the American Bar and Grill; pastina in brodo and sausages and peppers at La Scala, near Carnegie Hall, where I read the
Times Literary Supplement
and eavesdropped on one of the restaurant's steady customers, Dimitri Mitropoulos, the New York Philharmonic conductor, and his young male companions. In good weather I had a grilled cheese sandwich and milk shake at a drugstore counter and spent the rest of an extended lunch hour taking pictures along the Hudson waterfront. Quite recently, as I came back from one of these solitary outings and passed the Simon and Schuster reception desk, whose occupant was busy as usual buffing her nails and talking to her mother on the phone, I had an illumination, of sorts: I didn't care if I never became a long-term fixture at this or any other publishing house. I was happy to cede the future to brilliant and truly dedicated editors like Robert Gottlieb, Richard L. Grossman, and Michael Korda. I had had my fill of meetings, alcoholic agents, and infantilized authors who assumed editors were writing teachers.

Given these admissions, which, Herb reminded me, suggested that I was practically asking to be fired, he went to work on me like a thoracic surgeon: he spread my ribs, probed lungs, lights, and liver and concluded that the cause of my low morale and idleness—my “fucking the dog,” as he put it—was that I was working on other people's books when all the while I wanted to be writing my own. This was probably true, I admitted: what I needed was a subject or an event that could be brought to a dramatic focus in individual lives: the Western explorations (and subsequent court-martial) of John Charles Frémont, for example, or the transformations of Ulysses Grant from reluctant soldier, bankrupt and drunk, to Civil War hero and U.S. president. That's as far as I had ever got with defining the sort of book I wanted to write if I should ever leave publishing, but I knew I was hopelessly in love with the American nineteenth century—it was just far enough and near enough in time to be both strange and familiar, historical and contemporary. Nineteenth-century photography—daguerreotypes, Mathew Brady's portraits—brought the dead out of their graves and gave them an eerie, compelling, staring presence, as if they had just brushed past me out of the dark and were about to whisper in my ear. What was it like to have lived their lives, to have seen the great pulsating nineteenth century through their eyes?

“A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory,” Keats said, “and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative.” Among such richly dimensioned lives that I had thought about, Thoreau was too pleased with himself for my taste, too sanctimonious about his self-sufficiency and long preserved virginity. Keats would have recognized the allegory and mystery of Walt Whitman's life, but the Whitman biographies I had read when I worked for Louis Untermeyer seemed to be trapped into telling the story of a disappearing act, a great poet evanescing into a cult object—“I depart as air” and this was not my idea of the kind of book I wanted to write or read. Maybe Whitman's story had to be told in reverse, in his words “a backward glance o'er travel'd roads.”

In the spring of 1959 Hal Holbrook's one-man show,
Mark Twain Tonight!
, had just opened on Broadway at the Forty-first Street Theatre: three hours of makeup transformed a thirty-fiveyear-old actor into a seventy-year-old spellbinding monologist whose ghost story, “The Golden Arm,” was so terrifying in the telling that it nearly sent Annie into labor, just as it had sent Mark Twain's daughter Susy into hysterics. “Think about Mark Twain,” Herb said. This was an entirely new idea—Mark Twain had always been part of the literary landscape for me but not its commanding feature. In some ways I was as benighted as many of his contemporaries who thought of him as mere entertainer. “Yes, I like that a lot, more than anything,” I said. “I'll look into it.” Deliberate casualness aside, I was thunderstruck: in love with the idea.

Right after lunch I bought whatever I could find of Mark Twain at the Doubleday bookshop on Fifth Avenue. I spent the afternoon in my office reading
Roughing It
; the evening at the Harvard Club Library reading Albert Bigelow Paine's authorized biography of Mark Twain; and the next several weeks, on company time, doing the most single-minded and happiest thinking of my life. More awake than ever, more concentrated, at the same time I had the sort of warm, suffusing sensation (Keats's “drowsy numbness”) you have when you suddenly find something valuable and necessary you've been a long time looking for and never altogether expected to find, in this case it was a vocation as well as a book idea. By the end of that time I had written a ten-page proposal for “A Narrative Biography of Mark Twain in the Gilded Age.” “In telling the story of Mark Twain's triumphs and frustrations, his ambitions and conflicts,” I announced rather grandly, “this biography will also reveal something about the terms of existence for the good life and for the creative life in nineteenth-century America.”

Even in my ignorance I had learned enough about Mark Twain to recognize that he lived not only in the solitude of his work, as writers do, but also, to an extent almost unique among American writers, that he lived out in the world, fully engaged—wealth seeker, businessman, paterfamilias, world traveler, social creature, activist, dissident, professional celebrity. He was equally at home in the eras of the Pony Express and the motorcar, the river raft and the steam yachts of the plutocracy, the open frontier and the closed frontier, villages on the banks of the Mississippi and the great cities of six continents. He invited the biographer to exercise what Wright Mills called “the sociological imagination” and explore the intersection of history, society, and individual experience.

“Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody,” Mark Twain said. Freudian analysis had left its permanent imprint, opening my eyes to the irrational, conflictive, and subliminal forces that make people think and behave as they do. It was Mark Twain's “dark side”—his mystery and riven identities—I wanted to explore: for all his rootedness in the quotidian he was also a nocturnal creature in the line of Poe and Hawthorne—guilt ridden and dream haunted, his middle life a daydream of glory, his later life a nightmare, his laughter breaking into tears. I proposed to begin my book not with an infant born in a cabin in Florida, Missouri, but with an adult in his early thirties, a classic turning point in the life cycle, Dante's “middle of the journey”: one either made a decisive change then or resigned oneself to continuing on the same path. Starting Mark Twain's story in early midlife made sense: why enter into hopeless competition with him in writing about his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, and along the Mississippi? Just the words “When I was a boy” were a mantra for Mark Twain, an Open Sesame! for his memory and imagination. My book would begin, I explained in my proposal, with Mark Twain's arrival in New York in 1867, then as ever the scrambling center of American life, temple of trade and commerce, pattern of fashion and manners for the nation. “Make your mark in New York,” he reports with a prophetic pun, “and you are a made man.” My book would end in New York in 1910, with Mark Twain in his famous white suit lying in a casket at the Brick Presbyterian Church at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street.

I couldn't wait to get started. Max Schuster was vacationing in Vienna when my proposal reached him. “Mark Twain project absolutely magnificent both in form and substance,” he cabled. “Will discuss full implications on return.” That was generous of him, since I was upsetting his sense of order and some publishing plans that involved me. But when he returned he called me into his office and showed a different face. Even twitchier than usual, clicking and sucking on his ballpoint pen, he told me that a great deal of valuable training was now going to waste, especially, he added, since after nearly five years I was just beginning to carry my own weight. Numbed and dry-mouthed by the Miltown I had taken in preparation for this encounter, I could hardly respond or blame him for this flick of the whip. He refused to have a final lunch with me: an ingrate who had scratched at his door for a long time and was now bolting. But he offered me a $5,000 advance, payable in three cautious installments, and I accepted eagerly. The contract, with Max as my editor and sponsor, was to be my exit visa from Simon and Schuster. I went about settling my affairs at the house as if preparing to depart for the next world.

As for Herbert Alexander, the ultimate author of these changes: he suddenly turned unreachable when I asked him to read the proposal. Either he was in one of his depressive phases or simply slunk away. Like Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, who had learned the secret of imparting life to inanimate matter, he had gone too far and was now reluctant to be held accountable for the actions of his creature. Several years earlier he had sent me off to the vocational testers at Stevens Institute of Technology to flush from my system the idea that I ought to be a social worker; he had once warned me away from a marital entanglement he compared to climbing into a Bendix washing machine; later on he had told Annie and me, separately, that it was okay for us to marry. Now, as a direct consequence of a suggestion Herb made over one of his hypomanic lunches, I was quitting my job and, never before having written a full-length book, much less a biography of someone as flamboyant, enigmatic, and conspicuous as Mark Twain, committing myself to years of work on a venture that was all the more questionable in its wisdom because library shelves already had a running foot or two of Mark Twain biographies.

“This is a big league subject,” Joe Barnes cautioned me. “Are you sure you know what you're doing?” As I realized after only a week or two of reading Mark Twain manuscript letters at the New York Public Library, what I was “doing” was to enter another mode of being: total focus on the life of a stranger, in this instance a resistant stranger fiercely jealous of his privacy. Everything I knew would have to come into play but without my having to use the pronoun
I
. It was clear to me right away there was no useful distinction between research and writing: even the first notes one took were acts of narrative and interpretation. This was the life of biography: solitary; messy, in many ways, because existence was messy; and chastening, because the “truth” of a life would always remain elusive and shadowy, a mystery that had to be respected because it could never be penetrated. Even apparently ineluctable “facts” of time, place, and relationship were not bricks of information to be laid course upon course—facts were magma flowing from a hot core of accident and personality. The life of biography was risky, because it involved speculation, imagination, and taking chances. It was demanding, because lives as lived don't have the shape of art, but lives as written ought at least to acknowledge efforts in that direction. And it was inexorably full-time, even in sleep, for I hoped to train myself to dream the New York of a century ago, a forest of steeples palisaded by the masts of shipping. In the New York Public Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature I worked under the minatory gaze of its codonor's portrait: Dr. Albert A. Berg, Mount Sinai Hospital's longtime chief surgeon. During the mid- and late 1930s, before the introduction of sulfa drugs and other antibiotics, Berg performed annual and sometimes semiannual operations on my brother. At the age of eighteen, Howard had fallen seriously ill with osteomyelitis, a bone and bone marrow infection for which surgery was then the only available treatment. Howard suffered horribly but survived without a trace of self-pity, at least as far as I could ever see. In his portrait, as invariably on his rounds and in his visits to Howard's room at Mount Sinai, Berg wore a bloodred necktie and a bloodred carnation in his lapel. I assumed these were emblems of the surgeon's guild.

There
was a sort of symmetry in my choosing to write about Mark Twain. When I began his story he and I were both at the watershed age of our early thirties. Just as he arrived in New York to make a new start I was planning to leave my city for the same reason. Cambridge drew me back: the open stacks of Harvard's Widener Library, an invitation to productive browsing and unexpected discoveries, the unfenced banks of the Charles River, the nearby countryside. The “style,” such as it was, of Cambridge (and Boston) was regressive: decaying buildings; greasy spoon eateries serving grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee in cracked mugs; the sort of after-dark street life you'd find in Transylvania; a general air of neglect, of better days long since past. (According to the popular wisdom, if you wanted a good meal you went to Logan Airport and took Eastern or Northeast to New York.) But what had made life in New York so exhilarating—its surprises and accidents, marketplace chatter and competitive gossip, adrenaline-intoxicated style, its sense of itself as being the center of the universe—was not what I needed for my work, although I would miss the social traffic and easy companionship of the corridors, the trading of jokes and ideas. New York would always be the Promised City, but I needed a slower pulse rate, open space, perspective, a more deliberative life. Even Walt Whitman, the supreme poet of New York, I reminded myself, had said that for all its fierce and leavening energies the city was a great place to sell your crops, but not to grow them.

One morning in November 1959, soon after the movers left, we cleared out the last belongings from our Riverside Drive apartment, packed Susanna and Hester into a little blue Rambler station wagon, tied the baby carriage on the roof, and headed north. We drove past my old neighborhood at Ninety-sixth Street; Columbia (where Howard had gone to law school); Barnard, Annie's college, her mother's, and her aunt's; Harlem's Hamilton Terrace, where Georgia lived with her husband, Willie; Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, where our daughters were born; the George Washington Bridge—my father and I had walked it in the 1930s; Riverdale, where I had gone to school at Horace Mann. Once on the Saw Mill Parkway in Westchester we were bound for the calmer precincts of New England.