Nom de Plume (12 page)

At the height of his fame, Twain was bombarded by fan mail, including manuscripts from aspiring writers who wanted his opinion of their work and assistance with publication. Letters poured in from around the world, some addressed simply to “Mark Twain, Hartford, Connecticut.” Some asked for money. He filed away many letters under the heading, “
From an ass.
” He wrote to his mother, “I have a badgered, harassed feeling, a good part of the time.” Yet he was paradoxical as ever: even though he often checked into hotels incognito, using a variety of aliases including “S. L. Samuel” and “C. L. Samuel,” he was always thrilled to be recognized. Sometimes he would actually strut up and down busy streets in Manhattan, just as church services were ending and crowds were pouring out, so that he could bask in the sight of heads excitedly turning toward the great celebrity in their midst.

Once Twain was asked why the fame of many other humorists had been so ephemeral. “Because they were merely humorists,” he replied. “Humorists of the ‘mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration. Often it is merely an odd trick of speech or of spelling . . . and presently the fashion passes and the fame along with it.” Restless and ambitious all his life, Twain knew that to secure his legacy, his output had to transcend “mere” comic sketches and journalism. His reputation would ultimately rest on two masterpieces:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
, published in 1876 when the author was forty-one; and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, published nearly a decade later. Ernest Hemingway claimed that all of American literature was derived from from the latter novel, calling it “the best book we've ever had. There was nothing before. There's been nothing as good since.” The playwright Arthur Miller once said of Twain in an interview, “He wrote as though there had been no literature before him.”

Twain, a popular writer, was also one hell of a trickster. As the scholar John Seelye notes of Tom Sawyer in his introduction to the Penguin edition of
Huckleberry Finn
, Tom is “a prankster from the start,” not unlike the author himself, who adored practical jokes. “Where Huck Finn seems to be a projection of something mysterious deeply hidden in Mark Twain's psyche, Tom Sawyer is clearly an active agent of the author,” Seelye writes.

Swindler, con man, histrionic showman: Tom represents, at least on the surface, the essential Twain. Huck goes deeper; he evinces both halves of the author's troubled psyche (Clemens/Twain), with all its contradictions, anxieties, and follies. But as Twain grew older, his private, Clemensesque qualities floated disruptively to the surface, threatening the impish, rambunctious public man he had become. The blithe, witty charmer was far more mercurial than his admiring public ever knew, and struggled (often painfully) to manage the two worlds and selves he inhabited. When he was drunk, however, his carefully constructed mask came undone. As one friend observed, “He was always afraid of dying in the poorhouse. The burden of his woe was that he would grow old and lose the power of interesting an audience, and become unable to write, and then what would become of him?” The more Clemens drank, the worse it got; there was no Twainian joviality or playful wit to accompany his alcohol consumption. Instead, his friend said, he would “grow more and more gloomy and blue until he fairly wept at the misery of his own future.”

In April 1894, the world's most famous author declared bankruptcy. The wealth he'd amassed could not match his debts, and he'd had to embark upon a grueling round-the-world tour to repay creditors and become solvent again. Like his late father, Clemens had an almost manic relationship to money and had invested his considerable earnings dreadfully. He'd backed failed gadgets and fraudulent schemes, founded a money-losing publishing company, and patented a few unsuccessful inventions of his own, at great expense. Among them was an adjustable elastic waist strap for men that could be buttoned onto the back of a pair of trousers to keep them from falling down.

Foolishly, even though he was among the first Americans to have a telephone at home, he had declined to invest in Alexander Graham Bell's invention. He wasn't convinced that the telephone had much of a future. Twain himself acknowledged his gift for squandering his fortune. “Now here is a queer fact,” he wrote, “I am one of the wealthiest grandees in America—one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact—and yet if you asked me to lend you a couple of dollars I should have to ask you to take my note instead.” Even he must have appreciated the perverse irony of having succumbed to the Gilded Age—a lifestyle that he so despised.

Having brought his family to the brink of ruin, Clemens would endure greater tragedies in subsequent years. He lost several friends and relatives. His daughter Susy died in 1896; Livy died of heart failure in 1904, at the age of fifty-eight; and his daughter Jean died in 1909.

These catastrophic events left him lonely, bitter, brokenhearted, vindictive, and paranoid. Sam Clemens depended on Mark Twain to keep going, but the gentle, irreverent humor in his work gave way to a more cynical, dyspeptic edge. (He took to calling his famous white uniform his “don'tcareadam suits,” and boasted that they made him the most conspicuous man alive.) Although he'd always abhorred critics, he had previously displayed tolerance toward what he regarded as a necessary evil. “I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value,” he wrote. “However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.” Now, however, he was inclined to be far more bilious. If it's true that Clemens and Twain were polar opposites within the same deeply divided man, then it seems there was little actual Twain left in him at the end.

His insecurity often overwhelmed him, and his corrosive obsessions—success, wealth, fame—revealed a volatility that baffled even him. The “periodical and sudden changes of mood in me,” he once wrote, “from deep melancholy to half-insane tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life.” He loved playing billiards, which provided yet another excuse for his explosive temper to manifest itself. “When his game was going badly,” Albert Bigelow Paine wrote in his 1912 Twain biography, “his language sometimes became violent and he was likely to become critical of his opponent. Then reaction would set in, and remorse.”

Today, Mark Twain is still viewed as the mythic “Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” as Ron Powers has described him. “He's been scrubbed and sanitized.” Yet a more comprehensive version of Twain emerged in 2010 with the publication of the first installment of his rambling three-volume autobiography. It presents Twain raw and uncensored; he instructed that his unedited recollections be withheld from the public for one hundred years after his death. (As ever, what a brilliant marketing ploy.) He dictated most of the 500,000-word manuscript to a stenographer during the four years before he died, then postponed its publication for a century to preserve his genial reputation and legacy. The strategy worked. Among towering American literary figures, Twain remains essentially unknowable. As one contemporary journalist aptly put it, he's “still a mystery, a riddle wrapped in an enigma shrouded in a white suit.”

The biographer Justin Kaplan—whose 1966 account of Twain won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—has spoken of the author's dark moods, which are more fully revealed in the new
Autobiography.
The private Twain evinced a side filled with “rage and resentment . . . where he wants to get even, to settle scores with people whom he really despises. He loved invective,” Kaplan noted in an interview. For instance, after having stayed in 1904 with his family in Florence, Italy (where Livy would die), Twain unleashed his fury against the rather unaccommodating countess who owned the villa they'd rented. He characterized her as “excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward.” A lawyer and fellow investor who betrayed him was attacked as having “the pride of a tramp, the courage of a rabbit, the moral sense of a wax figure, the sex of a tapeworm.” And Twain's secretary and household manager, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, with whom he had a close, tempestuous relationship for the last several years of his life, was in the end an object of obsessive condemnation. In a letter to his daughter Clara, Twain fumed that Isabel was “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction & always getting disappointed, poor child.”

In the years before his death in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910, Twain was at his most miserable, full of malice and sadness and vitriol. His health was terrible, too, no doubt owing to his having smoked forty cigars a day for most of his life. Toward the end, he spent much of his time in bed.

Facing his own mortality, he hoped for reconciliation. “I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead,” he once wrote, “and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.” Not long before drifting off to sleep for the last time, he mumbled something about “dual personalities.” He died in his carved oak bed, with his daughter Clara at his side. Two days later, a letter appeared in the
New York Times.

To the Editor:

I wish to draw your attention to a peculiar coincidence.

Mark Twain, born Nov. 30, 1835.

Last perihelion of Halley's comet, Nov. 10, 1835.

Mark Twain died, April 21, 1910.

Perihelion of Halley's comet, April 20, 1910.

It so appears that the lifetime of the great humorist was nearly identical (the difference being exactly fifteen days) with the last long “year” of the great comet.

R. FRIDERICI.

Westchester, N. Y., April 22, 1910

Mark Twain would have loved that coincidence. In fact, he had once predicted it himself: “The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'” The comet was visible from Earth when he died, the final triumph of an inimitable showman.

He was Federal Prisoner 30664

Chapter 6

O. Henry &
WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER

I
f you are now reading or have recently read a short story by O. Henry, you are most likely a middle-school student. He was the greatest short story writer of his generation, but O. Henry—who died at forty-seven with twenty-three cents in his pocket—isn't read much these days, except as homework.

His stories are known for their irony, aphorisms, plot twists, and moral lessons, and the surprise endings he called “snappers.” They were formulaic, but the formula worked. “[H]e never told his story in the first paragraph but invariably began with patter and palaver; like a conjurer at a fair, it was the art of the anecdote that hooked the public,” wrote the critic Francis Hackett. “He planned, first of all, to make his theme straight and clear, as a preacher does who gives the text. Then he established his people with bold, brilliant strokes, like a great cartoonist. But the barb was always a surprise, adroitly prepared, craftily planted, and to catch him at it is an exercise for a detective.”

William Sydney Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862. His middle name was originally spelled “Sidney,” but he changed it; later in life he would drop “William” and be known as Sydney Porter.

By the time he was three years old, his mother was dead of tuberculosis. Along with his father, Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter, William moved into a boardinghouse run by his grandmother. Algernon—a heavy drinker, just as William would become—was also an aspiring inventor with plans for a flying machine and a horseless carriage driven by steam.

The year 1865 brought the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. William began attending a one-room schoolhouse run by his aunt, who served as a surrogate mother and whom he later credited with inspiring his love of art and literature. As a boy he had a talent for drawing, thanks to his aunt's attentive instruction; and he devoured Dumas, Hugo, Thackeray, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and others. “I did more reading between my thirteenth and my nineteenth years than I have done in all the years since, and my taste was much better then,” he once told a reporter.

Although he loved learning, college was for the rich, which meant that for him it was out of the question. At fifteen, William was sent to work in his uncle's pharmacy, and at nineteen he became a licensed pharmacist. “The grind in the drugstore was an agony to me,” he later admitted. Had he not received an invitation in 1882 to join a family friend in Texas, doing ranch work, William Porter might have lived and died a pharmacist rather than become the prolific writer O. Henry.

La Salle County, Texas, was not destined to be his last stop, but it was at least an escape from his tedious life at home. He was always reading poetry, especially Tennyson, and while herding sheep, he carried around a copy of
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
He wrote stories, too, but after reading them aloud to a family friend, he'd rip them up and throw them away.

Next he made his way to Austin, where, supposedly, he first used his future pen name: he had a habit of calling “Oh, Henry!” to a girlfriend's cat, said to respond only to that greeting. (True or not, the phrase has no connection to the candy bar of that name, launched in 1924.) He signed his girlfriend's autograph album as “O. Henry,” and composed a poem, “A Soliloquy by the Cat,” using this name. When he proposed marriage to his girlfriend, she rejected him; she came from a wealthy family, and he was a nobody with a dead-end job. Although he lost the girl, he'd found his pen name. Or so one version of the story goes; there are many. Porter was a good liar who enjoyed spinning fabrications about himself.

He had a series of drab jobs, finally working as a draftsman at the Texas Land Office, where he earned a hundred dollars a month. He wasn't thrilled by the work, but had no trouble finding friends. He played cards, charmed rapt listeners with his storytelling, and joined local singing and theater groups. He became a popular local figure and was known for always being impeccably dressed.

In 1888, following a speedy courtship, Porter eloped with seventeen-year-old Athol Estes. They had a son who died the day he was born. A year later, the couple had a daughter, Margaret. Porter, feeling settled and happy, was ready to pursue his true ambition: writing. After sending a journalism piece to the
Detroit Free Press
, he received an encouraging reply: “Am sorry it is not longer,” the editor wrote. “Check will be sent in a few days. Can you not send more matter—a good big installment every week?” Porter began selling freelance articles, mostly humor pieces, to newspapers and journals around the country.

In 1891, he took a job as a teller at the First National Bank of Austin, a position that seemed ideal at first—it was mindless, and would allow him to write in the evenings—but would later turn out to have damaging and long-lasting consequences. After working at the bank for three years, he resigned when an audit revealed shortages in his till. Though he was charged with embezzlement, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Porter decided to focus on his writing, and he turned entrepreneurial, buying a used printing press and publishing an eight-page weekly satirical magazine called
The Rolling Stone
, for which he served as writer, illustrator, typesetter, and printer. “It rolled on for about a year,” he said later, “and then showed unmistakable signs of getting mossy.” He shut it down but had no regrets; the experience had boosted his confidence. His family moved to Houston, where he worked as a reporter, cartoonist, and columnist for the
Houston Post
, a job he loved.

Unfortunately, his falling-out with the Austin bank came back to haunt him just six months later. The embezzlement case had been reopened by federal auditors, and he was arrested. Although he insisted that bank executives regularly “borrowed” money without keeping records of their transactions (and that they rarely repaid what they'd withdrawn), he had no proof. Whether Porter was a fall guy or a criminal, no one will ever know, but he couldn't face the thought of imprisonment. After being released on a $2,000 bond posted by his wealthy father-in-law, Porter hopped on a night train to New Orleans, and, a few weeks later, boarded a freighter bound for Honduras. It was a frightening experience at the time, but would prove excellent fodder for fiction. (Life as a South American fugitive was chronicled in his 1904 debut story collection,
Cabbages and Kings.
) When asked once why he did not read more fiction written by others, he replied, “It is all tame, as compared with the romance of my own life.”

Porter regretted his evasion of justice, but he argued until the end of his life that he was an innocent man who had no choice other than to flee. “I am like [Conrad's] Lord Jim,” he told a friend, “because we both made one fateful mistake at the supreme crisis of our lives, a mistake from which we could not recover.” Honduras was a smart choice—it had no extradition treaty with the United States—and he had some vague plan for his wife and daughter to join him in exile. It never happened. When Porter found out that Athol was dying of tuberculosis, he rushed back home.

A year later, after a three-day trial in Austin, Porter—now a grieving widower with a ten-year-old daughter—pleaded not guilty. He was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in a Columbus, Ohio, penitentiary. “I care not so much for the opinion of the general public,” he wrote in a letter to his mother-in-law, “but I would have a few of my friends still believe that there is some good in me.”

Becoming Federal Prisoner 30664 would launch his writing career and complete his transformation into O. Henry. Despite a painful separation from Margaret, with whom he was close, prison was the ultimate writing colony. The three years he spent there proved to be his MFA program, his refuge from the demands of the outside world.

He wrote stories during his night shifts in the prison infirmary, a plum job he had obtained because of his background as a licensed pharmacist. After saving the life of a warden who'd overdosed on arsenic, Porter gained additional privileges with minimal supervision, including sleeping at the infirmary and being able to roam the grounds more freely than other prisoners. Still, the inhumane conditions were difficult to witness, and the experience of being in prison left him shattered. Even after his early release for “good behavior,” he was never quite the same. Imprisonment left him ashamed, ended relationships, exacerbated his mercurial temper, and turned a gregarious, easygoing man into a solitary hard drinker (often consuming two quarts of whiskey a day)—a habit that would kill him in the end.

But in prison, Porter was disciplined and productive in his writing, making the best of grim circumstances. A guard recalled his routine: “After most of his work was finished and we had eaten our midnight supper, he would begin to write. . . . He seemed oblivious to the world of sleeping convicts about him, hearing not even the occasional sigh or groan from the beds which were stretched before him in the hospital ward, or the tramp of the passing guards. After he had written for perhaps two hours he would rise, make a round of the hospital, and then come back to his work again.”

He was already a published author; his first short story, “Miracle of Lava Canyon,” appeared the year his wife died. He didn't use a pseudonym, exactly, but he did sign the story as the eminent-sounding “W. S. Porter.” For other stories, he'd toyed with various pen names: Sydney Porter, James L. Bliss, T. B. Dowd, Howard Clark, S. H. Peters, and Olivier Henry. Even in his personal correspondence, he sampled all sorts of names, signing letters as Panhandle Pete, S. P., Hiram Q. Smith, and so on. Later, working with the young editor Witter Bynner (who would become a poet and scholar), Porter almost never called him by his actual name. Instead, he addressed Bynner affectionately as Honored Sir, Doubleyou B, Mr. Man, Pal, My Dear Person, Willie, Witt, B. Binny, and Mr. Bitterwinter, among other appellations.

From prison, Porter published more than a dozen stories, signing them “O. Henry,” the name with which he became the most widely read author of his time. He kept a small notebook in which he recorded the names of his stories and where they had been submitted. The first story he published as O. Henry was “Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking,” which appeared in
McClure's Magazine
in 1899. Because he used an intermediary in New Orleans to submit his stories to editors, no one knew they were written by a convicted felon. His friend would place each story in a different envelope and then mail them from his own address.

In 1901, Porter was a free man. He'd made sure that Margaret had no idea where her father had been during his absence; she knew only that he was away on “business.” He'd written letters to her regularly from prison:

July 8, 1898. M
Y
D
EAR
M
ARGARET
: You don't know how glad I was to get your nice little letter to-day. I am so sorry I couldn't come to tell you good-bye when I left Austin. You know I would have done so if I could have. Well, I think it's a shame some men folks have to go away from home to work and stay away so long don't you? But I tell you what's a fact. When I come home next time I'm going to stay there. . . . Now, Margaret, don't you worry any about me, for I'm well and fat as a pig and I'll have to be away from home a while yet and while I'm away you can just run up to Nashville and see the folks there. And not long after you come back home I'll be ready to come. And I won't ever have to leave again. . . . Look out pretty soon for another letter from me. I think about you every day and wonder what you are doing. Well, I will see you again before very long. Your loving P
APA
.

Porter was a changed man. He'd cut off several friendships rather than reveal the fact of his imprisonment. He had no wish to explain himself, and he hoped that no one would ever learn how he'd spent the past thirty-nine months of his life. He was determined to keep his secret and start anew.

The first step toward reinvention was no surprise: he shut down the name William Sydney Porter. Having adopted O. Henry in prison (and with no one able to trace it to an actual person), he made the transition easily. As William Porter, he was merely a journalist; as O. Henry, he was an author.

In 1902 he moved to New York City. The geographic change brought him closer to the center of the publishing industry and provided distance from his former self. In New York, where he had no friends or acquaintances, he was more prolific than ever, writing and publishing hundreds of stories. His popularity soared.

From 1903 to 1907, Porter lived in Manhattan's Gramercy Park neighborhood, which had been created in 1831 by the developer Samuel Ruggles. The area was just as Ruggles had envisioned it: “a bastion of civility and serenity.” Over the years, Gramercy Park became known for its literary figures—among them, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and the impoverished Stephen Crane, who lived with three aspiring artists in a tiny studio apartment. Melville, a customs inspector by day, was a resident for nearly thirty years, suffering there through the tepid reception of each of his novels, including
Moby-Dick.
Yet Porter—or O. Henry—is perhaps the author most closely identified with the neighborhood. He lived at 55 Irving Place in a first-floor brownstone apartment, and for the first time in his life, he was financially comfortable, having been given a contract by the
New York World
to write a weekly story, at the rate of a hundred dollars each.

Despite the financial incentive, he often missed deadlines—perhaps owing to his drunkenness. His editor refused to pay him until they arranged a compromise. For the first half of the story he delivered, he'd receive an advance; after submitting the other half, he'd be paid the remainder of his fee. Critics have noted that some of the beginnings and endings of O. Henry's stories seem disconnected, almost like Mad Libs. His quirky payment system might have had something to do with that.