The Portable Mark Twain (3 page)

Twain, on the other hand, had indeed traveled more than most people, enough to know that, the effects of British colonialism notwithstanding, the English language and the Anglo-Saxon point of view were not the only games being played in the world. In fact, by the end, Clemens had circumnavigated the globe and gone nearly everywhere except the place he set out for in 1857, the Amazon. But he got diverted into river-boating and did not look back. Twain later transferred the childhood ambition to get to South America to Huckleberry Finn, but Huck never made it either.

Twain (and Clemens, too, for that matter) had also traveled up and down the social ladder in remarkable ways. In his San Francisco days, it was oysters and champagne one day, unemployment and despair the next. In the mid-1880s he owned his own publishing house that had just published the monumentally successful memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and he had high hopes for his investments; ten years later he was trying to find his way out of debt. These swings in personal fortune probably made him that much more alert to thwarted ambition and to matters of class distinction and the spurious lines that divide human creatures from one another. Clemens knew firsthand the profligacy of ambition and the meagerness of destiny, but in this, as in most matters, he was on both sides of the question. He could have Pudd'nhead Wilson sardonically remark, “There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights.” Yet in “Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven” (1909) he could picture true “heavenly justice”; the hereafter was a place where one was judged and rewarded according to an inward greatness that, on earth, often never had the opportunity to develop.

As a rule, Twain recognized the markers of supposed merit for what they are, patent absurdities. In his day they might be pretentious titles, epaulets, or bad French; in our own they might be stretch limos, buns of steel, or bad French. He typically satirized such inequity and pretense with an eager glee. In
The Innocents Abroad
(1869), for example, Twain meets the Czar of Russia and marvels at the terrible yet whimsical authority he wields: “If I could have, I would have stolen his coat. When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by.” However, the author himself was not exempt from like affectation. Clemens had a love/hate relation with the English and more than once satirized their aristocratic ways. Nevertheless, he sometimes strutted around in the scarlet robes he had worn when he received an honorary degree from Oxford—there was no other red that could compare with it, he thought, “outside the arteries of an archangel.” He once bragged, “An Oxford decoration is a loftier distinction than is conferrable by any other university on either side of the ocean.” And, in the persona of Mark Twain, Clemens could become the ultimate name-dropper. He recounts in
Following the Equator
(1897) a visit by a Mohammedan “god.” A direct descendant of the Prophet and worshipped accordingly, this walking deity wants to discuss the “philosophy of Huck Finn.” Twain's reaction is predictable: “It would be false modesty to pretend that I was not inordinately pleased. I was. I was much more pleased than I should have been with a compliment from a man.”

These sorts of encounters between social unequals can make for great comedy, and Twain applied the attendant mechanisms of social adjustment (envy and flattery, obsequiousness and exasperation, indifference and condescension) in a variety of ways and to diverse effects. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) begins with a letter addressed to Artemus Ward. Twain, in this instance cast in the role of a dandified gentleman, expresses his “lurking suspicion” that he has been set up. In urging him to search for the edifying company of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, Ward has deliberately thrown Twain in the way of Simon Wheeler and a reminiscence of the notorious Jim Smiley. What follows, of course, is a rambling and hilarious narrative about a “fifteen minute nag,” a bull pup named “Andrew Jackson,” and the precocious jumping frog “Dan'l Webster.” If Twain had been less impatient with Wheeler, we might have heard the tale of a “yaller one-eyed cow” as well, but he storms off in a huff and his readers necessarily must follow. In “An Encounter with an Interviewer” (1874), a “peart” young reporter from the
Daily Thunder-storm
seeks an interview with the estimable Mr. Twain. The persona here is simpleminded and afflicted with an “irregular” memory, and Twain leads the interviewer on a wild goose chase for even the most basic information. The young man—having learned that Twain is 180 years old, attended Aaron Burr's funeral, and many other curious things—leaves exasperated and befuddled. Twain regrets the departure: “He was pleasant company, and I was sorry to see him go.”

In “The Story of the Old Ram” (1872) Twain the tenderfoot is tricked by “the boys” into mouth-watering anticipation to hear Jim Blaine's inebriated tale. The storyteller meanders about, getting further and further from the announced subject, and it is not until the raconteur falls asleep mid-sentence that Twain perceives that he has been “sold.” There are many other instances of unlikely pairings of character—those emissaries from the “grand divisions of society” in Virginia City, Nevada, Scotty Briggs and the Parson; or Twain the self-satisfied and ignorant substitute editor for an agricultural journal (who advises among other things that “clams will lie quiet if music be played to them”) and the outraged editor who rebukes him; or Hank Morgan, the practical, hardheaded, nineteenth-century Yankee, and Sandy, the good-hearted, innocent, sixth-century jabberer.

Some of Twain's encounters were not humorous, however, nor were they intended to be. In “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1874) the former slave and now a servant, Aunt Rachel, literally and figuratively towers above the author, clearly his moral superior. For once, Clemens did not hide behind the camouflage of an adopted persona but is known simply as “Misto C—” and as such bears the full weight of an unwanted recognition: namely, that his judgment of Aunt Rachel's character borders on criminal stupidity and callousness. Similarly, in one of the most affecting episodes in
Huckleberry Finn,
after playing yet another joke on Jim, Huck receives such a tongue lashing from the fugitive slave that he mulls over his deserved upbraiding and finally “humbles” himself to a black man. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885) was published in the company of other Civil War memoirs in the
Century
magazine. Clemens had spent a very brief time in the pro-Confederate Marion Rangers before removing to the Nevada Territory, and he freely admits that perhaps he “ought not be allowed much space among better people.” For the most part his description of the campaign is pure burlesque at the author's expense, but a sudden revulsion of moral feelings brought about by the shooting of an innocent man decides him on quitting the business of war “while I could save some remnant of my self-respect.” It is almost a certainty that this killing was pure fabrication, introduced to provide the author with a moral dilemma he might respond to with the sort of sensitivity he had attributed to Huckleberry Finn, whose narrative he had completed only a few months before writing this memoir. Clemens is extenuating his conduct during the war, but he is also expressing a value. The ultimate worth and dignity of a man or woman cut across class lines and unmistakably declare themselves, if only by appealing to one's moral sympathies and wounded sense of justice.

Despite the orthodox language of Clemens's confession to his brother that he was answering to the inner promptings of the Lord's will in becoming a humorist, it is more likely that he was following the path of least resistance. Comedy came naturally to him. It was apparently irresistible and, for the most part, something more than mere “fragrance” or “decoration.” Far from doing God's work, at least as early as 1865 and probably before, he seemed motivated to offer up the comforts of laughter as relief from a world that, depending on his mood, he had decided was an annoyance, a trial, an affliction, or a tragedy; a world that, if it could not be redeemed, might at least be made more tolerable. At any rate, in the same letter to Orion he confided a less than reverential regard for the workings of providence: “I have a religion—but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.”

The poor was not his cause, but it was, from time to time, his affiliation. There was not much young Clemens inherited from his father that he could not disavow or outgrow, but he did seem to be permanently affected by the idea that prosperity was just around the corner. In the 1820s, John Marshall Clemens had purchased at least 70,000 acres in Tennessee, and he held fast to the conviction that it would one day make the family rich. It didn't. To the contrary, it engendered in the children false hopes. As Clemens recalled late in life, “It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers and indolent. . . . It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.”

It was a curse that Sam Clemens could never quite shake. No doubt that prospective fortune grew in proportion to the degree the family felt the pinch of necessity. John Clemens died in 1847, but even before that his debts had mounted; the family auctioned off property, sold their furniture, and took in boarders. Young Sam Clemens never experienced the penury of Tom Blankenship (the impoverished and neglected Hannibal boy who apparently served as the model for Huck Finn), but at times he must have felt something of a child of misfortune himself. Still, the visionary in him persisted throughout his life, as even only a few items from the large inventory of his enthusiasms will attest. In the Nevada Territory in the 1860s, Clemens thought he would strike it rich by trading in mining stocks. He didn't. As the owner of his own publishing house, he enthusiastically believed every Catholic family in the world would purchase the authorized biography
Life of Pope Leo XIII
(1887). They didn't. He was right to believe that an automatic typesetter would make a fortune; he was wrong to believe the inventor James W. Paige, an inveterate tinkerer and perfectionist, would ever produce a commercially viable product. He was wrong, too, in investing around a quarter of a million dollars in the project and as a consequence leaving his own publishing concern undercapitalized. In 1894, Clemens entered into voluntary bankruptcy; by 1898, largely through the success of his around-the-world lecture tour, he was able to repay his debts in full. One would think Clemens might have learned the wisdom of Pudd'nhead Wilson's maxim published in
Following the Equator:
“There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it and when he can.” However, in 1900 Clemens began investing in a food supplement called Plasmon and eventually lost around $50,000.

These are merely instances, but they indicate, in Clemens, a tendency that was abroad in the land. Get-rich-quick schemes, grand aspirations, exploitation, and corporate and government corruption abounded after the Civil War. Twain dramatized the passion for instant wealth in such tales as “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract” (1870), “The £1,000,000 Bank Note” (1893), “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), and “The $30,000 Bequest” (1904). Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote a novel naming the era
The Gilded Age
(1873), but the literary historian Vernon Parrington might have come closer to the spirit of the times when he called it “The Great Barbecue”: “A huge barbecue was spread to which all presumably were invited. Not quite all, to be sure; inconspicuous persons, those who were at home on the farm or at work in the mills and offices, were overlooked; a good many indeed out of the total number of the American people. But all the important persons, leading bankers and promoters and business men, received invitations. There wasn't room for everybody and these were presumed to represent the whole. It was a splendid feast.”

The Gilded Age
is political and social satire, but the character of Colonel Beriah Sellers outshines the invective and is finally more interesting than the convoluted plot of the novel. He is, at any rate, something more than a mere satirical device and better illustrates the impulses behind the venality of a certain kind of American than do Twain's tales and sketches that explore this theme. Sellers is an altogether memorable creation—part visionary and part windbag; at once calculating and naïve. He is a quixotic braggart, but capable of quickly improvising explanations for events that might permit him some scrap of dignity. He is compromised in his material condition but rich in the affection of his wife and children. “Good gracious, it's the country to pile up wealth!” he proudly exclaims, but he dines on turnips and water and heats the room with a tallow candle. Sellers is a major stockholder in the soap bubbles of his effervescent imagination and charitably disposed to let others in on the ground floor of his next big deal. There is something majestically helpless about the man that simultaneously commands our sympathy and provokes our laughter.

Clemens based the character of Colonel Sellers on the personality of his mother's cousin, James Lampton, but there was a portion of himself in the figure as well. Clemens's imagination, when it was functioning well, was at once projective and assimilative, which is to say it was a compound of keen observation (of mannerisms, colloquial idiom, gesture, and the like) and a genuine identification with the created character. In his “Autobiography,” he emphasized only half of this equation: “Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race.” Samuel Clemens, unique in himself, acknowledged that he was representative, too—representative of material ambition and the desire to be accepted into a social order he had some doubts about, but also of a certain native social and cultural uncertainty vying with an equally native pride and vernacular boisterousness.