Prologue
On a chilly mid-November afternoon in 1869, a
small man with a deranged mop of curly red hair
and a wide-swept red mustache sauntered among
the pedestrians in the 100 block of Tremont
Street in Boston. He was desperately out of
place amid these men in their muttonchops and
tailored Scottish tweeds, and these women in
their jeweled bonnets and brilliant
brocade-lined shawls. Tremont bisected the
epicenter of American cultural authority and
power, announced by the Park Street Church
across the thoroughfare and the sweep of the
Boston Common behind it; the Georgian
residential rooftops lining the far side of the
Common; the wrought-iron balconies of Colonnade
Row; the great domed neoclassical State House
that commanded this elegant realm from the top
of nearby Beacon Hill.
It was not just his clothing, black and drably
functional, that marked him as an interloper (he
owned a smart white collar and swallowtails, but
they were reserved for other purposes). It was
his gait, a curious rocking, rolling shamble,
conspicuously unurbane – the physical
equivalent of a hinterland drawl, which he also
possessed.
None of this seemed to faze him. At 124 Tremont
Street, a dignified little four-story town house
recently converted to an office building, he
pushed open the door and let himself inside. He
stepped past the heavy tome-scented shelves that
filled the commercial shop at street level, the
bookstore of Ticknor & Fields, and climbed the
staircase leading to the second floor.
The stranger was – well, that depended. Born
Samuel Langhorne Clemens in “the almost
invisible village of Florida, Monroe County,
Missouri,” he had taken to calling himself “Mark
Twain” as a newspaperman in Nevada and
California, after experimenting with such other
pen names as Rambler, W. Epaminondas Adrastus
Blab, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and Josh.
Lately he had been called “The Wild Humorist of
the Pacific Slope” and “The Moralist of the
Main,” tags given him by his friend Charles
Henry Webb.
Ambiguous as he was, he was penetrating an
enclave quite certain of its own place in the
universe. Only Harvard College itself could have
fetched him closer to the core of the young
nation’s most important intellectual forces.
Ticknor & Fields comprised not only a bookseller
but a prestigious publishing house whose
authors, many of whom lived nearby, commanded
the first ranks of America’s emerging
literature: the “Sage of Concord,” Ralph Waldo
Emerson; the originator of the “Brahmin”
aesthetic, Oliver Wendell Holmes; Nathaniel
Hawthorne; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Harriet
Beecher Stowe; Henry David Thoreau.
The visitor’s destination was an extension of
this authoritative domain: the tiny editorial
office of the Atlantic Monthly, a literary,
cultural, and political magazine whose views,
taste, and diction were supplied by the same New
England literary aristocracy, and which was
distributed to the nation (or at least to some
thirty thousand of its citizens) as the highest
cultural standard. The Atlantic had been founded
twelve years earlier by a group of
progressive-minded intellectuals, with the
support of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Stowe,
and others. Harvard professor James Russell
Lowell was appointed its first editor.
After knocking on the office door, the
red-haired man was greeted by a robust figure
enwreathed in flowing curls of hair and beard:
the magazine’s editor, James T. Fields,
publishing partner of William D. Ticknor, and
the Atlantic’s editor since 1861. Fields was a
self-educated businessman from New Hampshire
with a genuine love of writers and ideas. He had
guided the magazine through the Civil War years
as the principled voice of abolitionist
sentiment. But perhaps even more importantly, he
had retained its emphasis on poetry, criticism,
essays, and fiction – an ongoing affirmation of
civilization’s values in those morbid and
despairing times. Now Fields, who had a
whimsical taste for eccentrics, swept a pile of
handwritten manuscripts from a sofa opposite an
open fireplace, and the two men chatted for a
few moments.
But it was not Fields for whom Clemens had made
this unannounced visit. He had come to meet
Fields’s young assistant, a moist, bookish
fellow by the name of William Dean Howells.
Howells had written a favorable, albeit
unsigned, notice of Clemens’s – make that Mark
Twain’s – new book for the Atlantic’s current
issue. The Atlantic did not usually deign to
review books of this ilk: a humorous travelogue
peddled door-to-door by common “subscription”
salesmen, titled The Innocents Abroad, or The
New Pilgrim’s Progress. Now, a few days after
reading the review, Clemens had arrived in
Boston in the course of a lecture tour that,
along with the book, was implanting his Western
reputation in the formidable circles of the
East, and not a moment too soon: he was a few
days from turning thirty-four. Clemens knew that
no other endorsement was as crucial as the
Atlantic’s: Howells had handed him an entrée
into literary legitimacy. He couldn’t help but
be curious about who would do such a thing, and
why. He’d ascertained the reviewer’s identity a
few days earlier in Pittsburgh, through a cousin
of Howells’s whom he’d met there. And now here
he was in Boston to look this man in his face
and shake his hand.
To the thirty-two-year-old Howells, rising to
his height of 5 feet 4 inches from behind his
desk, the visitor chatting with his boss was
nothing less than – well, what? Graphic? Bold?
Shakespearean? (“Or, if his ghost will not
suffer me the word,” Howells later mused in
print with typical fine-tuning, “then he was
Baconian.” The fastidious Howells had seldom
laid eyes on such a swashbuckler. Discreet dark
woolens draped his own plump frame, punctuated
by black bow ties. He wore his hair plastered
down and parted at mid-scalp. His own mustache
drooped softly over his upper lip, its long,
tapering points adding to his aspect of sleepy
introspection. His first impulse upon seeing
this apparition labeled “Mark Twain,” as he
later recalled, was of alarm for the proprieties
violated. Specifically, he shuddered at what
“droll comment” might have been in the mind of
his employer Mr. Fields as the two men of
letters contemplated the disheveled,
blazing-eyed figure in front of them. (And this
was one of Clemens’s good-grooming days. Others
who had encountered him at this stage of his
life remembered him as “disreputable-looking,”
“seedy,” even “sinister,” and equipped with “an
evil-smelling cigar butt.”)
The book that Howells had praised was a daring
choice for an Atlantic review, given that it
lampooned much of what the magazine stood for.
Exuberantly un-Eastern, impious, and unconcerned
with moral improvement, it amounted to a genial
pie in the face of the European classicism that
still regulated the tone and values of the
American intellectuals while they struggled to
liberate their nation from it. The Innocents
Abroad was Mark Twain’s eyewitness account of a
transatlantic excursion by some sixty-five
reverential American tourists, from New York
harbor to Old Europe and the Holy Land – the
first successful organized “luxury cruise” in
U.S. history. The idea for the voyage had been
dreamed up by Henry Ward Beecher, the nationally
renowned pastor of the Plymouth Congregational
Church in Brooklyn. Beecher had conceived it as
a way to finance his gathering of material for a
biography of Jesus – the idea being,
presumably, that the Gospels had preempted the
market for such a work quite long enough.
Beecher himself soon opted out of the journey,
as did eventually a number of highly advertised
celebrity-passengers including the Civil War
hero William Tecumseh Sherman. Beecher left the
expedition and its ship, the paddlewheel steamer
Quaker City, in the care of a Plymouth Church
Sunday-school teacher, one Captain Charles C.
Duncan.
No Sunday-school teacher could have been
prepared for the alcohol-reeking figure who
showed up at the cruise’s Wall Street booking
office, introduced by his equally disheveled
companion Edward H. House as “the Reverend Mark
Twain,” a Baptist minister who wondered whether
Reverend Beecher would allow him to preach
Baptist sermons en route to the Holy Land – and
who returned the next day, sober, to book the
passage under his real name and profession. This
voyage was exactly the sort of caper Clemens had
been looking for. A veteran of larky, outlandish
newspapering exploits in the far West during the
Civil War years, he had come back East a prudent
year and a half after Appomattox to cash in on
the postwar boom in popular journalism and
literature – and his own nascent fame as a
humorist and platform presence. After securing a
berth on the ship, Clemens took steps to adjust
his commission from the Alta California in San
Francisco to pay for his passage in exchange for
the letters he would send to the newspaper
during the expedition. On his return, he
contracted with the Hartford-based American
Publishing Company, a subscription house run by
Elisha Bliss, to expand the newspaper dispatches
into a book.
The result was something previously unseen in
the annals of travel literature, in literature
of any kind. Fact-laden and reportorial along
its narrative spine, heavily illustrated with
woodcuts, the book did not hesitate to shift its
tone unpredictably. It erupted frequently into
playful comic riffs, as when Mark Twain
“confessed” to a weeping spell inside the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, when he came
across the tomb of his beloved ancestor, Adam;
and it unleashed wicked set-piece send-ups of
Italian art, the biblical landscape, and the
behavior of Mark Twain’s fellow pilgrims aboard
the Quaker City. As such, it figured to have
about as much chance of delighting the dutiful,
doubting Howells as an ash dropped into his lap
from Clemens’s ever-present cigar. But Howells
had indeed given his sanction, at least
tentatively. “There is an amount of pure human
nature in the book that rarely gets into
literature,” he had written – an insight that
bridged the gap between American “high” and
popular prose writing. He added: “It is no
business of ours to fix his rank among the
humorists California has given us, but we think
he is, in an entirely different way from all the
others, quite worthy of the company of the
best.”
Mark Twain’s career prospects depended on what
happened next. Everything in the nation, it then
seemed, depended on what happened next. It was a
charged moment in American history. At the end
of 1869, the national trauma of the Civil War
was replaced with new urgencies – competing new
visions of the national future. The war’s
greatest hero sat in the White House, not
knowing exactly what to do. The golden spike at
Promontory Point in Utah finally linked the East
Coast to the West by rail, collapsing distance
and time, and erecting unimagined new structures
of financial power. The Fifteenth Amendment gave
former slaves the right to vote, and the risk of
paying for the privilege with their lives. The
city of New York was rising on an immigrant tide
to challenge Boston as the arbiter of national
aspirations.
It was, in short, exactly the sort of moment
when a fugitive from one version of America, the
nasty and brutish West, could intrude into the
settled, exclusionary East and make a pitch for
a piece of the action – provided that the
fugitive observed the courtesies and deferred to
the standards of Brahmin delicacy in manners and
language. Sam Clemens was capable of such
deference. He had also trampled, at some earlier
time, on most of these considerations, and now
he was about to lay waste one of the most
tender. “When I read that review of yours,”
Howells recalled Clemens drawling, “I felt like
the woman who was so glad her baby had come
white.”
This audacious little joke set the animating
tenor of the long Clemens-Howells friendship:
Clemens goading Howells to imagine something
beyond the borders of gentility and to laugh at
it even as he squirmed; Howells stretching those
borders to give it sanction. Howells must have
heard a familiar voice under the surface of that
vulgarism, as he had under the horseplay of The
Innocents Abroad. It was the voice of a boy from
Howells’s own neck of the West; perhaps the
improper boy Howells himself had wished he could
be.
So Howells chuckled and let it pass, and the two
shook hands and exchanged kind words and the
hopes of meeting again. On that note of truant
recognition began a symbiotic friendship of
forty-one years’ duration that would elevate
both these men.
Sam Clemens was the greater beneficiary. He was
not only reviewed in the Atlantic; by 1874 he
was contributing to it, to great acclaim. Life
on the Mississippi, his strange, fabulistic
“travel” masterpiece of 1883, began as a series
of essay-reminiscences in the magazine,
encouraged and edited by this newfound friend.
Howells’s embrace helped propel the former
steamboat pilot to status as the representative
figure of his nation and his century, and
bequeathed America a torrential literary voice
more truly, more enduringly its own than any
then existing or being conceived by the reigning
gods of New England probity and taste.
Howells benefited as well. Mark Twain’s rise to
critical and popular stardom in his magazine
ratified the editor’s instincts for finding new,
unorthodox writers in America and, later,
Europe. Other native-born writers who emerged to
prominence under his championing included Emily
Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank Norris, and
Stephen Crane. He later helped introduce such
international figures as Ibsen, Zola, Perez
Galdos, Verga, and Tolstoy. As he moved from
editing other people’s works to writing his
own – he completed more than a hundred books of
fiction, poetry, travel essays, biography,
reminiscence, criticism, and even dramatic
plays – Howells seemed to take inspiration from his
fellow Midwesterner. (The novelized memoir of
his youth, A Boy’s Town Described, published in
1890, contained strong echoes of The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer.) At his best, Howells was
considered a novelist on a par with his other
great friend, Henry James. Though that level of
esteem did not survive the 19th century, Howells
finished his long life enjoying the sobriquet,
“the Dean of American Letters.”
Breaching the ranks of New England literary
culture was Clemens’s most important achievement
(short of his actual works), and a signal
liberating event in the country’s imaginative
history. His audacity, and Howells’s
accommodation of it, may seem unremarkable to an
America long since accustomed to the leveling of
hierarchies, the demythifying of great artists
and the complexities of their works, the triumph
of careerism over apprenticeship to a tradition.
In the slipstream of the Clemens-Howells
creative bond, American literature ceased its
labored imitation of European and Classical high
discourse, and became a lean, blunt, vivid
chronicle of American self-invention, from the
yeasty perspective of the common man. Without
Howells’s friendship, Mark Twain might have
flared for a while, a regional curiosity among
many, and then faded, forgotten. On its
legitimizing strength, he gained the foundation
for international status as America’s
Shakespeare and struck a template for the
nation’s voice into the 20th century and beyond.
Mark Twain’s great achievement as the man who
found a voice for his country has made him a
challenge for his biographers. His words are
quoted, yet he somehow lies hidden in plain
sight – a giant on the historic landscape. He
has been so thoroughly rearranged and
reconstructed by a long succession of scholarly
critics that the contours of an actual, textured
human character have been obscured. And his
voice, not to mention his humor, has gone
missing from many of these analyses.
(Continues…)
Free Press
Copyright © 2005
Ron Powers
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-4899-6
Excerpted from Mark Twain
by Ron Powers
Copyright © 2005 by Ron Powers.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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