Mark Twain, A Biography Complete

A >> Albert Bigelow Paine >> Mark Twain, A Biography Complete


The speeches he made kept his hearers always in good humor; but he made
them think, too, for there was always substance and sound reason and
searching satire in the body of what he said.

It was natural that there should be reporters calling frequently at Mark
Twain's home, and now and then the place became a veritable storm-center
of news. Such a moment arrived when it became known that a public
library in Brooklyn had banished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer from the
children's room, presided over by a young woman of rather severe morals.
The incident had begun in November of the previous year. One of the
librarians, Asa Don Dickinson, who had vigorously voted against the
decree, wrote privately of the matter. Clemens had replied:

DEAR SIR,--I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom
Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distresses me
when I find that boys & girls have been allowed access to them. The
mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.
I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an
unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young
life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an
unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do
that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the
grave. Ask that young lady--she will tell you so.

Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in
defense of Huck's character since you wish it, but really, in my
opinion, it is no better than those of Solomon, David, & the rest of
the sacred brotherhood.

If there is an unexpurgated in the Children's Department, won't you
please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that
questionable companionship?

Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

I shall not show your letter to any one-it is safe with me.

Mr. Dickinson naturally kept this letter from the public, though he read
it aloud to the assembled librarians, and the fact of its existence and
its character eventually leaked out.--[It has been supplied to the writer
by Mr. Dickinson, and is published here with his consent.]--One of the
librarians who had heard it mentioned it at a theater-party in hearing of
an unrealized newspaper man. This was near the end of the following
March.

The "tip" was sufficient. Telephone-bells began to jingle, and groups of
newspaper men gathered simultaneously on Mr. Dickinson's and on Mark
Twain's door-steps. At a 21 Fifth Avenue you could hardly get in or out,
for stepping on them. The evening papers surmised details, and Huck and
Tom had a perfectly fresh crop of advertising, not only in America, but
in distant lands. Dickinson wrote Clemens that he would not give out the
letter without his authority, and Clemens replied:

Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove! The newspaper boys want
that letter--don't you let them get hold of it. They say you refuse
to allow them to see it without my consent. Keep on refusing, and
I'll take care of this end of the line.

In a recent letter to the writer Mr. Dickinson states that Mark Twain's
solicitude was for the librarian, whom he was unwilling to involve in
difficulties with his official superiors, and he adds:

There may be some doubt as to whether Mark Twain was or was not a
religious man, for there are many definitions of the word religion.
He was certainly a hater of conventions, had no patience with
sanctimony and bibliolatry, and was perhaps irreverent. But any one
who reads carefully the description of the conflict in Huck's soul,
in regard to the betrayal of Jim, will credit the creator of the
scene with deep and true moral feeling.

The reporters thinned out in the course of a few days when no result was
forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky
fiasco came along. The distinguished revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, as a
sort of advance agent for Gorky, had already called upon Clemens to
enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the
cause of Russian emancipation. Clemens gave his sympathy, and now
promised his aid, though he did not hesitate to discourage the mission.
He said that American enthusiasm in such matters stopped well above their
pockets, and that this revolutionary errand would fail. Howells, too,
was of this opinion. In his account of the episode he says:

I told a valued friend of his and mine that I did not believe he
could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the
figure too high.

Clemens's interest, however, grew. He attended a dinner given to Gorky
at the "A Club," No. 3 Fifth Avenue, and introduced Gorky to the diners.
Also he wrote a letter to be read by Tchaykoffsky at a meeting held at
the Grand Central Palace, where three thousand people gathered to hear
this great revolutionist recite the story of Russia's wrongs. The letter
ran:

DEAR MR. TCHAYKOFFSKY,--My sympathies are with the Russian
revolution, of course. It goes without saying. I hope it will
succeed, and now that I have talked with you I take heart to believe
it will. Government by falsified promises, by lies, by treachery,
and by the butcher-knife, for the aggrandizement of a single family
of drones and its idle and vicious kin has been borne quite long
enough in Russia, I should think. And it is to be hoped that the
roused nation, now rising in its strength, will presently put an end
to it and set up the republic in its place. Some of us, even the
white-headed, may live to see the blessed day when tsars and grand
dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.
Most sincerely yours,
MARK TWAIN.

Clemens and Howells called on Gorky and agreed to figure prominently in a
literary dinner to be given in his honor. The movement was really
assuming considerable proportions, when suddenly something happened which
caused it to flatten permanently, and rather ridiculously.

Arriving at 21 Fifth Avenue, one afternoon, I met Howells coming out. I
thought he had an unhappy, hunted look. I went up to the study, and on
opening the door I found the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke, and
Clemens among the drifting blue wreaths and layers, pacing up and down
rather fiercely. He turned, inquiringly, as I entered. I had clipped a
cartoon from a morning paper, which pictured him as upsetting the Tsar's
throne--the kind of thing he was likely to enjoy. I said:

"Here is something perhaps you may wish to see, Mr. Clemens."

He shook his head violently.

"No, I can't see anything now," and in another moment had disappeared
into his own room. Something extraordinary had happened. I wondered if,
after all their lifelong friendship, he and Howells had quarreled. I was
naturally curious, but it was not a good time to investigate. By and by
I went down on the street, where the newsboys were calling extras. When
I had bought one, and glanced at the first page, I knew. Gorky had been
expelled from his hotel for having brought to America, as his wife, a
woman not so recognized by the American laws. Madame Andreieva, a
Russian actress, was a leader in the cause of freedom, and by Russian
custom her relation with Gorky was recognized and respected; but it was
not sufficiently orthodox for American conventions, and it was certainly
unfortunate that an apostle of high purpose should come handicapped in
that way. Apparently the news had already reached Howells and Clemens,
and they had been feverishly discussing what was best to do about the
dinner.

Within a day or two Gorky and Madame Andreieva were evicted from a
procession of hotels, and of course the papers rang with the head-lines.
An army of reporters was chasing Clemens and Howells. The Russian
revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate
domestic interest. Howells came again, the reporters following and
standing guard at the door below. In 'My Mark Twain' he says:

That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured
ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then
"blowing a cone off," as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of
the great market in Naples had just broken in under its load of
ashes and cinders, and crushed hundreds of people; and we asked each
other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure
would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth
Avenue. The forbidden butler came up with a message that there were
some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens.

"How many?" he demanded.

"Five," the butler faltered.

"Reporters?"

The butler feigned uncertainty.

"What would you do?" he asked me.

"I wouldn't see them," I said, and then Clemens went directly down
to them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot
say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which
was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in
radiant satisfaction with having seen them.

It is not quite clear at this time just what word was sent to Gorky but
the matter must have been settled that night, for Clemens was in a fine
humor next morning. It was before dictation time, and he came drifting
into the study and began at once to speak of the dinner and the
impossibility of its being given now. Then he said:

"American public opinion is a delicate fabric. It shrivels like the webs
of morning at the lightest touch."

Later in the day he made this memorandum:

Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly
transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be
unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be
inflicted just the same. Certainly, then, there can be but one wise
thing for a visiting stranger to do--find out what the country's
customs are and refrain from offending against them.

The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justification are
entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive
back of them, but I think that the ink was wasted. Custom is
custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts,
seasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle
winds have upon Gibraltar.--[To Dan Beard he said, "Gorky made an
awful mistake, Dan. He might as well have come over here in his
shirt-tail."]

The Gorky disturbance had hardly begun to subside when there came another
upheaval that snuffed it out completely. On the afternoon of the 18th of
April I heard, at The Players, a wandering telephonic rumor that a great
earthquake was going on in San Francisco. Half an hour later, perhaps, I
met Clemens coming out of No. 21. He asked:

"Have you heard the news about San Francisco?"

I said I had heard a rumor of an earthquake; and had seen an extra with
big scare-heads; but I supposed the matter was exaggerated.

"No," he said, "I am afraid it isn't. We have just had a telephone
message that it is even worse than at first reported. A great fire is
consuming the city. Come along to the news-stand and we'll see if there
is a later edition."

We walked to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and got some fresh extras.
The news was indeed worse, than at first reported. San Francisco was
going to destruction. Clemens was moved deeply, and began to recall this
old friend and that whose lives and property might be in danger. He
spoke of Joe Goodman and the Gillis families, and pictured conditions in
the perishing city.




CCXLII

MARK TWAIN'S GOOD-BY TO THE PLATFORM

It was on April 19, 1906, the day following the great earthquake, that
Mark Twain gave a "Farewell Lecture" at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of
the Robert Fulton Memorial Association. Some weeks earlier Gen.
Frederick D. Grant, its president, had proposed to pay one thousand
dollars for a Mark Twain lecture; but Clemens' had replied that he was
permanently out of the field, and would never again address any audience
that had to pay to hear him.

"I always expect to talk as long as I can get people to listen to me," he
sand, "but I never again expect to charge for it." Later came one of his
inspirations, and he wrote: "I will lecture for one thousand dollars, on
one condition: that it will be understood to be my farewell lecture, and
that I may contribute the thousand dollars to the Fulton Association."

It was a suggestion not to be discouraged, and the bills and notices,
"Mark Twain's Farewell Lecture," were published without delay.

I first heard of the matter one afternoon when General Grant had called.
Clemens came into the study where I was working; he often wandered in and
out-sometimes without a word, sometimes to relieve himself concerning
things in general. But this time he suddenly chilled me by saying:

"I'm going to deliver my farewell lecture, and I want you to appear on
the stage and help me."

I feebly expressed my pleasure at the prospect. Then he said:

"I am going to lecture on Fulton--on the story of his achievements. It
will be a burlesque, of course, and I am going to pretend to forget my
facts, and I want you to sit there in a chair. Now and then, when I seem
to get stuck, I'll lean over and pretend to ask you some thing, and I
want you to pretend to prompt me. You don't need to laugh, or to pretend
to be assisting in the performance any more than just that."
HANDBILL OF MARK TWAIN'S "FAREWELL LECTURE":

MARK TWAIN

Will Deliver His Farewell Lecture
---------------------------------

CARNEGIE HALL

APRIL 19TH, 1906

FOR THE BENEFIT OF

Robert Fulton Memorial Association

MILITARY ORGANIZATION OLD GUARD IN
FULL DRESS UNIFORM WILL BE PRESENT

MUSIC BY OLD GUARD BAND

TICKETS AND BOXES ON SALE AT CARNEGIE HALL
AND WALDORF-ASTORIA

SEATS $1.50, $1.00, 50 CENTS

It was not likely that I should laugh. I had a sinking feeling in the
cardiac region which does not go with mirth. It did not for the moment
occur to me that the stage would be filled with eminent citizens and
vice-presidents, and I had a vision of myself sitting there alone in the
chair in that wide emptiness, with the chief performer directing
attention to me every other moment or so, for perhaps an hour. Let me
hurry on to say that it did not happen. I dare say he realized my
unfitness for the work, and the far greater appropriateness of conferring
the honor on General Grant, for in the end he gave him the assignment, to
my immeasurable relief.

It was a magnificent occasion. That spacious hall was hung with bunting,
the stage was banked and festooned with decoration of every sort. General
Grant, surrounded by his splendidly uniformed staff, sat in the
foreground, and behind was ranged a levee of foremost citizens of the
republic. The band played "America" as Mark Twain entered, and the great
audience rose and roared out its welcome. Some of those who knew him
best had hoped that on this occasion of his last lecture he would tell of
that first appearance in San Francisco, forty years before, when his
fortunes had hung in the balance. Perhaps he did not think of it, and no
one had had the courage to suggest it. At all events, he did a different
thing. He began by making a strong plea for the smitten city where the
flames were still raging, urging prompt help for those who had lost not
only their homes, but the last shred of their belongings and their means
of livelihood. Then followed his farcical history of Fulton, with
General Grant to make the responses, and presently he drifted into the
kind of lecture he had given so often in his long trip around the
world-retelling the tales which had won him fortune and friends in many
lands.

I do not know whether the entertainment was long or short. I think few
took account of time. To a letter of inquiry as to how long the
entertainment would last, he had replied:

I cannot say for sure. It is my custom to keep on talking till I
get the audience cowed. Sometimes it takes an hour and fifteen
minutes, sometimes I can do it in an hour.

There was no indication at any time that the audience was cowed. The
house was packed, and the applause was so recurrent and continuous that
often his voice was lost to those in its remoter corners. It did not
matter. The tales were familiar to his hearers; merely to see Mark
Twain, in his old age and in that splendid setting, relating them was
enough. The audience realized that it was witnessing the close of a
heroic chapter in a unique career.




CCXLIII

AN INVESTMENT IN REDDING

Many of the less important happenings seem worth remembering now. Among
them was the sale, at the Nast auction, of the Mark Twain letters,
already mentioned. The fact that these letters brought higher prices
than any others offered in this sale was gratifying. Roosevelt, Grant,
and even Lincoln items were sold; but the Mark Twain letters led the
list. One of them sold for forty-three dollars, which was said to be the
highest price ever paid for the letter of a living man. It was the
letter written in 1877, quoted earlier in this work, in which Clemens
proposed the lecture tour to Nast. None of the Clemens-Nast letters
brought less than twenty-seven dollars, and some of them were very brief.
It was a new measurement of public sentiment. Clemens, when he heard of
it, said:

"I can't rise to General Grant's lofty place in the estimation of this
country; but it is a deep satisfaction to me to know that when it comes
to letter-writing he can't sit in the front seat along with me. That
forty-three-dollar letter ought to be worth as much as eighty-six dollars
after I'm dead."

A perpetual string of callers came to 21 Fifth Avenue, and it kept the
secretary busy explaining to most of them why Mark Twain could not
entertain their propositions, or listen to their complaints, or allow
them to express in person their views on public questions. He did see a
great many of what might be called the milder type persons who were
evidently sincere and not too heavily freighted with eloquence. Of these
there came one day a very gentle-spoken woman who had promised that she
would stay but a moment, and say no more than a few words, if only she
might sit face to face with the great man. It was in the morning hour
before the dictations, and he received her, quite correctly clad in his
beautiful dressing-robe and propped against his pillows. She kept her
contract to the letter; but when she rose to go she said, in a voice of
deepest reverence:

"May I kiss your hand?"

It was a delicate situation, and might easily have been made ludicrous.
Denial would have hurt her. As it was, he lifted his hand, a small,
exquisite hand it was, with the gentle dignity and poise of a king, and
she touched her lips to it with what was certainly adoration. Then, as
she went, she said:

"How God must love you!"

"I hope so," he said, softly, and he did not even smile; but after she
had gone he could not help saying, in a quaint, half-pathetic voice "I
guess she hasn't heard of our strained relations."

Sitting in that royal bed, clad in that rich fashion, he easily conveyed
the impression of royalty, and watching him through those marvelous
mornings he seemed never less than a king, as indeed he was--the king of
a realm without national boundaries. Some of those nearest to him fell
naturally into the habit of referring to him as "the King," and in time
the title crept out of the immediate household and was taken up by others
who loved him.

He had been more than once photographed in his bed; but it was by those
who had come and gone in a brief time, with little chance to study his
natural attitudes. I had acquired some knowledge of the camera, and I
obtained his permission to let me photograph him--a permission he seldom
denied to any one. We had no dictations on Saturdays, and I took the
pictures on one of these holiday mornings. He was so patient and
tractable, and so natural in every attitude, that it was a delight to
make the negatives. I was afraid he would become impatient, and made
fewer exposures than I might otherwise have done. I think he expected
very little from this amateur performance; but, by that happy element of
accident which plays so large a part in photographic success, the results
were better than I had hoped for. When I brought him the prints, a few
days later, he expressed pleasure and asked, "Why didn't you make more?"

Among them was one in an attitude which had grown so familiar to us, that
of leaning over to get his pipe from the smoking-table, and this seemed
to give him particular satisfaction. It being a holiday, he had not
donned his dressing-gown, which on the whole was well for the
photographic result. He spoke of other pictures that had been made of
him, especially denouncing one photograph, taken some twenty years before
by Sarony, a picture, as he said, of a gorilla in an overcoat, which the
papers and magazines had insisted on using ever since.

"Sarony was as enthusiastic about wild animals as he was about
photography, and when Du Chaillu brought over the first gorilla he sent
for me to look at it and see if our genealogy was straight. I said it
was, and Sarony was so excited that I had recognized the resemblance
between us, that he wanted to make it more complete, so he borrowed my
overcoat and put it on the gorilla and photographed it, and spread that
picture out over the world as mine. It turns up every week in some
newspaper or magazine; but it's not my favorite; I have tried to get it
suppressed."

Mark Twain made his first investment in Redding that spring. I had
located there the autumn before, and bought a vacant old house, with a
few acres of land, at what seemed a modest price. I was naturally
enthusiastic over the bargain, and the beauty and salubrity of the
situation. His interest was aroused, and when he learned that there was
a place adjoining, equally reasonable and perhaps even more attractive,
he suggested immediately that I buy it for him; and he wanted to write a
check then for the purchase price, for fear the opportunity might be
lost. I think there was then no purpose in his mind of building a
country home; but he foresaw that such a site, at no great distance from
New York, would become more valuable, and he had plenty of idle means.
The purchase was made without difficulty--a tract of seventy-five acres,
to which presently was added another tract of one hundred and ten acres,
and subsequently still other parcels of land, to complete the ownership
of the hilltop, for it was not long until he had conceived the idea of a
home. He was getting weary of the heavy pressure of city life. He
craved the retirement of solitude--one not too far from the maelstrom, so
that he might mingle with it now and then when he chose. The country
home would not be begun for another year yet, but the purpose of it was
already in the air. No one of the family had at this time seen the
location.




CCXLIV

TRAITS AND PHILOSOPHIES

I brought to the dictation one morning the Omar Khayyam card which
Twichell had written him so long ago; I had found it among the letters.
It furnished him a subject for that morning. He said:

How strange there was a time when I had never heard of Omar Khayyam!
When that card arrived I had already read the dozen quatrains or so
in the morning paper, and was still steeped in the ecstasy of
delight which they occasioned. No poem had ever given me so much
pleasure before, and none has given me so much pleasure since. It
is the only poem I have ever carried about with me. It has not been
from under my hand all these years.

He had no general fondness for poetry; but many poems appealed to him,
and on occasion he liked to read them aloud. Once, during the dictation,
some verses were sent up by a young authoress who was waiting below for
his verdict. The lines pictured a phase of negro life, and she wished to
know if he thought them worthy of being read at some Tuskegee ceremony.
He did not fancy the idea of attending to the matter just then and said:

"Tell her she can read it. She has my permission. She may commit any
crime she wishes in my name."

It was urged that the verses were of high merit and the author a very
charming young lady.

"I'm very glad," he said, "and I am glad the Lord made her; I hope He
will make some more just like her. I don't always approve of His
handiwork, but in this case I do."

Then suddenly he added:

"Well, let me see it--no time like the present to get rid of these
things."

He took the manuscript and gave such a rendition of those really fine
verses as I believe could not be improved upon. We were held breathless
by his dramatic fervor and power. He returned a message to that young
aspirant that must have made her heart sing. When the dictation had
ended that day, I mentioned his dramatic gift.