Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Elmira, Hartford, and on the Stump
The farm is perfectly delightful, this season. It is as quiet & peaceful as a South-sea island.
— Samuel Clemens to W. D. Howells, August 9, 1876
In March 1871 Samuel Clemens faced a daunting future. He had washed out as the managing editor of the Buffalo Express and sold his one-third interest in the newspaper at a loss. As a result, he was thousands of dollars in debt. His writing of the book that would become Roughing It (1872) had stalled and was months behind schedule. He had grown to loathe Buffalo and its harsh winters, so he had listed his house for sale for ten thousand dollars less than his father-in-law had paid for it little more than a year before. His wife Olivia, a near invalid, suffered from nervous prostration, and their infant son Langdon was chronically ill. Sam's most recent release, Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography (1871), had been a critical and commercial flop. Rumors were afloat, fueled by its failure, that he was written out and reduced to mining slag from an exhausted vein. He depended for a livelihood on royalties from The Innocents Abroad (1869) but its sales were fast declining after its initial appearance two years earlier. And Bret Harte, his not-so-friendly rival, had recently emigrated from California and signed the most lucrative contract to date in the history of American letters to write exclusively for the firm of Fields, Osgood and Company, the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly. Sam's own prospects seemed dreary to dismal by comparison. He could not have predicted that as soon as Harte signed this contract his career went into a death spiral. As Howells later remarked, when Harte moved east he lost the power of observation. Or, as he might have said, Harte left his eye in San Francisco.
The interlude the Clemenses spent with Olivia's family in Elmira during the spring and summer of 1871 proved to be a welcome but temporary respite from their woes. As he notified his publisher Elisha Bliss and brother Orion two days after their arrival, "We are all here, & my wife has grown weak, stopped eating, & dropped back to where she was two weeks ago. But we've all the help we want here." Livy's prognosis had not improved a week later. "My wife has been very sick for two months," Sam informed John Henry Riley, "so I moved her hither on a mattrass [sic] & she is slowly recovering, though still in bed. We shall remain here 2 or 3 months, & eventually will move to Hartford & build," though likely not for at least the next year and a half. For weeks her recovery was doubtful and even once it began her recuperation was painfully slow. "Livy as feeble as ever — has not sat up but once or twice for a week," Sam confided to Orion on April 4. She could neither stand nor walk with assistance. "I find myself daily regarding her substantial recovery as farther & farther away," Sam wrote Mary Mason Fairbanks in mid-April. "I cannot see that she has gained a single hair's breadth in 30 days. She is hopeful & confident — but what does she found it on?" Only at the end of the month could Sam finally report that Livy was "making progress. ... She walks three or four steps by holding on to a chair, & every day she rides a few blocks. She is bright & cheerful," though Sam could not fathom the reason for her optimism. As late as May 2, over six weeks after the family landed in Elmira, he grumbled that Livy was "still confined to her bed & has been over three months."
No sooner had Sam dropped his bags at the Langdon mansion on Main Street than he began to plot a way forward.
He desperately needed to complete his overdue book about the West, which had reached a standstill after only 168 pages of manuscript, about one-tenth the length required for a subscription book. He soon settled into a routine. Most days he escaped the din of the city and the crying of his son by climbing Watercure Hill, two miles east of the city, to the house at Quarry Farm, offered him as a hideaway by his in-laws Theodore and Susan Crane. The retreat stood several hundred feet above the valley, with a view of Elmira, the Chemung River, and the distant blue hills of northern Pennsylvania.
Relieved of nursing duties by the Langdon servants and spared the distractions that plagued him in Buffalo, Sam shortly found his working groove again. He was joined on March 24, less than a week after his arrival in Elmira, by his old Nevada friend Joe Goodman, and the two writers began to worry over their respective projects like stray dogs over bones. Goodman "wrote loads of poetry while I wrote" the yet untitled western narrative, Sam testified years later, "& between whiles" they played cards or collected rocks and fossil shells from the quarry on the farm. On his part, Goodman remembered that Sam
was awfully tickled at my coming and wanted to pay me a salary to remain until he had finished the work, saying he had lost Pacific Coast atmosphere and vernacular, but that I brought it all back to him afresh. I told him I couldn't stop a great while, but that I would stay with him as long as I could, if he would agree not to speak about pay again. So every morning for a month or more we used to tramp together up to the Quarry Farm, about two miles from town, where he was doing his writing in the unoccupied farmhouse.
Sam averaged about twenty pages of sixty to seventy words per page, or about twelve hundred to fourteen hundred words of manuscript per day, according to Goodman. Sam's goal was "from ten thousand to twelve thousand words a week." More to the point, Sam solicited Goodman's opinion of his work in progress. As Goodman would later comment,
I recollect his giving me the manuscript of "Roughing It" to read one afternoon when I was visiting him. ... He made a great hit with Innocents Abroad and he was afraid he would not sustain his newly acquired reputation. When I began to read Sam sat down at his desk and wrote nervously. For an hour I read along intently, hardly noticing that Sam was beginning to fret and shift about uneasily. At last he could not stand it any longer and jumping up, he exclaimed "Damn you, you have been reading that stuff an hour and you haven't cracked a smile yet. I don't believe I'm keeping up my lick."
Goodman may fairly be regarded as the godfather of Sam's second travel book, although, as he allowed, "It was a long while before he grew calm enough to accept the assurance of my appreciation of his work."
They briefly considered cowriting a satirical political novel. Sam contacted Isaac Sheldon, the publisher who had issued his (Burlesque) Autobiography, to propose the joint project, even though he was still under contract to Elisha Bliss and the American Publishing Company of Hartford for three books. Sheldon was initially receptive to the notion — "I like the idea & it would sell well if it were a good story & had a quiet vein of humor" — and Sam replied with alacrity: "I begin to think I can get up quite a respectable novel, & mean to fool away some of my odd hours in the attempt." Three weeks after leaving Buffalo for Elmira, in other words, Sam had begun to plan a series of ventures to compete with Harte, reestablish his reputation as a humorist, and earn a living. "Joe & I have a 600-page book in contemplation which will wake up the nation," he crowed to Orion. Although their collaboration never advanced beyond the planning stage, the premise bore fruit in The Gilded Age (1873), the satirical exposé Sam would coauthor with Charles Dudley Warner two years later.
Meanwhile, he stewed over the prospects for his burlesque of the mythic West. He was "booming along" on the manuscript, he bragged to Orion on April 8, with 570 pages in the can, though "what I am writing now is so much better than the opening chapters ... that I do wish I could spare time to revamp the opening chapters, & even write some of them over again." Irritated by the publication in March of the (Burlesque) Autobiography by a rival press, moreover, Bliss tempered Sam's hopes for the new book by admonishing him for saturating the market with his brand of earthy humor: "I do not think there is as much of a desire to see another book from you as there was 3 months ago. Then anything offered would sell, people would subscribe to anything of yours without overhauling or looking at it much. Now they will inspect a Prospectus closer, & buy more on the strength of it, than they would have done a few months ago." Despite "pegging away at my book," Sam feared it would "have no success," he fretted to Mary Fairbanks on April 26, because "the papers have found at last the courage to pull me down off my pedestal & cast slurs at me — & that is simply a popular author's death rattle." (Recently, the Chicago Tribune had complained that Sam had "no aspirations or abilities in any other direction" than cheap humor and the Nation had charged that he "was sometimes rather vulgar and rather low" and, in any case, he was "not refined.") Four days later, however, he waxed confident the book would be "a tolerable success — possibly an excellent success if the chief newspapers start it off well." The statement begins to explain his clumsy attempt to micromanage the critical reception of Roughing It the next year. Four days later still, he effectively blamed Bliss in advance for bungling the artwork if the book failed to sell: the narrative would be "pretty readable, after all, & if it is well & profusely illustrated it will crowd the [popularity of the] 'Innocents.'"
Fortunately, Sam's reservations about parts of his narrative failed to cramp either his style or his speed of composition. He swore to Bliss in early May that the book was "half done," complete through chapter 15. By mid-May he had finished twelve hundred pages of manuscript, the equivalent of four hundred printed pages, and "consequently am two-thirds done." He planned
to write as much more as I have already written, & then cull from the mass the very best chapters & discard the rest. I am not half as well satisfied with the first part of the book as I am with what I am writing now. When I get it done I want to see the man who will begin to read it & not finish it. If it falls short of the Innocents in any respect I shall lose my guess. When I was writing the Innocents my daily "stent" was 30 pages of MS & I hardly ever got beyond it; but I have gone over that nearly every day for the last ten. That shows that I am writing with a red-hot interest. ... If I keep up my present lick three weeks more I shall be able & willing to scratch out half of the chapters of the Overland narrative — & shall do it.
Sam (over)confidently predicted that the "book will be done soon, now" because he was "now writing 200 [manuscript sheets] a week." But he had also begun to pad the narrative, particularly in chapters 10, 11, and 16, with generous dollops of text ladled into it from such printed sources as John Hyde's Mormonism: Its Leaders and Designs (1857), Samuel Bowles's Across the Continent (1865), Thomas J. Dimsdale's The Vigilantes of Montana (1866), and Catharine V. Waite's The Mormon Prophet and His Harem (1866). According to Hamlin Hill, Sam "paraphrased a lot of Dimsdale's material and even transcribed one passage verbatim without citing his source" — hardly the first time he had been guilty of plagiarism.
Sam hand-delivered his latest batch of copy to Bliss in early June, pausing en route at the luxury St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway in New York, attending Sunday services at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford on June 4, and dining that evening with Governor Marshall Jewell of Connecticut before returning to the Langdon mansion in Elmira. When he resumed writing Roughing It he continued to pad it with recycled material, including excerpts from sketches he had originally written for the Galaxy and the Buffalo Express — specifically, five of the "Around the World" letters he had contributed to its columns. He cannibalized chapter 38, about Mono Lake, from the abandoned "Curiosities of California" lecture he had prepared in Buffalo in 1869; and he assembled chapter 49, about gunplay in Virginia City, from Territorial Enterprise clippings he had preserved in one of his scrapbooks. Still, as the editors of the Mark Twain Papers observe, "the scrapbooks turned out to be much less useful" than Sam had anticipated. Though he cut and pasted over 130 pages of published passages into the narrative, he "used scarcely anything of his own from the Enterprise, and nothing at all of what he had published in the San Francisco Morning Call, the Californian, and the Golden Era." With the publication of his western travelogue, Sam had exhausted all of the usable material in his scrapbooks.
In mid-June Sam was still struggling to finish the final section of the book. It had "been dragging along just 12 months, now, & I am so sick & tired of it," he whined to Mother Fairbanks, adding, "If I were to chance another break or another move before I finish it I fear I never should get it done." He later told Annie Fields that when he "sat down to write" Roughing It he discovered that he needed "a cigar to steady my nerves. I began to smoke [again]" in order to complete the manuscript. He had spent "three weeks writing six chapters," he remembered a decade later, and then he surrendered to his nicotine addiction to conquer his writer's block or his attention deficit disorder. He resumed his custom of smoking three hundred cigars a month and finished the book in ninety days "without any bother or difficulty." "One of the most nervous men in the world" who had "constant difficulty in keeping still," Sam self-medicated.
By early July he had completed sixty-one of seventy-nine chapters; however, he was still short of the eighteen hundred manuscript sheets required for a subscription book of six hundred printed pages and he was running low on sources to crib. In early August he railed to New York and again registered at the St. Nicholas Hotel before continuing to Hartford, where he delivered another batch of printer's copy to Bliss. He remained in Hartford for most of the month, working on the book and hunting for a house to rent. He arranged to lease the home of John and Isabella Hooker at the corner of Forest and Hawthorn Streets in the Nook Farm neighborhood, a 140-acre enclave of artists, intellectuals, and politicians, beginning in October while the owners were traveling in Europe. Both Sam and Livy had stayed in the house in the past and it was available for only a hundred dollars a month payable quarterly. During the month, too, he began to backfill the manuscript with material inserted into the sections already completed. "I wrote a splendid chapter today, for the middle of the book," he notified Livy on August 10. This inset has been conjecturally identified as chapter 53, Jim Blaine's tale of "his grandfather's old ram," which Henry B. Wonham describes as "a magnificently woven shaggy dog story" narrated by a circumlocutious "drunken raconteur who never arrives at his titular subject." Jim Blaine's name evokes the moniker of James G. Blaine, Schuyler Colfax's successor as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Sam once referred to the Ohio congressman in his notebook as "the most notorious blatherskite in America." As he was reading proofs of some of the early chapters, Sam also queried Alfred Sutro about a tunnel project on the Comstock Lode he was financing. "I'm awful busy on my new book on Nevada & California," Sam noted, but he hoped "you might tell me something about the tunnel that would make an interesting page." After meeting Sutro in New York in late August he added a postscript to chapter 52. "I admire the book more & more the more I cut & slash & lick & trim & revamp it," he bragged. "It is a tedious, arduous job shaping such a mass of MS for the press. It took me two months to do it for the Innocents. But this is another sight easier job, because it is so much better literary work — so much more acceptably written." As he assured Livy in November, "This is a better book than the Innocents, & much better written."
W. D. Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, agreed and fairly described Roughing It as a "crazy-quilt of homespun fabrics." As Howells allowed, "A thousand anecdotes, relevant and irrelevant, embroider the work; excursions and digressions of all kinds are the very woof of it, as it were; everything far-fetched or near at hand is interwoven, and yet the complex is a sort of 'harmony of colors' which is not less than triumphant." Sam was "as uplifted" by Howells's notice "as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto." A pastiche or bricolage of tall tales, fictionalized autobiography, anecdote, allegory, animal fables, character sketches, factual reporting, mining narrative, and excerpts from other books about the West, his "record of several years of variegated vagabondizing" sometimes followed a meandering narrative flow and occasionally spilled over the banks. Just as Sam devised his lectures to be both entertaining and informative, he was obliged to include "quite a good deal of information in the book," especially about mining, milling, and assaying processes, as he explained in his preface. He halted in the middle of chapter 65, for example, to declare that "this is a good time to drop in a paragraph of information" from a guidebook. He began chapter 52 with a warning that because "I desire, in this chapter, to say an instructive word or two about the silver mines, the reader may take this fair warning and skip, if he chooses," as though the reader could cut a channel through a looping bend in the narrative.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Life of Mark Twain"
by .
Copyright © 2019 The Curators of the University of Missouri.
Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
