THE UNCROWNED KING
We come now to study America in the second half of the nineteenth
century.
The dominating factor in this period was the Civil War, a conflict in
which the physical and moral energy of the country was exhausted. There
followed the inevitable reaction: Abraham Lincoln was succeeded by the
carpetbagger in the South and the tariff-boodler in the North. The very
hero who had led the nation to victory, and had said, “Let us have
peace,” entered the White House to turn the government over to
corruptionists. In the two generations following the Civil War America
made enormous material and some intellectual progress, but no moral
progress discernible. As I write this book, our political morals are
embodied in a post-campaign jest: “The Republicans should have stolen
the Washington monument, and then Coolidge would have carried Florida
and South Carolina.”
Provincial America in the decades following the Civil War based its
religion upon the dogma that it was the most perfect nation upon God’s
footstool. The whisky-drinking, tobacco-chewing, obscenity-narrating,
Grand Old Party-voting mob would tolerate no criticism, not even that
kind implied by living differently. To it an artist was a freak, whom it
punished with mockery and practical jokes. There were only two possible
ways for him to survive; one was to flee to New York and be lost in the
crowd; the other was to turn into a clown and join in laughing at
himself, and at everything he knew to be serious and beautiful in life.
This latter course was adopted by a man of truly great talent, who might
have become one of the world’s satiric masters if he had not been
overpowered by the spirit of America. His tragic story has been told in
a remarkable study, “The Ordeal of Mark Twain,” by Van Wyck Brooks.
For something like forty years Mark Twain lived as an uncrowned American
king; his friends referred to him thus--“the King.” His was a life which
seemed to have come out of the Arabian Nights’ enchantment. His
slightest move was good for columns in the newspapers; when he traveled
about the world he was his country’s ambassador at large--his baggage
traveled free under consular dispensation, and in London and Vienna the
very traffic regulations were suspended. When he went to Washington to
plead for copyright laws, the two houses adjourned to hear him, and the
speaker of the House turned over his private office to the king of
letters. He made three hundred thousand dollars out of a single book, he
made a fortune out of anything he chose to write. The greatest
millionaires of the country were his intimate friends; he had a happy
family, a strong constitution, inexhaustible energy--what more could a
human being ask?
And yet Mark Twain was not happy. He grew less and less happy as time
passed. Bitterness and despair began to creep into his writings;
sentences like this: “Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.”
Stranger yet, it began to be whispered that America’s uncrowned king was
a radical! In times of stress some of us would go to him for help, for a
word of sympathy or backing, and always this strange thing was noticed;
he was full of understanding, and would agree with everything we said;
yes, he was one of us. But when we asked for a public action, a
declaration, he was not there.
“The Jungle” was published, and he wrote me a letter. It was burned in
the Helicon Hall fire, and I recall only one statement: he had had to
put the book down in the middle, because he could not endure the anguish
it caused him. Naturally, I had my thoughts about such a remark. What
right has a man to refuse to endure the anguish of knowing what other
human beings are suffering? If these sufferings cannot be helped, why
then perhaps we may flee from them; but think what the uncrowned king of
America could have done, in the way of backing a young author who had
aimed at the public’s heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach!
Then came the Gorki case. The great Russian writer came to America to
plead for freedom for his country, and to raise money for the cause. The
intriguers of the tsar set out to ruin him, and turned the bloodhounds
of the capitalist press upon him. A dinner in Gorki’s honor had been
planned, and Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were among the
sponsors. The storm of scandal broke, and these two great ones of
American letters turned tail and fled to cover.
A year or two later Mark Twain was visiting Bermuda, and came to see me.
He had taken to wearing a conspicuous white costume, and with his
snow-white hair and mustache he was a picturesque figure. He chatted
about past times, as old men like to do. I saw that he was kind,
warm-hearted, and also full of rebellion against capitalist greed and
knavery; but he was an old man, and a sick man, and I did not try to
probe the mystery of his life. The worm which was gnawing at his heart
was not revealed, until in the course of time his letters were given to
the public. Now we know the amazing story--that Mark Twain lived a
double life; he, the uncrowned king of America, was the most repressed
personality, the most completely cowed, shamed, and tormented great man
in the history of letters.
He was born in a Missouri River town in 1835. His father was a futile
dreamer with a perpetual motion machine. His mother was a victim of
patent medicines, who had seen better days, and reared a family of
ragged brats in a foul and shabby environment, where a boy saw four
separate murders with his own eyes. “Little Sam” was a shy, sensitive
child, his mother’s darling, and she raised him in a fierce
determination to have him grow up respectable and rich. He became a
printer, then a pilot on the Mississippi River. This latter was a great
career; the river pilot was the uncrowned king of this western country.
He saw all the world in glorious fashion; he was a real artist, and at
the same time carried a solemn responsibility.
The Civil War destroyed this career, and Mark Twain went out to Nevada
to become a gold miner, promising his mother that he would never return
until he had made a fortune. He failed as a miner, and was forced to
live by journalism. So he drifted into becoming the world’s buffoon. He
always despised it--so much so that he put a pistol to his head. But he
lacked the courage to pull the trigger, and had to go on and be a
writer. His “Jumping Frog” story went around the world; after which he
came East, and wrote “Innocents Abroad,” and made his three hundred
thousand dollars.
Shortly after that he exchanged the domination of his mother for that of
a wife. He fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy coal-dealer in
Elmira, New York. There was a terrible “to do” about it in respectable
“up-State” circles, for Samuel Clemens was a wild and woolly westerner,
who didn’t know how to handle a knife and fork, while the daughter of
the coal-dealer had been brought up on an income of forty thousand
dollars a year. However, this strange lover was a “lion,” so they
decided to accept him and teach him parlor tricks. They gave the young
couple a carriage and coachman, and a house which had cost twenty-five
thousand dollars; it wasn’t long before he was completely justifying
their faith, by living at the rate of a hundred thousand a year.
The wife was a frail woman, a semi-invalid, and Mark Twain adored her;
also, he was awe-stricken before her, because of her extremely high
social position. She was ignorant, provincial, rigidly fixed in a narrow
church-going respectability; by these standards she brought him up, and
raised a couple of daughters to help him. As Clemens phrased it, his
wife “edited” him; as his daughters phrased it, they “dusted papa off.”
What these women did to America’s greatest humorist makes one of the
most amazing stories in the history of culture. They went over
everything he wrote and revised it according to the standards of the
Elmira bourgeoisie. They suppressed the greater part of his most vital
ideas, and kept him from finishing his most important works. When he
wrote something commonplace and conventional they fell on his neck with
delight, and helped to spend the fortune which it brought in. When he
told the truth about America, or voiced his own conclusions about life,
they forced him to burn it, or hide it in the bottom of a trunk. His one
masterpiece, “Huckleberry Finn,” he wrote secretly at odd moments,
taking many years at the task, and finally publishing it with anxiety.
Mrs. Clemens came home from church one day, horrified by a rumor that
her husband had put some swear words into a story; she made him produce
the manuscript, in which poor Huck, telling how he can’t live in the
respectable world, exclaims: “They comb me all to hell.” Now when you
read “Huckleberry Finn,” you read: “They comb me all to thunder!”
Mark Twain had in him the making of one of the world’s great satirists.
He might have made over American civilization, by laughing it out of its
shams and pretensions. But he was not permitted to express himself as an
artist; he must emulate his father-in-law, the Elmira coal-dealer. The
unhappy wretch turned his attention to business ventures, and started a
huge publishing business, to publish his own and other books. He sold
three hundred thousand copies of General Grant’s Memoirs, and sold
hundreds of thousands of copies of other books, utterly worthless from
the literary point of view.
He was always at the mercy of inventors with some new scheme to make
millions. For example, there was a typesetting machine; he sunk a huge
fortune into that, and would spend his time figuring what he was going
to make--so many millions that it almost made a billion. He was a
wretched business man, and failed ignominously and went into bankruptcy,
losing his wife’s money as well as his own. H. H. Rogers, master pirate
of Standard Oil, came forward and took charge of his affairs,
incidentally playing billiards with him until four o’clock every
morning. And then some young radical brought him an exposure of the
Standard Oil Company, expecting him to publish this book as a public
service!
Going back to Mark Twain’s books, we can read these facts between the
lines, and see that he put his balked and cheated self, or some aspect
of this self, into his characters. We understand how he poured his soul
into Huck Finn; this poor henpecked genius, dressed up and made to go
through the paces of a literary lion, yearns back to the days when he
was a ragged urchin and was happy; Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer represent
all that daring, that escape from the bourgeois world, which Sam Clemens
dreamed but never achieved. He put another side of himself into Colonel
Sellers, who imagined fortunes; and yet another side into Pudd’nhead
Wilson, the village atheist who mocked at the shams of religion.
Secretly Mark Twain himself loathed Christianity, and wrote a letter of
cordial praise to Robert Ingersoll; but publicly he went to church every
Sunday, escorting his saintly wife, according to the customs of Elmira!
The more you read this story the more appalling you find it. This
uncrowned king of America built up literally a double personality; he
took to writing two sets of letters, one containing what he really
wanted to say, and the other what his official public self was obliged
to say. He accumulated a volume of “unmailed letters,” one of the
weirdest phenomena in literary history. He was indignant at the ending
of the Russian-Japanese war, because he believed that if it had
continued for a couple of months more the tsar would have been
overthrown. When Colonel George Harvey invited him to dine with the
Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference, he wrote a blistering
telegram, in which he declared himself inferior as a humorist to those
statesmen who had “turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and
blithesome comedy.” But he did not send that telegram; he sent another,
full of such enraptured praise of the Russian diplomats that Count Witte
sent it to the tsar!
That is only one sample out of many. He wrote a War Prayer, a grim
satire upon the Christian custom of praying for victory. “I have told
the whole truth in that,” he said to a friend; and then added the
lamentable conclusion: “Only dead men can tell the truth in this world.
It can be published after I am dead.” He explained the reason--this
financier who had fortunes to blow in upon mechanical inventions: “I
have a family to support, and I can’t afford this kind of dissipation.”
And again: “The silent, colossal National Lie that is the support and
confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and
unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw bricks
and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin.”
Of course a man who wrote like this despised himself. It was the tragedy
of Tolstoi, but in a far more humiliating form; Tolstoi at least wrote
what he pleased, and did in the end break with his family. But Mark
Twain stayed in the chains of love and respectability--his bitterness
boiling and steaming in him like a volcano, and breaking out here and
there with glare and sulphurous fumes. “The damned and mangy human
race,” was one of his phrases; and again he wrote: “My idea of our
civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties,
vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I
hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself,
I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.”
In the effort to excuse himself, this repressed personality evolved a
philosophy of fatalism. Man was merely a machine, and could not help
doing what he did. This was put into a book, “What is Man?” But then he
dared not publish the book! “Am I honest?” he wrote, to a friend. “I
give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have
suppressed a book, which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I
hold it my duty to publish it. There are other difficult tasks I am
equal to, but I am not equal to that one.” He did publish the book at
last, but anonymously, and with a preface explaining that he dared not
sign his name.
He, America’s greatest humorist, had a duty laid upon him; he saw that
duty clearly--how clearly we learn from a story, “The Mysterious
Stranger,” a ferocious satire upon the human race, published after his
death. In this book Satan asks: “Will a day come when the race will
detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by
laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has
unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money,
persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal
humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but
only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do
you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.” Such was
the spiritual tragedy going on in the soul of a man who was going about
New York, clad in a fancy white costume, smiled upon and applauded by
all beholders, crowned by all critics, wined and dined by Standard Oil
millionaires, dancing inexhaustibly until three or four o’clock in the
morning, and nicknamed in higher social circles “the belle of New York.”
Mrs. Ogi from Mississippi reads this onslaught upon Mrs. Ogi from
Elmira; and her husband wonders a little while he waits. But she only
smiles, and remarks: “In our family the men have a traditional saying:
‘It’s all right to be henpecked, but be sure you get the right hen!’”