Ron Powers - Mark Twain: A Life

PERSONS failing to understand why I refer to my subject as Sammy in his childhood will be prosecuted; persons failing to understand why I call him Sam and Clemens in dealing with his personal life thereafter will be banished; persons failing to understand why I use Mark Twain when speaking of him as an author will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE BIOGRAPHER
PER S.L.C.M.T., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.

O n 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 unurbanethe 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 waswell, 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 nations 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 Americas 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 visitors 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 magazines 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 fictionan ongoing affirmation of civilizations 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 Fieldss young assistant, a moist, bookish fellow by the name of William Dean Howells. Howells had written a favorable, albeit unsigned, notice of Clemenssmake that Mark Twainsnew 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 Pilgrims 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 entre into literary legitimacy. He couldnt help but be curious about who would do such a thing, and why. Hed ascertained the reviewers identity a few days earlier in Pittsburgh, through a cousin of Howellss whom hed met there. And now here he was in Boston to look this man in his face and shake his hand.