Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

III

Altho I have quoted Mark’s assertion that he had never had the felicity of having a play accepted, he did have two pieces produced by managers; and a third, written in collaboration with Howells, had a brief and inglorious career at the expense of its authors. His first play, made out of one of his novels, drew delighted audiences for several seasons; the second, written in partnership with Bret Harte, and the third, written in partnership with Howells, met with so little success that they sank at once beneath the wave of oblivion, being almost unknown except in the hazy memories of the few surviving spectators who chanced to see one or the other during its brief stay on the stage. No one of the three has ever been published.

After Mark had settled in Hartford he formed a close friendship with his near neighbor Charles Dudley Warner; and in 1873 they joined forces in a novel, the ‘Gilded Age.’ They wrote it not so much in collaboration as in conjunction,—that is to say, each of the writers was responsible for the chapters he prepared himself; and there was no integrating co-ordination of their respective contributions. Mark was the author of more than half of the chapters; and he was the creator of the one outstanding character, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, an imaginative reproduction of a man he had known since boyhood, James Lampton. Mark began by writing the first eleven chapters, then Warner wrote two, Mark followed with two more; and thus they worked alternately. They labored, so Mark declared, “in the superstition that we were writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were writing two incoherent yarns.”

It was not long after the publication of their conjoint work that they were informed of the performance in San Francisco of a dramatization by one Gilbert S. Densmore, otherwise unknown to fame, the character of Colonel Sellers being impersonated by John T. Raymond. Action was at once taken to put a stop to this infringement on the copyright of the story. In the end a satisfactory arrangement was arrived at. Densmore was bought out; Warner, discovering that his share in the story had been but little drawn upon, relinquished any claim he might have; Mark made the piece over; and Raymond continued to play Colonel Sellers, under a contract which divided the profits between the author and the actor. For a season or two Mark’s agent travelled with the company and reported on a postal card every night the author’s share; and Howells has related how these welcome missives would come about dinnertime and how Mark would read them aloud in triumph. “One hundred and fifty dollars—two hundred dollars—three hundred dollars, were the gay figures which they bore and which he flaunted in the air before he sat down at table.”

It is difficult now to determine how much of the dramatic skeleton Densmore had put together to enable Colonel Sellers to exhibit the facets of his lovable character, survived in the play which drew crowded houses one long winter in New York. Here Mark himself is the best witness in his own behalf; and his biographer has quoted from an unpublished letter a clear-cut statement:

I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I had expected to use little of [Densmore’s] language and but little of his plot. I do not think that there are now twenty sentences of Mr. Densmore’s in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I wrote and told him I should pay him about as much more as I had already paid him, in case the play proved a success.

Paine has printed Densmore’s acknowledgment for this second payment, thanking Mark “for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this matter.”

During the run of the play in New York in the winter of 1874-5 I saw it twice, the second time on the hundredth performance, when Mark appeared before the curtain to tell the audience the tale of the man who tried to ride the Mexican plug and to explain that he was like this man after his fiery steed had thrown him, in that he was “speechless.” I recall the play as a rickety contrivance; it creaked in its joints; its plot was arbitrary and violent and unconvincing. Perhaps it was no worse than the earlier ‘Solon Shingle’ or the later ‘Mighty Dollar’; but it was little, if any, better. Yet it served its purpose, which was to be a frame for the humorously veracious character of Colonel Sellers, the imperturbable visionary admirably acted by John T. Raymond. Mark himself liked Raymond’s impersonation,—at least he did at first. Later he and Raymond fell out; and he put into his autobiography the assertion that Raymond was lacking in the ability to express the finer qualities of Sellers.

But playgoers could see in the part only what Raymond has expressed with the keenest appreciation of its histrionic possibilities; and they were satisfied, even if the author was not. To us Americans the character had a special appeal, because he represented at once our ingenious inventiveness and our incurable optimism. We had never met James Lampton, but we were all ready to accept Colonel Sellers as an old friend. Raymond told me once that in town after town he would be accosted by some man, who would say to him, “I saw you to-night—and I recognized myself. Didn’t Mark ever tell you? Well, he took Sellers from me! Why, all my friends knew me the first time they saw you!”

The plot of the play was melodramatic on the verge of burlesque; it called for the wholly unnecessary explosion of a steamboat; it culminated in the trial of the injured heroine for the murder of the villain who had wronged her and insulted her. For the most part Colonel Sellers had little to do with the main story; and it was only when the sympathetic heroine was on trial for her life that Colonel Sellers was integrally related to the main action. I have revived my own fading memory of the bubbling humor of this final act by reading again what Howells wrote about it at the time:

But the greatest scenes are in the last act, where Colonel Sellers appears as a witness for the defence of Laura Hawkins. As he mounts the stand he affably recognizes and shakes hands with several acquaintances among the jury; he delivers his testimony in the form of a stump speech; he helplessly overrides all the protests, exceptions, and interruptions of the prosecution; from time to time he irresistibly turns and addresses the jury and can scarcely be silenced; while the attorneys are wrangling together he has seized a juryman by the coat-lapel and is earnestly exhorting him in whisper. The effect is irresistibly ludicrous. It is farce and not farce, for, however extravagantly impossible the situation is, the man in it is deliciously true to himself. There is one bit of pathos, where Sellers tells how he knew Laura as a little girl, and implies that, though she might have killed a man, she could not have done murder.

The extravagantly impossible situation may have been taken over from the Densmore perversion; but the handling of it, the expressing out of it of all the humor it might be made to contain, that, we may be sure, was the doing of Mark himself. No one else could have done it.

Forty years ago and more I pointed out, in an article on the ‘American on the Stage’ that in so far as Colonel Sellers was a schemer, with an incessant activity in devising new methods for making money, he had been anticipated by a character in Ben Jonson’s the ‘Devil is an Ass’—added evidence of the kinship of the descendants of the Puritans with the daring Elizabethan adventurers. Where the American proposed a liniment for the sore eyes so multitudinous in the Orient and saw “millions in it!” the Elizabethan had advocated a device for making wine of raisins:

What hast thou there?

O, “Making wine of Raisins”; this is in hand now.

Yes, and as true a wine as the wines of France,

Or Spain or Italy: look of what grape

My raisin is, that wine I’ll render perfect,

As of the Muscatel grape, I’ll render Muscatel;

Of the Canary, his; the claret, his;

So of all kinds; and bate you of the prices

Of wine throughout the kingdom half in half.

When it is objected that this enterprise may put up the price of raisins, the answer comes pat:

Why then I’ll make it out of blackberries,

And it shall do the same. ’Tis but more art,

And the charge less.

There is a significant kinship between Ben Jonson and Mark Twain in the superb impossibility of their towering fantasies. But there is no true likeness between Meercraft, whose very name libels him as an unscrupulous exploiter of the eternal gullibility of mankind, and Colonel Sellers, who may have deceived others but who did so only because he had first deceived himself. Colonel Sellers was a man without guile; he was as sincere as he was frank; and he made no more profit out of his swift succession of vain imaginings than did those who were carried away by his magnificent self-confidence. The similarity between Ben Jonson’s crook and Mark’s enthusiast is only superficial; yet it may be worth noting that frenzied speculation was as characteristic of the golden age of England after the dispersal of the Armada as it was in the gilded age of America which was the aftermath of the Civil War. Moreover Ben Jonson and Mark Twain have this in common also, that they were both of them humorists of soaring exuberance and both of them realists of immitigable veracity.