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!”