The Ordeal of Mark Twain

by Van Wyck Brooks

"The American proposes to realize his individuality freely and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly consenting that some other person, better qualified or more competent, should choose in his place. From the instant when he can do what he will, he easily wills what he is asked to will."

GUSTAVE RODRIGUES: The People of Action.

Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the gold-fields of Nevada—the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him out for destruction.

Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confrères of the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader—a student of history, travels, literature and the sciences—a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going, indolent good fellow with a love of humor—with talent, perhaps—but as one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and dandy—in fancy percales and patent leathers—in white duck and striped shirts—he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more. He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment.

Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded Age was doubly true of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine says, "all human beings, regardless of previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common fusing-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer." Life in the gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the 'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plenty as dust.... There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters, 'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. The 'flush times' were in magnificent flower!... The great 'Comstock lode' stretched its opulent length straight through the town from North to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development."

This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment, a spirit inflexibly opposed, as we can see, to the development of individuality. Had Mark Twain been free, it might have been a matter of indifference to him; he might have gone his own way and amused himself with the astonishing spectacle of the gold-fields and then taken himself off again. But Mark Twain was not free; he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that, far from being able to stand aloof from his environment, he had to make terms with it. For what obligations had he not incurred! To become such a conventional citizen as his father would have approved of, to make money and restore the fallen fortunes of his family—that old pledge was fixed in the back of his mind, where it had been confirmed by his failure to discover and assert any independent principle of his own. Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line, more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family. "His brother Orion was ten years older," says Mr. Paine, "but he had not the gift of success. By common consent, the young brother assumed permanently the position of family counselor and financier." These circumstances, I say, compelled Mark Twain to make terms with public opinion. He could not fall too far behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been his and to shine once more as a conspicuous and important personage, he had to "make good" again, quickly and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see from one of his Nevada letters in which he declares earnestly that he will never look upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man.

What chance was there now for the artist in Mark Twain to find itself? A unique opportunity had led him for four years into the channel of inner development through a special vocation; but it was only the indispensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that had obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No special vocation was indispensable in Nevada; consequently, no special vocation was tolerated. There, the pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held absolute sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered with the rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards: his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of his neighbors" and he himself impaired "the consistency of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." Even if Mark Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his creative instinct, therefore—and he was anything but fully aware of them—he could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy—all those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct—were, from the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly organized nervous system, they devised the most complicated methods of torturing him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum pipe, which cut him to the quick, this man who had been betrayed into uttering words of heartfelt gratitude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks of Steve Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief," was always finding means to prevent him from reading; there was the famous hold-up on the Divide on the night of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it our way," said one of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of his individuality was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark Twain was reminded a dozen times a day that his natural instincts and desires and tendencies were incompatible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any man who was pledged to succeed in it. That is why, though he always retaliated at first, he always yielded in the end.

Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying 'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it—and also to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his level best to become a millionaire.

It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment—these were the qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. "The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, "are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark Twain's business life.

So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain solved by becoming a humorist.

Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off "alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings"—wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." "He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!—all the contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary paper in Virginia City; hell!"