The Ordeal of Mark Twain

by Van Wyck Brooks

Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary pretensions called the Enterprise, which was edited and written by a group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was to the Enterprise that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with profound reluctance.

Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a life of literary activities and associations. He would naturally have gravitated toward such people as the Enterprise group: that he did so is proved by his constantly courting them as a contributor. But committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time," says Mr. Paine. "The Enterprise, 'Comstock to the backbone,' did what it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain could not have thought he would be losing caste by connecting himself with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'" says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when "the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness," says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the Enterprise office worn and travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. "My starboard leg seems to be unshipped," he announced at the door. "I'd like about one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he added: "My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It was, says Mr. Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feeling that there is something painful in that scene, something shamefaced, something that suggests not an acclamation but a surrender?

Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the Enterprise Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure." No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the Enterprise mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the Enterprise was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige, the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For him, therefore, the opportunity of the Enterprise meant an obligation to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would not have displayed such reluctance in joining the Enterprise, and the fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling his own soul.

Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the time has not yet come to discuss the psychogenesis and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. But that it was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how, to his amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giving a public reading together, the latter, whom he had supposed happy and satisfied with his triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself—I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him, to choosing selections for his next reading which would be justified not only as humor but as literature and art. This is only one of many instances of Mark Twain's lifelong revolt against a rôle which he apparently felt had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which he accepted it.

But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions. Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, "the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the mining shares he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his new title"—the pen-name he had adopted—"and its success." He knew that his severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he was making; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a rich man was ashamed in his mother's eyes to have adopted a career that promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name: "His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned," says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the nom de plume was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In short, he wanted a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the time—in pioneer circles, especially, observe—simply argues that all the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a form of "protective coloration" for men who could not risk, in their own persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting coincidence that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied "safe water." We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in Mark Twain's life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which he was proud only because it paid.

It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was intermittent; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the evidence of a "bad conscience." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the people.... But I need change and must move again." Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is crystallizing along its proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. "No—not home again—in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New York as he is about to start on the Quaker City excursion which is to result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he says: "I am wild with impatience to move—move—move!... Curse the endless delays! They always kill me—they make me neglect every duty and then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month." The second is even more specific: "I am so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless moving from place to place.... You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, transgressed his principle of growth?

One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr. Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!—"Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog"—a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed that he had not even offered it to The Californian, the magazine to which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, then I am done with literature and all other bosh—that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate him, this poor, ingenuous being!—this divided soul who has never been able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary edifice."

So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a humorist. He had adopted this rôle unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic self-respect, because it afforded the only available means of satisfying that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his creative instinct, had become dominant in him, the gregarious, acquisitive instinct of the success-loving pioneer. And what a corroboration that instinct now received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified by public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the stage," says Mr. Paine, "was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word—his nod, even, constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hannibal life if he had not exerted his imagination and prevailed over his companions by means other than physical. This dream had been fulfilled in his piloting career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular. United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other desire to make money, to please his family, to "make good" in pioneer terms, it received a confirmation so prodigious that the despised, rejected, repressed, inarticulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck dumb and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments were lulled to rest.

Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed out as one of the sights of the territory; his sayings were everywhere repeated on the streets. Tom Sawyer was walking the stage and "revelling in his power." Crashes of applause greeted his platform sallies; "the Comstock, ready to laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his expression and discovered a vast humor in his most earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the mining-towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; "his improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect." He had "acquired," in short, "a new and lucrative profession at a bound"; and before he went East, and owing to the success of "The Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined to regard him, in some degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute accordingly." When he set out on the voyage of the Quaker City he found himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sherman and Henry Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to follow the publication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides this, it brought him the recognition of The Atlantic Monthly. It brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be disposed to accept—"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London—mine being (between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in gold for a single evening; and so popular were these lectures that when one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny Kemble, the favorite actress of the period, "Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain." Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in Nevada and California we are told that "it paid him well; he could go home now, without shame." But even the promptings of his artistic conscience were now parried and laid at rest: "he had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most.

It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being gulled, and partly because he wasn't—because the beautiful force of his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere, because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets, are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way, by the people who really knew, whose judgment could really be trusted. Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply countersigning the verdict of America.