Mark Twain: The Final Years, 1891–1910

Abstract

In a span of only seven years, the crowd that takes Mark Twain seriously has acquired six fat new volumes, 4,363 pages of rich, challenging biographical discourse to sort out. The first three of these tomes, the Mark Twain Project’s prodigiously annotated and introduced Autobiography of Mark Twain (2010–15), invites readers to rove back and forth between Sam’s free-form experiments in catching the motions of his own mind, and masses of “Explanatory Notes” that get the facts straighter and contextualize these cadenzas of reminiscence, whim, grief, and outrage. And now we have the completion of Gary Scharnhorst’s The Life of Mark Twain, a spectacular effort to assemble and narrate the entire earthly story: childhood, family life, apprenticeships, excursions, adventures, professional and artistic growth, friends and enemies, financial ups and owns, celebrity, triumphs, disasters, you name it.Scharnhorst launched into all this with extraordinary background and momentum. He has immersed himself for half a century—and to our collective benefit—not only in Mark Twain’s writings and spoken words out beyond the widely-published materials, but also in how he was was regarded by family members and friends, by people who tried to do business with him, and by reporters, reviewers, and critics at every level of cultural clout. Additionally, Scharnhorst has strong credentials as a biographer and critic of several of Mark Twain’s famous contemporaries, among them Bret Harte, Horatio Alger, Jr., Owen Wister, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Julian Hawthorne, and Kate Field. Scharnhorst knows the Mark Twain story as thoroughly as anyone on the planet, along with the wide, dynamic world in which Sam Clemens grew up, flourished, suffered, and died. All of this experience is mustered to great effect in this final volume of The Life of Mark Twain.It’s no secret that narrative accounts of this life, or of segments of it, are typically organized around some central theme: the private self versus the public identity; the literary successes and struggles; the morally conflicted would-be tycoon; the career as humorist and wit; the political, spiritual, or moral growth or turmoil. Rejecting that kind of structure and limitation, Scharnhorst for the most part upholds an ethic of “just the facts,” getting avalanches of dates, places, doings, and companionships ordered and clarified. Opening in June 1891, with the departure of the Clemens family for the sojourn in Western Europe that wouldn’t bring them all home again until the spring of 1895, The Final Years commingles the wanderings, the publishing gambits and failures that (along with the Paige Compositor) led up to bankruptcy, the struggles and false starts in writing, and the Mark Twain travel letters, speeches, essays, and fresh books that reached the public during this interlude. Attention centers on The American Claimant, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and eventually Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, the deadpan historical novel that Clemens was struggling to complete in the neighborhood of Rouen in the summer and fall of 1894. Along the way, this segment of the narrative presents useful broader contexts of political and financial unrest, among them a spate of anti-Italian riots that broke out in France after the assassination of French President Carnot in June of that year, and the boggling scope and reverberations of the American Panic of 1893, which took down over one hundred U.S. railroad companies and six hundred banks. It was a tough season for anyone to think straight and feel secure.When the account moves to Mark Twain’s worldwide lecture tour of 1895–96, the organization settles into patterns that make this volume easy to navigate, yet also predictable in ways that might impede reading with the kind of sustained attention that theme-centered biography can elicit. As Sam and Livy head westward to board the steamship Warrimoo in Vancouver for their Pacific crossing, the pages load to the gunwales with names and dates: big cities and small towns, hotels and lecture halls and opera houses, local delegations, receptions, banquets, and quick side-trips—and the cumulative effect can be like a head-spilling scroll through old files of credit-card records and boarding passes. All this seems to resonate with another strong cadence in The Life: following each notable Mark Twain appearance, performance, or publication, Scharnhorst provides an extensive tally of where it got mentioned or critiqued. In one bulky paragraph, for example, covering initial response to the pot-boiler novel Tom Sawyer, Detective, we check-list our way through the Manchester Guardian, St. James Gazette, London Bookman, London Standard, Boston Transcript, Chicago Inter Ocean, Charleston News and Courier, and on and on. He musters longer arrays for “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” and also for Christian Science, Mark Twain’s slim and thematically scrambled volume from 1907.Though these tallies can be useful for anyone interested in the immediate impact of Mark Twain’s later writings, a temptation rises to skate over the next italicized inventory and the next, and merely marvel at the archival labor that brought them into shape. One notable exception, however, is Scharnhorst’s recovery of a seldom-mentioned ludicrous burst of controversy about Eve’s Diary when it appeared from Harpers in 1906. This flap was not about anything in the verbal text, but rather the handful of gently Pre-Raphaelite line-drawings by Lester Ralph, representing Eve as a simple nature-girl before an apple-bite brought shame about wandering in the buff. Public libraries in Massachusetts actually banned this sentimental little book on that basis—only six years before Paul Chabas’s September Morn—another innocent, stink-causing picture of a young woman outdoors undressed—and the aggressive New York Armory Show permanently shook up nudity as a subject in American visual art.Scharnhorst’s extraordinary work ethic, his admirable self-discipline, and his encyclopedic knowledge of Mark Twain’s world are in evidence everywhere in The Final Years. If there are a few moments where the narrative veers into unconvincing commentary, it’s hard to think of other big-scale studies that don’t have similar lapses, and worse. For instance, a write-off of Mark Twain’s eldest daughter Susy Clemens: “Sam and Livy’s oldest daughter, idolized by her parents and idealized in the lore about the family, was in fact a spoiled snob” (27)—a judgment that seems to be based on a few letters and comments from Susy to her family and close friends about servants and social life around the Villa Viviani in Florence in 1893. It’s worth remembering that Susy, who had been abruptly pulled out of Bryn Mawr College by her mother after one semester, was now trailing around after her parents thousands of miles from her home turf, where a single young woman could thrive and sustain friendships and perhaps even meet a life partner, and that she was tagging along from one rented place to another on a deracination that seemed endless as her youth burned by. No empathy for a predicament like that? Right here in this Mark Twain Annual, Linda Morris offers strong reasons for a measure of compassion. Also, several pages are given over without impact to refereeing the lit-crit mess of how to read Pudd’nhead Wilson, its engagements with race, personal identity, the social class, the South, and all the rest of it. The commentary here, too brief to settle anything, culminates with an unusual suggestion that this Mississippi River novel is really a kind of Western, because Wilson himself “is a type of Western hero who straddles the East and the West, mediating between order and chaos” (36), because Sam was “familiar with such tropes in Western writing as the gunfight” (36), and because “In the space behind Wilson’s house, Luigi and Judge Driscoll fight a proxy duel that triggers an inexorable chain of events” (36). But if a few assertions like these “won’t wash” in this magisterial biography, there is so much here that’s useful and durable as contributions to what we know about this extraordinary career and legacy. The Life of Mark Twain: The Final Years is certainly a book that anyone truly interested in Mark Twain and his legacy ought to read and cherish.