Afterword:—
Getting to Be Mark Twain
Over the course of the year he spent writing Roughing It , Clemens established most of the important circumstances that would direct his career over the next two decades. He would be a writer of books, not a journalist and not, primarily, a platform performer. In those books he would continue to lay claim to his own experience, sometimes panning for anecdotes, sometimes mining for something more essential. He would carry on a battle of wills and wits with Elisha Bliss that neither man would decisively win. He would write best in a condition that might be described as genial privacy, a condition that allowed him to work apart from the daily cares and turmoil of a household without sacrificing the nurture and support of a domestic circle; he would write best in Elmira.
And finally, as the summer of 1871 drew to a close and Roughing It was being set in proof, he moved to Hartford. The book whose composition began in Buffalo, the city Clemens could not love, took him eventually to the city that was to be his principal home for the next twenty years. He had first set foot in Hartford in January 1868 to negotiate the publication of The Innocents Abroad with Bliss's American Publishing Company and returned there in August of that year to submit the finished manuscript. At the time he had written, "Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief."[1] Exactly three years later, in August 1871, he was again in the city with a manuscript to deliver, that of the long-awaited California book. It was during this visit that he finally acted on the impulses that had attracted him to Hartford from the outset, arranging to rent the home of John and Isabella Hooker,
longtime friends of the Langdon family, in Nook Farm, a genteel enclave of writers and well-to-do people at the edge of the city.
It was a move Clemens could not have made, and in fact was not welcome to make, in the summer of 1869, when he and Olivia had been casting about for a nesting site. Some of the Hartfordians who were now to become his neighbors were then not at all prepared to welcome Mark Twain to their society. The Innocents Abroad had changed that, by virtue of its enormous popularity, certainly, but also, perhaps, because it revealed its author to be something other than a vulgar comedian. Clemens's persistent regard for Hartford, despite the snub, was no doubt reinforced by his affection for Joe Twichell, his ties to Bliss, and his appreciation of Olivia's friendships there, but from the outset what had chiefly drawn him to the city was his sense of its upright and elevating character. It was a land of steady habits, he said, a place where morality and huckleberries flourished. Given Clemens's passing resemblance to the man who would not want to belong to a club that would have him for a member, the snub may only have whetted his appetite to find acceptance there.
In one of the paeans to Hartford he wrote during his first visits to the city, Clemens spoke of its moral and moralizing atmosphere with such enthusiasm as to conclude, "We may expect the lion and the lamb to lie down together shortly in Connecticut." That the millennium might soon come to pass in Hartford should hardly be surprising, he says, but "to me, a sinner, the prospect is anything but inviting."[2] At the time it suited his purposes and his persona to place himself beyond the pale of Hartford respectability, thereby anticipating and perhaps even preparing the way for the rejection he suffered there a year later. By August of 1871, however, Hartford was glad to have him, and he was still glad to have Hartford, its wholesome, pervasive rectitude undiminished among the fixtures of his imagination. The sinner had not become a saint, but he had undergone some fundamental changes and clarifications over the course of the three years that separated his delivery of the second book manuscript from his delivery of the first.
By the time he and Olivia took up residence in Hartford at the beginning of October 1871, Clemens was within two months of his thirty-sixth birthday. His son, Langdon, was almost a year old, and Olivia was expecting their second child. He had managed,
against considerable odds and in the face of all but relentless adversity, to draft a follow-up to The Innocents Abroad , a follow-up which proved not to be a sequel but a kind of precursor of the first, at least in terms of the chronology of his life. He had begun a pattern, that is to say, of reaching back further into his past with each succeeding book, a pattern he continued, with occasional interruptions, through the heart of his career. He was about to become a lecturer again and would in fact have a chance to settle into his new home for only about two weeks before setting out for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where his 1871–72 tour began on 16 October. He was on the road, in New England and the Midwest, until the tour closed on 6 February 1872.
Although his lecture persona might seem to his audiences to have changed little since his previous tour two years earlier, Clemens's sense of Mark Twain had, like his sense of vocation, sharpened over the course of that time. Most fundamentally, Twain had ceased for the most part to be an innocent himself and had become instead a commentator on innocence, frequently the innocence of his earlier life. Writing Roughing It , in particular, had helped him establish his perspective in time; the book revealed him to be not simply a retrospective teller but a seasoned, reflective adult, an initiate able to recall his former naïveté vividly and with contagious enthusiasm even though he could no longer participate in it. This perspective aligned writer and persona more closely than ever before. The contemporaneous Mark Twain was older and more knowing than, say, the Mark Twain who had assumed an editorship at the Buffalo Express two years earlier. He was no longer available to such catastrophes as being thrown over Niagara Falls by Irish Indians or shot full of holes by outraged newspaper readers, although he might recall such incidents from his earlier life. In this regard he came nearer than he ever had to serving as a mask for Clemens himself. He had ceased to function primarily as a comic actor and become instead an impresario or raconteur capable of fashioning a younger self to fill that role and the related roles of butt, victim, novice, tenderfoot, and fledgling. This shift or evolution in point of view afforded Mark Twain a certain maturity without curtailing his access to the essentially adolescent springs of his imagination and "adventures." It enabled him to take his place, as Clemens had, in a world of grown-ups. Eventually it
would enable him to create other selves, other innocents, and to trace their uneasy accommodations to that world.
In 1877 Clemens learned, or came to believe, that his old nemesis Captain Charles C. Duncan of the Quaker City had slandered him in a lecture treating their 1867 "pleasure voyage." He responded, as Mark Twain, in a public letter to the editor of the New York World ,
Where is the use in bothering about what a man's character was ten years ago, anyway? Perhaps the captain values his character of ten years ago? I never have heard of any reason why he should; but still he may possibly value it. No matter. I do not value my character of ten years ago. I can go out any time and buy a better one for half it cost me. In truth, my character was simply in course of construction then. I hadn't anything up but the scaffolding, so to speak. But I have finished the edifice now and taken down that worm-eaten scaffolding. I have finished my moral edifice, and frescoed it and furnished it, and I am obliged to admit that it is one of the neatest and sweetest things of the kind that I have ever encountered. I greatly value it, and I would feel like resenting any damage done to it. But that old scaffolding is no longer of any use to me; and inasmuch as the "captain" seems able to use it to advantage, I hereby make him a present of it. It is a little shaky, of course, but if he will patch it here and there he will find that it is still superior to anything of the kind he can scare up upon his own premises. (14 February 1877)[3]
Not far beneath the humor of these observations, empowering their counterattack on Duncan, is Clemens's ready acknowledgment that when he stepped off the Quaker City a decade earlier, the terms of Mark Twain's identity, like those of his own, were radically uncertain. But if the scaffolding needed to frame his character was barely in place then, in 1867, its work was largely accomplished by the time the Clemenses moved to Hartford in 1871.
Like Gatsby, Clemens had come a long way in arriving at the enclave of respectability and status he sought, his land of steady habits. Over the four years that had passed since the Quaker City returned him from the Old World to the New, he had sifted or blundered among the many courses he might have followed to discover the future that was to hold him. During those years he found the stable personal identity that would make a stable literary identity possible; he settled the sources of Mark Twain. Now he was ready to build on those sources, to bring to life over the next two
decades voices that refracted that complex and dynamic identity. His search for a home had brought him at last to Hartford, but in the process of arriving there he had begun his approach to another, even more fertile Promised Land. Having been carried east during the course of writing Roughing It , the most western of his books, Clemens was, in the fall of 1871, poised to discover that his richest imaginative resources lay at neither extremity, East or West, but in what he was to call "the body of the nation," the Mississippi Valley. On 27 November of that year, as he was out lecturing for James Redpath and reading proof for Elisha Bliss, he mused to Olivia, "When I come to write the Mississippi book, then look out!" Writing Roughing It had brought him to the brink of finding his real and lasting fortune, a fortune buried in the very riverbanks he had earlier left in boarding an overland stagecoach in search of more promising Territory.