How Not to Get Rich Page 6

  There was no prestige in subscription publishing, but Bliss promised Twain wide distribution. “We are perhaps the oldest subscription house in the country, and have never failed to give a book an immense circulation,” Bliss said. Bliss offered Twain $10,000 for a completed manuscript, or a royalty of 5 percent. Exercising “the best business judgment I ever displayed,” Twain took the 5 percent.

  Released in July 1869, The Innocents Abroad was a bestseller in America and in Europe. The reviews were almost uniformly favorable. From William Dean Howells of the tony Atlantic Monthly, the book received the Eastern literary establishment’s version of five stars on Amazon. The book is “very amusing,” Howells wrote. Twain’s “is always good-humored humor,” and “even in its impudence it is charming.” The Examiner and London Review said the book was written in language “full of point and pungency, and abounds in anecdotes of racy humour.” The Innocents Abroad “makes no pretence to inform or instruct; it is simply meant to amuse, and in that it succeeds to perfection.”

  THE QUAKER CITY EXCURSION did more for Twain than make him famous throughout the English-speaking world and, for a time, prosperous. It also helped him settle on the woman he hoped to marry. Now in his early thirties, he had become ­eager to find a wife. But he also wanted to make sure he was ready for the responsibilities of a family. In an 1862 letter to Orion’s wife, he was forthright about the need to be financially secure.

  I am not married yet, and I never will marry until I can afford to have servants enough to leave my wife in the position for which I designed her, viz: as a companion. I don’t want to sleep with a three-fold Being who is cook, chambermaid and washerwoman all in one. I don’t mind sleeping with female servants as long as I am a bachelor—by no means—but after I marry, that sort of thing will be “played out,” you know.

  He discussed the subject with other female confidants as well. “I want a good wife,” he told a friend from the Quaker City trip. “I want a couple of them if they are particularly good.” Maybe his best bet, he went on, was to “swindle some poor girl into marrying me. But I wouldn’t expect to be ‘worthy’ of her. I wouldn’t have a girl that I was worthy of. She wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t be respectable enough.”

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  “It Is Ours—All Ours—Everything”

  It was aboard the Quaker City that an amiable young man from Elmira, New York, named Charley Langdon showed Twain a miniature portrait of his older sister. Then and there, Twain would claim, he fell in love with the delicate young woman and made up his mind to marry her. “I’ll harass that girl and harass her till she’ll have to say yes!” he told a friend.

  Her name was Olivia Langdon. Known to friends and family as Livy, she was not only respectable but rich. Her father was Jervis Langdon, a descendent of a distinguished New England family (one ancestor had been president of Harvard), though self-made in the American tradition. A storekeeper at sixteen, he had invested in timberlands and then coal, eventually owning not only mines but a railroad to transport the coal. Langdon was a pillar of the community, broad-minded in his views and socially progressive. He was an abolitionist whose home, it was said, had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Like her father, Livy Langdon had a kindly and generous nature, a nascent Lady Bountiful with a social conscience.

  Twain arranged to meet Livy and was soon a frequent and eager visitor to the Langdon home, which was like nothing back in Hannibal. The house and grounds occupied an entire city block; as horses and carriages approached, their weight automatically opened three sets of gates. “Huge chandeliers hung from the high ceilings of each room. Sumptuous curtains and plush upholstery gave the home the palatial yet somber, heavy look that the wealthy of the time so desired.”

  Undaunted by his surroundings—no doubt inspired by them—Twain courted Livy obsessively. This uneducated son of slaveholders, born into obscurity in rural Missouri, a man in his thirties with some fleeting notoriety based on nothing more substantial than a book he had written that some people found amusing, Twain was of course an unlikely suitor. In time, however, Livy, like the rest of America, succumbed to his inimitable charms. In November 1868, she accepted his proposal of marriage.

  AS MIGHT BE EXPECTED, Livy’s father had misgivings. Hoping to put these reservations to rest, Twain met privately with Langdon, who tactfully explained his position. While Langdon had grown fond of Twain, he barely knew his prospective son-in-law, who was a stranger not only in the town but in the entirety of the East. As part of his due diligence, Langdon asked Twain for the names of men who might vouch for Twain’s “character, in case I had one.” Twain furnished those of six “prominent” men. Langdon wrote to them all, and when their replies arrived, he met with Twain again.

  In their meeting, Langdon read the letters aloud. All those men “were frank to a fault,” Twain said. “They not only spoke in disapproval of me but they were quite unnecessarily and exaggeratedly enthusiastic about it.” One said Twain “would fill a drunkard’s grave.” Another said he was “born to be hung.”

  Langdon put down the letters, and the silence that followed, Twain said, “consisted largely of sadness and solemnity. I couldn’t think of anything to say.”

  Finally Langdon raised his head. He looked Twain in the eye and asked, “What kind of people are those? Haven’t you a friend in the world?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Again there was silence.

  “I’ll be your friend myself,” Langdon said. “Take the girl. I know you better than they do.”

  IN THE MONTHS leading up to the marriage, hoping to make sure his daughter would be financially sound, Langdon lent Twain $25,000 to buy a third share in a newspaper, the Buffalo Daily Express. More than a mere reporter and freelance writer, and more than an editor, Langdon’s son-in-law would be an owner of the newspaper, with a stake in the community, instant respectability, and the beginnings of a stock portfolio.

  Langdon even discussed buying the Tennessee land from Twain’s family. Langdon offered them $20,000 in cash and another $10,000 in stocks for the property and the coal underneath it. That’s six times what Orion believed the land was worth, and he had ethical reservations about any such sale. He was reluctant to sell to Langdon at any price. Without explanation, he let it be known that he feared Twain would “unconsciously cheat” his future father-in-law, and the deal fell through.

  MARK AND LIVY were married on February 2, 1870, at the Langdon mansion. When the reception was over, the bride and groom and rest of the wedding party took off by train for Buffalo. There the newlyweds were to make their home. Upon their arrival, they were taken by horse-drawn sleigh to a boardinghouse a friend of Twain’s had found for them. The other members of the party followed, also in sleighs. Losing contact with the rest of the group, the sleigh carrying the bride and groom rolled on and on until Twain, fearing they were lost, grew exasperated. Finally, the coachman pulled to a stop in front of a house on the city’s most fashionable street. “People who can afford to live in this sort of style won’t take boarders,” Twain muttered.

  Unfazed, Livy led her husband into the brightly lit house, where, to Twain’s befuddlement, the wedding guests were waiting. Again he grumbled that his friend had “put us into a boarding-house whose terms [were] far out of my reach.”

  Livy put her hand on her husband’s arm.

  “Don’t you understand?” she asked. “It is ours—all ours—everything—a gift from father!”

  The mansion was fully furnished. In on the secret, Livy had done the decorating. It was also fully staffed, with servants, including a cook and a uniformed coachman. Then there was another gift, in a small box Langdon carried. He opened it and handed them the deed. Twain was on the verge of tears. Momentarily (and uncharacteristically) speechless, he rallied sufficiently to put his gratitude into words.

  “Mr. Langdon,” Twain said. “Whenever you are in Buffalo, if it’s twice a year, come right here. Bring your bag a
nd stay overnight if you want to. It shan’t cost you a cent.”

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  “In Fairyland”

  The first months of Twain’s marriage were among the most enriching of his life. He adored his wife, his fame was increasing, and for the first time ever he had money to burn. By all accounts, his marriage was a happy one, which produced four children—a son, Langdon, who died before his second birthday, and three daughters—Susy, born in 1870; Clara in 1874; and Jean in 1880. Reverting to the name by which close friends and family still knew him, Twain described himself shortly after the wedding as “Little Sammy in Fairyland.”

  People are “most credulous when they are most happy,” Walter Bagehot, the editor of The Economist, observed in 1873, and Twain was exactly like all of us when things are going well. Believing almost anything was possible, he came up with what he described as “the pet scheme of my life.” Encouraged by the success of The Innocents Abroad, he decided to write a first-person account of the South African diamond strike of 1868, but with a catch. Someone else would do the actual experiencing for him. Twain would just write it all up. He told Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company about the idea. Bliss was interested. The other person Twain wanted to bring into the project was a friend from his San Francisco days, a clever newspaperman named John Riley. Riley was interested, too.

  The plan was for Riley to go to South Africa, with Twain footing all expenses. For three months, Riley would “skirmish, prospect, work, travel & take pretty minute notes.” He could even keep any diamonds he found, with this condition: If the diamonds were worth more than $5,000, Twain would get half. Once back in America, Riley was to live at Twain’s house, given room and board plus $50 a month, with Twain “to furnish the cigars.” There the two would talk about Riley’s South African adventures and, within a matter of weeks, Twain would bang out a 600-page book, which Bliss would publish. The first run of 50,000 copies, Twain told Riley, will “sweep the world like a besom of destruction (if you know what that is).” Riley would get “a chance to pick up a fortune in 3 months—the very same chance that thousands would be glad to take at their own expense.”

  Riley would get no share of the book sales. But that was okay, Twain assured him, because “I can slam you into the lecture field for life & secure you ten thousand dollars a year for as long as you live.” He would even let Riley in on the “dead sure tricks” of the lecturing racket. With Twain’s coaching, Riley could easily make $1,200 to $1,500 in a single night, at least in a big market like San Francisco. Riley could pull down $50,000 a year on the lecture circuit. He could pocket an equal amount of profit from the diamonds themselves. The plan is “sound as a drum—there isn’t a leak in it,” Twain said. “But hurry now. There is no single moment of time to lose . . . I’ll have you so well known in 18 months that there will be no man so ignorant as to have to ask, ‘Who is Riley?’”

  To Bliss, Twain explained that he would write the book “just as if I had been through it all myself, but will explain in the preface that this is done merely to give it life.” All he needed from Bliss was a contract and an advance of a thousand dollars. The book will “have a perfectly beautiful sale,” he assured the publisher. Even in the extremely unlikely event that Riley never made it back from South Africa—drowned at sea or eaten by lions or something—and the book did not materialize, Twain would just whip out a different 600-page book “in place of it.” In that case, Bliss could simply deduct the $1,000 advance on the diamond book from that of the substitute. “Don’t you see?” Twain said. “You get a book, in any event.” But speed was essential: “Say yes or no quick, Bliss, for this thing is brim-full of fame & fortune for both author [&] publisher. Expedition’s the word, & I don’t want any timidity or hesitancy now.” Riley “will be packing his trunk by this time tomorrow.” Bliss said yes.

  In January 1871, Riley set off for South Africa’s diamond fields. But things did not work out quite as planned. About 250 miles from Capetown, Riley’s steamer ran aground, taking on four feet of water. Riley managed to make it to shore, but the ordeal was one he swore he would not repeat “for one hundred thousand dollars.” He then spent the required three months in South Africa but found no diamonds.

  And by the time of Riley’s return, his South African expedition was no longer high on Twain’s to-do list. He was now absorbed in another book, the one that became Roughing It. “Let the diamond fever swell and sweat,” he told his erstwhile protégé. “We’ll try to catch it at the right moment.” They could get to work on Riley’s book in the summer of 1872, he said. With a stenographer at their side, “we’ll all light our cigars every morning, and with your notes before you, we’ll talk and yarn, and laugh and weep over your adventures, and the said reporter will take it all down.” Within a week or two, Twain figured he would have Riley “pumped dry.”

  Summer came and went, and Riley’s health began to fail. On his way back to the United States, he had managed to stab himself with a fork and contracted blood poisoning. Once home, he was diagnosed with cancer and was soon in no condition to work. In June, Twain signed another deal with Bliss—for a travel book about England. In August, Twain sailed for England. In September, Riley died—and the England book was never written.

  And as Twain and Bliss had agreed, the publisher applied the advance on the diamond book to the next one.

  WHAT’S SIGNIFICANT ABOUT the diamond book fiasco, writes Twain biographer Justin Kaplan, is that Twain envisioned an entire series of works in which another person lived through various adventures while he, as a kind of uber–ghost writer, would put the excitement down on paper. Twain was already famous, so his name on the cover would guarantee sales.

  He was like “a rural tinker with a box of gears, pulleys, and pendulums under his bed who thinks he has discovered perpetual motion,” Kaplan observed. Twain saw himself on the verge of “rationalizing literary production, of industrializing it, in fact, in order to turn out like so many gold bars stamped ‘Mark Twain,’ an endless stream of sequels to The Innocents Abroad.” Whatever flaws it might have had (in “recognition of the unpredictable,” for example), the scheme did not lack for “a kind of technological grandeur.”

  Technological grandeur was never far from Twain’s thinking—or his family’s. After all, he was born into a family of tinkerers. The patriarch, John Marshall Clemens, had his perpetual-­motion machine, while Orion Clemens worked for much of his life on a flying machine. In 1870, Orion was at work on at least five inventions, or what he thought were inventions. There was a wood-sawing machine, a knife of some sort, a wheel-and-chain gizmo for powering paddle-wheel boats, a brake for railroads that Twain estimated could earn his brother $250,000 a year, and (this author’s favorite) an “anti-sun-stroke hat.” None of these was ever patented, at least not by Orion. (Only a year earlier, a twenty-two-year-old named George Westinghouse did receive a patent for a comparable brake that became the industry standard, leading to Westinghouse’s immense fortune.)

  Twain, who regarded inventors with something like awe, encouraged Orion to keep tinkering. “An inventor is a poet—a true poet—and nothing in any degree less than a high order of poet,” he told Pamela. And, as an artist, only the inventor can understand

  or appreciate the legitimate “success” of his achievement, littler minds being able to get no higher than a comprehension of a vulgar moneyed success—We would all rejoice to see Orion achieve a moneyed success with his inventions, of course—but if he can, eventually, do something great, something imperial, it were better to do that & starve than not to do it at all.

  Even a device Twain referred to as Orion’s “modest little drilling machine” held great promise. It “shows the presence of the patrician blood of intellect . . . which separates its possessor from the common multitude & marks him as one not beholden to the caprices of politics but endowed with greatness in his own right.”

  Such uncharacteristically puffed-up prose leads
the reader to wonder what Twain took the next morning for his hangover.

  WHILE ORION FIDDLED with his inventions, Twain was at work on one of his own—one that, while less grandiose than Orion’s flying machine, had practical applications and actually did get patented. Twain got the idea in mid-December 1870 when he was paying a call on John Hay, then an editorial writer for the New York Tribune. Twain had entered the Tribune office and accidently barged in on Hay’s boss, who was hard at work on some literary composition of his own. Hay’s boss was Horace Greeley. As the paper’s founder and editor, Greeley “had the reputation of being pretty plain with strangers who interrupted his train of thought.”

  Greeley did not disappoint. “Well, what in hell do you want!” he barked.

  “I was looking for a gentlem—”

  “Don’t keep them in stock—clear out!”

  Twain said he “could have made a very neat retort, but didn’t, for I was flurried and didn’t think of it till I was down stairs.”

  Twain’s first impression of Greeley was that his reputation for impatience was well earned. But his second impression, which Twain passed along to the U.S. Patent Office, was that Greeley was wearing “the most extraordinary set of trowsers [sic].” Greeley’s trousers stuck half in and half out of his boots in a disorderly and uncomfortable way that Twain could never quite unsee. So he immediately went to work trying to figure out “some plan for making them hang more gracefully.”