The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan

Author:Fred Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307874597
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

2.

In late November 1879, soon after Twain returned from his Chicago triumph, Howells proposed that he speak in December at an Atlantic Monthly breakfast in honor of Holmes’s seventieth birthday. Twain begged off on the grounds that he still had not provided Bliss with the final chapters and revisions of A Tramp Abroad. Actually, the day and a half that would be required for his attendance was not the main issue. His presence, he feared, would be another reminder of his speech at the Whittier dinner, a shame that still burned two years later. Charles Warner, though, strongly argued that Twain ought to go and “act just as if nothing had happened.” Howells also pressed the case and the invitation. Twain soon agreed, though this time he made certain, perhaps with Livy’s preapproval, that his text was flatteringly innocuous.

With Warner, Twain visited Howells’ new Belmont house, where the friends enjoyed one another’s company. At the breakfast on December 3, those who wished Twain well held their breath; others expected, probably even desired, another blundering performance from a man they considered a vulgar comic writer. His subject was plagiarism, his example his unintentional borrowing in the dedication to Innocents Abroad of an idea and turn of phrase that first appeared in a dedication by Holmes to a volume of poems. Twain had read and reread the book while sick in Hawaii in 1866. “Pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people’s ideas,” he told his audience. The message between the lines was that, just as he had not consciously plagiarized, so had he not purposefully insulted the three Boston literary Brahmins in his 1877 talk. Shouldn’t that put an end to any criticism, including self-criticism? He ended with glowing praise of Holmes’s genius. Whatever his audience thought, his own sense of shame about his Whittier dinner performance diminished somewhat. It did not, though, entirely disappear. His tendency to cling to shame was relentless.

When in early January 1882 two friends, Charles Warner and Edward House, reported to him that Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune had for months been regularly printing hostile references to him, Twain burst into fury. Having been angry at Reid for almost ten years because Reid had not selected House to review The Gilded Age, he was eager to believe the worst of him. When threatened, Twain divided the world into friends and enemies. For those he believed had attempted to or actually had damaged him, his imagination delighted in their extreme discomfiture, for which he had a ready vocabulary of damning references. The claim about the Tribune most likely originated with House, who felt that Reid had spoken abusively to him in 1873 during The Gilded Age contretemps. Now Twain was eager to believe that the Tribune had “been flinging sneers and brutalities” at him with “persistent frequency as to attract general remark.”

Blinded by rage, Twain concocted a plan to write Reid’s biography, a damning account of his shabby character and dishonorable life. Filling his notebook with promising slurs,

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