my horoscope. The proverb says, ‘Born lucky, always lucky,’ and I am very superstitious. . . . All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size. . . . And so I have felt entirely certain that that machine would turn up trumps eventually. . . . I couldn’t shake off the confidence of a life time in my luck."¹² He had counted on that luck to deliver his version of the American Dream, which was larger and more spectacular than most people’s—Tom Sawyerish in its proportions and plans for showiness. After all, he could always bank on unfailing income from his pen and his platform tours after 1867, and that resultant confidence encouraged tendencies to accept unwarranted risks in business.

These habits of thought were compounded by Clemens’ delight in the expanding technology and literacy of the nineteenth century. The optimism of Clemens’ famous letter in honor of Walt Whitman, dated 24 May 1889, and his "Queen Victoria’s Jubilee" sketch (1897) is a sincere note; it gratified him to laud the progress in industry, science, and education that the nineteenth-century population had witnessed. He was incapable of following the quiet logic of Thoreau’s rejection of materialism, mass manufacturing, and organized commerce, and he toyed uneasily with Howells’ socialistic theories. Louis J. Budd’s study, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (1962), found that even as early as 1869 Clemens was sympathetic with "the case for capitalists in general"; that by 1877, "teetering between his old awe and a rising sense of being an insider, he . . . mixed socially with the local titans of finance and industry"; that after 1900, "Twain still found it hard to think that free enterprise could go seriously wrong," and "likewise found it confusingly easy to believe still that—‘taken by and large’—success in business is proof of a man’s honesty"; and that he defended Henry H. Rogers and the Standard Oil Company against public opinion and Ida Tar-bell’s muckraking journalism, telling Rogers and his wealthy friends:

"You men have won your places . . . not by family influences or extraneous help, but only by the natural gifts God gave you at your birth, made effective by your own energies."¹³ These views echoed the attitudes he had encountered in Hartford, where the Nook Farm writers, "as they acquired experience in an industrial culture, . . . attacked abuses but continued to assume that the good of the whole nation was being served by expanding capitalism. . . . The excesses in its exploitation by the unscrupulous were controllable. Industrial democracy was a successful experiment."¹⁴

The result has been described caustically by George Orwell: "He gave himself up to the prevailing fever. . . . He even for a period of

years deserted writing for business; and he squandered his time on buffooneries, . . . for instance, . . . a book like A Connecticut Yankee, which is a deliberate flattery of all that is worst and most vulgar in American life. The man who might have been a kind of rustic Voltaire became the world’s leading after-dinner speaker, charming alike for his anecdotes and his power to make businessmen feel themselves public benefactors."¹⁵ Lewis Leary notes that "Samuel Clemens had always wanted to be a millionaire, and now he was, vicariously. . . . One part of him hated it; the other part lapped it up greedily: he became more and more spoiled—a kind of private jester to the Rogerses and the Rockefellers and the Flaglers and their friends. He called Andrew Carnegie St. Andrew, and Carnegie called him St. Mark, and each knew that the joke of it was that neither was saintly at all. . . . It was good for these wealthy men to be seen with a person so popularly loved as Mark Twain. . . . Surely, no man could be all bad, if Mark Twain liked him."¹⁶

Having reviewed these patterns and faults and qualities of Clemens’ business methods, and having observed their generally unpleasant consequences on his financial well-being and his family’s security, the student of American literature might be moved to ask if anything, then, stands in the other column of that ledger—any benefits to balance the many losses that Clemens and his readers discerned in totting up the red ink and black ink of these financial transactions. The answer could be a qualified "yes." Clemens’ infatuation with business predictably carried over into comfortableness with economics as a literary metaphor, for business language as amusing slang, for business occurrences as important parts of literary plots. Imagery of the commercial marketplace permeates Clemens’ writings, providing humor by the incongruity of its application. Most obvious, business deals occur in stories involving misrepresentation of merchandise by sellers; in "A Visit to Niagara" (1869), as a simple example, the narrator gullibly believes that the Irish immigrants wearing Indian costumes and selling souvenir bead-baskets and moccasins are actually specimens of the romantic Noble Red Man. A similarly fooled narrator in Roughing It (1872) looks forward to an auctioneer’s funeral after he finds out what kind of horse a genuine Mexican plug really is. Other tales and novels incorporate business philosophies—including "The Curious Republic of Gondour" (1875), The American Claimant (1892), and "When in Doubt, Tell the Truth" (1906). Despite Clemens’ allegiance to the subscription-book industry, several stories make fun of the door-to-door salesman; the narrator of "The Canvasser’s Tale" (1876)

commences by observing a portfolio under his visitor’s arm and saying to himself, "Behold, Providence hath delivered his servant into the hands of another canvasser," and ends, despairingly, by writing, "You know the result perfectly well, because you know that when you have once opened the door to a canvasser, the trouble is done and you have got to suffer defeat"; he purchases three "echoes" for which he has little use. In a fragmentary manuscript known as "Burlesque Hamlet" (written in 1881), Clemens introduced "Basil Stockmar, book agent (with a canvassing copy), weary with tramping," into the Danish castle to stumble about during the soul-searching of Hamlet and the plotting of King Claudius—thus producing a slang-talking predecessor to his Connecticut Yankee, who would be mired anachronistically in another ancient kingdom.

One type of commercial exchange found no sympathy in Clemens’ writings—the trafficking in human slaves. He derogatorily remembered William Beebe, "rich man and slave trader," in a number of late reminiscences about early-day Hannibal,¹⁷ connecting Beebe and his son with heartless cruelty and the Clemens family’s monetary decline. Huckleberry Finn finds it impossible to forget Nigger Jim’s tangible value for his rightful owner or for anyone who wishes to capture and sell him. In a different strain, the narrator of The Innocents Abroad (1869) links Wall Street capitalism with immorality, reporting that the "slave girl market report" in Constantinople would indicate that "stocks are up, just at present," on account of reluctance on the part of the girls’ parents—"an unusual abundance of breadstuffs . . . enables them to hold back for high prices" (chapt. 34). In A Connecticut Yankee, the selling of human beings as slaves symbolizes the grossest venality of which people are capable as a society. The scenes of man-beating and auctioning slaves in A Connecticut Yankee remind one of the more poignant tale that won Clemens an Atlantic Monthly audience, "A True Story" (1874). But the Yankee is at least able to see a little humor in the mistaken identities that send Arthur and the Boss into slavery: "Yes, we were sold at auction, like swine. In a big town and an active market we should have brought a good price; but this place was utterly stagnant," comments the Yankee, with a New Englander’s appreciation for a bargain, "and so we sold at a figure which makes me ashamed, every time I think of it. The king of England brought seven dollars, and his prime minister nine; whereas the king was easily worth twelve dollars and I as easily worth fifteen. . . . If you force a sale on a dull market, I don’t care what the property is, you are going to make a poor business of it" (chapt. 34). The town-hall scene in "The

Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" sarcastically inverts this situation, staging a mock-auction in which the destroyed reputations of Hadleyburg’s leading citizens (mostly businessmen) are bid upon in reverse-scale. This "value" of an individual fascinated Clemens as a concept: in one installment of "Old Times on the Mississippi" (1875), he related how a steamboat pilot named Stephen succeeded in bringing around a parsimonious captain who had hired him at half-wages, $125 a month; steering the boat steadily into the river’s current, Stephen convinces the captain that he needs one of those "two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots!" In notebooks and letters, Clemens would constantly try to check his own financial worth over the years.

A pair of tales—"The £1,000,000 Bank-Note" (1893) and "The $30,000 Bequest" (1904)—reveal the two sides of Clemens’ feelings about business (and reflect, unintentionally, the erosion of his optimism after the collapse of the Paige typesetter hopes). In the earlier piece, a romance of youthful aspirations, an American obtains financial credit in London on the strength of possessing a bank-note of such large denomination that it cannot be cashed without complicated arrangements; thereby he saves his friend’s investments, gains a lucrative career for himself, and wins the hand of a lovely heiress. But the other short story portrays the darker, obverse side of this fairy tale; a happy but reverse-sexed couple are destroyed by an old man’s promise to leave them a bequest; they squander it in fantasized steps to improve their social standing and their amount of capital, then hesitate too long to sell their day-dreamed stock on Wall Street, with their "imaginary brokers . . . shouting frantically by imaginary long-distance, ‘Sell! sell! for Heaven’s sake sell! . . .’ The very next day came the historic crash, the record crash, the devastating crash, when the bottom fell out of Wall Street, and the whole body of gilt-edge stocks dropped ninety-five points in five hours. . . . Then . . . the man in her [Aleck] was vanquished, and the woman in her resumed sway. She . wept, saying: ‘I am to blame, do not forgive me, I cannot bear it. We are paupers!’" The maudlin story, not one of Clemens’ finest, is memorable for the nightmarish "dream" linkings of money, family, status, recklessness, and remorse.

Less obviously, a motif in the narrative diction of certain other pieces develops the theme of business, often for comic purposes. Here Clemens perhaps took his cue for figurative language from Bret Harte, who pioneered the humorous tensions possible between a genteel, fastidious narrator, and a mining-camp of Forty-niners

whose chief vernacular is poker slang; Harte’s gambler John Oakhurst solemnly "struck a streak of bad luck on the 23rd of November, 1850, and handed in his checks," while the character named "Tennessee" surrenders to an opponent holding "two bowers and an ace . . . two revolvers and a bowie knife." (Clemens exploited this same vein vividly in his story of Scotty Briggs and Buck Fanshaw’s funeral in chapter 47 of Roughing It.) Clemens extended the possibilities of this verbal irony, perceiving that business phraseology could be humorously incongruous out of its customary context. An example winds up the fantastic "Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" (1876), at the conclusion of which the victorious narrator nonchalantly offers to sell already dispatched tramps "by the gross, by cord measurement, or per ton," advising shoppers to "examine the lot in my cellar before purchasing elsewhere, as these . . . can be had at a low rate, because I wish to clear out my stock and get ready for the spring trade." A number of Clemens’ animal stories draw upon this commercial vocabulary, which thereby gains an added dimension of irony. Dick Baker’s supposedly wise cat named Tom Quartz disapproves of the improved system of blasting for quartz instead of using picks and shovels on the hillside: "That cat, you know, was always agin new fangled arrangements—somehow he never could abide ’em. . . . He’d get the blues, . . . knowin’ as he did, that the bills was runnin’ up all the time an’ we warn’t makin’ a cent" (Roughing It, chapt. 61). The jay in "Baker’s Blue-jay Yarn" (A Tramp Abroad, 1880), like an unwary investor, momentarily puzzles over the immensity of an acorn-hole he has decided to fill, then "finally says, ‘Well, it’s too many for me, that’s certain; must be a mighty long hole; however, I ain’t got no time to fool around here, I got to ’tend to business.’"

Infatuation with the making of fortunes reveals itself in various stories. Cecil Rhodes, the narrator of Following the Equator (1897) informs us, arrived in Sydney penniless but had the good sense to sell a vital piece of information to "the richest wool-broker in Sydney," who categorizes men into three kinds—" ‘Commonplace Men, Remarkable Men, and Lunatics. I’ll classify you with the Remarkables, and take the chances.’ The deal went through, and secured to the young stranger the first fortune he ever pocketed" (chapt. 13). Another such tale in Following the Equator (chapt. 28) recounts the fluke that made Ed Jackson the agent of Commodore Vanderbilt in developing a tobacco-commerce depot in Memphis, "in supreme command of that important business"—an inadvertent but happy consequence of his being the butt of a practical joke by his

Memphis pals, who forged a letter of introduction soliciting an interview with the millionaire. And Ed Jackson, in turn—previously only a wharf-boat clerk at the Memphis landing—is empowered to appoint his own loyal "assistants; choose them yourself—and carefully. . . . All things being equal, take the man you know, in preference to the stranger," advises Vanderbilt. "The $30,000 Bequest" is naturally filled with allusions to wealth and commerce; for instance, Sally is impressed with Aleck’s plans for their daughters’ matrimonial prospects: "‘I get the idea. Instead of finding fault with the samples on view, thus hurting feelings and obstructing trade without occasion, you merely offer a higher class of goods for the money, and leave nature to take her course.’. . . They must look the market over—which they did." In "How to Make History Dates Stick" (published in 1914), Clemens mentions the manner in which Henry VI "lost the throne and ended the dynasty which Henry IV had started in business with such good prospects." "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901) takes high-finance as its controlling metaphor, pretending to be a prospectus for setting up a new sales approach to the marketing of a "business"—"The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." The narrator proposes that "we should throw in a little trade-taffy about the Blessings of Civilization," and then "it will take in the Persons who are Sitting in Darkness, and we can resume Business at the old stand."¹⁸

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is of course the locus classicus for this sort of economic imagery, and the Yankee instinctively expresses himself in the slang of commerce. Deciding to undertake the task of telling a funny story to the monks gathered for dinner at the monastery in the Valley of Holiness, Hank Morgan must repeat it twelve times before overcoming their ingrained British reserve, and fifteen until "they disintegrated, and I got a broom and swept them up. This language is figurative. Those islanders—well, they are slow pay, at first, in the. matter of return for your investment of effort, but in the end they make the pay of all other nations poor and small by contrast" (chapt. 22). When he undertakes an easier task—pumping the miraculous waters from the holy fountain—he opines that "as a matter of business it was a good idea to get the notion around that the thing was difficult. Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising." In chapter 42, Clarence relates the doleful tale of the fall of Arthur’s kingship: "Three miles of the London, Canterbury & Dover were ready for the rails, and also ready and ripe for manipulation in the stock market. It was wildcat, and everybody knew it. The stock was

for sale a give-away. What does Sir Launcelot do, but—" The Yankee can finish the sorrowful events in his own imagination: "He quietly picked up nearly all of it, for a song; then he bought about twice as much more, deliverable upon call." Clarence adds that Launcelot "skinned them alive, and they deserved it." The imposition of real-world business transactions on the lofty deeds in a misty, legendary romance struck Clemens as the essence of literary burlesque, and many critics have agreed about its deftness since 1889. It is an amusing premise, a good antidote to the mellifluous but enshrining qualities of Tennyson’s idealistic verse.

But the most pixilated usage of an inappropriate business idiom occurs not in Connecticut Yankee but in Clemens’ famous if vicious dissection of The Deerslayer, that exercise in drollery titled "Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses" (1895). Scoffing at the efforts by six hostile Indians to drop upon the deck of a houseboat carrying the Hutter girls as it passes beneath a tree when approaching Lake Glimmerglass, Clemens’ persona demands: "Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by? No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper’s Indians never notice anything." All of them leap from the tree but somehow miss the objective; five of them land in the water instead, and one falls unconscious in the stern of the boat.

These verbal devices and plot ideas are admittedly small recompense for the suffering that Clemens inflicted on himself, his family, and his friends by indulging in business speculations, and every proponent of Clemens’ writings will always wish that he had restricted his activities to the world of letters. But we must keep in mind the disposition of the Samuel Clemens who emerged from Hannibal, Missouri in 1853 and matured on the Mississippi and in the Far West. His tremendous vitality was bound to lead him into other endeavors besides writing; no single occupation could contain his energies or gratify his longings. Like Charles Dickens, who persistently wore himself out under the labors of magazine editing and the challenges of amateur theatricals and author’s readings, Clemens craved a participatory role in his age. And his was the Gilded Age of technological advances and stock speculations and mass industrialism (and sometimes overnight ruination). The urge to develop and market his own products, moreover, was as strong and insistent a part of Clemens’ temperamental makeup as was his conviction that he could invest in a mine or a publishing house or a typesetter or a

railroad and make the sudden fortune that had eluded his father. Though it is often assumed (as Clemens claimed in his autobiographical dictations) that he merely fell prey in the mid-1880s to a smooth-talking inventor-adventurer and to his own logical wish as an author to print and distribute his writings without any interference or profit-taking by an intervening publisher, in actuality a side of Clemens’ imagination had ever been attracted toward the enticing power and income potentially afforded by stock investments, manufacturing, and commerce. His literary works—principally A Connecticut Yankee—simultaneously mirrored these business preoccupations and tried to sort out his confusing experiences. We can pity his remorse and we can admire the literature he constructed from language and situations that he encountered in the factories and the board-of-directors’ rooms, but we should be tolerant in accepting and trying to fathom the combination of genius and victim, sagacity and dupery, success and failure, that made Clemens an enigma to his contemporaries and a symbol of his age to our own.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

NOTES

    ¹Clemens to Olivia Clemens, 27–30 January 1894, New York City, quoted in Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, ed. Lewis Leary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 20—hereafter cited in the text as MTHHR.
   ²Mark Twain, Business Man, ed. Samuel C. Webster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946), p. 378, for example—hereafter cited as MTBus.
   ³Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 6—hereafter cited as MTLP. Professor Hill refers to Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940).
   ⁴Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1964), p. 18—hereafter cited as MT&EB.
   ⁵Dennis Welland, Mark Twain in England (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), p. 76.
   ⁶DeLancey Ferguson, Mark Twain: Man and Legend (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), p. 233.
   ⁷Clemens to Mollie Clemens, New York City, February 1867, MTBus, p. 90.
   ⁸A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Bernard L. Stein and Henry Nash Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 129–130. This edition is employed throughout. I am grateful to four individuals for perceptively discussing with me some ideas that figure in this essay: Christine Cole Browne (Clemens’ reliance on designated assistants"), Larone L. James (the atmosphere of secrecy stressed in Clemens’ fiction), Thomas A. Tenney (Clemens’ emphasis on a person’s monetary ‘worth"), and Jane Archer (the connection between auctions and self-esteem).
   ⁹Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, ed. William M. Gibson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 229–230.
   ¹⁰Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain: God’s Fool (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. xx.

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   ¹¹Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, ed. Frederick Anderson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 1: 39—hereafter cited as N&J.
   ¹²Clemens to Henry H. Rogers, Paris, 2 January 1895, MTHHR, p. 115.
   ¹³Louis J. Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 42, 67, 192, 196.
   ¹⁴Kenneth R. Andrews, Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 126.
   ¹⁵"Mark Twain—The Licensed Jester," Tribune, 26 November 1943, reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols., ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 2: 328. Orwell castigates "that flaw in his own nature, his inability to despise success" (2: 328).
   ¹⁶Lewis Leary, Southern Excursions: Essays on Mark Twain and Others (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 80–81.
   ¹⁷Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck & Tom, ed. Walter Blair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 39, 344. See also Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), pp. 111–113.
   ¹⁸North American Review, 172 (February 1901), 165, 172, 176. The essay is reprinted in A Pen Warmed-up in Hell, ed. Frederick Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 59–76.

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