MARK TWAIN, BUSINESS MAN: THE MARGINS OF PROFIT

Biographers and critics view Samuel L. Clemens’ business ventures ruefully, reasonably assuming that he cheated his readers of additional literary masterpieces by squandering his time and talents on deleterious commercial enterprises. Clemens’ surviving letters and correspondence encourage this response. In January 1894, beside himself with anxiety about his investments in the Paige typesetter and a publishing firm, Clemens invoked one of the frequent ship-reaching-port-in-a-storm images that dominated his letters and manuscripts of that decade: "When the anchor is down," he promised his wife Livy, "then I shall say: ‘Farewell—a long farewell—to business! I will never touch it again!’ I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it, I will swim in ink! Joan of Arc—but all this is premature; the anchor is not down yet."¹ Hardly by coincidence, mutinous crews, becalmed vessels, and shipwreck debris floated about in his subsequent writings, for Clemens’ frequent voyages between his family’s temporary home in Europe and his business headquarters in New York City proved futile, as everyone knows, and he was obliged to endure the ignominy of public exposure as a financial failure.

In the last four decades, however, a succession of scholars has filled out the record of Clemens’ business affairs with fascinating and incredible fullness, and their findings now afford fresh perspectives on this often-unappealing side of Clemens’ life. Samuel C. Webster interwove a family biography among the extant letters he chose to publish in an influential book titled Mark Twain, Business Man (1946),² principally a good-natured defense of Webster’s father, Clemens’ one-time publisher Charles L. Webster, against charges Clemens had raised in autobiographical dictations that appeared in Mark Twain in Eruption (1940). But Hamlin Hill complicated the matter by editing Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers (1967) and noting in the introduction that "the fact is that Charles L. Webster’s letters to his uncle, which Samuel Webster unfortunately did not examine while editing his volume, become increasingly dictatorial, overweening, and almost hysterical. . . . An accurate portrait of Charley Webster lies somewhere between the one in Mark Twain in Eruption and the one in Mark Twain, Business Man."³

Still, Clemens’ relationships with his publishers and business agents were conducive to financial mismanagements and misun-

derstandings. They certainly began inauspiciously. In a study of Clemens’ first publisher, Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss (1964), Hamlin Hill argues that Bliss "was coldly calculating, he was happy to cheat both authors and customers with a repertory of the worst tricks of salesmanship, and he apparently juggled books with the skill of a master accountant."⁴ In brief, Clemens learned the rudiments of literary business under the tutelage of a tougher, less ethical, more opportunistic taskmaster than Horace Bixby had ever been in teaching a cub pilot the course of the Mississippi River. That harsher education had begun on 21 November 1867 with a letter from Bliss soliciting "a work of some kind" from newspaper correspondent Clemens (MT&EB, p. 23). Although Clemens flirted with the idea of changing publishers during the mid-1870s, Bliss managed to sell 337,902 volumes for Mark Twain between 1869 and 1879 (p. 157); it was only Bliss’ death on 28 September 1880 that truly freed Clemens, for the next fourteen years, from the American Publishing Company.

Dennis Welland’s book about the English publication and reception of Clemens’ works, Mark Twain in England (1978), also sheds light on Clemens’ view of the publishing field. From the correspondence files of Chatto & Windus, Welland pieced together an image of Clemens as an impatient author who wanted his books manufactured and distributed as instantaneously as every writer always desires, but who found his match in canny Andrew Chatto, who parted Clemens from Routledge & Sons and kept him mollified if not entirely content for more than thirty-five years. Glancing over a list of Clemens’ major publishers—Charles H. Webb (1834–1905), who brought out the Jumping Frog volume in 1867; Elisha Bliss (1822–1880) and his American Publishing Company, 1869–1881; James R. Osgood (1826–1892), an ethical but ambitious man miscast in the subscription trade; Andrew Chatto (1841–1913), who signed Clemens to an initial contract on 24 May 1876, guided by Moncure Conway, and whose Chatto & Windus firm published at least 910,000 volumes for Clemens, if we include John Camden Hotten’s piracies before 1875; Charles L. Webster (1851–1891), who married Annie Moffett in 1875, fatefully entered his uncle Samuel Clemens’ employ in 1881, became his partner in a publishing firm in 1884, retired because of his nerves and health in 1888, and died in 1891; Frederick J. Hall, who had the misfortune to administer Charles L. Webster & Company while it labored to bring forth The Library of American Literature and survive the Panic of 1893; Francis E. "Frank" Bliss (1843-1915), who was more easily intimidated by Clemens than his father

Elisha had been, but who succeeded in obtaining Pudd’nhead Wilson, Following the Equator, and a uniform edition of Clemens’ collected writings after his bankruptcy; Frederick A. Duneka (d. 1919), who became general manager and secretary of the board of directors when George Harvey (1864–1928) assumed the presidency of Harper & Brothers, and who helped Harvey negotiate long-term contracts for acquiring Clemens’ writings—their lot hardly seems enviable. As Hamlin Hill writes, "The author ‘Mark Twain’ was dragged into this world by businessman Samuel L. Clemens; and there were some obvious internal conflicts with resulting rages (whose blasts frequently singed the publisher who happened to be standing by)." According to Professor Hill, "Clemens’ antagonism toward his publishers was merely an antagonism toward the commercial aspect of his own personality. . . . Having sacrificed genteel approval by stubbornly choosing subscription publication, Clemens blamed his publishers (in arduously intemperate language) when a volume failed or a promotion scheme fell through" (MTLP, p. 3). But the emerging picture of Clemens’ attitudes toward his publishers suggests something else as well: either the publisher owned Clemens, or Clemens owned the publisher; this author was incapable of respecting and heeding any publisher who lacked the steel to come off well in a close encounter with him. Osgood, Webster, Hall, and Frank Bliss quailed beneath Clemens’ withering scorn; Elisha Bliss, Andrew Chatto, Frederick Duneka, and George Harvey fought the prominent author toe-to-toe, earning his grudging approval and cooperation.

There is another conclusion that needs acknowledgement. Essentially Clemens’ efforts at finagling lucrative contracts for his prose were efficacious; he earned vastly more money than most of his contemporaries who wrote, and he even succeeded in keeping Elisha Bliss more watchful and honest than he might otherwise have been. Clemens’ London publisher proved especially diligent in procuring and promoting his works. His relations with most of his publishers were stormy and he wrote more letters querying points in his contracts and demanding additional concessions (and more of his letters have survived) than was typical for his day, but a large percentage of authors undergo periods of unhappiness or open dispute with their publishers. Besides, Clemens was more prolific than most writers, and he had to attend to wearisome details regarding new material.

As a publisher himself, moreover, Clemens was not exactly the unmitigated disaster that many people suppose. One biographer ob-

served, "For the first five years of its existence, the Webster company was a well-to-do concern. . . . Had Mark [Twain] confined his business speculations to publishing, he would not have got into very serious trouble."⁶ HamlinHill explains that the Library of American Literature, a worthy but expensive project, required massive subsidies, but "it is untrue that Clemens drained badly needed capital from the [Webster] Company to finance the Paige typesetter, although such a statement has often been accepted" (MTLP, p. 6). The impoverishment of rural book-buyers, trends toward urbanization, availability of trade bookstores, increases in public education—these and other reasons shrank the subscription-book market, and Charles L. Webster & Company, strapped by its costly Library undertaking, was unable to switch smoothly to the retail book trade. Clemens’ sojourn in Europe beginning in 1891 was ill-timed, since he "knew the subtleties and intricacies of subscription publication from over twenty years of personal experience," and yet he "helped choose (or veto) [no] more than a handful of the new books" that Webster & Company issued toward the end (MTLP, p. 300).

Of course it was indisputably unwise for an author of Clemens’ productivity and gifts, susceptible to fits and starts of inspiration, to occupy so many of his waking hours with the mundane worries of a publishing enterprise. And once having made that commitment, he unquestionably should have lavished all of his remaining energies on that single business, forsaking other temptations. For it was not his publishing company that placed his name in the annals of colossal, heart-breaking financial failures. He was a competent if not brilliant strategist, and his company had several stunning successes—the publication of General Grant’s Memoirs, most notably—that could have satisfied the appetites of a normal business entrepreneur.

When people deplore Clemens’ inclinations toward ‘‘business," they really mean something other than his close attention to his publishing arrangements; they are speaking of his repeated, risk-taking investments in companies and inventions that drained off so much of his authorial earnings. And what a sad inventory of misplaced confidence this is. The epitome of these gambles was his purchase in February 1880 of what he believed to be the controlling interests in the patent for a chalk-plate process to engrave illustrations, Kaolatype (MTBus, p. l42)—an invention combining his affection for the printing trade, a heritage of his earliest livelihood, and his interests as an author of illustrated books; requiring endless amounts of "final" outlays for perfecting the remaining flaws to render the method commercially marketable; encountering sales re-

sistance from clients he had presumed to be "definite" purchasers; incurring constant, maddening delays in production; fighting off attempts to reorganize and recapitalize the investment company, developments that threatened to leave Clemens and the original investors out in the cold; and a gradual relinquishing of his hopes, despite sporadic efforts to revitalize those once-brilliant prospects. The jubilant letter that Clemens wrote to Elisha Bliss on 20 March 1880 could stand as the prototype of numerous other schemes, foremost the Paige typesetter: "I own near four-fifths of the [Kaolatype] stock—paid cash for it," Clemens boasted, "and have agreed to lend the Co a liberal and sufficient sum every month for 3 months to get the thing going. (But I did this latter thing after I had myself hit upon a new application of the patent which I think puts non-success about out of the question.)" (MTLP, p. 121). On 9 December 1881, Pamela Moffett wrote ominously to her son Samuel Moffett that Clemens’ Kaolatype process "is very small indeed, compared to another enterprise Sam has set Charley [Webster] to work on. This is some new invention. They want to start with a capital of five hundred thousand dollars, a stock company. Charley took a lot of prominent men to Hartford the other day to examine the machines" (MLTP, p. 187 n. 1). There is no need to rehearse the dreary chronicle of Clemens’ rising hopes in that typesetting machine and its precipitous defeat in 1894, a ghastly exercise in self-delusion that outlasted, but failed to rescue, Clemens’ beleaguered publishing firm, which declared bankruptcy on 18 April 1894. Henry H. Rogers concluded that the Paige project was hopeless in December 1894, and by 2 January 1895 Clemens was writing that he must "soberly realize that my ten-year dream is actually dissolved" (MTHHR, p. 115).

These two large disappointments, coupled with his failure as a publisher, were only the most visible objects in Clemens’ stream of investment adventures; others bobbed along in the eddies and floods of his surplus funds: the Independent Watch Company of Fredonia, New York ($3,500 in 1881), whose directors he later designated as "the Watch thieves" (MTBus, p. 199), the Crown Point Iron Company, the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad (MTBus, p. 178); the Jewell Pin Company, a patented bed-clamp to keep children from kicking off their covers at night, the design for which Clemens fretted about in 1884 and 1885, a history game, a self-pasting scrapbook, generally cited as his one eminently successful business speculation. Incorrigible, he never learned a lesson about financial investing; in March 1898 he tried to convince an advisor that the American patent rights would be worth acquiring (at $1,500,000) for Jan Szczepanik’s

ingenious textile-designing machine, which Clemens had seen in Vienna (MTHHR, 327–332). He plunged heedlessly into a Plasmon health food craze while still dripping wet from his nightmarish dunking in the Paige fiasco. By 1900 he was elected a director of the Plasmon syndicate and was promoting its stock in the United States; six years later, two "rascals" had formed a new company that would eliminate Clemens. While under the guidance of Standard Oil tycoon Henry H. Rogers, Clemens’ stock-portfolio began to swell handsomely with blue-chip dividends: Brooklyn Union Gas, American Smelting Company, U.S. Steel, Borden’s Condensed Milk, International Navigation Company, Anaconda Copper Mining Company, Union Pacific (26 May 1904 MTHHR pp 392, 568–569). Yet in 1905 Clemens considered investing in the Insole Company, and in 1905 he invested $5,000 in the Hope-Jones Organ Company of New York and Elmira, urged on by his nephew Jervis Langdon, its president and treasurer (MTHHR, pp. 623, 624 n. 1). He also bought shares in the Tabard Inn Corporation, the Formaline Company, the American Mechanical Cashier Company, Koy-lo Company, the International Spiral Pin Company (MTHHR, p. 623)—without significant returns. On 3 August 1902 he reported to Henry Rogers his elation over a sterling offer: he could buy $50,000 worth of bonds in the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railroad. Two days later Rogers replied with admirable restraint: "In the first place, it would seem quite natural to inquire as to the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railroad. In view of the fact that Poor’s Manual makes no reference to the railroad, it is reasonably fair to assume that it is not of any great prominence. I certainly would never undertake to enter into the arrangement for myself. . . . Do be careful. It is much easier to keep out of trouble than it is to get out. You and I know that of old," he added tiredly (MTHHR, pp. 493–495).

What is the pattern of these pathetic gambles? Apparently Clemens sought opportunities to get in at the middle stage of a new undertaking, wanting to play the part of a moderately wealthy capitalist who underwrites the final expenses for polishing up a new invention or project, and then reaps tremendous dividends (improbable as that scenario may seem). But he always got called on for "just a little more" initial investment—and so he would throw away good money after bad. However, it is necessary to remember that the Paige machine was not exactly a crackpot venture; virtually every knowledgeable person in the printing industry in the 1880s and 1890s expected that the burgeoning technology in keyboards and metals would eventually replace the manual labor of setting type

with a machine-operation. Clemens’ fault lay in greedily consenting to contribute so much capital in order to obtain a lion’s share of anticipated returns, and in not pressing the Mergenthaler team for a reciprocal trade-off in stock that would have enabled everybody to win the race one way or another. Let it also be said that at least Clemens had the good sense to consult Henry Rogers about his troubles, and to heed Rogers’ words whenever his financial mentor was able to advise him on business affairs.

All of Clemens’ monetary dealings—his publishing company and his stock-purchases alike—are punctuated throughout by oddly discerning, intermittent desires to retire from such tedious, risky enterprises. In February 1867 his tone was only half jocular when scolding his brother Orion for placing "business in my hands when he knows I abhor everything in the nature of business & don’t even attend to my own."⁷ "I won’t talk business," he adjured Charles L. Webster on 29 June 1883, "I will perish first. I hate the very idea of business, in all its forms" (MTBus, p. 217). To the same manager he wrote on 19 January 1885, concerning the bed-clamp that he had been anxious to manufacture: "Dear Charley—No, it is business

—and so I don’t want anything to do with it. You are there to take care of my business, not make business for me to take care of. Your security is perfect, but I want no business that I must look personally after" (MTLP, p. 180). Of course Webster would have jeopardized his "security" if he had taken this injunction at its face-value: Clemens meant that he didn’t wish to be bothered by questions at that particular moment; actually he demanded minute accounts of expenditures and decisions for nearly every transaction. Too late, on 2 June 1893, Clemens plaintively begged Fred Hall: "Get me out of business! And I will be Yours forever gratefully" (MTLP, p. 344).

Most of his adult life Clemens searched after, and scolded, and abandoned a series of these "loyal assistant" figures like Webster and Hall. Their duties were often more onerous than Charles Warren Stoddard’s secretarial assignment to paste clippings about the Tichborne Clairmont trial into scrapbooks in 1873 and 1874. His habit of relying on business agents began with pathetic, "Dear Bro" Orion, who by the 1870s had proven that he could never make a living without close supervision. The necessity of overseeing Orion’s every move established Clemens’ lifelong practice of supervising each trivial aspect of a business operation, and of refusing to trust and delegate responsibilities to his own appointed manager. Orion Clemens, a broken man early in his life, sought advice and reassurance from his younger brother at every stage—business

negotiations seemed foreign to his visionary nature. But Orion was at least a devoted if unimaginative automaton. After Orion moved back to Keokuk, Iowa, bewildered and uncertain about his brother’s opinion of his aptitudes, Charley Webster took his turn in Clemens’ fire-pit of errand-running and contract-shuffling. Fred J. Hall fared little better. Only in the realm of fiction, understandably, did Clemens find his ideal of a business agent, Clarence, described in chapter 10 of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889):

"Clarence was twenty-two, now, and was my head executive, my right hand. He was a darling; he was equal to anything; there wasn’t anything he couldn’t turn his hand to."⁸ As a result, when the Boss discovers another man with "loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders" (chapter 13), he "wrote on a piece of bark—Put him in the Man-Factory—and gave it to him, and said—‘Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into the hands of Amyas le Poulet, whom I call Clarence, and he will understand.’" Clarence has charge of "the beginnings of all sorts of industries" and of "training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts—experts in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling." These endeavors were conducted as surreptitiously as the stealthy labors to perfect the Paige machine or the efforts to combat a stock take-over; the populace was unaware: "Unsuspected by this dark land, I had the civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very nose! It was fenced away from the public view, but there it was, a gigantic and unassailable fact—and to be heard from, yet, if I lived and had luck."

In real life, however, Clemens had the services of the fallible Fred Hall in 1889. By at least 1887 he had also begun to employ Franklin G. Whitmore (1846–1926), a Hartford real estate and insurance agent, to take care of everything from magazine subscriptions to the sale of the Hartford house in 1903. Isabel V. Lyon’s tenure of service after 1904 demonstrated just how far Clemens could go in expecting "business" assistance from his personal secretaries. Curiously, the procession of factotum figures in Clemens’ fiction often hark back to his earliest print-shop days, when he himself was an assistant, first to Joseph Ament and then to Orion Clemens. And secrecy is stressed; in "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger," written between 1902 and 1908, sixteen-year-old August Feldner is an apprentice to Heinrich Stein, who discreetly operates a printing shop in the moldering Rosenfeld castle: "My master was a printer. His was a new art, being only thirty or forty years old, and almost unknown in Austria. Very few persons in our secluded region had

ever seen a printed page, few had any very clear idea about the art of printing.
. . . Yet we had to conduct our business with some degree of privacy, on account of the Church. The Church was opposed to the cheapening of books and the indiscriminate dissemination of knowledge."⁹ The person to whom Clemens addressed confidential queries and directives during the final one and a half decades of his life was a most unlikely candidate for this role: millionaire Wall Street financier Henry H. Rogers. As Hamlin Hill noted, "The most puzzling aspect of his relationship with Rogers was Clemens’ apparently total insensitivity about his demands on the oil magnate’s time and energies. Almost as if Rogers and his executive secretary, Miss Harrison, were office boys, Clemens requested them to make stock purchases and sales, dividend collections, and engage in complicated business manipulations for him. Miss Harrison was an agent who had access to the Clemens’ safety-deposit box; Roger and she both had powers of attorney and negotiated literary contracts as well as purely financial investments."¹⁰ Perhaps "puzzling" is not the correct word for the kind of business association Clemens had preferred since he first utilized his brother’s otherwise wasted years. But to Rogers himself Clemens gave ungrudging credit: "You and I are a team: you are the most useful man I know, and I am the most ornamental" (MTHHR, p. 310). More than a trace of humility, resignation, and self-knowledge is recognizable in that remark, which suggests Clemens’ awareness that he lacked the expertise and the qualifications for a full-time business career.

Considering these occasional glimmers of sanity on the subject, and in view of Livy Clemens’ nervousness about her husband’s tangled finances, what would drive a respected, affluent prominent author to take those risks? In the first place, he thought of his business moves as logical extensions of his authorship; encouraged by his training in journalism, he became accustomed to conceiving of his craft as a type of commercial product rather than an artistically inspired creation. After all, he had been paid by the "em" as a printing compositor in St. Louis and New York City,¹¹ by the trip or month as a pilot on the river, by the ounce as a miner, by the column as a newspaperman, by the letter as a travel correspondent, by the public appearance as a platform lecturer; this background prepared the way for his concept of the author as monied capitalist. Even more significant, perhaps, he had scarcely ever been free from financial concerns since his earliest teens. Only someone schooled by one of America’s depression-eras can probably appreciate what amount of funds it would take to placate Clemens’ anxiety after the

ghastly series of experiences that seared his memory beginning in 1843, when the Clemenses’ Hannibal property was auctioned off to satisfy creditors and the family had to lease a city lot for a house from John Marshall Clemens’ distant cousin, affluent James Clemens, Jr., of St. Louis. Upon the death of John Marshall, the family became literally dependent on James’ good favor in providing them a place to live, and they pinned much hope on his benefactions; very likely Samuel Clemens was therefore mortified in 1855 when his elder relative refused to help him become a river pilot and advised him instead to "stick to his present trade or art" (N&J, 1: 26, 36). There would never be sufficient enough, or reliable enough, income to erase those bitter memories of vulnerability in Hannibal and St. Louis, or to allow the peace of mind that would encourage Clemens to envelop himself in a purely literary atmosphere. Haunted by experiences that followed his father’s bankruptcy and death, Clemens pursued a line of conduct that, ironically, brought him to a point strangely reminiscent of those sad, early days, when again in 1894 and 1895 he had to rely on the goodwill of his creditors and the benevolence of his benefactor, Henry H. Rogers. Four decades had brought him back to the same anguished conversations that probably took place around widow Jane Lampton Clemens’ dining table. Small wonder that Clemens’ fiction began to probe the possibility of cycles of dreams.

The amounts of money that his insecurity demanded were far from being satisfied by the publishing industry. Few huge fortunes had been made in American publishing up until then, and even as the twentieth century approached, the profit on books was generally uncertain and slow in accruing. Meantime, such entrepreneurs as Gould, Fisk, Rockefeller, Colt, Remington, Edison, Carnegie, and numerous others had given the process of fortune-making the appearance of being utterly feasible. Someone with Clemens’ psychological needs and active temperament found it excruciating to sit on the sidelines while major technological and financial events took place all around him. Another earlier influence can be mentioned as well: Clemens’ mining-camp days in Nevada and California between 1861 and 1865 had taught him to view his livelihood as a sort of gamble, and he would always be repeating the pattern of those freer years—watching for his chance to buy shares in a potentially big strike, a bonanza. To his mind, therefore, the notion of gaining lasting financial security would always be strictly a matter of timing. This partially accounts for the urgency with which he pushed each investment project, and the anger he manifested at

any delay. Virtually monomaniacal regarding each new venture, he promptly abandoned preceding enterprises; this latest one would assuredly make his permanent fortune, if he could only push people along in time. Significantly, he seemed to take pleasure in the very element of risk involved in each adventure in speculation, as though the situation recreated for his psyche the carefree days in miners’ cabins. Bored by routine, conservative policies of money-making, he liked his reputation as a high-stakes roller. Unfortunately, while his friends were often willing to let him win games of skill such as billiards in his own house, strangers gladly took his money in the business world.

A number of recurrent, possibly compulsive behavioral patterns characterized his decisions in both publishing and investing, not all of them detrimental. A partial survey might look at the following tendencies. Clemens keenly relished the clash of competing business interests, the possibility of surprise raids on astonished, complacent rivals, the jubilation after a seemingly successful coup. His metaphors in business correspondence are frequently militaristic. For one thing, he was convinced that cheating was rampant among the men with whom he dealt; he suspected that they were providing him with figures arrived at dishonestly, or that they were holding back crucial information, as Elisha Bliss sometimes did. He was implacable in repudiating those like Charles H. Webb, "liar and thief," Edward H. House, "gigantic liar . . . & . . . inconceivable hound," and James W. Paige, whom he wished to catch in a steel trap "and watch that trap till he died," men he decided had taken advantage of his trusting nature. Possibly for this reason, he invariably tried to convince his personal friends to join in his investment schemes, needing this reassurance and often putting a strain on social relationships by importuning them to cash in on the opportunities he was offering.

In all of this activity, Clemens spread his resources too thinly again and again, trying to be not only an author but a publisher as well, not only a publisher but a major backer of inventors, a Wall Street expert, and a celebrated public performer. Considering the extent of these proceedings, he never sufficiently surrounded himself with competent advisors in Nook Farm, where he actually had no adequate office. Instead he persisted in hiring "yes-men" of the Charley-Clarence stamp, and stationing them in New York City. Worse yet, he played superstitious hunches as though he were gambling on a steamboat race or a mine-shaft sinking. His main surprise at news of the Paige machine failure was that "it reverses