THHE CLEMENSES WERE AT BREAKFAST when the Warrimoo tied up at Circular Quay in Sydney Harbor on September 16, 1895. Before they had risen from the table, a reporter approached Clemens and requested an interview. Like most visitors, Clemens praised the harbor. It is, he was to write in Following the Equator, “the darling of Sydney and the wonder of the world.” Sydneysiders continue to be proud of their harbor, which they offer to show you from several points of view, including the deck of a ferry
Striking postmodern structures, like the glass tube that soars skyward from a concrete sheath, dwarf Sydney’s surviving “towers and spires and other architectural dignities and grandeurs” that Clemens described. New architectural dignities and grandeurs have arisen, including a complex that has become an Australian icon, the performing arts center known as the Sydney Opera House, poised at the harbor’s edge. With its great white roofs billowing like the sails of a clipper ship, it rivals the harbor itself as the darling of Sydney and the wonder of the world.
Clemens’s interview that morning was not his first in Sydney The night before, while the Warrimoo was anchored offshore in Watson’s Bay, the journalist Herbert Low spoke to him. Low had come out to the Warrimoo in a launch. As it bobbed up and down, he hollered up to Clemens, who leaned over the Warrimoo^ rail to respond.
According to an account of the interview, which appeared the next day, Low asked Clemens his ideas about Australia. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m ready to adopt any that seem handy. I don’t believe in going outside accepted views.” Noise submerged his next remarks, but then he said he was going to start his book about Australia right away, because “you know so much more of a country when you haven’t seen it than when you have.”
Low reported that Clemens was unwilling to fight Max O’Rell, who had challenged him to a duel Max O’Rell was the pseudonym of the French humorist Léon Paul Blouet, whose books, translated into English, were widely read in the English-speaking world and whose lecture tour of Australia, a few years earlier, was a happy memory in the minds of Low’s readers.
Clemens had recently aroused O’Rell's ire by publishing an unfavorable review of an American travelogue written by Paul Bourget, an influential French novelist and critic. Clemens wrote the review after he and his family had left their beloved Hartford home to live in France in order to economize and while he was half-mad with worry about his finances. This state of affairs, along with his dislike of the French, may have sharpened his irritation with the book, which made sweeping, negative generalizations about American life based on a brief and biased exposure to it. Clemens claimed in his review that if a foreigner wanted to learn about a country, he should read that country’s novels. When Clemens went to France, he said, he took along a copy of La Terre. This remark particularly infuriated O’Rell, inasmuch as Zola’s novel is a grim, repulsive portrait of French peasant life.
O’Rell was so enraged that he published a mean-spirited personal attack on Clemens, whom he unjustly accused of having “settled his fortune on his wife in order to avoid meeting his creditors.” O’Rell’s article appeared in March of 1895, only four months before the Clemenses embarked on their world tour.
Now, when asked about the proposed duel, Clemens was reported to have dismissed it. “I can disgrace myself nearer home, if I felt so inclined, than by going out to have a row with a Frenchman. The fact of the matter is I think Max O’Rell wanted an advertisement, and thought the best way to get it was to draw me. But I’m far too old a soldier for that sort ofthing.”
He continued jabbing at O’Rell the next morning, when he told the reporter who interviewed him on board the Warrimoo that Max O’Rell’s challenge was nothing but “twaddle.” Unlike Bourget, whom Clemens characterized as “a man of great literary reputation and capacity,” O’Rell as a writer had “no rank whatever.” Before he could continue, Mrs. Clemens placed “a delicate hand” over her husband’s mouth.
As for the interview the night before, during which Clemens was quoted as having called out, “Don’t forget my soulful eyes and deeply intelligent expression,” it is possible that most of his comments were invented. Thirteen years later, in 1908, Low wrote that the interview was largely imagined. “After a few attempts at questions, I gave it up — I could neither be heard nor hear. I bawled out, ‘Mr. Twain, I’ll have to imagine this interview,’ to which he screamed in a lull of the winch, ‘Go ahead, my boy; I’ve been there myself!’… Well, I imagined an interview, which, although not true, ought to have been; and no one was more pleased than Twain.”
Clemens presumably told him so when he met him the next day. Before Low’s launch returned to shore, Clemens called out, “I’ll meet you at the Australia to-morrow at eleven o’clock.”
The Australia, where the Clemenses were staying, was Sydney’s premier hotel, a palatial structure of seven stories, with marble columns supporting the ceilings of its public rooms. According to its handbook, the bar offered a “display of glass unrivalled in the colonies,” and its “experienced male dispensers of liquid refreshments” presided over a counter forty feet long.
It was at the Australia’s bar that a reporter spotted Clemens at about noon of the day of his arrival, drinking a whiskey cocktail with two men. It is likely that the reporter, who was then a freelancer and probably supplying several papers with reports of his interviews with Clemens, was Low.
Clemens, due to be photographed at a studio, invited the reporter to accompany him. Because Clemens’s agent had posted pictures of Mark Twain on every flat surface in town, he was instantly recognizable. Thirteen years later Low claimed that as he and Clemens walked about, they were “blocked by a veritable race of genteel cadgers …Men would pause, in affected abruptness, as Twain approached, then rush up to him, shake hands enthusiastically, saying something like this: ‘You are Mark Twain; I know it. Sir, it is the glory of my life to have shaken hands with you.’ “ Then they would take him aside and ask for money. These interruptions became so frequent that Clemens invented a remedy. “Approached by an enthusiastic literary admirer with a borrowing eye, he did not disclaim his identity, but after acknowledging it he would say rapidly, ‘Yes, indeed, I am Mark Twain; but I regret to say after all my labors in the literary vineyard I have arrived here in very distressed circumstances. Could you oblige me with half-a-crown till I get back to the States.’ It was a complete cure.” If this was not true, it ought to have been.
The article that appeared the next day got Clemens into trouble on several fronts. At the photographer’s studio, Clemens was shown a portrait of Sir Henry Parkes, the grand old man of Australian politics, five times premier of New South Wales, at that time a separate colony. “Mr. Clemens was delighted with the work,” wrote the reporter, “and, commenting upon the subject, said that Sir Henry had a truly splendid head, and that it was hard to believe that he could make the bitter speeches that he had heard attributed to him.” Clemens had unknowingly stepped into a line of political fire.
That summer, in a general election, Parkes had contested the seat for one of Sydney’s electoral districts. His opponent was George Reid, premier of the outgoing government. The contest was particularly bitter and marked by the grossest personal abuse. Parkes, who had long supported free trade, now advocated protectionism, the erection of customs tariffs in order to defend local agricultural and industrial interests. Reid, who championed free trade, won the seat by a tiny margin, but his party attained an overwhelming majority.
Asked his opinion about free trade, Clemens innocently said that his instinct told him that protectionism was wrong. “Surely it is wrong that on the [West Coast of the United States] they should be compelled to bring their iron from the east when they might get it landed at a much lower price direct from foreign ships at their own door.” His chapter on free trade in A Connecticut Yankee, he said, was written at a time “when one of the New York papers was publishing a great deal about the progress of New South Wales under free trade.”
One hundred years later, it is the conventional wisdom that free trade stimulates economic development, at least in the short run, and Australia’s ruling Liberal Party subscribes to this view. But even today the controversy is not dead. John Howard, the opposition leader, charges that in its enthusiasm for integration with the global economy, the government is costing Australia its soul. Local icons such as Arnotts Biscuits and the Speedo swimsuit are now owned by American companies. If Clemens’s judgment is to be trusted, it is perhaps a bit late in the day to worry about foreign influence. “The Australians did not seem to me to differ noticeably from Americans, either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections, or general appearance,” he was to write in Following the Equator.
Having advocated free trade, Clemens stumbled again by commenting on land use. He said that the proposal to “let the Government own the land, and lease it to people who would work it, and not leave it lying idle” had in principle “a measure of justice. But I do not see how so prodigious a revolution like that could be brought about without stopping dead and starting again; and to do that would mean a sort of revolution that is not to be brought about in this world except by bloodshed.” Some readers construed his remarks as supporting Reid’s proposed land tax, which aimed not only at replacing revenue from customs duties, which the government wanted to reduce, but also at breaking up the great land monopolies.
Perhaps sensing that he had blundered, Clemens told the reporter that “having thoroughly established my reputation for humour by talking of politics seriously, I shall stop.” If Clemens had been in any doubt as to the propriety of discussing political matters, the Australian Star, Sydney’s protectionist paper, put him straight the next day in an infuriated editorial, which suggested that he ask the premier to preside at his first lecture. Alluding to Clemens’s advocacy of international copyright law, the paper noted that “he wants plenty of protection for his own books.”
Clemens, awake to the folly of alienating potential ticket buyers, became more cautious in his statements to the press. Thereafter, all he was willing to say publically about politicians was that “it is easy to see that they are able men, and remarkable men, or they would not be in these positions.”
If Clemens’s remarks on Parkes, protectionism, and land use dumped him into simmering water, his comments on his fellow American writer Bret Harte turned up the flame. Little read today except for a few well-anthologized short stories, Harte was then a major figure. Asked his opinion about Harte, Clemens said he detested him because his work was shoddy. “His forte is pathos, but there should be no pathos which does not come out of a man’s heart. He has no heart, except his name, and I consider he has produced nothing that is genuine. He is artificial. That opinion, however, must be taken with some allowance, for … I do not care for the man.”
Clemens’s hostility to Harte was an abiding passion. They had become friends in San Francisco in 1864, when Clemens was twenty-eight and Harte a year younger. At the time Clemens was a wild journalist from Nevada, whereas Harte was the leader of the city’s young writers, the editor of a distinguished literary magazine, and the city’s foremost literary critic and arbiter of taste. According to Clemens, Harte helped him revise The Innocents Abroad, his irreverent account of a European and Holy Land tour, a book that became one of the great best-sellers of the nineteenth century, and the one that made Clemens’s reputation. “Harte read all the MS of the ‘Innocents’ & told me what passages, paragraphs & chapters to leave out — & I followed orders strictly,” Clemens wrote toward the end of 1870. And if his letter of a few months later is to be believed, Harte influenced him more generally. Harte “trimmed & trained & schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs & chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.”
In the early years of their friendship, Clemens admired Harte's work. When annotating a collection of Harte's stories about frontier life, Clemens wrote that “The Luck of Roaring Camp” was “nearly blemishless.” In 1871, after that collection became a best-seller and Harte's poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” better known as “The Heathen Chinee,” created a sensation, The Atlantic Monthly offered Harte the unprecedented sum of $10,000 to write a series of pieces over a one-year period. He moved to the East in a princely progress.
By this time both men were famous, but the Eastern literary establishment, from which Clemens sought approval, took Harte's work more seriously than his own. At those literary luncheons and dinners in and around Boston that both men attended in 1871, Clemens was merely another guest, whereas Harte was the star. In that year Clemens wrote to his brother that “I will ‘top’ Bret Harte again or bust.”
Five years later Harte proposed to Clemens that they collaborate on a play that would serve as a vehicle for Ah Sin, the Chinese laundryman from Harte’s “The Heathen Chinee.” Harte’s play, Two Men from Sandy Bar, had contained a small part for a Chinese man, and although the play had failed, the actor Charles Parsloe, who performed the Chinese character, won acclaim in that role. Perhaps Parsloe could be persuaded to impersonate Ah Sin. Harte, chronically in debt and desperate for money, saw a collaboration with Clemens as a quick solution to his financial woes. Clemens, although a best-selling author and the husband of an heiress, was living beyond his means and felt poor. As always, he was attracted by a fast-money scheme. Besides, a few months earlier, his creative tank dry, he had abandoned work on Huckleberry Finn and was now in the literary doldrums. Remembering the success of “The Heathen Chinee,” mindful of Parsloe’s triumph, and anticipating public interest in the collaboration of two leading writers on a play that featured a famous character, he agreed.
It was during their collaboration, during the fall and winter of 1876, or shortly thereafter, that the relationship between the two men ruptured byond repair. Each man angered the other. Harte may have offended Mrs. Clemens during a visit in December 1876. “Tell Mrs. Clemens,” he wrote after his visit, “that she must forgive me for my heterodoxy — that until she does I shall wear sackcloth (fashionably cut), and that I would put ashes on my forehead but that Nature has anticipated me.” During that stay, Harte asked for a loan, which Clemens refused on the grounds of poverty. Harte, who already owed Clemens a considerable sum, felt hurt when he learned that Clemens subsequently loaned the same amount to Parsloe. Harte was insulted by Clemens’s offer of twenty-five dollars a week plus room and board to collaborate on a second play. They disagreed about revisions to Ah Sin. Earlier, at Clemens’s urging, Harte had submitted a novel to Elisha Bliss, Clemens’s publisher, and when it sold poorly, Harte accused Clemens of conspiring with Bliss to promote Tom Sawyer at the expense of the other books on the list. Harte was right. Clemens, a director of the firm, had urged Bliss to do so. By the time Ah Sin opened in New York, in the summer of 1877, the two men were no longer speaking to each other. In view of their troubled collaboration, it is perhaps no wonder that the play failed.
“The holy passion of Friendship,” wrote Clemens, “is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.” Unpaid debts have ruined many a friendship, but it is unlikely that this was the primary cause of the break. It is more likely that Clemens was envious of Harte's critical success, resented being called a follower of Harte (whose stories of frontier life had stimulated public interest in the West, which Clemens exploited in Roughing It), disliked being in Harte’s debt for having “trimmed and trained and schooled” him, and was irritated by what he viewed as Harte's condescension, now that a teacher-pupil relationship was no longer appropriate. His feelings finally erupted, burying in boiling lava his admiration for Harte's work and his affection for the man.
When the reporter in Sydney asked Clemens his opinion of Harte, Mrs. Clemens was not present to prevent the fusillade of invective that followed. (A few days later, when she walked into a room in which he was being interviewed, she said, “I think it would be better if your wife saw your interviews in print before they were published.”) Perhaps Clemens did not know that in Australia, Harte’s work was popular and critically admired, or that, off and on for twenty years, plays based on Harte's stories had been performed in Sydney and Melbourne. The newspapers’ report of Clemens’s outburst was followed for several days by editorials and letters to the editor vigorously defending Harte.
One reader, possibly in a sly allusion to Max O’Rell, suggested that Clemens had sought “a mild … form of advertising” in lambasting Harte. He thought it likely that Clemens and Harte would probably “go around the corner … and over gin cocktails or some other equally abominable American invention, have ‘some laughs.’ “
The storm aroused by Clemens’s remarks about Harte helped to keep Mark Twain’s name before the public, and may even have stimulated ticket sales. For a performer, unfavorable publicity is better than no publicity at all. Sydney’s Protestant Hall, seating at least 2,000, was “crammed from floor to ceiling” at his first At Home, as his performances were called, and the hall was equally jammed during his subsequent appearances.
It is perhaps ironic that At Home should have described performances so far from home. But whether he himself or his manager Robert Sparrow Smythe proposed it, the term suggested perfectly the unstudied informality, spontaneity, and ease which he strove to project. His audiences helped him to produce this illusion. They felt, according to one reviewer, “that an old friend —- a personal friend, who had been speaking words of wit and wisdom to them from away back — had come to town.”
His first appearance elicited a roar of welcome when he walked quietly onto the stage. The Australian Star, which, a few days before, had chided him bitterly, reported “such an ovation, such an outburst of uncontrollable enthusiasm as but rarely comes within the experience of the average man. The man’s work and the feeling of it was evidently in the hearts of his audience, who not only cheered but waved hats and handkerchiefs as he stepped out behind the Stars and Stripes.”
Protestant Hall, the scene of Clemens’s triumph, survives today, gray, dilapidated, and boarded up. According to a fireman at the brick firehouse across the street, Protestant Hall closed about ten years ago, after serving as headquarters for the Australian Workers’ Union. The firehouse was built in 1888. Above its central door, a sculpted bust of Queen Victoria still contemplates the scene. One hundred years ago, the queen gazed at theatergoers crowding in to see Mark Twain. Their roars of welcome and applause were loud enough for even a head of stone to note.
One hundred years later, Alice and I wait for Mark Twain to appear on stage at Sydney’s Lookout Theatre. The auditorium is tiny, holding not 2,000 but thirty, although every seat is taken. Polite applause greets the performer, a middle-aged South African actor who is impersonating the master in one of his At Homes. His head encased in a white wig, a mustache fitted under his nose, he is dressed not in the white tie and formal black evening suit that Clemens wore for his performances, but in a white suit with a cream vest. (Clemens became famous for his white suits, but it was not for another ten years that he extended their use beyond the summer. According to his longtime servant Katy Leary, “he made up his mind, when he was seventy he could do as he darned pleased and nobody would dare say anything to him. So he was going to wear white for the rest of his life.”)
Tonight the actor takes his pieces from Clemens’s writings and autobiographical dictations. We recognize one item that Clemens used in his performances, the story from The Innocents Abroad in which the young Clemens, spending the night in his father’s office, gradually becomes aware of a corpse lying on the floor. “I went out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me; I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it.” The audience chuckles half-heartedly.
In Following the Equator, Clemens tells of “lecture-doubles” who, pretending to be Mark Twain, performed before unsuspecting American audiences. He even heard of another impostor operating in Australia. In 1881, on the day President Garfield was shot, Mrs. Clemens received a letter from Melbourne. The writer hoped that her grief would be assuaged by the knowledge that her husband’s Australian lecture tour had been a great success and that the whole population mourned his untimely death, as she would have already learned from the newspapers. Although the writer had not arrived in Melbourne in time to view the body, he did have the unhappy privilege of serving as a pallbearer.
According to Following the Equator, when Clemens arrived in Sydney fourteen years later, he asked journalists about the swindle. He was curious because “if the people should say that I was a dull, poor thing compared to what I was before I died, it would have a bad effect on business.” But to Clemens’s surprise, the journalists had never heard of the impostor. Neither, he claimed, had the journalists in Melbourne. The reader is kept in suspense for several chapters before the “mystery” is resolved.
In fact Clemens invented most of the mystery himself, although there was a kernel of truth to it. The 1881 letter of condolence was from Reginald Cholmondeley, who had entertained the Clemenses eight years before at Condover, his splendid Elizabethan house near Shrewsbury, and who was yachting around the world for pleasure when he wrote that letter to Mrs. Clemens as a practical joke. Clemens wrote back to Cholmondeley: “Being dead I might be excused from writing letters, but I am not that kind of a corpse.”
The South African actor, at any rate, is quite alive. Influenced by the tradition of modern standup comics, he sprinkles his routines with fillers such as “you know” and “seriously.” He makes no effort to approach Mark Twain’s technique, the deadpan expression, the slow delivery, the delicate pause. His performance, at best mildly amusing, reminds us that Clemens’s stupendous effect depended not upon the content of his stories but upon the manner of their telling.