INTRODUCTION

Ron Powers

The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day is far from the greatest novel about Washington ever written. It fails to reach the genre standard set, say, by Gore Vidal in Washington, D.C. That said, The Gilded Age is a fascinating and rewarding read: fascinating especially to lovers of its famous co-author.

In the spring of 1873, the thirty-six-year-old Samuel Clemens was already celebrated as the journalist, humorist, and lecturer Mark Twain. Here, the reader can watch him make his first uncertain foray into the novel form, clinging to the arm of his co-writer, Charles Dudley Warner. Scarcely conscious yet of his prodigious literary gifts, Mark Twain is feeling his way toward them by instinct: he’s assembled the tools and techniques of his popular sketches, and is refitting them into the machinery of fiction. These tools—largely disdained by “literary” novelists of the time—include a richly suggestive personal memory; a near-photographic attention to endless varieties of people as they perform their labor, or professions, or varieties of scam and duplicity; and an infallible ear for the ways in which people speak—and, in their speech, reveal themselves.

His instincts are as inspired as they are unconventional: construction of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer via these same appliances is little more than a year away, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will follow.

This “dress rehearsal” of Mark Twain’s great fictional career is reason enough to recommend The Gilded Age. As a bonus, the novel rewards anyone curious to discover how backroom deals, sexual intrigue, and high-powered deception differed between the Washington of 130 years ago and the Washington of today. (Quick hint: not much.)

Influential as a cultural artifact well beyond its literary merits—it supplied the nickname for the era of wealth, greed, scandal, and corruption symbolized by the figure of Boss Tweed, and it served to invent the Washington-novel genre—The Gilded Age happened almost by accident. It sprang into being out of an impulsive hearthside challenge in the Christmas season of 1872.

On this evening, Sam and Olivia Clemens were entertaining their next-door neighbors at Nook Farm, near Hartford, Charles Warner and his wife, Susan. The after-dinner talk had turned to the novels the two women were currently reading. The menfolk could not resist needling them over the quality of their choices. One of the wives adroitly froze those literary smirks with the suggestion that perhaps the gentlemen thought they could write a better novel? A friend of Warner’s who heard the tale later wrote, “Thereupon both Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Warner began to twit Mark Twain; they made all manner of good-natured fun of [The Innocents Abroad], called it an accidental hit, and finally defying him to write another like it.” ¹

Clemens and Warner vowed to write a novel together, each man handing the manuscript back to the other when he’d completed a chapter. The two would read their work to the wives each week, and challenge them to guess which part was written by which husband. They hit on the novel’s setting almost at once, an exotic one by genteel contemporary standards: political Washington.

They made for an odd couple of inside-the-Carriageway experts— on the surface, at least. Warner was a literary critic and writer of whimsical suburban essays and books along the lines of My Summer in a Garden. As co-owner of the Hartford Courant, he kept a close eye on the nation’s increasingly corrupt capital; what he observed outraged his reformist soul. Yet his considerable passion for social justice was muted under a rigidly Victorian syntax, which one reviewer had described as “dainty.”

No one would ever accuse Warner’s host of being dainty. Only six years removed from his freewheeling years as a jackleg journalist in Nevada and California, Sam Clemens had fashioned a rough-and-tumble, sharply mimetic voice to deliver his biting newspaper satire. Sam Clemens’s outrage was far less constrained than his partner’s by any “polite” instinct; and it was informed by observation incalculably more intense and intimate than Warner’s or any of his contemporaries, save perhaps for Walt Whitman. In certain important ways—ways enabled by those working-journalist “tools” of his—the provincial Clemens knew Washington far more intimately than did his urbane eastern friend.

The acute observing had begun when young Sam Clemens first hit Washington as a rustic eighteen-year-old in February 1854. This generally unknown visit was a stop in his astonishing two-thousand-mile odyssey outward from the Hannibal of his boyhood and then back to the Mississippi Valley. The rustic boy had negotiated several railroad connections, a stagecoach ride, a twenty-six-hour layover in Chicago, and a steamship voyage eastward across Lake Erie. He’d picked up printing jobs in New York and Philadelphia while touring the landmarks of those cities and writing letters about them to the home folks. These letters are astonishingly descriptive and knowledgeable—and authoritative—for a semi-schooled vagabond scarcely out of his mid-adolescence.

On arrival in Washington, in a snowstorm, he’d made a beeline for the seat of American government. “The public buildings of Washington are all fine specimens of architecture, and would add greatly to the embellishment of a city such as New York,” he pronounced starchily, “—but here they are sadly out of place looking like so many palaces in a Hottentot village.”² The boy found his way to the nerve center of the Capitol: the small, Victorian arena on the second floor of the North Wing.

I passed into the Senate Chamber to see the men who give the people the benefit of their wisdom and learning for a little glory and eight dollars a day. The Senate is now composed of a different material from what it once was. Its glory hath departed. Its halls no longer echo the words of a Clay, or Webster, or Calhoun . . . the void is felt. The Senators dress very plainly as they should, and . . . do not speak unless they have something to say—and that cannot be said of the Representatives. Mr. Cass [Sen. Lewis Cass, Democrat from Michigan] is a fine looking old man; Mr. Douglas, or “Young America” [Sen. Stephen Douglas, Democrat from Illinois] looks like a lawyer’s clerk, and Mr. Seward [Sen. William H. Seward, Whig from New York] is a slim, dark, bony individual, and looks like a respectable wind would blow him out of the country.³

Astounding stuff ! Especially given that the writer was not a seasoned journalist, but a kid less than ten years removed from playing hooky on the Mississippi River islands off the Hannibal shoreline.

What young Sam could not know, of course, was that the figures he described were just then wrestling with the destiny of the Union. Cass was soon to be secretary of state under President Buchanan. Douglas would become legendary as Abraham Lincoln’s rival for the presidency and in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Seward would also run for president against Lincoln, then become his wartime secretary of state and, afterward, negotiate the purchase of Alaska. On this snowy day, they were leading the debate on whether to repeal the Missouri Compromise, a debate that hastened the onset of the Civil War.

Clemens’s next sojourn in Washington came fourteen years later. By November 1867 he was an experienced journalist who had covered the legislature in Carson City, Nevada. He soaked up the congressional/White House scene as secretary to Senator William Morris Stewart, the Nevada Republican and soon-to-be author of the Fifteenth Amendment whom Sam had known out west. He wrote newspaper correspondence and got himself acquainted with political insiders all the way up to the impeachment-bound President Andrew Johnson; he also trained his closely observing eye on the new post–Civil War Washington culture: the brisk political aides and suave operatives and “society” parasites; the shady buttonholers from railroad, timber, and mining interests; the all-too-available congressmen and senators. He jotted razor-sharp thumbnail sketches of these denizens into his notebook: “—very deep eyes, sunken unshaven cheeks, thin lips . . . whole face sunken & sharp”; “strong, unshaven face hermit—woman-hater—lives up in queer way in mountains alone . . .”; “—dismally & drearily homely, & when he smiles it is like the breaking up of a hard winter.”⁴ He toyed with aphorism: “Whisky taken into Com[mittee] rooms in demijohns & carried out in demagogues”; “Sherman—Hunt Indians—hadn’t lost any.”⁵ All of it would be there for him when it came time to start shaping his portions of The Gilded Age.

Clemens’s third and last visit prior to the project with Warner occurred in July 1870. He shook hands with President Ulysses S. Grant and revisited his old haunts, the halls and gallery of the Senate. He looked up old acquaintances, got caught up on the latest gossip, and once again filled his notebook with impressions: “Oh, I have gathered material enough for a whole book!”⁶ he wrote to Livy. Soon he would have the chance to prove it.

Mark Twain and Charles Warner piled up the pages of their Washington book through the winter and spring of 1873. By April, it was finished: a 161,000-word Siamese twin of a novel, its two dissimilar voices growing out of a single plot. It was published the following December to strong early sales despite the sputtering reviews by critics who had never seen such a creature as this.

The story opens under Sam’s pen: the transmigration of a Tennessee family, the land-burdened Si Hawkinses, to Stone’s Landing, a small Missouri river town in the 1840s. Nudging the Hawkinses along is the flamboyant backwoods speculator and loudmouth opportunist “Colonel” Beriah Sellers, a friend of Si’s. Sellers’s get-rich schemes inevitably propel him to Washington, accompanied by Hawkins’s son and daughter, Washington and Laura. Laura Hawkins, brilliant and cursed with “the fatal gift of beauty” and unlucky in love, becomes a cynical player in Washington political society. Thus she leads the reader into a demimonde of crooked senators, money-grafting lobbyists, toadying journalists, sinister bosses, and lecherous committee chairmen. By the novel’s end she has gunned down her married lover, the ex-Confederate colonel Shelby, is acquitted at trial, and sinks obligingly into illness and death. (She is one of several Gilded Age characters lifted from the headlines: the ranking femme fatale of the time, Laura D. Fair, escaped conviction in two trials for the murder of her married lover in San Francisco.)

Judge Hawkins dies after bungling several chances to sell his accursed Tennessee acreage; a pair of clean-cut young eastern land surveyors get involved in a Sellers plot to turn Stone’s Landing into a navigation-and-rail metropolis; fortunes are won and lost; crooked senators try to purchase their reelections; telegrams are sent; unsuspected identities are discovered; and the novel’s reformed malingerer, Philip Sterling, finally gets rich in coal mining.

A conventional nineteenth-century melodrama, in other words. The book’s distinction lies in the setting, and in the incisiveness of its details. Most of the latter are supplied by Mark Twain.

Although he and Warner traded off every two or three chapters, and Warner supplied a few characters as well as his knowledge of the surveyor’s art, the novel belongs mostly to the westerner. (For those interested in comparing their styles, Mark Twain wrote the first eleven chapters, then 24–25, 27–28, 30, 32–34, 36–37, 42–43, 45, 51–53, 57, and 59–62. Warner wrote 12–23, 26, 29, 31, 38–41, 44, 46–48, 50, 54–55, 58, and 63. The two men contributed equally to 35, 49, and 56.) Warner supplied many distinctive elements (including a lot of Victorian sermonizing), but well-drawn characters, narrative dynamism, and crackling dialogue were not among them. Charles Warner was a conventionally competent nineteenth-century prose writer. Mark Twain was at work creating the prose style of the century to follow.

Here is Warner doing what he did best: discoursing about the world; in this instance, upon the soul of Woman.

What capacities she has of purity, tenderness, goodness; what capacities of vileness, bitterness and evil. Nature must needs be lavish with the mother and creator of men, and centre in her all the possibilities of life. And a few critical years can decide whether her life is to be full of sweetness and light, whether she is to be the vestal of a holy temple, or whether she will be the fallen priestess of a desecrated shrine. (p. 131)

Here is Mark Twain doing what he did best: immersing his senses in the world about him, and letting it speak for itself upon the page.

“Let me help you, Washington—Lafayette pass this plate to Washington— ah, well, well, my boy, things are looking pretty bright, now, I tell you. Speculation—my! the whole atmosphere’s full of money. I wouldn’t take three fortunes for one little operation I’ve got on hand now—have anything from the casters? No? Well, you’re right, you’re right. Some people like mustard with turnips, but—now there was Baron Poniatowski—Lord, but that man did know how to live! . . . The Baron used to say, ‘Take mustard, Sellers, try the mustard,—a man can’t know what turnips are in perfection without mustard,’ . . . Yes indeed, Washington, I’ve got one little operation on hand that—take some more water—help yourself, won’t you?—help yourself, there’s plenty of it.—You’ll find it pretty good, I guess.” (pp. 79–80)

There it all is—the essence of The Gilded Age, packed into one readout from the mind of Colonel Sellers: money obsession, posturing, cunning, velocity of thought and speech, duplicity as a form of etiquette. Here, Mark Twain is combining personal memory, his gift for dialect, and what Ward Just has called his “imaginative reportage”: his blazing curiosity about how things work. The Hawkins family and their migration are closely modeled on Marshall and Jane Clemens, Sam’s parents. The Falstaffian Sellers was drawn from James Lampton, a colorful cousin of Jane’s, who once fed young Sam a turnip-and-water dinner while bloviating about grandiose schemes. Mark Twain artfully replicates that dinner, while investing Lampton/Sellers with all he has learned about the American Flim-Flam Man and his embrace of opportunism, Washington-style. Sellers and his co-creations also take the reader on a tour of (among other things) federal legislative process, power politics, railroad operation, financial systems, riverboat navigation, influence peddling, the subtle codes of Washington social/sexual etiquette, and land speculation.

The Gilded Age fascinates largely as it showcases this developing power of Mark Twain’s observational genius and his blossoming comprehension of the larger uses to which it can be applied. Thus, The Gilded Age is best enjoyed as the journey-in-progress of America’s most illustrious author—oh, and also as thinly disguised nonfiction, which, after all, is the ultimate reward of any Washington novel.

RON POWERS, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and native of Hannibal, Missouri, has written thirteen books, including Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore; Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain; and, most recently, Mark Twain: A Life. He lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

NOTES

Quoted in E. J. Edwards, “How Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner Came to Write ‘The Gilded Age,’ ” New York Evening Mail, May 5, 1910, MTL V. 5, p. 259, Op. cit.

Letter to the Muscatine, Iowa, Journal, February 17 and 18, 1854, Mark Twain’s Letters, V. 1: 1853–1866, Berkeley: The Mark Twain Project, University of California Press, p. 40.

Ibid.

Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, V. 1., Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 492–94.

Ibid., pp. 488–89.

Letter to Livy Clemens, July 8, 1870, MTL V. 4, p. 167.