The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [4]
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,