Mark Twain in Washington, D.C.: The Adventures of a Capital Correspondent

Abstract

Mark Twain is often identified with distinctive regions: the Mississippi River Valley, the Pacific slope, genteel Hartford; or otherwise noted as a citizen of the world. Largely overlooked is the time he spent in Washington, D.C. John Muller's interesting book remedies that neglect by highlighting this era in Mark Twain's early career, thus aligning the emergence of Twain's identity with the national capital's. Eminently qualified to cover these twin topics, Muller is a journalist, as Twain was, a historian, and an associate librarian at the Washingtonian Division of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library. In this slim but lively volume, he brings light to a part of Mark Twain's career that, if mentioned at all, is usually noted in passing, and he provides a portrait of a city that is just beginning to come into its own as a center of national power. The text targets the interest of all readers and does not attend to the scholarly apparatus of source citations, though it does include a bibliography and an index.Washington's combination of formal order and haphazardness no doubt fascinated Twain. The influence that the federal government had on virtually every other part of the country made Washington especially interesting to journalists. Muller describes the community of newspapermen, and some women, literate people with whom Twain enjoyed professional camaraderie and social vitality. In this early and admittedly brief phase of his career, Mark Twain found an environment that spurred his literary industry.His first encounter with Washington in 1854 was not as Mark Twain but as Sam Clemens, journeyman printer. Having worked in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia during the previous nine months, he made his visit to Washington out of curiosity about this newest city, a definitively national metropolis. He was eager to observe its layout, its historical landmarks, and the governmental operations within its neoclassical buildings. The pieces he sent to be published in his brother Orion's Muscatine Journal are some of his first travel writing, a genre that would launch the name Mark Twain very broadly about fifteen years later. And Washington would play a silent role in Innocents Abroad, for he was living in the city during the period in which he toiled over the manuscript of this landmark travel book after his return from the Quaker City voyage. Muller's research uncovers the recollections of now obscure figures in the journalistic demimonde of Washington who described how Twain lived in relative squalor while devoting his literary energy to the book that would establish him. Moving beyond the short humorous pieces that had been his stock and trade, Innocents Abroad gave readers a view of Europe through the eyes of a naïf, which positioned him as a heterodox cultural critic with a distinctly American identity.Mark Twain in Washington, D.C. flirts with chronological narration in its first four or five chapters. But chapter 2 is devoted to Sam Clemens's itinerant sojourns in the American West and the Sandwich Islands, as well as his excursion to Europe and the Holy Land (a period more thoroughly covered by others as well as Twain himself), and chapter 3 dwells on the discovery of an 1867 New York Times article, the “Scupper Nong Letter,” attributed to Mark Twain. While the question of Twain's authorship of this piece is an intriguing and unsettled question, its placement in the book and the amount of space dedicated to it is a curious decision. There are other similarly questionable decisions such as the chapter on George Alfred Townsend, “Forgotten Man of Letters.” To be sure, Townsend and Twain were familiar with each other, having posed together for a Mathew Brady photograph, one of the fifty-one illustrations in the book. But a slim volume that verges into topics in which Twain becomes more of a footnote than a highlight raises questions about the text's proportions.Muller's attention is more productive when he turns to themes or categories: “Mark Twain's Boarding Houses”; the book publication of The Jumping Frog (1867) and the nineteenth-century history of literary marketing in the capital; and the long folkloric traditions behind Twain's “General Washington's Negro Body-Servant, a Biographical Sketch” (1868). When the text interlaces these topics with accounts of Twain's active though short-lived service as a Washington correspondent and his several lectures and public speeches while in the capital, it makes for engaging reading. The vivid descriptions of the material conditions of life in mid-century Washington—the rooming houses, salons, bookshops, governmental offices, and hotel saloons—provide interesting context to the anecdotes about this precariously formative stage of Mark Twain's career.By far, the richest materials are the accounts of Twain's adventures themselves, in which we see traits that will emerge in fuller figure later in his life. For example, well-known for his entrepreneurial spirit, Twain claims to have partnered with William Swinton to develop the first news syndicate, a plan for “manifolding correspondence, … of sending duplicates of a letter to variously widely separated newspapers” (60), and thus multiply their income for writing a single journalistic item. Perhaps the most delightful stories are those recalling Twain's parodies of his work as a government hanger-on—as secretary to Nevada Senator John Nye, as Senate doorkeeper, and as clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology (dedicated to the study of seashells)—some of which appeared in Sketches New and Old (1875). Revisiting these pieces in the context of Muller's book enables one to appreciate how Twain's immediate experience ignited his political humor. And indeed, it was his time in Washington that helped inspire the broad satire of The Gilded Age (1873), of which Muller says surprisingly little. On the other hand, Twain shows his resistance to being drawn into the capital's vortex. On the eve of Johnson's impeachment, surely a delicious opportunity for a political satirist, Twain left for San Francisco in order to prepare for the publication of Innocents Abroad. Muller links this absence with other episodes in which Sam Clemens eschewed an opportunity for public office and discouraged his brother Orion from seeking one, forging a link to one of the themes of The Gilded Age. And in an 1868 Washington letter to the Territorial Enterprise, the story titled “The Man Who Stopped at Gadsby's,” later included in A Tramp Abroad (1880), lampoons a San Franciscan who arrives in Washington expecting a prompt appointment as the postmaster of his hometown. Clearly, Twain saw the danger that Washington posed to people with high expectations of securing a favor.The final chapter deals with Twain's return to Washington in 1906 to lobby for his long-running concern with copyright protection, in effect seeking his own favor from the political class. Muller frames this as a “final coup-de-grace” (178) for the man who arrived in Washington as a bohemian journalist in 1867, making his last call on the city to extend secure legal ownership of intellectual property for himself and other artists. Mark Twain in Washington, D.C. doesn't fully live up to the complete narrative that this closing summary implies. Nonetheless, Muller has written a book of interest to anyone, general reader and scholar alike, interested in the man who became America's most distinctive author.