IXMARK TWAIN AND THE THEATER

Mark Twain was a born story-teller; he was a born actor; he was not affrighted by the idea of facing an audience; he was fond of the theater; he lived in a time when the drama was regaining its proud position in our literature and when men of letters who had begun as novelists were turning dramatists. Why is it that he did not leave us even one play worthy to be set by the side of the ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’? Why is it that the only piece of his which was successful on the stage, is a poor thing, not wholly his own? Why is it that he did not persevere in playwriting as did his fellow humorists, George Bernard Shaw and George Ade, and his fellow story-tellers, Barrie and Tarkington?

These are questions which must have occurred to not a few of his admirers; and they are questions to which it is not easy to find an immediate answer. Yet there must be an explanation of some sort for this puzzling fact; and there maybe profit in trying to discover it. Even if the answer shall prove to be incomplete and unsatisfactory, the inquiry is worth while for its own sake.

That Mark Twain was a born story-teller needs no argument; and that he was a born actor was equally evident not only to his few intimates but to all the many who heard him talk on his feet. If any witness must be called, the best would be Howells, his friend for forty years; and Howells’s testimony is emphatic and decisive. He tells us Mark

held that an actor doubled the value of the author’s words; and he was a great actor as well as a great author. He was a most consummate actor, with this difference from other actors, that he was the first to know the thoughts and invent the fancies to which his voice and action gave the color of life. Representation is the art of other actors; his art was creative as well as representative.

This quotation is from Howells’s introduction to the collection of Mark’s speeches; and I take another from ‘My Mark Twain’:

He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor he probably would not have been on thestage.... When he read his manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic qualities.... He was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic; and rightly so. What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine, and we ought to use every art to that end.

As a born actor, he understood the necessity of preparation and rehearsal. He left nothing to chance. He knew how his effects ought to be made; and he knew how to make them. Even his seemingly spontaneous after-dinner speeches were thought out and worked out, in every minutest detail of inflection and hesitation. In his ‘How to Tell a Story’ he insisted that the total impression of his hair-raising ghost-story, the ‘Golden Arm,’ depended upon the exact calculation of a certain pause; and I can testify that on the only occasion I had the pleasure of hearing him tell the gruesome tale—one summer evening in 1890 at Onteora, in a cabin dimly lit by a flickering wood fire—the pause was long enough to be almost unbearable.

He stood in no fear of an audience, because he had an imperturbable self-confidence, rooted in a knowledge of his certain power of impressing all who came within sound of his voice. Moreover, he possessed to the end of his life the boyish delight in being conspicuous that he ascribed to Tom Sawyer. It is true that he was diffidentbefore he had proved himself as a lecturer; and in a little speech he made after a musical recital given by his daughter in 1906, he described his trepidation when he was about to make his first appearance before an audience:

I had stage-fright then for the first and last time.... After the first agonizing five minutes, my stage-fright left me, never to return. I know if I was going to be hanged I could get up and make a good showing—and I intend to.

When he was living in Hartford he often took part in private theatricals, the other performers being members of his own household. After a performance of a dramatization of the ‘Prince and the Pauper’ by the children of the Educational Alliance in 1907, he was called upon for a speech and he told the thousand little spectators that he had himself acted the part of Miles Hendon twenty-two years earlier. One of his daughters had been the Prince and the daughter of a neighbor was the Pauper. Mrs. Clemens was the dramatist and stage-manager. “Our coachman was the assistant stage-manager, second in command.”

He had many friends among stage-folk, authors, actors and managers. He accepted the invitation to make the opening address at the Actors’ Fund Fair in 1907. He lent WilliamGillette the money which enabled that veracious actor to start his career. He once gave a characteristically amusing account of his success in passing through the sternly defended stage-entrance to Daly’s Theater. At a dinner to Henry Irving in London in June, 1900, he declared that

the greatest of all arts is to write a drama. It is a most difficult thing. It requires the highest talents possible and the rarest gifts. No, there is another talent that ranks with it—for anybody can write a drama—I have written about four hundred—but to get one accepted requires real ability. And I have never had that felicity yet.

He was a persistent playgoer, altho his visits to the theater were less frequent in later life than they had been earlier. He took the drama seriously, as he took the other facts of life; and he thought that the American theater was not doing its duty by the American people. In an illuminating article “About Play-Acting,” published in a magazine in 1898 (and most unaccountably not included in any of the volumes of his complete works) he described a tragedy which he had seen at the Burg Theater in Vienna. Then he listed the shows on exhibition in New York in a single week; and he drew a moral from the contrast:

It is right and wholesome to have these light comedies and entertaining shows; and I shouldn’t wish tosee them diminished. But none of us isalwaysin the comedy spirit; we have our graver moods; they come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape them. These moods have their appetites,—healthy and legitimate appetites—and there ought to be some way of satisfying them. It seems to me that New York ought to have one theater devoted to tragedy. With her three millions of population, and seventy outside millions to draw upon, she can afford it, she can support it. America devotes more time, labor, money and attention to distributing literary and musical culture among the general public than does any other nation, perhaps; yet here you find her neglecting what is possibly the most effective of all the breeders and nurses and disseminators of high literary taste and lofty emotion—the tragic stage. To leave that powerful agency out is to haul the culture-wagon with a crippled team. Nowadays when a mood comes which only Shakspere can set to music, what must we do? Read Shakspere ourselves? Isn’t it pitiful? It is playing an organ solo on a jews-harp.Wecan’t read. None but the Booths can do it....Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built upon by Shakspere. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my line; I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on a vacation.

Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built upon by Shakspere. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my line; I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on a vacation.

Altho I have quoted Mark’s assertion that he had never had the felicity of having a play accepted, he did have two pieces produced bymanagers; and a third, written in collaboration with Howells, had a brief and inglorious career at the expense of its authors. His first play, made out of one of his novels, drew delighted audiences for several seasons; the second, written in partnership with Bret Harte, and the third, written in partnership with Howells, met with so little success that they sank at once beneath the wave of oblivion, being almost unknown except in the hazy memories of the few surviving spectators who chanced to see one or the other during its brief stay on the stage. No one of the three has ever been published.

After Mark had settled in Hartford he formed a close friendship with his near neighbor Charles Dudley Warner; and in 1873 they joined forces in a novel, the ‘Gilded Age.’ They wrote it not so much in collaboration as in conjunction,—that is to say, each of the writers was responsible for the chapters he prepared himself; and there was no integrating co-ordination of their respective contributions. Mark was the author of more than half of the chapters; and he was the creator of the one outstanding character, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, an imaginative reproduction of a man he had known since boyhood, James Lampton. Mark began by writing the first eleven chapters, then Warner wrote two, Mark followed with two more; and thus they worked alternately.They labored, so Mark declared, “in the superstition that we were writing one coherent yarn, when I suppose, as a matter of fact, we were writing two incoherent yarns.”

It was not long after the publication of their conjoint work that they were informed of the performance in San Francisco of a dramatization by one Gilbert S. Densmore, otherwise unknown to fame, the character of Colonel Sellers being impersonated by John T. Raymond. Action was at once taken to put a stop to this infringement on the copyright of the story. In the end a satisfactory arrangement was arrived at. Densmore was bought out; Warner, discovering that his share in the story had been but little drawn upon, relinquished any claim he might have; Mark made the piece over; and Raymond continued to play Colonel Sellers, under a contract which divided the profits between the author and the actor. For a season or two Mark’s agent travelled with the company and reported on a postal card every night the author’s share; and Howells has related how these welcome missives would come about dinnertime and how Mark would read them aloud in triumph. “One hundred and fifty dollars—two hundred dollars—three hundred dollars, were the gay figures which they bore and which he flaunted in the air before he sat down at table.”

It is difficult now to determine how much of the dramatic skeleton Densmore had put together to enable Colonel Sellers to exhibit the facets of his lovable character, survived in the play which drew crowded houses one long winter in New York. Here Mark himself is the best witness in his own behalf; and his biographer has quoted from an unpublished letter a clear-cut statement:

I entirely rewrote the play three separate and distinct times. I had expected to use little of [Densmore’s] language and but little of his plot. I do not think that there are now twenty sentences of Mr. Densmore’s in the play, but I used so much of his plot that I wrote and told him I should pay him about as much more as I had already paid him, in case the play proved a success.

Paine has printed Densmore’s acknowledgment for this second payment, thanking Mark “for the very handsome manner in which you have acted in this matter.”

During the run of the play in New York in the winter of 1874-5 I saw it twice, the second time on the hundredth performance, when Mark appeared before the curtain to tell the audience the tale of the man who tried to ride the Mexican plug and to explain that he was like this man after his fiery steed had thrown him, in that he was “speechless.” I recall the play as a ricketycontrivance; it creaked in its joints; its plot was arbitrary and violent and unconvincing. Perhaps it was no worse than the earlier ‘Solon Shingle’ or the later ‘Mighty Dollar’; but it was little, if any, better. Yet it served its purpose, which was to be a frame for the humorously veracious character of Colonel Sellers, the imperturbable visionary admirably acted by John T. Raymond. Mark himself liked Raymond’s impersonation,—at least he did at first. Later he and Raymond fell out; and he put into his autobiography the assertion that Raymond was lacking in the ability to express the finer qualities of Sellers.

But playgoers could see in the part only what Raymond has expressed with the keenest appreciation of its histrionic possibilities; and they were satisfied, even if the author was not. To us Americans the character had a special appeal, because he represented at once our ingenious inventiveness and our incurable optimism. We had never met James Lampton, but we were all ready to accept Colonel Sellers as an old friend. Raymond told me once that in town after town he would be accosted by some man, who would say to him, “I saw you to-night—and I recognized myself. Didn’t Mark ever tell you? Well, he took Sellers fromme! Why, all my friends knew me the first time they saw you!”

The plot of the play was melodramatic on the verge of burlesque; it called for the wholly unnecessary explosion of a steamboat; it culminated in the trial of the injured heroine for the murder of the villain who had wronged her and insulted her. For the most part Colonel Sellers had little to do with the main story; and it was only when the sympathetic heroine was on trial for her life that Colonel Sellers was integrally related to the main action. I have revived my own fading memory of the bubbling humor of this final act by reading again what Howells wrote about it at the time:

But the greatest scenes are in the last act, where Colonel Sellers appears as a witness for the defence of Laura Hawkins. As he mounts the stand he affably recognizes and shakes hands with several acquaintances among the jury; he delivers his testimony in the form of a stump speech; he helplessly overrides all the protests, exceptions, and interruptions of the prosecution; from time to time he irresistibly turns and addresses the jury and can scarcely be silenced; while the attorneys are wrangling together he has seized a juryman by the coat-lapel and is earnestly exhorting him in whisper. The effect is irresistibly ludicrous. It is farce and not farce, for, however extravagantly impossible the situation is, the man in it is deliciously true to himself. There is one bit of pathos, where Sellers tells how he knew Laura as a little girl, and implies that, though she might have killed a man, she couldnothave donemurder.

The extravagantly impossible situation may have been taken over from the Densmore perversion; but the handling of it, the expressing out of it of all the humor it might be made to contain, that, we may be sure, was the doing of Mark himself. No one else could have done it.

Forty years ago and more I pointed out, in an article on the ‘American on the Stage’ that in so far as Colonel Sellers was a schemer, with an incessant activity in devising new methods for making money, he had been anticipated by a character in Ben Jonson’s the ‘Devil is an Ass’—added evidence of the kinship of the descendants of the Puritans with the daring Elizabethan adventurers. Where the American proposed a liniment for the sore eyes so multitudinous in the Orient and saw “millions in it!” the Elizabethan had advocated a device for making wine of raisins:

What hast thou there?O, “Making wine of Raisins”; this is in hand now.Yes, and as true a wine as the wines of France,Or Spain or Italy: look of what grapeMy raisin is, that wine I’ll render perfect,As of the Muscatel grape, I’ll render Muscatel;Of the Canary, his; the claret, his;So of all kinds; and bate you of the pricesOf wine throughout the kingdom half in half.

What hast thou there?

O, “Making wine of Raisins”; this is in hand now.

Yes, and as true a wine as the wines of France,

Or Spain or Italy: look of what grape

My raisin is, that wine I’ll render perfect,

As of the Muscatel grape, I’ll render Muscatel;

Of the Canary, his; the claret, his;

So of all kinds; and bate you of the prices

Of wine throughout the kingdom half in half.

When it is objected that this enterprise mayput up the price of raisins, the answer comes pat:

Why then I’ll make it out of blackberries,And it shall do the same. ’Tis but more art,And the charge less.

Why then I’ll make it out of blackberries,

And it shall do the same. ’Tis but more art,

And the charge less.

There is a significant kinship between Ben Jonson and Mark Twain in the superb impossibility of their towering fantasies. But there is no true likeness between Meercraft, whose very name libels him as an unscrupulous exploiter of the eternal gullibility of mankind, and Colonel Sellers, who may have deceived others but who did so only because he had first deceived himself. Colonel Sellers was a man without guile; he was as sincere as he was frank; and he made no more profit out of his swift succession of vain imaginings than did those who were carried away by his magnificent self-confidence. The similarity between Ben Jonson’s crook and Mark’s enthusiast is only superficial; yet it may be worth noting that frenzied speculation was as characteristic of the golden age of England after the dispersal of the Armada as it was in the gilded age of America which was the aftermath of the Civil War. Moreover Ben Jonson and Mark Twain have this in common also, that they were both of them humorists of soaring exuberance and both of them realists of immitigable veracity.

In the dramatization of the ‘Gilded Age’ Mark had a silent partner, the otherwise unknown Densmore. In the two other plays of his he was working in collaboration with associates of an assured fame, Howells and Bret Harte. In neither case was he fortunate in the alliance, for they were not experts in stage-craft, altho each of them had already ventured himself in the drama. What Mark needed, if he was to trot in double harness with a running mate, was an experienced playwright with an instinctive knowledge of the theater. When Mark yoked himself with Howells or with Harte, it was the blind leading the blind. The author of ‘Out of the Question’ and the author of ‘Two Men of Sandy Bar’ lacked just what the author of the ‘Gilded Age’ lacked,—practice in the application of the principles of playmaking.

The play written in collaboration with Bret Harte was called ‘Ah Sin,’ the name of the Heathen Chinee in ‘Plain Language from Truthful Jones.’ It was undertaken to enable Charles Parsloe, an actor now forgotten, to profit by the skill he had displayed in the small part of a Chinaman in Bret Harte’s earlier play, ‘Two Men of Sandy Bar,’ written for Stuart Robson,brought out in 1876 and withdrawn after a brief and inglorious career on the stage. Bret Harte did not know enough about playmaking to perceive that its failure had been due to its deficiency in that supporting skeleton of plot which is as necessary to a drama as the equally invisible steel-frame is to a skyscraper. But he was eager to try again, and he persuaded Mark to join him. Probably he had no need to be persuasive, since Mark had found his experience with the ‘Gilded Age’ exhilarating and profitable. Mark invited Harte to Hartford and they set to work. As I have always been curious about the secrets of collaboration, I asked Mark many years afterward, how they had gone about it. “Well,” he said, with his customary drawl, “Bret came to me at Hartford and we talked the whole thing out. Then Bret wrote the piece while I played billiards. Of course, I had to go over it and get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect.”

Mr. Paine, to whom I transmitted this information, thinks that it is “scarcely a fair statement of the case,” since “both authors worked on the play and worked hard.” But while what Mark said to me may have been an over-statement, I doubt if it was a misstatement. The original suggestion had come from Harte; and the probability is that the major part of thestory was his also. The two partners may have worked hard but I doubt if they worked as seriously at their playmaking as they were wont to do at their story-telling. The man of letters who is not primarily a man of theater, is prone to be somewhat contemptuous in his condescending to the drama.

The play was produced in Washington in May, 1877, with Parsloe as Ah Sin. I saw it when it was brought to New York in the fall of 1877. From two of the foremost writers in America much was expected; and the result of their combined efforts was lamentably disappointing. It was unworthy of either of them, still more unworthy of both. All I can replevin from my dim recollections is a trial before Judge Lynch, which lit up the last act, and which I now recall as having more than a little of the energy and the vigor which I found afterward in the episode of the attempted lynching in ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ Mr. Paine tells me that the manuscript is still extant. Sooner or later it ought to be published, since nothing written by either Mark Twain or Bret Harte is negligible.

Yet this flat failure of ‘Ah Sin’ did not quench Mark’s dramatic ardor. Even before the ‘Gilded Age’ had been dramatized he had begun on ‘Tom Sawyer’; and his first intention was to write it as a play. Fortunately for us he soonperceived that Tom would have more freedom if his adventures were narrated. After Mark had published ‘Tom Sawyer’ he was fired with another dramatic idea; and he wrote Howells in the first flush of his enthusiasm, that he was deep in a comedy with an old detective as the principal character:

I skeletoned the first act, andwrotethe second to-day, and am dog-tired now. Fifty-four pages of ms. in seven hours.

A few days later he wrote again, telling his friend that he had

piled up one hundred and fifty-one pages. The first, second and fourth acts are done, and done to my satisfaction too. Never had so much fun over anything in my life—such consuming interest and delight.

This piece was intended for Sol Smith Russell. But the theatrical experts to whom it was submitted did not share its author’s consuming interest. Dion Boucicault said that it was better than ‘Ah Sin’; but to say this was saying little. John Brougham wrote that it was “altogether too diffuse for dramatic representation.” In time Mark’s own opinion of his play seems to have cooled, and he put his manuscript aside. Possibly he utilized it more or less many years later when he wrote ‘Tom Sawyer, Detective’; but this is mere conjecture.

Then, after a longer interval he asked Howells to collaborate with him in a sequel to Colonel Sellers; and in ‘My Mark Twain’ Howells has given a detailed account of their conjoint misadventure. Mark had a host of suggestions but no story, so Howells supplied one as best he could; and the two friends spent a hilarious fortnight in writing the play. Mark had quarrelled with Raymond and did not want to let him reincarnate Sellers; and yet he had ultimately to recognize that Raymond was the only actor the public would accept in the character. So the piece was sent to Raymond, who accepted it, asking for certain alterations; and then most unexpectedly he returned the manuscript, refusing to have anything to do with it. After hawking their play about, the authors arranged to produce it themselves with Burbank (who was not an actor but an elocutionist-entertainer) as Sellers,—Burbank playing the part in imitation of Raymond. At last they had lost confidence in it so completely that they paid a forfeit rather than undertake the risk of a production in New York. So it was that the ‘American Claimant, or Mulberry Sellers Ten Years Later’ was made visible in New York only at a special matinee in the fall of 1887. It had a few performances in unimportant out of town theaters; and then it disappeared from the stage. Still, it had notlived in vain since it supplied material for several chapters in Mark’s later novel, to which he gave the same title, without the subtitle.

After this play had been withdrawn from the boards Mark’s ambition to establish himself as a dramatist did not again manifest itself. However, it is pleasant to believe that the pain of his own failure may have been more or less assuaged by the better fortune of dramatizations of two of his novels.

I have already noted that not long after the publication of the ‘Prince and the Pauper’ Mrs. Clemens had arranged scenes from it to be acted by members of the family and by their young friends, and that Mark himself had undertaken the part of Miles Hendon. A little later a dramatization of the whole story was made by Abby Sage Richardson; and this was produced in New York in January, 1890. It achieved instant popularity, as well it might, since the story is indisputably dramatic and since it has a more direct action than any other of Mark’s novels. This version, revised by Amélie Rives, was revived in 1920 by William Faversham, who appeared as Miles Hendon. The revival met with a reception as warm as that which had greeted the original production.

In one respect this professional dramatization was inferior to Mrs. Clemens’s amateur arrangement;it was so devised that one performer should assume two characters, the little Prince and the little Pauper; and this necessitated the omission of the culminating moment in the tale when the Prince and the Pauper stand face to face. And in both the amateur and the professional performances these two lads were impersonated by girls. This may have been necessary, since it is almost impossible to find competent boy actors, while there are girl actors aplenty; but none the less was it unfortunate, since a girl is never entirely satisfactory in boy’s clothes. Very rarely can she conceal from us the fact that she is a girl, doing her best to be a boy. Curiously enough, boys can act girls’ parts and make us forget for the moment that they are not what they seem.

Five years after Mrs. Richardson had dramatized the ‘Prince and the Pauper,’ Frank Mayo made a most effective play out of ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson.’ He arranged the title-part for his own vigorous and impressive acting. He simplified Mark’s story and he amplified it; he condensed it and he heightened it; he preserved the ingenious incidents and the veracious characters; he made his profit out of the telling dialog; and he was skilful in disentangling the essentially dramatic elements of Mark’s rather rambling story. He produced it in New York in the springof 1895. Mark was then in Europe; but when he returned he made haste to see the piece. He was discovered by the audience and called upon for a speech, in which he congratulated the player-playwright on a “delightful play.” He ended by saying, “Confidentially I have always had an idea that I was well equipt to write plays, but I have never encountered a manager who has agreed with me”—which was not strictly accurate since two different managers had accepted the ‘Gilded Age’ and ‘Ah Sin.’

When the ‘Gilded Age’ was brought out in New York in the fall of 1874, Mark climbed the eighty steps which led to the editorial offices of the New YorkWorld, then in the control of Manton Marble. He asked for the city editor and he was shown into the cubicle occupied by William C. Brownell. He explained that he had come to ask the editor to puff his play; whereupon Brownell inquired if it was a good play. “No,” was Mark’s drawling answer, “it isn’t a good play. It’s a bad play, a damned bad play. I couldn’t write a good play. But it has a good character. I can write character; and that character is the best I can do. If it was a good play,I shouldn’t have had to climb up here to ask you to puff it.”

Here Mark was unconsciously revealing his agreement with Aristotle, the master of all who know. Aristotle declared that in a tragedy—and the remark is even more applicable to comedy—plot is more important than character, since you can have an appealing drama without character but you cannot have it without plot. Lowell said the same thing in more detail, in one of his lectures on the ‘Old English Dramatists.’

In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that each scene should lead by a logic more or less stringent, if not to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow and that all should contribute their fraction of impulse to the inevitable catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and not merely mechanical with an arbitrary or haphazard joining of one part to another.

It was this constructive skill that Mark lacked. He could create characters; he could make them reveal themselves in appropriate situations; he could carry on a story which in the library would delight all of us, but which was without the compact directness demanded by us when we are in the theater. He possessed all the qualifications of the dramatist except the one thing needful, without which the rest are unavailing; he couldnot organize a structure with the necessary and harmonious connection and relation of its parts. In other words he was devoid of the engineering draftsmanship which plans the steel-frame, four-square to all the winds that blow.

He may have had—indeed, he did have—dramatic genius; but he never acquired the theatrical talent which would make his genius available. He could not cut and polish and set his own diamonds.

(1921)

Back to Index Next