Books: Dear Charley

MARK TWAIN, BUSINESS MAN—edited by Samuel Charles Webster—’Little, Brown ($4).

Everybody was inventing something when Mark Twain was writing some of the greatest U.S. fiction ever penned; so Mark, to whom nothing American was alien, was bound to catch the fever. “An inventor is a poet—a true poet!” he cried, when his brother, Orion Clemens, invented a “modest little drilling machine.” “To invent. . . shows the presence of the patrician blood of intellect—that ’round & top of sovereignty’ which separates its possessor from the common multitude & marks him as one not beholden to the caprices of politics but endowed with greatness in his own right.”

Mark Twain paid his fee to this kind of greatness by pouring most of his fortune into a patent clamp to keep babies from rolling out of bed, a checkerboard game for teaching world history (he invented these himself), a patent steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of marine telegraphy, a device for deodorizing gas-logs, copper type faces, a typesetter. When Author Twain entered old age, some half a million dollars in the red, he attributed his losses to the fact that the world was overrun with “idiots,” “moral icebergs,” “thieves,” “swindlers” and “pirates.” Outstanding among these wretches, he insisted, was his niece’s husband, Charles L. Webster, who served for five nerve-racking years (1884 through 1888) as Twain’s business manager and publisher.

Hamlet’s Father. Now, Samuel Charles Webster has written this book to clear his father’s name. His argument: Twain’s bitterness about Manager Webster was a product of his crusty old age; Webster did a fine job, including the skillful publishing and promotion of the century’s two literary smash hits (Huckleberry Finn and General Grant’s Memoirs). Webster’s evidence: Twain’s letters, now published in book form, to “Dear Charley”—many of which show great respect for Webster. and all of’which indicate that Webster would have had an easier time managing a swarm of bees. “I am not trying to discredit Mark Twain,” Author Webster explains, “for I always liked and admired him very much. I feel a good deal the way Hamlet must have felt when he wanted to see justice done his father. . . .”

“Uncle Sam” (Twain) gave Webster a flying start by putting him in charge of the Kaolatype—a brand-new chalkplate process for engraving illustrations. “This invention,” wrote Twain confidently, “. . . will utterly annihilate and sweep out of existence one of the minor industries of civilization. … I wish to give you $100 of its stock, now, anyhow, & make you Vice President & Treasurer—also Manager. . . . Act fearlessly & with decision.”

“I Wish to God. . . .” Thereafter letters from Uncle Sam (who lived mostly in Elmira and Fredonia, N.Y.) to Nephew Charley (who scurried about New York City) followed at more or less daily intervals :

“Dear Charley—Send an expert to examine the [Paige Type-Setting Machine]. … I reckon it will take about a hundred thousand machines to supply the world, & I judge the world has got to buy them—it can’t well be helped”; “Rush that brass [stamp]. Don’t let a moment be lost. . . . TELEGRAPH ME A RESULT OF SOME SORT IN 24 HOURS”;

“Throw brass aside for a while, & try copper. . . . After you have tried copper, then we will try brass again. … If we succeed, brass stamps will never be used any more in the Christian world”; “Look into that Bierstadt Artotype business, & see what figure a body can buy into at”; “I wish to God I could get a good pen. I’ll be damned if I think any are made.” . . . “Dear Charley—Look here, have the Am. Pub. Co. swindled me out of only $2,000? I thought it was five”; “I have this idea: to paint the white marble (which immediately surrounds [my] hall fireplace) the same strong red of the hall walls, & then cover it with Mr. De Forest’s thin arabesque-cut brass sheets. . . . Ask . . . if that can be done”; “Go to the Delaware, Lackawanna & Hudson R.R. and see if they will rent me a special sleeping car. . . . Go directly to the President of the Company. . . . Hurry!”; “No provision is made for a wooden barrack for the soldiers who guard General Grant’s tomb. I wonder what [it] would cost.. . . Could you ask?”

“Dear Charley—I have thought out an idea for a presentation copy [of General Grant’s Memoirs*] from the publishers to the Pope. . . . Bind it in pure solid gold lids (hinged at the back). The gold . . . would cost $500. . . . When placed on exhibition in Tiffany’s window, all New York and all strangers visiting New York would flock to see [the book] . . . descriptions of it would appear in all languages & in all newspapers in the world. . . . Find out … if His Holiness will accept. … I think the idea is sound.. . . P.S. No, the gold would cost nearer $3,000, instead of $500. That is all the better.”

After years of this, Manager Webster suffered a nervous breakdown and retired to the quiet countryside, where he spent his few remaining years carving ship models and looking at the stars through a telescope. Pope Leo XIII created him a Knight of the Order of Pius for publishing his biography. In later years, Uncle Sam once said acidly: “If the Pope made Webster a knight, he ought to have made him an archangel.”

*Published by the Mark Twain-Webster house, Charles L. Webster & Co.