Chasing the Last Laugh: How Mark Twain Escaped Debt and Disgrace with a Round-the-World Comedy Tour - Softcover

Zacks, Richard

 
9780345802538: Chasing the Last Laugh: How Mark Twain Escaped Debt and Disgrace with a Round-the-World Comedy Tour
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345802535 ISBN 13: 9780345802538
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In the 1890s, Mark Twain came back from the dead. The famous author’s career was collapsing, his masterpieces were at risk of falling into oblivion, and he was even mistakenly reported dead. But Twain orchestrated an amazing late-in-life comeback from bankruptcy, bad reviews, and family disaster by setting out on an unprecedented international comedy tour to restore his fortunes. Richard Zacks’s Chasing the Last Laugh captures some of Twain’s cleverest and funniest moments—many newly discovered in unpublished notebooks and letters—as he rode elephants in India, sorted diamonds in South Africa, and talked his way out of hell ninety minutes at a time. This untold chapter in the author’s life began with ridiculously bad choices and ended in hard-won triumph. 
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Zacks is the bestselling author of Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York; Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805; Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd; History Laid Bare; and An Underground Education. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and many other publications. He attended the University of Michigan and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Born in Savannah, Georgia, he now lives in New York City.

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chapter 1

Joys of Self-­Publishing

Twain was a proud man, so he kept up a false front of success to all outsiders. In the summer of 1893, he was by reputation America’s greatest humorist and a successful publisher who was married to an heiress. He ranked among the nation’s highest-­paid magazine writers and most prized after-­dinner speakers. His life—­on paper—­marked a fabulous success story, from Hannibal to Hartford to the family’s current address abroad in Paris.

Twain owned a publishing house; it was failing. His latest book, a contrived, almost slapstick novella, The American Claimant, hadn’t sold well; his backlist, even including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, was limping along, bringing in small change.

The publishing house owed money to bookbinders, paper suppliers, printers, owed rent for a plush office at 67 Fifth Avenue, at 14th Street; meanwhile, their list included underwhelming titles such as Stories from the Rabbis and One Hundred Desserts and Tenting on the Plains by General Custer’s widow. Twain had invested heavily in a typesetter that had 18,000 moving parts but was supposed to revolutionize the printing industry.

Twain teetered on the brink of financial ruin. At first he blamed himself for numerous bad business decisions, but once he got that formality out of the way, he unleashed his sizable writing talents on blaming others.

He wrote in a private notebook his thoughts on the inventor James W. Paige, whom he had amply funded but who still had not delivered his invention. “[He] and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-­trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.”

Twain and his wife owned their expensive home in Hartford, but they had run out of enough cash to live there in the style to which they were accustomed, with seven servants (a black butler, a gardener, cook, coachman, tutor and maids), and horses and an elegant carriage. They had moved out two years earlier, claiming Livy’s health required a change of scenery and they chose Europe, which sounds odd for financially strapped people, but it was cheaper than their Hartford high life. They chose self-­exile over the public shame of a diminished lifestyle.

The beautiful mansion lay empty.

“I have never felt so desperate in my life, for I haven’t got a penny to my name & Mrs. Clemens hasn’t enough laid up with [her brother Charles] Langdon to keep us two months. . . . I do not sleep, these nights, for visions of the poor-­house. . . . Everything does look blue, so dismally blue.”

Twain’s publishing house had started off magnificently in 1885. He had installed his former gofer, his niece’s thirty-­three-­year-­old husband, Charles L. Webster, to run it, even called it “Charles L. Webster & Co.”—­perhaps to insulate himself from blame. The quirky founding contract stipulated that Twain could “not be called upon” to perform any managerial or editorial duties but nonetheless would retain final approval of all new books.

The company’s first two releases were Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. One was a modest success; the other a record-­breaking blockbuster.

Grant’s memoirs set publishing records, with 600,000 volumes issued and nearly $400,000 ($12 million in today’s dollars) paid to the Grant family. Twain had lured the former president away from a verbal agreement with Century, calling for the general to receive industry-­standard royalties—­10% of the cover price; Twain instead offered 70% of net profits (after printing expenses, etc.), which Twain promised—­rightly—­would turn out to be double the Century offer.

And, contrary to some reports, Twain did not write the memoirs. In fact, he was furious when Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World charged that General Adam Badeau had ghostwritten many chapters as Grant lay dying from throat cancer. Twain dropped his threatened lawsuit, claiming he didn’t want to give any free publicity to “that daily issue of un-­medicated closet paper [i.e., toilet paper].”

The seeds of ruin, however, sprouted early. Sad-­eyed, balding Webster failed to oversee the torrents of cash; a bookkeeper embezzled $25,000 (wound up in Sing Sing prison) and a Midwest book agent stole $30,000. These were huge sums in that era when a beer cost a nickel. The company signed up famed minister Henry Ward Beecher, but he died before he could complete his autobiography or his life of Christ. Civil War generals—­Sheridan, Sherman, Winchester—­lined up to repeat Grant’s deluge of gold, but the public quickly tired of war memoirs.

The company pinned its hope on the pope, the immensely popular Leo XIII, whose face seemed to be everywhere, since his portrait accompanied an endorsement of Vin Mariani, a cocaine-­laced wine. Webster traveled to Rome, landed the contract, and was knighted to the Order of the Golden Spur, with robes and a ceremonial sword. (Webster later found himself the only papal knight in Fredonia, New York.)

“[Twain] had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast its colossal success,” later recalled author-­editor-­friend William Dean Howells. It bombed, despite the unusual inclusion of two color chromolithographs of the pope. “We did not consider how often Catholics could not read,” surmised Howells.

Twain replaced Webster with young Fred Hall, a stenographer with no publishing experience; he said he was replacing “guesswork” with “brains.” But no one saw that the Library of American Literature was crushing the company under a mountain of debt.

Ironically, their biggest seller was destroying them. Salesmen had no trouble lining up tens of thousands of “subscription” orders for the eleven-­volume collection. The well-­respected editors Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson had skimmed the cream of Hawthorne, Melville, Longfellow, and the like to create a compendium of 1,207 authors, 2,671 selections, 303 full-­page illustrations. More than half the nation still lived on farms and in small towns, and rural buyers, especially fond of ornate bindings, could achieve instant gentility and respectability with the purchase.

But the business plan had one crucial flaw. Customers had to pay only the first $3 monthly installment of the $33 cover price to receive the entire set, but it cost the company $13 to print, bind, and ship, and another $12 in commission to the agents. The publisher was $22 in the red on every sale, and, as the economy soured, customers increasingly stopped paying installments. Delinquent payments ballooned from $28,862 in 1891 to $67,795 in 1892.

The office manager observed, Twain-­like: “The faster installment orders came in, the faster our capital shrank, until our prosperity became embarrassing.”

Twain himself called it a “lingering suicide.”

What had begun as a quest by author Twain to receive a fair shake from publishers had spiraled into a nightmare. Now, instead of furnishing money, his venture, Charles L. Webster & Co., was sucking up cash. Twain deferred his royalties. Livy pumped in large sums, but the company eventually had to borrow from Harlem’s Mount Morris Bank, itself on shaky ground because of a bad investment in the Chicago & Alton Railroad.

The whole country was reeling from the Panic of 1893, as the stock market had crashed in...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345802535
ISBN 13 
9780345802538
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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