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In assessing herself, Madame de Sévigné claims to resist both decorum and licentiousness; declares herself afraid of both other people’s sympathy and her own self-reproach. (On the latter score she hasn’t much to worry about.) She claims to be “very sorry” about an insufficiency of religious feeling, but the piety that comes most naturally to her is the mock variety, not offered at an altar but cackled behind a fan: “Everything you write about the Marans woman is delightful, and the punishments she will have in hell. But do you realize you will accompany her if you continue to hate her—just think that you will be together for all eternity. Nothing more is needed to persuade you to seek your salvation.” She will promise to answer a packet of Françoise’s letters when she’s feeling “much less devout,” and three days later, in reporting an embarrassment suffered by Madame de Gêvres, she announces her own recovery from the lapse into spirituality: “My dear, I’m spiteful—I was delighted.”
Three hundred years later, we would no more have her on her knees than we would ask Pepys to stop groping the servant girls.
THE PALACE of the Sun King would probably have rendered Mark Twain less comfortable than King Arthur’s court left a certain Connecticut Yankee. Though he had met the czar of Russia in 1867 and found himself well enough treated (“we staid 4 hours and were made a good deal more at home than we could have been in a New York drawing-room”), the passing of the years left Samuel Clemens a strident antimonarchist. “Another throne has gone down,” he writes to the Boston Herald’s Sylvester Baxter in 1889, when the Brazilian monarchy falls; “I swim in oceans of satisfaction.” He came to regard royalism as “the grotesquest of all the swindles ever invented by man;” the czar as “the head slave-driver of Europe;” and the “stench” of titled Englishmen as being so bad it called for shipping to foreign parts. The basic ingredient of Clemens’s epistolary humor is usually a deadpan hyperbole, but the very idea of a king makes him lose his head.
On democratic home ground, this first completely American prose writer displays a range of letter-writing moods and methods that can surprise even those who know full well that Huckleberry Finn is not a Young Adult novel. The propulsion and vividness of Clemens’s letters—his narratives are always descriptive and his descriptions are always narratives—can be seen in especially stunning combination in what he writes from Elmira, New York, to Mr. and Mrs. William Dean Howells on August 25, 1877. He tells them the story of a debt-ridden black farmer who, by some spectacular quick thinking and courage, has just saved the occupants of a runaway horse-and-buggy:
He saw the frantic horse plunging down the hill toward him on a full gallop, throwing his heels as high as a man’s head at every jump. So Lewis turned his team diagonally across the road just at the “turn,” thus making a V with the fence. The running horse could not escape that, but must enter it. Then Lewis sprang to the ground and stood in this V. He gathered his vast strength, and with a perfect Creedmoor aim he seized the gray horse’s bit as he plunged by and fetched him up standing!
Clemens always appreciates strong, plain style in the letters he receives—praising, for instance, the prose of his daughter Susy for having “no barnacles on it.” And when he relaxes into his own epistolary labors, he seems to enjoy them, taking the time to send his wife, Livy, a “rebus,” that form of letter in which certain words, mostly nouns, are eliminated in favor of little sketches depicting them.
But he did not like having to put anything conventional or obligatory into his correspondence (“I cannot overcome my repugnance to telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do”) or to keep up with the letter-writing demands of literary success and celebrity. People visiting him with letters of introduction could get a chilly reception, as could those who approached only through the mails. He professed not to understand why strangers should feel the impulse to annoy him with “kindly letters” that left him with the choice of being “rudely silent” or annoyed by the labor and distraction of responding.
Clemens composed unsent letters—those black-inked jeremiads providing so much relief to the writer while doing no damage to the unaware “recipient”—with unusual frequency. He once even wrote an introduction for a collection of them that he contemplated publishing, and he advised all those inclined toward this subgenre to pigeonhole any letters they produced in it for much-later reading: “An old cold letter like that makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing.”
Clemens’s letters have retained a full-bloodedness that gives biographies of him a peculiar animation; the reader feels treated by the subject himself to a moving picture instead of the typical collection of stills. Once he leaves Hannibal, Missouri, for New York City in the 1850s, the future Mark Twain sends home repeated, bumptious assurances that success will soon come and be entirely his doing: “I fancy they’ll have to wait some time till they see me down-hearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants.” When he learns to pilot boats along the Mississippi, his self-confidence shows no sign of cooling off: “what vast respect Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago I could enter the ‘Rooms’ and receive only a customary fraternal greeting, but now they say, ‘Why, how are you, old fellow—when did you get in?’” After life on the river come his years in the West, with all their adventures in mining and prospecting and journalism, and all their sights and smells, to be mailed to people still in Missouri: “When crushed, sage brush emits an odor which isn’t exactly magnolia and equally isn’t exactly polecat, but is a sort of compromise between the two.”
This description, from 1861, appears in a letter to his mother, whose long life and heart’s secrets would excite Clemens’s imaginative respect for decades to come. But the family member who would forever provoke his greatest wonder, and exasperation, was his feckless brother Orion, who spent life in a prolonged, cheerful fit of self-delusion, bouncing from one ill-conceived business and belief to the next. In February 1879, while traveling in Munich, Clemens writes to Howells, his own greatest literary supporter, about Orion’s scheme to make money by lecturing on his famous brother: “Did you ever see the grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together? … Now only think of it! He still has 100 pages to write on his lecture, yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United States and invested the result!”
Clemens suggests that Orion’s ever-shifting allegiances and enthusiasms would make him a great literary character for Howells: “you must put him into romance.” Or perhaps the two of them can write a play about him: “Orion is a field which grows richer and richer the more he mulches it with each new topdressing of religion or other guano. Drop me an immediate line about this, won’t you?” When the brother proves incapable even of hiring a home nurse for their ailing mother, Clemens blows his top: “Jesus Christ!” he roars at Orion. “It is perilous to write such a man. You can go crazy on less material than anybody that ever lived.” And yet it is Orion, flitting between the Republicans and the Democrats, the Methodists and the Swedenborgians, chicken-farming and the law, who provides the comic material that any reader of Clemens’s correspondence winds up craving most.
The Mark Twain letters are replete with Clemens’s own failed business ventures, to which he always applied the sort of sustained zeal Orion could never summon. When it came to managing work he created personally, Clemens could be shrewd: he understood immediately that the banning of Huckleberry Finn by the public library of Concord, Massachusetts, would prove good for sales; knew enough to squelch hopeless dramatic adaptations of Tom Sawyer; fended off requests for product endorsements; and refused newspaper editors’ requests for free comment on one thing or another when he could just as easily compose his remarks for money. But his long detours into two different businesses supposedly allied to authorship—publishing and printing—proved slow-motion, draining debacles.
Working with Charles L. Webster, he had a solid success publishing Ulyss
es Grant’s memoirs, whose gallant completion by the dying Grant occasioned Clemens’s moving portrait of the persistent old general. Still, Charles L. Webster & Co. went bankrupt in 1894, at roughly the same time Clemens’s “ten-year dream” of developing a perfect typesetting machine, the Paige Compositor, came clanging to a dismal close. “All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplace contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle,” he had written—to Orion!—in 1889. The old boastfulness of those youthful letters from New York and the Mississippi River balloons once more over the mighty Compositor (“We own the whole field—every inch of it—and nothing can dislodge us”), but in the end, no amount of time and money can make the enterprise go. After it and the publishing business are gone, Clemens will discharge his debts by once more strenuously driving his pen.
How little detachment this greatest of ironists has in the peak moments of his far-flung life. Clemens hated “sham sentimentality” whenever he got wind of its sour sweetness, especially from incoming mail. But his own often exclamatory letters never stint on genuine feeling. He can rhapsodize a “perfect” summer day or unleash a cri de coeur of grief and guilt, such as the one he lets loose during his river days over the death of his brother Henry in a shipboard boiler explosion: “Men take me by the hand and congratulate me and call me ‘lucky’ because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up!” (This long, despairing letter stands in inverse proportion to the joyous later one about Lewis, the heroic farmhand.)
After the death of his wife, Clemens directs his cry of sorrow toward Howells: “Shall we ever laugh again? If I could only see a dog that I knew in the old times! and could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, and ease my heart.” This lord of fictional mischief had been a worshipful husband from the start, introducing Livy to his family in a letter written on February 27, 1869: “She is only a little body but she hasn’t her peer in Christendom … I warn you that whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is her willing slave for evermore.”
On those occasions when Clemens and Livy were apart, letters between them substituted for companionable conversation from pillow to pillow. Having witnessed a spat between the Howellses, Clemens couldn’t wait to tell his own wife about it: “It didn’t seem to me that I had any right to be having this feast and you not there.” It must have been particular torment, during her long last illness, for Clemens—as Charles Neider, the editor of his letters, tells us—to be permitted only forty minutes of daily visiting with Livy, and the dispatch of only two letters per day, preferably newsless and unexciting, into the sickroom.
As he aged and death increased its takings—not just Livy, but two daughters and many friends—Clemens grew more preoccupied with a dark religious determinism that held man to be “a helpless and irresponsible coffee mill ground by the hand of God.” The design was anything but intelligent, and the machine ran backward. “The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to. Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.”
As the twentieth century arrived, the big picture began commanding more of his focus than anything small—world disarmament trumping “that sewer—party politics”—but little sublunary concerns could never fully disappear from the letters of a writer so instinctively prescriptive. Near the end of his life, Clemens adds Sir Walter Scott to a list of literary dismissals that already includes Hawthorne, Henry James and Middlemarch. Posing a series of innocent-seeming questions to the critic Brander Matthews, he asks, regarding the Scotch novelist: “Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous? … Did he know how to write English and didn’t do it because he didn’t want to?”
In the year he turned forty-five, Clemens had found himself reading the “diffuse, conceited, ‘eloquent,’ bathotic” letters of the youthful Daniel Webster—and musing upon epistolary survival. At that point quite content in the prime of his own life beside a loving wife and healthy new baby, Clemens sat down to write a letter to his best friend, the Reverend Joseph Twichell and to wonder about whoever might be reading this same letter “80 years hence,” in the year 1960. Curiously enough, Clemens imagined this reader as a “pitying snob” who would only sneer at the “pathetically trivial” doings of the author’s family. Bringing the composition to an abrupt close, Clemens stopped addressing Twichell and issued a warning to the nasty specimen of posterity he was envisioning: “Suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind now, and once more toothless, and the rest of us are shadows, these many, many years. Yes, and your time cometh!”
Come it does, of course. But a half century beyond 1960, finding ourselves still avid for Clemens’s letters—in which the children are still cutting their teeth and the bloom remains on Livy’s cheek—we have the pleasure of seeing that the joke, for once, was on him.
THE MOST IMPORTANT letter Jessica Mitford ever wrote was a forgery, addressed to herself (“Darling Decca”) at the age of nineteen, on February 3, 1937. Pretending to be a girlfriend traveling on the Continent, the future muckraker issued an effervescent pseudo-invitation to come across the Channel: “We have taken a house in Dieppe—that is, Auntie has taken it! We mean to make it the centre of a sort of motor tour to all the amusing places round. We are going there from Austria on Wednesday, and we should so love you to join us next weekend sometime …”
The letter made it appear as if Mitford might soon be headed toward a world as stable and socially regulated as Madame de Sévigné’s. In fact, her destination was war-torn Spain, which she intended to reach after eloping with her second cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill’s who’d achieved a precocious stardom through his flamboyant rebellion against British public-school culture and his later service with the International Brigade defending Madrid. The Dieppe ruse worked. Shown the letter of invitation, Mitford’s mother, Lady Redesdale, let her daughter slip out of England, and before long Decca and Romilly were in Loyalist Bilbao, transmitting news of the Spanish war for a press bureau that had taken them on.
Looked at in class and period terms, all this might be regarded as normal youthful revolt. Lord Redesdale, known to his children as “Farve,” was a glowering martinet who used a stopwatch to time the sermons of whatever vicar he hired for the Cotswolds village that the Mitfords dominated. His wife (“Muv”) insisted that their six daughters, widely spaced in age but sharing a complicated matrix of games, nicknames and nonsense languages, receive much of their education at home—a confinement especially resented by Decca, who from the start possessed terrific gumption.
She was the fifth of the sisters to make a London debut. All of them had looks, wit and aggression to burn; each was “a terrific hater,” Decca would remember. The escapades of the older ones had been harmless enough during the 1920s heyday of the Bright Young Things (Evelyn Waugh even worked twelve-year-old Decca’s pet lamb into Vile Bodies), but they proved a good deal less amusing when conducted under the darker clouds of the decade that followed. It would be the grotesque doings of her sisters, more than the eccentricities and strictness of her parents, that prompted Decca’s flight in 1937.
“Whenever I see the words ‘Peer’s Daughter’ in a headline,” sighed Muv, “I know it’s going to be something about one of you children.” In 1936, after the collapse of her marriage to Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, Diana, the greatest beauty among the girls, wed Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. This new connection fired up Nazi enthusiasm in the most physically imposing of the sisters, Unity (middle name Valkyrie), who soon became friendly with Goebbels, Goering and Hitler himself. Nancy Mitford, the eldest and most caustic of the girls, satirized the family’s political adventurings in a novel called Wigs on the Green, but even she had the Mitford gift for group-loathing; in her case, a weirdly virulent anti-Americanism. When Decca, the clan’s only lefti
st, made her escape, Nancy joined forces with the family in trying to retrieve her.
After a period in Spain, the young Romillys did return, briefly, to England, where the lights in their London flat “blazed away night and day,” since nobody had ever informed Decca “that you had to pay for electricity.” Following the Munich pact of 1938, the couple were off to America, determined to stay there while Britain’s international alignments sorted themselves out. Esmond and Decca sponged and schemed and odd-jobbed their way up and down the East Coast until during the spring of 1940, in response to Hitler’s westward invasions, Romilly decided to enlist in the Canadian Air Force. He was killed the next year.
Decca remained in Washington with their baby daughter, Constancia (“Dinky”), finding work with the Office of Price Administration and a social life among the young New Dealers. She lived with Clifford and Virginia Durr, Southern liberals whose guests sometimes included Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife. (“Who is Lady Bird?” Muv wrote to Decca. “I looked her up in the Peerage, but could find no trace.”) By the middle of the war, Mitford had moved to San Francisco and gotten remarried to an OPA lawyer named Robert Treuhaft. She became an American citizen in order to join the Communist Party, in whose activities she and her husband avidly participated for the next fifteen years.