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 :