Contested Will (21 page)

Ironically, in her desire to move beyond autobiography, Keller joined a movement committed to the belief that literature was ultimately confessional. Yet Keller was living evidence that a great writer didn't need to see or hear things herself to write about them. Though she knew this, she remained unable to accept that it was Shakespeare's ability to imagine things that mattered – and that what he found in books, as much as or more than what he experienced first-hand, stimulated his imagination, as it had hers. In late May, Keller wrote to Booth, who had sent her a copy of his new book, apologising for having been unable to help get it ‘the fair, unbiased consideration which it deserves'. Twain wrote to Keller a month later, urging her to give over ‘the expectation of convincing anybody that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare'. But if Gilder wouldn't run her piece, he added, somebody else would.

Recalling her visit to Stormfield, Helen Keller writes that Twain ‘was at first skeptical' about Booth's cipher ‘and inclined to be facetious at our expense'. That facetiousness was either a pose or quickly vanished. Lyon remembered how Twain was galvanised by what he saw and ‘seized upon it with a destroying zeal. He is as
keen about it as Macy is; and you'd think that both men had Shakespeare by the throat righteously strangling him for some hideous crime.' Twain paced ‘the long living room with his light quick step, flushed and excited', while Macy, seeing his obvious enthusiasm, ‘promised to send to England' for a copy of the book that Keller had recently reviewed, Greenwood's
The Shakespeare Problem Restated
. For the rest of the weekend Twain held ‘long searching enthusiastic talks' with Macy who was ‘egging him on to write his own book “which will be timely”'.

Ordinarily, Twain didn't have the energy to write after seeing off house guests. Lyon recalled that this day ‘was different. There was silence in his room all morning.' We have Twain's own words for what he excitedly confided that day to posterity in his auto biographical dictation:

‘Distant future revealment' is a lovely notion, precisely what he thought Bacon had in mind by the acrostic. Twain could barely contain his excitement:

This was no parlour game for Twain, nor was his interest in Shakespeare and the authorship question a passing fancy. Quite the contrary; no writer of his day had wrestled longer with both. He was a regular theatregoer (as well as a dramatist in his own right) and familiar with Shakespeare's plays in performance – from Edwin Booth's
Hamlet
and Edwin Forrest's
Othello
to the rough-and-tumble frontier productions he had witnessed growing up and so brilliantly recaptures in
Huck Finn
. Twain not only reread Shakespeare's plays as preparation for
The Prince and the Pauper
, but also echoed and quoted Shakespeare in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
, and even tried his hand in 1876 at Elizabethan prose in the bawdy
1601
, set at Queen Elizabeth's fireside, in which Shakespeare himself figures as a character.

When Twain visited Shakespeare's birthplace during a trip to England in 1872, he was already sceptical that the man from Stratford could have written these plays: ‘It is curious there is not a scrap of manuscript in the shape of a letter or note of Shakespeare in the present day except the letter of someone trying to [borrow]
£
30 from him.' Twain's doubts in fact stretched back even further than that, to a time before he became a writer. His scepticism was less a deathbed conversion by an ageing writer obsessed with his legacy (though that too is part of it) than the confirmation of what he had half-suspected for over fifty years.

The heady days following the visit of Helen Keller and the Macys led Twain to admit what he had long left unspoken: from ‘away back towards the very beginnings of the Shakespeare–Bacon controversy I have been on the Bacon side, and have wanted to see our majestic Shakespeare unhorsed'. When Twain asked himself what led him to side with Bacon, he couldn't quite say: ‘My reasons for this attitude may have been good, they may have been bad, but such as they were, they strongly influenced me.'

Twain began working feverishly on a new project – part autobiography, part authorship polemic – and his reflections on Shakespeare's authorship took him back to the publication of ‘Delia Bacon's book – away back in that ancient day – 1857, or 1856'
when he was an apprentice steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River under the tutelage of George Ealer. Ealer, Twain recalls, was ‘an idolator of Shakespeare' and would often recite Shakespeare, ‘not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch, and I was steering'. Ealer didn't just take pleasure in reciting Shakespeare; he enjoyed arguing about him too. He had strong opinions about the controversy stirred up by ‘Delia Bacon's book' and shared them with Twain. Ealer even ‘bought the literature of the dispute as fast as it appeared', Twain recalled, ‘and we discussed it all through thirteen hundred miles of river'.

Ealer ‘was fiercely loyal to Shakespeare and cordially scornful of Bacon and all the pretensions of the Baconians', and so was Twain – ‘at first'. But Twain got fed up with Ealer's arguments and went over to the other, Baconian, side. He recognised from the start ‘how curiously theological' the controversy was – and soon became ‘welded to my faith' and ‘looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody's else's faith that didn't tally with mine'. Twain admits that he got the better of his formidable pilot-master only once, when he wrote out a passage from Shakespeare, then ‘riddled it with his wild steamboatful interlardings' – capturing what he actually heard as Ealer both steered and recited while guiding the steamboat downriver. He handed the passage to Ealer to read aloud and, as Twain expected, Ealer made the ‘thunderous interlardings … seem a part of the text', made ‘them sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare's own soul'.

Twain then sprang his trap, insisting that ‘Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws and the law courts.' Ealer replied that Shakespeare could have learned about the law from books, at which point Twain ‘got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the interlardings'. Ealer was forced to concede that ‘books couldn't teach a student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and make no
mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover'. Twain thought his argument irrefutable: ‘A man can't handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he had not personally served.'

It's hard to know how much of this account is true. Ealer had indeed been Twain's instructor on the Mississippi in November 1857 and then again from February to June 1858, when news about Delia Bacon's book, and the book itself, were already in circulation. If Twain's recollections are to be trusted, he and Ealer were probably familiar with Delia Bacon's argument from an article that had run in June 1857 in a newspaper they read, the
New Orleans Daily Picayune
. The ‘interlarding' passage sounds fictional, a re-creation, based on the burlesques of
Hamlet, Macbeth
and other plays that Twain in later years would perfect; yet there is a ring of truth in Lyon's account of how ‘the King told how … Ealer used to read Shakespeare aloud, all interrupted with river talk, and piloting orders', and how ‘splendid' it was ‘to hear and see' Twain ‘read it, for he acted it, and threw in plenty of river profanity'.

It's extremely unlikely, though, that Twain had argued back in 1857 that only a lawyer could have written the plays; some years had to pass before a procession of lawyers would pick up on Malone's hint and strongly urge that case. But what does sound like authentic Twain is the argument that you can only write convincingly about what you know about and have experienced first-hand. There's no substitute for that, he was convinced, no way to learn from books alone. Anyone who tries ‘will make mistakes' and ‘will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right'; ‘the reader who has served that trade will know the writer hasn't.'

In what sounds like another apocryphal episode that would be recycled in his book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, Twain tells the story of how, as a seven-year-old boy, he had tried to write a biographical account of Satan's life, and ran into all sorts of trouble with his schoolmaster, given how little factual evidence there was about the devil. The moral: Shakespeare and Satan ‘are the best-known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath
upon the planet'. More likely he had Jesus, not Satan, in mind, though it would have been near heretical to say so publicly. But he confessed as much to Paine at this time, who writes that Twain's ‘Shakespeare interest had diverging by-paths. One evening, when we were alone at dinner, he said: “There is only one other illustrious man in history about whom there is so little known,” and he added, “Jesus Christ.”' Twain ‘reviewed the statements of the Gospels concerning Christ, though he declared them to be mainly traditional and of no value'. Paine adds that Twain ‘did not admit that there had been a Christ with the character and mission related by the Gospels. “It is all a myth,” he said, tellingly. “There have been Saviours in every age of the world. It is all just a fairy tale.”' Once again, the Higher Criticism had left its mark.

After dredging up these memories from his childhood and time as a cub pilot in his autobiographical dictations, Twain briefly lost interest in the project. But he was re-energised a month later when the long-promised copy of Greenwood's
The Shakespeare Problem Restated
finally arrived. It ‘so fired the King', Isabel Lyon recalled, ‘that he has started again at his article, which he had dropped, on the Life of Shakespeare'. Twain wrote to his daughter Jean that ‘I am having a good time … dictating to the stenographer (Autobiography) a long day-after-day scoff at everybody who is ignorant enough and stupid enough to go on believing Shakespeare ever wrote a play or a poem in his life.' And his copy of Greenwood's book was soon ‘splattered' with notes and fresh ideas.

His biographer, Paine, who couldn't understand why Twain kept insisting that he knew ‘that Shakespeare didn't write those plays', asked how him how could be so sure. Twain replied: ‘I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned.' Paine thought that Twain was joking and ‘asked if he had been consulting a spiritual medium', but Twain was ‘clearly in earnest'. Paine finally learned that Twain's confidence was based on the string cipher and Twain insisted that Booth's book ‘was far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published; that Ignatius
Donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that … Booth, had demonstrated, beyond any doubt or question, that the Bacon signatures were there'. Paine was about to set sail for Egypt and begged for more information before his departure, but Twain refused, assuring him that the news would come by cable to his ship ‘and the world would quake with it'. Paine was so excited by this imminent revelation that, he writes, ‘I was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at Stormfield at the time of the upheaval.' In the end he sailed off and upon arriving in Cairo ‘looked eagerly through English newspapers, expecting any moment to come upon great head-lines; but I was always disappointed. Even on the return voyage there was no one I could find who had heard any particular Shakespeare news.'

Twain kept writing about the authorship of the plays because he cared about something other than what he believed Booth had already proven. Left unanswered by the cipher solution were questions that bore directly on Twain's unshakeable belief that writers could only successfully write about what they had experienced first-hand. Nowhere is this clearer than in the marginal notes he scrawled throughout the copy of Greenwood's book that Macy had sent him. One of those annotations reveals a great deal about the prism through which Twain now saw Shakespeare: ‘Certain people persisted to the end in believing that Arthur Orton was Sir Roger Tichborne. Shakespeare is another Arthur Orton – with all the valuable evidence against him, and not a single established
fact
in his favor.' Arthur Orton, known in his own day almost universally as the Claimant, is no longer a household name, though he was one of the wonders of the Victorian age. The controversy that raged over his identity goes back to 1854, when the young heir to one of the Britain's oldest aristocratic titles, Sir Roger Charles Tichborne, disappeared, reportedly drowned at sea off the coast of South America. His body was never recovered. The story had all the trappings of Shakespearean romance: families torn asunder by tempests, long searches for lost children, and, in the end, long-desired reunion. Roger Tichborne's mother refused to accept the
news that her son had died and began making enquiries abroad about his whereabouts. In 1866 a man arrived from Australia claiming to be her long-lost son and heir. He didn't look much like her son (he was a huge man, while her son, when she last saw him, was quite skinny, and Sir Roger's distinctive tattoo had somehow disappeared). Nonetheless, Lady Tichborne immediately identified him as the long-lost son, as did several other family friends and servants. Relatives, keen on protecting the family title and lands, thought the ill-educated Claimant a fraud. It would take litigation to settle the matter and in 1872 the longest and most celebrated British trial for imposture began. It generated tremendous interest, cutting across class boundaries and stirring up many of the same reactions as the authorship controversy did at this time: how could a low-class, unschooled provincial possibly be mistaken for a well-travelled, worldly man, one naturally knowledgeable about the ways of the aristocracy?