Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Yet The Innocents Abroad is replete with many evocative passages that reveal profound sentiment. In Damascus (chapter 45), Twain writes, it feels strange, not lugubriously sad as it is at Adam’s grave, “to be standing on ground that was once actually pressed by the feet of the Saviour.” “I cannot comprehend this,” he concludes, because “the gods of my understanding have been always hidden in clouds and very far away.” Christ, he remarks two chapters later, remains to him “a mysterious stranger.” Sam Clemens was reared with the Bible and was thoroughly familiar with it by the age of ten. Hence, even in his blossoming agnosticism (which he would soon have to curb in order to marry), he was respectful of the biblical fact of Christ. “One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen under our observation,” he wrote about Syria and the Holy Land, “is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity.” The longest journey Christ ever made was barely more than a hundred miles: “he spent his life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no larger than an ordinary county in the United States.”

  18 Love in a Locket

  While Mark Twain was still traveling in Spain, he sent a letter back to his old friend and former boss Joe Goodman, who published parts of it in the Virginia City Enterprise. “Between you and I,” he wrote, “this pleasure party of ours is composed of the damnedest, rustiest, ignorant, vulgar, slimy, psalm-singing cattle that could be scraped up in seventeen States.” He prefaced this remark by saying that he hadn’t let it out yet, “but am going to.” The next day this cat with nine lives was already out of the bag. While the Quaker City was docked in Cadiz, Spain, for refueling, the ship’s mail delivery contained a copy of Twain’s letter to the New York Tribune of September 19, in which he disparaged many of the passengers while extolling the social talents of Mary Fairbanks during their meeting with the czar of Russia in Yalta. By the time the ship reached New York on November 19, Clemens was in hot water with any number of the passengers. Their wrath was further fueled by an article he then published in the New York Herald entitled “The Quaker City Pilgrimage,” a piece unsigned but of obvious authorship, which the Herald later confirmed. It even listed the actual names of the passengers.1

  The article complained that the voyage was anything but a pleasure cruise because of the puritanical nature of many of the passengers. Instead, he wrote, “the pleasure ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse,” adding that there is “nothing exhilarating about a funeral excursion without a corpse.” (No doubt, Jane Clemens, who enjoyed any and all funeral processions in her old age, would have agreed.) The article, in its way, was another trial balloon for The Innocents Abroad. About their excursion to Paris, he wrote there and in his book that the French simply stared when the pilgrims spoke French: “We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.” As to the rest of the cruise, “Well, we were at home in Palestine. It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the Ufizzi, the Vatican. . . . We examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, Rome or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn’t we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of America.”2

  Many of the passengers were “howling” about the Herald article, but Mrs. Fairbanks tried to lighten the mood by arguing for Mark Twain’s future as a respectable writer. “ ‘Mark Twain,’ ” she wrote in her last letter to the Cleveland Herald, “may have ridiculed our prayer-meetings and our psalm-singing—that is his profession—and his newspapers expected it of him; but the better man, Samuel L. Clemens, I believe in his heart reverences the sacred mission of prayer, and will, I am sure, often recall with satisfaction the evening hours when his voice blended with others in the hymns of the ‘Plymouth Collection.’ ”3 Sam appreciated the protection Mrs. Fairbanks offered him and her other “cubs,” who included young Charlie Langdon. It is probably fair to say that this rough humorist from the West would never have successfully wooed the genteel Olivia Louise Langdon without “Mother” Fairbanks’s belief in and support for Mark Twain’s potential as a “cultivated” writer. This mother of two children of her own and one step-daughter had married the widowed Abel Fairbanks in 1852 and raised their three children. She would become the western reserve of the Clemens-Langdon union.

  Back home, Twain hit the ground running. Two days after the arrival of the Quaker City in New York, he shifted to Washington, D.C., taking up a job as private secretary to one of the senators from the new state of Nevada, William M. Stewart. This position wasn’t any more stable or remunerative than the one he had had with Orion in Nevada. And the relationship apparently was not strong either. In 1908 Stewart described the arrival of Clemens at 224 F Street North, where the two men planned to live: “I was seated at my window one morning when a very disreputable-looking person slouched into the room. He was arrayed in a seedy suit, which hung upon his lean frame in bunches with no style worth mentioning. A sheaf of scraggy black hair leaked out of a battered old slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance. He was a man I had known around the Nevada mining camps several years before.”4 This portrait, while perhaps having some semblance of truth, was also an ill-spirited exaggeration, payback for the illustration of a one-eyed Stewart in a slouch hat that Clemens had inserted at the last moment in Roughing It.

  Twain used his position as senatorial secretary for the next two months as a base from which to write letters for at least three different newspapers and to entertain invitations to lecture. He told his family on November 25 that he had received eighteen invitations to lecture at one hundred dollars apiece, but he told Frank Fuller that he didn’t want to “start in the provinces.”5 By now, however, he was well enough known to get another kind of invitation. In a letter dated November 21, 1867, Elisha Bliss, secretary and later president of the American Publishing Company in Hartford, Connecticut, inquired as to whether Clemens would like to revise and collect his Quaker City letters in a book. Bliss, a clever and sometimes devious businessman, would become Mark Twain’s publisher for more than a decade. “We are perhaps,” he told Sam, “the oldest subscription house in the country.” This was lowbrow publishing, scorned by most established and eastern writers, in which sales agents went into the towns and hinterlands of America to gather subscriptions before the first copy was printed. They took along a so-called prospectus, bound copies of sample chapters (and illustrations), and recorded the orders in the back pages, which were lined for the names and addresses of customers.

  The American Publishing Company had been successful in using this approach with Albert Deane Richardson’s memoir as a wartime journalist and Confederate prisoner, and it was now set to publish his Beyond the Mississippi (1867) and Personal History of Ulysses S Grant (1868), two titles that proved to be prescient indications of Twain’s future as a writer and later as a publisher. (In fact, Richardson’s biography of Grant may have marked the beginning of Twain’s lifelong fascination with the conquering general, whom he met for the first time in early 1868.) Twain probably lied when he told Bliss that he had “other propositions for a book,” but this response would not have discouraged the cagey Bliss, who ultimately had to stare down his company board to publish the irreverent Innocents. Sam told Bliss he knew of Richardson’s first book, The Secret Service, The Field, The Dungeon, and the Escape (1865) and knew something about “the subscription plan of publishing.”6 Richardson, a flamboyant reporter for the New York Tribune, was gaining (before his untimely death in 1869 at the hands of a jealous ex-husband) the very kind of popularity that Twain craved. Twain was definitely interested, especially since The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, while published in the traditional way, had failed him financ
ially. Richardson’s own first book, on the other hand, was still flourishing in the wake of the Civil War and would sell more than a hundred thousand copies.

  As Christmas approached, Twain stayed on in Washington, writing his letters, visiting at least one session of Congress as Stewart’s secretary, and also trying to secure a place for his brother Orion in the Department of the Interior. Walt Whitman had recently been fired from his position as a third-class clerk in that department on the grounds that he was the author of a “dirty book,” and we might wonder whether Sam Clemens, or Mark Twain, would have been more acceptable (even as a source of reference for his brother, a former federal employee) to Interior Secretary James Harlan, a former professor of mental and moral science from Iowa. Whatever the case, Orion continued to flounder in Keokuk, Iowa. Twain also kept up his familiar epistolary conversations with “Mother” Fairbanks. He told her that he had received a letter from Charlie Langdon. In fact, though he didn’t know it yet, he would soon meet Charlie’s parents and—most important—his sister. He had already seen her picture in a miniature back in September while still on the cruise. “A good wife,” he told Mrs. Fairbanks, “would be a perpetual incentive to progress,” but then he joked away the idea by saying that he wanted “a good wife—I want a couple of them if they are particularly good.” Then he turned serious again, promising lifelong fidelity because the girl he married would have to be above him socially, would have to uplift him. “I wouldn’t expect to be ‘worthy’ of her,” he told his maternal friend. “I wouldn’t have a girl that I was worthy of. She wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t be respectable enough.”7 It is fairly obvious that he already had a particular woman, or at least a type, in mind. Indeed, his association with this class of American female for five months on the Quaker City had stimulated such an interest, embodied mainly in the character of Mary Fairbanks.

  Olivia Langdon had grown up in Elmira, New York, then a thriving community served by the New York and Erie Railroad, in a palatial home in the center of town (today the site of a small shopping center), but also exactly one mile from one of the worst prisoner-of-war camps in the North. It had been dubbed “Hellmira” for its treatment of Confederate prisoners, three thousand of whom perished there from starvation and disease. During her teenage years she had been mysteriously paralyzed by what we now think was a case of neurasthenia, then particularly common among women of child-bearing age. Whether or not her illness was psychosomatic, it would continue to manifest itself annually, Twain would recall in a letter twenty-nine years after their marriage, in “a hard and wasting dysentery.”8 Olivia lay in a shuttered bedroom for two years until a faith healer came and ordered her to stand and walk. She had just turned twenty-two when she met Clemens, and in one or another of the photographs of her that he first saw in Charlie Langdon’s stateroom on the Quaker City, she bears a slight resemblance to Sam’s mother, Jane Clemens. And, as her brother’s ignored caveat about Twain’s questionable moral character (quoted in the previous chapter) may suggest, she was ready to meet Mark Twain and perhaps to fall in love with him.

  One puzzler in the life of this mysterious stranger is how Olivia’s father, this coal and lumber baron who hobnobbed with national leaders, ever allowed his daughter to become involved with a man of the slightest questionable character. Ample documentation from the autobiography and elsewhere shows that Jervis Langdon asked for letters of reference when Sam announced his serious intentions and that Langdon received discouraging responses (that Twain, for example, while in the West got drunk “oftener than was necessary”). Clearly, it was a case of love at first sight that could not be reversed. Livy, as she was familiarly addressed, was a sensitive young woman, well educated for her time but with a history of physical and mental fragility. Her future mate was a man desperate for a woman he could not only respect but also worship, someone whose angelic, girl-like tenderness made her utterly desirable in the nineteenth century. No Victorian-era father sensitive enough to become a champion for fugitive slaves, as Langdon had been, was going to miss the point here. Their union was simply inevitable. It had been only four years since she recovered from her illness, triggered by a fall on the ice, and as Twain later wrote in his autobiography, “she was never strong again while her life lasted.”9 He would become her protector.

  Returning to New York on Christmas Day, Twain stayed at Dan Slote’s place in Manhattan and saw some of his closest allies on the Quaker City. On New Year’s Day, as he told his mother, recalling the point later in his autobiography almost exactly, he started out to make a number of social calls but was stopped in his tracks at the home of a Mrs. Thomas S. Berry on West 44th Street, where he encountered Olivia Langdon. She was there that day to help her friend receive holiday guests. “Charlie Langdon’s sister was there (beautiful girl,) & Miss Alice Hooker, another beautiful girl, a niece of Henry Ward Beecher’s,” he wrote on January 8, 1868. “We sent the old folks home early, with instructions not to send the carriage till midnight, & then I just staid there & deviled the life out of those girls.” In fact, he had first met his future wife the night before, on New Year’s Eve. After a night of drinking during Christmas week with the “Quaker City night-hawks,” including Charlie Langdon, he called on the “cub” at the St. Nicholas Hotel, where the young man was staying with his parents and sister, whom Sam later remembered as “a sweet & timid & lovely young girl.” The Langdons had obviously heard much about the humorist and invited him to dine with them that evening, after which the party heard Charles Dickens, a favorite writer of Sam’s, on his second and last tour of America, read from David Copperfield at Steinway Hall.10

  After New Year’s Day, Twain would not see Olivia for another eight months, when he finally visited her in Elmira. He did, however, visit Alice Hooker, the other pretty girl he had met, daughter of John and Isabella Hooker, in Hartford. She lived with her parents in the Nook Farm community to the west of town. Hartford was also the home of the American Publishing Company and Elisha Bliss. During the next two months Twain visited the publisher and perhaps developed an early interest in Nook Farm, which was the home of such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe (related to the Hookers) and Charles Dudley Warner, co-owner of the prominent Hartford Courant and future co-author with Twain of The Gilded Age. The reason he didn’t visit Livy sooner is that he would leave for San Francisco on March 11 and not return east until the beginning of August. He also kept up a correspondence with young Emma Beach, so we have to wonder just how committed he was to Livy at this point. It appears, however, that he was simply biding his time, ratcheting up his name and reputation, so to speak, through the book and other activities before making his intentions known in Elmira.

  Back in Washington on January 11, he had given a late-night toast to “Woman” at the second annual banquet of the local newspaper correspondents’ club. It suggests the state of his mind about the so-called weaker sex and the institution of marriage. What follows is part of an actual newspaper stenographer’s record; it also tells us something about the idea of women in America in 1868: women were an institution that kept the opposite sex safely away from its inner animal.

  Human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to woman, sir. She sews on our buttons, [laughter,] she mends our clothes, [laughter,] she ropes us in at the church fairs. . . . Wheresoever you place woman, sir—in whatsoever position or estate—she is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world. [Here Mr. Twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers and remarked that the applause should come in at this point. It came in. Mr. Twain resumed his eulogy.]

  He then catalogued the names of the noblest women in history: Cleopatra, Desdemona, Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, even the naked Mother Eve, who “was ornamental, sir—particularly before the fashions changed,” and the mother of George Washington, who “raised a boy that could not lie.”11 Twain, of course, had already made fun of that legend before in the West.

  As this speech suggests and as his courtship letters confirm, Sam Cl
emens envisioned woman as his savior and marriage as his salvation. Woman—and in this case, Livy—was the ornament to his claim of civilization. He would soon promise almost everything to gain her hand. He would even try to become a Christian again (doubly difficult after the Quaker City experience), and, in the biggest challenge of all, he would give up smoking (for a time).

  19 The Innocent at Home

  If Twain was indeed committed to Livy only a few months into the relationship, he wasn’t telling anybody about it. In a recently recovered letter to his sister-in-law in Keokuk on February 21, 1868, he sounds as though he is playing the field and enjoying the recent acclaim stemming from his postvoyage letters in the Tribune and Herald. “I must answer some letters of ‘Quaker City’ ladies,” he told Mollie. “They are indefatigable correspondents, & exceedingly pleasant withal. I give them a paragraph from the book, now & then, just to hear them howl.” Earlier in the letter he speaks of receiving “a dainty little letter” from Lou Conrad, a neighbor of the Clemenses in St. Louis. “But what worries me,” he continued, “is that I have received no letter from my sweetheart in New York for three days. This won’t do. I shall have to run up there & see what the mischief is the matter. I will break that girl’s heart. I am getting too venerable now to put up with nonsense from children.”1