Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Mollie may have known the identity of the second woman, who remains a mystery woman in the life of Mark Twain, but the allusion is probably not to Olivia Langdon. For Twain, Olivia never left her pedestal, and his tone here may suggest someone flirtatious and naively clever. The reference does establish Twain’s emotional state as he entered the laborious and often frustrating process of writing and revising his second book.

  The first obstacle was the Alta, which, in an unusual step for any newspaper, had copyrighted Twain’s letters and now threatened to make a book of them itself, denying him the right to do so. Bliss suggested that he simply rewrite the letters, but that was out of the question. He would, he knew, have to make serious revisions in the Alta letters for a book, mainly toning down the religious and cultural irreverence and cleaning up his use of slang. Yet, whatever the changes, the Alta letters and The Innocents Abroad would obviously tell the same story. So on March 11 he left Washington behind and sailed on the Henry Chauncey out of New York, essentially reversing his arduous journey of a year before. He was more worried about the damage that the Alta ’s planned publication might cause his newly won literary reputation in the East than he was about not being able to use the material for his own book. “If the Alta ’s book were to come out with those wretched, slangy letters unrevised,” he told Mary Fairbanks, “I should be utterly ruined.”2

  He arrived in San Francisco on April 2 and immediately began his negotiations with the Alta. He also lectured at least twenty times between his arrival in San Francisco and return to New York in late July, including two shipboard performances. In one of the more intriguing intersections in American literary history, he spoke in his first San Francisco appearance on April 6 before a “ ‘Literary Society’ recently formed by the younger members of Rev. Dr. Charles Wadsworth’s church.” That Reverend Wadsworth would be Emily Dickinson’s “dearest earthly friend,” who had led the Calvary Presbyterian Church in the city since 1862, following a ministerial stint in Philadelphia, where the subsequently reclusive poet met him. Wadsworth’s national reputation as a clergyman was second only to Henry Ward Beecher’s, but unlike Beecher (and like Dickinson) he was apparently a shy individual, who never greeted his congregation after services. At least according to the Dickinson legend, Wadsworth had broken the belle of Amherst’s heart when he moved west. Twain had known of Wadsworth since at least March 4, 1866, when he attended one of the clergyman’s sermons. In a section of his Enterprise letter titled “Reflections on the Sabbath” and published that year about March 5 or 6, he had praised Wadsworth’s style of sermonizing, which included jokes delivered in a deadpan manner and criticism of Sunday school books, points of view that accorded well with Clemens’s own.3

  It is not altogether clear how Twain convinced the Alta editors to drop their plans for a book and give him full permission to use his letters elsewhere. By early May he told Mary Fairbanks that the matter had been settled in his favor. At first they had wanted to give him a 10 percent royalty on their book, but Twain argued that such a book would not reach his eastern audience and thus would cost him a fortune in lost royalties there. It was probably the goodwill he had established through his reputation as a humorist in San Francisco as well as his having staunch friends on the newspaper staff (he was praised by the Alta while he was in the city) that persuaded the editors to drop their claim, including even their request that the paper be thanked in the preface to The Innocents Abroad. The book’s future author spent the rest of his western visit lecturing again, both before and after his confrontation with the Alta, in California and Nevada. The highlight of the 1868 tour came on April 14, when Clemens spoke at Platt’s Hall, the house packed with an audience of sixteen hundred. He had given a lecture called “The Frozen Truth” on January 9 in Washington but now revised the title to “Pilgrim Life, Being a Sketch of His Notorious Voyage to Europe, Palestine, Etc., on Board the Steamship Quaker City.”4

  These lectures helped advertise the future book, and they also no doubt assisted Twain in the process of revising his Alta letters for it. The claim that he was revising mainly for a different audience in the East is probably exaggerated. American humor of the West and Southwest had long been familiar to New York readers of The Spirit of the Times, which published the best of what was being written before the Civil War.5 But a book was surely different from a series of newspaper articles because it required context and transitions that weekly letters did not. Clemens, as we have noted, also had to modify his expressions, purifying coarse passages and avoiding the charge of blasphemy. Generally, the story gets funnier with the revisions, but occasionally his changes backfire. The famous weeping-at-the-tomb-of-Adam scene in chapter 53, for example, is perhaps more richly humorous in the newspaper version, where Twain says he “shed some tender tears over poor old Adam” because he had lost so much by dying “young”: “He had not seen the telegraph, or the locomotive, or the steamboat; he did not even see the flood. He missed the Paris Exposition.” In the revision, also raucously funny, the narrator simply “burst into tears” because the “noble old man” didn’t live long enough to see his “blood relation,” having died “six thousand brief summers before I was born.”6

  Generally in the revision, he was kinder about the piety of his fellow passengers than he had been in either the Alta or the two New York papers. He also reduced the vulgarity of the fictional Mr. Brown, who had accompanied him on his travels since Hawaii. He completed much of this revision while still in San Francisco. As the editors of the scholarly edition of Twain’s letters note, more than half of the manuscript consisted of revised printed letters from the Alta and New York Tribune and Herald. He also persuaded Bret Harte to read his work, and he responded gratefully to Harte’s recommended cuts in the material—possibly a total of sixty-five pages of manuscript.7

  When he got back to New York, Twain was eager to bring his latest copy up to Bliss in Hartford, but the publisher put him off because he was busy with Richardson’s book on Grant. The two may have met in New York in very early August, but Twain also visited Bliss in Hartford for a week starting on August 7. By that time the American Publishing Company had possession of the manuscript and was in the process of providing extensive illustrations for it. Ten days later, he told “Mother” Fairbanks—who was vexed about something, possibly the fact that her “son” hadn’t visited her in Cleveland before making his recent trip to California (the last in his life, it would turn out)—that he planned to return to New York the next day and, shortly thereafter, travel to Elmira, ostensibly to visit Charlie Langdon.8 The two Quaker City friends also planned to visit Mary Fairbanks in Cleveland in September.

  In his authorized biography, which came out under the watchful eye of Clemens’s daughter Clara in 1912, just two years after Twain’s death, Paine describes in fairy-tale fashion the way the rising humorist fell in love with the delicate damsel. Charley picked Twain up at the train station in nearby Waverly (mainly because the visitor had taken the slower train from New York and didn’t reach Elmira till nearly midnight) and got him settled in for the night without meeting any other family members. “A gay and happy week followed,” the biographer tells us, “a week during which Samuel Clemens realized more fully than ever that in his heart there was room for only one woman in all the world.”9 Livy, too, Paine adds, realized a thing or two.

  During the visit, extended into the first week of September because of a minor carriage accident the injuries from which Twain exaggerated, he proposed marriage. The next we know, according to the first of more than a hundred courtship letters over the next eighteen months (she kept most of his, but we have only one of hers during this period), he was addressing her as his “Honored Sister.” By this time he had returned to St. Louis to visit his mother again. Livy had, according to the decorum of the day, already refused his first proposal and agreed to carry on a correspondence with him only if they treated each other as “brother” and “sister.” He thanked her on September 21 for letting him down “
so gently when you could have wounded so deeply,” but he confided his frustration to close friends in New York, saying that he was in love with a beautiful girl who was unfortunately rich.10 He very much resented the label of “fortune hunter” and was determined even before the success of The Innocents Abroad to support his wife on his own earnings, something he wasn’t always able to do in later years.

  When she finally said yes in November and her parents gave their conditional approval pending appropriate character references from the West, he was about to begin a winter lecture tour performing “The American Vandal Abroad” under the auspices of the American Literary Bureau. His original schedule of ten lectures ultimately grew to forty-three in nine different states from New York to Iowa between November 17 in Cleveland and March 20, 1869, in Sharon, Pennsylvania. The third lecture in this exhausting series took place at the opera house in Elmira on November 23, around the time his engagement to Livy was fixed. “Mr. & Mrs. L. have yielded a conditional consent,” he told Mary Fairbanks. “Livy has said, over & over again, the word which is so hard for a maiden to say. . . . She isn’t my sister any more—but some time in the future she is going to be my wife.”11

  That day wouldn’t come for more than a year, during which time the Langdon family had to come to terms with its shock. Charlie, despite his friendship with Sam, initially and somewhat adamantly opposed their marriage. The family members gradually gave up their fears about Mark Twain’s dubious past and convinced themselves—without favorable letters of reference, as it turned out—that he was a changing man. Olivia Lewis Langdon, the bride-to-be’s mother, wrote Mary Fairbanks in December 1868 to inquire just “what the kind of man he has been, and what the man [sic] he now is, or is to become.” Mary Fairbanks answered evidently that the better half of Mark Twain, the gentleman called Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was taking charge. “I touch no more spirituous liquors after this day,” Sam had told Mrs. Fairbanks on Thanksgiving Day. “I shall do no act which you or Livy might be pained to hear of—I shall seek the society of the good—I shall be a Christian. . . . Have no fears, my mother. I shall be worthy—yet.”12

  Becoming a Christian was the most important part of her parents’ terms in approving the marriage, he told his sister Pamela. Livy had offered to pray for him, and during their long courtship she sent him synopses of the weekly printed sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, half-brother not only to the famous novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe but the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher, who was a Congregationalist minister in Elmira and a close friend of Jervis Langdon’s. Twain, soon to go on record in his forthcoming book about the ugliness of the Sea of Galilee, told Livy that he had been praying since September to accept Christ into his heart, “that now I began clearly to comprehend that one must seek Jesus for himself alone, & uninfluenced by selfish motives.”13

  Considering also his later satires about the Garden of Eden (“Niagara Falls Park”) and heaven, as well as his past as an essentially lapsed Christian, it is not easy to tell how sincere Sam was about returning to Christianity. Certainly he was earnest in his desire for Livy. At any rate, he engaged her in numerous discussions about the difficulty he was having in coming to terms with the idea of Jesus as the son of God. He grappled with Beecher’s statement, in a sermon entitled “The Duty of Using One’s Life for Others,” that it was not enough simply to be a good person; one had to be a Christian in order to be a “fruit-bearer. A moral man is a vine that does not bear fruit.” “That is me, exactly,” he told Livy after reading the synopsis of the sermon she had sent; “I do not swear, I do not steal, I do not murder, I do not drink. [Yet] my ‘whole life is not.’ I am ‘not all over.’ ” He confessed that he may have lacked “the chief ingredient of piety”—that “inner sense” that allows one to live primarily for Christ. But he would keep trying, he told her: “I can be a Christian—I shall be a Christian.”14

  He was living on the cusp of Darwinism, which would lead to the replacement of essentialism with relativism. He never engaged publicly in such blasphemy, knowing well enough that he would lose the greater part of his American (i.e., Christian) readership, but we know from his posthumous writings how much private fun he had with these ideas. Years later, under his influence even Livy would lose her faith in Christianity.

  They were officially engaged on February 4, 1869, and married almost exactly a year later, on February 2. By the time of the engagement, he could boast to his love, “I devour religious literature, now, with a genuine interest & pleasure that I am so glad to see growing—& I hope it may always grow—& I believe it will.”15

  After so many months on the road during the 1868–69 lecture tour, while also going back and forth with Bliss over details of publication, he came to hate both lecturing and Bliss, about whom he would later, in his autobiography, become downright nasty, noting a quarter century after the publisher’s death that he felt “only compassion for him and if I could send him a fan I would.”16 He stayed with both, however, lecturing for one more season and writing for Bliss for more than ten years. He believed (before the immense success of The Innocents Abroad) that he could not make a decent living at either lecturing or authorship, certainly not enough to support a wife and family. Furthermore, lecturing took him away from Livy, something that, she soon made clear, especially after their wedding, she would not easily abide. The best idea, he thought, was to return to journalism. And here his initially skeptical future father-in-law came to his rescue with a sizable loan.

  The difficulty Mark Twain encountered in buying into a newspaper underscores the fact that he was still not entirely “respectable” in literary and elite journalistic circles. He first tried to buy into the Hartford Courant, one of whose owners was the future co-author of The Gilded Age. As Twain described this effort to Livy after their marriage, the Courant ultimately sought out his participation as a partner in the wake of the success of The Innocents Abroad. (“Twelve thousand copies of the book sold this month,” he told his wife in December 1869. “Nothing like it since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I guess.”) But his original interest in joining the Courant had been met with “insultingly contemptuous indifference.” Next he looked into Samuel Bowles’s Springfield Republican, telling this abrasive editor, who was both friend of Emily Dickinson and foe of Walt Whitman: “I am simply in search of a home. I must come to anchor.” Bowles not only ignored his offer but warned Warner and his co-owner against their taking Twain as a partner on the Courant.17

  He confided to Mary Fairbanks his interest in the Courant, and she may somehow have encouraged him to consider buying into her husband’s paper, the Cleveland Herald. Clemens had earlier thought of Cleveland as a place to make his home with Livy. But Abel Fairbanks and his partners at the Herald apparently were no more anxious to become formally associated with Mark Twain than the others. Sam told his sister Pamela that Jervis Langdon would probably put up $60,000 to buy a third interest in the paper for his future son-in-law. But, no doubt as an evasive tactic, Fairbanks raised the price by offering his wife’s friend only one-fourth of the business at the cost of $50,000.18

  This feint came after much back-and-forth, and by then, in August 1869, Sam was on the verge of buying into the Buffalo Express. (A decade later the Fairbankses would fall on hard times, and Mary would borrow a thousand dollars from the successful—and now “respectable”—Mark Twain.) He told Bliss that he “had just got mad with the Cleveland Herald folks & broken off all further negotiations for a purchase. . . . I have bought one-third of the Buffalo ‘Express.’ ” The full price was $25,000. Jervis Langdon, with his generous loan of half of that sum to help Sam make the down payment of $15,000, had effectively arranged to keep his daughter within reach, since Buffalo was an easy train ride from Elmira. Livy had earlier expressed her fears of “ever leaving this home of mine.” Twain, who had been essentially homeless for the last sixteen years, was himself a bit mystified at this latest juncture in his rootless life. He now had Livy and a way to support her. Yet in the larger sense, as he told
Mary Fairbanks, in a diplomatic effort to explain why he had declined the Herald ’s latest offer, this next chapter in his life was just another beginning—“another apprenticeship . . . to be tacked on to the tail end of a foolish life made up of apprenticeships. I believe I have been apprentice to pretty much everything.”19 This apprenticeship as a newspaper editor turned out to be a wrong turn, though it would provide some grist for his next book. He would begin again and again in a life that eventually took him back in his literary imagination to Hannibal and the Mississippi River.

  20 False Start in Buffalo

  Sam Clemens sealed two lifelong friendships in 1868, not only the deep affection of Olivia Langdon but also the unwavering loyalty of the Reverend Joseph Hopkins Twichell. It seems a fair surmise that Clemens remained relatively quiet about his own Civil War service for almost a quarter century, in part because he was intimidated by the war stories of the Reverend Joe, who had been a chaplain in the Army of the Potomac. In that Union force under the successive commands of Generals John Pope and Ambrose Burnside, as Lincoln continued to search for a killer named Grant, Twichell had witnessed such terrible campaigns as the Union defeats at Second Bull Run and Fredericksburg in 1862. Two years later at the bloody but successful Union encounter with the Confederates at Gettysburg, essentially the South’s last stand, he helped restrain General Dan Sickles while a combat surgeon amputated his right leg without anesthesia. Before the war, the notorious Sickles had been acquitted, on a plea of insanity, of killing his wife’s lover. And the sanity of his military movements at the Battle of Gettysburg was questioned for years after the war. Twichell finished his three-year term in the Seventy-first New York Regiment of Volunteers on schedule in July 1864, as Grant moved inexorably through the Wilderness toward Richmond and Union victory.