21 Back on the Lecture Circuit
What began as a dream just a year ago had now turned into a nightmare. Abandoning the scene of that dream, the Buffalo house that Livy’s parents bought and furnished for them—a genuine surprise for Sam, who was duped into thinking they were to occupy rented rooms—the couple retreated with their sick child to Elmira, where both mother and son slowly recovered from typhoid fever. One of the few bright notes at this time of continued crisis was the growing success of The Innocents Abroad. By this time it was clear that the book would probably make him rich, or at least pay all his debts. In its first year it sold 69,500 copies, netting its author $14,000. Now in early 1871, sales continued to boom. Moreover, as he told Bliss, he was “flooded with lecture invitations, & one periodical offers me $6,000 cash for 12 articles”—offers he did not accept. Then there was the $2,000 annually he was paid for writing his Galaxy pieces. Whatever he derived in the way of salary from the Express is not known, but it was very likely little or nothing. When he had first assumed his one-third ownership of that paper, he had expressed a concern about the newspaper’s day-to-day profitability. Yet with the other streams of income, he could afford to ignore this issue. “I hate business,” he told the business-astute Bliss, who had cut corners on the production of Roughing It, something Twain learned about only because Orion Clemens was now working for Bliss.1
Before retreating to Elmira, Sam had tried to cash in on his Innocents Abroad fame with a booklet called Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871), but it failed to make him any serious money. He knew he needed to remain focused on writing Roughing It, but that was becoming deucedly difficult. He had already received help from Orion’s notebook about their journey across the plains in 1861, for which he paid his brother a thousand dollars and got him the job with Bliss editing a new promotional magazine called The American Publisher. Joe Goodman, another player out of the same past, soon came to Elmira and read his friend’s manuscript, making valuable suggestions and praising the work as one of the best things Sam had ever written. He stayed with the Clemens family for a couple of months.2 Goodman steadied his friend as he pushed forward amidst persistent family problems, especially the continually precarious state of young Langdon’s health.
After Sam completed most of Roughing It, the Clemens family moved to Hartford in the first week of October, taking possession of the house they had rented. A few days later the legendary Chicago fire began, and J. Langdon & Company, which had coal and lumber offices in the city, suffered an estimated loss of fifty thousand dollars. (“There is literally no Chicago here,” Twain told his wife when he visited the city that December. “I recognize nothing here, that I ever saw before.”) With his family barely installed in the Hooker house and Livy six months pregnant, Twain had to leave for another lecture tour, again managed by the Redpath agency. It would be exhausting, of course, with seventy-seven engagements in almost as many cities in more than fifteen states between October 16, 1872, and the following February 27. He began in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with a lecture awkwardly titled “Reminiscences of Some un-Commonplace Characters I Have Chanced to Meet.” It failed him almost immediately, but quickly morphed into “Artemus Ward, Humorist,” which hardly fared much better. He was reluctant to share the bad news with Livy. After delivering the talk to mixed reviews in Boston in November, he told her: “It was a bad night, but we had a packed house, & if the papers say any disparaging things, don’t you believe a single word of it, for I never saw a lecture go off so magnificently before.”3
Mark Twain was fatigued even before he began this tour, having gone through so much emotional adversity at home. In December, after switching back and forth between lectures, he gave up the one on Artemus Ward and started reading selections from the proofs of Roughing It. This choice would carry him through the spring phase of the lecture tour and also serve to advertise his new book. Redpath featured the new success in the January number of his Lyceum Circular. Its quotations from several Chicago newspapers following two performances the week before Christmas provide us with a special window on the past. One described the speaker as “lank, lantern-jawed, and impudent” and added three inches to his actual height of five feet, eight and a half inches. “For something like a minute,” it continued, “he says not a word, but rubs his hands awkwardly and . . . begins in a slow drawl.” The first performance in Chicago was such a success that Twain agreed to give the second in a church, something he usually tried to avoid because he said people were reluctant to laugh in church. “While truly eloquent in his glowing descriptions of California scenery,” the Chicago Tribune observed, “he was infinitely droll in his yarns of life on the Pacific slope.” Unfortunately, the Tribune reproduced large patches of the lecture verbatim, thereby undermining its freshness in nearby cities and towns. This became an ongoing problem throughout the tour.4
Twain hadn’t started this tour with readings from his forthcoming book because he had still not completed it in late 1871. Instead, he had actually intended to begin with—but never gave—a lecture entitled “An Appeal in Behalf of Extending the Suffrage to Boys,” another of the early germs for Tom Sawyer. The way his lecture for the 1871–72 season evolved from one topic to the next is a good example of how Mark Twain’s genius worked: rather than focusing on one coherent idea, he often plunged in and creatively moved from one thing to another until everything somehow coalesced into a particular story. The “Reminiscences” lecture with which he actually began the season may have initially featured Artemus Ward, Dick Baker the quartz miner, Riley the journalist, and other “unCommonplace Characters” he had encountered in the West and Hawaii. It was mainly, however, about Ward, whose life and sayings ultimately took over the lecture and turned it into “Artemus Ward, Humorist.”
There were, however, two problems with that talk. First, some audiences found it in poor taste to speak mirthfully about the dead. (Ward had died of tuberculosis in England in 1867.) Second, Ward wasn’t that funny any longer, certainly not as funny as Mark Twain. As Twain kept patching up his lecture on the road, he told his wife that he was “trying to weed Artemus out of it & work myself in. What I say, fetches ’em—but what he says—don’t.” There was also the problem that Ward’s sayings were already familiar, especially in the East. For her part, Livy, living in the age of Victoria, was somewhat uncomfortable with her husband’s reputation as a mere humorist as against a “serious” author. This bias would be handed down to their children, beginning with Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens, who was born in 1872. Livy also hated her husband’s long absences. After he lectured in Hartford in November and quickly departed, Livy told him: “I do hope that this will be the last season that it will be necessary for you to lecture. It is not the way for a husband and wife to live if they can possibly avoid it, is it? Separation comes soon enough.” She was still feeling like a bride in spite of all the tragedy that had followed their wedding almost immediately. “I answered all your letters today,” she told him, referring to business letters Clemens could not reply to on the road. “It was a pleasure to be writing letters for you, it is a pleasure to do any thing for you.” She was so devoted to him that her traditional religious moorings were already weakening. “Do you pray for me Youth?” she asked the same month. “Pray for me as you used to do—I am not prayerful as of old but I believe my heart prays.”5 Part of this newly questioning state of mind arose from the pent-up anger over the death of her father, who had been a giant presence in her life.
Sam hadn’t seen his only living parent for more than a year. He finally did so when he performed his Roughing It lecture on December 8 in Fredonia, New York. Fortunately, he had still sworn off drinking liquor (to please Livy), for Fredonia, where the first meeting of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union would be held in 1873, was no doubt dry. Shortly after his marriage and residence in Buffalo, he had persuaded his mother and sister Pamela to move to this small town on Lake Erie. He called his mother his “first and closest f
riend,” but he always knew that she preferred her firstborn, Orion, whose bumbling life he would later ridicule in his letters to her. These would often contain money, which he also gave Orion in one way or another for the rest of his life. In the lecture season of 1871–72, he averaged just under $130 a performance (one or two going as high as $250), or $9,890 less Redpath’s 10 percent commission.6
Usually on the road alone, Twain had much time to think—and reminisce. After he lectured in Steubenville, Ohio, on January 9, he marveled in a letter to Livy that the nearby Ohio River had once been alive with steamboats. “Where be the pilots?” he asked rhetorically. “They were the starchy boys, in my time, & greatly envied by the youth of the West.” Part of this daydreaming came as a result of his boredom with lecturing. “At last I am through with the most detestable campaign that ever was—a campaign which was one eternal worry with contriving new lectures & being dissatisfied with them,” he told Mary Fairbanks in February when he had only two more lectures to give. He swore that he would never embark on such an ordeal again—“unless I get in debt again.”7 He had paid too much for his share of the Buffalo Express, but he had now made up that loss, and he had repaid the Langdon estate for the $12,500 he had borrowed from his late father-in-law. Sam had been home only once since November, and Susy would be born the next month.
His final two performances of the season were dismally reviewed. The Danbury (Connecticut) News called the February 21 lecture “a failure and a disappointment.” “Mr. Twain is not a beautiful man,” it continued. “His hair is carroty, his gait is shambling.” This wasn’t good press only fifty miles from Hartford, where his heart longed to be. Neither was the review of his last lecture in Amherst, Massachusetts, on February 27. The Amherst Student solemnly observed: “We do not know whether the audience had expected too much of the funny Mark Twain from reading his funny book, or whether two hours of nonsense is more than people care for at once, or not, but true it is that they had heard enough of him when he was done.” The Amherst Record was much more appreciative of Twain’s socializing at a reception at the Amherst House. Its remarks suggest that Mark Twain was already generating the first thoughts about one of his best-known books, then still more than a decade in the future. “He kept the company in the best of humor,” the Record observed, “by narrating some of his experiences in piloting on the Mississippi.”8
No doubt he was in better humor now that the ordeal of lecturing had finally come to an end for the season, and he thus enjoyed the society of this college town that hid away another great American writer. Emily Dickinson had not bothered to go next door to her brother’s house to meet Emerson when he came to Amherst to lecture in 1857 (he too had disappointed his Amherst auditors, according to another local paper). By 1872 the reclusive poet never left her father’s house. Ordinarily, Twain didn’t enjoy this kind of socializing either. He had long ago found that his various lecture hosts kept him up too late or infringed on his quiet time before performances. Staying with town leaders was even worse, and sometimes he even registered at hotels under a false name, or under his real one (that is, Samuel Clemens instead of Mark Twain), to avoid having to deal with anxious hosts. Lecturing in nineteenth-century America was no picnic. There were long and tedious train rides, notoriously uncomfortable hotels, and often harsh wintry weather to contend with. It is remarkable that Emerson did it for so many years—out of financial necessity, no doubt—but Mark Twain was getting richer by the week, and this would be his last season of lecturing for some time to come. In the first three months of publication, Roughing It, published in February, would earn him royalties of more than $10,000. And Olivia’s share of her father’s estate amounted to more than $237,000 in 1872.9
Sam was back home for the birth of his first daughter on March 19. She was born a healthy child, but eighteen-month-old Langdon was running out of time. He died on the second day of June—“quietly in his mother’s arms,” according to a witness. Reading the autobiographical account of this tragedy, one is shocked at Sam Clemens’s admissions, which were greatly exaggerated. “I was the cause of the child’s illness,” he confessed. “I took him [for] a drive in an open barouche for an airing. It was a raw, cold morning, but he was well wrapped about with furs. . . . But I soon dropped into a reverie and forgot all about my charge.” By the time he noticed that “the child’s furs had fallen loose,” he continued, “it was too late. The child was almost frozen.” Whatever truth there was in this confession, it is important to note that the incident obviously happened in the winter, and Langdon died of diphtheria in June.10 His autobiography is often notoriously (and typically) unreliable. Furthermore, Sam Clemens felt guilty about several deaths in his life, not only his brother Henry’s death on the Mississippi but also other premature departures that would profoundly shape his late ideas about the world. Some writers, Dreiser for example, never seemed to feel guilty about anything. Whitman saw everything as part of the grand scheme of nature that reflected the benign presence of God. But Mark Twain, who despised Conscience and held it responsible for so much evil in the world, initially took himself to task and then ultimately blamed everything on an insensitive God.
22 Home in Hartford
Mark Twain and his family rented the Hooker house for two and half years before occupying the Hartford mansion on Farmington Avenue, which is today the main shrine to the author of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Living “next door” was young William Hooker Gillette, the son of one of the two founders of the suburban development that had turned the Nook Farm woodland into an upper-class neighborhood by the time Twain lived there. As Gillette told a speech class at Harvard College in the 1930s, he knew the voice of his famous neighbor intimately. Although there is now a familiar three-minute motion picture clip of Mark Twain filmed in the early part of the twentieth century, no audio recording of him is extant, even though Thomas Edison’s company made both the film and several recordings. There is even a recording of Walt Whitman reading his poem entitled “America,” but nothing of America’s other great vernacular writer. We know the sound of Twain’s voice largely through contemporary descriptions, usually in the form of newspaper reviews of his lectures.
Anyone who visits Hannibal will find a Mark Twain imitator or two either performing at bed-and-breakfasts or simply crossing the streets of a town whose economic life now depends almost solely on the memory of Mark Twain’s boyhood and its dramatization in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Otherwise, one may listen to a recording of Hal Holbrook performing in Mark Twain Tonight or, at this writing, even see the actor, now well over the age of Twain at his death, impersonate him. We have, however, something almost as close to the real thing as the Whitman recording: we can almost hear Mark Twain’s “voice” in a recording Will Gillette made before that speech class in the 1930s. Gillette had been an actor noted for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. Twain helped pay for part of his acting education and later helped him win parts, including a role in the Hartford production of The Gilded Age in 1875.1 Holbrook relied in part on Gillette’s imitation in preparation for his own performances.
Besides the slight New England accent that Twain would barely have picked up by the 1870s and 1880s, while he lived in Hartford, there is in Gillette’s impression a certain whine in the voice, especially at points of emphasis. The recording is of the first few lines of the Jumping Frog story, and it recalls the tale’s brilliance as an exemplar of the oral tradition in American literature. Gillette told the speech class the day he made the recording that Mark Twain had been “a close friend.” His general recollection of the story is inexact but nevertheless accurate in its description of Jim Smiley as a man who was “always betting on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side, and if he couldn’t he’d change sides.” (My italics indicate emphasis or elongated vowels, which each time maximize the whining sound of Simon Wheeler’s voice.) “Any way that suited the other man wou
ld suit him,” the story continues, “if there was a dog fight, he’d bet on it; if there was a cat fight, he bet on it . . . why if there was two birds [a-settin’] on a fence, he would bet on which one would fly first . . . if he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him.” According to legend, Twain is supposed to have told Gillette more than once that his impression of him was the most accurate he had ever heard.
Thus we possess, at least, the mediated sound of the voice of Mark Twain in the early years of his life in this upscale community of such New England saints and sinners as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Isabelle Beecher Hooker—both sisters of Henry Ward Beecher. It is important to imagine the contrast of sounds and sense between this rough character from the hinterlands of Missouri and Nevada and these solemn New England advocates of abolition and women’s rights. Just his way of saying something, making an observation from his point of view with his unique vocalization, must have been its own wellspring of humor. No doubt as a newcomer to the Nook Farm community, he had to stifle his wickedly observant thoughts from time to time, if only for the sake of his Victorian wife. It was a community of established professionals, such as essayist and newspaper editor Charles Dudley Warner and preacher Joe Twichell, both now long forgotten except for their connection to this new outsider and stranger to New England culture. Livy, of course, wanted him to write like them—someday.
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