the gems of beautiful descriptions which sparkled all through his lecture. We expected to be amused, but we were taken by surprise when he carried us on the wings of his redundant fancy, away to the ruins, the cathedrals, and the monuments of the old world. There are some passages of gorgeous word painting which haunt us like a remembered picture. We congratulate Mr. Twain upon having taken the tide of public favor “at the flood” in the lecture field, and having conclusively proved that a man may be a humorist without being a clown.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer slightly qualified its accolade. While Sam, the “most popular of American humorists,” spoke before an “immense audience” of twelve hundred and delivered a “really beautiful” apostrophe to the Sphynx, the lecture overall was “slightly incoherent.” While his “dry, comical drawl” was “irresistible in a funny way,” he should have spoken louder because “those in the rear of the hall lost many of his good things.” As Sam wrote his family the next day from Cleveland, “Made a splendid hit last night & am the ‘lion’ to-day. . . . I captured them, if I do say it myself.” His speaking style had matured so far that he no longer stood behind a lectern reading from a manuscript but glanced at talking points on cards as he roamed the stage. Much as he began his Sandwich Islands lecture with a description of a leper on the Honolulu dock, moreover, he began “American Vandal,” delivered dozens of times during the 1868–69 season, with a similarly gruesome image: “Saw a man without a skin. He looked horrible. He didn’t appear to be comfortable. I have often seen that creature in my dreams.” He later tried to ease the shock by imagining, rather than a living being, a statue “of a man flayed, every vein, muscle, every fiber and tendon of the human frame, represented in minute detail.” On November 19 he lectured at the Academy of Music on Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh before a full house of fifteen hundred in the midst of a driving rain, on the same evening that the popular actress Fanny Kemble attracted an audience of only two hundred to Lafayette Hall a few blocks away. Sam later bragged to Frank Bliss, Elisha’s son and treasurer of the American Publishing Company, that he “drew the largest audience ever assembled” in the city “to hear a lecture.” According to the Pittsburgh Gazette, Sam was a “poet as well as humorist.” His address “abounded here and there with specimens of word-painting and flights of true eloquence which, coming wholly unexpected, moved and thrilled all present.” He was “entitled above all living men to the name of American humorist.” The Pittsburgh Post lauded in particular Sam’s prose aria to the Sphynx. Ironically, Gorman Beauchamp avers that Sam in this meditation “comes perilously close to sounding like the guidebooks.” The Pittsburgh Dispatch, however, was underwhelmed. It “styled him a great fraud, said there was nothing in him,” declared that “as a lecturer he was a failure,” and “even ventured to tell the Young Men’s Library Association that if they wished to make their lectures a success, they would not engage” him. Ironically, at virtually the same moment in November 1868, James Parton urged James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, to recruit Sam as a contributor.13
The next day Sam took the train to Elmira, where he lectured at the nearly full Opera House the evening of November 23 to benefit the local volunteer fire department. According to the Elmira Advertiser, he “was not in good voice,” though it nevertheless pronounced his performance “pleasing” and declared that it had been received with “hearty laughter and applause.” On his part, however, Sam was disappointed by his recital and closed by apologizing to the audience. He later bewailed the “dull harangue I dragged myself through so painfully in Elmira.” During his visit he also pressed his suit and the strategy worked. Livy “felt the first faint symptom Sunday, & the lecture Monday night brought the disease to the surface,” he wrote Mary Fairbanks. “Tuesday & Tuesday night she avoided me & could not do more than be simply polite to me because her parents said NO absolutely (almost).” On Wednesday evening, however, Sam apparently proposed again and Livy “said over & over & over again that she loved me but was sorry she did & hoped it would pass away.” The next day she yielded and “said she was glad & proud she loved me!” Sam remembered in his autobiography that she “poured out her prodigal affections in kisses and caresses and in a vocabulary of endearments whose profusion was always an astonishment to me. I was born reserved as to endearments of speech and caresses, and hers broke upon me as the summer waves upon Gibraltar”—an evocative metaphor for one who had recently landed at Gibraltar during a storm. He left her home on Friday night, November 27, “to save her sacred name from the tongues of the gossips,” and returned to the Everett House in New York. Livy soon admitted to her friend Alice Hooker “that a great satisfying love has slowly gradually worked its way into my heart—into my entire being.” Mary Fairbanks referred a quarter century later to the “cordial surrender” of “this fair daughter of an aristocratic family.” Sam allowed that “through the breaking clouds I see the star of Hope rising in the placid blue beyond.” On the final day of 1868 he reflected in a letter to Livy from Cleveland on the events of a year that “found me a waif, floating at random upon the sea of life” and “leaves me freighted with a good purpose, & blessed with a fair wind, a chart to follow, a port to reach. It found me listless, useless, aimless—it leaves me knighted with noble ambition. It found me well-nigh a skeptic—it leaves me a believer.”14
On the surface, they seemed as poorly matched as the socially ambitious flapdoodle Ichabod Crane and Katrina Van Tassel, the comely daughter of the Sleepy Hollow squire. Anna Dickinson, a Langdon family friend whom Sam had heard lecture eleven months earlier, considered Livy “the flower of the house” and Sam a “vulgar boor. . . . I hear of him all about the country at wine suppers, & late orgies,—dirty, smoking, drinking.” Dickinson even ridiculed Sam’s physical appearance, once referring to his “bird-of-prey beak.” Kate Field also thought Sam was “amusing but not inherently a gentleman. . . . He talks or rather drawls through his nose in an absurd manner but to marry such a voice or to connect such a voice with sentiment is to me incomprehensible. Yet this queer, original man with a disregard for things polite” had courted “a delicate little woman who thinks much of her upholstery and will tolerate no smoking or drinking in her house.”15 Livy’s parents, moreover, were not initially pleased by the prospect of a son-in-law better known for coarse humor than fine manners. They conditionally agreed to accept Sam as Livy’s suitor but declined to announce the engagement until they were certain their daughter and Sam were compatible. On his part, Sam was determined to pay his debts and prove that he could support a wife comfortably, if not in the style to which she was accustomed. “I have paddled my own canoe since I was thirteen, wholly without encouragement or assistance from any one,” he assured Livy’s mother, “& am fully competent to so paddle it the rest of the voyage & take a passenger along.”16
The elder Langdons requested names of people whom they could contact for character references and Sam complied. He consented to a dissection of his life. As he wrote Mary Fairbanks, he and Livy were not “absolutely engaged, because of course Livy would not fall in love Sunday & engage herself Thursday” and “I must have time to settle, & create a new & better character, & prove myself.” As he admitted to Livy two days after she had provisionally agreed to marry him, “I have been through the world’s ‘mill’” and
traversed its ramifications from end to end—I have searched it, & probed it, & put it under the microscope, & I know it, through & through, & from back to back,—its follies, it[s] frauds & its vanities—all by personal experience & not through dainty theories culled from nice moral books in luxurious parlors where temptation never comes & it is easy to be good & keep the heart warm & one’s best impulses fresh & strong & uncontaminated—& now I know how to be a better man, & the value of so being, & when I say that I shall be, it is just the same as if I swore it!
His apologies for past misbehavior—for example, “I have only sorrowed that sins of mine should be visited upon your innocent head”—became a recurr
ing refrain in his courtship letters.17
Like the young Ben Franklin whom Orion had idolized, Sam also undertook a program of moral self-reform. “I touch no more spirituous liquors after this day (though I have made no promises),” he wrote Mary Fairbanks in late November 1868. He was less equivocal in a letter to his sister Pamela a couple of days later: “I drink no spirituous liquors any more—I do nothing that is not thoroughly right.” He might as well have reenlisted in the Hannibal chapter of the Cadets of Temperance. “When I am permanently settled—& when I am a Christian—& when I have demonstrated that I have a good, steady, reliable character,” he added, Livy’s “parents will withdraw their objections, & she may marry me—I say she will—I intend she shall—” Writing her again on December 2 he claimed that
no man is freer from the sin of swearing than is thy servant this day; & no man is freer from the inclination to swear, than he, whether he is in a passion or otherwise. I was the worst swearer, & the most reckless, that sailed out of New York in the Quaker City. . . . But I am as perfectly & as permanently cured of the habit as I am of chewing tobacco.
And to Livy he wrote, “I stopped chewing tobacco because it was a mean habit, partly, & partly because my mother desired it. I ceased from profanity because Mrs. Fairbanks desired it. I stopped drinking strong liquors because you desired it. I stopped drinking all other liquors because it seemed plain that you desired it.” And to Livy’s mother he noted that he had been “a profane swearer” and “a man without a religion,” but “now I never swear; I never taste wine or spirits upon any occasion whatsoever; I am orderly, & my conduct is above reproach in a worldly sense; & finally, I now claim that I am a Christian.”18
In response to their request for character references, Sam referred the Langdons to Mary Mason Fairbanks and to six prominent San Franciscans, including Bret Harte, Horatio Stebbins, and Charles Wadsworth. Livy’s imperious mother, Olivia Lewis Langdon—who, Sam thought, “was born for a countess” and who had met Mary Fairbanks in Elmira the previous June—expressed the hope to Sam’s “mother” on September 4 that Livy’s suitor was “destined to make his mark & my prayer is that he may live to a good purpose.” She privately addressed Fairbanks with her most pressing questions three months later:
I cannot, & need not, detail to you the utter surprise & almost astonishment with which Mr Langdon & myself listened to Mr Clemens declaration to us of his love for our precious child, and how at first our parental hearts said no.—to the bare thought of such a stranger, mining in our hearts for the possession of one of the few jewels we have. . . .
You, my dear friend have known Mr Clemens, more or less intimately since your and his embarkation on the “Quaker City”—you knew him first, as a somewhat celebrated personage next you knew him as a fellow-traveller, and as your acquaintance with him increased into the time of weeks & months, you began to look upon him from your higher standpoint of maturer experience & closer estimate & appreciation of men. . . . And now you have known him in your family, at the fireside day by day, almost as if he were your own son.— — — Now what I am about to write, must be plainly & frankly spoken. . . . [W]hat I desire is your opinion of him as a man; what the kind of man he has been, and what the man he now is, or is to become.
I have learned from Charlie [sic] . . . that a great change had taken place in Mr Clemens, that he seemed to have entered upon a new manner of life, with higher & better purposes actuating his conduct.——
The question, the answer to which, would settle a most weaning anxiety, is,—from what standard of conduct,—from what habitual life, did this change, or improvement, or reformation commence?
Does this change, so desirably commenced make of an immoral man a moral one, as the world looks at men?—or—does this change make of one, who has been entirely a man of the world, different in this regard, that he resolutely aims to enter upon a new, because a Christian life?
While Fairbanks’s reply does not survive, she no doubt reassured the Langdons that Sam was repairing his character in a “cordial, whole-hearted endorsement” of him.19
Meanwhile, Jervis Langdon asked James S. Hutchinson, a former Elmira Sunday school superintendent and bank cashier who had worked for him before moving to San Francisco, to interview Sam’s character references there. In late December, moreover, Sam provided Livy’s parents with the names of some additional men they might contact, including Henry G. Blasdel, governor of Nevada; Joe Goodman; J. Neely Johnson, former governor of California and justice of the Nevada Supreme Court; Lewis Leland, co-owner with his brothers of the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, the Metropolitan in New York, and the Grand Union in Saratoga Springs, New York; Andrew Marsh, his fellow Nevada territorial legislative reporter; and Robert B. Swain, superintendent of the U.S. Branch Mint in San Francisco. At the same time, he tried to preempt criticism of his conduct in the West by confessing to it in advance, in effect inoculating his reputation and status as a suitor against the truth, in conjunction with a rhetorical move that must have disarmed his future father-in-law: “I was just what Charlie [sic] would have been, similarly circumstanced, & deprived of home influences. I think all my references can say I never did anything mean, false or criminal.” On the contrary,
the same doors that were open to me seven years ago are open to me yet; that all the friends I made in seven years, are still my friends; that wherever I have been I can go again—& enter in the light of day & hold my head up; that I never deceived or defrauded anybody, & don’t owe a cent. And they can say that I attended to my business with due diligence, & made my own living, & never asked anybody to help me do it, either. All the rest they can say about me will be bad. I can tell the whole story myself, without mincing it, & will if they refuse.
A month later, when the letters from California began to arrive in Elmira, Sam advised Livy to read them judiciously because, he admitted, “I bear upon my head a deadly weight of sin—a weight such as you cannot comprehend—thirty-three years of ill-doing & wrongful speech.” He had once been someone who
would be hateful in your eyes, provided you simply viewed me from a distance, without knowing my secret heart—but I have lived that life, & it is of the past. I do not live backward. God does not ask of the returning sinner what he has been, but what he is & what he will be. And this is what you ask of me. If I must show what I am & prove what I shall be, I am content. As far as what I have been is concerned, I am only sorry that I did not tell all of that, in full & relentless detail, to your father & your mother, & to you, Livy—for it would be all the better that you knew it also.
Sam later concocted a legend to the effect that all of his references urged the Langdons to deny him permission to marry their daughter. Or as he remembered in his autobiography, “All those men were frank to a fault. They not only spoke in disapproval of me, but they were quite unnecessarily and exaggeratedly enthusiastic about it.” Jervis Langdon asked him, “‘What kind of people are these? Haven’t you a friend in the world?’ I said ‘Apparently not.’ Then he said ‘I’ll be your friend myself. Take the girl. I know you better than they do.’”20
The surviving circumstantial evidence fails to substantiate the legend, however. Hutchinson’s report to Livy’s parents does not survive, so its contents and the identity of all the men he contacted are unknown. But Harte, for one, later congratulated Sam on his marriage. “You ought to be very happy with that sweet wife of yours and I suppose you are,” Harte later wrote him. “It is not every man that can cap a hard, thorny, restless youth with so graceful a crown.” Hutchinson interviewed Stebbins, who replied rather ambiguously that Sam was “rather erratic, but I consider him harmless.” Sam resented the innuendo: “I am ashamed of the friend whose friendship was so weak & so unworthy,” he wrote Livy, “that he shrank from coming out openly & above-board & saying all he knew about me, good or bad—for there is nothing generous in his grieving insinuation—it is a covert stab, nothing better.” He remembered a few months later that Stebbins
<
br /> came within an ace of breaking off my marriage by saying to the gentleman instructed by “her” father to call on him and inquire into my character, that “Clemens is a humbug—shallow & superficial—a man who has talent, no doubt, but will make a trivial & possibly a worse use of it—a man whose life promised little & has accomplished less—a humbug, Sir, a humbug.” That was the spirit of the remarks—I have forgotten the precise language.
In his autobiography Sam recalled—still worse—that Stebbins had declared he “would fill a drunkard’s grave.” Though there is no evidence he interviewed Wadsworth, Hutchinson apparently contacted a deacon in Wadsworth’s church who decreed that he “would rather bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow.”21 Livy cited some of these references in a letter she mailed Sam in Sparta, Wisconsin, around January 15, though it missed him there. It followed him through Toledo and Norwalk, Ohio, and finally reached him in Cleveland on January 24.
The success of Sam’s suit depended entirely on Livy’s willingness to forgive and forget his past—which is exactly what happened. Unlike “the bad little boy who did not come to grief,” he protested that he had repented his sins. “I know that howsoever black they may have painted me,” he beseeched his betrothed, “you will steadfastly believe that I am not so black now, & never will be, any more. . . . The most degraded sinner is accepted & made clean on high when his repentance is sincere—his past life is forgiven & forgotten.” Much as a supplicant to join a church is required to confess contrition for past sins and confess his faith, Sam was expected to prove that he was a changed man. In his case, he was required to express contrition continually. “When I knew that your kind heart had suffered for two days for what I had done in past years,” he wrote Livy in January 1869, “it cut me more than if all my friends had abused me. Livy I can’t bear to think of you suffering pain—I had rather feel a thousand pangs than that you should suffer one.” In another letter to her that same month he wrote, “I know I can explain away every haunting spectre that distresses your thoughts.” He well understood, too, that “those California letters” had alarmed her and “made your father & mother unhappy,” but he promised to “atone for it, if the leading a blameless life henceforward can atone for it.” When at last he read the so-called Sparta letter, he was reassured not by what his character references had written—it could not have been so bad as he feared—but by Livy’s forgiving spirit. He apologized to her for the unfavorable news it contained but on balance he was reassured: “I sought eagerly for just one thing—if I could find that, I was safe,” Sam wrote her. “I did find it—you still have faith in me. That was enough—it is all I ask.” Or as he explained to Charley Stoddard seven months later, “at last the young lady said she had thought it all over deliberately & did not believe it, & would not believe it if an archangel had spoken it.”22 Crisis averted.
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