The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Sam next slipped west into Iowa, first to speak for almost two hours before “a splendid house” where “everything went off handsomely” the evening of January 14 in Davenport. One of the local papers qualified its praise, however. The lecture “was a success” but “a thing to be enjoyed, not remembered.” The next evening, despite another “splendid audience” in Metropolitan Hall in Iowa City, the reviewer for the University Reporter expressed dissatisfaction “that we had heard so much that we never care to hear again.” The critic for the Iowa City Republican was also “generally disappointed. As a lecture it was a humbug. As an occasion for laughter on very small capital of wit or ideas it was a success.” The local YMCA, which sponsored his appearance and netted $130 from it, nevertheless was “wretchedly imposed upon” and “so of course was the audience.” In an ad hominem attack, this critic charged that Sam had been the only lecturer “engaged for the course whose personal character was unknown.” Worse yet, according to the Republican, Sam repeatedly directed “a storm of curses and abuse” at the landlord of the Clinton House in Iowa City for waking him too early one morning. Sam confessed to Livy that he was so angry he “stormed” at the landlord “with some little violence.”32 So much for his vow to shun profanity, though he later wrote the hotelier to apologize.

  He then headed back to Ohio, where at White’s Hall in Toledo he enjoyed one of his greatest successes of the tour the evening of January 20. The theater was “filled from cellar to garret,” according to the Toledo Blade, with “one of the best tickled audiences that ever assembled there.” The Toledo Commercial commended Sam’s “purity of tone and expression which gives [his wit] a relish to the most cultivated minds. There is nothing gross and coarse in his utterances—no appeal to the baser passions and prejudices.” Sam bragged to Livy that “the great hall was crowded full of the pleasantest & handsomest people, & I did the very best I possibly could—& did better than I ever did before.” He was particularly pleased that he had carried off the laurels in the hometown of his rival humorist Petroleum V. Nasby. As he wrote Twichell, “I swept Nasby’s dung hill (Toledo,) like a Besom of Destruction. . . . Came off with flying colors.” After appearing in Norwalk, Sam again lectured at Case Hall in Cleveland on January 22 before “the best humored audience that we ever saw,” according to the Plain Dealer, to benefit the local Protestant orphan asylum, on whose board of managers Mary Fairbanks served. He was honored “to do what in me lies in aid of so generous a charity.” A Cleveland audience had launched him on his lecture tour, he explained, “and I am naturally curious to know if another Cleveland audience can be found to endorse the kind treatment which I received at the hands of the first.” His lecture, attended by “a large and delighted audience,” abounded in “peculiar and irresistible” humor, the Cleveland Herald reported, and at its close he joked that his listeners ought to donate as much as possible to the asylum because “some persons have to take care of those sixty orphans, and they have to wash them.” The Cleveland Leader agreed that while the “hall was not as full as we had hoped to see it,” Sam was “more familiar with his subject” than when he appeared there two months earlier. His “quaint, quiet humor kept the audience laughing,” and the lecture raised several hundred dollars for the charity.33

  During the next week Sam resumed his “long, wearisome winter’s siege” across the Midwest. He appeared in a half dozen scattered towns, including “a crowded house” in Batavia, Illinois, on January 26 and Galena, Illinois, on January 29. “I have finished my lecture tonight, the people are satisfied, your kiss has comforted me, & I am as happy & contented as anybody in the world to-night,” he wrote Livy that evening. The Galena Gazette reported that for ninety minutes he kept the audience at the Bench Street Methodist Church “vibrating between hysterical fits of laughter, occasioned by his inimitable drolleries.” Three nights later, Sam spoke at Strawn’s Hall in Jacksonville, Illinois, and, according to the St. Louis Missouri Republican, the lecture “was an eminent success, if one might judge from its effect upon the risible muscles of his audience.”34

  After speaking in Jacksonville, Sam fled back to Elmira to enjoy a hiatus in his schedule with his fiancée. He had proved his mettle and/or Livy’s parents were finally reconciled to the inevitable. On February 4 they agreed to announce the formal engagement of their daughter to Sam. He wrote Mary Fairbanks the next day with the good news, couched in a mining metaphor: “There isn’t much of her, but what there is, assays as high as any bullion that ever I saw.” Livy’s mother soon contacted Mother Fairbanks, too, to express her appreciation. “I feel oppressed (not painfully) with the constant reminder of the more than friend you have been to my child elect,” she acknowledged, before praising the “restful, yea beautiful background [of] his mind & heart.” Olivia Lewis Langdon concluded that the love her daughter and Sam had forged “is very beautiful to look at, and may it grow more & more perfect as they shall travel together toward immortality.” Sam also notified his family that he “was duly & solemnly & irrevocably engaged to be married” to “the best girl in all the world, & the most sensible, & I am just as proud of her as I can be.” He confessed to a motive for feigning his conversion, though not explicitly to faking it: Livy had “set herself the task of making a Christian of me. I said she would succeed, but that in the meantime she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit & end by tumbling into it—& lo! the prophecy is fulfilled.” He allowed, too, that they would probably not marry for a good while because “I am not rich enough to give her a comfortable home right away, & I don’t want anybody’s help.” Three weeks later, Sam assured his mother that Livy had no equal in Christendom, adding,

  I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion imperatively demands a two-hundred-dollar diamond one, and told her it was typical of her future life—namely, that she would have to flourish on substance, rather than luxuries (but you see I know the girl—she don’t care anything about luxuries). . . . She spends no money but her astral year’s allowance, and spends nearly every cent of that on other people. She will be a good, sensible little wife, without any airs about her.

  He had been laying plans for their life together even before Livy confessed her love for him. The most viable career model for literary comedians at the time, prior to newspaper syndication, was pioneered by a trio of Sam’s friends: Josh Billings (aka Henry Wheeler Shaw), Petroleum V. Nasby (aka David Ross Locke), and Artemus Ward. All three had worked for newspapers—the New York Weekly, the Toledo Blade, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, respectively. Sam began to search for a profitable newspaper in which to invest and from which he could earn a decent living in a city as near to Elmira as possible. He reassured Livy’s mother, “I propose to earn money enough some way or other to buy a remunerative share in a newspaper of high standing, & then instruct & elevate & civilize the public through its columns.” When he married, or so he advised Orion, he expected to be “done with literature and all other bosh—that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then.”35

  He first approached his friend John Russell Young of the New York Tribune, who advised him that each share of his paper that came on the market cost seven thousand dollars and yielded an income of one or two thousand dollars annually. Sam told Young that he “would take as many shares as I could mortgage my book for, & as many more as I could pay for with labor of hand & brain,” but no shares were available. Nasby tried to persuade him to take an interest in the Toledo Blade, albeit to no avail. “I can buy into plenty of paying newspapers,” he informed Twichell, “but my future wife wants me to be surrounded by a good moral & religious atmosphere (for I shall unite with the church as soon as I am located,) & so she likes the idea of living in Hartford. We could make more money elsewhere, but neither of us are much fired with a mania for money-getting. That is a matter of second-rate, even third-rate importance with us.”36 So he contacted the owner-editors of the Hartford Courant, former Civil War general and Connecticut governor Jos
eph R. Hawley and the essayist Charles Dudley Warner, who expressed no interest in inviting a literary comedian into their tent. They greeted his inquiries with “insultingly contemptuous indifference.” While in western Massachusetts to cover a boat race for the Alta California, he chatted with Samuel Bowles, owner and editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, about the possibility of buying into his paper.37 Not only had Bowles no reason to take on a partner but he was, Sam subsequently learned, the “born & bred cur” who had advised Hawley and Warner not to entertain his offer to invest in the Courant.38 In any event, years later Sam joked in his journal about an editor of the Springfield Republican who suffers an “accident in a sitz-bath with a steel-trap” and “got his Nüsse caught.” In addition, Sam sent out feelers to the proprietors of the Hartford Post, though they were “lo[a]th to sell.” Mary Fairbanks was eager for him to invest in the Cleveland Herald and work as its political editor, and for a time he was tempted. In an apparent sign of good faith, Abel Fairbanks reprinted the jumping frog sketch in the Herald for November 14. “I like the Herald as an anchorage for me, better than any paper in the Union—its location, its policies, present business & prospects, all are suitable,” Sam acknowledged to Jervis Langdon. Abel Fairbanks was half owner and equal partner in the business with the Benedict family and, according to Sam, desperately wanted him “to buy an eighth from the Benedicts, so that control would rest with him when I gave my vote so—price about $25,000. He says if I can get it he will be my security until I can pay for it all by the labor of my tongue & hands, & that I shall not be hurried.” He advised Livy the next day, “I think we’ll live in Cleveland, & then we’ll persuade Mr. Langdon to come & live in Euclid Avenue, so that we can have a place to go & get a good dinner occasionally.”39

  In the end Sam declined the Cleveland offer, however. Not only did the paper claim a daily circulation of only about seventy-five hundred, but he increasingly desired to live in Hartford and was decreasingly inclined “to wed my fortunes to a trimming, time-serving, policy-shifting, popularity-hunting, money-grasping paper” like the Herald. He complained to Livy in mid-February 1869 that the newspaper “would change its politics in a minute, in order to be on the popular side, I think, & do a great many things for money which I wouldn’t do.” In July 1869, moreover, Abel Fairbanks suddenly raised the price of an interest in the paper from a one-eighth ownership stake for $25,000 or one-third share for $62,500—Jervis Langdon had offered to lend him $60,000 of this amount—to a one-fourth interest for $50,000 or one-half interest for $100,000. Sam realized, too, that the position would have been a career dead end. In a letter to the Fairbankses on August 14, 1869, withdrawing from the negotiation, he emphasized the reasons:

  The more I thought of trying to transform myself into a political editor, the more incongruous & the more hazardous the thing looked. I always did hate politics, & the prospect of becoming its servant at last, & especially when there was no necessity for doing it, was anything but attractive. It just offered another apprenticeship—another one, 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—& just as I was about to graduate as a journeyman I always had to go apprentice to something else. No sir, I said, I’ll prostitute my talents to something else.

  Sam’s final sentence is strikingly similar to his indictment in The Innocents Abroad of “the groveling spirit” that allowed the Old Masters “to prostitute their noble talents” to such Florentine patrons of art as Cosimo de’ Medici. Lest he be misunderstood, Sam added in his letter to Abel and Mary Fairbanks that he had been “very near being associated in business” with them and “I went home mighty sorry about that $62,000 raise.” In fact, with the help of a $12,500 loan from Jervis Langdon and a $10,000 lien held by Thomas A. Kennett, the seller, Sam had already purchased a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express. Like the Herald, the Express hewed to the Radical Republican line on Reconstruction and the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Better yet, he had been required to invest only $2,500 of his own money—though Kennett soon bragged that he had sold a property “for twenty-five thousand that was not worth three-fourths of the money.” Sam informed his sister Pamela in November 1869 that he was “twenty-two thousand dollars in debt,” but by practicing a strict frugality he planned to be debt-free within two years.40

  Sam had expected The Innocents Abroad to be issued on March 1, 1869, in accordance with the contract he had signed with Bliss the previous October—another consummation devoutly to be wished. But for reasons of his own, mostly related to his focus on other projects, Bliss failed to honor the commitment. Sam considered his speaking tour, like his lectures in New York in May 1867, in no small part a public relations campaign to sell the book. As he queried Frank Bliss from Chicago on January 7, “Why don’t you issue prospectuses & startling advertisements now while I am stirring the bowels of these communities? I have big houses—& more invitations to lecture than I can fill.” Elisha Bliss replied by blaming the delay in publication on the time-consuming engraving of the 234 woodcuts for the book, many of them based on photographs James took during the voyage. All the illustrations had to be engraved and electrotyped before any text could be set. The cuts were mostly executed by True Williams, an inebriate and one of the premier illustrators of the day who was, according to Frank Bliss, “the greatest combination of hog and angel I ever saw.” Bliss admitted to Sam on February 10 that

  we have no proofs as yet to send. We are pushing things now very rapidly however. We are about ready to begin to electrotype. We are filling IT WITH ENGRAVINGS. We had an artist from N[ew] York here 2 or 3 weeks reading Mss & drawing sketches. They are now in hands of engravers, & we receive first batch of them this week when we can push the electrotyping, rapidly. We think you will be very much pleased with the style in which we are getting it up. We are inserting a copy of enclosed in every book we send out & are spreading the report of the Book in all circulars &c &c. We anticipate a good sale for it & think we will disappoint you some in the result, we hope agreeably. There will be about 200 engravings in the Book we think, we have 150 now in ready. . . . We shall hurry the thing up rapidly as soon as we begin to get engravings.

  When the illustrations—“drawn by a young artist of considerable talent,” as he put it—finally landed on his desk, Sam was pleased with them, particularly a caricature of him dressed like an Indian “on the war-path.” He reiterated his praise in a note to Mother Fairbanks: “You ought to see the pictures—they are very gay—and they are ingeniously drawn and daintily engraved, too. I have examined proofs of eighty of them, so far, and like them all.”41

  Still, Bliss was forced to address other lingering issues with the book. The directors of the company not only objected to the supposed irreverence of Sam’s subtitle but wanted Bliss to quash the entire project lest it offend readers and sully the reputation of the firm. Alarmed by delays in production, Sam hastened to Hartford in early March “to make inquiries.” Upon his arrival the president of the company, Sidney Drake, “frankly threw himself and the house upon my mercy and begged me to take away ‘The Innocents Abroad’ and release the concern from the contract. I said I wouldn’t—and so ended the interview.” Sam worried that the celebrity he had earned by whistle-stopping across the Midwest during the winter and spring would be squandered. He needed the royalties the book would earn to marry and invest in a newspaper. He threatened legal action, or so he claimed in his version of events, and Bliss “acted upon the warning” and sent the manuscript to the typesetters.42

  Between mid-February and early March, meanwhile, Sam continued his exhausting tour of the Midwest and Northeast. He reported to Elisha Bliss that he faced “a splendid audience” and enjoyed “a splendid success” at Day’s Hall in Ravenna, Ohio, the evening of February 13, and the local reviewers concurred. The Portage County Democrat pronounced the lecture “a success viewed either from a humorous or financial standpoint. The audience was
the largest of the season, and without being a witness of the fact it would have been impossible to believe that so much fun could have been compressed into an hour.” The Ravenna Democratic Press similarly reported that Sam’s “quaint style, his quiet but yet sparking wit, met the hearty applause, while his eloquent description thrilled a delighted audience.” Three nights later he attracted a “good audience” to Corinthian Hall in Titusville, Pennsylvania, that was “highly gratified with the lecture.” The Titusville Herald agreed that Sam entertained “one of the largest and most select audiences of the season” for “nearly two hours, occasionally exciting their uproar[i]ous laughter, or lifting them in his eloquent flights.” In Franklin, Pennsylvania, the next evening, he addressed “a crammed house” and “gave the very best satisfaction,” then headed to Elmira to spend four days with Livy and two days in New York on business. Between February 23 and March 3 he spoke in Trenton, New Jersey, and Stuyvesant, Geneseo, and Lockport, New York, before arriving in Hartford on March 5 to shepherd his book through the press and begin the task of proofreading. He soon recruited Livy to help him by paying her a backhanded compliment: “You are just as ornamental as ever you can be—all you need is to be useful.”43