The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  On March 14 Sam interrupted his proofing to visit Petroleum V. Nasby (“a good fellow and companionable”) in Boston, his first-ever trip to the ostensible epicenter or “hub of the universe.” The two humorists “sat up till daylight” reading Harte’s Condensed Novels in Sam’s room at the luxurious Parker House. “Boston is just as delightful a city as there is in America,” he reported to his Alta California readers, and he spent much of his first time there sightseeing—the Old South Church, Bunker Hill, Quincy Market, and Faneuil Hall. Sam was introduced to Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of his literary heroes, and he tried to contact James Redpath of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, later the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, on School Street. A native of Scotland, a former antislavery activist and war correspondent, a onetime resident of St. Louis, and another frequenter of Pfaff’s beer cellar in New York, Redpath was away from his office but soon wrote Sam to offer to manage his lecture tour during the 1869–70 season, and Sam was interested. Redpath was, in fact, one of the few middlemen in literary production that he always trusted and admired. “The chief ingredients of Redpath’s makeup were honesty, sincerity, kindliness, and pluck. He wasn’t afraid,” Sam remembered. “He was one of Ossawatomie [John] Brown’s right-hand men in the ‘bleeding Kansas’ days; he was all through that struggle. He carried his life in his hands, and from one day to another it wasn’t worth the price of a night’s lodging.” Sam playfully caricatured Redpath in The Gilded Age (1873) as the cutthroat lecture agent J. Adolphe Griller, “a small man, slovenly in dress, his tone confidential, his manner wholly void of animation, all his features below the forehead protruding.” Though “every visible sign about him proclaimed him a poor, witless, useless weakling, the truth was that he had the brains to plan great enterprises and the pluck to carry them through.”44

  Sam wanted to discuss with Redpath his plans to deliver a talk titled “Curiosities of California” the next winter, based in part on a summer trip to the West. He wrote Redpath that there was

  scope to the subject, for the country is a curiosity; d[itt]o the fluctuations of fortune in the mines, where men grow rich in a day & poor in another; d[itt]o the people—for you have been in new countries & understand that; d[itt]o the Lake Tahoe, whose wonders are little known & less appreciated here; ditto the never-mentioned strange Dead Sea of California; & ditto a passing mention, maybe, of the Big Trees & Yo Semite.

  He agreed to continue to charge a hundred dollars per appearance—he was one of Redpath’s second-tier speakers, not yet a marquee attraction—but he wanted to confine his tour to New England and New York to minimize travel and expenses. “I talked all around through the West last winter, & always charged $100,” he explained, “but then the distances were grand, gloomy & peculiar and I wouldn’t go over the same ground again for the same money, by any means. I hate long journeys.” He preferred, however, to try out the lecture “in about five small places first, to get the hang” of it before appearing in front of “one of the two big lecture societies of Boston. You know one corrects & amends portions of his lecture all the time, the first five or six nights, & he never is satisfied with it till about the sixth delivery.” Sam outlined the lecture during the spring—it “suits me very well,” he reported to Redpath—and completed a draft of it by early July, even before his projected departure for San Francisco in early August 1869. He urged Redpath to book him to speak in New England at “any time & place” that winter “without consulting me,” though he declined to lecture in churches, in Buffalo, or on Sunday. He believed he might easily earn ten thousand dollars during the winter 1869–70 season had he agreed to a western tour, “but I would rather make 2 or 3 thousand in New England than submit again to so much wearing travel.”45

  Sam closed his 1868–69 lecture tour on the same peripatetic note with which he opened it. After leaving Boston, he lectured in Newtown, on Long Island, the evening of March 16 and entrained the next day to Elmira to spend a couple nights with the Langdons. In his final appearance of the season on March 20, he spoke before a “large and appreciative audience” and won a “grand success” in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Then he hurried back to Elmira, where he expected to remain two or three weeks while he and Livy—“my faithful, judicious and painstaking editor”—read “500 or 600 pages of proof together.” The “two or three weeks” stretched into seven, however, during which time they proofread about five hundred pages, an average of only about ten per day. By April 15 he and Livy had read together three hundred pages of proof, and Sam began to worry the book would run long. “Every day I expect a call to ‘come to Hartford’ & cut down the MSS,” he reported to Mary Fairbanks. “What I hate is that it will be the best part that will be sacrificed by the scissors.” The same day, however, he wrote Bliss that it would be “a readable book, I know—because I wrote it myself. And it is going to be a mighty handsome book.” He finally deleted some material, though his abridgement failed to expedite production. In his autobiography, he remembered that in late July he “telegraphed Bliss that if the book was not on sale in twenty-four hours” he would “bring suit for damages.” In fact, frustrated and impatient, he fired off an intemperate letter to his dilatory publisher on July 22, around the anniversary of his delivery of the manuscript, accusing him of deliberately sabotaging sales:

  Mr Bliss, are you not making a mistake about publishing this year? The book was to have been ready peremptorily just a year ago, exactly. Then, as it was necessary to make room & a market for Grant’s biography [A. D. Richardson’s A Personal History of Ulysses S Grant], it was judged much better to delay this book of mine a month or two. Then . . . it was thought best to make a spring book of mine. . . . And then . . . it was considered best to make mine a summer book & give [Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi] a fresh boost. And now that the further delay of my book will encourage agents to continue to labor for the “Mississippi” (I only just barely suppose this from hearing you tell a new agent he could have my book when issued if he would work on the “Mississippi” until that vague & uncertain event transpired,) it is deemed best to hold it back & make a fall book of it. . . .

  I object to any further delay, & hereby enter my protest against it. These delays are too one-sided. Every one of them has had for its object the furthering of the Am. Pub. Co.’s interest, & to compass this, my interests have been entirely disregarded. We both know what figure the sales were expected to reach if due & proper diligence were exerted in behalf of the publication. If that result is not achieved shall you be prepared to show that your tardiness was not the cause?—& failing this, shall you be prepared to recompense me for the damage sustained? These are grave questions. I have ceased to expect a large sale for a book whose success depended in a great measure upon its publication while the public were as yet interested in its subject, but I shall feel entirely justified in holding the Publishing Company responsible in case the sales fall short or reasonably short of what we originally expected them to reach.

  I think you will do me the justice to say that I have borne these annoying & damaging delays as patiently as any man with bread & butter & reputation at stake could have borne them. I cannot think I have been treated just right.

  On his part, Bliss replied in high dudgeon. “[I]f you want to say such things to me again,” he admonished Sam, “just come out plain & call me a d——d cheat & scoundrel—which will really it seems to me cover the whole ground & be a great deal more brief.” To be fair, Bliss probably invested more money in producing the illustrations—an estimated five thousand dollars—and in publicizing The Innocents Abroad than on any other book published by the house. Sam soon regretted the tone if not the substance of his letter and apologized: “I wrote you a wicked letter, & was sorry afterward that I did it. . . . If I made you mad, I forgive you.”46 The facts remain, however, that Sam’s book was not issued for more than a year after he submitted copy and that he was in no way responsible for the repeated delays.

  Sam’s prolonged stay under the same roof as his fiancée also
violated the Victorian proprieties adjudged by Mary Fairbanks. He left for New York on May 6 and after licking his wounds for four days he chided his “mother” from Hartford:

  You drove me away from Elmira at last. Your first shot staggered me, & your second “fetched” me. You made me feel meaner & meaner, & finally I absolutely couldn’t stand it—& so I surprised them all by suddenly packing my trunk. Livy spoke right out, & said that to leave was unnecessary, uncalled-for, absurd, & utterly exasperating & foolish—but I smoothed her feathers down at last by insisting that your judgment in this matter, just as usual, was solid good sense—I smoothed her plumage down but I never convinced her. And I never convinced Mr. Langdon, or Mr. or Mrs. Crane, or Hattie Lewis—but when Livy fancied that her mother did not coincide with the others quite cordially enough, her pride took fire & she spiked her guns & said Go!——and come back in fourteen days by the watch! Such are her orders. So you see what you have done, Mother. You have filled with sorrow two loving hearts.

  Sam returned to the Langdon home in late May. In fact, as he wrote to his mother and sister from Elmira on June 4, the months since his departure for California in early March 1868, which included his long winter lecture tour, comprised “the idlest, laziest” period “I ever spent in my life. And in that time my absolute & necessary expenses have been scorchingly heavy—for I have now less than three thousand six hundred dollars in bank out of the eight or nine thousand I have made during those months, lecturing. My expenses were something frightful during the winter. I feel ashamed of my idleness, & yet I have had really no inclination to [do] anything but court Livy.”47

  Bliss finally copyrighted The Innocents Abroad on July 28, 1869, and the press mailed the first three bound copies of the book to Sam in Elmira; he finally received them when he visited the Langdons on August 11. “It is the very handsomest book of the season & you ought to be proud of your work,” he assured Bliss. “It will sell.”48

  The first of some twelve hundred reviews had already appeared in print. The Hartford Times asserted on July 28 that Sam “contrives to give us new views of old scenes, many new facts, and decidedly new impressions” and the Courant added that he “writes about Rome exactly as he would about Dogtown in California, with the same lack of illusion.” On August 7, reviewing advance sheets—no bound copy of the book could have arrived on the West Coast so soon—the San Francisco Bulletin averred that Sam might be “occasionally coarse” but he was “never ill natured.” More to the point, he had “a mortal antipathy to humbug in every shape” and was “the most remorseless of iconoclasts.” Unsurprisingly, some critics lamented the “persiflage” in the book. The New York Evening Post, for example, declared that it “would have been more acceptable to the public, and more creditable to the author’s well-established reputation,” had it been only two-thirds as long; the Springfield Republican thought “these 650 pages might be boiled down to a thick syrup of 300, without losing any of their sweetness,” and the Liberal Christian, a Boston Unitarian weekly paper, opined that it was “too big by half.” On the other hand, David Gray insisted in the Buffalo Courier that it was “not a line too long.”49

  Most of the notices were very favorable. Oliver Wendell Holmes—the “first great man who ever wrote me a letter,” Sam claimed—commended him for his “familiar descriptions and frequently quaint and amusing comments, from such an entirely distinct and characteristic point of view.” Henry Wheeler Shaw declared The Innocents Abroad “the most delishus history i ever perused.” Harte lauded in the Overland Monthly the volume he had helped to edit in manuscript. The Quaker City voyage, he opined, “was a huge practical joke, of which not the least amusing feature was the fact that ‘Mark Twain’ had embarked on it.” An “honest hater of all cant,” he added, “Mr. Clemens deserves to rank foremost among Western humorists.” His book, with its “lack of ‘moral or aesthetic limitation,’” consisted of “six hundred and fifty pages of open and declared fun.” The New York Sun, owned and edited by Sam’s fellow excursionist Moses Beach, lauded the author for pricking “a great many bubbles blown by previous travellers.” Josephus N. Larned, Sam’s colleague on the Buffalo Express, praised the unique point of view from which the story is narrated: the author saw “things as they actually presented themselves, not as he has been taught to expect them,” and tempered his impressions with “as acute an appreciation of sham and humbug as his sense of the humorous and ludicrous was keen.” Howells, the associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the leading parlor magazine in the country, hailed it in the December 1869 issue, defending Sam’s “good-humored humor”: “we do not remember where it is indulged at the cost of the weak or helpless side, or where it is insolent, with all its sauciness and irreverence.” It ought to win for the author “something better than the uncertain standing of a popular favorite,” Howells concluded. “It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists California has given us, but we think he is . . . quite worthy of the company of the best.” Years later, Howells recalled that he “had the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that [the book] was such fun as we had not had before.” In any case, he “praised it enough to satisfy the author.”50

  The more brutal notices—not surprisingly, given the critical response to early versions of his Quaker City lecture—objected to Sam’s chutzpah. J. G. Holland of Scribner’s dismissed the author as a “mere fun-maker of ephemeral popularity,” and the New York Evening Press disdained “the somewhat flippant manner in which he treats religious subjects.” A pair of Elmira publications that no doubt landed in the Langdons’ parlor were divided on the merits of the book: the Elmira Saturday Evening Review disparaged “its apparent irreverence” and “its playful allusions to matters that a large portion of mankind have been taught to regard as sacred,” while the Elmira Gazette averred that its “sights and scenes of famous places abroad . . . are treated in that peculiarly attractive vein of power and genuine humor.” The Californian censured “the wicked things that Mark Twain says,” and the Boston Transcript asserted that some of the “levities” about the Holy Land “might displease the pious.” Then again, a few reviewers offered a counterargument: the Syracuse Standard claimed that the “lack of reverence” in the narrative was its “chiefest charm,” and the New York Herald opined that there was nothing “so very irreverent” in it. The critics seem to have read different books.51

  Sam had urged Whitelaw Reid, the new managing editor of the New York Tribune, to “get your reviewer to praise the bad passages & feeble places,” though Reid had ignored his request. In an otherwise favorable notice, the Tribune critic—perhaps Reid himself—lamented that the book “sometimes unfortunately degenerates into an offensive irreverence for things which other men hold sacred.” Fortunately, Sam did not seem to mind. He privately conceded that he had “written irreverently, but I did it heedlessly, or when out of temper—never in cold blood,” and that the “irreverence of the volume appears to be a tip-top good feature of it, diplomatically speaking, though I wish with all my heart there wasn’t an irreverent passage in it.” He soon wrote Reid to thank him: “I am ever so much obliged to you for that notice, & I confess that I felt a deal relieved when I read it,” he allowed, “for I was afraid from the start that I might ‘catch it’ disagreeably & caustically in the Tribune, & yet I would not & could not write seriously and try to get you to be a traitor to your own judgment & say kind things of the volume if you couldn’t feel them.”52

  A pirated English edition of The Innocents Abroad—with the provocative subtitle A Book of Travel in Pursuit of Pleasure—was issued over a year later, in September 1870, by John Camden Hotten, a prominent publisher of pornography with such titles in his catalog as Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod. The travelogue was widely belittled in the British press, however, as if it were straightforward reporting and not a work of humor. The Athenaeum, for example, sniffed that “whoever he might be,” the “writer of this book is ignorant of many of those things that would
be familiar to an English tourist. . . . The only thing that characterizes Mark Twain is the reckless manner in which he makes his assertions.” The London Saturday Review pronounced the author “a very offensive specimen of the vulgarest kind of Yankee” and his book “a deliberate and wicked creation of a diseased mind.” The reviews spurred sales of the pirated edition and Hotten remained a thorn in Sam’s side until his death in 1873.53

  By any measure, The Innocents Abroad in both its American and British incarnations was a stunning commercial success. In the first month it sold over 5,000 copies—more than The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867) had sold during its first year or so. By the end of 1869 some 31,500 copies had been bound, and 12,000 of them sold in December alone. “My book is waltzing me out of debt so fast,” Sam boasted to Mother Fairbanks the first week of January 1870, “that I shan’t owe any man a cent by this time next year. By the 1st of February I will have paid $15,000 out of my own pocket on two or three indebtednesses since the first of last August, & shall still have three or four thousand left in bank—for a rainy day. It has been quite a money-making year to me—most of it came from the book—I have not drawn a penny from the Express.” Though six steam presses and a paper mill were operating night and day, Sam claimed, “still we can’t catch up on the orders.” He repeatedly urged Bliss to host an oyster dinner for him in Hartford to celebrate and publicize the book. A total of some 67,000 copies were bound during its first year in print; about 85,000 during its first sixteen months; and about 90,000 during its first two years. About 150,000 copies had been sold by the end of 1879. It became the most popular book Sam ever wrote, earning its author about fourteen thousand dollars during its first year and at least twice that amount during its first five years in print despite Elisha Bliss’s flawed bookkeeping. In 1903 Sam estimated that his income from the American editions totaled about thirty-five thousand dollars and at his death some half million copies had been sold. Bruce Michelson and others have concluded it was “the most popular travel book every written by an American.” So wildly popular was it that Sam poked fun at hostile reviewers—not for the last time. The Boston Advertiser in late October 1870 ridiculed the Saturday Review for taking The Innocents Abroad too seriously: “We can imagine the delight of the humorist in reading this tribute to his power.” In the December 1870 Galaxy, Sam quoted this Advertiser blurb and parodied the Saturday Review notice in retaliation, piling irony upon irony, referring sarcastically to his own “insolence,” “impertinence,” “presumption,” “mendacity,” and “majestic ignorance.” As late as 1907 he laughed in an interview that the Saturday Review notice had been even “more deliciously funny” than The Innocents Abroad because the “ingenious critic” charged him “with displaying shocking ignorance and an utter disregard of truth.”54 But as critics still wonder, who was “sold”? Sam, the Saturday Review, the Boston Advertiser, or all three?