The Life of Mark Twain
Page 81
My books are bad enough just as they are written; then what must they be after Mr. John Camden Hotten has composed half-a-dozen chapters and added the same to them? . . . And suppose that on top of all this, he continually and persistently forgot to offer you a single penny or even send you a copy of your mutilated book to burn. . . . Mr. Hotten says that one nom de plume of mine is “Carl Byng.” I hold that there is no affliction in this world that makes a man feel so down-trodden and abused as the giving him a name that does not belong to him. . . . Mr. Hotten prints unrevised, uncorrected, and in some respects, spurious books, with my name to them.
As late as 1890 Sam was still fuming about the “unprincipled” British publisher who stole his work.32
Then came more bad news. Harte resigned as editor of the Overland to pursue more lucrative literary opportunities in the East, in effect invading Sam’s territory. According to Sam, he “crossed the continent through such a prodigious blaze of national interest and excitement” in February 1871 “that one might have supposed he was the Viceroy of India.” The Buffalo Courier reported in its “Personal” column on February 14—a clipping of which survives among the Mark Twain Papers—that Harte was “visiting friends” in Chicago who hoped to persuade him to adopt the city “as his future home.” Harte spurned the offer, however. With equal parts of envy and resentment, Sam wrote John Henry Riley that Harte’s “journey east to Boston was a perfect torchlight procession of eclat & homage. All the cities are fussing about which shall secure him for a citizen.” Harte arrived in Boston on February 24 to a lavish welcome. Howells met him at the train station, and he dined the next day at the Parker House with the Saturday Club, whose members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell, the brightest stars in the American literary firmament. Howells hosted a well-publicized dinner in Harte’s honor at his Cambridge home the evening of February 28 attended by the cream of Boston literary society, including Henry Adams and the young Henry James. Boston “has had no such sensation since the demolition of the ‘Coliseum’ as the arrival of Bret Harte,” the Boston Commonwealth reported. On March 6 Harte signed the most lucrative contract to that date in the history of American letters with Fields, Osgood & Company, the firm that published the works of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell as well as those of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and John Greenleaf Whittier, to contribute exclusively for a year to its magazines, the Atlantic Monthly and Every Saturday, at a princely salary of ten thousand dollars. In Buffalo, meanwhile, Sam was writing for the less prestigious Galaxy for two thousand dollars a year and quietly nursing Livy and a grudge. As he informed Orion, “I must & will keep shady & quiet till Bret Harte simmers down a little & then I mean to go up head again & stay there.” He reiterated his resolve at the close of the letter: “I will ‘top’ Bret Harte again or bust.”33
Like an ambitious prospector, Sam had discovered a promising lead in Buffalo. Like a mining claim with rich “indications” that were ultimately disappointing, however, the city had played out after a year and a half. Despite his previous assertions that he was a “permanency” there, Sam concluded to pull up stakes at the close of his annus horribilis. “I have come at last to loathe Buffalo so bitterly,” he confided to Riley on March 3, a week after Harte’s arrival in Boston, that he sold his one-third share of the Express for fifteen thousand dollars—ten thousand less than he had paid for it. His last piece in the Express appeared six weeks before he and Livy moved. They had wearied of their “sorrowful and pathetic brief sojourn in Buffalo where we became hermits,” as he put it in 1906. “When we could endure imprisonment no longer,” they sold the Delaware Avenue house for nineteen thousand dollars—a thousand less than Jervis Langdon had paid for it a year earlier. The erasure of Sam’s debt to Jervis Langdon and Livy’s inheritance enabled them to sell both properties at a loss without suffering financial hardship, with enough money in reserve for a down payment on a house in Connecticut. He also withdrew as a featured contributor to the Galaxy after a single year because, he admitted to Francis Church, his periodical writing “crowds book work so much.” Bliss, who feared that Sam’s commitment to the Galaxy overtaxed his time and overexposed his name, was no doubt relieved when his star contributor confided to him that he had resigned “because the magazine interfered so much with other work.” However, when the news that Sam was leaving Buffalo began to leak—this even before Livy fell ill with typhoid fever—it was couched in humorous terms, as in the New York Tribune: “He says trying to think how he shall be funny at a certain date is very melancholy; keeps him awake at night; prompts him to commit suicide, run for Congress, or describe in print his reminiscences of distinguished men whose funerals he has had the pleasure of attending.” His popularity had begun to slip when his Galaxy articles stopped being funny. By the time Sam explained why he was retiring from the magazine in his valedictory column in the April issue, likely written in early March, the reasons had become more personal than professional. He was, he explained, in no mood to write comedy:
For the last eight months, with hardly an interval, I have had for my fellows and comrades, night and day, doctors and watchers of the sick! During these eight months death has taken two members of my home circle and malignantly threatened two others. All this I have experienced, yet all the time been under contract to furnish “humorous” matter once a month for this magazine. . . . Please to put yourself in my place and contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that some of the “humor” I have written during this period could have been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity of the occasion.
Sam wrote these lines only after he was certain Livy was finally “out of danger & mending tolerably fast.” As he notified Orion on March 9, “We are selling our dwelling & everything here & are going to spend the summer in Elmira while we build a house in Hartford. Eight months’ sickness & death in one place is enough.” In mid-March he grudgingly changed his mind about returning to the stage, offering in a letter to Redpath to lecture the next season most places in New England for $150 per appearance but not less than $250 at the Boston Music Hall.34
These many months of virtually unrelieved sorrow and misery were the result of a convergence of misfortunes. Jervis Langdon had suffered declining health and died in Elmira, Emma Nye had died in Buffalo, and Livy and their son Langdon were chronically ill. Sam spent more time sitting beside sickbeds than at his writing desk, and even the minor project he completed, the pamphlet containing his burlesque autobiography, had proven a critical and commercial flop. (He later expressed regret that he had published it.) He was disillusioned with Buffalo as a home. His brother was broke, if not broken, and still unable to sell the family land in Tennessee. Sam had abandoned his career in journalism, the composition of his second major book had stalled months behind schedule, the pirates in England were stealing his work, and Bret Harte had invaded his domain. The immediate future seemed bleak.
He planned to spend the summer and fall in Elmira while he completed the western book and Livy recuperated. “When we go to Elmira,” he wrote Orion from Buffalo on March 4, “we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home till the book is finished, but we have very little doubt that Hartford will be the place.” By March 14 Livy was able to sit up in bed, though she was not yet able to walk. She sipped ale to build her blood—a remarkable concession for the daughter of prohibitionists, though Sam insisted that she had suggested its use as a tonic and her doctor had concurred. “She was as tight as a brick this afternoon” and the ale “made her unendurably slangy,” he reported to Sue Crane. “She talks incessantly, anyhow,” he added—a trait he later attributed to both Hank Morgan’s wife Sandy in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Eve in “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” (1904). As soon as “she can walk across the floor we shall leave” for her mother’s home, he wrote his mother the next day, and eventually they would move “to Ha
rtford to live—about 2 years from now—shall travel in the meantime, maybe.” He still hoped to write a book about England along the lines of The Innocents Abroad. But he felt such anguish over his inability to manage the “chaos of my household” in Buffalo that he did not wait until Livy could walk again to escape Buffalo. “The vials of hellfire bottled up for my benefit must be about emptied,” he wrote Bliss on March 17, eleven days after Harte signed his contract with Fields, Osgood. “By the living God I don’t believe they ever will be emptied. . . . We are packing up, to-night, & tomorrow I shall take my wife to Elmira on a mattrass [sic]. . . . It is a great risk, but the doctor agrees that the risk is just as great to have her stay here.” For the past seven weeks, he noted, “I have not had my natural rest but have been a night-&-day sick-nurse” to Livy and their son. “I believe if that baby goes on crying 3 more hours this way I will butt my frantic brains out & try to get some peace.” He pleaded with Bliss to appreciate his plight: “Now do you see?—I want rest. I want to get clear away from all hamperings, all harassments. I am going to shut myself up in a farm-house alone, on top an Elmira hill, & write—on my book. I will see no company, & worry about nothing. I never will make another promise again of any kind that can be avoided, so help me God.”35 Sam turned a page in his life the next day. He left Buffalo as he had earlier fled Hannibal and Virginia City, rarely to return there again, and by evening had dropped anchor in a safe but temporary harbor—the Langdon mansion on Main Street in Elmira—with Livy and baby Langdon in tow.
Abbreviations
AMT Autobiography of Mark Twain
EB Virginia City, Nevada, Evening Bulletin
ET&S Mark Twain’s Early Tales and Sketches
GHN Gold Hill (Nev.) News
HF&TS Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories
IA The Innocents Abroad
LM Life on the Mississippi
MTCI Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews
MTL Mark Twain’s Letters
MTP Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley
N&J Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals
NCT Nevada City, California, Transcript
RI Roughing It (1872 ed.)
SFAC San Francisco Alta California
SFB San Francisco Bulletin
SFDC San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle
SFMC San Francisco Morning Call
SLC Samuel Langhorne Clemens
SU Sacramento Union
TIA Traveling with the Innocents Abroad
UCCL Union Catalog of Clemens Letters, ed. Paul Machlis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); letters are cited by catalog number.
UCLC Union Catalog of Letters to Clemens, ed. Paul Machlis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); letters are cited by catalog number.
VCDU Virginia City, Nevada, Daily Union
VCTE Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise
Notes
Preface
1. “Biographical,” SFDC, 23 January 1866, 2; Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 401; Weir, “Mark Twain and Social Class,” 205; MTCI, 334; AMT, 1:221; Mark Twain–Howells Letters, 781–82.
2. SLC, quoted in Hill, Mark Twain: God’s Fool, 136; Howells, My Mark Twain, 93; Beard, Hardly a Man Is Now Alive, 343; Budd, “Hiding Out in Public,” 130; Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 1268; DeVoto, “Introduction,” in Mark Twain in Eruption, xiv; Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull, 272; Hill, Mark Twain: God’s Fool, 136; Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, 67.
3. AMT, 1:210. See also Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 1269: “It isn’t so astonishing the number of things I can remember, but the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.”
4. AMT, 1:268. Elsewhere she indicated, “I discount him ninety per cent. The rest is pure gold” (Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 16).
5. ET&S, 1:185; Powers, Dangerous Waters, 261; Jeffrey Steinbrink, quoted in Skandera-Trombley, “Mark Twain: God’s Fool Redux,” 418–19; Hill, “The Biographical Equation,” 3; SLC, quoted in Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 65; Hill, “Introduction,” in Roughing It (1981), 16; MTCI, 607.
6. “How a Humorist Uses Humor,” 60; Budd, Our Mark Twain, 240; Leary, Mark Twain, 6; Budd, “‘A Talent for Posturing,’” 78; Aldrich, Crowding Memories, 144; MTCI, 375, 481, 642–43; MTL, 1:322, 2:160; Mark Twain’s Letters, ed. Paine, 385.
7. Mark Twain–Howells Letters, 534.
8. Howells, My Mark Twain, 17.
9. Thomas Sargent Perry, quoted in Edel, “The Figure under the Carpet,” 19; Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, 218; Albert Bigelow Paine, quoted in Hill, Mark Twain: God’s Fool, 208, 268; Cox, “Introduction,” in Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (1980), xix; DeVoto, Mark Twain’s America, xi, 208; DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work, 13, 85; Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, xix–xxi.
10. Lowry, “Littery Man,” 8; Pettit, “Mark Twain and the Negro,” 88; DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work, 108; Mark Twain Speaks for Himself, xv; Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain, xiii; Robinson, “Mark Twain, 1835–1910,” 15, 17.
11. Lewis, “The American Fear of Literature,” 15; Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 6; Bellamy, Mark Twain as a Literary Artist, 55; Wagenknecht, Mark Twain: The Man and His Work, 109; Mattson, “Mark Twain on War and Peace,” 793; Kaplan, The Singular Mark Twain, 2; Goeke, “Border Life on the Mississippi,” 14; Krass, Ignorance, Confidence, and Filthy Rich Friends, 2; Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, 234; Camfield, The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, 99, 100; MTCI, 377–81.
12. AMT, 2:151, 2:153; MTCI, 450; SLC, quoted in Keller, Midstream, 51.
13. Robinson, “Mark Twain, 1835–1910,” 25; MTCI, 541; Selected Letters of W. D. Howells, 3:271; Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 181.
14. John C. Gerber, “Clemens, Samuel Langhorne,” in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, 162; Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, 69; DeVoto, Mark Twain’s America, 195.
15. MTL, 3:91, 4:350; Camfield, The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, 455; MTCI, 262; Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 959; “A Substitute for Rulloff,” New York Tribune, 3 May 1871, 2; Harper, I Remember, 139; King, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters, 173–74; Mark Twain–Howells Letters, 838; Branch, “Introduction,” in ET&S, 1:24.
16. Camfield, The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, 667; Wonham, review of Mark Twain and Human Nature, 87.
17. Leland Krauth, “Biographers,” in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, 84.
18. MTL, 1:328, 4:97; Fischer, Mark Twain in the West, 1.
19. Shelden, “Mark Twain and His Biographers,” 353; Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 9; Camfield, The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, 668; DeVoto, “Introduction,” in The Portable Mark Twain, 6; Ferguson, Mark Twain: Man and Legend, 50; Powers, Mark Twain: A Life, 77; Armon and Blair, notes, HF&TS, 288; Roark, “Mark Twain’s ‘Laura,’” 67.
20. Loving, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens, 261.
21. Fishkin, Lighting Out for the Territory, 9; Levy, Huck Finn’s America, 33.
22. Mark Twain of the Enterprise, 139; Mark Twain–Howells Letters, 586–87; Mark Twain’s Letters, ed. Paine, 527.
23. Howells, My Mark Twain, 10, 101; Michelson, Printer’s Devil, 7.
Prologue
1. Notebook, 22 January 1896, MTP; Following the Equator, 352.
Chapter 1
1. AMT, 1:203–4; Briden, “‘Too Publick a Fornicator,’” 4; HF&TS, 86; N&J, 3:540.
2. MTCI, 361.
3. Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 13; Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 3; Pettit, “Mark Twain, Unreconstructed Southerner,” 22.
4. “Mental Telegraphy,” 100; Watterson, “Mark Twain: An Intimate Memory,” 373; Lampton, “Hero in a Fool’s Paradise,” 24.
5. Paullin, “Mark Twain’s Virginia Kin,” 297–98; HF&TS, 113.
6. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 3; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 86; HF&TS, 83–85, 106–7; AMT, 1:212.
7. AMT, 2:357–58; HF&TS, 104; Following the Equator, 351; Pudd’nhead Wil
son, 4; Holcombe, History of Marion County, 915; “A Memory,” 286.
8. AMT, 1:210; Huckleberry Finn, 286, 320.
9. The Gilded Age, 24; AMT, 1:61. Harold K. Bush Jr. estimates the Clemens landholdings in Tennessee at 288,000 acres; see Bush, Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis, 46.
10. Howe, “Narrating the Tennessee Land,” 15; AMT, 1:63, 1:209; The Gilded Age, 556–57; Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 7.
11. HF&TS, 327; Holcombe, History of Marion County, 915; The Gilded Age, 22.
12. AMT, 1:64, 1:658; Webster, Mark Twain: Business Man, 4–5; Bidewell, “Mark Twain’s Florida Years,” 160; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 42.
Chapter 2
1. AMT, 1:209; Gregory, “Orion Clemens on Mark Twain’s Birthplace,” 17; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 44, 46; Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri, 47; Abbott, “Tom’s Sawyer’s Town,” 17; HF&TS, 91.
2. Lauber, The Making of Mark Twain, 11; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 48; Satires and Burlesques, 180; Tom Sawyer, 49; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 156; Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri, 49; Sanborn, Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years, 15.
3. AMT, 1:62. Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri, 88; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 36; and Powers, Dangerous Waters, 36, all suggest (following SLC’s lead) that John Marshall Clemens’s financial problems were caused by the crash of 1834, when Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle fought over the future of the Bank of the United States. But the Clemens family likely suffered more in Missouri following the Panic of 1837 than in Tennessee after the Bank War of 1834.
4. Twainian 26 (November–December 1967): 3; HF&TS, 313.
5. Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 51–52, 56–57; “Life Insurance,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 25 October 1849, 4.
6. Howells, My Mark Twain, 134; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 60; John Marshall Clemens to Pamelia Hancock Goggin, 16 March 1842, UCLC 43457; Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 82; AMT, 1:178; Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 38–39.