Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The evening was a triumph. “Made a splendid hit last night & am the ‘lion’ to-day,” he wrote to Jane and Pamela.21 Among the enchanted was Mary Fairbanks, whose Herald review amounted to a gracious acceptance of her friend’s persona—although she did emphasize the more uplifting moments.

  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.22

  The Plain Dealer anointed him the “most popular of American humorists since the demise of poor Artemus.”23

  Sam rode to Pittsburgh on this ballast of approbation. Speaking at the Academy of Music during a rainstorm on November 20, he outdrew the great British actress Fanny Kemble, attracting a turnaway crowd of 1,500 to her 200. The Pittsburgh Gazette pronounced him “entitled above all living men to the name of American humorist.”24

  The next stop was Elmira, where a more consequential audience awaited him.

  “The calf has returned; may the prodigal have some breakfast?” This was Sam’s doorway greeting to the Langdons at their table as famously told by Paine.25 It was Saturday morning, November 21. He was to lecture in the city two nights later, then rest for a week before heading to Rondout, New York, on December 2. Once again, his jovial affect covered anxieties. A momentous challenge awaited him on this particular podium.

  The lecture was a benefit for the city’s volunteer fire company. A leading member in that company was young Charley Langdon, who had been so horrified to learn of Sam’s intentions toward his sister. On this Monday night, Charley, Jervis, Olivia Lewis Langdon, and Livy Langdon sat facing him from the audience. It was to be Livy’s first glimpse of a performance by her suitor.

  Sam fumbled the lecture. At least he thought he did. Distracted by Livy, he labored through a subpar performance. At the end, he blurted an apology for his “failure” and slunk from the stage, overcome with humiliation.

  The local press saw it differently. The Elmira Advertiser judged it pleasing and satisfying; well received, in fact, although the reviewer did note that Mark Twain “was not in good voice.”26

  The next day, Sam began the do-or-die phase of his campaign for Olivia Langdon’s hand. He began it with the two of them alone in the Langdon parlor. Livy wore a blue dress, a color that forever afterward symbolized purity to Sam. He then moved on to the formidable Olivia Lewis Langdon and the more genial, cancer-wracked Jervis. When it was over, a day later—or two days, depending on which letter he was writing—he was emotionally spent but triumphant. The girl in the photograph had finally said yes to him. And the parents had given their provisional approval.

  His ecstasy radiates from the starburst of letter writing that ensued. To Mary Fairbanks, “It is MY thanksgiving day, above all other days that ever shone on earth. Because, after twenty-four hours of persecution from me, Mr. & Mrs. L. have yielded a conditional consent—Livy has said, over & over again, the word which is so hard for a maiden to say, & if there were a church near here with a steeple high enough to make it an object I should go & jump over it.”27

  The deciding element for Livy, he told her, was his lecture—the same lecture for which he had apologized onstage. “[S]ometime in the future she is going to be my wife, & I think we shall live in Cleveland.”28 His dreams of bourgeois domesticity tumbled over one another. Mother Fairbanks would persuade her husband to sell Sam an interest in the Herald. “And then we shall live in the house next to yours.”29 He stipulated that the engagement was not yet formal—it was a secret, in fact—and favored her with a gusset of God-belief, the star of Hope breaking through clouds: his vow to be a Christian.

  To Joe Twichell two days later, writing from New York, Sam slipped into more of a “guy” mode. “Sound the loud timbrel!…for I have fought the good fight & lo! I have won! Refused three times—warned to quit, once—accepted at last!”30 He repeated his willingness to jump over a church steeple.

  The conditions of Livy’s parents were that if Livy made up her mind “thoroughly & eternally,” and if Sam could prove that his past contained nothing shameful or criminal, then would establish a good character and settle down, “I may take the sun out of their domestic firmament, the angel out of their fireside heaven.”31 Jervis had asked him for references during that visit, and Clemens later recalled that he had named “six prominent men,” all San Franciscans.32 Of these, only two are known: the Reverends Horatio Stebbins and Charles Wadsworth. Jervis made some inquiries of his own.

  The tone of Sam’s letters to Livy changed right away, during his train ride from Elmira to New York. No more “Honored Sister” now; and not as much strained Victorian syntax. In this and the nearly two hundred other letters he would write to her from the lecture trail until their marriage, and in all the letters to her in the thirty-four years afterward, an unself-conscious and undiminished sweetness shines through. It is the sweetness of a jubilant boy who has suffered much, and seen an impossible dream come true.

  My Dear, Dear Livy:

  When I found myself comfortably on board the cars last night…said to myself: “Now whatever others may think, it is my opinion that I am blessed above all other men that live…”

  Page upon page of endearment followed, a torrent of consciousness that rushed from thought to thought with no attempt at transition; the ampersands trailed like a steamboat’s wake.

  I leave my fate, my weal, my woe, my life, in your hands & at your mercy, with a trust, & a confidence & an abiding sense of security which nothing can shake…

  I do love, love, love you, Livy!

  You are so pure, so great, so good, so beautiful. How can I help loving you?…[H]ow can I keep from worshipping you, you dear little paragon?…I listen for a dear voice, I look for a darling face, I caress the empty air!…Good-bye—& I send a thousand kisses—pray send me some.

  He closed with “Mark” crossed out and “Samuel” inserted, and then:

  P.S.—I do LOVE you, Livy!

  Some further thoughts, and then:

  P.P.P.S.—I do love, LOVE, LOVE you, Livy, darling.

  More thoughts. And:

  PPPPP.S—I do love you, Livy!33

  OLIVIA AND Jervis Langdon groped for a means to open up the psyche of the mysterious stranger now poised to take their daughter from them. Who was this “Mark Twain”? Where had he come from? What sort of husband might he make for Livy? On December 1, Olivia Lewis Langdon commenced the investigation with a carefully phrased letter to Mary Mason Fairbanks.

  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…I do not ask as to his standing among men, nor do I need to be assured that he is a man of genius that he possesses a high order of intellectual endowments, nor do I scarcely crave your opinion of his affectional nature, but what I desire is your opinion of him as a man; what kind of man he has been, and what the man he now is, or is to become.34

  Mary Fairbanks’s answer was positive. But trouble lay ahead. When the responses from Sam’s references came back, they were withering. The two clergymen predicted that he would fill a drunkard’s grave.35

  Oblivious to these, Sam lectured across New Jersey and New York State through December, piling up some two thousand miles of railroad travel. He kept up a blizzard of love letters to Livy, who gamely tried to process the sustained pitch of passion unlike any she had experienced. Weak from another of her many spells of illness, she tried to counter the passion by urging “reason.” Sam agreed—passio
nately. Sometimes she simply had to protest Sam’s flaming hyperbole—which triggered more of the same: “And you are not ‘Perfection’—no?” he chided. “And I shan’t say you are?” Then, lightly scratched out: “There you go, again, you dear little concentration of Literalness!”36 This particular missive covered twenty-six pages and a two-page postscript, along with evidence that Sam had discarded one whole page and parts of four more. In other responses to her now-lost letters, he declares that his “wild, distempered language” is not deliberate flattery—“But I will curb it, for your sake.”37 He didn’t.

  He foraged the Bible, already well familiar to him, for pertinent quotations—Corinthians, Psalms, Romans, more Psalms, Matthew. He alluded to Protestant hymns and churches he’d dropped in on. He mentioned prayer sessions with Joe Twichell, and his admission to the young minister that his constant praying had not brought him the “progress” he’d sought, “—& that now I began clearly to comprehend that one must seek Jesus for himself alone, & uninfluenced by selfish motives.”38 These remarks suggest that Sam was struggling to recapture the Christian faith that had deserted him with the death of Henry; he was not merely trying to fool Olivia Langdon. Fraudulence was never a part of Sam Clemens’s makeup. Self-deception perhaps was a different matter.

  The tour was depleting him. Travel expenses ate up more than half of his earnings—he later estimated that, from a gross intake of about $9,000, he banked only $3,600. For a while, he accepted the hospitality of citizens, but he learned to avoid the agonies of this luxury. Among its horrors was the obligatory sightseeing tour around the town in which he slumped, scowling, from his carriage seat at the predictable inventory: “the Mayor’s house; the ex-mayor’s house; the house of a State Senator,…the public school with its infernal architecture; the female seminary; paper mill or factory of some kind or other;…the place where the park is going to be.”39 “All towns are alike,” groused the future bard of American town life, “—all have the same stupid trivialities to show, & all demand an impossible interest at the suffering stranger’s hands.”40 The tour was usually followed by the reception, which obliged him to endure hours of “showing off” by local wits and dignitaries; and, finally, the ice-cold guest room with its tacit constraints against smoking cigars and throwing his clothes around. (He did anyway.) Unless he could not avoid it, he put up in hotels.

  IN THE midst of it all, Sam found himself obliged to assemble more references. Jervis, having digested the first round, had grown testy in response to the unsuspecting suitor’s witticisms, and was rumbling about the need to “make haste slowly.” It didn’t take Sam long to intuit that his trusted friends had backstabbed him. He put together a more prestigious list: J. Neeley Johnson, a Nevada Supreme Court justice who’d been a governor of California; the current Nevada governor, H. G. Blaisdel; Joe Goodman; and a handful of others. With desperate optimism—“I think all my references can say I never did anything mean, false or criminal,”41 he assured Livy’s father—he waited for the responses to trickle in, traveling and lecturing all the while.

  As the year wound down, his esprit flagged a little. “Why is it that godliness flies me?” he wrote Livy. “Why is it that prayer seems so unavailing & all my searching & seeking a mockery? I study the Testament every night, I read anything touching upon religion that comes in my way,…but sometimes a chilly apathy comes upon me at last.”42 He missed a stop in Fort Wayne. He worried about Livy’s health and her misgivings about leaving her family household. Learning, on New Year’s Eve, that she had obtained a copy of the Jumping Frog book, he felt a new wave of revulsion for “the villainous sketch”: “Don’t read a word in that Jumping Frog book, Livy—don’t. I hate to hear that infamous volume mentioned. I would be glad to know that every copy of it was burned, & gone forever.”43

  But he could not outrun all sources of infamy. The Langdons’ investigation deepened, and as 1869 dawned, Sam Clemens was on trial.

  * Scholars at the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, have identified no less than fifteen distinct “crossing-out” styles in Mark Twain’s letters. They range from what Robert Hirst has called the “deletions-intended-to-be-read” method he used to twit Mary Fairbanks and Livy, through a range of X’s, horizontal slashes that scarcely obscure what he first wrote, to a method of ever-denser loops and false p’s and d’s written over the original and designed to prevent anyone from reading the deleted matter.

  * No “standard” text of the Vandal lecture exists, although fifty-seven pages of the original manuscript are preserved in the Mark Twain Papers. Mark Twain committed his lectures to memory, and then typically improvised on them from city to city. Useful pastiches of the lecture as reported in newspapers at the time can be found in The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain’s Lecture Tours, edited by Fred W. Lorch (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968), and in Mark Twain Speaking, edited by Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976). The excerpts here are drawn from both sources and, where possible, corrected against the manuscript pages.

  24

  “Quite Worthy of the Best”

  (1869)

  And you had a delightful philosophy lesson, Livy—& wished that we might study it together some day. It is the echo of a wish that speaks in my heart many & many a time.”1

  Philosophy had become only one of her intellectual pursuits. She was tinkering with test tubes as well. Livy had taken up chemistry lessons with her friends the Spaulding sisters, Clara and Allie; visiting Elmira a couple of weeks later, Sam professed fear “because they are always cooking up some new-fangled gas or other & blowing everything endways with their experiments”2 Livy had been inspired by a meeting of Elmira’s Academy of Sciences hosted by her intellectually engaged parents. It was all part of an emerging “science” vogue that fed into America’s embrace of Progress and the belief in human perfectibility. This optimistic illusion would radiate through the rest of the 19th century, eventually claiming Mark Twain among its chief adherents, and victims.

  Livy’s curiosities enhanced their exploration of each other’s mind. It was a welcome phase. The first weeks of Sam’s courtship bore all the cerebral complexity of a Saint Bernard beating its tail against the floor. But Livy’s gravitas and the cerebral cast of her personality must have compelled him from the moment of their first meeting in New York. (Their exchanges after the Charles Dickens lecture, and the subtexts of those remarks, will probably never be known.) By December 1868, discussion of books was a frequent element of their correspondence. They cited sentimental tracts and verse narratives dealing with Christian views of marriage. Soon they were comparing notes on Tennyson, Milton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne, Victor Hugo, Matthew Arnold, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Sam, unlike Livy, was not an academically trained reader, but he read all the time, his choices as eclectic and humanistic as his narratives would prove to be. What he happened to have with him on the train would often be the topic of their book talk.

  They developed an easy way of weaving literary ideas into their correspondence. “Your criticism on the ‘Nature & Life’ sermons is concentrated excellence,” writes Sam, and: “Poor Swift—under the placid surface of this simply-worded book flows the full tide of his venom—the turbid sea of his matchless hate.” “It always makes me proud of you when you assault one of her [Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s] impenetrable sentences & tear off its shell & bring its sense to light.” Even Sam’s teasing revealed their mutual immersion in words: remarking on one of her many spectacular spelling gaffes, Sam chides her, “ ‘Sicisiors’ don’t spell scissors, you funny little orthographist.”3 By January 1869, writing from far-off Illinois, the hot-blooded Casanova of a few months earlier was sounding quite domesticated: “when we are serene & happy old married folk, we will sit together & con other books all the long pleasant evenings, & let the great world toil & struggle & nurse its pet ambition…”4

  Samuel Clemens’s immersion in language must have been attractive to
Livy, who was otherwise so different from him. The sickly young woman had experienced the world largely at second hand, through books; and now here was this Sam Clemens, back from a part of the globe she never expected to see, with a book about it on the way. Whatever Livy responded to in Sam, it was not the quality that was building his national reputation—his sense of humor. (She wasn’t all that thrilled about his drawl, either, for that matter; he worked on cutting it down.) Harriet Lewis’s appraisal of her joke-getting limitations was on the money. More disquieting was her conviction, inherited from her family and social strata, that her suitor’s calling as a “humor” writer was not a lofty ambition; perhaps not even respectable. Sam himself admitted that “[s]he thinks a humorist is something perfectly awful.”5 It was likely the reason he hoped she wouldn’t read the Jumping Frog book. Sam found Livy’s myopia both amusing and a source of anxiety. In an attack of Respectability, he’d composed a high-blown Christmas epistle in December to Mrs. Fairbanks—that other stranger to the joys of thigh-slappers—and, with Livy in mind as an audience, allowed the Cleveland matron to publish an excerpt in the Herald on January 16. It was all about Sam’s Yuletide remembrances of Bethlehem during the Quaker City expedition, with its now-crumbling wall and venerable olives, back when the stars were shedding a purer luster above the barren hills.6 Predictably, Livy loved it. “I want to thank you,” she wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks. “I want the public, who know him now, only as ‘the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope,’ to know something of his deeper, larger nature.”7