Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  As his Vandal tour chugged eastward through Illinois—Rockford and Chicago and Galesburg and El Paso and Ottawa—Sam daydreamed about his forthcoming book. “It will have a great sale in the West—& the East too,” he wrote to Elisha Bliss’s son Frank, the treasurer of the publishing company, from Chicago. “Why don’t you issue prospectuses & startling advertisements now while I am stirring the bowels of these communities?”8 He didn’t know it, but those prospectuses and advertisements were months from seeing the light of day. The book would not be published in March. The book was in danger of not being published at all.

  He schemed of other ventures that would establish him as a solid citizen worthy of kinship to Jervis Langdon. He knew that many Elmira friends of the Langdon family viewed him with suspicion if not contempt. Might Mr. Clemens be casting a sidelong glance at the quarter-million-dollar inheritance that awaited young Olivia? Versions of this theory survived Mark Twain’s death, but its plausibility seems remote. Sam’s own words and behavior revealed an overweening anxiety to hoist himself up to her level—as an Eastern squire and a man of means, but also as an honorable husband. As for Livy, she seemed indifferent to money, in these decades before she saw it taken away from her. She seldom wore the Langdon jewelry, and she delighted in the simple gold engagement ring that Sam obtained through Mrs. Fairbanks.

  “I do not wish to marry Miss Langdon for her wealth,” Sam had bluntly informed Olivia Lewis Langdon, “& she knows that perfectly well. As far as I am concerned, Mr. Langdon can cut her off with a shilling—or the half of it.” He’d assured the matriarch that he had paddled his own canoe since he was thirteen, and was “fully competent to so paddle it the rest of the voyage.”9 Continuing the campaign, he had told Langdon of his interest in buying a share of the Cleveland Herald. Shares were going for seven thousand dollars each, and he wanted to buy as many as he could “mortgage my book for, & as many more as I could pay for with labor of hand & brain.”10 He added, “If I do buy, I shall retain Horace Greeley on the paper.”

  His instincts for upgrading his profile to Jervis and Olivia were timelier than he knew. Back in Elmira, the responses to the Langdons’ “character” enquiries were starting to trickle in from the West—responses from people Sam himself had suggested. Their general tone indicated that Sam had not improved his ability to read people’s attitudes toward him since his duel-dodging Washoe days.

  A letter from Livy gave him an inkling of those appraisals. She was shocked by an unnamed respondent, and Sam’s attempt to calm her covered more than five hundred words. He didn’t mind honest criticism, he told her, “but I am ashamed of the friend whose friendship was so weak & so unworthy that he shrank from…saying all he knew about me, good or bad—for there is nothing generous in his grieving insinuation…”11 He regretted her pain. “Oh, when I knew that your kind heart had suffered for two days for what I had done in past years, it cut me more than if all my friends had abused me.”12

  He was speaking a little too soon.

  AUDIENCES ALONG the circuit were mostly delighted with the Vandal. As long as he salted in “a foundation of good sense,” the tidy Main Street critics were prepared to salute his “rich vein of mirth-provoking wit.” As long as he gave them a little Athens, looked down upon by bright moonlight from the Acropolis, they could forgive his “native element of quaint humor”—after all, “Cutting wit, unless for the tough hide of vice or bigotry, ought not to be cultivated or indulged in.” His “eloquent passages, brilliant in thought and word,” gave him license to “tickle” the audiences, even if “they didn’t know what they were laughing at half the time.”

  The travails of touring kept pace with the rewards. Fatigue and frustration began to stimulate the explosive temper that would erupt throughout his life. Lost luggage in Peoria. Then calamity in Ottawa: in a church filling up with well-dressed and eager listeners, Mark Twain seethed as the committee chairman began quacking his introduction while people were still finding their seats. Mark Twain labored a quarter-way through his talk, then exploded at the doorkeeper to shut the doors. His concentration shattered, “angry, wearied to death with travel…I just hobbled miserably through, apologized, bade the house good-night, & then gave the President a piece of my mind, without any butter or sugar on it.”13 Another temper tantrum in Iowa City: out of sorts already from a hard fall on the ice and a premature wake-up by the hotelkeeper, Mark Twain reached for the bell cord in his room to order coffee, discovered that no bell existed, and improvised by slamming his door until everyone on his floor was yelling at him. This little preview of American rock-star behavior was covered in all its details in the next day’s Iowa City Republican, which described the “unearthly screams” of “the veritable animal, with his skin on at least, but not much else.”14 For good measure, the paper panned the animal’s lecture as a “humbug…it was impossible to know when he was talking in earnest and when in burlesque.”15

  The frustrations, the indignities, the idle time, the fatigue, the loneliness—each of these spelled danger for an emotionally volatile personality such as Sam’s. Combined, they produced a pressure for which a good stiff drink or twelve was a tempting antidote, especially for a veteran of Washoe’s saloons. But Sam did not compound his lecture tour discontents by drinking. He declared his total abstinence on Christmas Eve, 1868, and a year later was celebrating his first anniversary in a letter to Livy. Sam would resume moderate (and perhaps some immoderate) drinking within a few years; but his days of drunkenness were over—at least until the tormented years near the end of his life.

  From Jacksonville, Illinois, Sam embarked on an 860-mile, two-day run to Elmira, where, on February 4, “I was duly & solemnly & irrevocably engaged to be married to Miss Olivia L. Langdon, aged 23½,” as he informed Jane and the family in St. Louis.16 It had not been easy. The day following the conclusion of his exhausting journey, he had been summoned to a private audience with Jervis Langdon to endure his Ordeal by References. Jervis hauled out the testimonials from Sam’s old friends and read him their endorsements. Besides the prediction that Sam would fill a drunkard’s grave was the suggestion that he was born to be hung, and the declaration that “I would rather bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow.”17 Nearly seven months afterward, the outrage these letters triggered still burned in Sam Clemens. He vented it in a letter to his old friend Charles Warren Stoddard, placing a special emphasis on the viciousness of a mutual friend, the clergyman Stebbins.

  He came within an ace of breaking off my marriage by [relaying his opinion to Jervis Langdon] that “Clemens is a humbug—shallow & superficial…a man whose life promised little & has accomplished less—a humbug, Sir, a humbug”…It was not calculated to help my case in an old, proud & honored family who are rigidly upright & without reproach themselves.18

  Stebbins’s verdict was far from the exception, Clemens acknowledged.

  The friends I had referred to in California said with one accord that I got drunk oftener than was necessary, & that I was wild, & godless, idle, lecherous & a discontented & unsettled rover & they could not recommend any girl of high character & social position to marry me…19

  These defamations did not injure his cause so much, Clemens told Stoddard, “as I had already said all that about myself beforehand.” It was the “humbug” that stung. “I had never expected anybody who knew me to say it—& consequently there was a dark & portentious time for a while…”

  In his dictations of 1906, Mark Twain remembered that as he’d stood shocked and mute, Jervis Langdon had brushed these opinions aside: “What kind of people are these? Haven’t you a friend in the world?…I’ll be your friend myself. Take the girl. I know you better than they do.”20 His letter to Stoddard, only recently recovered in full, offers a more authentic-sounding scenario than that of Jervis’s melodramatic recitation. Instead of speaking, the father listened to the opinion of the only person in the world that counted.

  “[A]t last the young lady said she had thought it al
l over deliberately & did not believe it, & would not believe it if an archangel had spoken—& since then there has not been flaw nor ripple upon my course of true love…”21

  THATWENT well. Sam hurried back to Cleveland to commence another string of eastward whistle-stops. On Valentine’s Day, from Ravenna, he sent a cheerful love note to Livy that included some thoughts about his newspaper-affiliation plans. His fancy had shifted from Cleveland to booming, prosperous, prestigious Hartford, postwar America’s most resurgent city. Visions of a life with Livy at Nook Farm, swapping lies and theology with his manly new chum Joe Twichell, had cast northern Ohio and the admonishing Mrs. Fairbanks in a less attractive light. He’d inquired with the co-editor of the Hartford Courant, Joseph R. Hawley. Hawley stalled Sam, pleading the need to consult with his partner Charles Dudley Warner. Sam could not know that his carousing California reputation had undercut him again. Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Daily Republican, had run into Clemens out west; what he’d seen prompted him to secretly steer Hawley away from Clemens. Hawley regretted following this advice when The Innocents Abroad became a big success. Clemens may have sensed Bowles’s animosity; he told Livy, that “I…find myself calling him in my secret heart a born & bred cur, every time.”22

  Stalling of a different sort was emanating from the American Publishing Company. A letter from Elisha Bliss caught up with Sam in Cleveland. It was couched in language so carefully jovial that Sam failed to pick up on its true and troubling message, as Bliss had surely hoped he would. How was Sam’s cold coming along? Had he had a busy trip? Enjoying himself? “Now about the Book.” As to the page proofs that Sam had requested—“we have no proofs as yet to send.” Bliss rushed ahead with blandishments. “We are pushing things now very rapidly however. We are about ready to begin to electrotype. We are filling IT WITH ENGRAVINGS.”23 Translation: the book lagged several months behind production schedule. No type had been set. The process of electrotyping the wood engravings for the illustrations, a precondition to the typesetting, had not begun. The unstated reasons went beyond routine complications, and posed a serious threat to the survival of the book. Sam picked up on none of this. “[G]lad to hear you are getting along so well,” he replied to Bliss from Ravenna, Ohio. “When I get to Hartford I will read such proofs as are ready…”24

  He was scheduled to hit Hartford in the first week of March, not a minute too soon. His exhaustion was deepening, and, with it, frustration. A planned hiatus of nine days with Livy in Elmira had to be scrapped: new lecture dates. Indignities mounted. He lectured in Alliance, Ohio, on February 15, stayed awake at his hotel until 2 a.m. waiting for a train back to Ravenna; arrived there at 4; slept for an hour and a half and then boarded a train to Titusville, Pennsylvania; tried to get some shut-eye during a four-hour layover in a town called Corry; was awakened by a gaggle of businessmen who’d spotted his name on the register and wanted to talk booking dates. He arrived in Titusville just in time to take the lectern. A drunk in the back of the hall disrupted him; instead of ejecting the man, the policeman on duty tried to reason with him, and the lout kept up his heckling unrestrained. “[T]he versatile genius of ‘Mark Twain’ ” delivered “rare poetic description,” reported the Titusville Morning Herald, “as well as keen and racy bits.”25 He’d slept one hour in the previous thirty-six.

  He clumped into Franklin, Pennsylvania, the following night, and then (in a rare action) blew off an appearance in Geneseo, New York, pleading impossible rail connections, and detoured to Elmira, eighty-nine miles south, for a brief rendezvous with his intended. His itinerary, thus far merely backbreaking, accelerated into the near-inhuman. From Stuyvesant, New York, on February 26: “The night is more than half gone, & I take the train at 9 in the morning…My stove smokes, & I am enveloped in a fog of it, & my eyes smart, although the doors are open & I am very cold. I am tired, & sleepy, & disappointed, & angry, & yet I am trying to write to Livy.”26 It would get no better in a string of upstate New York appearances.

  FATIGUE, THOUGHTS of his fiancée, and the sheer dumb exhilaration of getting off the road may have explained his mild reaction to the news that awaited him at 148 Asylum Street in Hartford when he arrived on March 5, the day after Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated. Elisha Bliss confessed that routine complications with the engraving process were not the reason for the book’s scheduling logjam. The real problem involved the company’s board of directors, who had finally adjusted their eyeglasses and examined Mark Twain’s manuscript. They were staggered by what they read. As Mark Twain recalled in 1906, “the majority of them were of the opinion that there were places in it of a humorous character.”27 Not only that; there was the proposed title. John Bunyan’s classic allegory, here in the old cradle of Puritanism, held semisacred status; to employ it ironically was tantamount to blasphemy. The offending work must be rejected.

  The board of directors held the advantage in this confrontation with secretary Bliss, the career dry-goods man and publishing neophyte. But Bliss held his ground. His salesman’s sense of the public told him that The New Pilgrim’s Progress, or whatever they decided to call it, was going to be a tremendous success. In a remarkable all-or-nothing stand, Bliss declared that if American Publishing refused the book, he would break from the company and publish it himself.

  The board was already in partial retreat when Clemens arrived in town. In a last-ditch attempt to circumvent Bliss, the board chairman, Sidney Drake, invited Sam for a friendly little buggy ride. Drake perhaps overestimated the power of his charm. “He was a pathetic old relic,” Mark Twain recalled. “He had a delicate purpose in view and it took him some time to hearten himself [to it]…[H]e frankly threw himself and the house upon my mercy and begged me to…release the concern from the contract. I said I wouldn’t—and so ended the interview and the buggy conversation.”28 The manuscript survived. But now it was hopelessly behind its publishing date.

  HIS LETTERS show no signs of anger over this near-miss. He seems more preoccupied with tallying the number of letters he’d received from Livy—which never equaled the total he’d hoped for. “I like the pictures (for the book) ever so much,” he wrote to her from Hartford. “They were drawn by a young artist of considerable talent.”29 The artist was True Williams, a dapper, balding, thirty-year-old self-taught illustrator who, like many of his fellow Civil War veterans, was a loner and flourishing alcoholic. (Marching with Sherman’s army through Georgia had given Williams severe varicose veins and many bad nights.) Bliss hired him for The Innocents through Williams’s employer, the New York syndicate of Fay & Cox. With this assignment, Williams drifted into Mark Twain’s penumbra for a decade of work that gave enduring faces and attitudes to Mark Twain’s best-known characters, then struggled through two divorces, failing eyesight and dissipation before dying alone in Chicago at age fifty-eight.30

  Sam visited Joe and Harmony Twichell and admired their two-month-old baby, Julia Curtis Twichell. He attended a lecture by a giant of the circuit, Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke), who delivered a peculiar, “nigger”-laced précis of the Negro through history that Sam later construed as an argument against slavery.31 The two talked in Sam’s room from 10 p.m. until dawn.

  At last Bliss supplied him with an initial thirty pages of proofs of the book. Assured that the rest of them were on the way, he planned a trip to Elmira, where he and Livy together would pore over them as they arrived. “Some proof sheets will doubtless reach Elmira before I do,” he alerted her. “Open the package if you choose, little Curiosity, for you have just as much authority to do it as I have…you are part of me—you are myself—& I would no more be troubled by your looking over my shoulder than it would embarrass me to look over my own shoulder.”32

  Life was suddenly an exciting strut again. On March 14, he sashayed off to Boston with his new chum Petroleum Nasby, where he was introduced to Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was Mark Twain’s first encounter with a star of the New England literary establishment whose hegemony his work w
ould render obsolete. Holmes, the physician and poet/essayist who wore his hair combed severely across his head like a Yankee farmer, had sat with the semi-divines of the Saturday Club—Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana Jr., and the polymath Louis Agassiz. His Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, published serially in the Atlantic in 1857 and later issued in book form, was an effort to exemplify high conversation as an enlivening, morally improving pursuit. His “Autocrat” alter ego assumed contours considered comic by his admirers, and aspiring intellectuals across the country tee-hee’d at such risible aphorisms of his as, “Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall,” and “A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.”

  After two more appearances on Long Island and in Pennsylvania, the season of the Vandal was finally over. The season of the Innocent was about to begin.

  “I want a name that is striking, comprehensive, & out of the common order,” he’d written to Mary Fairbanks a day before his getaway. “I had chosen ‘The New Pilgrims’ Progress,’ but it is thought that many dull people [meaning Sidney Drake and his board] will shudder at that, as at least taking the name of a consecrated book in vain…I have thought of ‘The Irruption of the Jonathans—Or, the Modern Pilgrim’s Progress’—you see the second title can remain, if I only precede it with something that will let it d o w n e a s y. Give me a name, please.”33

  Before she could answer, he’d supplied it himself. The Sharon Herald reported it in its March 24 editions. Back in Elmira Sam inscribed it in his copy of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which he was marking for Livy’s edification. Six days later he presented it to Elisha Bliss as one of two choices, the other choice being, The Exodus of the Innocents. “I like ‘The Innocents Abroad’ rather the best,” he told the publisher.34