by Ron Powers
By spring, Sam and Livy were shoulder-to-shoulder at her parents’ house, editing page proofs as they came in from Bliss. They’d reviewed three hundred pages, yet the Pilgrims were only as far as Rome. Sam had worried that he would have too little material to fill a book; now, with what shaped up to be a thousand-page volume, he faced the prospect of massive cuts in the second half, and fretted that the best parts would be sacrificed.
This concern didn’t spoil the delights of pooling his book tasks with Livy—his “serene-&-happy-old-married-folks” fantasy coming true even before the wedding. Besides enjoying the intimacy of the shared work, Sam was eager to hear Livy’s criticisms of language and style, and to secure her imprimatur on a book that he hoped would be accepted by people of her social class. Livy entered her corrections in purple ink. The two relaxed with games of cribbage at night.
Livy witnessed her fiancé’s debut as a scourge of professional proofreaders who dared tamper with his usage and spelling. To Bliss:
I wish you would have MY revises revised again & look over them yourself & see that my marks have been corrected. A proof-reader who persists in making two words (& sometimes even compound words) of “anywhere” and “everything;” & who spells villainy “villiany” & liquefies “liquifies &c, &c, is not three removes from an idiot infernally unreliable…”35
On May 5, Sam ended his seven-week stay in the Langdon household and entrained with Charley for a brief visit to New York, after which Sam returned to Hartford. Charley’s reasons for the trip were medical. Sam’s were Victorian. Living under the same roof with the woman he intended to marry had set tongues to wagging—the tongues of Mary Fairbanks, Olivia Lewis Langdon, and his own mother back in St. Louis. Both Sam and Livy were infuriated. “You drove me away from Elmira at last,” Sam lectured Mrs. Fairbanks. “You made me feel meaner & meaner, & finally I absolutely couldn’t stand it…Livy spoke right out, & said that to leave was unnecessary, uncalled-for, absurd, & utterly exasperating & foolish.”36
By mid-May, Sam believed that publication was imminent, and he turned giddy. He wrote upside-down sentences to Livy. He ticked off for her the delicious statistics: 224 illustrations. Four weeks’ time for a mill just to produce the necessary volume of paper—thirty tons’ worth. He fidgeted around Hartford, now in grassy springtime bloom; hung with Joe Twichell, read proofs. And he sent nightly romantic epistles to Livy. He poured out his yearning for her in language so feverish as to suggest an underlying inferno of pain, or a loneliness so deeply ingrained that he’d hardly noticed it until its counterforce appeared in his life. “To think that within the last twenty-four hours I should have written fifty mortal pages of manuscript to you,” he muses in the second of two long letters one night in March, “& yet am obliged at last to beg further time…”37
Livy, you are so interwoven with the very fibres of my being that if I were to lose you it seems to me that to lose memory & reason at the same time would be a blessing to me.38
Oh, you darling little speller!—you spell “terrible” right, this time. And I won’t have it—it is un-Livy-ish. Spell it wrong, next time, for I love everything that is like Livy.39
Little sweetheart, I had a scary dream about you last night. I thought you came to me crying, & said “Farewell”—& I knew by some instinct that you meant it for a final farewell. It made me feel as if the world had dropped from under my feet!40
I wish I could touch you. (That word touch is your handwriting—maybe…I have unconsciously adopted yours.) Take the pen & write “touch,” with your eyes shut.41
She did, and the result was indeed strikingly similar.
Livy, Livy, Livy darling, it is such a happiness, such a pleasure, such a luxury, to write you, that I don’t know when to stop. Oh, you must come down right away with your father & mother [to New York, where he was visiting]. I would be the most delighted man on the whole earth. I would just almost fly away with ecstasy. Please, little woman, little darling, come.42
One spring night in Hartford he returned to his rooms from a walk around town and began a letter with a jokey passage about the “ten million frogs” he’d heard croaking. In the midst of that thought, Sam took another of those abrupt plunges into the elegiac darkness that could envelop him at the very summit of joy.
They made good music, to-night, especially when it was very still & lonely & a long-drawn dog-howl swelled up out of the far distance & blended with it. The shadows seemed to grow more sombre, then, & the stillness more solemn, & the whispering foliage more spiritual, & the mysterious murmur of the night-wind more freighted with the moaning of shrouded wanderers from the tombs. The “voices of the night” are always eloquent.43
THE PRESSES did not roll on The Innocents Abroad in four weeks, as Sam had believed they would. They did not roll for the rest of June, and they did not roll for half of July. Sam’s mood of expectant playfulness deteriorated. His efforts to buy into the Hartford Courant were going nowhere. He needed to secure some anchor in the business world. In July he swallowed his scruples and dragged himself to Cleveland to negotiate an interest in Abel Fairbanks’s “trimming, time-serving, policy-shifting” Herald. He arrived to discover that Fairbanks, a scowling, rimless-glasses fellow with an angry slash of a mouth whom Sam had never liked much anyway, had increased the price.
So Sam, back in Elmira now, was a bombshell waiting to explode when Elisha Bliss sent “Friend Twain” a complacent answer, on July 12, to his latest inquiry as to when the hell The Innocents was going to be published. “Unfortunately we have been delayed too long to make a summer Book of it—but unavoidably. We propose to make a fall book of it…”44 “Friend Twain” was anything but soothed. Publication was now set at a year beyond the original date. The book had taken a backseat to A. D. Richardson’s Ulysses S. Grant biography, and then to his new edition of Beyond the Mississippi, and then to The Great Metropolis, a book by one Junius Henri Browne. Then there was the idiotic panic of the board of directors. Now this.
“Friend Twain” launched a splenetic letter that spoke for the exasperation of writers in the centuries before his time, and in the centuries since.
“Do not misunderstand,” he instructed Bliss,
I am not contending that I am hurt unto death simply because the delay for “Grant” damaged my interests; or because the delay for the “Metropolis” damaged my interests likewise; or because the delay necessary to make me a spring vegetable damaged my interests…No. All I want to know is,—viz:—to wit—as follows:
After it is done being a fall book, upon what argument shall you perceive that it will be best to make a winter book of it? And—
After it is done being a winter book, upon what argument shall you perceive that it will be best to make another spring book of it again?…
All I desire is to be informed from time to time…so that I can go on informing my friends intelligently—I mean that infatuated baker’s dozen of them who faithful unto death, still believe that I am going to publish a book.45
The secretary wrote back a squeaky little note saying he didn’t have time to give a full reply just now. He enclosed three bound volumes, and promised to get review copies out to the newspapers right away.
Through all this, Sam had been vaguely promising his kinfolks that he would soon travel west to visit them. Toward the end of the month a wail issued from Missouri. “I have been waiting, waiting, for you,” Jane Clemens wrote.
[S]even years ago all the people I know could not have made me believe that one of my children would not think worth while to come and see me. There is no excuse for a child not to go and see his old mother…If a carrige or omnibus comes near the gate we are shure it is Sam. You can immagine the rest.46
No doubt he could, and did. He was experienced in that sort of thing.
IN MID-AUGUST, Samuel Clemens finally became a newspaper mogul, of sorts. With the help, not to say prodding, of Jervis Langdon—whose loan of $12,500 carried a subtle settle-down-or-else message—he bought a one-th
ird ownership of the Buffalo Express. The Express was a plump northern New York state daily of the Republican persuasion. It was published in an old red-brick building on East Swan Street, in which wooden tables, a nailed-up bookshelf, a few smelly coal-burning stoves, and a lot of cobwebs formed the décor. Buffalo was about one hundred railroad miles northwest of Elmira. That was one hundred railroad miles too many for Sam, but he understood that Jervis’s was an offer he’d better not refuse. He took over as managing editor on August 15 with the same dang-my-buttons aplomb that had carried him through the door of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise seven years and a lifetime earlier. “Is this the editorial room of The Buffalo Express?” a former editor recalled the auburn-haired stranger asking as he entered the building on East Swan Street. Assured that it was, the questioner ambled on in “and with cold and biting emphasis drawled: ‘Well, if this is the editorial room of The Buffalo Express I think that I ought to have a seat, for I am the editor.’ ”47 The editorial room was crowded with Republican politicians who liked to hang out with the reporters and editors, an incestuous situation that Mark Twain ended virtually on the moment of his arrival: When several ward heelers jumped up to glad-hand him into their cozy little circle, the ex-editor recalled, “the new editor frowned them down…Mark Twain and the politicians never affiliated.”48
He had learned a thing or two about newspapering from Joe Goodman. He redesigned the paper in the first week. Soon he was ensconced in his personal lounging chair, pipe between his teeth, shoes off, reading copy, and bossing everybody around. He commuted to Elmira on weekends. Before long, his duties evolved from editing other people’s work to supplying his own. During his stay at the paper he contributed about sixty feature pieces, including some of his best early sketches. He wrote thirty-one editorials and about as many unsigned items.49 Among these was an August 26 screed that indexed his progress toward “de-Southernizing” his received racial attitudes. News came from Memphis that a Negro accused of rape and lynched a few years earlier had been exonerated—posthumously—by the confession of another man. The ironic title of Sam’s piece was “Only a Nigger.”
Ah, well! Too bad, to be sure! A little blunder in the administration of justice by Southern mob-law; but nothing to speak of. Only “a nigger” killed by mistake—that is all…mistakes will happen, even if in the conduct of the best regulated and most highly toned mobs…What are the lives of a few “niggers” in comparison with the preservation of the impetuous instincts of a proud and fiery race?…Keep the lash knotted; keep the brand and the faggots in waiting, for prompt work with the next “nigger” who may be suspected of any damnable crime!…50
THE BIG Eastern journals had received review copies of The Innocents Abroad by now. Mark Twain, the scourge of too-chummy politicians in the editorial room, shilled for favorable reviews with several editors. To Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune, he mock-joshed, “[T]his is to ask you if you won’t get your reviewer to praise the bad passages & feeble places in it for me…the meritorious parts can get along themselves, of course.”51
He got his first look at the book on August 11 at the Langdons’ house, where Bliss had sent a complimentary copy: a 651-page steamboat encased in a black-cloth cover, the title and subtitle stamped in gold over a montage of images—the Sphinx, a pyramid, the dome of St. Peter’s cathedral. “It is the very handsomest book of the season,” he wrote gamely to Bliss in the second of two conciliatory letters. “I like the book, I like you & your style & your business vim, & believe the chebang will be a success.”52 Two days later he wrote to James Redpath, asking out of his fall lecture schedule, pleading the distractions of his engagement and his new newspaper responsibilities. To Mary and Abel Fairbanks, he announced that he had decided to “prostitute my talents” to the Express.53
He bit down on his pipe and waited for reaction to his book.
A little ripple of applause issued from an important quarter. The Elmira Advertiser of August 14 declared it written in an “easy and pleasing” style. A week or so of silence. Then, on August 27, Whitelaw Reid’s New York Tribune rolled out the first review in a metropolitan daily, a measured endorsement that ended, “The greater part of his book is pure fun, and considering how much of it there is, the freshness is wonderfully well sustained.”54 Then the ovation began.
“Very few will be able to read it without laughing at least half the time,” declared the Hartford Courant. “It may be absurd, but it certainly is funny…” “We had no idea so much humor, wit, geniality, fine description and good sense, could be contained within the covers of any one book,” trumpeted the National Standard of New Jersey. “Mark Twain, always interesting, in this book has outrivaled himself,” reported the Meriden (Conn.) Republican. “It is instructive, humorous, racy, full of quaint expressions that make you laugh unexpectedly, and before you are quite ready…You begin the book and do not want to leave it till the last line is reached…No one can read its pages without feeling there is still beauty and sunshine in the world.” “The book is a Golconda of wit and a very mine of sparkling entertainment,” said the New York Express. “The humor is natural, never forced,” proclaimed the Newark (N.J.) Register. “The narrative is instructive, and the descriptive passages are some of the finest in the English language.” On and on the praise flowed, throughout the final months of 1869 and well into March of the following year: “Buy it, and you will bless Mark Twain to the end of your existence…” “The book opens richer and richer with every leaf you turn…” “One of the most readable and amusing books of the period…” “The book must be taken in interrupted doses. There is more fun in it than it is safe to swallow at once…”55
In San Francisco, Bret Harte, who had helped Mark Twain edit the manuscript, and then published advance excerpts from it in his brand-new Overland Monthly, proclaimed it “six hundred and fifty pages of open and declared fun,” and added that “Mr. Clemens deserves to rank foremost among Western humorists.”56 From Boston came approbation from the Autocrat himself. Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in his usual hard-boiled style, began a letter to Sam by averring, “I don’t see what excuse you had for sending me such a great big book, which would have cost me ever so many dollars.” He went on to rave that “some parts of your travels had a very special interest for me,” going even so far as to cite the “frequently quaint and amusing contents,” and summing up with the over-the-top declaration that “your book is very entertaining and will give a great deal of pleasure.”57 Perhaps fearful that his own readers might reach for the smelling salts after digesting such flamboyant rhetoric, Holmes forbade Mark Twain to use the praise in promoting The Innocents.
Genteel Boston had heard from Nevada by way of Missouri, and had acknowledged the power behind the barbaric yawp.
Then came the Boston-based review that thrillingly made the Brahmin acceptance public. An essay in the Atlantic Monthly declared, “There is an amount of pure human nature in the book that rarely gets into literature…among the humorists California has given us…we think he is, in an entirely different way from all the others, quite worthy of the company of the best.”58
Critics found some faults. Most typical was that the book ran on too long, a complaint that conveniently allowed a jab at the “subscription” selling mode. “There is some dead wood in it,” declared the Nation, “as there has to be in all books which are sold by book-agents…The rural-district reader likes to see that he has got his money’s worth…[N]o man ever saw a book-agent with a small volume in his hand.” But the reviewers mostly focused on the book’s most wickedly attractive attribute: its permeating, seductive have-an-apple humor.
Sam had got it right in his letter to Orion of four years earlier: “Humor” remained literature of a low order in a 19th-century America whose tastes were still legislated by the Boston Transcendentalists, with their neo-Calvinist view that humor was incompatible with the important business of life: elevating the intellect and uniting Man with the Eternal. “Humor” was a curiosity per
formed by people called “humorists,” a specialized skill roughly equivalent to sawing one’s accomplice in half in a magic show. It was not to be confused with Serious Writing. Humorists were “a kind of personages whom no other society has produced,” declared one critic, “and who certainly could in no other society attain celebrity…[Humor writing is] about as odd a profession, by the bye, as has ever been seen.”59 Especially when that humor reached the Holy Land. Bennett’s Herald was among the few that met that issue head-on, dismissing the “over-pious and fastidious critics” who condemned Mark Twain’s treatment of Jerusalem and its environs.
We cannot find anything so very irreverent in his account…After swallowing all the free-thinking and rationalistic emanations of the day, we shall not strain over a few paragraphs, which, if not marked by austere piety, need not, necessarily, be regarded as sacrilege.60
Most other reviewers, like Livy, felt obliged to convey something of Mark Twain’s deeper, larger nature.
“The author is not straining to be funny; he is not trying to make a joke book; and there is nothing in it of that painfully unnatural sort of wit that is so wearisome.” “Its morals are of a high tone…” “It is not a book filled with caricature and stale jokes, but a clear, well-written volume…” “…genuine native humor…Not what [is merely] remarkable for its vulgarity and insipidity, but a real, crisp, tangible wit…” “…aglow with that cheerful, hopeful, wholesome religion which has so much faith that it does not fear to crack a joke or to make one…” “The writer sees the humorous side of every thing…but is not lacking in power to be sober and wise, and even eloquent…” “It is pure in morals…” “…by no means a mere jest book, but contains more information…than would be gathered from many dry books of travel.”
