by Ron Powers
On March 2, Sam put Jervis Langdon’s $40,000 gift house on the market at a price of $25,000 (the couple elected to keep the $15,000 worth of furniture). The previous day, he had sold his interest in the Express to another co-owner, George Selkirk, for $15,000, payable over time. This was a $10,000 discount from the share’s $25,000 value, $7,500 of which Sam still owed the previous holder. Two weeks later, Sam wrote to James Redpath, further modifying his vow to not lecture again forever: $150 per appearance in New England, and not a cent less than $250 in Boston.16
On March 18, Sam, Livy, and Langdon Clemens left for the Langdon house in Elmira, where Olivia Lewis Langdon welcomed them as temporary guests. Elisha Bliss supervised the Clemens’s furniture. Langdon was sickly; Livy was worse. Her doctors saw the move as a health risk for her, and she traveled as an invalid, on a mattress. The doctors were right. So was Livy, for that matter. “I dread very much my first visit at home,” she had written to her friend Alice Hooker, now the wife of John C. Day, in January, “—I know that I shall realize more than I possibly can away from there that Father has left us never to return any more—”17 On arrival, Livy stopped eating. Sam worried for her life. A new wet nurse was brought in for the baby. Livy slowly improved: through early April, she still could not stand. Her convalescence was aided by a new “tonic” that she herself had suggested back in Buffalo, according to Sam; and one that he’d endorsed: ale. “She was as tight as a brick this afternoon,” Sam had cheerfully reported to Susan Crane just before the move. “She talks incessantly, anyhow, so the ale hadn’t any advantage of her there, but it made her unendurably slangy, & that is what we grieved for.”18
His preternatural will to work took hold again. He churned out page after page in his almost typographically regular handwriting. Three days after his arrival he sent Bliss and Orion an excerpt from the manuscript for printing in American Publisher: the section describing the Pony Express rider on the plains: “by all odds it is the finest piece of writing I ever did,” he declared.19 Not long afterward, he notified the two that he was “to the 570th page & booming along. And what I am writing now is so much better than the opening chapters, or the Innocents Abroad…”20 Two days later he added a postscript to the same letter: “—Am to 610th page, now.”21 But as the weeks went along, it was the work still to be done that overtook his calculations. He figured that he needed 1,800 pages of manuscript to make a 600-page book. The “booming” began to sound more like a dull rumble.
The “farmhouse on top of an Elmira hill” was the epicenter of Quarry Hill Farm, Jervis Langdon’s bequest to Susan and Theodore Crane. While Theodore supervised improvements on the old house and acquired acres of adjacent property, Susan, a gentle and thoughtful woman, welcomed Sam to the household as a daytime visitor. He walked from town house to farmhouse, a mile and a half up the mountain, several days each week through the spring and summer of 1871. In the peaceful confines of his first rural residence since the Quarles Farm of his childhood (Jackass Hill perhaps excepted), Mark Twain drove himself through the endless landscape of his Western book. A prominent character from that book materialized at his side on March 24. Joe Goodman, on hiatus from the Territorial Enterprise, came back east to spend some time on his poetry and a novel in progress. (Elmira lay less than a hundred miles from Goodman’s boyhood hometown of Masonville, New York.) Goodman arrived to find Sam mired in the middle of every writer’s nowhere—an unfinished manuscript whose novelty and freshness had worn off, leaving him unable to judge anymore whether it was any good or not. Sam was edging toward the worst symptom of that state: self-loathing. In December, he had coaxed a New York firm to publish Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, a pamphlet he’d thrown together for a quick cash strike; when a Boston periodical panned it for what it was, Sam moped to Mary Fairbanks that these “slurs” amounted to “a popular author’s death rattle.”22
Joe Goodman, Washoe incarnate, was exactly what Sam needed. As the two men walked and talked along the hilly terrain above the Chemung River, recalling characters, feuds, hoaxes, and roof-walking nights on the town, the fountains of the deep broke up again for Sam. He urged his old friend to hang around a little longer. The Cranes offered their hospitality, and Joe Goodman remained at Quarry Farm into the early summer, writing his own work and helpfully commenting on Sam’s. Albert Bigelow Paine, through whose eyes we can glimpse a sweet lost world of stock-company melodrama, reconstructed this interlude with everything but the greasepaint and footlights.
“Joe,” [Clemens] said, “I guess I’m done for. I don’t appear to be able to get along at all with my work, and what I do write does not seem valuable…Here is what I have written, Joe. Read it, and see if that is your opinion.”
Goodman took the manuscript and seated himself at a chair…Clemens watched him furtively, till he could stand it no longer. Then he threw down his pen, exclaiming:
“I knew it! I knew it! I am writing nothing but rot! You have sat there all this time reading without a smile…I am not strong enough to fight against fate…Oh, Joe, I wish to God I could die myself!”
“Mark,” said Joe, “I was reading critically, not for amusement…I have found it perfectly absorbing. You are doing a great book!”23
Something like that must have actually happened. Sam sent along a hundred new manuscript pages at end of April, pronouncing his work “pretty readable, after all…it will crowd the ‘Innocents.’ ”24 He let it slip to Orion that he and Goodman were contemplating a 600-page book “which will wake up the nation”25—possibly a version of the Washington novel that had been taking shape in his mind. He was writing “with a red-hot interest” now,26 and over one virtuoso six-day stretch, he accelerated from 23 handwritten pages to 30, then 33, then 35, then 52; and finished the manic sprint with a nearly inconceivable 65.* Two weeks after that, he was two-thirds finished, he said—1,200 manuscript pages. His thoughts tended toward a simultaneous publication in England, to protect his copyright interests there.
As Sam’s energy picked up, so did Livy’s. By late April she was able to walk three or four steps while holding on to a chair.
He felt sufficiently up to speed for a quick visit to Hartford in early June, bearing another clutch of manuscript for Bliss. He’d been lured there partly by Joe Twichell, who’d merrily summoned him with the mock-heroic “Mark! Mark! dear friend of days gone by, whose delights we tasted in those happy though distant times when thou didst lodge with us…where art thou?”27 He caught a service at Twichell’s church, had dinner with the Connecticut governor, and dropped in on Orion and Mollie, making the right appreciative noise about his older brother’s newest failed invention, a new kind of riverboat. (Orion had been thinking of this one for years, along with a new kind of wood-sawing machine, a new kind of knife, and an anti-sunstroke hat.)
Back in Elmira, Sam found Livy and Langdon flourishing. He mailed a photograph of Langdon at six and a half months to Bret Harte in Boston, a peace offering after their misunderstanding about the complimentary copies of The Innocents.28 Then Sam faced the dreaded resumption of his damnably lucrative lecturing career.
Sam was determined not to accept the same exhausting conditions he had endured on last year’s crazy-quilt tour. He sent a list of “stipulations” to James Redpath, who was already busy booking fall engagements for his growing stable of Boston Lyceum stars. Among Sam’s demands: the best price that any given town had ever paid Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby (a Redpath client whose top rate was $400). Main railroad lines only; no “out-of-the way branches.” No steamboat trips, or stage or carriage trips longer than two miles. “To simplify it, I don’t want any engagements OFF the railroads.” He would consider nothing “a single rod” west of St. Louis or Davenport, Iowa, nor south of Washington. At least twelve tune-up dates in towns before he hit a major city. No lectures outside New England for less than $125, if Redpath pleased, “because I thereby escape one-horse towns, candle-lighted halls, & execrable hotels.”29
His “sti
pulations” preoccupied him more than the tiresome question of the lecture itself. The Vandal was overexposed by now; as for his replacement, “I never liked that stupid Sandwich Islands lecture.”30 What to talk about? An index of his success in answering that question—not to mention of his enlightenment toward women—lay in a lecture he dashed off all in one June day, and advertised his intention to deliver, before ultimately scuttling it. The subject was “An Appeal in Behalf of Extending the Suffrage to Boys.”31 The question of extending the vote to women was enflaming passions in 1871. The previous year had seen the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, conferring voting rights on black American men. When the measure had been before Congress two years before that, women had petitioned to be included, but were rebuffed. They lost the support even of Frederick Douglass himself. Women’s groups had been at the forefront of the prewar abolitionist crusade, but now Douglass kept silent, out of conviction that Congress would never support the enfranchisement of both Negroes and women. Two national suffrage-activist groups surged into prominence that year; the more radical of them with the team of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton as its leaders, the other headed by Sam’s friend Henry Ward Beecher. Talk of civil disobedience was in the air, and would soon give way to action. Even the demure Livy Clemens had gone on the record with her “I am woman’s rights.”32
At least ten of Redpath’s Boston Lyceum clients had prepared lectures on the subject. They included Susan Anthony (whose talks were sometimes written by Stanton), Anna Dickinson, Mary Livermore, several clergymen—even Petroleum V. Nasby, who proposed to orate on “Struggles of a Conservative with the Woman Question.” Olivia Clemens’s husband saw himself as the puckish jackanapes of this roster. “Extending the Suffrage to Boys” would have been perfectly familiar to the women of the Nevada Sanitary Ball committee, or to the Menken, or to the Washington journalists who chortled over “She bears our children—ours as a general thing.” Or to Livy, whose virginal purity Sam sought to protect in his courtship letters, by discouraging and sometimes “forbidding” her to read Don Quixote, parts of Shakespeare, or the racy Gil Blas—“It would sadly offend your delicacy,” he advised her, “& I prefer not to have that dulled in you. It is a woman’s chief ornament.”33 A few days after his brainstorm, Sam learned that Redpath was considering a lecture proposal from a woman who proposed a humorous talk.
The idea of a woman reading a humorous lecture is perhaps the ghastliest conception to which the human mind has yet given birth…Why, Redpath, the thing is wholly out of the question…Tenderness, pathos, tragedy—the earnest, the beautiful, the majestic—all these they can & do succeed in, but they fail in humor, except in the sparkling, vivacious kind…34
Sam’s lecture topic got as far as being advertised in Redpath’s Lyceum Magazine for 1871–72 before he tore it up and wrote a new one on June 27—and, on the same day, put that one aside and wrote another. “It is the one I am going to deliver,” he assured Redpath as soon as he had finished drafting it. “I think I shall call it ‘Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters whom I have Met.’ ”35
Sam was foraging. The lecture would focus on Mark Twain’s encounters with “kings, humorists, lunatics, idiots & all,” as he explained to Whitelaw Reid—name-dropping with embellishments, in a phrase. Sam told several people that summer that it was “the best one I ever wrote,” but the truth was that he had no real message to bring to the lecture trail that fall. His entire creative focus was on the Western manuscript. In early July, he still lacked 450 pages of his imagined quota. “Some of it is tip-top,” he advised Bliss, and offered a possible title:
FLUSH TIMES
in the
SILVER MINES,
& other Matters.
A PERSONAL NARRATIVE36
Sam was learning the ball-and-chain element of writing a subscription book. The Nation critic was right: it absolutely had to be big and fat, so that it looked like a good bargain to the thrifty rural folk when the salesman knocked on the door. In the throes of mental fatigue and quota panic, Sam swept up his scrapbooks and letters on the land of coconut trees, volcanoes, and hula-hula girls, and hurled them into the maw. The Sandwich Islands were not, strictly speaking, a section of Washoe, but copy was copy. With only three months before the start of his next odyssey by railroad, he scrambled to arrange the material into the final fifteen chapters of the Western book.
Sam was off to Hartford with his fifth clutch of manuscript pages at the beginning of August. Passing through New York, he bought two new coats and five vests for the approaching marathon. (“I didn’t need five vests, but sent for them in a spurt of anger when I found I had nothing with me but a lot of those hated old single breasted atrocities that I have thrown away thirteen times, given away six times, & burned up twice…”)37 Sam stayed in Hartford nearly three weeks, immersed in cutting and adding copy, and reviewing many of the 304 illustrations that made it into the edition—some of them at the last possible minute.
As to the drawings, Bliss had retained True Williams as the chief artist, backed up by Roswell Shurtleff, whose elegantly detailed landscape portraits complemented Williams’s angular but always dynamic cartoonish style. Among Williams’s talents was his ability to capture Mark Twain’s likeness in a few line strokes: the great bush of dark hair, the severe brow, the strong nose over the thick, compact mustache. Williams had used Mark Twain’s features once or twice in The Innocents Abroad, but this time, the cartoon-Twain graced nearly every illustration that referred to the narrator. Mark Twain’s features were familiar to a great many Americans now, from the lecture platform and advertising handbills. He was perhaps the first American author to thus “star” as a line-drawn image in his own book.
True Williams brought along some familiar liabilities to go with his assets. Chief among these were his drinking binges, which now slowed his output and pushed the illustrations beyond their deadline. Bliss hired a third artist, Edward F. Mullen, and began scavenging for suitable engravings from other books, including those of his own American Publishing Company.
Sam’s Hartford trip amounted practically to a family reunion—save for Livy, home with Langdon. Orion and Mollie were now living there, in a second-story room of their boardinghouse on College Street. Downstairs were Jane Clemens and Annie Moffett, on a visit from Pamela’s house in Fredonia. (Pamela and her son, Sammy, were both in Elmira taking a water cure for the nervous disorders that afflicted both of them.) Jane had just turned sixty-eight and was feeling her oats again. She had bought a silk dress for twenty-four dollars “to swell around in.” Sam had sent money to his mother over the years, but at times since returning from California, he had regarded his homecoming duties as a nuisance. On this reencounter he recovered his boyhood affection for her, rediscovering the “wonderfully winning woman, with her gentle simplicity & her never-failing goodness of heart & yearning interest in all creatures & their smallest joys & sorrows.”38
Annie, he found attractive and interesting; Mollie, as attractive as he’d remembered her in her days of social glory in Carson City. As for Orion, he was
as queer & heedless a bird as ever. He met a strange young lady in the hall this evening; mistook her for the landlady’s daughter (the resemblance being equal to that between a cameleopard & a kangaroo,) & shouted: “Hello, you’re back early!” She took him for a fugitive from the asylum & left without finishing her errand.39
Sam gave Orion the single-breasted-atrocity vests.
At work in American Publishing’s editorial offices, Sam discovered that not even 1,800 pages were going to be enough. He wrote a new chapter on the spot, possibly Chapter 53, the now-classic “frame” anecdote “about” Jim Blaine’s grandfather’s old ram, in which the ram disappears from Blaine’s story after being mentioned in the second sentence, and Blaine meanders through a dozen digressions before falling asleep drunk.40 The anecdote, in short, was nothing but padding, but padding of a sublime sort. It joined such other tall tales in the book as the one about
the bull that chased “Bemis” up a tree in Chapter 7, and the sublime “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral,” a compressed encylopedia of Nevada slang as spewed out by a “stalwart rough” named Scotty, trying to make himself clear to the genteel minister he wants to conduct the service. (“Cheese it, pard; you’ve banked your ball clean outside the string. What I was a drivin’ at, was, that he never throwed off on his mother—don’t you see?”)41
Meanwhile, Bliss was moving the business side forward. He’d closed a deal with the English house of George Routledge & Sons for a simultaneous publication in England, thus shoring up rights against “pirated” editions of the book in Great Britain, and now was preparing his door-to-door booksellers for a December canvassing campaign. Missing from the preparation was the book’s title. Flush Times in the Silver Mines had not captivated Bliss, and the publisher kept ruminating. He and Sam toyed with The Innocents at Home for a while, but that one didn’t stick, either.
Sam’s hiatus in Hartford came to a stop on the last day of August. He rushed home to Elmira, responding to a wire from Livy: sickly little Langdon had weakened again, this time to the point of death. “We have scarcely any hope of the baby’s recovery,” he notified Orion. “Livy takes neither sleep nor rest.”42
It is impossible to ignore some curious signs of detachment, or what seems like detachment at the remove of more than 130 years, in Sam’s degree of concern about his infant son’s crisis. In a letter to a cousin just before he’d left Hartford, Sam reported that Langdon’s life “is almost despaired of.”43 But two paragraphs later, he was airily remarking that “[e]very time I am in New York or Boston I try to remember & get some photographs taken, but always fail.” And just a few days after his homecoming, he was back in Washington trying to secure a patent for a get-rich invention that had been in his thoughts for the past five years: an elastic waist strap that could be buttoned onto the rear of a pair of pants to keep them from sliding down. (Males wearing trousers that hit well below the navel were thought vulgar in those quaint times.) “…I’ll have to run, or I’ll get no dinner. Am so glad to hear you & the cubbie are improving,” he wrote Livy on September 8, at the end of a long paragraph of gripes about the annoyances of “the invention business.”44 He had not completely excluded Livy from his affections, however. She was now pregnant with their second child, Susy.
