After his war years, Twichell eventually became the minister of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford. It was in October 1868, while Twain was visiting Bliss, whose house stood across the street from the church, that he first met Twichell. The two men hit it off immediately, even after Twain suggested that this upscale church in the upscale literary community of Nook Farm, west of Hartford, might be called the “Church of the Holy Speculators.” He told Livy that month, “I have made a friend. It is the Rev. J. H. Twichell. I have only known him a week, & yet I believe I think almost as much of him as I do of Charlie. I could hardly find words strong enough to tell how much I do think of that man.”1 The feeling would soon be mutual and lasting: Twain would travel to Bermuda and Germany with Twichell and write him into several of his works. The Reverend Twichell would officiate at Mark Twain’s wedding and speak at his funeral.
Albert Bigelow Paine tells us that clergymen just loved Mark Twain, but it is something of a puzzle to figure out what drew Twichell to him, at least at the outset of their relationship. Twichell had seen three years of combat serving as moral and religious mentor to the tough Irish Catholic laborers who formed the regiment that originated under Sickles as the Excelsior Brigade in Lower Manhattan. After describing to his father the awful results of an early battle in which eighty-three men in a nearby regiment had been killed, he told him: “If I had no faith in God, and did not feel that the plan, the plan, is unfolding in ways of His appointment, I should go crazy.”2 Like many Americans on both sides, he had believed in the war as a holy cause, while his new friend had fled from it as a bad idea. Twichell had been pastor of Asylum Hill Church since 1865, and would soon become known as “Mark Twain’s pastor.” There seems little doubt that most of Twichell’s war experience spilled out of him as these two became fast friends, especially after Twain moved to Hartford (as he did shortly) and they began taking long Saturday morning walks together. Hearing the horror of the pastor’s war memories may have ultimately tilted Twain toward his antiwar frame of mind in the anti-imperialist essays at the end of the century and earlier in his own essentially antiwar story “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” in which such sentiment is camouflaged as humor.
One of the factors that surely brought this polished advocate of “Muscular Christianity” together with the often carelessly dressed, twang-tongued agnostic out of the West was Clemens’s need to become a Christian in order to please both Livy and her parents. A graduate of Yale College and the Union Theological Seminary, Twichell stood for personal morality and integrity over the more pietistic doctrines of Christian orthodoxy. All his ideas were bound up with anti-slavery and the Republican Party, which after the war ran roughshod over the defeated South. As a man of the cloth, he may initially have seen Mark Twain as his biggest challenge, but the relationship soon settled into a lasting friendship, apparently unthreatened by their obvious disagreement on the subject of Christianity.3
In November 1868 Mark Twain began his first lecture tour with James Redpath’s Speakers’ Bureau in Boston; it would take him to the Midwest and back with approximately forty-three engagements in 123 days, Christmas included, ending on March 20, 1869. By this time Redpath—a vocal abolitionist, reporter in the Kansas territory from 1854 to 1859, and author of panegyrics that helped make the name of John Brown a shibboleth for the anti-slavery cause—had become with the war’s outcome a respectable businessman with a stable of some of the most renowned speakers in the country. These included Anna E. Dickinson, staunch advocate for both abolition and women’s rights, and Petroleum V. Nasby, who championed the same causes by appearing to oppose them. Both earned well above the one-hundred-dollar lecture fee that Twain then received.
By that August 1869, Twain was settled into a rooming house in Buffalo only a few doors down East Swan Street from the Express and ready to take on his new duties as editor alongside Josephus N. Larned, the political editor (who, said Twain in his newspaper “Salutatory” of August 21, “is already excellent, and only needs to serve a term in the penitentiary in order to be perfect”).4 Larned and his associates were delighted to have Mark Twain on their editorial staff and even more pleased the following year when he gave the regional newspaper a national touch by agreeing to write a regular column for the Galaxy. This prominent literary monthly had already taken the risk of publishing not only John Burroughs’s defense of the unorthodox Leaves of Grass but also Whitman’s own essay “Personalism” and some of his poems. (Whitman’s essay had been about his version of Emersonian self-reliance, but Twain’s wit—or some of it—in the Galaxy reflected the self-reliance of the lowbrow interpreter of the human condition.)
The Express was a Republican newspaper that at the very outset of Twain’s association with it assailed Democrats as a joke. Its editorial of August 19 on that subject, “Inspired Humor,” went unsigned, but a clipping of it with penciled correction by Sam survives in the MTP. An editorial on the following day entitled “The ‘Monopoly’ Speaks” attempted to calm the waters with regard to Jervis Langdon’s high coal prices in Buffalo. Internal evidence from Sam’s letter to Livy on August 19 suggests that he wrote or seriously influenced that editorial, which asked readers to consider the arguments of John D. Slee that the high prices were the result of the “unreasonable demands of the miners.” Slee was an agent of the coal association representing Langdon’s interests.5 Twain obviously felt obligated to defend his future father-in-law, despite any sympathy he may have had for the miners. He must have been in a “close place,” as he would have Huck say about his troubled conscience over Jim in Huckleberry Finn. He was not only helping to divert unflattering attention away from Jervis Langdon, to whom he was deeply grateful, but was also pleasing Langdon’s daughter and his future wife. Up to this time the Express had been sympathetic to citizens’ complaints about the price of coal, but Larned, who operated the “political crank,” now sat at a desk directly facing the one occupied by Editor Clemens.
One issue on which the Express was not shy was the so-called Byron scandal, at least not in defending Harriet Beecher Stowe. The famous author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had recently asserted in the Atlantic Monthly that the poet Lord Byron’s widow had told her years earlier that Byron had committed incest with his half-sister. The defense by the Express was probably a courageous act, for the Atlantic itself lost a great many subscribers over Stowe’s article, which was considered to have been in poor taste. As a matter of fact, Stowe’s reputation itself suffered permanent damage. The paper, and Twain, may have been pressured to help by the Reverend Thomas Beecher, her half-brother, who had recently come to her defense in an Elmira paper. Already, Twain was regretting that he and Livy could not live (or so they then thought) in the Nook Farm community of Hartford, where the Beecher clan owned or controlled most of the land for sale. (Twain would initially rent the home of Isabella Beecher Hooker, Stowe’s half-sister, when his family moved to Hartford.) Furthermore, he was hopeful that sales of The Innocents Abroad would put him in the same financial ballpark as Mrs. Stowe (a goal the book may have reached after several years but certainly not with its initial sales). “To some, who cherish an ancient political grudge against the author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ” he wrote in an unsigned editorial of August 24, “there seems to be a sufficient reason for savagely denouncing the story in the fact that it comes from Mrs. Stowe, whom they improve the occasion to abuse.”6
Twain soon started an “Around the World” series for the Express in which Professor Darius R. Ford of Elmira College would travel and write “the newspaper account of his (our) trip.” Twain would stay in Buffalo and embellish Ford’s letters as they arrived. Ford already had a traveling companion in young Charlie Langdon, whose father now sent him on another “cruise” to keep him away from his Elmira drinking companions. The series was planned for forty or fifty letters, but only ten were ultimately published between October 16, 1869, and January 29, 1870, most of them written solely by Mark Twain. In fact, Professor Ford,
perhaps himself an imbiber, produced only two of the letters.7
The scheme, however, gave Twain the idea in 1870 of having Bliss bankroll an old journalist friend and drinking pal from California to travel to South Africa in search of diamonds. John Henry Riley would be allowed to keep all the diamonds he found there and had only to save up his memories of the venture for Twain’s later embellishment into a book. But by the time Riley returned the same year (without any diamonds), Twain was too busy with other matters and kept putting him off. Before Twain could give Riley his full attention, the unfortunate journalist died of blood poisoning after accidentally stabbing himself with a fork.8 The book was never written, of course, and the contract for it with the American Publishing Company was fulfilled only in 1876 with the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The ill-fated Riley would live again in chapter 59 of Roughing It as “Blucher,” an eccentric newspaper reporter in San Francisco. In fact, Twain wrote about him in the Galaxy for November 1870 and had it reprinted in the Express.9 The idea for African diamonds would be only the first of a series of harebrained schemes, investments, and inventions that regularly distracted Mark Twain from his work as a writer. When he did get away long enough to succeed in literature, often accomplished by frenzied spurts of writing, the outcome was usually an accident, a fortuitous collision of genius and serendipity.
Twain took long weekends off during the waning days of his bachelorhood in Buffalo in order to visit Livy in Elmira. Afterwards, when the two settled there in a furnished home on Delaware Avenue that her parents had paid for, he spent even less time at “the office.” The Buffalo period was nevertheless an important time in Mark Twain’s development as a writer.10 He soon realized that he had forgotten just what drudgery journalism involved, and writing monthly for a national magazine was almost as bad. Furthermore, writing for the Galaxy tended to overexpose him and thus threatened the sales of his future books. But in the Express and the Galaxy he wrote pieces that he would later reuse in such works as Roughing It and Sketches, New and Old (1875). There were, for example, the sketch about Lake Mono in California in the former book and “Journalism in Tennessee” in the latter. Furthermore, most of the “Around the World” letters focused on western memories and went, revised, into Roughing It. He was learning to turn the oral traditions of the Old Southwest and West into literary performances that were viable and lasting.
When the assassin of his friend Albert D. Richardson was acquitted on an insanity plea in a sensational trial in New York City in the spring of 1870, Twain went on record, probably for the first time, not only against that kind of legal tactic but also against the jury system itself. Richardson, star Tribune journalist and successful fellow writer for the American Publishing Company, had been shot by the ex-husband of a woman he had recently married. In “Our Precious Lunatic,” the Express editor belittled the jury’s decision by observing that the murderer’s great-grandfather (a Tammany henchman and drunk by the name of Daniel McFarland) had also been “tainted with insanity, and frequently killed people who were distasteful to him.” In reference to the defendant’s alcoholism, Twain wrote that the younger McFarland “had to submit to the inconvenience of having his wife [Abby Sage Richardson, who would later dramatize The Prince and the Pauper] give public readings for the family support; and at times, when he handed these shameful earnings to the barkeeper, his haughty soul was so torn with anguish that he could hardly stand without leaning up against something.”11
By this time, Sam had been married in Elmira, a wedding attended by his sister Pamela and her daughter Annie, but for unknown reasons not his mother, who remained in St. Louis. Instead, his other “mother,” Mary Fairbanks, came all the way from Cleveland to attend the ceremony. The bride’s side of the family included, along with her parents, Mrs. Theodore W. Crane (Susan, Livy’s foster sister) and a number of other relatives. Charlie, who was still making his world tour with the professor, was also missing—in person, if not now in his approval of the marriage. Other guests to the ceremony presided over by Thomas K. Beecher and friend Joe Twichell included acquaintances from Elmira and associates of Jervis Langdon, as well as Larned of the Express.
It is well known to Mark Twain scholars that his literary return to Hannibal was sparked by his conversation in 1874 with Twichell about piloting and the resulting articles in the Atlantic. But his marriage also evoked ghosts of the past. In a letter four days after the wedding, on February 2, 1870, to Will Bowen, who had settled in St. Louis following his involuntary service for the Union as a river pilot, Sam thanked him for his letter of congratulations and told him that it had brought their childhood past back to him “like a panorama.” Saying that the “old days have trooped by in their old glory again,” he recalled Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard; “that one-legged nigger, Higgins” his childhood sweetheart Laura Hawkins (Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer); and the time “I jumped overboard from the ferry boat in the middle of the river that stormy day to get my hat, & swam two or three miles after it (& got it).”12 Now he had taken yet another plunge into the Mississippi River, and its muddy waters would leave an aftertaste that was not soon forgotten.
He had finished his second winter lecture tour the month before and was now basking in the glow of his honeymoon at home and avoiding the Express office altogether. By the spring and summer of 1870 he not only was engaged in producing the monthly Galaxy articles but also had signed a contract to produce “another 600-page” book for the American Publishing Company, this one to be called Roughing It. He wouldn’t actually begin its composition right away, however, because of terrible misfortunes that emerged in the wake of his happy marriage. First, Jervis Langdon was diagnosed with stomach cancer and died at age sixty on August 6. The long ordeal of his dying exhausted the family, especially Livy, who sat for hours every day at his side, taking her turn with other family members, including Sam. Jervis left an estate valued at over one million dollars, to be equally divided among his wife, daughter, son, and foster daughter. (Part of Susan Crane’s inheritance included Quarry Farm, which became the family’s summer hillside getaway, about three miles outside Elmira overlooking the Chemung River. It would come to play a major role in the literary career of Mark Twain.)13 Livy came close to suffering an emotional breakdown over the sudden loss of her father, and she nearly lost the baby she was then carrying. The next month Emma Nye, a childhood friend, made a previously scheduled visit to the Clemens’s Buffalo home and almost immediately contracted typhoid fever; she died in their bedroom on September 29, further exacerbating Livy’s fragile emotional state.
Incredibly, Sam kept right on working on promised projects, both the book and the Galaxy pieces. He suffered along with the rest of the family, fretting deeply over his wife’s condition, but he nevertheless managed to write. It is hard to imagine, even today, how he functioned as a humorist, but the Galaxy is hard evidence of his success. Admittedly, most of the best pieces were written before these crises, which culminated with the premature birth and ill health of their first child, Langdon, on November 7, 1872. Twain’s Galaxy writings featured such prominent works in the Twain canon as “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract” and “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper.” The latter is not as funny as “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief,” first published in the Californian in 1865 as “The Christmas Fireside” and reprinted with the longer title in the 1867 Jumping Frog collection. That is probably because it is not as optimistic. While the Bad Little Boy can outmaneuver fate and even the goody-goody scenarios of boyhood behavior promoted by the pulpit, the Good Little Boy has to live after the Fall of Man. In his world (and that of the rest of humanity) “there was a screw loose somewhere.” The 1870 sequel may faintly anticipate Twain’s later pessimism. It also belonged to the genre of the benign attacks on the model boy, exemplified in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1869).14 Yet Twain’s “The Christmas Fireside” had in fact made this attack fo
ur years before Aldrich’s book.
In the June number the quality of Twain’s Galaxy work fell off somewhat, but, significantly, in a series of recollections, he referred to his Enterprise hoaxes, including “A Bloody Massacre near Carson.” It seems that he was still apologizing for it, or defending himself about it. “The idea that anybody could ever take my massacre for a genuine occurrence,” he told his Galaxy readers, “never once suggested itself to me, hedged about as it was by all those tell-tale absurdities.”15
One of his cruder but still amusing pieces of this period (at least from the distance of more than a century) never made it into the Galaxy, probably because it did not meet the prevailing Victorian standard of literary taste. As a matter of fact, when Twain completed his stint with that magazine, the Nation, which had been monitoring his performances in the Galaxy, remarked in the April 1871 issue that the humorist “was sometimes rather vulgar and low.” When the Franco-Prussian War in the spring of 1870 led quickly to a siege of Paris and reduced the French to eating the animals out of their own zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, Twain described the menu of a famous Parisian restaurant, Trois Frères, as offering “giraffe cutlets, rhinoceros steaks, and ragout of kangaroo.” “Less pretentious dishes,” he continued, “fell to the commonality. The latter had to content themselves with such ordinary plats as horse, mule, donkey, cats, dogs, and rats,” or a bill of fare offering “horse soup” and “minced cat.”16
“War and ‘Wittles’ ” appeared in the Express of December 16, 1870. His humor here came at the expense of human suffering and reflected his current mood, which was somewhat dark. Buffalo had never pleased him. He had always wanted to live in Hartford, since his first visit there. Young Langdon wasn’t strong and would soon struggle against the very same disease that had killed Emma Nye only months before in the same house. Livy, still mourning for her dead father and quite ill herself, was unable to care for the child and had to rely on a wet nurse. Servants in the Buffalo house had also become an unpleasant distraction, what with rivalries among them and their failure to perform satisfactorily. It was time for a change. By March, Sam had put up both his house and his share of the newspaper for sale (ultimately taking a loss on both) and taken the first step away from Buffalo for good. “We are packing up, to-night,” he told Bliss on March 17, 1871, “& tomorrow I shall take my wife to Elmira on a mattress—for she can neither sit up nor stand. . . . I had rather die twice over than repeat the last six months of my life.”17 Livy was not prostrated merely by her grief. A month before, she too had come down with typhoid fever.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 20