The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  The major downside to subscription publication was the exaggerated expectations of the subscribers. To entice purchasers, a subscription book contained plenty of illustrations, preferably steel engravings, pages aplenty, and an attractive binding. Buyers literally thought that they could judge a book by its cover. No potential subscription buyer “ever saw a book-agent with a small volume in his hand,” the Nation jested. Unfortunately, books sold in advance were often printed on “wretched paper” and contained “vile engravings,” Sam admitted. “No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books,” Howells opined, “and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.” The method of printing and distributing books by subscription was undoubtedly profitable. According to John Tebbel, between 1861 and 1868 Hartford publishers like Bliss hired “10,000 door-to-door agents, sold nearly 1.5 million books, and grossed 5 million dollars in sales,” and by the end of the century subscription publishers issued two-thirds of all books sold in America.4

  Meanwhile, Sam left New York for Washington to start his new job. He was determined both to earn some fast money and to secure a patronage appointment for his brother Orion. After again failing to sell any significant part of the Clemens family’s Tennessee land, the former acting governor of Nevada Territory was working as a part-time typesetter for the St. Louis Missouri Democrat, living with his mother and sister, and boarding for $1.25 a day while his wife Mollie lived with her parents in Keokuk, Iowa. During one entire week, after shifts totaling about fifty hours, Orion was paid less than $10. As he lamented, his skills at the case had so diminished “that I cannot hold a situation in a job or book office, and I cannot set type fast enough for an evening paper. I have not capital to go into practice of law. So there is nothing left, as I know no other business, but to work on a morning paper, and I have no friends except about the Democrat office. I can do no better then than to do such work as I can get till an opening offers for a regular situation.” Sam pledged to find him a government position worthy of his talents, perhaps as a clerk in the Interior Department, perhaps in the Patent Office. Orion had been tinkering in St. Louis with an invention of some kind, perhaps the drill or the flying machine he mentioned to Mollie in letters at the time, perhaps the motorized saw his brother mentioned in his autobiography. “I will move Heaven & earth for Orion,” Sam promised his mother the day after the Quaker City docked in New York.5

  Sam arrived in Washington on November 22, shortly before the Fortieth Congress adjourned for the holidays. Stewart lived in a rooming house on F Street NW near the White House. “I was seated at my window one morning when a very disreputable-looking person slouched into the room,” Stewart remembered.

  He was arrayed in a seedy suit, which hung upon his lean frame in bunches with no style worth mentioning. A sheaf of scraggy black hair leaked out of a battered old slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance. He was a man I had known around the Nevada mining camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L. Clemens.

  The ruffian “became a member of my family and my clerk” at a salary of six dollars a day, though Sam later admitted that “a capabler man did the work”—no doubt another Smiggy McGlural—who was paid a hundred dollars a month.6

  With a government sinecure in hand, Sam buckled down to writing. As an occasional reporter for the New York Tribune, Territorial Enterprise, Alta California, Packard’s Monthly, and soon the New York Herald and Chicago Republican, he slept at Stewart’s rooming house, boarded at the luxurious Willard Hotel, scribbled on his book about the Quaker City excursion by night, observed congressional debates by day, and nursed his ambition. As one of the forty-nine accredited D.C. press correspondents he was, he wrote his family, “pretty well known now—intend to be better known.” He visited “the Capitol, several times, to look at it—almost to worship it; for surely it must be the most exquisitely beautiful edifice that exists on earth to-day.” Still, as in 1853, Sam was generally unimpressed by the caliber of American politicians. “Every morning, after breakfast,” he joked, “Congress passes a brand-new Reconstruction Act; after luncheon they amend it and put some Constitution in it; when it is time to go to dinner, they repeal it, and get ready to start fresh in the morning.” He quipped in his notebook that whiskey was “taken into Com[mittee] rooms in demijohns & carried out in demagogues.” With Congress awash in various forms of public corruption, he concluded that the federal legislators constituted the only “distinctly native American criminal class.” He even disparaged in his journal the ignorance of the lawmakers: “There are some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn’t one man in Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame.” In the halls of the Capitol, he asserted, “rascality achieves its highest perfection.” Despite his own efforts to find Orion a patronage job, he was outspoken in his critique of the spoils system. “The heads of Departments are harassed by Congressmen to give clerkships to their constituents until they are fairly obliged to consent in order to get a little peace,” he carped. “What a rotten, rotten, and unspeakable nasty concern this nest of departments is,” he wrote the Enterprise, “with its brainless battalions of Congressional poor-relation-clerks and their book-keeping, pencil-sharpening strumpets.” He compared the government bureaucracy to the Circumlocution Office in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. It is no wonder that a generation later Sam became a proponent of civil service reform.7

  He was particularly disturbed by the antics of a pair of venal public officials. Under fire by Southern Democrats after the death of Lincoln and the succession of Andrew Johnson, the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, refused to resign, invoking the Tenure of Office Act. Cabinet officers did not believe at the time that, upon confirmation by the U.S. Senate, they simply served at the pleasure of the president. Stanton’s recalcitrance rallied the Radical Republicans and sparked impeachment proceedings against Johnson. Sam remained sympathetic to the president. “In cases where a Cabinet officer refuses to resign and will not be removed,” he asked, “may we not put a barrel of powder under him and blast him from his position? The thing looks feasible to me. It is expeditious, unostentatious, and singularly effective. Why distress Secretary Stanton with arguments and theories?” Sam was similarly troubled by the political machinations of Ben “Beast” Butler, ironically a Radical Republican and a controversial presidential aspirant who had commanded the Union forces that occupied New Orleans during the Civil War. From Sam’s perspective, the “forward part of his bald skull looks raised, like a water blister.”8

  But there were exceptions. John Conness, the U.S. senator from California whom Sam once considered a scourge incarnate, was “one of the pleasantest men, socially, and one of the best hearted that exists.” He grudgingly admired Stewart, whom he deemed “about the hardest working man in Congress.” Sam was also struck by the talents of the “young, able & scholarly” Ohio congressman James A. Garfield, who had served as General William Rosecrans’s chief of staff during the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863.9

  The acrimony among the repatriated passengers of the Quaker City soon deteriorated into a spat over the alleged consumption of spirits aboard ship. Captain Charles C. Duncan publicly claimed that some of the excursionists (no doubt targeting Sam) “were under the influence of liquor from the time the vessel left New York until they returned.” In rebuttal, Stephen Griswold testified “to the general sobriety of his fellow pilgrims.” The only exception was “a gentleman afflicted with consumption who drank under medical advice,” Judge Jacob S. Haldeman of Pennsylvania, an invalid alcoholic also addicted to morphine. Emily Severance described him, though not by name, as a “victim of intemperance.” Haldeman was the passenger Sam mentions in chapter 60 of The Innocents Abroad who ran “through a gangway, between decks, one stormy night, when he caught his foot in the
iron staple of a door that had been heedlessly left off a hatchway” and broke his ankle.10

  The Brooklyn Eagle invited Sam to mediate the opposing claims; he was “the man to settle the point; let us hear from him.” That is, Sam was asked to settle a dispute between two men who disliked each other—and both of whom he disliked. He replied within a week and disagreed with both of them. “[Y]ou called upon me, as upon a sort of Fountain-Head of Facts,” he began,

  to pour out some truth upon the Quaker City muddle, which Captain Duncan and Mr. Griswold have lately stirred up between them. . . . I must decide that Mr. Griswold, in acknowledging that he saw one man intoxicated on board the Quaker City, more than proved Duncan to be right. . . . But it isn’t the dictionary meaning of the words we speak that must be weighed, in order to get at the absolute correctness or incorrectness of the statement, but the impression they convey. . . . Capt. Duncan told the truth in words, but the words didn’t convey it to the public. . . . I am truly sorry to say that in Italy Capt. Duncan bought wine and drank it on board the ship—, and it almost breaks my heart when I reflect that in all human probability it was his example that seduced the innocent passengers into getting intoxicated, and I almost shudder to think that he may have done it in order to create telling illustrations for his intended lecture before the Temperance League in Brooklyn, of which he is President. . . . Capt. Duncan offered wine to me—he tried to make even me fall with his horrid Italian intoxicating bowl—but my virtue was proof against his wiles. I sternly refused to taste it. I preferred the French article. So did Griswold.

  The same day Sam’s note was printed, Duncan responded in kind: “I have read Mark Twain’s last in today’s Eagle, and am of opinion that when that letter was written Mark Twain was sober.” A week later, when Duncan lectured in Washington on the Quaker City tour, he was much more conciliatory. With Sam in the audience, he declared that “if he ever made another voyage of the sort he would like to have Mark along with him.” However, this sentiment would not survive the publication of The Innocents Abroad. In chapter 10, Sam recounted the Fourth of July celebration aboard the Quaker City and quoted the “good speech” Duncan delivered on the occasion: “‘Ladies and Gentlemen: May we all live to a green old age and be prosperous and happy. Steward, bring up another basket of champagne.’” Duncan later accused Sam of uttering “an outrageous libel” when he “said he made this speech.” But Duncan was outgunned in this battle of wits. His own log contains this entry for July 4, 1867: “champagne and toasts, thirteen regular ones.”11

  Sam’s friend Frank Fuller wanted him to take to the road with a Quaker City talk; by November 24 Fuller had lined up invitations to deliver eighteen lectures at a hundred dollars per appearance “in various parts of the Union,” but Sam declined all of them. By December 18 he was “already dead tired of being in one place so long,” but he preferred a bird in the hand. “If I stay here all winter and keep on hanging out my sign in the Tribune and getting well acquainted with great dignitaries to introduce me,” he calculated, “I can lecture next season on my own reputation, to 100 houses, and houses that will be readier to accept me without a criticism than they are now. . . . Here in the next six months I will make . . . a reputation that will not be as precarious a capital as it is now.” Three weeks later, however, Sam admitted to Fuller that he regretted his decision: “I believe I have made a mistake in not lecturing this winter. I did not suppose I was any better known when I got back than I was before I started—but every day I find additional reasons for thinking I was mistaken about that.” On Christmas Eve, similarly, Sam confided to Emily Severance that he wished he was on holiday in the Sandwich Islands or California. He was “in a fidget to move. It isn’t a novel sensation, though—I never was any other way.” The next day he took the train to New York to reunite for two weeks with some of the Quaker City nighthawks. He stayed with Dan Slote and one evening they enjoyed a “blow-out” reminiscing about the excursion with Charley Langdon and Jack Van Nostrand.12

  On December 27 Sam dined with Charley as well as his father and twenty-two-year-old sister at the St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway. Jervis Langdon was a financial magnate; founding member and pillar of the Park Congregational Church in Elmira, New York; a fervent Republican; a conductor on the Underground Railroad; a personal friend of Frederick Douglass; and a staunch abolitionist “from the cradle” who, Sam remarked, worked “openly and valiantly in that cause all through the days when to do such a thing was to ensure a man disgrace, insult, hatred and bodily peril.” As Shelley Fisher Fishkin has aptly put it, while Sam’s father “had been sending abolitionists to the state penitentiary,” his future father-in-law “had been funding their activities.” Langdon also endorsed such reforms as temperance, women’s suffrage, and prison and dress reform. On her part, the bookish Olivia Louise Langdon was, Sam thought, “a sweet & timid & lovely” but frail and delicate young woman.

  In 1855, at the age of nine, Olivia had matriculated at the Elmira Ladies’ Seminary, the predecessor of Elmira College, where she studied French, science, and history. In her commonplace book, begun as a teenager, Livy quoted Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Ruskin, William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and others. Sam later described her as “an Emersonian devotee all her life.” At sixteen she had begun to suffer from a back ailment, perhaps Pott’s disease or spinal tuberculosis, and though she recovered “she was never strong again while her life lasted,” according to Sam. Bernard DeVoto contended that Livy was afflicted with “neurasthenia,”13 a debilitating nervous disorder afflicting leisure-class white women almost exclusively—an illness dramatized by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” that has since been defined out of existence.

  Sam had first glimpsed an ivory miniature portrait of Livy that Charley carried in his luggage aboard the Quaker City and, according to the legend Sam fostered later in life, he had been smitten at first sight. As he wrote his sister Pamela a year before his marriage, “the first time I ever saw her”—he apparently referred to his first sight of Livy’s picture—“I said she was the most beautiful creature in the world, & I haven’t altered my opinion yet. I take as much pride in her brains as I do in her beauty, & as much pride in her happy & equable disposition as I do in her brains.” Sam alluded to this morsel of family lore in Ah Sin (1877), the play he cowrote with Bret Harte. There the hero similarly confesses that he had loved the ingénue before he “ever saw your face” and that “long before” they met personally he had “dwelt upon your photograph” and “loved you as an ideal.” In any event, Sam later admitted to Livy that during their dinner together at the St. Nicholas Hotel he had struggled “to keep from loving you with all my heart! But you seemed to my bewildered vision, a visiting Spirit from the upper air—a something to worship, reverently & at a distance—& not a creature of common human clay, to be profaned by the love of such as I.”14

  On New Year’s Eve Sam attended Charles Dickens’s reading from David Copperfield at Steinway Hall in company with the Langdons, an occasion often characterized by biographers as his first date with Livy. The event “made the fortune of my life—not in dollars, I am not thinking of dollars; it made the real fortune of my life in that it made the happiness of my life,” he waxed nostalgically forty years later, because “from that day to this the sister has never been out of my mind nor heart.” Also in the audience that evening was Kate Field, who covered Dickens’s speaking tour for the New York Tribune. Field had given Dickens the vase of flowers that, Sam noted, adorned the speaker’s desk. On the whole, however, he was “a great deal disappointed” by Dickens’s performance. “He is a bad reader, in one sense,” he reported in his next letter to the Alta, “because he does not enunciate his words sharply and distinctly—he does not cut the syllables cleanly, and therefore many and many of them fell dead before they reached our part of the house.” His reading was “rather monotonous, as a general thing,” he declared, with “no heart,
no feeling in it—it is glittering frostwork; his rich humor cannot fail to tickle an audience into ecstasies save when he reads to himself. And what a bright, intelligent audience he had! He ought to have made them laugh, or cry, or shout, at his own good will or pleasure—but he did not.” On a more positive note, Sam bragged that he had sat next to a “highly respectable young white woman” at the theater.15

  On New Year’s Day, Sam again saw Livy, along with her Hartford friend Alice Hooker, the daughter of Isabella Beecher Hooker, at the home of their mutual friends Thomas and Anna Berry on West Forty-Fourth Street. Sam spent the entire day with them. “I just staid [sic] there & deviled the life out of those girls,” he wrote his mother. “I am going to spend a few days with the Langdon’s [sic], in Elmira, New York, as soon as I get time, & a few days at Mrs. Hooker’s, in Hartford, Conn., shortly.” He would not see Livy again until the following August, however, nor would he apparently so much as write to her. On Sunday, January 5, 1868, he dined in Brooklyn with Henry Ward Beecher; his wife Eunice; his sisters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Isabella and Catherine Beecher; and his “old Quaker City favorite, Emma Beach,” then spent the night next door at the Beach house. Like most of the ministers with whom he socialized, he thought Henry Ward was “a brick” despite his temperance views. Though he was offered nothing stronger than cider to drink, Sam informed Beecher that he believed “no dinner could be perfect without champagne, or at least some kind of Burgundy” and Beecher replied “that privately he was a good deal of the same opinion, but it wouldn’t do to say it aloud.”16