and did not believe I could be present at this one without turning away my head at the last moment. . . . [but] I believed that if ever it would be possible to see a man hanged, and derive satisfaction from the spectacle, this was the time. . . . That assassin got out of the closed carriage, and the first thing his eye fell upon was that awful gallows towering above a great sea of human heads, out yonder on the hill side and his cheek never blanched, and never a muscle quivered! He strode firmly away, and skipped gaily up the steps of the gallows like a happy girl. . . . [T]hat man stood there unmoved though he knew that the sheriff was reaching deliberately for the drop while the black cap descended over his quiet face!—then down through the hole in the scaffold the strap-bound figure shot like a dart!—a dreadful shiver started at the shoulders, violently convulsed the whole body all the way down, and died away with a tense drawing of the toes downward, like a doubled fist—and all was over! I saw it all. I took exact note of every detail, even to [the hangman’s] considerately helping to fix the leather strap that bound his legs together and his quiet removal of his slippers—and I never wish to see it again. I can see that stiff, straight corpse hanging there yet, with its black pillow-cased head turned rigidly to one side, and the purple streaks creeping through the hands and driving the fleshy hue of life before them.
Not only was Villain the first man hanged in Virginia City but, according to Marion Goldman, Bulette was “the only murdered Comstock prostitute whose assailant was brought to trial, convicted, and punished.”7
Sam lectured at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City on April 27 and 28 to critical praise, though not capacity crowds. The Virginia City Trespass reported that “a very large and fashionable audience” attended Sam’s first performance, and the Enterprise added that they were “delighted.” Doten, who heard Sam both evenings, noted in the Gold Hill News that the first talk was “well attended,” but in his journal he conceded that there was “not [a] very full house,” though it was “humorous, very, as well as pleasing & instructive—Much applauded—lasted about an hour.” Unfortunately, Sam was charged two hundred dollars per night for the use of the “miserable barn.” He spoke on April 29 and 30 in Carson City, where he was treated “exceedingly well.” While he was in the vicinity he visited both Lake Tahoe and Donner Lake before returning to Sacramento on May 3. Paradoxically, he preferred the old stage route over the Sierra Nevada to the new route via the Central Pacific Railroad. That trip was “more irksome” than the old one, he asserted, “on account of your being obliged to shift from cars to stages and back again every now and then in the mountains. We used to rattle across all the way by stage, and never mind it at all, save that we had to ride thirty hours without stopping.” He then sailed back to San Francisco on the steamer Capital on May 5.8
Sam completed most of the manuscript of The Innocents Abroad in San Francisco over the next few weeks. “I am steadily at work,” he informed Elisha Bliss on May 5, “and shall start East with the completed Manuscript about the middle of June.” In an 1895 interview he remembered that he “worked every day from one o’clock in the afternoon till midnight, and I got it finished in sixty-two days. I must have written on an average 3,000 words per day.”9 He reconnected with Bret Harte, by then the founding editor of the Overland Monthly and the author of “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” who helped him revise his travel letters. “Harte read all the MS of the ‘Innocents’ & told me what passages, paragraphs, & chapters to leave out—& I followed orders strictly,” Sam allowed later. In all, he deleted about sixty-five pages of manuscript at Harte’s suggestion. In appreciation, he handed the manuscript to Harte “and told him to take such matter out of it as he pleased for The Overland free of charge.” As a result, early drafts of four chapters of the book appeared in the magazine between July and October 1868, though not without censure. Noah Brooks griped, for example, that “By Rail Through France” in the July issue “did not show a gleam of that humor which had given [Sam] so much vogue through his newspaper letters.” Meanwhile, Sam formed ambitious plans to publicize the book with a speaking tour the next winter. “I want to preach in the States,” he wrote Frank Fuller. The volume “will be issued from the press early in December & the canvassers will be all over the country two or three months before that.”10
Yet the composition of the book was a more grueling task than Sam had anticipated. Less than half of the book consisted of the Alta California and New York Tribune letters, though virtually all of the first ten chapters were based on them. He cited all but one of his surviving Alta letters, but he did not reprint any of them without change. As he explained to Elisha Bliss, he planned to weed the letters “of their . . . inelegancies of expression,” and he promised Mary Fairbanks that there would “not be any slang in this book except it should occur in a mild form in dialogues,” much as there were no racial epithets in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin except those quoted in conversations. Sam tamed his rhetoric and softened his satire to make it more palatable to eastern readers, his target audience. His indelicate reference to the use by Palestinians of dried camel dung for fuel in one of his Alta letters was deleted in revision, for example, and he also tempered his ridicule of the Old Masters because, he confessed to Emma Beach, “I cannot afford to expose my want of cultivation too much.” Whereas in an Alta letter from Constantinople he had mocked the “old-master worshippers from the wilds of New Jersey, who can’t tell a fresco from a lath-and-plaster,” he revised the passage for The Innocents Abroad to crack wise about “those old connoisseurs from the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a fresco and a fire-plug.” He carefully changed every use of the racial epithet “nigger” to “negro.” Perhaps surprisingly, Sam never mentioned Mary Fairbanks in either his travel letters or the finished book, as if he understood that the only way to spare her from his corrosive sarcasm was to omit her entirely. She surely was not one of the Sinners, and he refused to group her among the Pilgrims. He slightly shaded his irreverence in revision as well. Whereas he noted in an Alta letter from Genoa that he had “seen stacks of bones of St. Denis, enough to make four St. Denis’s and have a bone or two to spare,” he revised the statement for The Innocents Abroad: “As for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.” He even referred in the book to Italian priests who were “bankrupt in the true religion—which is ours.”11
Moreover, because so many of Sam’s letters about his travels through France and Italy had been lost, he was compelled to fill the gaps in the narrative by relying on a pastiche of sources other than his faded memories—the newspaper correspondence of his fellow passengers, especially Reeves Jackson and Mary Fairbanks; the diary of Emma Beach; biblical and other lore; and the scorned guidebooks. He padded the book with long digressions summarizing the myth of Abélard and Héloïse, the legend of the cave of the seven sleepers, and comic paraphrases of church history and biblical text, including the parable of the Prodigal Son and the tale of the sons of Jacob—none of them particularly relevant to his narrative. Some of the incidents, such as the visit to the Marseilles zoo, were invented out of whole cloth. The account of his Parisian visit was a thin tissue of borrowings from Galignani’s New Paris Guide for 1867. His reliance on this source, according to Dewey Ganzel, is “most apparent in his descriptions of Notre Dame, the Bois de Boulogne, and the Père-Lachaise Cemetery.” For example, the guidebook noted that the portals of the Cathédrale Notre Dame “are bisected by square pillars. That of the central one was removed on Jan. 1st, 1852, on the occasion of the thanksgivings for the renewal of the President’s powers.” Sam hardly revised the lines in his book: “The portals of the great western front are bisected by square pillars. They took the central one way, in 1852, on the occasion of thanksgivings for the reinstitution of the Presidential powers.” However disappointed Sam may have been by Charles Dickens’s public appearance in New York the previous December, he was, according to Robert Regan, at least indirec
tly indebted to Dickens’s Pictures from Italy for background in the Italy chapters; and he fleshed out chapter 27 by quoting William H. Neligan’s Rome: Its Churches, Its Charities, and Its Schools. Though Sam professed little affection for the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne—“I do not care for his stories, for I do not think that they are as great as many others by American writers”—he apparently described the Colosseum, the catacombs, and the Capuchin Convent with Guido Reni’s painting of Saint Michael vanquishing Satan after reading The Marble Faun. He punctuated the Levant section of the book with allusions to Edward Robinson’s Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea and Charles Wyllys Elliott’s Remarkable Characters and Memorable Places of the Holy Land, and he excerpted passages from Prime’s Tent Life in the Holy Land (here renamed and retitled William C. Grimes’ Nomadic Life in Palestine). He even quoted one sentence from Prime without attribution. Sam admitted in The Innocents Abroad that he loved “to quote from Grimes, because he is so dramatic. And because he is so romantic. And because he seems to care but little whether he tells the truth or not.” Sam completed a draft of the manuscript, according to the San Francisco correspondent of the Reese River Reveille, by June 6 and spent his final month in California polishing his prose.12
Then there was the problem of a title. He considered several alternatives, as he wrote Mary Fairbanks—“The Exodus of the Innocents,” “The Crusade of the Innocents,” “The Irruption of the Jonathans,” “The New Pilgrim’s Progress”—the latter possibility as ironic as the title of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Sam worried that “dull” readers might “shudder” at it “as taking the name of a consecrated book in vain.” The reference to John Bunyan’s Christian classic would only have underscored the alleged sacrileges the book contained, though Sam eventually used it as a subtitle. Mary Fairbanks proposed a couple of silly possibilities: “Alonzo & Melissa” and “The Loves of the Angels.”13 In any event, “The Innocents Abroad” was more fitting and appropriate than the title he gave the most popular of his Quaker City lectures—“The American Vandal Abroad.”
Sam reported to Bliss on June 23 that he had finished a draft of the book “& I think it will do.” He had originally planned to leave San Francisco for his return on June 18, though his departure was delayed until July 6 so that he could prepare and deliver a farewell lecture. He delivered this address, “The Oldest of the Republics: Venice, Past and Present,” before a full house at the Mercantile Library on Bush Street in San Francisco on the evening of July 2. It was the only time he ever spoke on this subject, and the oration was designed to combat the accusation he was merely an irreverent or even blasphemous humorist. In his handbill he conceded that his “last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good.” He began by admitting the talk might be “somewhat didactic. I don’t know what didactic means, but it is a high sounding word, and I wish to use it, meaning no harm whatever.” The Alta California lauded Sam’s performance the next day: “The applause was frequent and appreciative.” The Californian added that “the hall echoed with . . . cachinnations.” The Dramatic Chronicle commended its “wit without vulgarity,” and even the San Francisco Weekly Mercury praised it: “a fine affair, superior in many respects to his last—one or two words and one anecdote being all that could possibly be questioned.” But the San Francisco correspondent for the Hawaiian Gazette struck a dissenting note: Sam was “not an entertaining speaker, and the satisfaction rendered was, as I might express it, ‘so, so.’” Still, Sam bragged to Fairbanks on July 5 that the lecture “gave so much satisfaction that I feel some inches taller, now.” He fully understood, too, that such a talk “before an unbiased audience such as I would find in an eastern city or on board the Quaker City” would probably prove “a shameful failure”—another indication he recognized a difference in regional tastes.14
Sam sailed the next day aboard the steamer Montana with 150 other passengers, paused on July 13 in Acapulco and on July 20 in Panama City, where he crossed paths with his friend Ned Wakeman, “as tempestuous of exterior, as hearty of manner and as stormy of voice as ever,—and just as good a man as exists anywhere.” Wakeman told him a fantastic dream tale about “a visit which he had made to heaven. I kept it in my mind, and a month or two later I put it on paper. . . . Five or six years afterward I showed the manuscript to Howells,” who encouraged him to publish it. Instead, Sam developed the story in fits and starts over the next forty years, and it gradually morphed into a parody of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868), a religious best seller “which had imagined a mean little ten-cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island.” He finally published part of the manuscript in Harper’s Monthly under the title “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1907–8), about a journey to the celestial realm. A revised version appeared in book form in 1909 and was the last story Sam published before his death. In 1872, after Wakeman suffered a stroke, Sam publicly appealed for donations to assist the captain and his family. “I have made voyages with the old man when fortune was a friend to him,” he declared, “and am aware that he gave with a generous heart and willing hand to all the needy that came in his way.” The charity was soon fully subscribed. A few months before his death in 1875 Wakeman asked Sam to be his official biographer, though Sam demurred and tried to foist the task onto his brother Orion. Wakeman “had never had a day’s schooling in his life, but had picked up worlds and worlds of knowledge at second-hand, and none of it correct,” Sam reminisced in his autobiography. “He was a liberal talker, and inexhaustibly interesting.”15
The day after Sam heard Wakeman relate the story about his visit to heaven, he crossed the isthmus by train, caught the Henry Chauncey at Aspinwall, reached New York on July 28, registered at the Westminster Hotel, and entrained on August 4 to Hartford to deliver his book manuscript to Bliss. He never set foot in California or Nevada again.
CHAPTER 17
Hartford, Elmira, and Buffalo
Marry be d——d. I am too old to marry. I am nearly 31. I have got gray hair in my head.
—Samuel Langhorne Clemens to Will Bowen, August 25, 1866
AFTER RETURNING FROM his visit to Hartford, Sam Clemens checked into the fashionable Everett House on Union Square in New York City. He visited Moses Beach at both his home on Columbia Street in Brooklyn and his summer house near Poughkeepsie, New York, to choose some of the photographs William James had taken during the Quaker City voyage for reproduction in The Innocents Abroad (1869), but because there were “such a multitude of them” Sam finally suggested that Elisha Bliss’s art editors make the selections. He had other plans—particularly to make his long-delayed first trip late in August to the Langdon home in Elmira, New York, a handsome brownstone mansion situated on three acres of prime real estate near downtown. With a population of about sixteen thousand, about the same size as Honolulu, the city was a major transportation center, a crossroads much like Hannibal had been in the 1850s, and a hub for both passenger and freight lines with a canal link between the Susquehanna and Chemung Rivers and the Erie Canal. Before the Civil War, moreover, Elmira was an important stop on the Underground Railroad—the Langdon mansion was connected by a tunnel to Park Church across Main Street and used to conceal fugitive slaves en route to Canada and freedom—and hosted such prominent abolitionist lecturers as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. During the war, a prisoner camp (Hellmira), the (im)moral equivalent of the rebel camp in Andersonville, South Carolina, had been located about a mile from town, where over twelve thousand captured rebel soldiers were incarcerated in squalid conditions and over three thousand of them died.1 Sam traveled to Elmira ostensibly to honor the invitation to visit extended to him the previous December by the Langdon family. He rekindled his friendship with Charley and Jervis Langdon and was introduced to Charley’s mother, his older sister Susan, and her husband Theodore Crane.
> But Sam also had an ulterior motive. He was infatuated with Charley’s younger sister Olivia. He had repeatedly protested his unsuitability for marriage during the past year on the grounds that he was too poor to support a spouse. “I want a good wife—I want a couple of them if they are particularly good,” he wrote his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks less than three weeks before meeting Livy for the first time,
but where is the wherewithal? It costs nearly two letters a week to keep me. If I doubled it, the firm would come to grief the first time anything happened to the senior partner. . . . [I]f I were settled I would quit all nonsense and swindle some poor girl into marrying me. But I wouldn’t expect to be “worthy” of her. I wouldn’t have a girl that I thought I was worthy of. She wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t be respectable enough.2
The Life of Mark Twain Page 68