Like Groucho Marx, he refused to join any club that would invite him to be a member. Moreover, as Sam joked in his Quaker City lecture, he believed that the institution of marriage was demonstrably a failure because the Sultan of Turkey had eight hundred wives and was still unhappy. Besides, he apparently continued to revel in his rowdy ways. On August 15, two weeks before arriving in Elmira, he wrote Frank Fuller, who had invested in a vulcanized rubber goods company, “Please forward one dozen Odorless Rubber Cundrums [condoms]—I don’t mind them being odorless—I can supply the odor myself.” With the nest egg from his western lectures and the pending publication of his book, he might wed respectably but not well. The genteel Olivia Langdon was so far socially superior to him that she should have been out of his reach. She had been born to wealth and privilege and was, as Sam later wrote, “the brightest jewel that ever adorned an earthly home,” whereas he had been born poor and had led a roustabout life on the river and in the mining camps. On the surface, Sam should have been welcome in the Langdon home for a day or two and then shown the door. Instead, he spent over two weeks there, from August 21 until September 8. As he wrote Bliss on August 25, “I am here, enjoying myself royally. Haven’t any desire to shorten my visit. I am getting acquainted with everybody. Shall be here nearly two weeks yet.” He later apologized to Livy for his “desperate temerity in venturing to locate myself for two weeks in a house where I was a stranger.” Hattie Lewis, also visiting Elmira at the time, observed that her “rich, beautiful and intellectual” cousin Livy “could not see through a joke, or see anything to laugh at in the wittiest sayings.” But Lewis soon realized that her own quickness “at seeing the point of a joke and the witty sayings that I had considered almost irresistible were simply nothing in comparison with my cousin’s gifts. Mr. C[lemens] evidently preferred her sense to my nonsense.” Livy’s sense of humor was so dry Sam once dubbed her “little Gravity”—with all four letters of “Livy” in sequence, as if the name were a contraction rather than a diminutive.3 Before Sam finally left in early September, he proposed marriage to the darling of the family and she brusquely refused him—she “said she never could or would love me”—though she agreed that he might write to her occasionally as though she were his “sister.”4 It was a setback but not a defeat. He beat a tactical retreat to plan not a blitzkrieg but a siege.
Early in the morning of September 8, before he and Charley left the Langdon home to visit the Fairbanks family in Cleveland, Sam wrote Livy the first of almost two hundred love letters he sent her over the next seventeen months.
Livy later told their daughter Susy that they were “the loveliest love letters that ever were written,” a hyperbolic statement that demonstrates her own faculty for fiction. In fact, the letters were utterly banal, predictable in their lachrymose effusions of affection, and even embarrassing in the context of his other writings. The tone in which Sam courted Livy from afar often seems strained, and his sweet nothings sometimes bordered on nothingness. “The impulse is strong upon me,” he began the first one,
to say to you how grateful I am to you and to all of you, for the patience, the consideration & the unfailing kindness which has been shown me ever since I came within the shadow of this roof, and which has made the past fortnight the sole period of my life unmarred by a regret. Unmarred by a regret. I say it deliberately. For I do not regret that I have loved you, still love & shall always love you. I accept the situation, uncomplainingly, hard as it is. Of old I am acquainted with grief, disaster & disappointment, & have borne these troubles as became a man. So, also, I shall bear this last & bitterest, even though it break my heart. I would not dishonor this worthiest love that has yet been born within me by any puerile thought, or word, or deed. It is better to have loved & lost you than that my life should have remained forever the blank it was before. For once, at least, in the idle years that have drifted over me, I have seen the world all beautiful, & known what it was to hope. For once I have known what it was to feel my sluggish pulses stir with a living ambition. The world that was so beautiful, is dark again; the hope that shone as the sun, is gone; the brave ambition is dead. Yet I say again, it is better for me that I have loved & do love you; that with more than Eastern devotion I worship you; that I lay down all of my life that is worth the living, upon this hopeless altar where no fires of love shall descend to consume it. If you could but—
But no more of this. I have said it only from that impulse which drives men to speak of great calamities which have befallen them, & so seek relief. I could not say it to give you pain. The words are spoken, & they have fallen upon forgiving ears. For your dear sake my tongue & my pen are now forbidden to repeat them ever again.
And so, henceforward, I claim only that you will let me freight my speeches to you with simply the sacred love a brother bears to a sister. I ask that you will write to me sometimes, as to a friend whom you feel will do all that a man may to be worthy of your friendship—or as to a brother whom you know will hold his sister’s honor as dearly as his own, her wishes as his law, her pure judgements above his blinded worldly wisdom. Being adrift, now, & rudderless, my voyage promises ill; but while the friendly beacon of your sisterly love beams through never so faintly through the fogs & the mists, I cannot be hopelessly wrecked. I shall not shame your confidence by speaking to you in future letters of this dead love whose requiem I have been chanting. No, I will not offend. I will not misunderstand you.
My honored sister, you are so good & so beautiful—& I am so proud of you! Give me a little room in that great heart of yours—only the little you have promised me—& if I fail to deserve it may I remain forever the homeless vagabond I am!
If you & mother Fairbanks will only scold me & upbraid me now & then, I shall fight my way through the world, never fear. Write me something from time to time—texts from the New Testament, if nothing else occurs to you—or dissertations on smoking—or extracts from your Book of Sermons—anything, whatever—the reflection that my matchless sister wrote it will be sufficient. If it be a suggestion, I will entertain it; if it be an injunction, I will honor it; if it be a command I will obey it or exhaust my energies trying.
And now, good-bye, my precious sister—& may all the sorrows which fate has ordained for you fall upon this foolish head of mine, which would be so glad & so proud to suffer them in your stead. I leave you to the ministering angels—for, daughter of earth as you are, they throng the air about you—they are with you, & such as you, always.
It was a letter unlike any other one extant that he had ever written before, and it was followed by dozens like it. As he admitted to Livy in December 1868, “I must get a little magniloquent in speech every time I think of you.”5
Sam and Charley spent a few days in Cleveland, where they were the guests of honor at a reception hosted by Abel and Mary Fairbanks at their home on St. Clair Street in the tony Bratenahl neighborhood. Charley, the former Interrogation Point, was “a good traveling comrade,” Sam reported to Livy, “& if he has any unworthy traits in his nature the partiality born of old companionship has blinded me to them.” Though he was never particularly fond of Abel Fairbanks, he was impressed by Cleveland, “a stirring, enterprising young city of a hundred thousand inhabitants.” His introduction to the local gentry in the mansions of Elmira and Cleveland seems to have turned his head. Whereas he had referred with populist contempt to merchant “princes of shoddy” in one of his Alta California letters in the spring of 1867, he now admired the fashionable houses along so-called Millionaires’ Row on Euclid Avenue, “one of the finest streets in America.” The homes there cost “$100,000 to ‘come in.’ Therefore, none of your poor white trash can live in that street.”6
Charley returned from Cleveland to Elmira, and Sam continued to St. Louis to visit his mother and sister for the first time since he left for the West in 1861, though he was depressed and disconsolate there. He yearned for “a cheerful day—an untroubled spirit. . . . I have not once been in a happy humor” in Missouri, he
wrote Mrs. Fairbanks, though he blamed his failure to “appear cheery even at my mother’s own fireside” on his “deep hatred of St. Louis” rather than his disappointment in love. He later admitted to his sister Pamela that he had been “savage & crazy in St Louis” because “I had just been refused by my idol a few days before.” Albert Bigelow Paine reports that Sam adored Livy “as little less than a saint, and she became, indeed, his saving grace.” He compared her to “an angel” in a letter addressed to her in early December 1868, even while admitting that he was “not fit to mate with an angel—I could not make myself fit.” In fact, Sam worshipped Livy as nothing less than an incarnation of the Holy Spirit. “Livy darling, precious little Comforter,” he once declared, “you have cast out the devil that possessed me for the present, & all is well.”7 On September 21 Sam wrote Livy to thank her for her prayers. “I would be less than a man,” he conceded, “if I went on in my old careless way while you were praying for me—if I showed lack of respect, worthiness, reverence, while the needs of one like me were being voiced in the august presence of God. I beg that you will continue to pray for me—for I have a vague, far-away sort of idea that it may not be wholly in vain.” Departing St. Louis on September 26, Sam paused in Cleveland that night and in Elmira for two days while returning east. He had planned to linger at the Langdon mansion for only one day, but as he was leaving for the train depot he fell backward from the buggy, suffered a bump on his head, and remained an extra twenty-four hours. He admitted later that he exaggerated the severity of the injury in order to prolong his stay: “I got not a bruise. I was not even jolted. Nothing was the matter with me at all.” But the extended visit, Sam remembered in his autobiography, “pushed my suit forward several steps.” The bruise became part of his courtship dance. He explained enigmatically in a letter to Mary Fairbanks at the time that in Elmira “the (friendly) correspondence was argued against & objected to before, but not this time”—that is, Livy had decided Sam might write her more intimate letters. According to Paine, he also confessed to Charley Langdon during this visit that he was in love with his sister, much to Charley’s consternation. Sam soon proposed a second time to Livy “in hot-blooded heedlessness” in a letter after his departure on September 29—and she refused a second time. She even chastised him for his overfamiliarity. “I accept the rebuke, severe as it was, & surely I ought to thank you for the lesson it brings. For it has brought me back to my senses. I walk upon the ground again—not in the clouds. . . . I am sorry,” he replied. “I will not offend again.” Still, Livy gave him one of her photographs, an endearment in the symbolic shorthand of the period.8
As soon became apparent, Livy expected to exact a steep price from Sam—his soul—in exchange for her hand in marriage. In a reverse Faustian bargain, she insisted that he become a Christian before she would consider him as anything more than just a friend; she feared a separation from her lover and future husband in the afterlife. Livy eventually relaxed her strictures. W. D. Howells remembered that in his presence she once told Sam, “Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you.” Like the speaker in one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, she was willing to sacrifice eternity to be damned with her husband:
And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
Without my right of frost,
Death’s privilege?
Still, in late October 1868, much as Livy’s parents acquiesced to his suit, Sam seemed to bend to the inevitable. He wrote his brother Orion an “excellent letter” to announce “that he is likely to become a Christian.”9
He had by this time met the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher, minister of Park Church, spiritual adviser to the Langdon family, and younger brother of Catherine Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Certainly he attended Beecher’s Sunday evening worship service at the Opera House in Elmira on February 21, 1869. Sam reminisced in his autobiography that Beecher was
deeply versed in the sciences, and his pulpit eloquence fell but little short of that of his great brother, Henry Ward. His was a keen intellect, and he was brilliant in conversation. . . . He was one of the best men I have ever known; also he was one of the best citizens I have ever known. To the end of his days he was looked up to in that town, by both sinner and saint, as a man whose judgment in matters concerning the welfare of the town was better and sounder than anyone else’s, and whose purity and integrity were unassailable. He was beloved and revered by all the citizenship.
When Beecher was accused of heterodoxy by other local clergy (whose congregations were dwindling in number as attendance at Beecher’s meetings was growing) and expelled from the local ministerial association, both Sam and Jervis Langdon rallied to his defense in the Elmira Advertiser—Sam in a characteristically sarcastic letter to the editor. “The Ministerial Union,” he quipped, had left Beecher “dangling in the air with no other support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of Christ.”10
In early October 1868 Sam also met Joseph Twichell, proponent of the Social Gospel and muscular Christianity, at a church sociable in the parlor of Elisha Bliss’s home on Asylum Street in Hartford. Twichell pastored the prosperous flock of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church (or the “Church of the Holy Speculators,” as Sam once christened it) and lived in a parsonage across the street from Bliss. Neither Sam nor Twichell was immediately attracted to the other. “I cannot say that at that point we were wholly sympathetic in either thought or feeling,” Twichell admitted later. “Our antecedent conditions and experience in life had been very different, and, in some ways, contrasted.” A graduate of Yale College and Andover Theological Seminary, Twichell had been a Union chaplain during the Civil War and had been ordained in January 1863. He epitomized the type of intellectual clergyman Sam admired, and his friendship with Sam at this crucial juncture could only have aided and abetted his courtship. He dined with the Twichell family on October 14 and heard Joe Twichell preach for the first time four days later. “I could hardly find words strong enough to tell how much I do think of that man,” Sam wrote Livy. After Sam attended Sunday services at his church, Twichell “apologized to me for talking so much about religion. He would not have done me that wrong if he had known how much I respected him for it & how beautiful his strong love for his subject made his words seem. When religion, coming from your lips & his, shall be distasteful to me, I shall be a lost man indeed.” After church Sam accompanied Twichell “to the alms house & helped him preach & sing to the inmates. (I helped in the singing, anyhow.)” He was characteristically struck by the “cripples, jibbering idiots, raving madmen,” and others confined to the institution. Twichell convened a party of local ministers at his house in late October to introduce them to Sam, who was surprised when they thanked him “fervently for having written & published certain trash which they said had lit up some gloomy days with a wholesome laugh.” As Sam wrote Livy, “I had not flattered myself before that a part of my mission on earth was to be a benefactor to the clergy.” In early November, Twichell sponsored Sam’s honorary membership in the Scroll and Key, a secret society at Yale College. Twichell’s wife Harmony asked him around this time why he did not marry and Sam
made no answer for a little, but, with his eyes bent on the floor, appeared to be deeply pondering. Then he looked up, and said slowly, in a voice tremulous with earnestness (with what sympathy he was heard may be imagined): “I am taking thought of it. I am in love beyond all telling with the dearest and best girl in the whole world. I don’t suppose she will marry me. I can’t think it possible. She ought not to. But if she doesn’t I shall be sure that the best thing I ever did was to fall in love with her, and proud to have it known that I tried to win her!”
Twichell was “about my age,” he wrote Livy; in fact, the minister and Sam remained the best of friends until Sam’s death forty years later.11
Against an uncertain future, Sam needed to bank as much money as possible. He launched a four-month, eight-state, forty-three-cit
y tour on November 17 showcasing the third version of his Quaker City lecture, “The American Vandal Abroad.” He gleaned his text from the manuscript of The Innocents Abroad and, to forestall any criticism, he omitted all derisive comments about the pilgrims and, after promising his sister Pamela that “there would be no scoffing at sacred things in my books or lectures,” he deleted virtually all references to the Holy Land. He booked some of the dates on his own, while he depended upon the Associated Western Literary Societies in Dubuque, Iowa, and the American Literary Bureau in New York to schedule most of the engagements. He charged a standard hundred-dollar speaking fee per date and paid his own expenses. As a result, his lectures were not particularly remunerative. While he bragged publicly about his “salary of twenty-six hundred dollars a month,” he confessed to his sister that “I spend about half as much money as I make.” He likely cleared less than three thousand dollars during the season.12 Not yet a headliner like Henry Ward Beecher, Anna Dickinson, or Wendell Phillips, who routinely were paid upwards of four hundred dollars per appearance, Sam was mostly booked to speak in the Midwest and the East in small and midsize cities rather than in the metropolises of Albany, Boston, Buffalo, Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia.
He opened his season at Case Hall in Cleveland, with Solon and Emily Severance in the audience, where he predictably enough received a boost from Mary Fairbanks’s favorable notice in the Cleveland Herald. She applauded Sam’s “quaint utterances,” his recitation of “funny incidents,” and
The Life of Mark Twain Page 69