Some commentators over the years have charged that Sam affected a self-reformation in order to marry Livy, that it was merely a part of his courtship ritual, or worse that he was mostly interested in the money she would inherit. Ambrose Bierce was among the first. Romancing an heiress, according to the irascible Bierce, “was not the act of a desperate man” but “the cool, methodical, cumulative culmination of human nature, working in the breast of an orphan hankering for someone with a fortune to love—someone with a bank account to caress.” Dixon Wecter asserted that “no better lover’s gambit could have been devised” than Sam’s make-believe conversion, and Allison Ensor has speculated that he merely acted “the part of returned prodigal, of sinner turned Christian.” Andrew Hoffman asserts that Sam “did not dare express himself with total honesty” and “feigned a religious faith he did not have.” Similarly, James M. Cox dismissed the “unfortunate sentimentality” of Sam’s love letters, and Fred Kaplan described Sam’s “brilliant performances.” Certainly to “have any chance of winning Livy’s hand,” Peter Messent observes, Sam “needed to turn over a moral new leaf.” Only slightly more charitably, other critics suggest he was guilty of self-delusion during his courtship. The most recent editors of his correspondence speculate that he “may well have been working a deception about his own character and beliefs,” though “it is impossible” to read his letters to Livy “without realizing that if he was, he was not aware of it at the time.” In any case, during their courtship he monitored Livy’s reading like a censorious school librarian. “Read nothing that is not perfectly pure,” he urged her. “Don Quixote is one of the most exquisite books that was ever written,” but “neither it nor Shakspeare are proper books for virgins to read until some hand has culled them of their grossness.” Instead he recommended such innocuous titles as Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House” and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.23
True enough, Sam wrestled with his own religious convictions, or more correctly his lack of them. In his love letters to Livy he twice invoked the example of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus as a model for his own transformation. Livy regularly sent him printed copies of Henry Ward Beecher’s sermons, and he once claimed in a letter to her while on tour that he had a variety of “religious experience” in an Indianapolis hotel room. True enough, too, during his courtship he temporarily stopped swearing and drinking hard liquor and he even offered to stop smoking (his “pet vice”) if Livy required the sacrifice. By December 1868, at her request, he had reduced his smoking to only a couple of hours on Sunday afternoons. “I’m ‘boss’ of the habit, now, & shall never let it boss me anymore,” he insisted to Joe Twichell. A year later, Sam assured Livy that he would “treat smoking exactly as I would treat the forefinger of my left hand. . . . If you asked me in all seriousness to cut that finger off . . . I give you my word I would cut it off.” As he confessed to Twichell, “I would deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral.” On Christmas 1868, a month before his engagement to Livy was formally announced, Sam swore off “all manner of tabooed beverages” and a year later, a month before their wedding, he admitted to Livy that he could not tell “but that I have fared considerably better in consequence, than I did formerly—& certainly I have not upon my soul the sin of leading others to dissipate.”24
Over the years he had in fact increased his consumption of cigars from a hundred a month at the age of eight to two hundred a month at the age of twenty and three hundred a month by the age of thirty. But in 1869, the year Sam turned thirty-four and he was courting Livy, he almost ceased smoking for “a year and a half. My health did not improve, because it was not possible to improve health which was already perfect.” As he bragged in his seventieth birthday speech in 1905, “I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn’t break my bonds.” But in truth he never broke the tobacco habit entirely because it was too ingrained. In a letter to Livy less than a month before their wedding, he dismissed all arguments that “moderate smoking is deleterious to me. I cannot attach any weight to either the arguments or the evidence of those who know nothing about the matter personally & so must simply theorize. . . . I have smoked habitually for 26 of my 34 years, & I am the only healthy member our family has. . . . My health is wholly faultless—& has been ever since I was 8 years old.” That is, he believed at the time and for most of the rest of his life that smoking in moderation was merely a “harmless pleasure.”25 He soon resumed his daily ration of cigars.
Moreover, he at least twice told Livy flagrant lies during their engagement to excuse his former behavior. “I have not now, & never had, any love for any kind of liquors,” he insisted in late December 1868, “& not even a passable liking for any but champagne & ale, & only for these at intervals.” And he claimed a month later that, notwithstanding his frequent moves, he had been “a wanderer from necessity, three-fourths of my time—a wanderer from choice only one-fourth.” Wandering was “not my habit, nor my proclivity.” Livy bought at least the latter lie. She wrote Alice Hooker that “everything in the future is very uncertain as Mr. Clemens is not settled anywhere, but he is very tired of the wandering life that he has been leading.” While he pledged to abandon his vagabondage just as he promised to temper his smoking and drinking, he in fact was never cured of it. He conceded to Mary Fairbanks in September 1869, during his courtship of Livy, that he felt “a sort of itching in my feet” and “if my life were as aimless as of old, my trunk would be packed, now.” Soon after their marriage, according to Annie Adams Fields, Jervis Langdon even tried to bribe Sam to mend his habits. If his son-in-law promised to “leave off smoking and drinking ale,” Langdon agreed to pay him ten thousand dollars and sponsor a trip with his bride to Europe, but Sam refused to “sell myself.” He was constitutionally opposed to temperance on the grounds that it “only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.” When work on his next book stalled the next year, moreover, he reverted to some of his profligate behavior. He needed “a cigar to steady my nerves” to write and a glass of ale “to go to sleep.” Even Mother Fairbanks eventually realized that “my apron string is no check to you.”26
Still, in some significant ways Sam reformed his behavior forever during his courtship and after his marriage. He readily admitted that he had been “a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me.” Under the influence of Livy, her mother, and “domestic feminists” like Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who believed that through their traditional roles as wives and mothers they might work to reform the world, he outgrew his bias against so-called petticoat tyranny. “You cannot do Anna Dickinson’s work,” he wrote Livy from Cleveland in January 1869, but
she cannot do yours. Livy you might as well reproach yourself for not being able to win bloody victories in battle, like Joan of Arc. In your sphere you are as great, & as noble, & as efficient as any Joan of Arc that ever lived. Be content with the strength that God has given you & the station He has given into your charge—& don’t be discouraged & unsettled by Anna Dickinson’s incendiary words. I like Anna Dickinson, & admire her grand character, & have often & over again made her detractors feel ashamed of themselves; but I am thankful that you are not the sort of woman that is her ideal, & grateful that you never can be.
While at first glance Sam’s comments may seem sexist, Laura Skandera-Trombley explains that his admonition is “practically identical to the advice Dickinson dispensed to young women coming to her asking what could they do to aid the cause. Dickinson’s response was that not every woman could be on the frontlines; that the best offense was to show what a woman can be in the world. If you want a ‘mission,’ I find there are plenty of house-keepers, but very few home-makers. There is something to do and an e
xample to set.” In short, Livy was no shrinking violet or emasculating shrew, “no pampered darling of a wealthy family” or “hysterical hypochondriac,” no mere “angel in the house.” In a letter to Mother Fairbanks cowritten with Sam shortly after their union, Olivia defiantly proclaimed, “I am women’s rights.” Livy was more than a “True Woman,” if she was not quite a “New Woman.” Her marriage to Sam was more than a conventional mid-Victorian union, and Sam prospered under Livy’s tutelage. He asserted in “The Temperance Insurrection” (1874) that “in extending the suffrage to women this country could lose absolutely nothing and might gain a great deal.” Or as he put it less felicitously elsewhere in the same essay, “our last chance . . . to save the country” would be for “women to be raised to the political altitude of the negro, the imported savage, and the pardoned thief, and allowed to vote.” As he declared from the stage in 1901, “For twenty-five years I’ve been a woman’s rights man.” In 1895 Sam asserted in his notebook that “no civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.” In chapter 32 of Following the Equator (1897), he contended that the “arguments against woman suffrage have always taken the easy form of prophecy. The prophets have been prophesying ever since the women’s rights movement began [at the Seneca Falls Convention] in 1848—and in forty seven years they have never scored a hit.” In an interview in 1909, four months before his death, he again insisted that he had “advocated [women’s suffrage] earnestly for the last fifty years,”27 exaggerating the period of his commitment to the cause by only a decade.
Sam returned to the stump in Rondout, on the Hudson River north of New York, on December 2 and at the Newark Opera House on December 9, 1868. The Newark Courier praised Sam’s “quaint humor and eloquent and powerful description” and pronounced it “beyond all question the most enjoyable lecture of the season.” The Newark Advertiser shared the sentiment: “The audience was constantly convulsed with laughter, and was continued in its happy humor by quiet touches of wit.” Even Sam regarded it as the “most superb success I ever achieved.” He traveled the next day to Albany, where he spent the night at the Delavan House en route to Norwich, New York, where he “preached” the evening of December 11 before a “full house” and “gave satisfaction.” He spoke in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on December 16 and in Fort Plain, New York, three days later. One critic in upstate New York ignorantly accused him of affecting a “Down East” accent and impersonating a “shrewd, fun-loving, genuine ‘live Yankee.’”28 After pausing overnight in Elmira, Sam headed to Michigan.
Upon arriving in Detroit on December 21 he acknowledged to Livy that he wished he “never had to travel any more”—a frequent refrain in his correspondence for years to come—and pined for a permanent home. “You can’t imagine how dreadfully wearing this lecturing is, Livy,” he allowed. “I begin to be appalled at the idea of doing it another season.” He was especially inconvenienced when he was compelled to lodge in a private home, often the house of a lecture committeeman, because the lyceum series was underfunded. An itinerant speaker “dreads a private house . . . more than he dreads 200 miles of railway travel,” he admitted to Livy. “In spite of yourself you respect their unholy breakfast hours—you can’t help it—& then you feel drowsy & miserable for two days & you give two audiences a very poor lecture.” Local hosts also felt obliged to escort visitors on tours of their villages. “I had to submit to the customary & exasperating drive around town in a freezing open buggy this morning,” he once complained. The sites/sights always consisted
of the mayor’s house; the ex-mayor’s house; the house of a State Senator; house of an ex-governor; house of a former member of Congress; the public school with its infernal architecture; the female seminary; paper mill or factory of some kind or other; the cemetery; the court house; the plaza; the place where the park is going to be—& I must sit & shiver & stare at a melancholy grove of skeleton trees & listen while my friend gushes enthusiastic statistics & dimensions. All towns are alike—all have the same stupid trivialities to show, & all demand an impossible interest at the suffering stranger’s hands. . . . I only have to submit to these inflictions when I am the guest of somebody & cannot refuse to suffer in return for his hospitality.
Under the circumstances, he preferred hotels. “When I am paying my own bills at a hotel,” he explained, he might “say No Sir—not any village wonders for the subscriber, if you please.” He was even more emphatic a couple of years later: “Hotels are the only proper places for lecturers. When I am ill natured I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel—where I can ring up a domestic & give him a quarter & then break furniture over him—then I go to bed calmed & soothed, & sleep as peacefully as a child.”29
Sam was welcomed by audiences across Michigan during the final days of 1868. His lecture at Young Men’s Hall in Detroit on December 22 was well attended—“1,000 or 1,100 people there,” he wrote Livy. The Detroit Advertiser and Tribune reported that his description of moonlit Athens was “among the most wonderful that are suggested by any city of the world”; the Detroit Post commended his “eminently dry” wit; and the Detroit Republican lauded his “immense” joking and “intensely funny” anecdotes. But Sam “was not at all satisfied with my performance” because “I was awkward & constrained” and “ill at ease,” and the Detroit Free Press shared his reservations: While the lecture “was decidedly good,” Sam’s delivery of it “was not what might have been expected, an assumed drawl, though very taking and appropriate at times, spoiling the effect of many of the finest sentences.” In Charlotte, Michigan, two nights later, he held “the audience spell-bound,” according to the Charlotte Republican, whose reporter also exonerated Sam from charges of impiety: “There was not a word” in the lecture “to disturb anyone’s belief, religious or political.” The next evening he spoke before “the largest audience that has ever attended any lecture” at Mead’s Hall in Lansing. He was introduced by Samuel H. Row, the state commissioner of insurance, who noticed during the talk that Sam was “sweating blood” because the audience failed to cotton to his humor. Row began to clap his hands, stamp his feet, and cheer until the audience finally fell in line. The Lansing State Republican averred in its review that Sam’s wit was “eminently dry, and the force of his manner, which is natural and not affected”—this in defense of his “long talk,” or drawl—“made it still more striking.” After spending Christmas in Elmira he closed the year in Akron, where he “captured” the standing-room-only audience.30
During the first two weeks of January, Sam barnstormed across Indiana and Illinois. He spoke before a “respectable audience” at Hamilton’s Hall in Fort Wayne on January 3, and the local reviewers again were complimentary. The Fort Wayne Democrat opined that the lecture was “one of the finest . . . that it has ever been our pleasure” to hear, and the Fort Wayne Gazette similarly praised the “very amusing and interesting lecture” with its “passages of great beauty and eloquence.” Sam was received less cordially at Metropolitan Hall in Indianapolis the next evening. The Indianapolis Journal conceded that the impression left by his first few sentences—his ghastly description of a flayed body—was “anything but favorable,” though he recovered “so suddenly, so thoroughly, and so pleasantly” that by “the close of the lecture, the doubter at first is a willing and delighted captive, drinking in every word,” and concluded that Sam’s wit was “always of the highest order.” But the Indianapolis Sentinel panned his performance. Its critic carped that “of all the miserable speaking ever heard, Mark Twain certainly can get up the poorest. Imagine a singsong snuffling tone from the nose, never varying six notes, and frequently mumbling out so that no one could understand it.” The Sentinel reviewer was so critical that he admonished Sam to “quit lecturing.” Still, the Rockford, Illinois, Register declared that his talk there in Brown’s Hall on January 6 was so entertaining “that scarce a breathing spell was afforded between the outbursts.” The Chicago Tribune reported that Sam’s lecture at Library Hall in the Windy
City on January 7 “was good and the attendance large”; the Chicago Times added that his “recital was interspersed with anecdotes, comparisons, and incidents which were highly interesting, and frequently utterly ridiculous and absurd”; and the Chicago Republican pronounced Sam “a brilliant wit.” His humor played well in Peoria, too, where he spoke before an audience of about twelve hundred at Rouse’s Opera House the evening of January 11 and, as he wrote Mother Fairbanks, achieved a “fine success.” The Peoria Transcript extolled Sam as “a man of high natural ability and considerable culture.” He lectured the next night in Decatur before “a large and respectable audience”; and his talk at the Methodist Church in Ottawa, Illinois, before a “large audience” a few evenings later, according to the Ottawa Free Trader, was “amusing and droll,” though Sam considered it a “botch” and his delivery “lame” because “the church was harder to speak in than an empty barrel would have been.” As he wrote Livy, “I just hobbled miserably through, apologized,” and “bade the house good-night.” Twenty years later, Sam mused in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court about a humorous lecturer who flooded a church audience “with the killingest jokes for an hour and never got a laugh” because, a parishioner explained, “it was all [the listeners] could do to keep from laughin’ right out in meetin’.”31
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