Sam appeared before a full house and “made a handsome success,” as he crowed even before he read the reviews the next morning, having inferred his triumph from the response of the crowd. As he had asserted in 1865, “Pay no attention to the papers, but watch the audience. A silent crowd is damning censure.” The next day the local reviewers affirmed his judgment. The Boston Transcript, the local newspaper of record, observed that “at the early part of the lecture there was evidently some disappointment” but Sam “soon was in favor with his hearers, and the last two-thirds of the production were richly enjoyed. Mr. Clemens is truly an original lecturer, his manner being as unique as the matter. . . . His most ludicrous jokes were related with a serious air that imparted a fresh flavor to them.” The Boston Herald announced the lecture was “a rare treat, and all who were fortunate enough to hear it will remember its rich and racy points as long as they live,” and the Evening Journal noted that he was “very cordially received” and “frequently rewarded with hearty laughter and applause.” The Boston Advertiser concluded that if Sam could “please everywhere as he pleased in Boston last night, he will be sure to make his fortune if he does not become a standard author.” The Boston Post concurred: “The lecturer’s observations were always amusing, frequently uncontrollably laughable, and continually applauded.” William S. Robinson, the Boston correspondent of the Springfield Republican, concluded that Sam was “not only a genuine humorist,—that we all know,—but an enjoyable and successful lecturer.” The Boston correspondent of the Hartford Courant reported that Sam “kept his audience in a suppressed giggle for an hour,” and the Boston correspondent of the Sacramento Union proclaimed that the lecture “was a perfect success; rarely, if ever, does a Boston audience yield so instantly to the summons” of a speaker “as did his.” In the only surviving letter Livy wrote Sam during their courtship, she expressed her pride and happiness “that you succeeded so well in Boston.”75
After passing this litmus test, Sam was fairly launched on his tour. He allowed to Mother Fairbanks on November 19 that he had “an easy time of it this year—talk nearly altogether in New England, & shall close during the last week in January.” He was unable to accept all invitations to speak but, unlike the previous winter when he traveled long distances between lectures, he no longer blew like a feather in a whirlwind. Instead, he lodged at the opulent Young’s Hotel on Court Avenue in downtown Boston—well known for its fashionable billiard room—and socialized in Redpath’s office with other hundred-dollar-a-night lecturers such as Josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby.
Sam reported in the Express that he found public lecturing “a pleasant business in New England. The railway trips are short, and so they are never fatiguing.” He traveled a few short hours to many of his engagements in such towns as Warren, Hudson, and Waltham, Massachusetts, during the day and slept in the same bed every night. His speaking style was so unusual that he was sometimes criticized by reviewers who expected more conventional performances. A reporter in Norwich, Connecticut, condemned as “verging on indecency” Sam’s opening remarks about the statue of a skinless man and urged him to abandon his clownish manners; and another in Holyoke, Massachusetts, expressed surprise that Sam should even “allow himself to be advertised as a lecturer.” But he appeared before a “vast audience” at Allyn Hall in Hartford the evening of November 23 and, according to the Hartford Courant, “made as decided a hit . . . as he did in Boston.” Six nights later he lectured at the Congregational Church in Newtonville, Massachusetts, where the Newton Journal reported that he elicited “shouts of laughter,” though the next night in Thompsonville, Connecticut, according to the Springfield Republican, his audience “was far from pleased” with his jokes. After spending the evening of November 31 with Twichell in Hartford, he headed south early in the morning of December 1 for Brooklyn. That evening he appeared at the Bedford Avenue Reformed Church, where he was interrupted by “ever recurring peals of laughter,” according to the Brooklyn Times, by an audience “whose senses of appreciation were unmistakably tickled in the right spot,” according to the Brooklyn Eagle. A week later he was welcomed at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia by one of the largest audiences ever to fill the hall, and the critics raved about his performance. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin struck a surprising note in its review the next morning: “we believe that he may, if he chooses, exercise a very considerable influence as a reformer.” Similarly, the Philadelphia Inquirer pronounced the lecture “a decided success.” The next night, at Lincoln Hall in Washington, D.C., he was introduced by the Civil War general Ambrose Burnside and proceeded to convulse “his hearers with laughter” and win “a success of the most decided character,” the National Republican declared. The Evening Star commended the “slow passionless manner in which he gets off a good thing” and his “eloquent and pathetic as well as droll” comments, though the Morning Chronicle disagreed: in the opinion of some auditors he “fell rather below the estimate which had been formed of him from his humorous writings.” The Chronicle reviewer remembered that Sam had delivered an earlier version of his Sandwich Islands lecture in Georgetown in February 1868 and regretted “that most of his really good stories are familiar to his audience before he tells them.”76
Back in Connecticut a week later, Sam bragged to Livy that he “had a packed house in New Britain.” At Armory Hall in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on the evening of December 15, however, he suffered from a severe cold and, as the Providence Journal reported, his voice was “dry and husky.” As a result, the Pawtucket Gazette and Chronicle was lukewarm in its praise: the lecture was “intensely interesting to those who were intensely interested.” Sam was “a fair lecturer,” this reviewer concluded, “but he writes much better than he talks.” He was in better voice a week later in Portland, Maine, where he was hailed in the Eastern Argus as “the first of living humorists” and his talk “one of the most pleasing and satisfactory entertainments of the whole course.” The Portland Transcript added that Sam “entertained the audience with a comical mingling of sense and nonsense.” In Rockport, Massachusetts, the evening of December 23, however, his shtick flopped, as often was the case in small towns and intimate venues. (Years after he abandoned the stage, Sam reminisced that a “country audience is the difficult audience; a passage which it will approve with a ripple will bring a crash in the city. A fair success in the country means a triumph in the city.”) According to the Cape Ann Advertiser, Sam “contrived to conceal his wit and humor so adroitly that his audience found it very difficult to detect it.” At the Music Hall in New Haven the evening of December 27, however, he “spoke in a very droll, sang froid sort of manner” for over an hour before a “fair audience,” and the Morning Journal and Courier reported that his “listeners were well pleased.” Similarly, the next evening a large audience in Trenton, New Jersey, expressed admiration for his performance, and on December 29 Sam entertained a large and “very intelligent audience” at the Newark Opera House with “his inconceivably droll sayings and sagacious thoughts.” The critic for the Newark Advertiser, however, reached a very different conclusion from the Philadelphia reviewer who considered Sam an incipient reformer. He interpreted the lecture as a broad critique of doomed missionary efforts to civilize the “savages” and inferred from Sam’s remarks that it was “impossible to materially modify the nature or the ways of the negroes and brown races.” Though Sam regarded his Newark appearance the previous December his “most superb success” of the season, the Newark Advertiser was disappointed on this occasion: “The entertainment lasted about an hour, and closed with the repetition of a few ancient ‘yarns,’ most of which could be found in last year’s almanac. As a whole, Mr. Clemens did not make so favorable an impression as last year.”77
All the while Sam was enlarging his circle of influential acquaintances. Sometime during the weeks he lodged at Young’s Hotel in Boston and after the publication of Howells’s review of The Innocents Abroad in the December 1869 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, whi
ch appeared on November 16, Sam visited the editorial offices of the magazine on Tremont Street to meet Howells and express his appreciation for the notice. Howells remembered forty years later that with “his crest of dense red hair and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache,” Sam was protected from the winter weather by a sealskin coat he had bought in Buffalo.78 Two years later, these two young men of letters forged a permanent friendship. Much as Mary Mason Fairbanks became Sam’s moral mentor and Joe Twichell his best friend and confidant, Howells became his editor and trusted literary adviser. It is no coincidence that during the period of his courtship and early marriage Sam cultivated lifelong friendships with these three people, who epitomized middle-class respectability. Fourteen months younger than Sam, Howells was a fellow westerner (from Ohio) and, like Sam, a former printer’s devil and journalist. He had penned a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, when Sam was still piloting steamboats, and been rewarded by an appointment as U.S. consul in Venice. In 1865 he settled in Boston, the literary center of the nation, and in 1871 he would succeed James T. Fields as editor of the Atlantic. In that office he shaped the literary tastes of the nation for the next decade.
Sam also crossed paths with Frederick Douglass, the most eminent civil rights activist of his generation and a Langdon family friend, on December 15, a week after Douglass delivered his landmark speech in Boston in defense of Chinese immigration, “The Composite Nation.” Douglass “seemed exceedingly glad to see me,” Sam reported to Livy, “& I certainly was glad to see him, for I do so admire his ‘spunk.’” A decade later he urged President Rutherford B. Hayes to retain Douglass in the office of marshal of the District of Columbia in return for “his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race.”79
Meanwhile, Livy and her parents traveled to New York to purchase her bridal trousseau (and, unknown to Sam, to furnish the house in Buffalo that Jervis Langdon had bought his daughter and her husband as a wedding gift). Sam joined them as often as possible between speaking dates—for example, most of the week of December 1–6 and the evening and morning of December 10–11. He also squeezed a weeklong visit to Elmira beginning on New Year’s Day into his itinerary before returning to the road in early January for the final frenetic seventeen days and fourteen engagements of his season. Livy accompanied him to the first of these dates, in Owego, New York, on January 4, though Sam was disappointed by his performance and apologized to her: “I was a dead body that night & so I never succeeded in infusing life into that torpid Owego house.” He apparently delivered an abridged hourlong version of his lecture—the Owego Times remarked that some listeners faulted its “seeming brevity,” though added that it was “superbly entertaining.” The Owego Gazette noted that nevertheless “all went away satisfied, after a full hour of side-splitting laughter.” After appearing before a small crowd in Cohoes, near Troy, New York, on January 7, Sam complained to Redpath that the lyceum in that “one horse” town was “another infernal no-season-ticket concern.” He confided to Livy in his exasperation that he “wouldn’t do another lecture season unless I were in absolute want, almost.” He apparently again delivered an abridged version of the lecture because the local paper reported that “the audience was somewhat disappointed” by the length of the address. Three nights later at Tweddle Hall in Albany, however, he attracted “the biggest audience of the whole season” and several hundred people were turned away for lack of seats. The Albany Evening Journal commended the lecture (“droll and interesting”) and the Albany Argus the lecturer (“the best humorist now before the public”). He addressed a “noble” and “enormous house” in Utica the evening of January 14 and the Utica Observer reported the next day that “from the first appearance of the lecturer upon the stage, to the close of the lecture, the audience were kept in as good humor as they are while reading one of his inimitable sketches.” Sam complained to Livy in a letter written afterward, however, that “my nerves, & my whole physical economy, are shattered with the wear & tear of traveling, lecturing, ten thousand petty annoyances & vexations, & an unusual loss of sleep.” He rested for a few hours at a Syracuse hotel while en route to Ogdensburg on January 18.80
After speaking that evening, he shuffled off to Buffalo to spend part of the next day—the only time he landed in the city during his four-month absence from the Express—before continuing to Fredonia, where he spoke at the Normal School that night. He enjoyed another “delightful audience” there, and he “thought it was about as good a lecture as I ever listened to.” The Fredonia Censor similarly commended Sam, noting that he “incorporated enough good sense and interesting information with the fun in his lecture on the Sandwich Islands to prevent any regrets over an evening spent merely for nonsense, and the jokes were consequently the more enjoyed.”81
Sam’s last two appearances of the tour were disappointing, however. His talk in Hornellsville, New York, on January 20 was, according to the local paper, “a fizzle,” and his lecture at Institute Hall in Jamestown the next evening was panned unmercifully. One of his reviewers, under the signature “Many Citizens,” griped with enviable obduracy in the Jamestown Journal that Sam had disgusted his listeners with his reference to the native diet of “baked dogs” and his offer “to illustrate cannibalism if anyone would send up a baby to the platform.” This attendee clearly expected to be more edified than entertained. “I might go on,” he continued, to show “the irrelevancy and senselessness of nearly all his lecture. It was entirely worthless. . . . I went there expecting to hear something thrilling and original about these interesting islands and this trash was all he had to offer. Some silly young people laughed, though what they could see to laugh at, I don’t know.” The editor of the Journal, Coleman Bishop, attempted to excuse Sam’s transgressions in the next edition, though he succeeded only in exacerbating the problem. The lecture, Bishop explained, “was not intended as a moral reform effort, an historical essay, an archeological research, a political stump speech, a description of scenery, a recounting of travel and adventure—or anything else.” It was unmitigated, “cool-headed nonsense.” Put another way, “it was a lamentable failure” as a serious lecture but “viewed from the humorous side it was capital.” This was not the defense Sam would have wanted, and he predictably repudiated the comments of the “sanctimonious buzzard” who penned it. The Journal (presumably Bishop) continued to heckle Sam for weeks. He had sold forty thousand copies of The Innocents Abroad, the paper reported, and he “‘sold’ an equal number of innocents at home, if this place is any index of his success as a drawing lecturer. As a seller of innocents” he was “a success.” There was little wonder that the next year Sam urged Redpath not to book him in Jamestown again “unless Providence compels you. I suppose all lecturers hate that place.”82
The review of his performance in Jamestown by “Many Citizens” and Bishop’s limp defense of it stuck like a bone in Sam’s craw for years. Rarely one to forgive or forget an insult, he vented his anger and frustration in a letter addressed to his pseudonymous critic in 1886 but never mailed. “I have long waited to meet you, get acquainted with you and kill you,” he began. “You wrote that thing about my lecture sixteen years ago, in the Jamestown, N.Y. Journal—property of that ostentatiously pious, half-human Bishop.” He conceded that it had been “a poor lecture and poorly delivered,” but he insisted that he had been “fagged with railway travel. Do you suppose it improved matters any for you to come out in print and tell the implacable truth about it? I was at a disadvantage; I was on my back, so to speak. Did you consider it magnanimous to jump on me with your boots?”83
Still, the “rascally pilgrimage” through the provinces had ended and he was determined never to lecture again for money, a resolution he often reiterated during the winter and spring of 1870 in letters to Mother Fairbanks (“I lecture no more after this season, unless dire necessity shall compel me”), his former manager Frank Fuller (“I’m out of the lecture field permanently”), his manager James Redpath (“I am out of
the field permanently”), and his friend and fellow humorist Benjamin P. Shillaber (“I believe I am out of the lecture field & I tell you it is imperial luxury to believe it, too”). Sam expected to earn his living in future as a newspaper editor and author of books. After his wedding he hoped that he would never again be separated from Livy for such an extended period. As he wrote her with unabashed ardor from Hornellsville on January 20,
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