This, my precious Livy, is the last letter of a correspondence that has lasted seventeen months—the pleasantest correspondence I ever had a share in. For over two months of the time, we wrote every other day. During the succeeding twelve months we have written every day that we have been parted from each other. Your letters have made one ray of sunlight & created a thrill of pleasure in every one of these long-drawn days, howsoever dreary the day was otherwise.
He assured her that it was “the last long correspondence we ever shall have.”84 He left for Elmira after his lecture in Jamestown and arrived at the Langdon mansion on January 22.
The same day, Sam wrote Elisha Bliss to ask how much he was owed in quarterly royalties for The Innocents Abroad, and Bliss replied by mailing him a check for $4,309 on sales of about 23,500 copies. Sam had plenty of cash on hand on his wedding day. For the next week and a half he welcomed and entertained out-of-town guests, including J. N. Larned from Buffalo, Abel and Mary Mason Fairbanks from Cleveland, the Twichells from Hartford, and his sister Pamela and niece Annie from St. Louis. Some of them, including Mother Fairbanks, thought Livy was too good for him. He also notified friends out west of the pending nuptials. As he wrote Jim Gillis, Livy was even “lovelier than the peerless ‘Chaparral Quails’” whom he and Gillis had wooed five years earlier in Tuolomne County.85
The marriage was finally solemnized at seven in the evening on Wednesday, February 2. Before about a hundred friends and family in the parlor of the Langdon mansion, with Joe Twichell and Thomas K. Beecher officiating, Sam and Livy pledged their love, according to Mother Fairbanks, in a “quiet, impressive ceremony.” Hardly the oaf of legend, the groom behaved “with charming grace and dignity.” Should readers of the Cleveland Herald have thought Mary Fairbanks violated the couple’s privacy by reporting the wedding, she wrote in her own defense that “‘Mark Twain’ belongs to the public which has a right to know.” Sam was so well known a public personality that his wedding was, in fact, reported in newspapers across the nation and the humorist B. P. Shillaber congratulated the couple in six stanzas of forgettable but widely reprinted verse; for example,
And better far than all, dear Mark,
Thou’st found the matrimonial ark
In which the true who there embark
Find many a charm,
That prudence whispers those who hark
To save from harm.
The next day, in lieu of a wedding journey, the bride and groom as well as a party of about twenty guests took to the rails in a palace car to Buffalo. “We shall not be likely to stir from that town for several months, for neither of us are fond of traveling,” Sam wrote Mother Fairbanks. Most of the party registered at the Tifft House, the most luxurious hotel in the city, while Sam expected to nestle with Livy in the boardinghouse—“of as respectable a character as my light salary as editor [of the Express] would command”—that he had commissioned John D. F. Slee to locate for them. Slee replied that he had succeeded in finding a suitable abode, two furnished rooms in a house “on one of our most pleasant streets” featuring “a Bay Window with Eastern and Southern exposure” available for only twenty dollars a week, including gas. The house was owned by a small family “with no predilection for taking boarders, and consenting to the present arrangement only because of the anticipated pleasure of your company.”86
Upon their arrival, Slee escorted Sam and Livy to a three-story brick home with a stable and carriage house on a half acre of property on fashionable Delaware Avenue, much to Sam’s dismay. Why had Slee rented rooms for them in so exclusive and expensive a neighborhood? When they entered the house, as Sam remembered in his autobiography, his “indignation reached high-water mark” and he berated Slee “for being so stupid as to put us into a boarding-house whose terms would be far out of my reach.” He subsequently admitted to Slee “that never in his life did he have such an intoxicating rush of pleasure” as when Livy told him that “this was our home.” Then Jervis Langdon presented Sam with the deed to the house and a check to assist in its maintenance. His father-in-law had bought it for twenty thousand dollars and spent another twenty thousand to furnish and staff it with a maid named Ellen, a cook and housekeeper named Harriet, and the coachman Patrick McAleer, who remained in the family livery for the next twenty-one years. Both a horse and a carriage were included in the gift, and even the coal bin was full and the pantry stocked. Utterly nonplussed, Sam facetiously declared that the surprise gift was “a first class swindle.” A few days later, he referred to it as an “Aladdin’s palace,” as though he were living a fantasy from the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, and he jokingly characterized himself as “Little Sammy in Fairy Land.” He wrote John McComb in San Francisco that he “never, never, never, expected to be the hero of a romance in real life” until he had been cast in the role and that the check for overhead “was not necessary, for my book and lecturing keep me equal to minor emergencies.” He assured Livy’s mother in late February that their home was
the daintiest, & the most exquisite & enchanting that can be found in all America—& the longer we know it the more fascinating it grows & the firmer the hold it fastens upon each fettered sense. It is perfect. Perfect in all its dimensions, proportions & appointments. It is filled with that nameless grace which faultless harmony gives. The colors are all rich, & all beautiful, & all blended & interchanged & interwoven without a single marring discord. Our home is a ceaseless, unsurfeiting feast for the eye & the soul, & the whole being. It is a constant delight. It is a poem, it is music—& it speaks & it sings, to us, all the day long.
He soon reiterated the point to Livy’s father: “our home is as quiet & peaceful as a monastery, & yet as bright & cheerful as sunshine without & sunshine within can make it.” To add to their joy, Livy was pregnant within the first month of their marriage. As Sam wrote a boyhood friend, “I was married a month ago & so have cast away the blue goggles of bachelordom & now look at the world through the crystal lenses of my new estate.”87
As her wifely role required, Livy supervised the servants and managed the household accounts. “Livy makes a most excellent little housekeeper, & I always knew she would,” Sam assured her parents. “Everything goes on as smoothly as if it were worked by hidden machinery. The servants are willing & entirely respectful toward her (which they had better be.)” He boasted to Redpath that he had “a lovely wife, a lovely house, bewitchingly furnished, a lovely carriage, & a coachman whose style & dignity are simply awe-inspiring—nothing less.” After spending a few days with Sam in Buffalo in March, Petroleum V. Nasby reported in the Toledo Blade that Livy was “a beautiful, accomplished, lovable woman.” Joe Goodman, who visited the Clemenses in Buffalo in April 1870, was flabbergasted by the changes he witnessed in Sam’s behavior since the Virginia City days, particularly his adherence to mid-Victorian standards of bourgeois respectability. Goodman arrived at the house on Delaware Avenue “just before dinner time,” he remembered in 1908, and Sam escorted him to his room and showed him “a fresh bottle of whiskey on the table.” He had persuaded Livy to permit him to buy it, according to Goodman,
by telling her it was awful sinful, of course, but that I had lived in sin all my life and she couldn’t expect to reform me except by gradations. We took a pull at the bottle and went down to dinner. I was talking and laughing and running on at about forty knots, when I suddenly observed that there was nothing doing—that everybody seemed to be waiting for me to finish; so I shut up at once. Then Mark bowed his head and began in a sepulchral voice: “O Lord, for that we are about to receive”—I couldn’t restrain myself, it was so absurd; I just snorted, and Mark finished amid my uncontrollable laughter. Afterwards, by ourselves, I asked him when the change of heart had occurred. “Oh, Hell! There isn’t any change,” he said. “Of course, I don’t believe in it, but Livy does, and I want to do everything I can to please her; so I try to go through with it solemnly and reverently.”
If Sam’s manner was mild, his manor was stylish, in sh
arp contrast to the shack in Florida, Missouri, where he was born and the austere house on Main Street in Hannibal where he had lived as a child. Four days after the wedding, Sam wrote Will Bowen—his “First, & Oldest, & Dearest Friend”—back in Missouri that Livy was
the best girl, & the sweetest, & the gentlest, & the daintiest [the same word he used to describe his new house], & the most modest & unpretentious, & the wisest in all things she should be wise in & the most ignorant in all matters it would not grace her to know, & she is sensible & quick, & loving & faithful, forgiving, full of charity—& her beautiful life is ordered by a religion that is all kindliness & unselfishness.
She was, he said, “the only sweetheart I ever loved.” On her part, Livy wrote her sister Sue that she and Sam were “as happy people as you ever saw. Our days seem to be made up of only bright sunlight, with no shadow in them.” She echoed the observation in a note to her parents: they were “as happy as two mortals can well be” and she was “perfectly happy in this new home,” though she missed them and the luxury of the mansion in Elmira. She well understood that “the clouds will come some time, but I pray that when they do I may be woman enough to meet them.”88 Unfortunately, the storms would gather sooner than expected.
CHAPTER 18
Buffalo Exitus
Our year and a half in Buffalo had so saturated us with horrors and distress that we became restless and wanted to change, either to a place with pleasanter associations or with none at all.
—Autobiography of Mark Twain
WITHIN A MONTH of his marriage, Sam Clemens began to suspect that the Buffalo Express was not as profitable as he had been led to believe and that he and Jervis Langdon had been shown doctored account books by Josephus N. Larned and George H. Selkirk—a suspicion he never proved. But the gild was off the lily, and he soon lost interest in daily journalism. Never inured to the daily grind of editing, after his barnstorming tour and his wedding he took little part in the day-to-day operation of the paper and, for perhaps the first time in his career, seems to have suffered from writer’s block. As he wrote his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks less than two weeks after his wedding, “Every day I nerve myself, & sieze [sic] my pen, & dispose my paper, & prepare to buckle on the harness & work! And then I pace the floor—back & forth, back & forth, with vacuous mind—& finally I lay down the pen & confess that my time is not come—that I am utterly empty.” Though back in Buffalo, Sam rarely went to his office in the Express building. The newspaper “pays me an ample livelihood, & does it without my having to go near it,” he explained. “I write sketches for it, & occasional squibs & editorials—that is all. I don’t go to the office.” In late February he admitted to Elisha Bliss that he did not “go near the Express office more than twice a week—& then only for an hour.” By November, as he informed C. H. Webb, “I never write a line for my paper.” In one of his few original contributions to its columns during the month after his marriage, he denounced a notorious burlesque troupe, Lydia Thompson’s Blondes, who had performed in Buffalo the previous August. To judge from the details he mentioned in his condemnation of their routine, he likely attended one of their shows. But the cast attracted headlines across the country six months later for assaulting a critic in Chicago who had panned their act, and as a journalist and newlywed Sam defended both members of his guild and time-honored standards of behavior. The Blondes “come on stage naked, to all intents and purposes,” he complained, “padded, painted; powdered; oiled; enameled; and glorified with false hair. They are coarsely, vulgarly voluptuous. . . . They dance dismal dances, assisted by a melancholy rabble of painted, tinseled, gamey old skeletons, who spin on one toe and display their relics beseechingly to dull pitlings who refuse to hunger for them and will not applaud.”1 Such uncharacteristically prudish comments soon after his wedding stand in stark contrast to his admiration for the body-stockinged displays of Adah Isaacs Menken years earlier.
Sam felt increasingly un(der)appreciated in Buffalo. On March 15, 1870, he spoke there before an “audience uncommonly large in size and fashionable in quality” at a benefit for the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). He read the jumping frog sketch and the Express predictably hailed his performance: “His style of elocution is peculiarly his own, and the manner in which he delineated the humor of his sketches was irresistibly funny.” At the end the audience called for an encore, but Sam refused and “coolly informed the assemblage that his ‘contract’ had been fulfilled.” The reason for his refusal? He later complained that he had spoken before “a packed house, free of charge,” and the GAR “never even had the common politeness to thank me.” He resolved never again to appear on the stage in Buffalo, insisting that if booked to speak in the city he would “get sick the day I am to lecture there.” For that matter, he had again announced his retirement from the platform. As he reiterated to James Redpath on March 22, 1870, six weeks after his wedding, “I am not going to lecture any more forever. I have got things ciphered down to a fraction now. I know just about what it will cost us to live & I can make the money without lecturing.” Redpath reluctantly proclaimed that Sam had suffered the “fate of Midas.” The “brilliant but unfortunate lecturer” had toured “and made money; he wrote a book—and made money; and when a relative under the guise of friendship, perpetuated ‘a first class swindle’ on him, he made a great deal of money.” In San Francisco, Ambrose Bierce sardonically responded to the news “that Mark Twain, being above want, will lecture no more. We didn’t think that of Mark; we supposed that after marrying a rich girl he would have decency enough to make a show of working for a year or two anyhow. But it seems his native laziness has wrecked his finer feelings, and he has abandoned himself to his natural vice with the stolid indifference of a pig at his ablutions.” Urged to speak the next winter in Philadelphia, Sam demurred: “I have a stronger desire to lecture again in Philadelphia than in any other city, not even excepting Boston itself. But piles & piles of money couldn’t seduce me away from home this season!”2 He had not yet realized that he and Livy would rarely live within their means.
The same month he was snubbed by the sponsors of his Buffalo lecture, Sam agreed to contribute most of his new material to the Galaxy, a slick monthly magazine recently launched in New York by brothers Francis and William Conant Church. Merged a decade later with the Atlantic Monthly, the Galaxy during its short life featured contributions by Sam, George Armstrong Custer, John W. De Forest, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, Ivan Turgenev, Richard Grant White, and Walt Whitman. “I would rather write for a Magazine for $2 a page than for a newspaper at $10,” he explained to Mary Fairbanks. “One takes more pains, the ‘truck’ looks nicer in print, & one has a pleasanter audience.” Or, as he disclosed to Bliss, he preferred magazine work because it offered “an opening for higher-class writing—stuff which I hate to shovel into a daily newspaper” like muck from a stable. Certainly Sam enjoyed a choice among a variety of venues in the heyday of American journalism. During the decade of the 1870s the number of U.S. newspapers nearly doubled to about seven thousand, and the number of weekly and monthly magazines correspondingly increased from about seven hundred in 1865 to over twelve hundred in 1870. So when the editors of the Galaxy invited him to write ten pages of humorous material a month for an annual salary of twenty-four hundred dollars, Sam leapt at the opportunity. Though the Church brothers wanted to own the copyright and reserve the right to reprint his columns, Sam made a counteroffer to contribute to the Galaxy for two thousand dollars a year on the condition that “I can have entire ownership & disposal of what I write.” The brothers quickly agreed. Less than two weeks later, Sam boasted to Mother Fairbanks that the Churches
pay me a good salary & let me have my trash again after they have used it in the magazine. I just came to the conclusion that I would quit turning my attention to making money especially, & go to writing for enjoyment as well as profit. I needed a Magazine wherein to shovel any fine-spun stuff that might accumulate in my head, & which isn’t
entirely suited to either a daily, Weekly, or any kind of newspaper. You see I often feel like writing something, & before I set down the first word I think, “No, it isn’t worthwhile to write it—might do for a magazine, but not a newspaper.” Do you see? I can make a living without any trouble, & still write to suit myself—& therefore wouldn’t you do as I am doing, if you were me? I shall still write for the Express, of course, but not every week, perhaps. People who write every week write themselves out, and tire the public, too, before very long.
With a best-selling book, popular lectures, and a decade in daily journalism to his credit, Sam began to make the type of marketing decisions that would prolong his literary career. “I have taken the editorship of a department in the ‘Galaxy’ magazine, New York, & am to furnish ten pages of matter every month . . . for $2,000 a year,” he announced to his in-laws before the end of March. “I shall write one or two sketches a month for the Express, & I have an idea that for a good while I shall do nothing else on the paper. Thus the Galaxy & the Express together will give me fully six days’ work every month, & I positively need the rest of the time to admire the house.” His arrangement with the Galaxy also “gives me a chance to travel if I want to—but if I hadn’t taken it I would have been tied hand & foot here & forever & ever. It also gives me a chance to write what I please, not what I must.” He was back at his desk but not exactly back under harness. His long absence from Buffalo and his evasive return sparked rumors, which Sam denied, that he planned to sell his house and interest in the newspaper and leave town. Such rumors, he insisted in a notice repeatedly printed in the Express in early March, were “entirely foundationless. I am a permanency here. I am prospering well enough to please my friends and distress my enemies, and consequently am in a state of tranquil satisfaction.” He repeated his intentions in his column in the May issue of the Galaxy: “I have not sold out of the ‘Buffalo Express,’ and shall not, neither shall I stop writing for it.”3
The Life of Mark Twain Page 77