Sam regarded his monthly column in the Galaxy as something of a bully pulpit. He was ever ready to stir controversy, never ready to shun it. He denounced, for example, the “cancerous piety” of William T. Sabine, the rector of the Episcopal Church of the Atonement in the theater district of New York, a “crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile,” for his refusal to permit funerals for actors to be conducted in his sanctuary on the grounds that the deceased were undoubtedly sinners. The actor George Holland died on December 22, 1870, and the actor Joseph Jefferson visited Sabine the next day to arrange for his final rites. Sabine resisted Jefferson’s appeal to the better angel of his nature. He told Jefferson that
I had a distaste for officiating at such a funeral, and that I did not care to be mixed up with it. I said to the gentleman that I was willing to bury the deceased from his house, but that I objected to having the funeral solemnized at church. . . . I have always warned the professing members of my congregation to keep away from theatres and not to have anything to do with them. I don’t think that they teach moral lessons.
Sam was outraged by the slight. “Think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has Black Crooks in it,” he protested. Othello, one of his favorite Shakespearean plays since he attended a performance of it in 1854, was “a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy.” Sam similarly criticized the clergyman T. DeWitt Talmage of the Central Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn for his apparent denigration (which Sam read secondhand and out of context) of odiferous workingmen in the pews of his sanctuary: “We have reason to believe that there will be laboring men in heaven and also a number of negroes, and Esquimaux . . . and a few Indians, and possibly even some Spaniards, and Portuguese. All things are possible with God. We shall have all these sorts of people in heaven; but, alas! in getting them we shall lose the society of Dr. Talmage.”4
Sam also debunked the mythological Ben Franklin in the Galaxy, alleging that he “was of a vicious disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages.” In his “pernicious” autobiography, according to Sam, Franklin had recounted “how he entered Philadelphia, for the first time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four rolls of bread under his arm. But really, when you come to examining it critically, it was nothing. Anybody could have done it.”5 Such sarcastic comments foreshadow by over a half century D. H. Lawrence’s chapter on Franklin in Studies in Classic American Literature. Sam’s satire of Franklin, Orion’s onetime role model, was arguably a masked or coded critique of his brother.
Several of the items Sam contributed to the Galaxy over the months were pressed into double duty by republication in the Express. His most memorable piece to appear in both venues, however, was originally printed in the newspaper and only later in the magazine. Centered at the top of the front page of the New York Tribune for September 13, during the German siege of the City of Lights at the height of the Franco-Prussian War, was a map titled “The Defences and Environs of Paris.” This map features an irregularly shaped walled city at its center, divided by the Seine, with a canal to the northeast, Vincennes to the east, St. Cloud to the west, and a series of clearly marked forts. Sam executed a visual parody of this map for publication in the Express four days later.
That is, in a riot of antic imagination he ridiculed the fortifications of Paris even as Bismarck’s armies were ravaging the French countryside. “I doubt if he ever enjoyed anything more than the jackknife engraving that he did on a piece of board for a military Map of the Siege of Paris,” Larned recalled. “His half day of whittling and the laughter that went with it are something that I find pleasant to remember.” When Sam carved the map into the wood, he later joked, “by an unimportant oversight” or “heedlessness” he “engraved the map so that it reads wrong end first, except to left-handed people. I forgot that in order to make it right in print it should be drawn and engraved upside down.” Thus the Erie Canal appears in the reversed reproduction in place of the Champs Élysées, though by the time he drew Vincennes and Saint Cloud he positioned them correctly. While there is again an irregular city of Paris in the center of the map divided by the Seine and surrounded by several forts, Sam included several comic details: a fence, a farmhouse, the Rhine River, and the misplaced cities of Omaha and Jersey City, Podunk and Verdun. “At Omaha and the High Bridge are vast masses of Prussian infantry,” he explained in his annotations to the map when he reprinted it in the Galaxy, “and it is only fair to say that they are likely to stay there, as that figure of a window-sash between them stands for a brewery.” He advised anyone “who desires to contemplate the map stand on his head or hold it before her looking-glass. That will bring it right.” Bruce Michelson fairly observes that “in the ‘Map of Paris’ funhouse” names and words “become for a flash preposterous, dizzying.” Sam claimed in his autobiography that some American students carried copies of the map “to the big beer halls” in Berlin where German soldiers would “lose their tempers over it and blackguard it and abuse it and revile the author of it, to the students’ entire content. The soldiers were always divided in opinion about the author of it, some of them believing he was ignorant, but well-intentioned; the others believing he was merely an idiot.” Schuyler Colfax, recently elected vice president of the United States, wrote Sam that he had “had the heartiest possible laugh over it, and so have all my family. You are a wicked, conscienceless wag, who ought to be punished severely.” The parody was so popular that Sam sent a copy to the Library of Congress to be archived among its “geographical treasures.” Years later, he recycled the reversed engraving joke of the map of Paris in the play Colonel Sellers and in the unfinished “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy.”6
With The Innocents Abroad continuing to sell thousands of copies per month a year after its first printing, Elisha Bliss was eager to issue Sam’s next book, whatever the topic. Sam assured the publisher in late January 1870 that he could “get a book ready for you any time you want it; but you can’t want one before this time next year, so I have plenty of time.” Even before his wedding he floated an idea he had for a humorous book detailing the cruise of Noah’s Ark as reported in the diaries of Ham, Shem, and others, a “pre-deluge” or “deluge” narrative. “The curious beasts & great contrasts” in the story, he was convinced, “offer a gorgeous chance for the artist’s fancy & ingenuity.” In any case, he notified Bliss, he intended “to take plenty of time and pains” with the new story and as a result “maybe it will be several years before it is all written, but it will be a perfect lightning striker when it is done. You can have the first say (that is plain enough) on that or any other book I may prepare for the press, as long as you deal in a fair, open, and honorable way with me.” He drafted a few pages of an ersatz “Shem’s diary” before laying the project aside, though he occasionally revisited the premise for the rest of his life. His interest in it was apparently rekindled around 1890 when he read a biblical history in the studio of the illustrator Dan Beard that, according to Beard, “explained the construction of Noah’s Ark in the most detailed fashion.” A few years later, in “About All Kinds of Ships” (1893), Sam imagined an interview between Noah and a ship inspector who refuses to license the ark to sail because it is not seaworthy and has no ship’s surgeon, chambermaids, life preservers, or cages for the animals. Shortly before his death, Sam wrote yet another fragment of Shem’s diary as well as several “letters from the earth” along the same lines (i.e., Noah built the ark “the best he could, but left out most of the essentials. It had no rudder, it had no sails, it had no compass, it had no pumps,” etc.).7
He elsewhere contemplated the possibility of writing another travel book. “I have a sort of vague half-notion of spending the summer in England” with Livy, Sam wrote Bliss in March. He thought he “could writ
e a telling book” about the trip similar to Innocents, and he hoped to persuade Livy’s parents to accompany them. “Bliss is very anxious that I should go abroad during the summer & get a book written for next spring,” he advised them on April 1, “but I shan’t unless you find that you will have to go.” He wrote the Washington, D.C., correspondent of the Sacramento Union in late March that he and Livy had “about half a mind to spend next Summer in some little interior village in England.”8 The prospective trip was canceled, however, when Jervis Langdon began to suffer from an intestinal ailment initially diagnosed as nervous dyspepsia. In addition, Sam flirted with the idea of a book based on his boyhood in Hannibal, a type of rehearsal for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and tentatively composed a few chapters. The fragment, which Bernard DeVoto published in Mark Twain at Work (1942), does not seem an especially auspicious start, however.
Sam also began to plan a book about the American West as an alternative to all these projects. Much like the guidebooks to Europe and the Holy Land that he had consulted during the Quaker City voyage, such travel books as Washington Irving’s A Tour of the Prairies or George Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians depicted a romantic or mythological West packaged for sale to genteel eastern readers. Bret Harte, for example, understood from the beginning of his career that his success depended upon his popularity in the East. As he wrote in January 1866, over two years before the founding of the Overland Monthly, he expected his first important book to “depend entirely” on its “sale in the East” for its commercial success. By mid-1870, the end of its second year of publication, the Overland Monthly—edited by Harte and published in San Francisco—began to circulate as widely on the Eastern Seaboard as in the states of California, Nevada, and Oregon combined. Harte’s early western tales were routinely reprinted from the Overland in such eastern newspapers as the New York Evening Post and the Hartford Courant. That is, in such comic/pathetic tales as “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” “Tennessee’s Partner,” and “The Idyl of Red Gulch,” Harte proved the market for the literary West. As W. D. Howells reminisced, moreover, after Harte moved back to his native New York in 1871 he exploited the popularity of “the semi-mythical California he had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over again” to the end of his life because it was the best “thing he could do.”9
Sam decided to compete with Harte—if not on his own turf, at least on the western topic. He asked his mother and sister in St. Louis to forward the scrapbook of his clippings from the Territorial Enterprise he had left with them three years earlier, and it arrived in Buffalo in late March 1870. In late May, Sam was forming plans to travel to the Adirondacks with his in-laws or perhaps even to sail to California with Abel and Mary Fairbanks because “the publishers are getting right impatient to see another book on the stocks, & I doubt if I could do better than rub up old Pacific memories & put them between covers along with some eloquent pictures.” But his work on the manuscript stalled, as he explained to Bliss, because “the inspiration don’t come. Wait till I get rested up & rejuvenated in the Adirondacks, & then something will develop itself sure.” Livy reported to her friend Alice Hooker Day that her father had “lost a good deal of flesh” and was unable to “keep food on his stomach.” He was only able to sip fresh milk and beef tea and “sometimes he cannot retain even this.” A week later, Jervis Langdon rallied and, as late as mid-June, Sam still hoped to spend the summer traveling with his in-laws. Charley Langdon had reached Paris on his round-the-world trip and Jervis, according to Sam, wanted to sail to Europe and “keep him out of bad company & hold his nose steadily to the grindstone of study until he acquires some knowledge of the French language.” As Sue Crane wrote, the family was “hopeful when for several days [Jervis Langdon] retains his food” but “cast down and fearful when for three successive days he retains nothing. He is about the house and yard much of the time, but suffers constantly from pain and weariness.”10
Before the end of June, Jervis’s health began to fail dramatically and Sam and Livy, who was in her fourth month of pregnancy, were summoned to Elmira to help care for him. Every day Sam took watch by his sickbed from midnight to 4:00 a.m. and for three additional hours at midday, and Susan or Livy watched over him the other seventeen hours. “I went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure,” Sam remembered in his autobiography.
I went on watch sleepy and remained miserably sleepy and wretched straight along through the four hours. I can still see myself sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf over the drawn white face of the patient; I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting unconsciousnesses. . . . Of course the physicians begged those daughters to permit the employment of professional nurses, but they would not consent.
On June 25 Sam notified Mary Fairbanks that Jervis Langdon’s illness “must presently culminate in death. All of us are in deep grief, this morning, for death seems nearer at hand than at any time before. . . . It is the saddest, saddest time. There is no sound in the house. . . . Blinds are down & the gloom in the hearts of the household finds its type in the sombreness of hall & chamber.” That same day Livy’s father prepared a will, appointed his executors, and reorganized his business so that it would operate under new management after his death. He appointed three directors to run the company: his employee John Slee, his son-in-law Theodore Crane, and his son Charley. Sam thoroughly approved of Crane’s selection. He was “competent in his line—that of head clerk and superintendent of the subordinate clerks,” though “his capacities were limited to that position. He was good and upright and indestructibly honest and honorable, but he had neither desire nor ambition to be anything above chief clerk.” But Sam harbored strong doubts about Charley’s fitness to lead the firm. He was hardly past his majority “and not any older than his age—that is to say, he was a boy. His mother had indulged him from the cradle up, and had stood between him and such discomforts as duties, studies, work, responsibility, and so on. He had gone to school only when he wanted to, as a rule, and he didn’t want to often enough for his desire to be mistaken for a passion.” Charley’s permissive parents had allowed him to become “conceited, arrogant, and overbearing.” Sam expected that he would sow his wild oats “for six or eight years yet unless he gets married sooner.”11
In early July, Jervis Langdon again unexpectedly rallied—Sam notified Bliss on July 4 that “we have every reason to believe that he is going to get well, & that speedily,” so he took a hurried, weeklong trip to Washington to lobby for a bill that would enable his father-in-law—or Jervis’s heirs—to collect a half-million-dollar debt owed his company by the City of Memphis for street paving. His efforts failed. However, the morning of July 8 he joined William Stewart in calling on President Ulysses Grant at the Executive Mansion. They “found him in his working costume with an old short linen duster on and it was well spattered with ink.” Sam “thought it would be the neat thing to show a little embarrassment when introduced,” he wrote Livy the same day, “but something occurred to make me change my deportment to calm & dignified self-possession. It was this: The General was fearfully embarrassed himself!” That evening, he dined with former vice president Hannibal Hamlin; Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, the model for the corrupt Senator Dilsworthy in The Gilded Age (1873); and Richard B. Irwin of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in San Francisco. Sam wrote Livy that night that he “had a good time” in the city and had “gathered material enough for a whole book!” The political intrigue he observed in the nation’s capital during this week eventually shaped his half of The Gilded Age. The Washington correspondent of the Sacramento Union, who crossed paths with Sam, reported with some disappointment that the former Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope, who “used to smoke pipes, and quaff lager and dress rather slouchily,” now “dresses wi
th good taste, never drinks or smokes. Such, alas! are some of the results of marriage.”12
Elisha Bliss traveled to Elmira in mid-July, during a lull between Jervis Langdon’s health crises, to present Sam with a contract for his next book, equal in length to The Innocents Abroad and to be completed by January 1, 1871. Sam wanted to share earnings equally with the publisher, but Bliss convinced him that the 7½ percent royalty he offered was equal to half the profits. A “little doubtful” and “suspicious” of the assertion, Sam “asked him if he could swear to that” and Bliss “promptly put up his hand and made oath to it.” The subject of the volume was unspecified, but Sam confided to Orion the same day he signed the agreement that, though he might change his mind, “I propose to do up Nevada & Cal., beginning with the trip across the country in the stage.” He asked his brother to send any documents he had kept about “the route we took—or the names of any of the Stations we stopped at? Do you remember any of the scenes, names, incidents or adventures of the coach trip?—for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot down a foolscap page of items for me. I wish I could have two days’ talk with you.” “If I get only half a chance,” he promised Bliss on August 2, “I will write a book that will sell like fury provided you put pictures enough in it.”13
Sam did not get the chance to begin the book for several weeks. He notified Bliss on August 5 that the physicians had pronounced his father-in-law’s condition “utterly hopeless. The family are shrouded in gloom, awaiting the end.” Jervis Langdon died the next day, August 6, at the age of sixty-one from a virulent form of stomach cancer, and his body was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, the first grave in the family plot. Toward the end of his life the only form of nourishment he tolerated was champagne foam. Sam eulogized him in the Express as “a great and noble man,” “a very pure and noble Christian gentleman,” and a benevolent capitalist who “worked with all his might; and as fast as his great gains accumulated he toiled to sow them broadcast for the good of the city, the church and the poor.” He wrote privately on August 11, “This is a house of mourning, now. My wife is nearly broken down with grief & watching.” Livy wrote Alice Hooker Day after her father’s death that she often felt “that he was my back bone, that what energy I had came from him, that he was the moving spring—it seems to me that all who have lived by the side of so noble and self sustained a life as his was must feel so—and you know how he carried us all along, by his strength and cheer—Truly a great light went out of our home.”14
The Life of Mark Twain Page 78