The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Jervis Langdon’s estate totaled about a million dollars and was divided among his widow, two daughters, and son. Livy’s mother received the property and mansion on Main Street in Elmira. Susan Crane received Quarry Farm, forty-three acres of land with a slate quarry and a house on the crest of East Hill two miles from downtown Elmira that her father had bought in May 1869 as a weekend and summer retreat. The Cranes remodeled and enlarged the house and moved there to live year-round in 1871, and the Clemenses spent the summer of 1871 and most of the summers for the next twenty years there. Livy’s share of her father’s bequest was about a quarter million dollars in cash and stock, the equivalent of a fortune of nearly $5 million in 2018 dollars. In San Francisco, Ambrose Bierce reported the news caustically: “At the time of [Sam’s] marriage, a few months since, we expressed some doubt as to the propriety of the transaction. That doubt has been removed by [his father-in-law’s] death.” Sam may have repaid the balance of the $12,500 loan he received from Jervis Langdon from his royalties on sales of The Innocents Abroad. If so, the money became part of the estate shared by Livy. Or the balance of the loan may have been effectively canceled in Jervis Langdon’s will as part of Livy’s inheritance. In any case, he memorialized his late father-in-law in the character of Eli Bolton in The Gilded Age. “All his life Eli Bolton had been giving . . . fellows a lift,” the narrator remarks, “and shouldering the losses when things turned out unfortunately. His ledger, take-it-altogether, would not show a balance on the right side; but perhaps the losses on his books will turn out to be credits in a world where accounts are kept on a different basis.” Much as the narrator commends “the sweet sanity of the Bolton household” in the novel, Sam elsewhere described the Langdons as “the pleasantest family I ever knew.”15

  Sam and Livy remained in Elmira until after Livy’s mother’s birthday in August before returning to Buffalo. He began the new book and in his letters to Bliss he tried to sound upbeat. He wrote his sister Pamela in late August that he was “just as busy as I can be—am still writing for the Galaxy & also writing a book like the ‘Innocents’ in size & style.” He finished the first four chapters by September 4 and predicted that the book would “jump right strait [sic] into a continental celebrity the first month it is issued. Now I want it illustrated lavishly. We shall sell 90,000 copies the first 12 months. I haven’t even a shadow of a doubt of that.” But he had little appetite for any kind of writing, least of all humor writing, and his and Livy’s afflictions, like a plague of locusts, were not yet over. She suffered from insomnia after the death of her father and every night he administered a narcotic to sedate her. They had scarcely unpacked in Buffalo before they were visited by one of her former schoolmates, Emma Nye, traveling from her home in South Carolina to a teaching job in Detroit, who promptly fell ill from typhoid fever. Livy was no longer able to afford the luxury of grief for her father and switched roles from patient to caregiver. As Sam lamented on September 7, Nye “lies in our bed-chamber fighting wordy battles with the phantoms of delirium. Livy & a hired nurse watch her without ceasing,—night & day.” He remembered in his autobiography that the “constant interruption of her sleep seriously delayed” Livy’s recovery. He reported to Orion that “the premises are full of nurses & doctors & we are all fagged out” and that “the doctor gives us no encouragement that we & the hired nurses can cease to watch her for a month or two to come.” Under the circumstances, Sam’s fitful progress on the new book stalled; by September 21 he had written only an additional three or four chapters (“am up to page 180—only about 1500 more to write”). Nye died a week later in the Clemenses’ master bedroom. Her last days, Sam grieved, were “among the blackest, the gloomiest, the most wretched” of his life.16

  But by mid-October Sam was back in a groove. “I am driveling along tolerably fairly on the book—getting off from 12 to 20 pages (MS.) a day,” he reported to Bliss. “I am writing it so carefully that I’ll never have to alter a sentence, I guess, but it is very slow work. I like it well, as far as I have got. The people will read it.” But in late October, Livy suffered a “premature confinement” and a near miscarriage, perhaps as the result of lead poisoning. The Clemens house on Delaware Avenue was located near the Cornell Lead Works in an era when the toxic effects of lead pollution were not yet understood. Livy and Sam’s son was born a month prematurely on November 9. Named Langdon in honor of his grandfather, the child weighed only four and a half pounds at birth. Two days later, Sam groaned to Orion about his recent medical expenses, including “a four or five hundred-dollar doctor’s bill” and “a sixty-dollar nurse bill,” even as he was “sitting still with idle hands—for Livy is very sick & I do not believe the baby will live five days.” The child was “dangerously ill” in mid-December, Sam alerted Mary Fairbanks, and required a wet nurse. Yet the next month, Livy assured Alice Hooker Day that her family enjoyed “very quiet happy lives, even in spite of the great sorrow”—Jervis’s death—“that is almost constantly present to us.”17

  Meanwhile, Orion was foundering in St. Louis, still unable to dispose of the Clemens family land in Tennessee. In January 1870, the month before Sam’s wedding, Orion had claimed that he was “penniless, and working for my daily bread” as a proofreader for the St. Louis Missouri Democrat for twenty-five dollars a week. Pamela tried to comfort Orion’s wife Mollie with what had become a shared pipe dream. She hoped that Orion’s failure to attract buyers for the family property was simply part of the divine plan. She had heard “such flattering accounts of the prosperity of the south” by the spring of 1870 that “I cannot help thinking that maybe our Heavenly Father has put obstacles in the way of our selling the land heretofore, that we may realize a great deal more out of it hereafter, and that at no distant day.” Sam was not so sanguine and finally washed his hands of the matter. “I don’t want to be consulted at all about Tenn[essee],” he warned Orion.

  I don’t want it even mentioned to me. When I make a suggestion it is for you to act upon it or throw it aside, but I beseech you never to ask my advice, opinion or consent about that hated property. If it was because I felt the slightest personal interest in the infernal land that I ever made a suggestion, the suggestion would never be made. Do exactly as you please with the land.

  Still, he resolved to help his brother find a better berth. Orion wanted a job that paid a salary of “$100 a month, no night work, liberty after supper to rest.” Sam might have hired him at the Express but, as he explained, “it would be night work,” so Sam asked Bliss for help. His brother was

  an old & able writer & editor. He is night editor of the Daily St Louis Democrat, & is gradually putting his eyes out at it. He has served four years as Secretary of State of Nevada, having been appointed to the place by Mr. Lincoln—he had all the financial affairs of the Territory in his hands during that time & came out with the name of an able, honest & every way competent officer. He is well read in law, & I think understands book-keeping. He is a very valuable man for any sort of office work, but not worth a cent outside as a business man. Now I would like to get him out of night-work but haven’t any other sort to offer him myself. Have you got a place for him at $100 or $150 a month, in your office?

  Bliss replied that he had “no real place” for Orion “just now,” but “would like for your sake to create a position for him, if possible.” In an ironic reversal of fortunes, much as Joe Goodman hired Sam in 1862 in an apparent attempt to inveigle territorial printing contracts from Orion, Bliss hired Orion in 1870 to keep Sam in his debt. As Sam advised his brother on November 5, Bliss planned to launch a monthly paper, a free advertising circular with a projected circulation of about a hundred thousand,

  & will get all his authors to contribute occasional articles. He believes he can eventually put a price on it & make it a lucrative literary sheet. Well, you see he offers you the editorship of it at $100 a month till he can do better by you. It gives you a chance to make him do better by you—I mean by proving yourself indispensable—& that is the
only terms on which a man ought to want preferment. . . . I desire that you throw up that cursed night work & take this editorship & conduct it so well that editorships will assail you at the end of a year. . . . Bliss offered me in effect $4,000 a year to take this berth he offers you—& so he has confidence in his little undertaking. He is shrewdly counting on two things, now—one is, by creating a position for you, he will keep me from “whoring after strange gods,” which is Scripture for deserting to other publishers; &, 2d, get an occasional article out of me for the paper, a thing which would be exceedingly occasional otherwise.

  The same day, Sam wrote to assure Bliss that his brother was “a tip-top editor—a better than I [sic], because he is full of talent & besides is perfectly faithful, honest, straightforward & reliable. There isn’t money enough in America to get him to do a dishonest act—whereas I am different.” Orion was earning $1,300 annually or $25 a week in St. Louis but, Sam added, “if you can’t stand the extra hundred, I’ll pay it.”18 Bliss apparently believed Sam had agreed to a quid pro quo: if the publisher hired Orion, Sam would write books exclusively for the American Publishing Company and contribute regularly to the American Publisher. In any case, Bliss offered and Orion accepted the editorship of the paper, and he and Mollie had resettled in Hartford by mid-December 1870.

  Unfortunately, the arrangement was fraught with difficulties from the beginning. Bliss sometimes treated the former acting governor of the Territory of Nevada as an office boy, assigning him clerical and other menial tasks. Even more troublesome was Orion’s repeated requests, driven by Bliss’s demands, for Sam’s writing. Through Orion, Bliss offered Sam five thousand dollars a year to write exclusively for the Publisher and “give him all your books, which he thinks you ought to do—let him do all your publishing, and just write books and for the paper.” Sam bristled at the suggestion that all of his periodical writing should appear in a free advertising circular. “Now do try & leave me clear out of the Publisher for the present,” he petitioned Orion on March 4, “for I am endangering my reputation by writing too much—I want to get out of the public view for a while. I am still nursing Livy night & day & cannot write anything. I am nearly worn out.” Ten days later, he was more adamant. “I will not appear once a month nor once in three months, in the Publisher nor any other periodical,” he insisted. Nor would he consent to allow Orion and Bliss to “advertise me as anything more than an occasional contributor—& I tell you I want you to let me choose my own occasions, too.” He scolded his brother for implying that the success of the paper depended on him: “You talk as if I am responsible for your newspaper venture. If I am I want it to stop right here—for I am not going to have another year of harassment about periodical writing. There isn’t money enough between hell & Hartford to hire me to write once a month for any periodical. I would do more to advance Bliss’s interests than any other man’s in the world,” but Sam refused to allow Bliss and his brother to promote the American Publisher as “Mark Twain’s paper.” He added, “Haven’t I risked cheapening myself sufficiently by a year’s periodical dancing before the public [in the Galaxy] but must continue it?” When Orion complained in mid-March 1871 about Bliss’s patronizing behavior, Sam was firm in his indifference. “At any other time your experiences there would distress me greatly,” he allowed, “but I am & have been for weeks so buried under beetling Alps of trouble that yours look like little passing discomforts to me.—molehills.”19

  Sam had his own troubles in extremis. He admonished Bliss to remove his name from the list of contributors to the American Publisher “& never mention me again—& then I shall feel that the fetters are off & I am free.” Bliss retorted that he had never promoted the magazine as the only venue in which Sam’s writings appeared, and Sam continued behind the scenes to sponsor Orion’s failing editorship. The older brother insisted in July that he was “going to work to the best advantage I can” for Bliss “in the hope that the first of next January I can get an advance of ten dollars a month on my wages, which will enable me to pay the difference between the board where we are and the very much better accommodations where we are going. We pay $15 a week where we are.” Orion’s hassles with the American Publishing Company ended only when Bliss fired him after only fifteen months on the job. The American Publisher suspended publication nine months later, in December 1872. Meanwhile, Orion worked from autumn 1872 until spring 1873 as a reporter for the Hartford Times—according to Sam, “the pleasantest berth he had ever had in his life”—before he was lured away by a huge salary to edit the Rutland, Vermont, Globe. He lasted there only three months, from May until July 1873. Orion later referred vaguely to “the cloudy obscurity . . . over my mind that drove me from Rutland [and] that has neutralized my forces so often.” He then briefly joined the staff of the Oil City, Pennsylvania, Derrick, but lost that job as a result of the financial panic that shook the nation in September 1873 and precipitated the long economic depression that lasted for years. Mollie Clemens complained that “every thing he undertakes fails: and he lives the most dreadful life of fear; when he has a situation at any thing, he is in that everlasting state of fear fear FEAR.” The former acting governor of Nevada Territory finally found a job as a proofreader for the New York Evening Post at a salary of ten dollars a week in December 1873 and a temporary position as a reporter for the New York Tribune in January 1874, but his shop foreman on the Evening Post “swore at him & ordered him around ‘like a steamboat mate’” before firing him, according to Sam. By May 1874 he and Mollie had returned to Keokuk, Iowa, where with Sam’s help—a gift of $900—they rented a four-acre chicken farm from Mollie’s father two miles from town. “I could not become at this late time of life a distinguished lawyer,” Orion conceded, “but I might make a comfortable living” by practicing a little law and earning some money from “the garden and the poultry” while living in the farmhouse. They never bought the farm, however, because “Old father Stotts,” as Sam called him, “seems to have been a trifle sharp in his transactions” and drove a hard bargain for the property. The entire Stotts family, Sam wrote his mother, “are pretty low-down stock. A body might as well marry into a gipsy camp as among such a scurvy lot as these.” After only two years, Orion and Mollie abandoned the experiment, moved into Keokuk, and opened a boardinghouse.20 Jane Clemens joined them there six years later, and with their modest income and Sam’s monthly remittances the three of them lived more or less happily for the rest of their lives.

  Sam’s gloomy mood in spring 1871 is reflected in a trio of letters on the topic of crime and punishment, triggered by recent events, that he sent Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune. In the first piece he protested the public tolerance for a rival lecturer, John H. Surratt, who had been implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and whose mother had been convicted by a military tribunal and hanged for her role in the crime. While insisting upon his innocence, Surratt had fled the country in 1865 but was arrested in 1867, extradited to the United States, and freed after a mistrial. During the 1870–71 season he lectured across the East about the conspiracy, all the while claiming he was not a part of it and earning Sam’s scorn. Surratt would be “a prodigious success as a lecturer” with “an income of $25,000 a year,” Sam grumbled, if he became a lightning rod for controversy. But he would “drop entirely out of the public notice in three short weeks” if people “cease[d] to make public mention of him. His little candle would straightway begin to burn weaker and weaker, and the ‘cabbage head’ would begin to develop more and more prominently on its top, and presently the poor thing would flicker out and pass away in a film of smoke, leaving nothing behind but an evanescent stench.”21 Sam knew well the means and ends of publicity.

  In the second of these letters to the Tribune, he elaborated on the suggestion of Joseph Holt, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Army, that a bona fide murderer might be spared from capital punishment if a volunteer offered to be executed instead, much as a Civil War conscript might hire a substitute to r
eplace him in the ranks of the army. The imminent execution of the gifted philologist Edward H. Rulloff, who had been convicted of murder in 1870, posed an ethical dilemma for some people who believed that, given his genius, Rulloff ought to be spared. (Coincidentally, Rulloff’s brother, William Rulofson, co-owned the studio in San Francisco where Sam had posed for publicity photos in April 1868.) To resolve the dilemma, Sam proposed that anyone who opposed Rulloff’s execution on the grounds that he was a prodigy should replace him on the gallows:

  I believe in capital punishment. I believe that when a murder has been done it should be answered for with blood. I have all my life been taught to feel this way, and the fetters of education are strong. The fact that the death law is rendered almost inoperative by its very severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness. . . . Feeling as I do, I am not sorry that Rulloff is to be hanged, but I am sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world. . . . What miracles this murderer might have wrought, and what luster he might have shed upon his country, if he had not put a forfeit upon his life so foolishly! But what if the law could be satisfied, and the gifted criminal still be saved. If a life be offered up on the gallows to atone for the murder Rulloff did, will that suffice? If so, give me the proofs, for in all earnestness and truth I aver that in such a case I will instantly bring forward a man who, in the interests of learning and science, will take Rulloff’s crime upon himself, and submit to be hanged in Rulloff’s place.