Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  With a little more than a month before his deadline, and with the great bulk of the agreed-on length still ahead of him, Mark Twain became a scavenger-writer. It was the “Jumping Frog” approach all over again, but with better material and higher goals. He’d finished fifteen draft-chapters since he had begun the manuscript in the rooms at 224 F Street, taking the narrative from New York Harbor to the departure from Paris for Versailles. During this stretch he had used the printed letters at his disposal, but these were few and he had largely composed fresh copy. Now, as the time urgency increased, he shifted from original composition to line-edited revisions of the Alta, Tribune, and (one) Herald dispatches. Many pages from the final manuscript were in fact pasteups of these columns, with his revisions scrawled in the margins. Combined with the undigested data culled from guidebooks and local histories, and passages from the travel books he aimed to lampoon, these pasteups comprised more than half the word count. Sam’s slapdash approach worked. Besides providing a convenient structure, the Alta and Tribune letters were fundamentally strong, and needed mainly the refining elements that Mark Twain now knew were necessary: the elimination of slang and scatology; a more forgiving and generalized portrayal of the pilgrims; and a shift in his satiric aim from sacred art and sacred relics to the parasitic pitchmen and the phony claims surrounding these treasures.

  The full revolutionary force of these improvements, sadly, will never engage the 21st-century mind with the same impact as it did the readership of its time. Victorian, pre-electrical America remained largely isolated from direct experience with the world beyond the oceans and reverent toward classical and biblical icons; thus its readers relished the dense exposition of travel books, a genre to which The Innocents Abroad inescapably belongs. Mark Twain’s work continues to reward a scrupulous reading with bursts of wit and incomparable description; but these tend to be separated by long passages of dutiful reportage, citations from other books, and obvious padding—imperfections noted by some reviewers of the time.

  On June 17, Sam reported to Bliss that “the book is finished, & I think it will do. It will make more than 600 pages, but I shall reduce it at sea.”27 He promised to sail for New York within a week, and to deliver the manuscript at Hartford by the end of July.

  But it wasn’t going to be that easy. The manuscript wasn’t finished with him—nor would it be for many more months. No one besides himself had read it. He needed another pair of eyes. He needed a benediction pronounced over this terrifying newborn of his. Mother Fairbanks was a continent away. He turned to an old friend and mentor who had been kind to him in Sam’s California past.

  Bret Harte was now thirty-one, still striving to establish himself among America’s important writers. He was just beginning to publish the work that would get him there—the sketches of the California landscape and the miners, gunslingers, golden-hearted prostitutes, and wanderers who populated it. Meanwhile, he edited an ill-starred California poetry journal; he encouraged younger writers and promoted promising ones. At the time of Sam’s return, Harte was helping a man named Anton Roman launch a new literary magazine, the Overland Monthly, an attempt to match the influence (and the look) of the Atlantic Monthly back east. Sam lugged his bundle of verbiage over to the magazine’s offices and pleaded with the swamped Harte to read and comment on it. Incredibly, Harte consented. Whatever outrages real or imagined he would visit on Mark Twain in the future, in this moment he was a true friend in need.

  A few years later, despite the fractiousness that arose between them, Sam Clemens was able to give Bret Harte his due in the editorial shaping of The Innocents Abroad. “Harte read all of the MS,” he told Charles Henry Webb in 1870, “& told me what passages, paragraphs & chapters to leave out—& I followed orders strictly.”28 To Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sam allowed that Harte “trimmed & trained & schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness” into a polished writer.29 In return, Sam allowed him to publish four chapters from the Innocents manuscript in the Overland Monthly without charge.

  He had planned to set out for New York on June 30, but at the last minute, he succumbed to one final lecturing gig. He addressed an affluent crowd on the night of July 2 on the topic of Venice, drawing almost verbatim on that section of his manuscript. It was a big success: “wit without vulgarity,”30 no less, and garnished near the end with “all kinds of concealed jokes, drolleries, flashes of humor and sarcasm.”31 It would be his final appearance in California. Four days later he boarded the Montana and put the Golden State behind him forever. He reconnected with the Henry Chauncey at Panama. He edited the manuscript as he sailed, and disembarked at New York Harbor with the remaining sheaf of papers that would make him permanently and universally famous.

  * This is the mysterious “Pauline,” last name unknown, whom Sam mentions to Charles Henry Webb (“I hunted for her & couldn’t find her”) in November 1867 (MTL, vol. 2, p. 115).

  22

  The Girl in the Miniature

  (July 1868–October 1868)

  He checked into the Westminster Hotel on Wednesday, July 29, and, swamped by the greeting of “many friends,” anxiously telegraphed Elisha Bliss, “If I do not come until tomorrow will it answer? Answer immediately.”1 He had promised to deliver the manuscript in Hartford by July 28, and, inexperienced in the ways of publishers, thought perhaps Bliss might hold him to his promise. He was thinking of calling his book The New Pilgrim’s Progress, after John Bunyan’s 1678 Puritan allegory of a religious journey through life. Bunyan’s book remained second in popularity only to the Bible among Christian believers after nearly two hundred years, and Sam thought to make ironic capital of its universally known title.

  Another universally known icon caused him to change his plans. Bliss wired him back suggesting a postponement—the first of many in the book’s production—because July 30 was the publication date of another important new book from the American Publishing Company: A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant, by A. D. Richardson. Bliss suggested a meeting in New York the following week, after the Grant book had been launched, and then perhaps a working visit to Hartford after that. With the delay came a journalistic opportunity, and with that came a chance for Sam to express the social conscience that always burned harder in him than ideology.

  Arriving at the Westminster on the same day—in one of those coincidences that dotted Mark Twain’s life—was his diplomatic friend Anson Burlingame, along with the Chinese delegation. Burlingame had just negotiated a treaty that established consular relations between China and the United States and recognized China’s legitimacy in the community of nations. Burlingame prevailed on Sam to offer the New York Tribune an analysis of the treaty; and Sam, remembering his revulsion at the routine brutality dealt by Americans to Chinese laborers in the West, worked up a six-thousand-word piece in only a few hours. Never again, he wrote with “infinite satisfaction,” would jealous American workers be able to “beat and bang and set the dogs” on helpless immigrant Chinese.

  These pastimes are lost to them forever…I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him…2

  He arrived in Hartford on August 4 and spent two weeks there discussing the more delicious elements of making a book: typeface options and illustration ideas. He tightened the manuscript again, until it stood at about 1,100 pages. Things were harmonious enough with Bliss that Sam could turn his thoughts to the ambitious winter lecture tour that he would undertake in a few months. His reputation at the podium had attracted the interest of several booking agents, notably the pioneer of speaker management, James Redpath of the newly founded Boston Lyceum Bureau; G. L. Torbert in Chicago; and representatives of the American Literary Bureau in New York. Here lay an important chance and challenge: to discover how good he really was on the other side of the Rockies, by
launching out onto a competitive Eastern lecture circuit crowded with established luminaries. Not to mention drawing attention to the book, which he thought was then scheduled for a December publication.

  Sam surveyed these prospects in a short letter, written from Bliss’s offices, to his former agent, Frank Fuller. Fuller had recently taken on a new career, as co-owner of a company that made products from rubber, including condoms, apparently. It was too much for Sam to resist: “Please forward one dozen Odorless Rubber Cundrums—I don’t mind them being odorless—I can supply the odor myself. I would like to have your picture on them.”3 In an Alta letter some weeks later, Mark Twain slyly informed his readers that “the ex-Acting Governor of Utah” was “making money hand over fist in the manufacture…of a patent odorless India rubber cloth, which is coming greatly into fashion for buggy-tops and such things.”4

  Sam returned to New York on August 17, then several days later caught a train for Elmira on August 21. He had arranged an invitation for himself to spend a few days at the Charley Langdon household—ostensibly to visit Mary Fairbanks’s “other cub,” but perhaps also to check out the beautiful sister whom he had finally met in New York at New Year’s. Afterward, Sam and Charley planned to travel to Cleveland and look in on Mother Bear. Then Sam planned to go on alone to St. Louis for a family visit.

  Any hopes that Clemens might have had for a grand entrance into the Langdon house were bollixed when he mistakenly boarded a local train out of New York. “Express Mail” proved to be more like snail mail; it stopped about every fifteen minutes for stays of nearly an hour, or so it felt to Sam. As the day lurched on into evening, he began to telegraph his spasmodic progress to Charley, finally snapping, “figure out when it will arrive and meet me.”5 The answer was “midnight.” By the time Charley responded to this injunction, the train was within fifteen miles of Elmira.

  Impeccably tailored, barbered, and mustached in the manner of a young town squire, Charley boarded the train and shrank back at the sight of his highly peccable guest. Sam lounged in the smoking car under a foul-looking yellow duster and the wreckage of a straw hat. Charley blurted: “You’ve got some other clothes, haven’t you?” Luckily for Sam, he did.

  LAURA WRIGHT may still have been floating through Sam’s dreams, but as he entered the Langdon household, it was the girl in the ivory miniature who now fully entered his waking life. Entering, she changed it utterly. His wild years were over. The great arc of his punishing fame and his majestic sorrows was about to begin.

  Her name was of course her mother’s name as well. It drew upon the symbol for peace, light, unity, healing, and tradition common to the great religions of the earth: the golden lampstand fueled by the oil from two olive trees in Zecharah’s vision; the dove bearing the olive branch in the Noah myth; the blessed olive tree kindling the glass like a glittering star, light upon light, in the Quranic aya. Sam, clopping through Palestine on his donkey, probably looked on living olive trees that had taken root in the time of Jesus. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s Olivia, seeking her true love, is confused by twins with assumed identities. (Olivia, to a disguised twin: “Are you a comedian?”)

  She was the product of an educated, wealthy, and socially progressive household. Her father’s New England line had produced a delegate to the Constitutional Congress who became governor of New Hampshire, and, later, a president of Harvard, but Jervis’s fortune was self-made. His grandparents on either side were farmers settled in New York State. When Jervis was sixteen his widowed mother, Eunice Langdon, steered him to a man named Stevens who owned small stores in Vernon and Ithaca, and Jervis learned the mercantile business. By age twenty-three he was running several stores and had married Olivia Lewis (on July 23, 1832). A few years after that, he joined up with a lumber dealer; moved his wife and adopted nine-year-old daughter Susan to Elmira (Mrs. Langdon mistakenly believed she was infertile); witnessed the birth of his daughter Olivia on November 27, 1845, and his son Charles four years later; bought several hundred acres of rich Allegheny County pine-tree land that turned out to be even richer in deposits of coal; shifted into that business just in time to help feed the enormous factory-fuel demand ignited by the Civil War; and ended up owning coal mines from Pennsylvania to Nova Scotia and a railroad transportation system to move the yield. By the war’s end he was the wealthiest man in a small prosperous city, a co-founder and benefactor of a Congregational church. Susan made a happy marriage in 1858 with Theodore W. Crane, Jervis’s business manager in J. Langdon, Miner & Dealer in Anthracite & Bituminous Coal. In a manner of looking at it, Jervis Langdon was living the life that Marshall Clemens had dreamed of.

  Yet Jervis Langdon’s personality and social beliefs were as far removed from Marshall’s as was possible in this America. A compact man with a square face and mild, quizzical eyes, Jervis liked people, and he liked to laugh, and he liked to sing, and these traits partly tempered an unrelenting reformist zeal. He and his wife shared abolitionist passions so intense that, less than a year after arriving in Elmira, they flaunted them at considerable risk in the town: they joined thirty-nine other congregants in a bolt from the First Presbyterian Church, which, like its sister congregation in Hannibal and many others, held to the “Bible defense of slavery.” In January 1846, this group founded the First Independent Congregational Church (soon renamed Park Church), which discriminated, as it were, against slavery sympathizers. Langdon’s philanthropy kept the struggling church solvent in its early years.

  Riskier still to the Langdons’ safety in those years was their link to the Underground Railroad. The Railroad comprised a web of secret way stations in fourteen states, mostly farmhouses and town residences, that received fugitives concealed in wagons under dark of night, sheltered them for a while, and then moved them along to the next stopping point north. Despite the dangers of heavy fines and imprisonment, the operatives along the Railroad liberated some fifty thousand Negroes in the sixty-odd years through the end of the Civil War. Among Jervis Langdon’s close comrades in this movement was a former slave whom Langdon and his wife had helped escape from bondage as a Baltimore ship caulker back in 1838. The man had become a self-educated author, international lecturer, and abolitionist symbol; his name was Frederick Douglass.

  Langdon and his friends found a dubious but ultimately sympathetic ally in the pastor who arrived in 1854 and steered the church for the ensuing forty-six years: Thomas K. Beecher, the brother of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

  By autumn 1868, Jervis Langdon was at the peak of his business and civic success. He was also suffering through the early stages of the stomach cancer that in less than two years would kill him. His family lived in a three-story manor decorated with lush carpeting and drapes, and grand chandeliers, whose grounds occupied a full block.

  “I SHALL be here a week yet—maybe two,” Sam advised Jane and the family from the Langdons’ on August 25. “I am most comfortably situated here. This is the pleasantest family I ever knew.”6

  Mark Twain never wrote in detail about these opening moments of his romance with Olivia, but some hints survive, thanks to a cousin of Olivia who was staying at the house and found herself smitten by Sam. Thirty years on, Harriet Lewis Paff wryly recalled her losing battle.

  I really felt that I had one advantage over my cousin…She was rich, beautiful and intellectual, but she could not see through a joke, or see anything to laugh at in the wittiest sayings unless explained in detail—I could…He said—“How do you do,” just as anyone would, except with that lazy drawl which has added much flavor to his wit and humor…We rode, walked, talked & sang together, for Mr. C. had a very sweet tenor voice. But alas—I soon discovered that my quickness at seeing the point of a joke and the witty sayings that I had considered almost irresistible were simply nothing in comparison to my cousin’s gifts. Mr. C. evidently greatly preferred her sense to my nonsense.7

  Harriet Lewis sensed well ahead of Livy that some woo was being pitched, and finally left, “thinking the
courtship might progress better if I were out of the way.”8 Before leaving, she clued her sheltered friend in on Sam’s motives for being there “and said that on my return I should ask a question, in regard to a question I was quite sure would be asked of her, and I wanted a favorable answer to both.”9

  Soon afterward, Sam did ask The Question of Livy that Harriet had predicted. After Livy gave him her answer, she resuscitated him with the only reassuring news she could think of: she would pray for him daily. Suddenly Sam was not so comfortably situated after all.

  It is something of a wonder that Sam’s welcome at the Langdons’ did not expire after that first visit. The family had greeted him warmly and had taken genuine delight in his droll stories in the first few days; but as one week lengthened into two, a kind of frozen cordiality set in, punctuated by the discreet drumming of fingers. (When Livy informed him of this half a year later, Sam was devastated.) Sam’s usually trusty bravado was working against him now, as were his normally keen instincts for a situation. He was bloodying his nose against the very fortress of upper-class Eastern manners that he had wished to understand and surmount.

  Livy’s horrified reaction to Sam’s proposal reflected her own acculturation within that fortress. As her biographer Resa Willis has pointed out, Olivia Louise Langdon was Victorian to the core. She lived her childhood in a cloistered garden, all luxury and books and music. Her mother taught her to read, and to explore science, history, mathematics, novels, poetry. She was enrolled at age nine as a day student in the nearby Elmira Ladies’ Seminary in 1854. By thirteen, she was a resident there, immersed in Latin and Greek. She was never strong, was frequently ill, and one winter, at age sixteen, she became an invalid. Mark Twain wrote that she’d fallen on ice; no more information than that survives. Willis points out that her prostration was hardly rare: the Beautiful Invalid was a prevalent figure among upper-class women of the time. Neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, nervosa—the pre-Freudian names for it were exotic and wonderful. She remained bedridden for two years, resisting treatment—one doctor thought she’d just used up too much mental energy, or electricity, or something—until an eccentric doctor named Newton, offered fifteen hundred dollars by the desperate family, walked into her room, opened the shades, sat her up, coaxed her into hobbling around a little on his shoulder, recommended more of the same, collected his fee, and went home. After a long recovery, she reemerged into the world a small, slight figure, like the man who would marry her, and dark-haired and dark-eyed, and beautiful in a mild sort of way. She tended to tuck her chin into her neck slightly, like her mother, which intensified her gaze. Her characteristic expression was of a young woman considering whether to smile—a frequent dilemma, given her anemic sense of humor.