Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  LIVY WAS getting on in years. To reach twenty-two unmarried in the mid-19th century was to approach spinsterhood and a lifetime of embroidery, good works, and schoolteaching. Livy was a good match for Sam in her love of reading; she copied selections from Whitman and Emerson into the commonplace book that she’d begun just before her eighteenth birthday. So why did she turn Sam Clemens down?

  Protocol, for one thing. Politely bred New England ladies, even twenty-two-year-olds, always said “no” the first time a man proposed, especially if he had not obtained the permission of the parents to make such a proposal. For another, she was almost certainly not then attracted to this wild-haired, cigar-smoking, long-drawling, welcome-overstaying creature from the distant west, ten years her senior.* He was a curiosity, not marriage material. The phrasing of her turndown, never recorded, must have pinned his ears back. But Sam had some phrasing of his own to deploy. He began deploying it in the early morning hours of his departure day from the Langdons’. Scribbling away in his guest room, anguished by his romantic desire for Livy and a little unhinged by her rejection, Sam tore from his soul the first of the famous 184† love letters he would write in the course of a courtship conducted largely at long distance, and thus largely by words on a page.

  These letters rank among the most compelling documents in Samuel Clemens’s literature (he never signed them “Mark Twain”). Lengthy, intense, sonorous, and apologetic at first, then shifting, as their intimacy deepened, into the playful, boastful, needful, and gently seductive, they let us trace the trajectory of Sam’s and Livy’s convergence. In them, new layers of his personality reveal themselves. Clemens/Twain had built a reputation as a virtuoso of sarcasm and invective and sharply pointed satire, not to say ridicule. From the stage, he could be mesmeric, even sensual; but always at a remove. Up close, he had the capacity to charm his listener and to bring all within earshot into his force field; but again, the distance never quite closed. In these letters, for Livy, the distance closed.

  This first epistle, and several afterward, show the mesmerizer in the throes of self-hypnosis. Here Sam transforms himself with unconscious precision into the sort of lofty, spiritual aspirant he understands Olivia to have been groomed to marry: the perfect Victorian Gentleman undone by his own faux pas; the Frame Narrator purging himself of the Sut Lovingood within.

  Even getting that far took some fast thinking. Desperate to extricate himself from the crisis posed by Livy’s flat turndown, Sam negotiated a compromise with the wary young woman: they would correspond, and continue their friendship, but strictly under the chaste rubric of “brother” and “sister.” (His imaginary family was growing by leaps and bounds.) Thus the salutation of the initial letter, written to her while still at Elmira:

  My Honored “Sister”—

  The impulse is strong upon me to say to you how grateful I am to you…for the patience, the consideration & the unfailing kindness which has been shown me ever since I came within the shadow of this roof…I do not regret that I have loved you, still love & shall always love you. I accept the situation, uncomplainingly, hard as it is. Of old I am acquainted with grief, disaster & disappointment, & have borne these troubles as became a man. So, also, I shall bear this last & bitterest, even though it break my heart…

  And so, henceforward, I claim only that you will let me freight my speeches to you with simply the sacred love a brother bears to a sister…If you & mother Fairbanks will only scold me & upbraid me now & then, I shall fight my way through the world, never fear. Write me something from time to time—texts from the New Testament, if nothing else occurs to you…10

  He keeps it up in letters posted over the next several weeks:

  I cannot frame language so that it will express to you how grateful I am for that large charity & thoughtful consideration which prompted you to speak so gently when you could have wounded so deeply…You say to me: “I shall pray for you daily.” Not any words that ever were spoken to me have touched me like these.11

  I am afraid to write any more, because you were just a little severe the other day, you know. Good-bye, & God give you His peace.12

  He was of a distinctly ecclesiastical frame of mind these days, and managed to let that fact slip in. “And so you…are left to say, ‘human friendship is impotent to help.’ You have read Matt. XXV, 44–45? & XVII, 18–20?”13 “What was the name of that hymn we fancied so much in church one day? ‘Fading, Still Fading’ is beautiful—old, but beautiful.”14 He was praying a lot, too. “I pray as one who prays with words, against a firm-set mountain of sin. I pray too hopefully, sometimes, & sometimes hopelessly. But I still pray—& shall continue to pray.”15 Most of Livy’s responses, unhappily, have not been recovered.

  It is tempting, given Mark Twain’s mimetic mastery of written and spoken styles, to read these ornate passages in a cynical light, as the stratagem of a worldly pretender, out to ensnare a sheltered rich girl and ride her petticoats to Easy Street. Almost certainly Sam’s admitted craving for self-validation—in this case, for acceptance as “authentic” by a girl from the American aristocracy—fueled the intensity of his efforts. But such cynicism withers when viewed against the long and loving arc of Sam’s marriage to Olivia. Love, friendship, loyalty—these were values of unconditional importance to Samuel Clemens. Once he bestowed them on someone, his fidelity was unshakable, so long as they were returned in kind; nothing wounded him as deeply as evidence that his faith had been betrayed. The language of these letters may be affected, but their ardency would prove genuine, and permanent. As for the voice, it likely came from that great seamless universe in Clemens’s mind where dreams, reality, fact, and fiction conjoined. He likely was the perfect Victorian Gentleman as he wrote those lines. As the editors of his letters from this period have observed, “He may well have been working a deception about his own character and beliefs—but it is impossible to read these letters without realizing that if he was, he was not aware of it at the time.”16 Olivia, when she got to know him better, put it more succinctly: she simply called him “Youth.”

  SAM LEFT the Langdon house on September 8, clinging to what remained of his dignity, and to the permission Livy had given him to keep writing to her. He departed Elmira with Charley Langdon, who was still thankfully in the dark about Sam’s romantic aspirations. The two cubs boarded a train for Cleveland, as they’d planned, where Mother Bear awaited them, tapping her paws impatiently. The visit was purely social for young Charley, an innocent reunion with a shipboard friend; but for the other two, it carried some heavy freight. Cleveland was the city Sam had selected for his debut as a professional lecturer. The appearance, set for November 17, would launch a dense winter tour whose schedule was still filling up: requests for bookings had flowed into his agents’ offices and to him personally throughout the summer and into the early fall.

  By the time he left the Langdons’ house, Mark Twain was committed to a staggering itinerary: twenty-six dates (the bookings would eventually approach forty) over nine weeks along a zigzagging trail of cities and towns in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. His last scheduled date was in Iowa City on January 9, 1869; but Torbert in Chicago kept nailing down bookings through December and January, and then, after a hiatus, a sort of “curtain call” in Sharon, Pennsylvania, on March 20. He would lecture on Christmas Day, and on all but four of the first fifteen days of January. He would appear in cities as prominent as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Chicago, and in towns as obscure as Rondout, New York; Tecumseh, Michigan; and Ottawa, Illinois. (The size of a town was incidental to its importance on the circuit: a full house was a full house, and houses in those days did not differ significantly in size.)

  His average fee would be about $100—respectable but not top-of-the-line. The highest-paid speaker in the East at the time was Olive Logan, the women’s rights crusader, who commanded $250. Henry Ward Beecher, Anna Dickinson, and Horace Greeley were among those in the $150–$200 range. Sa
m hoped to make up by sheer volume what he could not amass in per-lecture billing. He needed significant money, the sooner the better. He’d convinced himself that Olivia Langdon would never accept the hand of a vagabond entertainer and freelance journalist of marginal means. But with his Holy Land book on track for a December publication, he had a shot at presenting himself to her as a successful author-lecturer.

  To Mary Fairbanks, Sam’s tour could establish her protégé as a rising paragon of the lyceum. Or it could anneal his reputation as a clown. Sam had remained suspiciously vague as to the subject of his lecture. He’d indicated that he might dust off his 1866 “Sandwich Islands” success, or possibly unveil a new talk on the subject of California. These topics were mentioned in newspaper advertisements that appeared early in his tour.

  Mother Fairbanks was not fooled for a minute. She scented Quaker City from the get-go, and she smelled trouble along with it. The Holy Land voyage had taken on semisacred proportions to her and most of her fellow travelers. It was about beautiful, lofty things and pleasant, respectable people. Mark Twain had desecrated this image—and truly presumed on their friendship—with his withering piece in the New York Herald the day after the steamship docked. She wasn’t overjoyed with what she’d read about his Toast to Woman at the press correspondents’ banquet in Washington, for that matter. She saw his visit to Cleveland as a chance for her to gain some control over this lecture, and her cub’s moral development along with it.

  Sam anticipated all this, and the negotiating it would entail. He knew that Mary Fairbanks had divined the subject matter that he eventually, inevitably, settled on. He knew exactly how she expected him to treat it: with the uplifting (and slang-free) solemnity of the standard-issue Tasteful Victorian Elucidator. This was out of the question; and yet to simply steamroll the Fairbanksean sensibilities with a broadside of ridicule was also unthinkable. He was not so cruel that he would humiliate his adoring mentor in her home city, in the presence of her friends. He needed her goodwill, both professionally and with the Langdons: an admiring review of his talk in her husband’s Herald would launch his tour on a note of triumph. That was why he had chosen Cleveland as his debut city, and had specifically asked Mrs. Fairbanks to write a review.

  Sam spent much of his time in the Mary and Abel Fairbanks household scribbling through preliminary drafts of the lecture. Among his innocuous working titles was “Americans in the Old World.” A less bridled theme was taking shape in his mind, but he wasn’t yet ready to reveal it. He nodded dutifully at Mary’s copious advice for revisions. He and Charley explored the city, and sat for a joint portrait looking world-weary in snazzy evening clothes. Their hosts held a reception for them, at which Charley sparkled, reining in his avidity for alcohol. Sam confided to his “Mother” about his new “sister.” (Mary Fairbanks had been after him to find a wife; how she felt about his finding a new sibling remains unclear.) After two weeks of this, Charley returned to Elmira and Sam traveled on for a brief reunion with the homefolks in St. Louis. This time his heart wasn’t in the visit. The old Mississippi River city struck him as muddy, smoky, mean, an infection. Perhaps he was making the river a scapegoat for a newfound shame about his non-Eastern origins. He fidgeted under the family’s hospitality, impatient to leave. “I am called East.”17

  His prospects had taken an amazing turn out there. Livy had sent a letter to him in Cleveland that contained, miraculously, a photograph of herself. He dashed off a letter of buoyant thanks from Pamela’s and Jane’s household—“I never dreamt of such a thing”18—that was prudently garnished with “mend-my-conduct” language: he even vowed to pray with Livy. Details of timing were left unexamined. He also answered a missive from the Mother Bear, whose advice on the lecture continued to track him through the postal service. “Don’t be afraid to write sermons,” he assured her gamely. “Your advice about the building of the lecture I shall strictly follow.” On the same day, he twitted Frank Fuller about not receiving any “cundrums.” “I can get along without them, I suppose. My aunt never uses them.”19 Then in early October he escaped back to the region that felt more and more like home.

  He planned to head to New York and then to Hartford to consult on the production of The New Pilgrim’s Progress, as it was still being called. Rail connections being excellent, it was hardly a problem to detour south through Elmira for an overnight call on the Langdons and Livy. Nursing a bad cold and undoubtedly distracted, he took another pratfall in the maze of elite Eastern manners, and came within another hair of losing the princess he was courting. Yet another pratfall—a real one this time—saved him.

  On the afternoon of his planned nighttime departure, Sam took Charley Langdon aside and let him in on his romantic feelings toward Livy. Other family members already had their suspicions—elder sister Susan Crane, who had been around the block a time or two, sensed the current on Sam’s first visit, and disapproved. The ever-democratic Jervis Langdon was more forgiving, and more focused on what his daughter wanted. Tormented with the early symptoms of his stomach cancer, he had found relief in sharing laughter with Sam, and seems to have looked kindly on the match from the start. Charley was a different story. As he took on the affectations of his snobbish social circle, the young man’s shipboard deference to Sam mutated into condescension. Mark Twain would remember Charley as “conceited, arrogant, and overbearing,” hopelessly spoiled by “his worst enemy,” his mother. Charley may have accepted the notorious Quaker City “sinner” as a traveling companion and a good fellow, but brother-in-law was too much. Livy’s brother stunned Sam by his response: an icy suggestion that Clemens might want to board an earlier train; for instance, the one leaving in half an hour. He relented a little; but by evening, he was still only too eager to escort the visitor to the train station.

  A split second of slapstick saved Sam’s suitor status. The pair climbed into the “democrat wagon” outside the main gate; the horse lurched forward—and Sam and Charley did an involuntary synchronized double-backwards somersault onto the cobblestones. It seemed that the seat had not been locked into place.

  Neither was badly hurt. Charley suffered a forehead gash when a seat landed on it, and Sam lay seeing stars for several minutes until the Langdon women rushed outdoors to slosh him with water. They hoisted him inside, tucked him into bed and insisted that he stay an extra day to recuperate, with Livy keeping watch. Sam, who later allowed that he’d faked his injuries a little, let himself be persuaded. Not even catching the measles at Will Bowen’s house had been this much fun. He broke his “neck in eleven different places,” he gleefully reported to Mother Fairbanks. As for Charley,

  The seat followed Charley out & split his head wide open, so that you could look through it just as if you were looking through a gorge in a mountain. There wasn’t anything to intercept the view—which was curious, because his brains hadn’t been knocked out.20

  Sam made good use of his time under Livy’s care. “I can’t write about that matter that is in your mind & mine,” he reported to Mrs. Fairbanks, “but suffice it that it bears just a little pleasanter aspect than it did when I saw you last…”21 Yet Sam promptly overplayed his hand. Soon after his departure for Hartford, in a fit of “hot-blooded heedlessness,” he dropped the brother pose and scorched the young woman with a letter of naked passion—a letter now lost. Clammy regret was not long in forming. “I’ll bet I have written a letter that will finish me,” he moaned to Mother Fairbanks. “I wish I had it back again—I would tone it down some.”22 Livy’s reply, also unrecovered, sent Sam hightailing it back to the “Honored Sister” mode on October 18: “You have rebuked me…I accept the rebuke, severe as it was, & surely I ought to thank you for the lesson it brings…I walk upon the ground again—not in the clouds.”23

  SAM LICKED this wound in leafy Hartford for the rest of October, boarding at the Bliss household and working on the book manuscript and his lecture. Elisha Bliss lived with his second wife, Amelia Crosby Bliss, not far from the American Publishing Company
offices at 148 Asylum Avenue, near its conjunction with Farmington Avenue to the south. Farmington and Asylum diverged westward in a widening “V” through Asylum Hill, a graceful wooded swell of 615 acres that had been known as Lord’s Hill until 1807, when the Connecticut Asylum for the Deaf was established there. It was on the southern slope of Asylum Hill, tucked up against a curved bank of the North Park River, that Mark Twain was soon to be happy, for a time. There lay Nook Farm.