by Ron Powers
America’s reviewers were grappling with something that few of them had expected to encounter between book covers, a kind of literary desegregation: humor released from the ghetto and allotted full citizenship; humor and “serious” writing living in the same neighborhood. In its first eighteen months on the subcription market, The Innocents Abroad sold 82,524 copies at an average $4 a book (price varied with the choice of binding) for a total royalty of $16,504, or about $217,762 in today’s dollars. Sidney Drake was not heard from any further on the subject of its unsuitable humor. Mark Twain would never again, in his lifetime or afterward, be less than a preeminent figure in American culture.
IN SEPTEMBER, under pressure from Redpath to honor some key engagements, notably a November appearance at the Music Hall in Boston, Mark Twain reluctantly resumed his lecture schedule. It was a brutal slog: fifty-one stops over nearly three months, including Christmas Eve (Slatersville, R.I.). He would be away for both Livy’s twenty-fourth birthday, on November 28, and his own thirty-fourth, two days later. Sam lectured in Pittsburgh and environs, then spent six weeks in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Washington, Maine, and Connecticut, boarding in Boston for most of this time. He suffered another “separation” dream involving Livy, the torment deepened this time by a rival—“He was always with you,…you put me gently aside, & said you knew you were drifting to certain wreck, but it could not be helped…I siezed your hand, & said, ‘O, Livy, I loved you with such infinite tenderness!’ ”61 Otherwise, this unwanted return to the lecture trail produced some significant rewards. “On the success of [the Boston lecture] depends my future success in New England,” he’d written to Pamela. He’d added that he was “twenty-two thousand dollars in debt” (his debt from the Express venture), and that he’d had his life insured for ten thousand dollars, taking two hundred dollars out of his pocket “which I was going to send to Ma.”62 Before a full house of 2,600 on November 11, he achieved that success, as adjudged by the daily papers; the Herald chortled over its “rich and racy points.”
Several days after that he met Frederick Douglass, also on tour. “I certainly was glad to see him,” he told Livy, “for I do so admire his ‘spunk.’ ”63 The exposure to Douglass’s gravitas, his absence of reassuring “negritude,” registered deeply with Sam, and moved his own intellectual train a little farther down a track that had originated with Uncle Dan’l. Douglass told Sam the story of how in 1848 he had enrolled his daughter Rosetta, then nine, in an all-white female academy in Rochester, New York, only to see her sent home after a parent objected. Douglass had demanded that the principal ask the children to vote on whether they wanted to accept her; their vote in favor was unanimous. “There was pathos in the way he said it,” Sam told Livy. “I would like to hear him make a speech. Has a grand face.”64
Finally on this Boston sojourn, on a chilly afternoon, Mark Twain moved along Tremont Street in his curious rocking, rolling shamble, entered the bookstore Ticknor & Fields, climbed the staircase to the second-floor offices of the Atlantic Monthly, inquired for William Dean Howells, and commenced a lifetime of friendship and letters.
25
Fairyland
(1870)
The first rough contours of the super-nation to come were taking shape now. In 1870, a new, uninterrupted railroad line spanned the United States, and John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil. Baseball became a professional sport in 1871, and people started going to ball games in large crowds. (Hartford would boast the Dark Blues of the National Association in 1874; Sam was a fan.) The suburb began to assume its own identity, distinct from both city and country town. Howells would become its first chronicler in fiction, anticipating Cheever and O’Hara and Updike. A “middle class” took form, a product of new opportunities in business ownership and management, and it viewed itself as distinctive, certainly from the common rubes and immigrants below it, but also from the conspicuously consuming upper class of the Gilded Age. This new, powerful middle class comprised Victorians, American-style: in a word, “gentry.” The upper 10 percent of the prosperous Northeast filled up their “leisure” time by yachting and playing tennis and golf. The Victorians went around on bicycles with extreme wheels—the Dexter and the Shire Boneshaker. (Sam bought a bicycle and fell down several times on it; years later he wrote a novel with lots of bicycles in it, ridden by knights.) Their wives shopped in department stores, buying dresses for fashion as well as durability, and ornamental tchotchkes to put in the parlor, their new household headquarters. Olivia Langdon loved these stores; she assembled much of her wedding trousseau from these stores, and, later, the furnishings of the great house at Nook Farm.
The photographic image, its iconic power unleashed by the ten thousand– odd battlefield exposures made by Mathew Brady and his associates during the late war, was domesticated; portrait-making studios proliferated. Sam, who’d already had his picture taken several times, had it taken several dozen more, and looked terrific in half-profile every time. (He didn’t think any had done him justice, though, until May 1870; he ordered fifteen hundred copies of that one.) Advertising began its historic colonization of the physical world: in the 1870s, product messages were plastered across so many hillsides, boulders, and barn roofs that some states began to restrict outdoor-sign painting. Graphic design accelerated advertising’s reach: an 1870 issue of Harper’s Weekly featured an illustrated pitch for Waltham watches, endorsed by Henry Ward Beecher; by the 1880s, lithographed advertising cards would urge, DON’T FAIL TO SMOKE MARK TWAIN CIGARS.
It was an age of hustle and commerce—and, paradoxically, of the Child. America, by now fatigued with mourning the Union and Confederate dead, turned its sentimental attention to its young, igniting an efflorescence of periodicals and books for children. In 1869 a semiautobiographical novel about a mischievous but ultimately lovable boy was published to widespread acclaim; the boy’s name was Tom, but his last name wasn’t Sawyer.
THE AUTHOR and newspaper owner Samuel Clemens vaulted into the upper reaches of this new postwar society when he married Olivia Langdon on February 2, 1870, after seventeen months of courtship. He had written an estimated 189 love letters—about half have been recovered, beginning with “My Honored Sister,” on September 7, 1868, and concluding with “…God bless you, Sam,” on January 20, 1870. In that final prenuptial letter, written just before a lecture in Hornellsville, New York, Sam told Livy that it had been “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.” Her letters “have made one ray of sunlight & created a thrill of pleasure in every one of these long-drawn days,” and he promised, “This is the last long correspondence we shall ever have, my Livy—& now on this day it passes forever…& becomes a memory.”1
An astonishing self-description of Mark Twain’s ability to own an audience—his rock idol’s instincts and audacity—found its way into Sam’s second-to-last known letter of the exchange, written after midnight on January 15, from Bagg’s Hotel in Utica. Perhaps his adrenaline was still pumping after the freakish events of his previous night’s stop in Cambridge, New York: arriving exhausted in a sleet storm, he was infuriated to find that a local paper, the Troy Times, had printed a transcription of his lecture, complete with dashes and hyphens to replicate his famous drawl. As he sat fuming in his hotel, he looked out the window to see the nearby lecture hall site burst into flames from a falling chandelier. (“My spirits came up till I felt that all I needed to be entirely happy was to see the Troy Times editors…locked up in that burning building.”)2 Firemen doused the blaze, to his dismay, and he had to lecture in the soaked, ash-stinking hall.
It was with those events swirling in his mind that Mark Twain ambled onstage in Utica and surveyed the expectant full house. He decided to mess with their minds a little. They liked pauses? He would give them a pause. Still exhilarated hours after this gambit, he described it to Livy, along wit
h his feelings of conquest.
…I stood patient & silent, minute after minute…till my roused good-nature passed from my heart & countenance to theirs along a thousand invisible electrical currents & conquered their reserve, swept their self-possession to the winds, & the great house “came down” like an avalanche!3
“No man knows better than I,” he continued, “the enormous value of a wholehearted welcome achieved without a spoken word—and no man will dare more than I to get it. An audience captured in that way, belongs to the speaker, body & soul, for the rest of the evening.”4
THE WEDDING took place inside the Langdon household with at least seventy-five guests present.* Joe Twichell came up from Hartford to assist Thomas K. Beecher in the ceremony. Pamela and Annie Moffett, now seventeen, arrived from St. Louis—the first trip east for either of them. Jane stayed home for reasons that are not clear. Mary and Abel Fairbanks attended with their daughter Alice, as did Harriet Lewis, and Susan Crane, Harmony Twichell, Julia Jones Beecher (Thomas’s wife), and several Elmira neighbors and business associates of Jervis, former schoolmates of Livy, some Republican politicians, doctors, lawyers, a former Civil War general and Olivia’s eighty-seven-year-old grandmother, Eunice Ford.5
Charley Langdon was among the missing. His parents had shooed the twenty-one-year-old out of the house again. Accompanied by the Elmira College professor Darius Ford, a former tutor of Livy’s, Charley was on a global “study tour.” Chief among his studies was the science of staying sober.
Mary Fairbanks wrote up the affair for the Cleveland Herald with admirable tact—no gossip or slang from this correspondent! She disclosed that the bride hid her blushes in the folds of her bridal veil, reported that “Mark Twain” “filled the role of bridegroom with charming grace and dignity,” and let on that everyone was polite. This was not strictly the case. An Elmira woman (probably Mrs. L. Holden Dent) crashed the party, elbowed her way through the celebrants, and demanded that Sam promenade her around the room. He was furious about it later. As for Livy, Annie Moffett recalled that “[e]ven her sweet disposition was in danger of disintegration.”6 The next day a car supplied by a railroad magnate transported the newlyweds and several guests from Elmira to Buffalo. Sam, for some reason, set aside his new Eastern good manners and spent a good deal of the journey belting out the lyrics of an old song that went frostily unmentioned by Mrs. Fairbanks. Even the spunkier Annie allowed that it did “not seem particularly appropriate for a wedding trip.”7
There was an old woman in our town,
In our town did dwell,
She loved her husband dearily
But another man twicet as well,
Another man twicet as well.
The ditty must have meant something to Sam; he included versions of it in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Prince and the Pauper.
At Buffalo they were driven to 472 Delaware Avenue, an exquisite two-story brick house with mansard roof, high arching windows, and a small balcony above the entrance. This was nothing like the cheap boardinghouse he’d been led to expect; he could never meet the rent. “Then the battalion of ambushed friends and relatives burst in on us, out of closets and from behind curtains.”8 The house was his and Livy’s. Jervis and Olivia had bought it for them as a $40,000 wedding present—horses, stables, coach, furnishings, and servants included. Handed the property deed by Jervis at the doorway, Sam wise-cracked that this was “a first class swindle.” Within moments, though, he teared up, and croaked out to Jervis Langdon that he was always welcome in the household—“You may stay overnight if you want to. It shan’t cost you a cent.”9 The next morning, general uproar ensued.10 The rest of the twenty or so guests went running around the premises oohing and aahing about the library and the cozy dining room and the shade of blue in the drawing room, while the Reverend Thomas Beecher flopped down on the floor and began rolling over. To his wife’s horrified “What are you doing, Mr. Beecher?” he replied, as any gentleman would under the circumstances, “I am trying to take the feather edge off.”11 Then everybody collected in the drawing room, where Mrs. Beecher led them in several verses of “Heaven Is My Home.”
ON THE Sunday afternoon following Jervis’s staggering bequest, awaiting the dinner bell in his new household, Sam reached for his pen and began a reply to a letter from Will Bowen. “My First, & Oldest & Dearest Friend,” was the salutation. Within a few strokes—“Your letter has stirred me to the bottom”—he was deep into an invocational chant, half to Bowen and half to himself, from which the greater part of his literature would issue, including the boy’s book forever linked to his name.
“The fountains of my great deep are broken up,” it famously began,
& I have rained reminiscences for four & twenty hours. The old life has swept before me like a panorama; the old days have trooped by in their old glory, again; the old faces have looked out of the mists of the past; old footsteps have sounded in my listening ears; old hands have clasped mine, old voices have greeted me, & the songs I loved ages & ages ago have come wailing down the centuries! Heavens what eternities have swung their hoary cycles about us since those days were new!
There followed some five hundred words of impassioned reminiscence that amounted almost to a brief index of the plots and imagery in the works soon to come.
Since we tore down Dick Hardy’s stable!;…since old General Gaines used to say, “Whoop! Bow your neck & spread;” since Jimmy Finn was the town drunkard…since Clint Levering was drowned;…since we used to undress & play Robin Hood in our shirt-tails, with lath swords, in the woods on Holliday’s Hill on those long summer days; since we used to go in swimming above the still-house branch…since I jumped overboard from the ferry boat in the middle of the river that stormy day to get my hat…while all the town collected on the wharf &…looked out across the angry waste of “white-caps” toward where people said Sam. Clemens was last seen before he went down;…since Owsley shot Smar;…since Laura Hawkins was my sweetheart…12
The floodgates of his greatest literature were opened.
Livy expressed her contentment to her parents four days after the arrival. “If I could write you a reem of paper I could not begin to tell you half that I want to tell you—I wish that I could remember some of the funny things that Mr Clemens says and does—and besides these funny things, he is so tender and considerate in every way.”13 Sam began giving the new parlor piano a daily workout, playing and singing his favorite old songs by the hour. Soon, he was coaxing a sense of humor out of his rather sobersided bride, or at least a newfound sense of playfulness. The two took turns scribbling interjections in each other’s letters to friends and relatives, often with Livy perched on Sam’s lap. Seizing the pen after Sam had accused her of cooking the account book to make the cash flow look balanced, she interjected, “Father it is not true—Samuel slanders me—”14 And following Sam’s assertion to Mary Fairbanks that “I have got her trained so that she tones down & almost stops talking at the word of command,” Livy scrawled, “I deny it, I am woman’s rights.”15 As proof of her power, she forced Sam to keep his hands out of his pockets and sit up straight. By this time, she was pregnant.
It got to the point that Sam was referring to himself as “Little Sammy in Fairy Land.” Livy came up with a more penetrating nickname, one that would virtually replace “Samuel” in her references to him through all the years. After one of his wisecracks in a letter to Olivia Lewis Langdon, Livy began her rebuttal: “Isn’t he a funny Youth?”16
The Youth was growing fidgety with his new role as newspaper executive. His byline in the Express boosted sales, but the novelty wore off. Schemes, brainstorms, fantasies came and went. The previous November he had thought to capitalize on Charley’s and Professor Ford’s global travels by rewriting their dispatches into a series in the Saturday paper: “Mark Twain’s Voyage Around the World by Proxy.” That idea lasted through eight installments, and Sam ended up writing mostly about his adventures in the West. He thought about taking Livy to Englan
d, thought about hiking the Adirondacks with the Twichells, thought about some inventions, and, in the comfort of his hearth with Livy close by, resolved that his lecturing ordeals were over. “I am not going to lecture any more forever,” he notified Redpath in March.17 And again a couple of months later: “I guess I am out of the field permanently.”18
He re-redefined his “executive” stance vis-à-vis the Express in a way that suited him a little better: near-total detachment. As he told an editor of the Galaxy, “I write sketches for it, & occasional squibs & editorials—that is all. I don’t go to the office.”19 By the end of 1870, he was boasting that “I never write a line for my paper, I do not see the office oftener than once a week, & do not stay there an hour at any time…”20 His commitment to the paper crumbled further under a couple of fresh distractions: ongoing encouragement from Isabella Beecher Hooker to sell his interest in the Buffalo paper and move to Hartford; and the chance to get himself back into the Eastern urban spotlight. The latter came via an invitation to write and edit a “humor department” for the Galaxy, the ambitious New York monthly founded in 1866. The magazine’s author list included Anthony Trollope, Ivan Turgenev, a new young writer named Henry James, and Sam’s new acquaintance William Dean Howells. Its publishers, the brothers William Conant Church and Francis P. Church, had noted the success of The Innocents (whose still-ascending sales now averaged more than 7,000 copies a month and $1,300 monthly royalties to Sam21), and offered him $2,400. Sam renegotiated for a fee of $2,000 and the rights to everything he wrote, and by late March was pouring his energies into the magazine’s ten-page humor section that he called “Memoranda.”