Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  SAM AND Livy had been collaborating on other passionate life plans as well. Getting to Hartford was a predominating aim for both of them, and in his visits there through the hectic summer, Sam had investigated ways to make it happen. Buying or building a house would unavoidably draw upon Livy’s inheritance, and Sam, although resigned to this, shared Livy’s view that they should be certain that such an investment was the right one. Yet they could not live on indefinitely as Olivia Lewis Langdon’s guests in the Elmira household.

  An opportunity opened up by way of John and Isabella Hooker, the founding couple of Nook Farm and the parents of Livy’s friend Alice Hooker Day. The Hookers offered to lease their house to Sam and Livy for a quarterly rent of three hundred dollars, while they toured Europe and, on returning, lodged in the spacious Francis Gillette house. The Hookers’ three-story Victorian Gothic, with its steeply angled roof, arch windows, and multiple gables, had charmed Sam on his first visit in 1868. It was the first of what would become the famous tight cluster of Nook Farm mansions, a cluster just taking form in 1871. The Hookers commissioned the house in 1853 from Octavius Jordan, a British-born architect who lived in Hartford. Jordan was an exponent of the “picturesque” school, with its homage to the timeless English country house enclosed by gardens. Sam and Livy arranged shipping for their furniture in Buffalo in the last days of September, and packed their belongings in Elmira. By October 3, they were ensconced in the Hooker house at Forest and Hawthorne streets, with Livy reeling again under the strain compounded by her pregnancy.

  Sam was feeling strains of his own. In two weeks, Mark Twain’s lyceum tour was set to begin. The ordeal was going to commence all over again, this time with the additional distractions of a baby son in questionable health and a pregnant wife who was struggling to contain her distress at his long absences. Sam was aware that even America’s newest literary darling, Bret Harte, had stumbled badly at Harvard in June. Invited to write and deliver a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa society, Harte had showed up late, his poem unfinished. He had tried to wing it with some other verse he’d brought along; the verse was blatantly irrelevant to the occasion, and the press that had kept track of his great eastward hegira several weeks earlier pronounced him “A Fizzle.”

  There was also the matter of Sam’s lecture, “Reminiscences of Some Pleasant Characters I Have Met.”

  “The best one I ever wrote, I think,” he had assured Orion. Now he could only hope it was the best lecture he wrote on June 27.

  * Eleven a.m. more or less, given that there were then 144 “official” times throughout North America.

  * Like most writers, Mark Twain was often obsessed with his daily page-count. His pages had only 70–80 words. A newly discovered letter that Mark Twain likely wrote on November 14, 1880, just after he had finished The Prince and the Pauper, reads in part: “You see, I write on an average, 400 pages of manuscript per working month—to do this, one must make it a rigid duty to refrain from writing family letters—there isn’t any other way. I can’t write one before work, for then I should go to work with depleted fuel; I can’t write one after work, for that would waste me like sickness (I’m 45 & must go carefully;) when I do write one, I don’t do any work that day. You see, I conscientiously put the very best work I possibly can into my books, for I have made an estimate & found that I get 25 cents a word for every word in the ‘Tramp,’ (‘A Tramp Abroad’) which is $20 per note-paper page of M.S.—for I usually get 80 words onto a page like this which I am now writing.”

  27

  Sociable Jimmy

  (1871–72)

  The proportions of the disaster were immediately apparent. Mark Twain unveiled “Reminiscences of Some un-Commonplace Characters I Have Chanced to Meet” (he’d had the good sense to replace “Pleasant”) on October 16 at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and delivered it again the next night in Allentown. The “chuckle-headed Dutch,” as he furiously called them, sat on their hands. The Bethlehem Times complained that he was inaudible and had rehashed anecdotes from The Innocents Abroad, and that he hadn’t been “instructive…or entertaining”1 That was a rave compared to what the Allentown Chronicle had to say: “Mark Twain has the reputation of being a funny man, and the greatest joke he ever perpetrated was his ‘lecture’ last evening.”2

  “This lecture will never do,” he wailed to Livy after the opening performance. “I hate it & won’t keep it.”3 He was already scribbling notes for a new talk as he sat swaying in railroad cars; this one was on Artemus Ward, still a cultural icon nearly five years after his death. At Wilkes-Barre, on the third day, he canceled stops in Easton and Reading so he could get something decent together in time for his engagement in Washington five days later. The truth was that he’d never really invested enough care in his fall lecture. The crushing events of the year, combined with the pressure of churning out the long Western manuscript in fast drafts, had fatally distracted him. The Innocents Abroad material, which had so enlivened his Vandal tour, was familiar now, and no longer welcome.

  Why he did not draw immediately on the new mother lode, the book in production soon to emerge as Roughing It, is a mystery. By mid-October he still had not thought to harvest it. In Washington, he worked at the Ward lecture over two days in the newly redecorated Arlington Hotel. Then he ambled out onto the Lincoln Hall stage to face a record audience of 2,000, of whom 150 were crowded around his feet on the stage itself—and bombed again. The Evening Star tried to be kind—“pleasant,” it proclaimed the talk, in an unwitting irony—but the paper had to admit that the material was basically a confusing mélange of Ward and Mark Twain. “No lecturer has a right to trifle with his audience in that kind of style.”4 The Morning Chronicle lambasted Mark Twain’s “unfit habits of speech,” and drew pointed attention to his faltering stage manner: his “eccentricities of bearing,” his “simply outré” gestures.5 In Morristown, New Jersey, he was branded a fraud. In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the critic called his lecture “plagiaristic” of Ward and blamed it on laziness.6 The response at Brattleboro was harder to judge; Vermonters rarely changed their expressions for any reason. Then came Boston. Sam knew that the avatars of high American literature would be present, or at least near enough to read the reviews the next day. “Boston must sit up & behave, & do right by me,” he’d told Livy. “As Boston goes, so goes New England.”7 Again, he would rely on the Artemus Ward talk. His late-night letter home following his performance was preemptive:

  Livy, it was a bad night, but we had a packed house, & if the papers say any disparaging things, don’t you believe a single word of it, for I never saw a lecture go off so magnificently before. I tell you it made me feel like my old self again. I wanted to talk a week. People say Boston audiences ain’t responsive. People lie. Boston audiences get perfectly uproarious when they get started. I am satisfied with to-night.8

  The Boston papers gave a different picture. The Evening Transcript noted the “pleasure” and “merriment” in the audience, but nothing more.9 The Advertiser panned him, compounding the insult by printing a synopsis of the talk. His disappointment in the reviews evaporated the next day when some of those Boston-based avatars swept him up into a glorious literary luncheon at Louis P. Ober’s burnished, masculine Greek Revival restaurant on Winter Place. The organizer was Ralph Keeler, a convivial young bohemian whom Sam had known at the San Francisco Golden Era. (Keeler was two years away from his murder aboard a ship off the coast of Cuba.) The other guests were the editor and Bad Boy novelist Thomas Bailey Aldrich; the aging James T. Fields, now retired as publisher of the Atlantic; Bret Harte; and the Atlantic’s new editor, William Dean Howells. Harte (despite his misstep at Harvard) had lately been embraced by the Eastern circle. Fields, in one of his last acts as Atlantic editor, had signed Harte to a one-year contract with the magazine for the spectacular retainer of ten thousand dollars. Toward Mark Twain, the Brahmins had been somewhat more skeptical: his authentic Westernness was far less polished, after all, than the variety offered by Harte, w
hich betrayed an Easterner’s efforts to sound “Western.” But now, with Howells as his sponsor, this luncheon ratified Mark Twain’s provisional inclusion among the younger American men of letters.

  If Sam recorded any accounts of that luncheon, they are lost. Howells’s memory of it remained joyously vivid over the years, though. He described several times “the lurid lunch which the divine Keeler gave us out of his poverty,” recalling especially the beefsteak and the shoe-peg mushrooms and the omelette soufflé, and the way Harte put his hand on Clemens’s “sealskin shoulder” and sputtered out to those present, “This is the dream of his life.”10 The occasion served as the rapprochement between Mark Twain and Harte—for a while, at least. The occasion also marked the first social meeting between Clemens and Howells.* Soon afterward, Sam directed Elisha Bliss to send copies of The Innocents Abroad to Howells, Aldrich, and Keeler, marked with his compliments. “We’ve been having a good many dinners together,”11 he explained. “The Hub of the Solar System,”† as Oliver Wendell Holmes liked to call Boston, had become Mark Twain’s personal hub for his two weeks of lecturing in the area, just as it had during his previous tour. Aldrich revealed a sharper wit on these evenings than he had shown in The Story of a Bad Boy. In later years Mark Twain rated Aldrich in a class by himself as a raconteur: “when he speaks the diamonds flash.”12 Still, the deeper connection was with Howells, and their friendship blossomed even further in the new year.

  Mark Twain’s affection toward Aldrich developed in spite of Mrs. Aldrich. It was Lilian Aldrich’s bad luck to draw suspicious conclusions about Sam Clemens’s long drawl and “rocking and rolling gait” on their first meeting, and to behave like a classic Boston bluenose about it. Sam got the message, and tucked the memory into his mental “vengeance due” list. The opera buffa unfolded with Mrs. Aldrich singing the role of Her Offended Ladyship, Thomas Aldrich as the Befuddled Lord, and Sam in the role of the Prince in Disguise. As Act I opens, Aldrich and Mark Twain enter the Aldrich household with a burst of merry laughter, to find Mrs. Aldrich unprepared for a dinner guest. She notices her husband’s friend’s attire: sealskin coat with the fur outward, cap pulled halfway down over his face, yellowish-brown trousers, and matching stockings. She notices that he is swaying from side to side, and seems to be having trouble with his speech.

  Act II finds the trio seated in the library, Her Ladyship rigid with dignity and looking daggers at her husband, who labors to keep the conversational ball rolling until the dinner hour. The dinner hour comes and goes, with no maid making an entrance to announce that the soup was on. Act II is a very strained act.

  In Act III, the tragic finale, the mysterious stranger arises sadly and takes his leave. As the strings reach a crescendo, Her Ladyship stands and sings the memorable lament: “How could you have brought a man in that condition to your home / To sit at your table, and to meet your wife? / Why, he was so intoxicated he could not stand straight / He stammered in his speech.”13 To which the anguished Lord responds: “Why, dear, did you not know who he was? / What you thought wine was but his mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, characteristics of himself / And born with Mark Twain.”14 Upon hearing this revelation, Her Ladyship bursts into uncontrollable sobs, and delivers the famous aria: “Mark Twain! / Was that Mark Twain / Oh, go after him, go after him; bring him back and tell him, tell him—/ O, what can you tell him!”15 Curtain of charity.

  THE ARTEMUS Ward lecture continued to misfire as Mark Twain worked the small cities and towns around Boston. The audience sat staring at him in Worcester, and the chairman with his “owlish mug” perched on the stage behind him, another guaranteed goat-getter for Sam. But the crowds remained large, even on the many rainy evenings; and gradually, thanks to ceaseless tinkering aboard trains and in hotel rooms, Mark Twain pruned the weakest elements from the talk. He replaced its jokey conclusion with a thoughtful meditation on Ward; he recited a sentimental eulogy to the late humorist composed by a British poet. Sam’s cheerful letters home to Livy were doubtlessly genuine in their affection, though his ornate lovemaking had long since given way to gossip, anecdotes from the day, and household concerns, such as thanking her for sending him some socks. It is not clear whether Sam appreciated the depths of Livy’s loneliness for him, made worse by the growing erosion of her once-ironclad Christian faith. Or it may have been that he already sensed the worst for Langdon, and was steeling himself against the inevitability. A year old, Langdon still could not sit upright without help. He had trouble imitating the sounds Livy made for him each day, and he cried almost constantly. “Kiss cubbie for me” was about the extent of Sam’s reference to Langdon in the surviving letters.

  Livy kept as mentally and physically active as she could. Her mother came to visit, bringing her quiltwork, through the early phase of the lecture tour, and relieved some of the pressure with Langdon. Livy kept up a dutiful reading schedule, plowing through a tome on the Netherlands and Dickens’s Child’s History of England, and hired tutors for her pursuit of German and French.

  Sam managed a weekend detour to Hartford on November 18 and 19. The day afterward, Livy wrote him an affectionate letter that could not conceal an undercurrent of sadness. This is the first in a cluster of four surviving letters from her, written over a two-week span, that afford a rare glimpse into the heart of Olivia Clemens at twenty-six—her concerns, emotional state, and her manner of thought and speech: unadorned at times, but always intelligent, always aimed at the heart of things.

  Didn’t we have a good visit together? I do hope that this will be the last season that it will be necessary for you to lecture, it is not the way for a husband and wife to live if they can possibly avoid it, is it? Separation comes soon enough—…

  I am going over to “the club” now in a few minutes I wish you were going with me I rather dread it—I want you along to protect me.

  The baby grows so sweet and dear, I know as he grows older you and he will love each other like every thing…16

  “I am so sorry to have to leave you with all the weight of housekeeping on your shoulders,” he wrote back; and added, a shade patronizingly, “—& at the same time I know that it is a blessing to you—for only wholesome care & work can make lonely people endure existence.”17

  That letter crossed in the mails with

  My Dear Heart,

  It is too bad to give you the last end of my day when the life and energy are rather gone out of me—…

  Today I took him [the baby] down town, he rode on the front seat in Margaret’s [the nursemaid’s] arms…Oh Youth he is such a delight to me I am so thankful for him—If anything happens to me you must love him awfully—…

  I hope that I shall get a letter from you tomorrow morning, I do like to hear from you little man, because you know—well you know all about it—…

  Do you pray for me Youth? oh we must be a prayerful family—pray for me as you used to do—I am not prayerful as of old but I believe my heart prays—…18

  Her longest and most heartfelt letter of this skein reached him at his lecture stop at Fredonia, New York, where Jane, Pamela, Annie, and Sammy were living. Addressing “My Dear Heart,” she opened on an almost accusatory note.

  It did me no good to wish for twenty letters, I did not get one—I have rec’d only one letter and one little note from you since you left home, they both came in the same mail—It is Saturday night, and I am homesick for you, not hearing from you makes me feel still more homesick—…

  She admitted that she was “a little cross, beside wanting you so much and being disappointed about hearing from you…” and decided to suspend writing further until

  Bed time—

  Have been drawing a plan of our house and feel better than at dinner time…

  Sunday Evening

  I tell you I am glad that tomorrow is Monday, because I shall probably get letters—if I do not—well I do not know what I shall do, telegraph you I guess—

  Mother and I went to church this morning…

  It is
so long since I have been to church that I was mellowed by the very atmosphere I think, Mr Twichells prayer touched me and made me cry, he prayed particularly for those who had fallen away and were longing to come back to God—Youth I am ashamed to go back, because I have fallen away so many times…I hope not to have as delicate a child next time as little Langdon was—

  …Mrs Warner was speaking this P.M. of lukewarmness toward God…I told her if I felt toward God as I did toward my husband I should never be in the least troubled—I did not tell her how almost perfectly cold I am toward God—

  She went on to discuss their house-building plans in Hartford. The plan that she had been drawing for the house was serious and sophisticated, well beyond anything Sam was capable of conceiving. She worked at it for nearly two years before submitting it to the architects, and it formed a fairly accurate working blueprint for the finished edifice. Livy had calculated that it would cost them $29,000 to buy acreage, build a house on it, and purchase new furniture—an undercalculation, as things turned out. She was due to receive a settlement when the co-partnership of her father’s coal company expired; but that was eight years away and the amount was uncertain. Her inheritance remained mostly tied up in investments. In the meantime, her brother Charley had told her that she could expect an income of three to five hundred dollars a month from the coal enterprise. Sam could expect to earn two thousand dollars from lecturing one month in New England. Livy had concluded that, even discounting the money Sam sent to Jane, and incidental matters, they could live in a cottage with a servant until the co-partnership settlement came in. Mid-paragraph Livy’s tone shifted again: