Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 11

  The Langdon family’s wealth was new money; they used it with liberality and without ostentation. They were mainstays of church and community. Before the war Langdon was an abolitionist and aided fugitive slaves. He was now active in behalf of the freedmen, supported Negro education in the South, and was friend and host to Frederick Douglass. The Langdons had become gentry, and thirty years after he first met them, when Sam Clemens tried to rationalize in a novel what in his bereavement and bankruptcy had begun to seem an unreal past, he made a simple telescoping of his background and Livy’s: she came from the first family in town and the richest, he from the second family, poorer than hers, but still gentry. (Both families in this fiction were slaveowners.)

  When she was sixteen Olivia fell on the ice, suffered a mysterious injury to her spine, and became partially paralyzed. For two years she lay in her bedroom with the shades drawn. A procession of doctors gave her parents little hope for even a partial recovery. Above her bed was a pulley and tackle designed by one of these doctors to help her to raise herself to a half-reclining position. The experiment was agonizing, she became nauseated and faint, but the apparatus, though not used again, was never removed. Neurasthenia, hysteria, post-traumatic syndrome: the terms change, and there is little or nothing to go on. This was a century of sal volatile and the sick headache, of the Beautiful Invalid and the Mysterious Ailment. Elizabeth Barrett took to her bedroom with an “affection” of the spine. Even the robust Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, after his humiliating caning on the Senate floor, became an invalid although his doctors could find no organic damage. Olivia Langdon’s paralysis vanished as darkly as it began. After two years of supine captivity her family tried a last resort, a mind healer named Newton who would have been as much at home in the Mississippi Valley of Clemens’ boyhood as he was in the Southern Tier in the 1860s. Certainly Dr. Newton’s performance in the Langdon house (he explained his power as “some subtle form of electricity” proceeding from his body) helped tickle Clemens’ lifelong fascination with mind science, mental telegraphy, Christian Science, and other heterodoxies. According to the family recollection, Dr. Newton opened the shades, opened the windows, prayed, put an arm behind Livy’s shoulders, and said, “Now we will sit up, my child.” After a few minutes he said, “Now we will walk a few steps, my child,” and she did.* During her last years asthma, hyperthyroidism, and a heart ailment made her an invalid once again, and she had periods of invalidism and nervous prostration throughout her life, but she lived to be nearly sixty and she had four children. While Clemens was courting her she was as sensitive about her health, he told Mary Fairbanks, “as I am about my drawling speech and stammerers of their infirmity.” Perhaps his celebrated drawl served the same obscure self-protective purpose for him as her illness did for her. At the very least, his comparison suggests how direct his sympathy for her was.

  Jervis Langdon could afford Dr. Newton’s fee of $1,500 for his professional services. Soon after, he built the brownstone mansion at 21 Main Street in Elmira where Livy celebrated her restored health and where, in August 1868, Clemens came to woo her. Three sets of iron gates, baronially clanging when they opened or shut, gave entrance to grounds covering a city block. The Langdon greenhouse (which, like the Langdon coal monopoly in a warm winter, suffered from overproduction) supplied flowers for local funerals in such profusion that Clemens joked, to Livy’s acute distress, that often the problem was, “We haven’t a confounded corpse.” The mansion was somber and huge, its predominant tones those of brownstone, mahogany, and rich stuffs. The parlor, where Clemens and Livy were married and where later they lay before burial, was heavily curtained, massively upholstered. Upstairs there were unexpected halls and stairways and rooms enough for the Langdon family, their servants, Jervis Langdon’s eighty-six-year-old mother, a first cousin of Olivia’s paying her a twelve-month visit during 1868, and such transients as Sam Clemens. Years later his daughter Clara recalled that the house had a distinctive perfume. It might have been what Clemens, who in his own house in Hartford was to carry Langdon’s four-square splendor to steamboat opulence, recognized as “that odor of sanctity which comes with cash.” He first saw Livy—and fell in love with her, he said—in a miniature portrait encased in purple velvet; it was in a setting of equal richness that he saw her late in August 1868. He had delivered The Innocents Abroad to Bliss in Hartford earlier in the month, and he expected that the book would be published the following March, after a lecture tour which would publicize it and earn him some money. He wore a yellow duster and a battered straw hat when he arrived in Elmira from New York in the smoking car of a train called the Cannonball.

  There were carriage rides in the city and in the hills above, walks in the Langdon garden, leisurely visiting. Evenings there were prayers and hymns in the parlor, and Clemens also sang, in his clear tenor voice, the spirituals and jubilees his uncle’s slaves had taught him, strange music in the North. In this household, “the pleasantest family I ever knew,” Clemens was for a while idyllically and unsuspectingly happy, and he fancied he was “quite a pleasant addition to the family circle.” (A half year later Livy hurt his feelings bitterly, set him to moping about rejection and snubbing, by telling him that at one point during his first visit the family had begun to wish that he would leave.) And quite as unsuspecting were the Langdon parents, hospitable, delighted (at first) with their unusual visitor. They had not yet admitted to themselves the possibility of losing Livy to any man, least of all to Sam Clemens. He was ten years older than Livy, older still in the sights he had seen and the things he had done, Othello wooing Desdemona with tales of travels and dangers. The people Clemens had known in Hannibal, on the river, and in the West were scarcely less foreign to Livy than Othello’s cannibals and men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders.

  Livy was beautiful. Her black hair was drawn smooth over her forehead, framing her cameo face and dark eyes. Her smile, Howells remembered, was of “angelic tenderness,” and myopia gave her a look of musing intensity. She was gentle, calm, spiritual, and refined, qualities which Clemens idealized in her and which he found all the more compelling for their contrast to his Western experience. But she also had “the heart-free laugh of a girl,” he said, and he sensed in her, and later discovered, an immense capacity for giving and receiving affection. “I was born reserved as to endearments of speech and caresses,” he wrote in his autobiography. He remembered only one kiss in his family, when John Marshall Clemens on his deathbed kissed Pamela; kissing was rare in Hannibal and generally “ended with courtship—along with the deadly piano-playing of that day.” Livy “poured out her prodigal affections in kisses and caresses and in a vocabulary of endearments whose profusion was always an astonishment to me.” Yet even after they were engaged the name “Sam” came from her only with the greatest difficulty, as if it represented aspects of that past of his she could never share. She was slow to grasp a joke, but he saw this as a challenge and enjoyed it, and for her benefit he patiently annotated a passage from Holmes’s Autocrat, “That is a joke, my literal Livy.” Her “gentle gravities” sometimes made him laugh. She was timid, often frightened, and when thunder and lightning came she hid in a closet. Yet, invested by him with a power she hardly suspected, when she spoke the word “disapprove” it had, he said, the force of another person’s “damn.” She disapproved of drinking, smoking, swearing, and, for a while, humorists.

  He was in love with Livy, he wanted to marry her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, and he found the pace of a conventional genteel courtship much too slow for him. After less than two weeks in the Langdon house he abandoned the reserve he was born with and proposed to her, and she said no. Early in September, on his last night in Elmira, he consolidated his forces behind the original line of battle. “I do not regret that I have loved you, still love you, and shall always love you,” he wrote in the first of nearly two hundred love letters (a mass of manuscript as long as a subscription book) before their marriage in February 1870.
He would be able to bear the bitterest “grief, disaster, and disappointment” of his life provided “you will let me freight my speeches to you with simply the sacred love a brother bears to a sister.” To save him from becoming forever a “homeless vagabond,” he invited Livy, as he had invited Mary Fairbanks, to supervise his regeneration. He begged her to scold and correct him, to lecture him on the sin of smoking, to send him texts from the New Testament, to tell him about Thomas K. Beecher’s sermon on Sunday, to send him Henry Ward Beecher’s sermon pamphlets.

  He courted her by offering in all sincerity to make over his character and habits to suit her standards. Less than a year after they were married he said in half-jest, “I would deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral.” Yet he eventually withdrew many of the important concessions he made to her, and he most often had his way about things, even though he enjoyed and exploited playing the role of a man under his wife’s thumb. During his courtship he took the oath, but within a few years of their marriage Livy herself was drinking beer before going to bed and he was drinking cocktails of Scotch, lemon, sugar, and Angostura bitters before breakfast as well as dinner and also hot whiskeys at night. “I believe in you, even as I believe in the Savior,” he told her early in his courtship, but he went on to explain that his faith was “as simple and unquestioning as the faith of a devotee in the idol he worships.” After such romantic paganism it is not surprising that he never became a Christian, and that she eventually became an unbeliever. She reigned, but she did not rule. Nevertheless, within five years of their marriage, Sam Clemens the bohemian and vagabond had undergone a thorough transformation. He embraced upper-middle-class values. He became a gentleman, and for a while an Anglophile who despised the raw democracy which bred him and the corruption and coarseness he saw all around him. He was the antithesis of Walt Whitman, also sea-changed in his thirties, for Clemens began to find himself as a writer by joining the social order instead of freeing himself from it; only later, when the mature artist came in conflict with the Victorian gentleman of property, did Clemens realize he had been scarred by his concessions. The journalist Walter Whitman became the poet Walt, but Sam became Samuel L. Clemens. He had known Whitman’s open road long enough, and what he wanted was home. “The idol is the measure of the worshipper,” said James Russell Lowell, and in choosing his idol Clemens chose his transformations as well. They were not forced on him by Olivia Langdon, who, although she had his love, also had what was only an instructed proxy from him. More than a year before he even saw her picture he had already, in some advice given him by Anson Burlingame, the American minister to China, glimpsed his eventual goals. “What you need now is the refinement of association,” Burlingame had said somewhat pointedly after Clemens had got tight in Honolulu. “Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb.”

  During his courtship and first years of marriage Clemens came as close as he ever would to orthodox belief, and the echoes of this attempt could be heard long after he gave it up; the English poet and novelist George Macdonald, visiting America in 1872, was told that Jervis Langdon had expected his new son-in-law to combine his religious fervor and his broad experience of men by writing a life of Christ. He prayed, he went to church, he could even end a love letter with a “Goodbye—with a kiss of reverent honor and another of deathless affection—and—Hebrews XIII, 20, 21.” He kissed by the Book, he knew that he had to reach the altar by way of the amen corner. In the exuberance of his formal engagement to Livy in February 1869 he explained his strategy to his mother: “She said she never would or could love me—but she set herself the task of making a Christian of me. I said she would succeed, but that in the meantime she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit and end by tumbling into it—and lo! the prophecy is fulfilled.”

  Visiting his family in St. Louis after Livy first refused him, he felt “savage and crazy,” was angry and low-spirited, defied Pamela’s temperance pledges, drank, and became even gloomier. The whole visit was a “ghastly infliction,” he wrote to Mary Fairbanks on September 24; “I am afraid I do not always disguise it, either.” The only good news came in a letter from Livy along with her picture: she assured him that he was in her prayers, and she said he could come for a second visit at the end of the month. He spent a night and a day in Elmira, and she seemed to give him some grounds for hope; at least she did not object to his increasing persistence within the relationship of brother and sister. Then he had a lucky accident. Early in the evening, as he was climbing into the democrat wagon which was to take him to the depot, the horse suddenly started and he fell over backward into the gutter. He was carried into the house, and there he stayed another day or two, nursed by Livy. It was one of those episodes in his life which, like his first sight of Livy’s miniature on board the Quaker City, had the shape of daydream to begin with and which he made part of his own mythology. By the time he came to this episode in his Autobiography, he had turned it into an even better story, in which he played the role of wily suitor: “I got not a bruise. I was not even jolted. Nothing was the matter with me at all…. That was one of the happiest half dozen moments of my life.” This was his version of it in 1906, but only a week after it happened he told Mary Fairbanks that he had actually been knocked unconscious, and he even wrote it up for the Alta California: “I fell out of a wagon backwards, and broke my neck in two places.” The episode liberated the heroically masochistic Tom Sawyer within him. In a fragment which he wrote shortly after his marriage, his first explicit attempt to write fiction about the experience of boyhood filtered through the nostalgia of manhood, his boy hero stands outside the house of the girl he loves and is very nearly run over by a wagon; he is sorry that he was not hit, “because then I would have been crippled and they would have carried me into her house all bloody and busted up, and she would have cried, and I would have been per-fectly happy, because I would have had to stay there till I got well, which I wish I never would get well.”

  But even after this accident he found he was playing a stronger hand than he actually had. In one letter he tried to move beyond their brother-sister relationship; Livy scolded him, and from Hartford, where he was working with Bliss on his manuscript, he wrote her a repentant letter in which he begged from her “a sister’s pardon” for his “hotblooded heedlessness.” He also announced that he had just met and struck up what promised to be an enduring friendship with Joseph Hopkins Twichell, the pastor of the fashionable Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford. Twichell was handsome (he bore a startling resemblance to Bret Harte, in fact); he enjoyed not only Clemens’ humor but also his bawdiness and profanity, and in return he preached to him a kind of muscular and nondoctrinal Christianity; and along with the physique of an athlete he retained the eagerness and enthusiasm of an undergraduate. Clemens commemorated his meeting with Twichell by writing all the details to Livy: He met Twichell at a church sociable, went home with him, had tea and spent the evening listening to Twichell talk about religion, remembered his manners and got up to go at nine-thirty, but stayed until eleven. The next morning, Sunday, he went to church and then accompanied Twichell to the Hartford almshouse, where the former Yale oarsman and chaplain to General Daniel Sickles preached and sang to the inmates. Two weeks later, still in Hartford, he told her more about his new friend and more about his own earnest attempts at prayer, but, as if he already sensed victory, his tone changed. He had begun to tease her, even about such matters as her nightly prayers for his salvation, and he was no longer defensive. At Twichell’s house, he told her, he had talked to a party of ministers who thanked him for having written “certain trash” which brightened their somber hours with laughter. There was something, after all, to be said for humorists. This was the last letter he addressed to her as “sister.” “Some few castles in Spain going up,” he told Mary Fairbanks on October 31.

  On a lecture tour, he came back to Elmira and the Langdon house on Saturday morning,
November 21. “The calf has returned,” he said. “May the prodigal have some breakfast?” Abandoning the fiction of brotherly love, he began a six-day siege. Livy attended his lecture on Monday night. On Wednesday (he told Twichell) she “said over and over and over again that she loved me.” He was in Paradise, enjoyed “supreme happiness,” and, letting down the bars of his reserve, he declared, “I do love, love, love you, Livy.” On Thanksgiving Day her parents, still in a state of shock and astonishment, consented to an engagement which they insisted should remain secret until they were able to learn a great deal more about Mr. Clemens’ morality, history, character, and prospects.

  II

  Clemens had come to Elmira that November with a new professional confidence that supported his wooing of Livy. The lecture on Venice that he gave as his farewell to San Francisco was a success, but he told Mary Fairbanks it had been written for and delivered to a friendly Western audience and “would be pretty roughly criticized in an Eastern town.” Early in October, while he was in Hartford working with Bliss, he wrote a new one specifically for an Eastern audience. He called it “The American Vandal Abroad,” and it reflected his knowledge of his strong points and of the demands that would be made on him. It was almost a précis of his book, and it had the double advantage of exploiting the relatively fresh appeal of the Quaker City cruise and of publicizing The Innocents Abroad. It made fun of the American middle-class tourist, but the satire was mostly mild and good-natured. His audience hungered for faraway grandeurs, and he gave them gorgeous pictures, along with verbal fireworks, of the Acropolis and Venice, Damascus and the Pyramids. There was a moral too: travel, he said, liberalized and made a better man of the American Vandal—even though the moral was “an entirely gratuitous contribution.” He spiced his lecture with nonsense, preposterous stories, and wild exaggerations, all in his increasingly individual vein of play.