Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 16

  His Boston debut at the Music Hall on November 10 was “a handsome success—I know that whether the papers say so in the morning or not,” he told Livy, and he celebrated this success, which established him on the New England circuit, by going out and spending every penny he had with him on his wedding outfit. He kept a room at Young’s Hotel on Court Avenue in Boston as his base, and during November and December he lectured nearly every night and spent his days in Redpath’s office on School Street smoking and talking shop with Nasby and Josh Billings. He posed with them one day in November for a group photograph which its publisher entitled “The American Humorists.” These three heirs and protégés of Artemus Ward faced the camera with the undertaker solemnity that Ward had made a trademark of the platform humorist. Nasby, barrel-bodied, solidly planted, with the face of a farmer and the constitution of an ox, and Billings, corpulent, knees crossed, long hair (which concealed a birthmark on his neck), are seated. Clemens alone is standing, slight, slope-shouldered, at the age of thirty-four the youngest of the group but its visual center and dominating figure. His star alone was in the ascendant. The popularity of Nasby and Billings would soon die with them, along with their calculated but crude eccentricities of spelling and mannerism; of the three “American Humorists” only Mark Twain would survive as more than a period curiosity. In his autobiography he reflected on “the surprising fact that within the compass of these forty years wherein I have been playing professional humorist before the public, I have had for company seventy-eight other American humorists. Each and every one of the seventy-eight”—he included Nasby and Billings—“rose in my time, became conspicuous and popular, and by and by vanished.” They vanished, he went on to say, “because they were merely humorists. Humorists of the ‘mere’ sort cannot survive.” Looking back on what seemed a cemetery, he tried to isolate the reason for his survival. “Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. By forever, I mean thirty years.” And he concluded, a long way from November in Boston and the photographic studio of George M. Baker at 149 Washington Street: “I have always preached. That is the reason that I have lasted thirty years.”

  He was enjoying his victories and feeling his strength, and it was this aura of mastery and confidence that helped stamp his image on Howells’ memory after their first meeting in Boston that autumn. Clemens had come to thank the Atlantic reviewer for his notice of The Innocents Abroad, and in the magazine’s tiny office over the bookstore of Ticknor and Fields at 124 Tremont Street he was introduced to his lifelong friend, partisan, and literary conscience. Clemens was wearing a sealskin coat, whether for caprice, love of effect, or warmth Howells was not sure, but the coat was as vivid as his crest of thick auburn hair and the wide sweep of his mustache, and was, in a sense, the paraphernalia of a public personality which Howells soon recognized to be distinct from the man Clemens—“as I must call him,” Howells wrote over forty years later, “instead of Mark Twain, which seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense.” For both Howells and James Fields the crux of this first encounter was that here was an original whose vivid, utterly individual qualities fitted into no Boston category they knew.

  Clemens had once called “The Jumping Frog” “a villainous backwoods sketch,” and he had begged Livy not to read in the book, had told her in December 1868 that he wished every copy of “that infamous volume” were burned and gone. But in his year of triumph as author and lecturer he began to recognize his first passport to the East for what it was. “Between you and I, privately Livy dear,” he wrote to her in December 1869, “it is the best humorous sketch America has produced yet, and I must read it in public some day, in order that people may know what there is in it.” The following month he was suing his old friend Charles H. Webb in the New York courts in order to reclaim the copyright and the plates of the book he had published so casually when he came to New York. Late that month, he summed up the part the Frog had played in his dreamlike progress from placer miner’s cabin to the Langdon mansion. Writing to Jim Gillis, who had stayed at Jackass Hill in Calaveras County, he recalled the rain and mud of Angel’s Camp and the story he had heard one day around the saloon stove. “I published that story, and it became widely known in America, India, China, England,” he wrote, “and the reputation it made for me has paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since.” Later on, life on Jackass Hill would symbolize bankruptcy and disgrace, but now, with his passion for turning points, he traced all his good fortune from its origins in a “dismal sojourn” at Angel’s Camp to its fulfillments in fame, cash, the ownership of a newspaper, and, above all else, Livy: “A week from today I shall be married.”

  IV

  Clemens and Livy were married in the Langdon parlor on Wednesday, February 2, 1870. The next day they set off for Buffalo in a private railroad car which had been placed at Jervis Langdon’s disposal, a friendly gesture from the president of the Pennsylvania Northern Central. The new couple were accompanied on their wedding journey by a crowd of family and friends: the Langdons; Pamela Moffett and her daughter, Annie (Jane Clemens obstinately stayed behind in St. Louis); Thomas K. Beecher, who had performed the service jointly with Twichell, thus more closely uniting Hartford and Elmira on a spiritual axis; and Mary Fairbanks. Mrs. Fairbanks had already noted that her protégé “filled the role of bridegroom with charming grace and dignity,” and she was now mounting a further invasion of privacy in the form of a long report of wedding, wedding trip, and honeymoon house for the readers of the Cleveland Herald. Reacting against this spectacular lack of privacy, the plush staidness of the private car, and the boned-turkey-and-temperance-beverage propriety of the wedding supper the night before, the bridegroom entertained the company with a ballad about a woman who wanted to poison her husband for the sake of a man she loved twice as well; in Life on The Mississippi that ballad (“it wasn’t a nice song—for a parlor”) is sung by a roaring-drunk raftsman.

  At the Buffalo station Clemens and Livy left the others, and there began an episode which he soon made as famous as Livy’s miniature and his fall from the wagon. They boarded a sleigh which was supposed to take them to the boardinghouse he had asked Langdon’s Buffalo agent to find for them; this, as well as Livy’s plain gold engagement ring, which now doubled as her wedding ring, was an index of the modest scale of living he had planned at first. The driver took them on what seemed an endless trip through dark and icy streets before he delivered them at the door of 472 Delaware Avenue, a three-story mansard-roofed brick mansion on a fashionable street. “Oh, this won’t do,” Clemens said. “People who can afford to live in this sort of style won’t take boarders.” At the door Langdon presented to his son-in-law a box containing the deed to this mansion (which, with land and furnishing, had cost about $43,000) and a check to help him keep it going. Inside the house, which was ablaze with gaslight, the wedding party was waiting, and they followed Clemens as he explored the rooms, marveled at the elegance and delicateness of the blue satin drawing room and the warmth of his scarlet-upholstered study, met the coachman, the cook, and the housemaid Langdon had engaged to wait on him. In the stable behind the house were horse and carriage.

  The gaudy surprise was the work both of Jervis Langdon and of Livy, who had chosen the furnishings, including a canopied and curtained bed all done in pale-blue satin. On the threshold of the house, in terms that he elaborated then and later without acknowledging their ambiguities, Clemens declared that he was the victim of “a first-class swindle,” a hoax, a fraud, a practical joke. The deed in the little box was also his paper of indenture to maintain a scale of living inconceivably far above that of the boardinghouse. Ten days later he was joking about the pale-blue livery coat with monogrammed brass buttons that he had to go out and buy for Patrick McAleer, the coachman, and he said, “That coat of Patrick’s cost me more than did any that ever I wore.” But whatever feelings he may have had of anxiety, dismay, and the usurping of his prerogatives were d
rowned in gratitude. There were tears in his eyes, he had difficulty finding his voice, and finally, two or three words at a time, he managed to say, with something of his usual spirit, “Mr. Langdon, whenever you are in Buffalo, if it’s twice a year, come right up here, and bring your bag with you. You may stay overnight if you want to. It shan’t cost you a cent.”

  Soon he was guiding visitors through his palace and saving for the last, as the final glory to take their breath away, the drawing room, its lights turned up high and the furniture covers removed. Over and over he told what he called “the story of what happened to Little Sammy in Fairy Land when he went hunting for a Boarding House,” and the mansion was almost as important as Livy herself. “We are about as happy in our Aladdin’s palace,” he wrote, “as if we were roosting in the closing chapter of a popular novel.” To his old friends on the Alta California he reported, “I never, never, never expected to be the hero of a romance in real life as unlooked for and unexpected as the wildest of them. The check in the bank, accompanying the gift, was not necessary, for my book and lecturing keep me equal to minor emergencies.”

  The Sunday afternoon after their wedding Livy lay upstairs resting before their five-o’clock dinner. Downstairs in his scarlet study Clemens began a long letter to “My First, and Oldest and Dearest Friend,” Will Bowen. Out of nostalgia, inwardness, and his new happiness and release he made some crucial associations between his marriage and his materials as a writer.

  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, and the songs I loved ages and ages ago have come wailing down the centuries.

  He had “rained reminiscences for four and twenty hours,” he told Will, and in a remarkable passage about seven hundred words long he catalogued their shared Hannibal past: schooldays at Dawson’s, the woods on Holliday’s Hill, Jimmy Finn the town drunkard, the time they tore down Dick Hardy’s stable, the time Sam purposely caught the measles from Will, the time the town thought Sam drowned in the river, the time the tramp burned to death in his jail cell—the catalogue comes to an end with:

  Laura Hawkins was my sweetheart—Hold: That rouses me out of my dream, and brings me violently back into this day and this generation. For behold I have at this moment the only sweetheart I ever loved, and bless her old heart she is lying asleep upstairs in a bed that I sleep in every night, and for four whole days she has been Mrs. Samuel L. Clemens!

  Livy sleeps, imagination and memory awake and seek out the past. She is a flesh-and-blood wife, but she is also a guiding principle, a symbolic figure he invests with its own power to select and purify. She has become an idealized superego which frees him from the taint of adolescent experiments and frontier lawlessness and allows him to experience a productive tension between the social order he has become a part of and the boyhood reality he can never leave behind him.

  Before the gentle majesty of her purity all evil things and evil ways and evil deeds stand abashed,—then surrender. Wherefore without effort or struggle, or spoken exorcism, all the old vices and shameful habits that have possessed me these many years, are falling away, one by one, and departing into the darkness.

  In order to recapture his past he must follow a familiar pattern of rebirth and become less rather than more like his old self. Now he hears footsteps on the stairs.

  My princess has come down to dinner (bless me, isn’t it cozy, nobody but just us two, and three servants to wait on us and respectfully call us “Mr.” and “Mrs.” Clemens” instead of “Sam” and “Livy”). It took me many a year to work up to where I can put on style, but now I’ll do it.

  It took the Internal Revenue Department only a few days to take note of Clemens’ “style” and to greet him with a letter inquiring after his liability under the five per cent tax on gross income over one thousand dollars (a measure which was introduced during the Civil War and discontinued after universal disgruntlement in 1872). On the heels of this letter came the Internal Revenue assessor himself, who left behind a form with questions on it so ingenious, Clemens remarked, “that the oldest man in the world couldn’t understand what the most of them were driving at.” Clemens had considerable trouble filling out the return, used pencil and two colors of ink, and finally scribbled across the top, “Pay no attention to any figures except those in black ink—otherwise this report will drive innocent men crazy. Saml. L. Clemens, Elmira, N. Y.” On March 19 he wrote and published in the Express a piece about the experience which he called “A Mysterious Visit.”

  The Mysterious Visitor, whom the narrator, Mark Twain, only later discovers to be the assessor, appears honest enough, “barring that expression of villainy which we all have.” Hoping to find out what the visitor’s business is, Mark Twain, with a fatal confidence in his own shrewdness, decides to draw him out by doing most of the talking himself, and soon he is giving the stranger some strange information indeed: his lecturing receipts for the past season were $14,750; his income from his newspaper, The Daily Warwhoop, was $8,000 in four months; and, carried away by his own extravagant visions, he tells the visitor, that his royalty income from The Innocents Abroad was a little over $190,000. Now the Mysterious Visitor reveals his identity. “By working on my vanity,” Mark Twain laments, “the stranger had seduced me into declaring an income of $214,000.” In panic he turns for advice to one of the leading citizens of the town, a man who lives like a prince. This upright man shows him how to falsify his figures, manipulate his deductions, and end up with a taxable income of $250. While the citizen is giving this advice his little boy picks his father’s pocket and removes a two-dollar bill; the narrator is willing to bet that even this little boy “would make a false return of his income.”

  Following the example of “the very best of the solid men of the city,” Mark Twain goes to the revenue office, and “under the accusing eyes of my old visitor I stood up and swore to lie after lie, fraud after fraud, villainy after villainy, till my soul was coated inches and inches thick with perjury, and my self-respect gone forever. But what of it? It is nothing more than thousands of the richest and proudest, and most respected, honored, and courted men in America do every year.” It is a strangely bitter fable for a man who had owned a mansion on Delaware Avenue for only a month and a half. Clemens believed that the Midas myth had to end tragically, and his own life, culminating in bankruptcy and disasters which he felt were his punishment, was, in part, an acting out of this belief. Even in his honeymoon palace the doorbell announced a Mysterious Visitor who was not at all distantly related to some other strangers: the stranger at Angel’s Camp who filled Smiley’s frog full of quail shot, the Mysterious Stranger who came to Eseldorf, and the offended stranger who came to Hadleyburg and corrupted the town.

  * The five years between 1835 and 1840 saw the birth of a remarkable number of major members of the American business elite. Andrew Carnegie, for example, was born in 1835 (five days before Mark Twain), Jay Gould in 1836, J. P. Morgan in 1837, John D. Rockefeller in 1839. These men came to financial maturity during the twenty-five years after the start of the Civil War, a period whose “most remarkable phenomenon,” James Bryce wrote in 1888, was the appearance not only of “those few colossal millionaires who fill the public eye, but of many millionaires of the second order, men with fortunes ranging from $5,000,000 to $15,000,000.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “A popular author’s death rattle”

  I

  “WE ARE BURDENED and bent with happiness,” Clemens told Jervis Langdon that May. He was at home almost all the time now and hardly ever went to the Express office any more. A marble statuette of Peace presided over the house, and Livy presided over a dining table covered with a fringed red cloth. Evenings in his study after dinner he read poetry to her until their bedtime at ten; breakfast was at ten the next morning, and another quiet day began. “Am just married,” he had
written, declining an invitation to lecture, “and don’t take an interest in anything out of doors.” He was overwhelmed by Livy’s prodigal affections and caresses, and his love for her, despite his etherealizing of her, was also plainly and contentedly sexual. Livy, once frail and sickly, was well now; in April she conceived.