Delphi complete works of.., p.563
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 563
INNOCENTS ABROAD AND AT HOME. 1867-1870
WHEN MARK TWAIN landed in New York in January of 1867, he had in his mind an idea of travelling round the world and writing letters about it. But he was still a little vague as to how to begin. He started writing ‘letters’ from New York to the Alta of San Francisco, made a trip to the Mississippi to see his mother at St. Louis, visited his native town of Hannibal, made arrangements about publishing a book of sketches, and then opportunity came to him, just as it should, at the opportune moment.
He learned that the luxurious paddle-wheel steamer Quaker City would leave New York on an excursion trip across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. The ship would be ‘provided with every necessary comfort, including library and musical instruments’; it would carry ‘an experienced physician’; it would proceed — but it is unnecessary to give further details. All the world knows of the Quaker City and its cargo of Innocents Abroad.
Mark Twain leaped at the chance. He proposed to the proprietors of the Alta that he should go on the excursion. They accepted the offer, forwarded his passage money, and promised him twenty dollars a letter for his correspondence.
To the elation caused by this prospect there was added just before he sailed the satisfaction of another laurel in his new crown of success. His friend, ‘Governor Frank Fuller’ — governor once of Utah and hence ‘Governor’ for ever — was in New York. He insisted that Mark should lecture; prophesied fame and a fortune, took the Cooper Institute and advertised ‘a serio-humorous lecture concerning Kanakadom,’ by ‘Mark Twain’ (there was no Mr. Clemens any more). At the last moment it began to seem clear, to the lecturer’s horror, that nobody was coming. Mark Twain as yet was not worth fifty cents. A great flood of free tickets was sent to all the school teachers within range. The lecture was given in a hall crowded to capacity, to an audience suffocated with laughter. Financially the lecture was a failure: it cost $500; the receipts were $300. The generous ‘Governor’ made good the deficit. ‘It’s all right, Mark,’ he said; ‘the fortune didn’t come, but the fame has arrived.’
And on June 8, 1867, in the glow of a new notoriety, Mark Twain sailed as one of the ‘lions’ of the Quaker City.
The sea voyage, as judged by our pampered standards of to-day, was dingy and drab enough. The paddle-wheel steamer, luxurious in 1867, would seem cramped and dim to-day; the speed a crawl. The passenger list contained a high percentage of ministers of the Gospel, spinsters and teachers, whose moral worth is out of proportion to their value as fun. In these days when all the women are young enough to dance, and all the girls are old enough to drink, the ‘Innocents’ seem a pretty dusty crowd. ‘Debates’ in the evening in the saloon seem poor stuff in an age of jazz music and radio. But after all, they had with them the unregenerate American bar, that covered a multitude of sins, and was worth more than a floating palace, dry.
The excursionists ‘did’ the Continent, from Paris to the Crimea, with Asia to the Holy Land and Africa to the pyramids. They got their money’s worth. Without Mark Twain they would have been only a set of spectacled American tourists, thumbing their guide-books, and trying to admire Giotto and remember when Vermicelli lived. Mark Twain waved over them the magic wand of inspired genius, and turned them into the merry group of Innocents Abroad, whose pilgrimage is part of history. The letters which he sent home to the Alta in California and to the Tribune in New York reached the public this time — east, west, and everywhere — and deserved to. When the boat returned to America (November 19, 1867), Mark Twain stepped off the Quaker City a celebrity. He had gone away a lamb — or at best a western mustang — he came back a lion.
Success greeted him on his return like a tidal wave. All of a sudden, it seemed, the American nation knew him and acclaimed him. His success was not as sudden, as sweeping and as phenomenal as that of Dickens after the Pickwick Papers. But it was second only to it. And it had in it the same ingredient of personal affection. The public took Mark to its heart, as England had taken young ‘Boz’; and with an added feeling of national pride unknown and unnecessary in the case of Dickens. Here was, at last, an American author. The Longfellows and the Hawthornes and the Fenimore Coopers had written English literature in America. Here at last was a man who wrote American literature, and wrote it in and on Europe. The publication of the Innocents Abroad was the first step in the Americanization of Europe now reaching its climax.
No wonder success came in a flood. A lecture bureau offered him a contract for eighteen nights at a hundred dollars a night. A western senator wanted him as literary secretary. The New York Tribune put him on their staff. All of the papers — the Tribune, the Herald, the San Francisco Alta, the Chicago press, the magazines, wanted letters and articles. And meanwhile his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, which had appeared (May 1, 1867) just before the Quaker City left, was on the market and selling.
Bigger things were to come.
In Hartford, Connecticut, was a sagacious and wide-minded publisher, Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company. He saw at once the mine of humour, and of gold, in Mark Twain’s work. He proposed to bring out the Quaker City letters as a book of travel. It was Mark Twain’s visits to Hartford to consult with Bliss that made his first connection with that town — presently to be his home — and his friendship with the Reverend ‘Joe’ Twitchell, henceforth his closest associate. The book arrangements, generous enough, were soon made.
Then came a hitch. The Alta people, having paid for the Quaker City trip and paid for the letters that described it, had got the idea in their heads that the literary material was theirs, and proposed to publish it. Hearing this, Mark Twain was consumed with fury at ‘the Alta thieves.’ It is unfortunate how often in his literary life Mark Twain felt that he was being cheated by a pack of rogues, and how many were the associations and friendships shattered thereby. Like most geniuses, he alternated in his view of his work between utter despair and absolute conceit. He was thus inclined to be first grateful to people for helping him, then angry with them for cheating him.
In the case of the Alta, he did an amazing but a wise thing. Letters and telegraphs could serve no purpose. He decided to ‘see the thieves face to face,’ set off for California (1868) — by sea, via Aspinwall. Once on the spot he easily persuaded the Alta people — noble fellows now and not thieves — to let go their claims. He only stayed long enough in San Francisco to deliver a lecture on the Quaker City trip — a pandemonium of success. Then on July 2, 1868, he made, at a dinner, a speech of farewell to the wonderland of the West, which he never saw again.
Back in New York (July 28, 1868), he picked up again the golden thread of success. The ensuing season was spent in getting his new book ready and in a triumphant lecture tour of the cities of the East. His lecture was called ‘A Vandal Abroad.’ He floated from place to place on a rising tide of national admiration. Money rolled in a flood. The season, his first on the platform, netted him $8000 in some sixty nights. Mr. Paine, his matchless biographer, quotes for us a contemporary journalist’s impression at the time.
‘Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely built, with dark reddish-brown hair and moustache. His features are fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. He dresses in scrupulous evening attire. In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it, or flirting around the corners of it, then marching or counter-marching in the rear of it. He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.’
Strangely enough, at this period, even with the exceptional success that had crowned his lecturing and the literary reputation, if not fame, that his writing had brought, Mark Twain did not yet think of himself as an author, or contemplate writing as his profession. He looked on himself as a journalist, a newspaperman, and his mind still ran rather in terms of a flow of ‘funny pieces’ than the creation of a masterpiece. Indeed, up to this time, America took him still as a ‘funny man,’ not an author, and he followed, as we all do, the estimate of his fellows. He therefore looked about for a newspaper opening, bought with his accumulated surplus (one won’t say ‘savings’; he never saved) a share in the Buffalo Express, and sat down at the editorial desk (August 14, 1869). He proposed evidently to use the desk in the old Nevada fashion, for he announced to his readers, ‘I shall not often meddle with politics because we have a political editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall not write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.’
This cheerful form of editing, combined with lecturing and writing sketches for the Galaxy magazine in New York, kept him at work for the year 1869.
But meantime a new inspiration to effort and a greater happiness than fame had come into Mark Twain’s life. He had met the girl who was to be his wife, he had entered on that lifelong devotion which only ended at the grave. Among the pilgrims of the Quaker City had been a young man from Elmira, New York, by name Charlie Langdon. One day (it was in the Bay of Smyrna) Langdon showed to his friend Clemens a beautiful little miniature of his beloved sister Olivia Langdon. As with David Copperfield and Dora, it was all over. Mark Twain fell so deeply in love that he never again came to the surface.
A month or so after the return of the pilgrims, the Langdons were in New York and young Charlie invited his celebrated friend to dine with them at the old St. Nicholas Hotel. There Mark Twain saw and loved at sight the girl of his day-dreams. After dinner they went to Steinway Hall to hear a lecture by the world-famous Charles Dickens, now on his second American tour (the first was twenty-six years before) and carrying all before him — including the remnants of his own strength and life — in the tumult of his success. It is strange to think of Mark Twain, seated beside his frail little sweetheart — she was that to his mind already — listening to Dickens’s impassioned rendering of the storm scene in David Copperfield.
The dinner party was followed by a call, and a little later by an invitation to visit the family at Elmira; also by Mark Twain ‘dropping in’ during a lecture tour. In fact, it was soon clear that this impetuous young man was ‘courting Livy.’ Knowing a celebrity is one thing; letting him ‘court Livy’ is another.
For Olivia Langdon was in complete contrast to her dynamic lover. She was as delicate as he was robust, as devout as he was sceptical, as orthodox as he was unconventional. For years, in consequence of a fall, she had been an invalid. Then she had been healed, through a sort of miracle, by a faith-healer. It left her with a deep sense of religious faith, that any doubt or irreverence wounded to the heart. But marriages are made in heaven — or were, in that Victorian age. To obtain the hand of Livy Langdon young Mr. Clemens, after the fashion of the time, must obtain the consent of her father and the approval of all her family. Now the Langdons were well-to-do people of the merchant class, orthodox, conventional, devout. To them, Mark Twain, arriving in a queer suit of clothes, with a shock of red hair, a piercing eye, an intensity of intelligence masked with a drawling speech, was an arresting personality. He appeared as an uncouth genius, an uncut diamond, a dynamo. About him was the aureole of celebrity, somewhat dazzling to plain people. But it is one thing to feel flattered in having an uncut diamond or a dynamo in the parlour. It is another thing to give to it your fragile, innocent daughter. The more so as young Charlie Langdon must have known that the dynamo had a profane tongue, or worse, and a mind sceptical to the verge of sin.
Hence the courtship met, if not with opposition from the family, at least with a certain inertia. But love, as Mr. Robert Benchley has said, conquers all. Mr. Jarvis Langdon, shrewd after his degree, forgave the young lover and gave the family consent to an engagement that was announced on February 4, 1869. Nor did he do things by halves. Without the knowledge of his prospective son-in-law he bought and furnished a house in Buffalo (472 Delaware Avenue) and turned it over as a fairy gift for the wedding day (February 2, 1870).
Behold then Samuel L. Clemens — now become for everybody Mark Twain, the great American humorist — the rough days of his western life put behind him, settled down at number 472 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, trying hard to be respectable. Here he lives the model life of a family man, joins in morning prayer and listens as best he can to the daily reading of the Scriptures. More than that, he even makes desperate efforts to give up smoking.
He has his wife at his side, his desk at his elbow, and the world at his feet. After all, what does tobacco matter? Let’s have another chapter of Deuteronomy.
THE FLOOD-TIDE OF SUCCESS. 1870-1877
ON MARK TWAIN’S wedding day his publishers handed him a cheque for $4000, as his royalty for three months’ sale of the Innocents Abroad. The book was a success from the start; over 30,000 copies (at three dollars and a half) were sold in five months. The sales never stopped. We are told by those who know, that the Innocents Abroad is still the most widely sold travel book there is. The money received was the beginning of the phenomenal returns of Mark Twain’s writings and plays and lectures. They should have made him a rich man. They never did. All his life he moved with a dark shadow of debt just behind him; always about to emerge into the sunshine of unbounded wealth, and never reaching it. In the end the shadow covered all the horizon; but as yet it was only a small dark cloud in a clear sky.
The book, The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims’ Progress, deserves all its success. It could not be written again. The time has passed. Travel is too common, the world too completely unified, to leave room for Innocents. Everybody has been everywhere — at least through the magic door of the moving-picture house. But in those days world-travel was still new. The book was read for its wonderful pictures of foreign scenery and foreign cities and queer foreign people; it was read for the intense light in which it revealed the past — the monuments, the art, the catacombs, the history of Europe. It was read by Americans for its intense scorn of the bygone tyranny of the old world. But more than for all these reasons put together (and multiplied), it was read because it was ‘funny.’
The first day out at sea, with the sea-sick old gentleman murmuring ‘Oh my!’ — the Italian guide being rebuked in the matter of Christopher Columbus — the sheer burlesque thrown in to ‘modernize’ the gladiatorial fights of Rome — these things remain in the mind of readers for a lifetime. It is an amazing book, that seldom flags and never stops, undisfigured as yet by the prolixity that grew into Mark Twain’s later writing — the garrulousness of self-assured old age.
It is the point of view that appeals. The book represents Europe as seen from the Rocky Mountains, Rome as interpreted from Carson City. Mark Twain in all his life and work saw only two things, Western America and Europe. Of the East (meaning the Eastern States) he was unaware. He lived in it, worked in it, and died in it, but he never saw it. The East was just his audience. A good actor never sees them.
The success of the Innocents Abroad not only reached over America but spread to England. Indeed it was in England that Mark Twain was first recognized as an ‘author,’ as a man of literary genius, by people of taste and cultivation. In America he was the delight of the uncultivated West; to the ‘culture’ of New England he was still regarded as an amusing western ‘cut-up,’ not to be classed, of course, with the solemn Emersons and the dignified Longfellows. Thus ever does enthroned dullness guard its sovereignty.
Seated thus in his new chair in Buffalo, Mark Twain planned all sorts of literary projects. It is amazing, from now on, how much he planned and never started; how much he started and never finished; how much he finished and threw away. He projected a six-hundred-page book on the cruise of Noah’s Ark — presumably a monumental piece of funny irreverence. All through his life he never realized that people who read the Bible don’t want it made fun of, and people who don’t read the Bible don’t see any fun to make of it.
He planned and executed a cheerful article on God, Ancient and Modern. ‘The sole solicitude of the God of the Bible,’ so he wrote, ‘was about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances . . . when the fury was on him, he was blind to all reason — he not only slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and his cattle.’
This is the real Mark Twain — elemental, defiant.
His wife would not let him publish the article. It was suppressed as one of the first victims of the new ‘censorship.’ Mark Twain’s biographers are fond of telling us that after his marriage his wife became censor and the editor of his work. He himself says so, with affectionate gratitude, in the preface to his Joan of Arc twenty-five years later. For all that he wrote henceforth Olivia Clemens, ‘Livy,’ became his critic and his censor, cutting away what was wrong, and schooling him into culture. Nothing must be printed unless ‘Livy’ gave it her approval.
Put very simply, this means that what he wrote must fit into the frame of what was thought ‘nice’ in Elmira, N. Y., in 1870; that he mustn’t write awful words like God damn! — though he may write d — n (with a stroke), provided that it is in a half-playful way and put into the mouth of a churchgoing character. He mustn’t write about nasty things except in a nice way. Crime must be lighted up into melodrama — as Mr. Dickens did it. Love must sigh and languish — but keep its clothes on (Mark would have said, keep its pants on). Death itself may be as melodramatic as the drunkard’s fate, as poignant as the death of little Paul, but it must be ‘respectable’ — and never wander out of sight of the loving pastor, the kindly old clergyman, or the ‘stern minister’ to whose business it belongs. Thus the whole of literature must be ‘stewed’ in respectability before being served.
These were the fetters and this was the editing imposed upon Mark Twain. His marriage with Livy Langdon was from the first day such a beautiful romance, her love for him so tender and so cherishing, and his for her so instant and so undying, that the voice of the critic must be subdued. To those who love Mark Twain’s work the memory of his sweet wife is sacred. Yet one cannot but wonder and question at her influence on her husband’s work and the history of American letters.
WHEN MARK TWAIN landed in New York in January of 1867, he had in his mind an idea of travelling round the world and writing letters about it. But he was still a little vague as to how to begin. He started writing ‘letters’ from New York to the Alta of San Francisco, made a trip to the Mississippi to see his mother at St. Louis, visited his native town of Hannibal, made arrangements about publishing a book of sketches, and then opportunity came to him, just as it should, at the opportune moment.
He learned that the luxurious paddle-wheel steamer Quaker City would leave New York on an excursion trip across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. The ship would be ‘provided with every necessary comfort, including library and musical instruments’; it would carry ‘an experienced physician’; it would proceed — but it is unnecessary to give further details. All the world knows of the Quaker City and its cargo of Innocents Abroad.
Mark Twain leaped at the chance. He proposed to the proprietors of the Alta that he should go on the excursion. They accepted the offer, forwarded his passage money, and promised him twenty dollars a letter for his correspondence.
To the elation caused by this prospect there was added just before he sailed the satisfaction of another laurel in his new crown of success. His friend, ‘Governor Frank Fuller’ — governor once of Utah and hence ‘Governor’ for ever — was in New York. He insisted that Mark should lecture; prophesied fame and a fortune, took the Cooper Institute and advertised ‘a serio-humorous lecture concerning Kanakadom,’ by ‘Mark Twain’ (there was no Mr. Clemens any more). At the last moment it began to seem clear, to the lecturer’s horror, that nobody was coming. Mark Twain as yet was not worth fifty cents. A great flood of free tickets was sent to all the school teachers within range. The lecture was given in a hall crowded to capacity, to an audience suffocated with laughter. Financially the lecture was a failure: it cost $500; the receipts were $300. The generous ‘Governor’ made good the deficit. ‘It’s all right, Mark,’ he said; ‘the fortune didn’t come, but the fame has arrived.’
And on June 8, 1867, in the glow of a new notoriety, Mark Twain sailed as one of the ‘lions’ of the Quaker City.
The sea voyage, as judged by our pampered standards of to-day, was dingy and drab enough. The paddle-wheel steamer, luxurious in 1867, would seem cramped and dim to-day; the speed a crawl. The passenger list contained a high percentage of ministers of the Gospel, spinsters and teachers, whose moral worth is out of proportion to their value as fun. In these days when all the women are young enough to dance, and all the girls are old enough to drink, the ‘Innocents’ seem a pretty dusty crowd. ‘Debates’ in the evening in the saloon seem poor stuff in an age of jazz music and radio. But after all, they had with them the unregenerate American bar, that covered a multitude of sins, and was worth more than a floating palace, dry.
The excursionists ‘did’ the Continent, from Paris to the Crimea, with Asia to the Holy Land and Africa to the pyramids. They got their money’s worth. Without Mark Twain they would have been only a set of spectacled American tourists, thumbing their guide-books, and trying to admire Giotto and remember when Vermicelli lived. Mark Twain waved over them the magic wand of inspired genius, and turned them into the merry group of Innocents Abroad, whose pilgrimage is part of history. The letters which he sent home to the Alta in California and to the Tribune in New York reached the public this time — east, west, and everywhere — and deserved to. When the boat returned to America (November 19, 1867), Mark Twain stepped off the Quaker City a celebrity. He had gone away a lamb — or at best a western mustang — he came back a lion.
Success greeted him on his return like a tidal wave. All of a sudden, it seemed, the American nation knew him and acclaimed him. His success was not as sudden, as sweeping and as phenomenal as that of Dickens after the Pickwick Papers. But it was second only to it. And it had in it the same ingredient of personal affection. The public took Mark to its heart, as England had taken young ‘Boz’; and with an added feeling of national pride unknown and unnecessary in the case of Dickens. Here was, at last, an American author. The Longfellows and the Hawthornes and the Fenimore Coopers had written English literature in America. Here at last was a man who wrote American literature, and wrote it in and on Europe. The publication of the Innocents Abroad was the first step in the Americanization of Europe now reaching its climax.
No wonder success came in a flood. A lecture bureau offered him a contract for eighteen nights at a hundred dollars a night. A western senator wanted him as literary secretary. The New York Tribune put him on their staff. All of the papers — the Tribune, the Herald, the San Francisco Alta, the Chicago press, the magazines, wanted letters and articles. And meanwhile his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, which had appeared (May 1, 1867) just before the Quaker City left, was on the market and selling.
Bigger things were to come.
In Hartford, Connecticut, was a sagacious and wide-minded publisher, Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company. He saw at once the mine of humour, and of gold, in Mark Twain’s work. He proposed to bring out the Quaker City letters as a book of travel. It was Mark Twain’s visits to Hartford to consult with Bliss that made his first connection with that town — presently to be his home — and his friendship with the Reverend ‘Joe’ Twitchell, henceforth his closest associate. The book arrangements, generous enough, were soon made.
Then came a hitch. The Alta people, having paid for the Quaker City trip and paid for the letters that described it, had got the idea in their heads that the literary material was theirs, and proposed to publish it. Hearing this, Mark Twain was consumed with fury at ‘the Alta thieves.’ It is unfortunate how often in his literary life Mark Twain felt that he was being cheated by a pack of rogues, and how many were the associations and friendships shattered thereby. Like most geniuses, he alternated in his view of his work between utter despair and absolute conceit. He was thus inclined to be first grateful to people for helping him, then angry with them for cheating him.
In the case of the Alta, he did an amazing but a wise thing. Letters and telegraphs could serve no purpose. He decided to ‘see the thieves face to face,’ set off for California (1868) — by sea, via Aspinwall. Once on the spot he easily persuaded the Alta people — noble fellows now and not thieves — to let go their claims. He only stayed long enough in San Francisco to deliver a lecture on the Quaker City trip — a pandemonium of success. Then on July 2, 1868, he made, at a dinner, a speech of farewell to the wonderland of the West, which he never saw again.
Back in New York (July 28, 1868), he picked up again the golden thread of success. The ensuing season was spent in getting his new book ready and in a triumphant lecture tour of the cities of the East. His lecture was called ‘A Vandal Abroad.’ He floated from place to place on a rising tide of national admiration. Money rolled in a flood. The season, his first on the platform, netted him $8000 in some sixty nights. Mr. Paine, his matchless biographer, quotes for us a contemporary journalist’s impression at the time.
‘Mark Twain is a man of medium height, about five feet ten, sparsely built, with dark reddish-brown hair and moustache. His features are fair, his eyes keen and twinkling. He dresses in scrupulous evening attire. In lecturing he hangs about the desk, leaning on it, or flirting around the corners of it, then marching or counter-marching in the rear of it. He seldom casts a glance at his manuscript.’
Strangely enough, at this period, even with the exceptional success that had crowned his lecturing and the literary reputation, if not fame, that his writing had brought, Mark Twain did not yet think of himself as an author, or contemplate writing as his profession. He looked on himself as a journalist, a newspaperman, and his mind still ran rather in terms of a flow of ‘funny pieces’ than the creation of a masterpiece. Indeed, up to this time, America took him still as a ‘funny man,’ not an author, and he followed, as we all do, the estimate of his fellows. He therefore looked about for a newspaper opening, bought with his accumulated surplus (one won’t say ‘savings’; he never saved) a share in the Buffalo Express, and sat down at the editorial desk (August 14, 1869). He proposed evidently to use the desk in the old Nevada fashion, for he announced to his readers, ‘I shall not often meddle with politics because we have a political editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect. I shall not write any poetry unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.’
This cheerful form of editing, combined with lecturing and writing sketches for the Galaxy magazine in New York, kept him at work for the year 1869.
But meantime a new inspiration to effort and a greater happiness than fame had come into Mark Twain’s life. He had met the girl who was to be his wife, he had entered on that lifelong devotion which only ended at the grave. Among the pilgrims of the Quaker City had been a young man from Elmira, New York, by name Charlie Langdon. One day (it was in the Bay of Smyrna) Langdon showed to his friend Clemens a beautiful little miniature of his beloved sister Olivia Langdon. As with David Copperfield and Dora, it was all over. Mark Twain fell so deeply in love that he never again came to the surface.
A month or so after the return of the pilgrims, the Langdons were in New York and young Charlie invited his celebrated friend to dine with them at the old St. Nicholas Hotel. There Mark Twain saw and loved at sight the girl of his day-dreams. After dinner they went to Steinway Hall to hear a lecture by the world-famous Charles Dickens, now on his second American tour (the first was twenty-six years before) and carrying all before him — including the remnants of his own strength and life — in the tumult of his success. It is strange to think of Mark Twain, seated beside his frail little sweetheart — she was that to his mind already — listening to Dickens’s impassioned rendering of the storm scene in David Copperfield.
The dinner party was followed by a call, and a little later by an invitation to visit the family at Elmira; also by Mark Twain ‘dropping in’ during a lecture tour. In fact, it was soon clear that this impetuous young man was ‘courting Livy.’ Knowing a celebrity is one thing; letting him ‘court Livy’ is another.
For Olivia Langdon was in complete contrast to her dynamic lover. She was as delicate as he was robust, as devout as he was sceptical, as orthodox as he was unconventional. For years, in consequence of a fall, she had been an invalid. Then she had been healed, through a sort of miracle, by a faith-healer. It left her with a deep sense of religious faith, that any doubt or irreverence wounded to the heart. But marriages are made in heaven — or were, in that Victorian age. To obtain the hand of Livy Langdon young Mr. Clemens, after the fashion of the time, must obtain the consent of her father and the approval of all her family. Now the Langdons were well-to-do people of the merchant class, orthodox, conventional, devout. To them, Mark Twain, arriving in a queer suit of clothes, with a shock of red hair, a piercing eye, an intensity of intelligence masked with a drawling speech, was an arresting personality. He appeared as an uncouth genius, an uncut diamond, a dynamo. About him was the aureole of celebrity, somewhat dazzling to plain people. But it is one thing to feel flattered in having an uncut diamond or a dynamo in the parlour. It is another thing to give to it your fragile, innocent daughter. The more so as young Charlie Langdon must have known that the dynamo had a profane tongue, or worse, and a mind sceptical to the verge of sin.
Hence the courtship met, if not with opposition from the family, at least with a certain inertia. But love, as Mr. Robert Benchley has said, conquers all. Mr. Jarvis Langdon, shrewd after his degree, forgave the young lover and gave the family consent to an engagement that was announced on February 4, 1869. Nor did he do things by halves. Without the knowledge of his prospective son-in-law he bought and furnished a house in Buffalo (472 Delaware Avenue) and turned it over as a fairy gift for the wedding day (February 2, 1870).
Behold then Samuel L. Clemens — now become for everybody Mark Twain, the great American humorist — the rough days of his western life put behind him, settled down at number 472 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, trying hard to be respectable. Here he lives the model life of a family man, joins in morning prayer and listens as best he can to the daily reading of the Scriptures. More than that, he even makes desperate efforts to give up smoking.
He has his wife at his side, his desk at his elbow, and the world at his feet. After all, what does tobacco matter? Let’s have another chapter of Deuteronomy.
THE FLOOD-TIDE OF SUCCESS. 1870-1877
ON MARK TWAIN’S wedding day his publishers handed him a cheque for $4000, as his royalty for three months’ sale of the Innocents Abroad. The book was a success from the start; over 30,000 copies (at three dollars and a half) were sold in five months. The sales never stopped. We are told by those who know, that the Innocents Abroad is still the most widely sold travel book there is. The money received was the beginning of the phenomenal returns of Mark Twain’s writings and plays and lectures. They should have made him a rich man. They never did. All his life he moved with a dark shadow of debt just behind him; always about to emerge into the sunshine of unbounded wealth, and never reaching it. In the end the shadow covered all the horizon; but as yet it was only a small dark cloud in a clear sky.
The book, The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims’ Progress, deserves all its success. It could not be written again. The time has passed. Travel is too common, the world too completely unified, to leave room for Innocents. Everybody has been everywhere — at least through the magic door of the moving-picture house. But in those days world-travel was still new. The book was read for its wonderful pictures of foreign scenery and foreign cities and queer foreign people; it was read for the intense light in which it revealed the past — the monuments, the art, the catacombs, the history of Europe. It was read by Americans for its intense scorn of the bygone tyranny of the old world. But more than for all these reasons put together (and multiplied), it was read because it was ‘funny.’
The first day out at sea, with the sea-sick old gentleman murmuring ‘Oh my!’ — the Italian guide being rebuked in the matter of Christopher Columbus — the sheer burlesque thrown in to ‘modernize’ the gladiatorial fights of Rome — these things remain in the mind of readers for a lifetime. It is an amazing book, that seldom flags and never stops, undisfigured as yet by the prolixity that grew into Mark Twain’s later writing — the garrulousness of self-assured old age.
It is the point of view that appeals. The book represents Europe as seen from the Rocky Mountains, Rome as interpreted from Carson City. Mark Twain in all his life and work saw only two things, Western America and Europe. Of the East (meaning the Eastern States) he was unaware. He lived in it, worked in it, and died in it, but he never saw it. The East was just his audience. A good actor never sees them.
The success of the Innocents Abroad not only reached over America but spread to England. Indeed it was in England that Mark Twain was first recognized as an ‘author,’ as a man of literary genius, by people of taste and cultivation. In America he was the delight of the uncultivated West; to the ‘culture’ of New England he was still regarded as an amusing western ‘cut-up,’ not to be classed, of course, with the solemn Emersons and the dignified Longfellows. Thus ever does enthroned dullness guard its sovereignty.
Seated thus in his new chair in Buffalo, Mark Twain planned all sorts of literary projects. It is amazing, from now on, how much he planned and never started; how much he started and never finished; how much he finished and threw away. He projected a six-hundred-page book on the cruise of Noah’s Ark — presumably a monumental piece of funny irreverence. All through his life he never realized that people who read the Bible don’t want it made fun of, and people who don’t read the Bible don’t see any fun to make of it.
He planned and executed a cheerful article on God, Ancient and Modern. ‘The sole solicitude of the God of the Bible,’ so he wrote, ‘was about a handful of truculent nomads. He worried and fretted over them in a peculiarly and distractingly human way. One day he coaxed and petted them beyond their due, the next he harried and lashed them beyond their deserts. He sulked, he cursed, he raged, he grieved, according to his mood and the circumstances . . . when the fury was on him, he was blind to all reason — he not only slaughtered the offender, but even his harmless little children and his cattle.’
This is the real Mark Twain — elemental, defiant.
His wife would not let him publish the article. It was suppressed as one of the first victims of the new ‘censorship.’ Mark Twain’s biographers are fond of telling us that after his marriage his wife became censor and the editor of his work. He himself says so, with affectionate gratitude, in the preface to his Joan of Arc twenty-five years later. For all that he wrote henceforth Olivia Clemens, ‘Livy,’ became his critic and his censor, cutting away what was wrong, and schooling him into culture. Nothing must be printed unless ‘Livy’ gave it her approval.
Put very simply, this means that what he wrote must fit into the frame of what was thought ‘nice’ in Elmira, N. Y., in 1870; that he mustn’t write awful words like God damn! — though he may write d — n (with a stroke), provided that it is in a half-playful way and put into the mouth of a churchgoing character. He mustn’t write about nasty things except in a nice way. Crime must be lighted up into melodrama — as Mr. Dickens did it. Love must sigh and languish — but keep its clothes on (Mark would have said, keep its pants on). Death itself may be as melodramatic as the drunkard’s fate, as poignant as the death of little Paul, but it must be ‘respectable’ — and never wander out of sight of the loving pastor, the kindly old clergyman, or the ‘stern minister’ to whose business it belongs. Thus the whole of literature must be ‘stewed’ in respectability before being served.
These were the fetters and this was the editing imposed upon Mark Twain. His marriage with Livy Langdon was from the first day such a beautiful romance, her love for him so tender and so cherishing, and his for her so instant and so undying, that the voice of the critic must be subdued. To those who love Mark Twain’s work the memory of his sweet wife is sacred. Yet one cannot but wonder and question at her influence on her husband’s work and the history of American letters.
