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CHAPTER THREE

Turning Point

In 1909, only a year before Sam Clemens’s death, Harper’s Bazar published “The Turning Point of My Life,” his last work written for publication. Here he described the composition of The Innocents Abroad as “the last link” in the chain of events that had made him “a member of the literary guild.” All the links he described were no doubt important, but the great good fortune of traveling through the Mediterranean on the Quaker City, on assignment, and then having the opportunity to write a book about his experience was crucial. The voyage, which lasted just over five months, from June to November 1867, was the first made by an American ship to the Old World exclusively for pleasure. Clemens was to see the Azores, Gibraltar, Tangiers, Marseilles, Paris, several Italian cities, Athens (just a peek, it turned out, because the ship was quarantined), Constantinople, Sevastopol, Yalta (where he met the czar), Ephesus, Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Egypt, Spain, and Bermuda (five days), which was to become one of the author’s favorite places. He was also to encounter, more frequently than he might have wished, the other seventy-five passengers and the ship’s officers. He soon found they were, as he wrote in October to Joseph Goodman back in Virginia City, “the d dest, rustiest, ignorant, vulgar, slimy, psalm-singing cattle that could be scraped up in seventeen States,” and following his return he referred in a letter (to John Russell Young) to “the Quaker City’s strange menagerie of ignorance, imbecility, bigotry, & dotage.” In truth, however, his associates on ship were probably not very different from the readers he would address when he came to write a book about his experiences; they were just wealthier.

His immediate task, he had been instructed, was “to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favors of the Alta California.”¹ He was expected to produce, according to his later testimony, fifty letters, for which he was to be paid twenty dollars per letter, and in due time the Alta published that number.² He wrote several others that apparently never arrived. He also had commissions from the New York Tribune (for that paper he wrote only seven letters, far fewer than he had planned) and for the New York Herald (in which only three unsigned pieces appeared). Half the trip expenses were to come from the fees the Alta was to pay him; he expected to profit chiefly from the other assignments, the ones that, as it happened, he could only partially complete. For one thing, it was difficult to write on board ship, as he complained in a letter written from Naples in August, and he could not write on shore because of his continual need to be sightseeing. Thus in his October 1 Alta letter he reported that he was on the Quaker City for the first time in six weeks but that his “anticipations of quiet are blighted” by “one party of Italian thieves fiddling and singing for pennies on one side of the ship, and a bagpiper, who knows only one tune, on the other.”³

The letters Mark Twain produced for the Alta were written for the audience he had been addressing for years. Not intended to constitute a complete account of the voyage, they focus somewhat erratically on this attraction and that topic. At the end of his sixth letter he is in Paris, though he has surprisingly little to say about that great city; the next is from Genoa, where he announces, “I want to camp here” because of its beautiful women. A few pages later he is inspired to write an account of his companion Brown’s French composition to his hotel keeper in Paris. A casual journalistic style permitted movement forward and back in time.

In other respects, these Alta letters are like earlier ones about Mark Twain’s Hawaiian and American travels and adventures. Brown appears once again, intermittently. There are humorous passages and serious ones, a good deal of irreverence, and a pronounced chauvinism. Few things that the traveler saw struck him as better than what America had to offer. Sometimes he stretched a point to demonstrate to the Old World that America was actually more advanced. When the head of the Russian railroad system told him that he employed ten thousand convicts, Mark Twain topped him: “I said we had eighty thousand convicts employed on the railways in California—all of them under sentence of death for murder in the first degree.” “That,” he explained, “closed him out” (p. 162).

A significant new feature, on the other hand, is the continuing narrative, determined by the prearranged itinerary of the Quaker City. What, one wonders, will Mark Twain do and say in Venice or in Jerusalem? There is also the letter writer’s running feud with his fellow voyagers, the “pilgrims,” who were altogether different in their piety and hypocrisy from his usual associates. In the Holy Land, for example, when he drank at “Ananias’s well,” he noted that “the water was just as fresh as if the well had been dug only yesterday.” He then went on: “I was deeply moved. I mentioned it to the old Doctor, who is the religious enthusiast of our party, and he lifted up his hands and said, ‘Oh, how wonderful is prophecy!’ … I start a bogus astonisher for him every now and then, just to hear him yelp” (p. 202).

Another new characteristic is that Mark Twain begins putting more emphasis on his own reactions, his personal experiences, and less on the places he visited. He knew that he was not the first visitor to write about travels in the Old World; the special nature of his accounts was to come from the responses being his: Mark Twain’s anticipations and surprises. Since his strength was comedy, he prepared ridiculous expectations so that his actual experiences would unsettle him. Thus in Venice “the fairy boat in which the princely cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit canals” turned out to be “an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clopped on to the middle of it” (pp. 97–98). Sometimes the technique is resorted to merely as a throwaway, as when he reports, “After a good deal of worrying and tramping under a roasting Spanish sun, I managed to tree the Barber of Seville, and I was sorry for it afterwards. With all that fellow’s reputation, he was the worst barber on earth. If I am not pleased with the Two Gentlemen of Verona when I get there next week, I shall not hunt for any more lions” (p. 55). He put less emphasis on his ridiculous self in the last letters, when the fact that he had few notes and many letters to write caused him to pad his account with biblical stories and even to translate King James version idioms into flat prose. The Alta half-seriously apologized for the thirty-fifth letter, marked by the reporter’s “strange conduct in presenting … information to the public with such a confident air of furnishing news” (p. 229).

Still it should be noted that even while he was traveling, the writer had begun to set higher standards for himself—or rather more genteel ones. On the Quaker City he had met a Cleveland, Ohio, woman, Mary Mason Fairbanks, who was also writing newspaper accounts of the voyage, and she served as his critic during the preparation of the last twenty or so letters; his continuing friendship with her and her husband would make him more conscious of genteel values. He refers to her in a revealing letter (the same one quoted previously) to John Russell Young, managing editor of the New York Tribune, on his return. “I stopped writing for the Tribune, partly because I seemed to write so awkwardly, & partly because I was apt to betray glaring disrespect for the Holy Land & the Primes and Thompson’s [authors of solemn travel books] who had glorified it.” But, he explained to Young, “coming home I cramped myself down to at least something like decency of expression, & wrote some twenty letters, which have survived the examination of a most fastidious censor on shipboard and are consequently not incendiary documents. There are several among these I think you would probably accept, after reading them. I would so like to write some savage letters about Palestine, but it wouldn’t do.” He enclosed letters he thought suitable, with the not very encouraging comments that “the letters I have sent you heretofore have been—well, they have been worse, much worse, than those I am sending you now.”

Clearly the writer was ambivalent. Exactly what was suitable for an Eastern audience, and how crucial was that literary market? Soon he was to meet a woman who would represent that audience for him; she would serve for many years as the censor he felt he needed. Olivia Langdon’s brother, who had been Clemens’s shipmate, would provide the necessary introduction. After his trip, however, he returned to New York on November 19, 1867, and went almost immediately to Washington, D.C., to take on for a short time a position he had accepted while still in Europe as secretary to Senator William Stewart of Nevada. Stewart later wrote an account of Clemens’s appearance when he arrived in Washington:

I was seated at my window one morning when a very disreputable-looking person slouched into the room. He was arrayed in a seedy suit, which hung upon his lean frame in bunches with no style worth mentioning. A sheaf of scraggy black [sic] hair leaked out of a battered old slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance.⁴

Another sketch of a devil-may-care Clemens is provided by a journalist who visited him in his Washington room and later reported in the New York Evening Post on “How ‘Innocents Abroad’ Was Written.”

The little drum stove was full of ashes, running over on the zinc sheet; the bed seemed to be unmade for a week, the slops not having been carried out for a fortnight, the room foul with tobacco smoke, the floor, dirty enough to begin with, was littered with newspapers, from which Twain had cut his letters…. And there was tobacco, and tobacco everywhere. One thing, there were no flies. The smoke killed them, and I am now surprised that the smoke did not kill me too.⁵

Expecting the experience in the nation’s capital to be “better than lecturing for $50. a night for a Literary Society in Chicago & paying my own expenses” (as he wrote to his old friend Frank Fuller), he spent the winter in Washington, where in addition to his work as private secretary for Senator Stewart, he gave a lecture on his trip abroad, “The Frozen Truth.” His familiarity with the political scene was to prove useful in the writing of a novel. He also gave a humorous account of his Washington activities in “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship.”⁶ Continuing to act as a journalist, he made the New York Tribune office in Washington his headquarters. By December 4 he was writing a new series of letters for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, eleven letters in all, the last dated March 2, 1868. He identified himself in a letter to Mrs. Fairbanks as a “Tribune ‘occasional,’ Alta ‘special,’ “with “propositions from the Herald.” For the Alta he wrote fourteen letters, the earliest on the day after his arrival in New York, later ones in July 1868, and two in July 1869. He was soon to begin a series of letters for the Chicago Republican as well as some for the New York Herald.⁷ He was open to anything, for he was by now a highly ambitious journalist who could augment his income on the lecture platform. The successful Western journalist was becoming a successful Eastern one. His trip abroad had cured his depression, but it had not yet changed his life.

What he wrote is worth describing as a way of indicating his literary personality at this time, especially his little-known letters to the Enterprise. They are much better than the letters written at the same time for the Alta. According to his first letter, “To write ‘EDS. ENTERPRISE’ seems a good deal like coming home again.” Mark Twain is full of admiration for Washington, particularly the Capitol, which he has examined several times, “almost to worship it, for surely it must be the most exquisitely beautiful edifice that exists on earth to-day”⁸—this from his vantage point as recent world traveler. He is soon exploring political corruption and problems of poverty in New York. After describing life in a tenement, the struggles of a sixty-year-old ex-circus clown, now a “rag-picker and a searcher after old bones and broken bottles,” and the plight of poor little girls who nevertheless enjoy showing off their wretched “rusty rag dolls,” he presents the lessons he has learned about the possibilities of political action to redress social injustice.

In this city, with its scores of millionaires, there are to-day a hundred thousand men out of employment. It is an item of threatening portent. Many apprehend bread riots, and certainly there is a serious danger that they may occur. If this army of men had a leader, New York would be in an unenviable situation. It has been proposed in the Legislature to appropriate $500,000 to the relief of the New York poor, but of course the thing is cried down by every body—the money would never get further than the pockets of a gang of thieving politicians. They would represent the “poor” to the best of their ability, and there the State’s charity would stop.⁹

The longer he made Washington his headquarters, the more disenchanted Clemens became. In particular, he found the Democratic Party thoroughly corrupt, as he reported in a piece he wrote for the New York Tribune, “The White House Funeral.” Now identifying himself with both the Republican Party and the North, he satirized Andrew Johnson by providing his imagined farewell address: “My great deeds speak for themselves. I vetoed the Reconstruction Acts; I vetoed the Freedman’s Bureau; I vetoed civil liberty;… I vetoed everything & everybody that the malignant Northern hordes approved; I hugged traitors to my bosom;… I smiled upon the Ku-Klux;… I rescued the bones of the patriot martyr, Booth.”¹⁰

In the letters that he wrote for the Chicago Republican in January and February, Mark Twain worked hard at being funny. Valentine’s Day, he explained in one letter, has special meaning for him. “For the last sixty years I have never seen this day approach without emotion.” He is moved by the valentines he receives, especially those intended “to conceal the real passion that is consuming the young women who send them.” One such reads in part: “SIR: Our metallic burial cases have taken the premium at six State Fairs in this country, and also at the great Paris Exposition. Parties who have used them have been in each instance charmed with them. Not one has yet entered a complaint.… Families supplied at reduced rates.” Other “Valentines” received on February 14 deal with a “patent Cancer-Eradicator,” a “double-back action, chronometer-balance, incombustible wooden legs,” gravestones, and one “fraught with a world of happiness for me. It—it says: ‘SIR: YOU better pay for your washing. BRIDGET.’”¹¹

Two other pieces from Washington, D.C., are sketches. The earlier, published in the New York Citizen of December 21, 1867, and entitled “The Facts in the Case of the Senate Doorkeeper,” is signed “Mark Twain, Doorkeeper ad interim.” He tells how as doorkeeper he was “snubbed” every time he attempted to speak on the Senate floor. Eventually he was impeached for a variety of causes, among them charging senators fifty cents admission.¹² Here the writer posed as what can only be termed an inspired lunatic. In “The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,” published in the New York Tribune of December 27, 1867, he tells how as secretary of the Senate Committee on Conchology he never enjoyed the courtesy due him from other members of the cabinet.¹³ Again it is the inspired idiot who writes. This persona, in which the writer presented himself as a humorist and nothing more, suggested that “Mark Twain” was at a loss for fresh inspiration.

In late December 1867, Clemens met Olivia Langdon, who was visiting New York with her parents. She was twenty-two, ten years younger than Clemens. Her brother, Charles, had been Clemens’s Quaker City companion; all five attended a reading by Charles Dickens on December 31. In a letter to the Alta California dated January 11, the writer took pleasure in reporting that “there was a beautiful young lady with me—a highly respectable young white woman.” Although Clemens was to see his bride-to-be twice more within a few weeks, he did not begin his formal courtship until August, when he visited the Langdons in Elmira. By then his situation had changed significantly.

Just after Clemens arrived in New York following his trip abroad, a man who was to play a crucial role in his life, Elisha Bliss Jr. of the American Publishing Company of Hartford, wrote to ask Clemens for “a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the East, &c., with such interesting additions as may be proper.”¹⁴ Clemens replied on December 2 that he could “make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write.” He believed that he could revise the letters, “weed them of their chief faults of construction & inelegancies of expression,” drop some and write others in their place. He sought more information, especially concerning “what amount of money I might possibly make out of it”; clearly, he was enticed by Bliss’s invitation. Early in January 1868, he wrote to his mother and sister to request that they “cut my letters out of the Alta’s and send them to me in an envelop.”

For a conference with Bliss in late January, Clemens visited Hartford. He stayed with the Hooker family at Nook Farm, where he was later to make his home. (Alice Hooker had been with Olivia Langdon at the Dickens reading.) A few days later, Clemens wrote from New York to accept Bliss’s proposition that he furnish “Manuscript properly prepared & written sufficient to make an Octavo volume of at least 500 pages … the subject of the same to be the trip of the ‘Quaker City’ to the Holy Land.”¹⁵ The author would have a great deal of revising to do, but he was encouraged by the fact that he was already expecting the book to be highly remunerative, at a time when he had been looking desperately for some project that would pay him well. As he explained to his family in late January, “I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, & a good deal of it.” (Bliss had offered him a royalty of 5 percent of sales.) Untroubled by a deadline to deliver the manuscript by “the middle of July,” Clemens even continued writing for newspapers.

By January 31, he was writing to Emeline Beach, who had been on the Quaker City, asking for names and other information that he had not remembered. He was also consulting the published letters of three other Quaker City passengers. But shortly after receiving copies of his own Alta letters from his family, he learned that the Alta proprietors intended to publish his letters in book form and that they were not willing to let him use them. About the middle of March, he was therefore obliged to head for San Francisco, a trip he described fancifully in a letter to the Chicago Republican for May 19. He had “chartered one of the superb vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.” Traveling this time by crossing Panama, Clemens successfully arranged in San Francisco with the Alta to publish the Quaker City letters in revised form. Although the reason for the long trip was to obtain rights to his Alta letters, the author had another enterprise in mind, for he needed money. A celebrity in San Francisco, where Mark Twain’s letters to the Alta, the Enterprise, and eastern papers had been reprinted, he soon had newspapers announcing plans for a lecture.¹⁶ The Golden Era was among the many publications that publicized his intentions. Mark Twain was “to enter minutely into the scandal of the Quaker City, … and how his innate morality was unsuccessfully assailed during his brief but perilous career.”¹⁷ He made his presence felt by attending entertainments sponsored by Presbyterian and Methodist churches. The much-publicized lecture, presented on April 14, earned Mark Twain some sixteen hundred dollars and drew such a large audience that it had to be repeated the next day.¹⁸

The lecturer began by promising to make his performance “somewhat didactic. I don’t know what didactic means, but it is a good, high-sounding word, and I wish to use it, meaning no harm whatsoever.”¹⁹ After a less-than-triumphant first effort, the Alta reported, he “got the hang of the sermon,” and thereafter he spoke with “that confidential tone that breaks down… barriers between the man on the stage and people occupying the seats.”²⁰ Now he possessed the secret to his continuing success as a speaker. He went on to lecture in Sacramento, Marysville, Nevada City, Grass Valley, and Virginia City, and he reported his experiences to the readers of the Chicago Republican.

By May 5, he had returned to San Francisco, where he completed the transformation of his newspaper letters into a book manuscript, a task he had begun earlier in Washington. There was also to be much new matter. Much of the work consisted simply of pasting newspaper clippings to paper and making revisions in the margins. In his autobiography Mark Twain remembered that he “worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad day in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days the average was 3,000 words a day—nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me.”²¹ Then Bret Harte, who was preparing the first issue of the Overland Monthly, agreed to review the manuscript. In compensation, Mark Twain let Harte publish four excerpts in his journal. In November 1870, in a letter to C. H. Webb, he reported, “Harte read all of the MS of the ‘Innocents’ & told me what passages, paragraphs, & chapters to leave out—& I followed orders strictly. It was a kind thing for Harte to do, & I think I appreciated it.” The cuts were substantial. A surviving manuscript has a few of Harte’s notes; one indicates that a description of seasickness should be deleted because it is a hackneyed subject, treated by Dickens, Thackeray, and Jerrold.²²

After giving a final lecture on Venice in San Francisco, Mark Twain left California for the last time on July 6 to return to New York. He found Captain Edgar Wakeman’s ship in the harbor of Panama and was able to record for the Chicagoans a good deal of his colorful talk. This time Wakeman told him a story that he would later develop into one of his very best pieces, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” But he reported to the Republican simply that “the old gentleman told his remarkable dream.”²³ He arrived on July 29 in New York, which was now to serve as his headquarters. Then he went to Hartford to deliver his book manuscript.

While returning to the East, he drafted two sketches in his notebook. One concerns an imagined personage, “Mamie Grant, the Child-Missionary.” The complete sketch, preserved in the notebook, is as good an indication of the state of the author’s mind and art at this time as one could possibly wish. Mamie is an eager, devoted Sunday school student, just nine years old, deeply read in pious tracts. In her earnest attempts to save the souls of those who call at her uncle’s house on business, she manages to stop his newspaper subscription, antagonize the tax collector, and prevent the return of one thousand dollars desperately needed to prevent foreclosure on the mortgage. But she is content. “I have saved a paper carrier, a census bureau, a creditor & a debtor, & they will bless me forever. I have done a noble work to-day. I may yet see my poor little name in a beautiful Sunday School book.” Mark Twain’s skepticism found do-goodism the target most ready at hand for his satire. The burlesque of moral tracts is truly devastating. In speaking to the census-taker, his Mamie shows a remarkable grasp of “the dreadful game of poker:”

Take these tracts. This one, entitled, “The Doomed Drunkard, or the Wages of Sin,” teaches how the insidious monster that lurks in the wine-cup, drags souls to perdition. This one, entitled, “Deuces and, or the Gamester’s Last Throw,” tells how the almost ruined gambler, playing at the dreadful game of poker, made a ten strike & a spare, & thus encouraged, drew two cards & pocketed the deep red; urged on by the demon of destruction, he ordered it up & went alone on a double run of eight, with two for his heels, & then, just as fortune seemed at last to have turned in his favor, his opponent coppered the ace & won. The fated gamester blew his brains out & perished. Ah, poker is a dreadful, dreadful game. You will see in this book how well our theological students are qualified to teach understandingly all classes that come within their reach. Gamblers’ souls are worthy to be saved, & so the holy students even acquaint themselves with the science & technicalities of their horrid games in order to be able to talk to them for the saving of their souls in language which they are accustomed to.

The census-taker has had enough and makes a quick departure.²⁴ But Mark Twain, who saw his own future in the East, already sensed such brazen irreverence was not likely to advance his career: “Mamie Grant” was not offered for publication.

Arriving in New York on July 29, Clemens once again benefited from Anson Burlingame’s assistance, and with much help from him and his staff a piece appeared on the front page of the New York Tribune of August 4, “The Treaty with China.” More significantly, when he visited Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York, that summer, he promptly fell in love. Very likely Burlingame had something to do with his interest in the Langdons, for it was Burlingame who had told him, “Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character: always climb.” If it is not clear that the Langdons were superior in intellect and character, they were certainly superior socially. Clemens extended his visit and was a house guest from August 21 to September 8, during which time he proposed marriage but met discouragement. Olivia’s father, Jervis Langdon, had become wealthy chiefly from the coal business. His business, J. Langdon and Company, included as a partner both his son, Charles Langdon, and his son-in-law, Theodore W. Crane, who had married Jervis’s adopted daughter, Susan. In antebellum days the Langdons had been dedicated abolitionists and had assisted escaping slaves by means of the “Underground Railroad.” Among others, they had assisted Frederick Douglass while he was a fugitive. Clemens now became a frequent visitor to Elmira, a city of some 15,000 people just south of the Finger Lakes area of central New York. The Langdons were in many ways the kind of people whom Mark Twain had been satirizing: distinctly genteel and respectable. They were devout churchgoers whose minister, Thomas Beecher, was a member of the noted Beecher family.

Olivia, twenty-two when she met thirty-two-year-old Samuel Clemens, had formerly been an invalid as the result of severe back pains. She was unable to walk for some time, but by early 1867 she was much improved. It took a great deal of persistence on Clemens’s part to persuade her family that he was “respectable”—a very convincing case could have been made that he was not—and to persuade Olivia to accept him.²⁵ When he could not be in her company, he wrote to her nearly every day, with the result that by the end of November they were “provisionally” engaged. Readers of the letters to Olivia find someone quite different from the person presented heretofore in these pages. Specifically, the letter-writer thought that he needed to become a Christian in order to win Olivia, and after a great deal of mental effort, he was able to write to her mother on February 13,1869, “I now claim to be a Christian.”

Clemens had several occasions to visit Hartford to see his publisher; there he discovered the huckleberry. The little-known passage in which he announces this discovery is in his best humorous style.

I never saw any place before where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here. I do not know which has the ascendency. Possibly the huckleberries, in their season, but the morality holds out the longest. The huckleberries are in season now. They are a new beverage to me. This is my first acquaintance with them, and certainly it is a pleasant one. They are excellent. I had always thought a huckleberry was something like a turnip. On the contrary, they are no larger than buckshot. They are better than buckshot, though, and more digestible.²⁶

Strange that Mark Twain was to use the name of a berry he discovered in Hartford for a character intimately associated with his boyhood in Missouri and worth noting that from the beginning he linked the berry with moral issues.

In the Spirit of the Times for November 7,1868, one of his funniest pieces yet written made its appearance, though he did not select it for republication in his American collections. It shows his ability to make much of little on the subject of the “Private Habits of Horace Greeley.” While expressing admiration for the eminent man, he manages to find a way to make much good-natured fun. He notes, for example, that Greeley “snores awfully.” “In a moment of irritation, once, I was rash enough to say I would never sleep with him until he broke himself of the unfortunate habit. I have kept my word with bigoted and unwavering determination.”²⁷

Suggestive as an indication of how Clemens was sensing his uncertain identity is an amusing sketch he called “A Mystery,” published on November 16, 1868, in the Cleveland Herald (partly owned by Mary Fairbanks’s husband), in which he tells how he has been burdened by a double who runs up costly hotel bills in the name of Mark Twain and then absconds, gets “persistently and eternally drunk,” and even imitates Mark Twain in presenting himself as a lecturer, with his topic “The Moral Impossibility of Doughnuts.” A few of the double’s characteristics suggest that he represents the Mark Twain of the West: “It is a careless, free and easy Double. It is a double which don’t care whether school keeps or not, if I may use such an expression.” “A Mystery” demonstrates that just ten days before his provisional engagement, and probably while he was a guest in Mother Fairbanks’s home, Clemens was expressing sorrow over the demise of his fresher, freer side.²⁸

In the fall of 1868, Clemens worked on his book in Hartford, where he was pleased to meet the Rev. Joseph Twichell, who was to have a role in Clemens’s marriage and become a longtime friend. Clemens also gave some time to the lecture circuit. He took on the aggressive James Redpath of Boston as his booking agent; Redpath scheduled forty engagements at one hundred dollars each.²⁹ Mark Twain’s topic was announced as “The American Vandal Abroad,” permitting him to draw on the whole range of his experiences in Europe and the Holy Land and making use of his book manuscript. He portrayed “that class of traveling Americans who are not elaborately educated, cultivated, refined, and gilded and filigreed with the ineffable graces of the first society.” When he characterized the vandal as “always self-possessed, always untouched, unabashed—even in the presence of the Sphinx,”³⁰ it might be said he was making fun of himself. The tour lasted till early March and provided him some “eight or nine thousand dollars,” but expenses were so high that in June he told his mother that he had “less than three thousand six hundred dollars in [the] bank.” He had been able to visit Elmira from time to time and even to lecture there. The final revisions of The Innocents Abroad were made while Clemens was courting Olivia Langdon, who helped with the proofreading and began her long career as his editor. It was for her, for his fellow voyager Mrs. Fairbanks, and for the genteel audience they represented that Mark Twain composed passages of sentimental rhetoric, such as the descriptions of the Sphinx and of the Sea of Galilee at night.

Now Clemens needed to concentrate on establishing his relationship with Olivia and with her parents. By late November 1868, he won a conditional consent that they would be married, but questions remained. Olivia’s mother wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks on December 1: If “a great change had taken place in Mr Clemens,” “from what standard of conduct,—from what habitual life, did this change, or improvement, or reformation; commence?”³¹ Olivia’s father, Jervis Langdon, asked Clemens for the names of people in the West who might serve as references. When Clemens supplied six, Langdon asked a former employee living in San Francisco to interview the six, as well as some others Clemens had not named. Feeling uneasy about what Langdon might hear, Clemens confessed to him, “I think that much of my conduct on the Pacific Coast was not of a character to recommend me to the respectful regard of a high eastern civilization, but it was not considered blameworthy there, perhaps.” He then provided the names of additional references. One result of Langdon’s inquiry was this comment from a Presbyterian deacon: “I would rather bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow.”³² Meanwhile, Clemens was assuring Olivia of his transformation: “I am striving & shall still strive to reach the highest altitude of worth, the highest Christian excellence.” Ultimately Clemens was able to present himself in a way that both of Olivia’s parents found they could accept, and a formal engagement was announced. Clemens told his family, “She said she never could or would love me—but she set herself the task of making a Christian of me. I said she would succeed, but in the meantime she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit & end by tumbling into it—& lo! the prophecy is fulfilled.”

After finishing proofreading on the Innocents, Clemens devoted some attention to the question of where he would settle. “I want to get located in life,” he told Olivia in May, 1869. In his thirty-fourth year, he did not have much to show for his years thus far, or so it clearly seemed to the man approaching marriage. For a time Cleveland attracted him; there Mrs. Fairbanks’s husband was publisher of the Herald. But he decided against it because, as he told them in August, “It just offered another apprenticeship—another one, to be tacked on to the tail end of a foolish life made up of apprenticeships. I believe I have been apprentice to pretty much everything—& just as I was about to graduate as a journeyman I always had to go apprentice to something else.” Instead, with a large loan from Jervis Langdon and with installments to be paid later, Clemens purchased a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express and became its associate editor, to “do a little of everything,” as he reported to the Fairbankses. For a time Clemens supposed that he was making a real commitment to the paper. In September 1869, he received a letter asking if he would still be lecturing. He replied, “I hope to get out of the lecture-field forever.… I mean to make this newspaper support me hereafter.”

Finally, in August 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, substantially different from the Alta letters from which it was derived. New sections had been added about Paris and Egypt and notably one on the Sphinx. Also inserted were accounts of the narrator’s movement from place to place. The changes were made for several reasons. The most obvious resulted from Mark Twain’s recognition of the difference between writing for a newspaper and writing a book. In attempting to address a different audience, an eastern one and one that included women such as the woman he was to marry, he dropped local references and eliminated certain coarse expressions, such as “slimy cesspool” and “bawdy house.” (The author had warned Olivia not to read Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, or Shakespeare’s plays because they contained “grossness.”) He also removed several but by no means all of the irreverent comments that had characterized his treatment of the Holy Land. The character Brown was completely eliminated, never to reappear in Mark Twain’s writings, but while dropping Brown’s vulgar remarks, Mark Twain retained the merely ignorant comments and assigned them to others. Some he kept for himself, as he sought to flesh out the character of the narrator. Perhaps to compensate for such changes, the writer added to his criticisms of the hypocritical pilgrims. The presence of that theme is underscored by the subtitle he gave his book, The New Pilgrims’ Progress.

More important, Mark Twain sought to give the account a shape, a sense of design, by developing theme and attitude. He made the account more subjective by placing greater emphasis on the narrator. As he notes in the preface, the book suggests “to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who had travelled in those countries before him.” The eyes of Mark Twain were unique, however, for they saw what was funny, what evoked personal memories, and what demonstrated the ways in which reality often differed from expectations. In his Western writings he makes fun of genteel falsehoods and naive tenderfeet and identifies himself as a rugged veteran. Now he himself is often an innocent, and his illusions are stripped away.

What is Europe for the visiting American? Often Mark Twain asserts that it is a misrepresented product, created by years of anticipation. Nothing proves to be as advertised, neither Parisian barbers, Arabian horses, nor the Holy Land itself. Even Jesus Christ, Mark Twain explained, would never visit there again, having had the misfortune of seeing it once, which was surely enough. The author is the victim of misleading expectations, though frequently he has no one to blame but his overly gullible self. Nonetheless, he gets revenge by exploding superstitions, myths, and legends; indeed, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish passages of genuine sentiment from burlesque imitation, even though the “genuine” passages were written in a deliberate effort to gratify his new audience. For example, the drafts surviving at Vassar College of the Sphinx description show that he worked hard at this passage, which became a favorite in his lectures. He knew his live audiences liked such purple prose:

After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blending at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed. (chap. 58)

The passage goes on and on.

In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain adopts an identity, though he does not wear it consistently. He is the honest innocent who is ready to become the skeptic; the iconoclastic democrat; at worst, the ignorant philistine. Usually his good nature and sense of humor ingratiate him with the reader, and his report remains good fun. Indeed, Mark Twain’s basic technique was to appear playful.³³

Again and again, Mark Twain contrasts reality with his own expectations, sometimes by quoting what previous visitors, especially pious ones, had reported. He pretends to be particularly disappointed by the Sea of Galilee, which emerged as “a lake six miles wide and neutral in color; with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery; at one end bare, unsightly rocks, with (almost) invisible holes in them of no consequence to the picture; eastward, ‘wild and desolate mountains’ (low, desolate hills, he [William C. Grimes, a fictitious author] should have said); in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with snow on it; peculiarity of the picture, ‘calmness’; its prominent feature, one tree.” To this he adds, “No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful—to one’s actual vision” (chap. 48). Aware that the reality he encountered was not all that his readers wanted, he provided a second account on another level that emphasizes not the actual lake but the people and events it had witnessed.

One of the writer’s most difficult problems in transforming his wisecracking letters into a book acceptable to Middle Americans was coping with his skepticism. He could scoff, imperiously, at Roman Catholic traditions, such as those linked with Veronica’s handkerchief, but he obviously could not make fun of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the piety of those who visited it. Still he found an outlet, a permissible one, by reporting his ecstasy in being able to visit “Adam’s tomb,” which he places within the same church. Burlesquing the responses of such visitors as William C. Prime, author of Tent Life in the Holy Land (1857), he exclaims:

The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation. The unerring instinct of nature thrilled its recognition. The fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depth, and I gave way to tumultuous emotion. I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor dead relative. Let him who would sneer at my emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his taste in my journeyings through Holy Land. (chap. 53)

The passage, only part of which is quoted here, is stressed in the original publication, where a picture shows Mark Twain shedding pious tears. In 1902, a newspaper asked rhetorically, “Who is Mark Twain?” and answered, “The man who visited Adam’s tomb, the man who wept over the remains of his first parent. That beautiful act of filial devotion is known in every part of the globe, read by every traveller, translated into every language.”³⁴

Although often undercut, Mark Twain’s dominant intention was to show reality as it is, uncolored by pretense, conventionality, and gentility, his familiar enemies. Here these targets are often specifically literary, with Prime’s guidebook at the head of the list. The narrator seeks to entertain himself, and thereby he entertains his readers. He finds that there is much fun in being playful, and so he improvises amusement—although doing so in the Holy Land is difficult, since playfulness is too close to irreverence. The author observed to his publisher, Bliss, that “the irreverence of the volume appears to be a tip-top feature of it, diplomatically speaking, though I wish with all my heart that there wasn’t an irreverent passage in it.” This lament made by the famous “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” presumably came from his desire to please the woman he was courting, who thought “a humorist is something perfectly awful”—as he explained in January 1869 to “Mother Fairbanks.” What he would have liked to make fun of was now “forbidden ground,” he had reported to this same friend a few months earlier.

Mark Twain’s weapon was style. In order to tell the truth, he showed what it is not. Sometimes what it is not is his invention, a kind of exercise in literary absurdity, as in the affectations of the Adam’s tomb passage or in the description of a Roman holiday slaughter as it might be described in the Spirit of the Times. These experiments are among the high points of the book, reminding readers constantly that it is a piece of writing they are reading, at a significant remove from the ostensible subject. The author in his first book—as distinguished from his Celebrated Jumping Frog collection—is not the same Mark Twain that readers had encountered earlier. Now he is specifically an author, one who draws attention to his stylistic repertoire.

Mark Twain’s iconoclasm is limited, however, as Bret Harte noted when he reviewed the book in the Overland Monthly. If Mark Twain rejected the art of the old masters, he shared with many Americans the bad taste that led him to admire such meretricious works of architecture as the Milan cathedral. Sometimes his uncertainty about what he could accept and reject leads to amusing passages, as when he attends a performance of the cancan in Paris. “I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers” (chap. 14).

Yet it was passages such as these that helped make The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress a great success. Published in July 1869, it sold 77,800 copies during its first sixteen months and approximately 125,000 in the United States during its first decade. The advertisements called Mark Twain “the people’s author,” and indeed he was. Reviews were generally favorable, both American and English, including one by the influential William Dean Howells, who wrote in the December Atlantic Monthly, “There is an amount of pure human nature in the book that rarely gets into literature.”³⁵

In 1870, the English publisher John Camden Hotten published an unauthorized two-volume edition. The first volume was called The Innocents Abroad… The Voyage Out, and the second The New Pilgrim’s Progress… The Voyage Home. This edition was reprinted several times and also appeared in a one-volume edition. Later, Routledge published an authorized edition, revised by the author, who was paid $250 for it.³⁶ In time Mark Twain’s writings were more widely sold in England than in the United States.

He was acutely conscious that he had written little during the time he was revising the Innocents, lecturing, and courting. In a letter to his family written in June 1869, he called this period “the idlest, laziest 14 months I ever spent in my life.… I feel ashamed of my idleness, & yet I have had really no inclination to do anything but court Livy.” Despite the book he had produced, he still thought of himself as a journalist. Among the pieces dating from this time are several sketches: “George Washington’s Negro Body-Servant,” published in the Galaxy in February 1868; “Cannibalism in the Cars,” published in the English journal Broadway in November, and “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins” in Packard’s Monthly in August 1869. The latter two were collected in Sketches, New and Old (1875).

One of these sketches was solicited by the American agent of George Routledge and Sons, the English publisher whose pirated Celebrated Jumping Frog had sold well. Routledge paid generously for “Cannibalism in the Cars,” a fact that the writer was not to forget.³⁷ Another sketch, “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins,” deserves attention because it is the first evidence of what was to become an abiding interest: the subjects of twins, duality, and the problem of identity, themes to be associated throughout his writing with roleplaying. Actual Siamese twins were being exhibited in the United States when Mark Twain was writing a humorous sketch about the complications of two separate people being physically connected. That the consequences of the actions of each one were the same for both fascinated him: imprisonment and drunkenness for both, though one is blameless. Although not explicitly, the twins are by implication an instance of dual identity.³⁸ One may presume that the writer’s interest in the subject resulted from his attempting, in his thirties, to take on a new identity, that of a candidate for gentility, in Van Wyck Brooks’s phrase. Would he be compelled to switch sides in the battle between authenticity and pretentious gentility?

Although he wrote several pieces for the Buffalo Express before he took up his responsibilities in that connection, his name appeared on nothing published there until he officially announced his presence on August 21. In his “Salutation” he promised—as if announcing his reformation, somewhat begrudgingly,

I shall not make use of slang or vulgarity upon any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use profanity except when discussing house-rent and taxes. Indeed, upon a second thought, I shall never use it even then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading—though, to speak truly, I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political editor who is already excellent, and only needs a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.³⁹

Here one can see the old Mark Twain peeking out as well as an interpretation of the new manner of life the writer was entering, uneasily

During the next thirteen months, Mark Twain published some fifty pieces in the Express, mostly in the period through April 1870, including a column of fillers entitled “People and Things” and a later one entitled “Browsing Around.” For two months he applied himself diligently. Ten Express pieces would make appearances in Sketches, New and Old. One that did not appear there, “Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, His Private Habits,” suggests a preoccupation with Clemens’s need to eliminate his habit of swearing, a frequent topic in his letters to Mrs. Fairbanks. “Mr. Beecher never swears. In all his life a profane expression has never passed his lips. But if he were to take it in his head to try it once, he would make even that disgusting habit beautiful—he would handle it as it was never handled before, and if there was a wholesome moral lesson in it anywhere, he would ferret it out and use it with tremendous effect.”⁴⁰ “The Legend of the Capitoline Venus,” a condensed novel, tells the story of an artist who is denied the hand of the woman he loves until he raises fifty thousand dollars, a story that has autobiographical overtones because it was written while he was under pressure to demonstrate his eligibility for Olivia’s hand to her father.

Mark Twain’s most ambitious project for the Express was a series of letters written on the basis of an idea that engaged him for several years: writing travel letters while staying home by using the reports of an actual traveler as grist for his mill. Charles Langdon, Olivia’s brother, was to make another trip, this time a grand tour around the world, accompanied by a tutor, Darius R. Ford, who would send back accounts of their experiences. Mark Twain described his imaginative scheme in the pages of the Express. “These letters are [to be] written jointly by Professor D. R. Ford and Mark Twain. The former does the actual travelling, and such facts as escape his notice are supplied by the latter, who remains at home.”⁴¹ So Mark Twain announced on February 12. The Express built up the series with announcements: “Mark Twain in Saturday’s Express. A Voyage Around the World by Proxy. First of a Series of Letters.” Plans called for at least fifty installments. The trip came to an abrupt halt in Japan when Charles Langdon was summoned home to be with his dying father. But none of the letters published was in any sense by Ford, since none arrived soon enough to serve their purpose. Instead, Mark Twain decided to fill in by recounting his own Western experiences, basing his writings on the lectures on California that he had been preparing. Of the eight pieces he wrote, materials from six later found their way into his next book. Based on his own travels, they are pieces on Mono Lake in California, Silver City nabobs, California mining, and the glorious story of Dick Baker’s curious cat, Tom Quartz. The second letter is a wholly fictitious account of Haiti, and the last, on Hawaii, is based on a travel letter Mark Twain had written in 1866.⁴² The joint authorship scheme did result in two published letters, appearing in the Express on February 12 and March 5,1869.

If an occasional piece from his pen, in addition to the “Around the World Letters,” appeared in the Express during the late fall and winter, Mark Twain was largely occupied with another lucrative lecture tour begun on November 1. This time he appeared, with appropriate anxiety, in dubious Boston, where his topic was the one he used throughout the tour, “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.” The subject was now a favorite with Mark Twain. He was well received, went on to suburbs of Boston, then to Connecticut, where he made a highly successful appearance in Hartford, and then on to Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Washington, then back to Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.⁴³

As to his relationship with Olivia, Clemens’s reformation even included, if only briefly, abstention from alcohol and, for a somewhat longer time, forswearing smoking. To make sure Olivia understood the enormity of this sacrifice, Clemens explained how content he felt while smoking in bed. He described himself in a letter in January 1869 remaining in bed till 1 P.M., “where he smoked thousands of cigars, & was excessively happy,” and in May, he alluded to his intention to read her latest letter to him “in bed, with the added delight of a cigar.” Indeed, he found it altogether difficult to avoid smoking when he was a house guest among nonsmokers. (He quite lacked the modern-day awareness that secondhand smoke is distasteful to some people.) Even in an age when smoking was common, Clemens’s immoderate smoking was the subject of comment. He once wrote, in self-defense, to his clergyman friend Joseph Twichell, “When they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon—they little knew how trivial & valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!”

Late in 1869, Clemens met William Dean Howells, whose review of The Innocents Abroad had just appeared, in the office of James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, where Clemens had gone to express his appreciation for the review. Howells was two years younger than Clemens but was already married, the father of two children, and author of two books based on his experiences as American consul in Venice. Then a mere subeditor of the Atlantic, Howells began a ten-year stint as editor in 1871. The two men soon became close friends; Howells was frequently able to be of assistance to his highly individualistic associate; he recognized Mark Twain’s genius early and was able to encourage him to become a major writer. Clemens fully recognized how valuable Howells was to him; he wrote Howells as early as March 1878, “I owe as much to your training as the rude country printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand & teaches him the right way to handle his art.” Howells provided assistance both before publication by his editing and after by reviewing many of his books, including Roughing It, The Gilded Age, A Tramp Abroad, and Joan of Arc. He also edited Tom Sawyer, and after his friend’s death in 1910, Howells wrote a series of pieces that appeared as “My Memories of Mark Twain,” later published in book form with his reviews and other pieces on the author as My Mark Twain (1910). Here he called his friend a profoundly truthful man, with “a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth.”⁴⁴ Howells’s deeply admiring account of his experiences with his dear friend is a classic appreciation that ought to be better known. A superb edition also exists of the voluminous and articulate correspondence of the two men.

At the end of his lecture tour, on February 2,1870, Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon were married in Elmira. Joseph Twichell and the Langdons’ minister, Thomas Beecher, officiated. As planned, the couple settled in Buffalo, to Clemens’s surprise not in a boardinghouse but in a large and handsome house of their own, with three servants, a stable, horse and carriage—a generous gift from Jervis Langdon.

Clemens now limited his smoking at home. He wrote to Twichell in December 1870:

Smoke? I always smoke from 3 to 5 on Sunday afternoons—& in New York the other day I smoked a week, day & night. But when Livy is well I smoke only those 2 hours on Sunday. I’m “boss” of the habit. Originally, I quit solely on Livy’s account (not that I believed there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral), & I stick to it on Livy’s account, & shall always continue to do so, without a pang.

He found a plausible excuse to return to regular smoking when he began to write his next book: after suffering from writer’s block, “I began to smoke, and I wrote my book.”⁴⁵ Thereafter till the end of his life he smoked a great deal. According to a letter he wrote in March 1885, he was smoking three hundred cigars a month. Since he especially enjoyed smoking in bed, Olivia was to experience quantities of secondhand smoke for years. The result was, in time, a weakened heart.⁴⁶

For a time after their marriage, the Clemenses read the Bible together and went to church. But soon Sam found difficult the notion that reading the Bible was for the sake of his soul. Moreover, after his experiences in the Holy Land, he found the Bible full of mythology. Judging his practice to be hypocritical, he gave up trying to be a Christian, and in time Olivia gave up her Christianity, too, although she felt obliged on occasion to attend church with her mother.⁴⁷

As to his position at the newspaper, soon Clemens was visiting the Express office only twice a week. An indication that he was not much interested in being a newspaperman is that he soon signed up to write a series of pieces to appear in the Galaxy, a monthly magazine to which he had already contributed two sketches. On March 11, he wrote to the editor, Francis P. Church, “If I can have entire ownership & disposal of what I write for the Galaxy, after it has appeared in the magazine, I will edit your humorous department for two thousand dollars ($2,000) a year.” But first he had to meet his obligations to the Express, and after his lecture tour he dutifully produced a spate of pieces for the newspaper—ten during February, March, and April, and thereafter an occasional piece, only four during the remainder of his tenure as associate editor.

For the Galaxy, Mark Twain had to supply material for ten pages of printed copy a month. Thinking that he might write about his experiences in the West, he wrote to his family in St. Louis to retrieve his files of what he had written for the Territorial Express. In a piece called “Introductory,” he told his readers what they might expect, noting that he would not limit himself to humor: “I would always prefer to have the privilege of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to me, without the reader’s feeling obliged to consider himself outraged.”⁴⁸ In all he produced eighty-seven pieces, many slight, several flimsy, and a number of gems. Certain of the pieces are reminiscences, of “My First Literary Venture” as a contributor to the Hannibal Journal; on “A Couple of Sad Experiences,” his publication of the petrified man and bloody massacre hoaxes; some memories of Hawaii; and some on his experiences in the San Francisco police courts. In addition, he capitalized on his California memories to write a series of seven “serious and sensible” imaginary letters from “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” in which—following the example of Oliver Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World” letters—he has his letter-writer, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, tell the woeful story of his American experiences. Ah Song Hi’s reports, in the face of great expectations, are uniformly painful. He who “wanted to dance, shout, sing, worship the generous Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” is beaten from his very arrival in San Francisco. He is imprisoned, attacked by his fellow prisoners (whose wickedness and crimes he catalogs), then found guilty of disorderly conduct after a farcical trial. Other pieces of social criticism appeared in the Galaxy. They include “About Smells,” which concerns a Brooklyn clergyman’s objections to the odors of common working people in his church, and a critique of a minister who would not officiate at the funeral of an actor. Most of the pieces, however, fulfill his assignment as a humorist, such as his account of how he edited an agricultural paper despite abysmal ignorance. He ludicrously discusses oyster beds under the heading “Landscape Gardening” and recommends the importation of the guano, “a fine bird.”

Perhaps the most amusing piece is a putative review of The Innocents Abroad, ascribed to the London Saturday Review (that journal had reviewed the book favorably with great condescension). Mark Twain fooled many readers into believing that his hoax had actually appeared in England. Mark Twain’s mock review finds much exaggeration in the Innocents and expresses astonishment at the author’s “stupefying simplicity and innocence,” “his colossal ignorance.” For example, “He did not know, until he got to Rome, that Michael Angelo was dead! And then, instead of crawling away and hiding his shameful ignorance somewhere, he proceeds to express a pious, grateful satisfaction that he is gone and out of his troubles!” The reviewer continues, “The book is absolutely dangerous, considering the magnitude of the misstatements, and the convincing confidence with which they are made…. The poor blunderer mouses among the sublime creations of the Old Masters, trying to acquire the elegant proficiency in art-knowledge, which he has a groping sort of comprehension is a proper thing for the travelled man to display.” The author of The Innocents Abroad proves to be the ideal victim of Mark Twain’s irony.

Some thirty-three of the Express and Galaxy pieces were preserved—mostly in revised form—in Sketches, New and Old, the selection from his short pieces that Mark Twain published in 1875. Except for the social criticism, the Galaxy and Express pieces represent no new development in the writer’s career but are rather a continuation of the sketch writing he had begun in the West. To his brother Orion he referred to it as “periodical dancing before the public.”

It was the success of the Innocents as well as the strain of producing sketches on schedule that would turn Mark Twain to other kinds of writing, although he continued to write a few sketches. He declared to a correspondent on March 3, 1871, that he was determined to write no more for periodicals but instead to write books. He made a similar protest in print, as an introduction to “My First Literary Venture.” Accordingly, most of the later short pieces, until the 1890s, are properly stories or essays, such as the damning attack on Commodore Vanderbilt he published in Packard’s Monthly in March 1869.⁴⁹ By the late 1890s, the writer looked back at his early work with distaste. “I find that I cannot stand things I wrote a quarter of a century ago. They seem to have two qualities, gush and vulgarity.” The pieces are decidedly uneven, but a few, such as “Some Learned Fables” and “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man,” are still amusing and deserve more attention than they have customarily received.

Strange as it may seem, Mark Twain’s writings after he went east had much wider publication in book form in England than in the United States; this was due partly to the activities of literary pirates, who gathered his pieces without authorization from the writer or his American publishers. Two thin volumes, Eye Openers and Screamers, collected Express, Galaxy, and other sketches in 1871. Besides other small volumes, a fat collection of sixty-six pieces was published by Routledge in 1872 as Mark Twain’s Sketches; this one was, however, authorized. In it a prefatory note from the author states, “This book contains all of my sketches which I feel willing to father.” Although he himself prepared this volume for publication, he used the versions of his work that had appeared in England in 1871 as the basis for the printer’s copy of a number of the pieces, despite the fact that these versions had been heavily edited by the unauthorized publisher, John Camden Hotten. Hotten himself drew attention to this strange practice of accepting a stranger’s unsought editing in a letter to the English journal Spectator published June 8, after the 1872 Sketches was published. He noted, for example, that he had found a “rather strongly-worded article entitled ‘Journalism in Tennessee’” likely to profit from the elimination of “certain forcible expressions,” such as “bumming his board” and “animated tank of mendacity, gin, and profanity”; and so he performed the pruning.⁵⁰ Now in an authorized edition the same changes had appeared.

Hotten later published a volume of 107 sketches, along with the Innocents, combined as The Choice Humorous Works of Mark Twain (1873). After Hotten died in June 1873, he was succeeded by the man who was to become Mark Twain’s authorized publisher, Andrew Chatto, whose firm became Chatto and Windus. Chatto obligingly gave the American writer the opportunity to revise his work, and he did so, deleting seventeen sketches and making revisions. In 1874, The Choice Humorous Works appeared, “Revised and Corrected by the Author.” None of these volumes appeared in the uniform edition the writer assembled toward the end of his career. Only Sketches, New and Old serves there to represent his early work.

Although Mark Twain was resolved to concentrate on writing books after 1871, just what he would undertake next was not clear to him for a time. In July 1866, he had recorded an idea in his notebook: “Conversation between the carpenters of Noah’s Ark, laughing at him for an old visionary.”⁵¹ In August 1869, he asked his sister to send him his “account of the Deluge (it is a diary kept by Shem),” which he described as being of “70 or 80 pages.” When he wrote to Elisha Bliss about it in January 1870, he called it a “Noah’s Ark” book. He supposed, with hope, that “maybe it will be several years before it is all written—but it will be a perfect lightning striker when it is done.” Although he returned to this work at the end of his life, only partial drafts survive.⁵² In 1939, Bernard DeVoto prepared for publication Mark Twain manuscripts he called “Papers of the Adam Family,” eventually published in 1962 in the collection Letters from the Earth. Rather more to the point is a letter written to Mrs. Fairbanks a little earlier. Here he explained that the success of the Innocents had so encouraged him that he intended “to write another book during the summer.”

The popularity of the Innocents was to have a great effect on Mark Twain’s career. In the preface to the second volume of an English edition of the work, he described his modest expectations. “I did not seriously expect anybody to buy the book when it was originally written—and that will account for a good deal of its chirping complacency and freedom from restraint: the idea that nobody is listening, is apt to seduce a body into airing his small thoughts with a rather juvenile frankness.”

In March 1870, following his marriage, Clemens was still thinking about a book. He had decided, he wrote the Langdons, that his activities at the Express would be limited to writing only “one or two sketches a month”; that chore and his work for the Galaxy occupied him “fully only six days every month.” He needed time, he explained, “to write a book in.” One of his Express pieces, published in April, was about the West, “The Facts in the Great Landslide Case,” and in May he wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks that since his publishers wanted another book, “I doubt if I could do better than rub up old Pacific memories & put them between covers along with some eloquent pictures.” For this purpose he expected to go west with Olivia. But he did not commit himself to a book until July 15, when he signed a contract with Bliss while he was in Elmira, New York, where Jervis Langdon, Olivia’s father, was fatally ill. Langdon had accepted Clemens and given him the vital reassurance that it was possible for a wealthy, respectable person to be principled and upright.⁵³

He contracted to complete the book in less than six months and immediately began preparation by writing to Orion about their journey to Nevada in 1861. “I propose to do up Nevada & Cal., beginning with the trip across the country in the stage.” This time he had no rough draft, similar to his Alta letters from Europe, to get him started. But he was excited and optimistic, since he was getting the biggest royalty “ever paid on a subscription book in this country,” 7.5 percent.

Like the Innocents, the book that Mark Twain was to write about the West belongs to a special class, addressed to a specific readership. The American Publishing Company sold its books not in stores but through agents, who sought subscribers in advance of actual publication by showing a prospectus and sample selections by door-to-door canvassing, The typical buyer lived in a small town and was without access to a bookstore. Such a reader wanted, or it was supposed by such publishers that he wanted, big books with many pictures. (The Innocents Abroad had 234 illustrations—many not freshly prepared for the book.) Purportedly he did not seek “literature” but information. The typical subscription book therefore was nonfiction, often a first-person narrative with some kind of current appeal. Appearance too was important: several styles of bindings, usually with illustrations on the cover, were offered. William Dean Howells had pointed to the importance of appropriate illustrations in his review of The Innocents Abroad, although he had later observed that “no book of quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books, and I think they went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.”⁵⁴ Most authors with literary pretensions had no use for such books. In the city, Howells knew, agents were “a nuisance and a bore,” “a proverb of the undesirable.”⁵⁵ But the success of the Innocents not surprisingly prompted Mark Twain to undertake another lengthy subscription book, even though by the time he had finished his first he had complained in June 1869 to Mrs. Fairbanks that he had “lost very nearly all my interest in it long ago.” He judged—as he wrote “Uncle Remus,” Joel Chandler Harris, in 1881—“When a book will sell by subscription, it will sell two or three times as many copies as it would in the trade; and the profit is bulkier because the retail price is greater.”

Mark Twain had come to understand that the appeal of a subscription book did not depend wholly on the author. He told his publisher, Bliss, that he would “write a book that will sell like fury provided you put pictures enough in it.” The important role that Bliss played is suggested by the fact that it was Bliss, according to A. B. Paine, who named the book Roughing It.⁵⁶ The completed book has three hundred illustrations.

The American Publishing Company, which was at this time releasing only two books a year, was distinctly a commercial operation. Although the writer was eventually disenchanted with it because he believed he had been cheated by its officers, he was to prepare most of his books with the memory of the success of the first one before him. As late as 1897, he was still producing sequels. At one point he intended to call the book about his round-the-world tour The Latest Innocent Abroad or The Surviving Innocent Abroad.

A major consideration for an effective subscription book was its size, which was stipulated in the contract for a new book. The author was to write “a 600-page 8 vo book (like the last) for my publishers,” he wrote his family in late July 1870. That would be 240,000 words. But this time the writing did not go as scheduled. Family crises intervened: the death of Olivia’s father on August 6; the illness of a house guest who eventually died in the master bedroom of the Clemenses’ Buffalo house at the end of September; the premature birth of a child, Langdon—always feeble, on November 7; Olivia’s dangerous illness (typhoid) in February 1871. The new father continued to write as best he could under the trying circumstances. But he also let himself become distracted with three other publication ideas. In early December 1870, he proposed that the publishers of the Galaxy put out a small work, Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, published in March 1871. (The author sought to circumvent the contract he had with the American Publishing Company by considering this forty-eight-page volume a “pamphlet.”) The author’s too transparent efforts to be funny resulted in a publication that detracted from Mark Twain’s reputation. (Fortunately, it attracted little attention.) Another December project was an ill-fated “diamond book,” discussed below. He also decided impulsively that his next book with the American Publishing Company should be a book of his sketches, which he wanted published before the account of his Western adventures. In early January he told Bliss, “Name the Sketch book ‘Mark Twain’s Sketches’ and go on canvassing like mad.” The book was to include “The Jumping Frog,” since Clemens now had obtained the rights to the book Webb had published. In addition, he sent Bliss some new sketches and then tried to return to his Western book.

In late January 1871, he wrote to Bliss that he now judged that the volume of sketches should be delayed until the Western book had been published. He would write “night and day” and send him “200 pages of MS. every week” in order to finish by April 15. In exchange, he wanted the book to be published on May 15, since his “popularity is booming now.” But he was unable to finish then because of the demands on him from Olivia, who was still very weak. According to what he wrote in 1882, another difficulty was caused by the fact, noted earlier, that he was abstaining from smoking. “I found myself most seriously obstructed. I was three weeks writing six chapters. Then I gave up the fight, resumed my three hundred cigars, burned the six chapters, and wrote the book in three months, without any bother or difficulty.”⁵⁷

After writing a good deal, he concluded in March 1871 that he had to undertake a major revision, he told Orion, in order to “alter the whole style of one of my characters & re-write him clear through to where I am now.” Probably that “character” was the “hero.” As published, the book provides a portrait of a very young and thoroughly innocent young man. His innocence and the adventures it leads to are central in the book. Or perhaps the author was simply offering an excuse for his slow progress.⁵⁸

Before he was finished writing, Clemens found that his trying experiences in Buffalo had soured him on the place, and he had already learned from the success of The Innocents Abroad that he did not need to work for a newspaper. He decided that he, his wife, and sickly son, Langdon, should leave Buffalo and that he should dissolve his connection with the Express. By March 3, he told J. H. Riley, he had come to “loathe Buffalo so bitterly (always hated it)” that he had advertised his house for sale. He intended to move to Hartford, where in time he expected, he told Riley, to “build a house … just like this one.” “I want to get clear away from all hamperings, all harassments,” he wrote Bliss. A move to Hartford would be made with the assistance of Orion, who had been living in Hartford since late 1870, as a member of Bliss’s staff.

In March, the Clemenses moved temporarily to Elmira, where they stayed with Mrs. Langdon. The writer worked productively and without harassments at Quarry Farm, two and a half miles away. In April, his old friend Joe Goodman, his editor when he was a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise, arrived for a two-month visit. Goodman’s admiration of the manuscript was encouraging, although Mark Twain already had an idea for another book, one that he and Goodman would write jointly. He wrote Orion that it “will wake up the nation.” He was more enthusiastic about this new book—which would never be written—than the one he was supposed to be finishing. Roughing It was completed by August, although the author himself had digressed from his task during June to prepare lectures he was planning to deliver in the fall, in order to make the money he would need to establish his family with a new home in Hartford. The sale of his interest in the Buffalo Express cost him $ 10,000, but he had $25,000 from the sale of the house his father-in-law had given him.

The last part of Roughing It was much the easiest to prepare, since fifteen of the last seventeen chapters were merely revisions of the Sandwich Island letters Mark Twain had written six years earlier. But even when he thought he was through, there was more editing and more revising. To make the book long enough to meet the terms of his contract, he added three long appendixes, one on Mormon history and others well larded with quotations from documents. This device was to prove useful in stretching later subscription books to an adequate length.

Although generally less admired, Roughing It is in actuality a distinctly better book than the Innocents. Whereas the earlier book was a revision of on-the-spot reports, the new book was based on memories artfully shaped—except for the Sandwich Island chapters, which were composed much as the Innocents had been. Autobiographical in outline, Roughing It tells the story of Clemens’s cross-country stagecoach journey, and his life in Nevada, California, and Hawaii, but it is controlled by important shaping concerns as the author looks back nearly ten years to an earlier self. A few years earlier, he had taken a quick look backward, when in November 1868 he had written to Olivia, “I have been through the world’s ‘mill’—I have traversed its ramifications from end to end—I have searched it, & probed it, & put it under the microscope & know it, through & through, & from back to back—its follies, its frauds, & its vanities—all by personal experience & not through dainty theories culled from nice moral books in luxurious parlors where temptation never comes.” Despite his candidacy for gentility, the author presents himself in Roughing It as a man of experience. He reminds the reader repeatedly in the early chapters that he has traveled to Europe and to the Holy Land; he suggests that those experiences, as well as the ones he is telling about, made him what he is now. As a result, the reader is encouraged to feel that he is hearing the voice of the authentic Mark Twain, who is providing his autobiography. Here the writer provides answers to some implied questions. How did there come to be this humorist, this skeptical, sometimes cynical character? Who is this frank, confidential, vulnerable, justice-seeking comic writer, whose graceful but firm prose seems to fit him like a glove? The writer’s Western experience provides explanations. Chapter 1 begins with the writer mocking his youthful self—the “before” to be contrasted with the present “after.” He makes the ex-journeyman printer and experienced ex-pilot of twenty-six sound ten years younger as he describes the jealousy of a younger brother contemplating the older.

[Brother] was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word “travel” had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us about it, and be a hero…. What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe.

This naive youth will go west and there through initiation lose his innocence. Roughing It is a retelling of an old familiar story, but in Mark Twain’s words it is a fresh and original one. As an exploration of the values that come into existence when the restraints of an ordered life are relaxed, the book is a celebration of freedom. The loss of that innocence, and later that freedom, is recalled with considerable nostalgia, at the same time that Mark Twain implies that the civilization of the East is marked by pretense and vanity.

All the romantic features of the West are here: wild Indians, barren deserts, the buffalo hunt, prospecting, the bucking bronco, the Pony Express rider, the desperado, the tall tale. Early in the book two incidents suggest the ways of the West. Chapter 5 describes the coyote: “not a pretty creature or respectable either,” especially to “a dog that has a good opinion of himself.” The coyote attracts his attention, leads the dog on, misleading him into thinking that the varmint can be caught, and the dog becomes “more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger.” At length this coyote “turns and smiles blandly upon him once more,” then runs off with a speed that makes the dog’s “head swim.” Once so taken in, once so humiliated, the dog is unlikely to be victimized again soon. Such lessons were ones that the newcomer had to learn, as in chapter 24, when the narrator is persuaded to buy “a Genuine Mexican Plug” that proves to be unridable. After several painful attempts to master the beast, he meets an “elderly-looking comforter,” who informs him, “Stranger, you’ve been taken in.” To emphasize the point he has been making, Mark Twain ends his chapter with this moral: “Now whoever has had the luck to ride a real Mexican plug will recognize the animal depicted in this chapter, and hardly consider him exaggerated—but the uninitiated will feel justified in regarding his portrait as a fancy sketch, perhaps.”

Many other stories have a similar point. When in chapter 32 Mark Twain and two companions are lost in a snowstorm, then lose their horses and decide that they cannot survive, each ceremoniously prepares for the end by giving up his dearest vice: the first his bottle of whiskey, the second his playing cards, the third his pipe, each in a spirit of sincere reformation. Then “oblivion comes.” But in the morning (in the next chapter), the three wake to discover that they are “not fifteen steps from … a stage station.” Their situation is “painfully ridiculous and humiliating,” and each soon ashamedly gathers up what he has thrown away and vows never to say more about reformation.

Others are taken in, too, in Mark Twain’s collection of somewhat imaginative recollections, such as one he had told before of how General Buncombe was humbugged by a practical joke played on him in the landslide case and failed for two months to recognize how he had been victimized. One of the earliest stories in Roughing It shows a victim coping with his situation. In chapter 7, the writer’s touring party experiences “disaster and disgrace” in a buffalo hunt. One of their number, Bemis, is thrown from his horse and chased up a tree by a wounded buffalo. He manages to avoid humiliation by resourcefully telling a fanciful tale, full of circumstance. He climbed “the only solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent,” only to find the buffalo climbing after him. So he lassoed him, fired his revolver at the beast, and “shinned down the tree and shot for home,” leaving the buffalo “dangling in the air, twenty feet from the ground.” Bemis’s fantastic tale restores him to comradeship with those who heard it.

Roughing It is dedicated to a friend of Clemens’s Western days, Calvin H. Higbie, “In Memory of the Curious Times When We Two WERE MILLIONAIRES FOR TEN DAYS.” The story of how such riches were obtained, though far from true, is central to Mark Twain’s account of a land where great wealth was won and lost overnight. Only a few pages are devoted to Mark Twain’s Enterprise journalism, with Clement T. Rice, the Unreliable, here being referred to as Boggs. There are memorable and hilarious stories of Scotty Briggs’s efforts to communicate with a minister who cannot understand his vernacular, of Ned Blakely (modeled on Captain Wakeman), of Jim Blaine’s grandfather’s ram and Dick Baker’s cat. For the subscription book buyer, there is abundant factual information about that very curious subject, Mormon polygamy; a beautiful description of Lake Tahoe, about which the author had pleasant memories; and a sympathetic analysis of the situation of the Chinese in California. Samuel Clemens’s adventures are a good part of the story, but Mark Twain never neglected the maxim “Don’t spoil a good story for the truth.” Readers who do not have access to an edition with the original illustrations miss a great deal of what both author and publisher intended. Although some of the illustrations had appeared in earlier books, most were drawn for this new one. The chief artist was True W. Williams, who had provided illustrations for The Innocents Abroad; his illustrations of Tom Sawyer would prove to be a complementary part of that book. Increasingly, the author was to grasp the importance of illustrations; in December 1872, he wrote to the artist Thomas Nast that he recognized the need for “good pictures. They’ve got to improve on ‘Roughing It.’”⁵⁹

In Roughing It, victimization and humiliation are constant themes, but the victim is seldom hurt for long, and the tone is good-natured, compassionate, seldom hostile or sadistic. Instead, the book emphasizes the solidarity and community enjoyed by those who have achieved status by being initiated into the fellowship of toughened Western skeptics. As in The Innocents Abroad, the narrator is frequently disillusioned, but now he responds with greater cheerfulness. The theme of initiation is lost in the Sandwich Island portion, even though the writer seems to have intended to use it. For those readers who appreciate the accomplishments of the first four-fifths of the book, these last chapters may be left unread, though there is a falling-off even earlier, after the protagonist forsakes the pursuit of wealth for the life of a newspaperman.

Clemens’s years in the West had not been financially rewarding. Only two-fifths of the way through the book, in chapter 28, the narrator recognizes that his hopes are never to be realized. “So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.” The writing of Roughing It brought home to its author, once and for all, the inescapable truth that the West had not rendered him the rewards he had expected and that he had better look elsewhere. He ended his account with what he called the moral of the story: “If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are ‘no account,’ go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not.” This notion of hard work rather than relocation as a formula for success may have been eagerly embraced as what Clemens feared he had now committed himself to.

When Clemens had first visited Hartford, he was a house guest at the home of John and Isabella Beecher Hooker, the latter a sister of several noted clergymen, including Henry Ward Beecher and Thomas K. Beecher, the Elmira minister who had married the Clemenses. Afterwards he had visited Hartford often to see his publisher. Although it has often been supposed that the Clemenses’ move to Hartford was made solely for Clemens’s convenience, other factors were important. Olivia enjoyed visiting with the Hookers’ daughter Alice. Indeed, Olivia was with Alice when Clemens first met her. Even before the Clemenses were married, Sam and “Livy” had hoped they could live in Hartford.⁶⁰

Thus when, in October 1871 after their summer at Quarry Farm, the Clemenses took up residence in the Hooker house, which they rented, they were moving into a house familiar to both of them. (It still stands today, though much modified.) The Hooker house was part of Nook Farm, a community developed on a tract of a hundred acres to the west of the city. The Clemenses were to become very much a part of it. Among the residents of Nook Farm were Susan and Charles Dudley Warner (the latter would soon become Mark Twain’s coauthor), Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the afore-mentioned Hookers, George and Lilly Warner, General Joseph Hawley (owner of the Hartford Courant, governor of Connecticut, U.S. senator), and the Rev. Nathaniel Burton. Harmony and Joseph Twichell lived not far away. William Dean Howells wrote of the enclave, “It seems to me quite an ideal life. They live very near each other, in a sort of suburban grove, and their neighbors … go in and out of each other’s houses without ringing.”⁶¹ The Hartford years were happy ones for the Clemenses, although Mark Twain seldom managed to write very much at his Hartford residence.

Just two weeks after moving to Hartford, he began an unusually extended lecture tour, nearly eighty appearances in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New England, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, West Virginia, and Maryland. His experiences were interesting enough, he wrote Olivia in January, to be the subject of a book. As his tour ended, his Western book was published in February 1872. Though not so successful as The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It sold very well: over 72,000 copies in the first two years. Reviews were favorable, too. One found his genius “characterized by the breadth, and ruggedness, and audacity of the West.”⁶² In an anonymous review, Howells called it “singularly entertaining,” but admitted that the writing was not always marked by “all the literary virtues.”⁶³ Clemens’s future neighbor and collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, opined in the Hartford Courant, “It is not mere accident that everybody likes to read this author’s stories and sketches; it is not mere accident that they are interesting reading. His style is singularly lucid, unambiguous and strong.” A review in the Boston Evening Transcript identified as high points of the book Dick Baker’s story of his cat, Jim Blaine’s account of his grandfather’s ram, and Scotty Briggs’s conversation with the minister. In England, Routledge published a “Copyright Edition” in 1872; it was entitled The Innocents at Home. It was reviewed in the Manchester Guardian, which objected to the use of slang and the author’s being contented “with dwelling on the outside of things and simply describing manners and customs.” The reviewer for the London Examiner focused on the author’s use of humor.⁶⁴ A third publication of the book was that by Tauchnitz of Leipzig, Germany. In an autobiographical sketch, the author wrote with some pleasure, “Baron Tauchnitz proposes to issue my books complete, on the Continent in English.”⁶⁵

The American Publishing Company sold 62,000 copies of Roughing It during the first four months of publication, more than the author had expected (though soon he learned that it was less successful than The Innocents Abroad). Moreover, the English sales of Roughing It were also profitable to the author, whereas the pirated publication of The Innocents Abroad had not been. With a second success on the heels of the first, Mark Twain was firmly positioned as a solidly productive writer who knew his craft and had found his market.