Chapter Three—
Coming to Anchor

Samuel Clemens went to Buffalo in August of 1869 resolved to do two things he knew little about: settle down and edit a daily newspaper. Having spent most of his life tossing and being tossed about, he intended now to drop anchor in the safe harbor to which Jervis Langdon had piloted him, assume a desk in the Express office at 14 East Swan Street, and apply himself with relentless diligence to whatever duties befell him there. Above all he would stay put—would become, as he later phrased it, a permanency in Buffalo.^[1]

He arrived in the city on 8 August 1869 bearing characteristic burdens of guilt and gratitude. That night he apologized in a letter to Olivia for an unnamed offense he blamed himself for committing the day before in Elmira ("I hurt you yesterday") and asked her to thank her father again on his behalf, "for my obligations to him almost overshadow my obligations to Charley, now." Clemens's obligations to Olivia's brother derived from Charles's role in introducing him to her. The prospective bridegroom intended to use his berth in Buffalo as an opportunity to justify the confidence others, particularly Olivia and her parents, had placed in him. He would work hard and wholeheartedly at newspapering. As he took his place at the Express , he bragged to Mary Fairbanks about the determination and stamina he brought to the job. "I am capable of slaving over an editorial desk without rest from noon till Midnight," he wrote, "& keep it up without losing a day for 3 years on a stretch, as I am abundantly able to prove" (14 August 1869). Mrs. Fairbanks would very likely have caught the intimation here that but for her husband's treachery in dealing with him, Clemens

would at that very time have been exhibiting this tireless dedication in Cleveland. A week later he confided in his sister, Pamela Moffett, "We are not in the Cleveland Herald. We are a hundred thousand times better off.... I have partners I have a strong liking & the highest respect for. I am well satisfied" (20–21 August 1869).

Clemens plunged into his duties at the Buffalo Express with the kind of frantic enthusiasm he customarily lavished on the beginnings of enterprises he regarded as important. "He 'worked like a horse,'" according to Albert Bigelow Paine, who was very likely guided in his assessment by Clemens's reminiscence. "His hours were not regular, but they were long. Often he was at his desk at eight in the morning, and remained there until ten or eleven at night."^[2] Clemens had good reasons for working hard, first among them that he believed he was settling into a permanent position that would provide the security upon which his impending marriage to Olivia depended. That is to say, he regarded his position at the Express as affording appropriate scope both for his ambition and for the prerogatives of Mark Twain. His commitment there was to be ongoing, perhaps even lifelong. When a correspondent inquired about his availability as a lecturer, he responded, "I mean to make this newspaper support me hereafter" (SLC to Henry M. Crane, 8 September 1869). Insofar as he indulged himself in imagining it, his future was to be spent contentedly in Buffalo with Olivia, and Mark Twain would become, like Toledo's humorist-lecturer Petroleum V. Nasby, a fixture of a daily metropolitan newspaper.^[3]

On Saturday, 14 August 1869, Clemens wrote Elisha Bliss, "I entered upon possession [of a one-third interest in the Express ] today & made the first payment ($15,000.)" He made his official debut as a columnist the following Saturday, a circumstance heralded both by his own paper and by the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser . The blurbs announced that his maiden effort would be entitled "Mark Twain's First Visit to Niagara Falls" and that "similar articles from the pen of the above well-known writer will appear each week hereafter."^[4] Even before that debut, however, while the ink was still drying on his Express contract, Clemens chose to involve himself anonymously in the newspaper's treatment of a controversy of considerable importance to his future father-in-law, a matter known in Buffalo as "the coal question."

While Jervis Langdon's first impulses in proposing Buffalo as a

home no doubt arose from his concern for the welfare and happiness of his daughter and prospective son-in-law, there is no gainsaying that his business interests stood to be well served by his placing a sympathetic editor at a major Buffalo newspaper. At the time, virtually all of Buffalo's coal was supplied by four companies which had united to form the Anthracite Coal Association; one of these companies was Langdon's. Believing that the association amounted to a monopoly and that the monopoly was driving prices artificially high, several Buffalo businessmen had created the cooperative Citizen's Mutual Coal Mining, Purchasing and Sale Company in early August 1869. "The coal question" took the form of a debate between backers of the Citizen's company, which was trying to secure coal on its own and offer it at lower cost, and those of the association, which denied fixing or inflating prices.^[5]

Controversy engendered by the coal question warmed the editorial pages of the Buffalo papers, and it was squarely into the middle of this controversy that Clemens inserted himself when he joined the Express . On 20 August 1869, the day before his official debut in the paper, he apparently wrote an editorial entitled "The 'Monopoly' Speaks," in which he argued that "up to the present we have heard only the people's side of the coal question, though there could be no doubt that the coal men had a side also." The editorial reproduced a letter from association agent and Langdon affiliate J. D. F. Slee, whom Clemens introduced as "a gentleman of unimpeachable character," defending the coal men and maintaining that the charges brought against them were "utterly groundless." The Express , which to this point had generally taken the side of the Citizen's company against the "monopolists," also reprinted, at Slee's urging, a pro-association article from the New York Evening Post . The Express 's turnabout was doubtless attributable to Clemens's arrival, a circumstance which was not lost on rival newspapermen. Shortly after he began work in Buffalo, he fumed to Olivia about "a sneaking little communication in one of the other papers wondering why the Express had become so docile & quiet about the great coal monopoly question" (3 September 1869). In the same letter, however, he made clear the role he had played in producing that docility by silencing some voices raised in opposition to the association:

Another of those anti-monopoly thieves sent in a long gratuitous advertisement to-night, about coal "for the people" at $5.50 a ton—& I have deposited it under the table. The effrontery of these people transcends everything I ever heard of. Do they suppose we print a paper for the fun of it? This man Denther sent in just such a thing the other day, & I left that out. The other papers insert both of them for nothing.

It would be easy to make too much of this situation, but the fact is that, having found his way to the Express with Jervis Langdon's help and feeling for that reason and many others manifestly beholden to him, Clemens wasted neither time nor opportunity in trying to further Langdon's financial interests in Buffalo. Langdon seems never to have applied the slightest pressure in this direction, but perhaps he comprehended, possibly quite benignly, how important his good opinion had become to his daughter's fiancé and how readily that fiancé was bowed by the weight of gratitude.

When Clemens formally and unanonymously addressed his Buffalo readership for the first time, though, it was not as a hardworking, debt-burdened, well-meaning supplicant for approval, but as Mark Twain, the bad-boy outlander who took the opportunity to apologize in advance for the outrages he would play upon the people of Buffalo. "Being a stranger," he wrote, in his August 21 "Salutatory," "it would be immodest and unbecoming in me to suddenly and violently assume the associate editorship of the BUFFALO EXPRESS without a single explanatory word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning." The dominating tone is of ironic and even accidental aggression: given the spaciousness of his wisdom and learning, the fledgling editorialist will mount an unprovoked assault upon his readers that will come largely without premeditation and wholly without malice. "I only wish to assure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal," he goes on, "that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time." Such an assurance makes it clear that he is very likely to hurt the paper undeliberately, through his heedlessness, incorrigibility, and brash innocence.

Until it dwindles into a general complaint against the custom of salutatories and valedictories, Mark Twain's greeting to Express

readers amounts to a funny and compact distillation of the persona many of them had already encountered on the lecture stage. He strikes a pose comprised of complacency, unambition, drollery, and underscrupulousness—and sets it off with the resonant declaration, "Such is my platform." As it was before a lecture audience, however, Twain's performance here is so laced with ironies and transparent hypocrisies that he tacitly invites the audience to join him in a game that mixes self-presentation with self-parody. He advises his constituents,

I am simply going to do my plain, unpretending duty, when I cannot get out of it; I shall work diligently and honestly and faithfully at all times and upon all occasions, when privation and want shall compel me to do it; in writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience; I shall witheringly rebuke all forms of crime and misconduct, except when committed by the party inhabiting my own vest.

The patent "clinchers" in this passage signal a reader that both he and the author know that humor is being committed here; it makes the two complicitous, and it keeps them so even when one of them, the author, provocatively denies that complicity by maintaining a perfect deadpan. The audience laughs with the author, and the author demonstrates his control—over the joke, over the audience, over himself—by mastering the impulse to laugh with them. This is a very different thing from laughing at a clown, a comedian, or even a "mere" humorist. It was an important part of the essential mechanism that allowed the Clemens/Twain twinning to persevere even at the outset of the Buffalo residency, when the would-be newlywed was trying earnestly to settle into a profession, a community, and a regimen of stable habits.

The first article signed by Mark Twain during his editorship at the Express , "A Day at Niagara," appeared concomitantly with his "Salutatory" on 21 August 1869 and did little to carry him beyond the bounds of bad-boy burlesque. The tourist-narrator is annoyed by the thicket of signs around Niagara Falls because, he says, "they always happened to prohibit exactly the very thing I was just wanting to do. I desired to roll on the grass: the sign prohibited it. I wished to climb a tree: the sign prohibited it. I longed to smoke: a sign forbade it." When he is forbidden even the "poor satisfaction"

of pitching a stone over the falls "to astonish and pulverize such parties as might be pickinicking below," his equanimity is strained beyond its limits: "There was no recourse, now, but to seek consolation in the flowing bowl. I drew my flask from my pocket, but it was all in vain. A sign confronted me which said: 'No drinking allowed on these premises.'" He nevertheless manages to justify taking a long pull at the flask by recalling the maxim, "All signs fail in a dry time." The anecdote's chief purpose is obviously to arrive at this play-on-words punchline. It is the kind of comic performance in which Clemens claimed to take little satisfaction—the creation of an elaborate, sometimes creaky structure for the sake of a single flimsy pun—but he brought himself to carry out several such performances during his tenure at the Express . Perhaps the more surprising feature of the piece, given his groom-to-be status at the time, was his willingness to hinge the joke on Mark Twain's reputation for drinking.

He continued to draw upon that reputation when he extended his Niagara Falls meditations the following Saturday, 28 August 1869, in an article entitled "English Festivities." There the joke depends on Mark Twain's claiming to be a teetotaler when he is invited by a troop of British fusileers to join in round after round of toasts, beginning with one in honor of the queen's birthday: "I said there was one insuperable drawback—I never drank anything strong upon any occasion whatever, and I did not see how I was going to do proper and ample justice to anybody's birthday with the thin and ungenerous beverages I was accustomed to." The fusileers defer to their guest's temperate habits, permitting him to join in their night-long toasts first with soda water, then lemonade, then ice water, then cider. As the night passes and the harddrinking fusileers glow with robust health, each of the narrator's thin and ungenerous beverages takes its toll on his constitution until at last he is moved to complain: "I am full of gas and my teeth are loose, and I am wrenched with cramps, and afflicted with scurvy, and toothache, measles, mumps and lockjaw, and the cider last night has given me the cholera." The entire episode turns out to be a dream, a circumstance that accounts for Mark Twain's claiming to be a nondrinker but that hardly diminishes a reader's satisfaction either with the stout-hearted fusileers or with the indignities that befall the abstemious narrator. In the ruddy environ-

ment of midnight camaraderie, a world Clemens knew well, temperance comes off as foolish, unmanly, and even unhealthy. Clemens himself was an abstainer at the time, but in "English Festivities" he saved Mark Twain from the taint of teetotaling by allowing him to wake from the dream and wink at his audience: "One avoids much dissipation by being asleep."

Clemens's debut appearances in the Express —whether anonymous, as in "The 'Monopoly' Speaks," or under his pseudonym, as in "Salutatory," "A Day at Niagara," and "English Festivities"—reflect the complex pressures he faced at the time, pressures that grew largely out of the tension between his need to establish credentials as a solid citizen and his unwillingness to abandon the anarchic or rebellious side of his character, particularly as it was manifest in Mark Twain. When Mary Fairbanks sought to check that rebelliousness by criticizing some of his early Express pieces for their impiety, he responded, "I will be more reverential, if you want me to, though I tell you it don't jibe with my principles. There is a fascination about meddling with forbidden things" (26 September 1869). Had his tenure at the Express gone uninterrupted, Clemens might have chosen to exploit rather than to resolve this tension by making use of his double identity as editor-celebrity, working with sober earnestness in his unsigned pieces and allowing Mark Twain to cavort among burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, and other amusements. That is essentially how he operated when as a reporter in Nevada he first appropriated the pseudonym, and that is how his Express editorship began, but circumstances conspired to intercept his plans to fashion a coherent, if double, life in Buffalo.

Clemens labored diligently during his initial stint at the Express , as if to underscore his commitment to settling down. On 21 August 1869, after little more than a week on the job, he reported to Olivia that he had asked lecture agent James Redpath to excuse him from performing during the coming season. "I would rather scribble, now," he told her, "while I take a genuine interest in it." Should that interest flag, he could look to his co-editor, Josephus N. Larned, as a model of steady self-discipline. "That fellow works straight along all day, day in & day out, like an honest old treadmill horse," he wrote Olivia. "I tell him I wish I had his industry & he had my sense" (8–9 September 1869). The Buffalo

press corps welcomed Clemens with comradely warmth, and on 9 October the Express ran several columns of "Press Greetings" to its new editor from papers across the country. Nasby's Toledo Blade declared Mark Twain "the greatest humorous writer America has ever produced" and concluded, "The Express has always been a good paper—it will henceforth be better." The Leavenworth Conservative agreed that "that paper and the press in general will be greatly benefited by so genial, keen and vigorous a writer—at present the first of American humorists." "His paper is the liveliest that has ever been seen in Western New York," chimed the Meriden Reporter . "That's what one smart man can do."

By the time these greetings appeared, however, Clemens's plans had already changed in such a way as to jeopardize his fledgling dedication to the Express . James Redpath was unable or perhaps unwilling to free him from several lecture commitments which had already been made for the forthcoming season. Clemens consequently authorized Redpath to schedule him for a full season's calendar of performances, maintaining, at least with Olivia, that "it isn't worth the bother of getting well familiarized with a lecture & then deliver it only half a dozen times.... When I once start in lecturing I might as well consent to be banged about from town to town while the lecture season lasts, for it would take that shape anyhow." He reasoned that he "ought to have some money to commence married life with" and that lecturing was a ready and proven source of income for him. All of that having been argued, a serious ethical and professional problem lingered. "The distress of it," Clemens wrote Olivia, "is that the paper will suffer by my absence, & at the very time that it ought to keep up its best gait & not lose the start we have just given it & have the long, hard pull of giving it a new start after a while. I feel sure that the money I make lecturing, the paper will lose while I am gone—but you see how I am situated" (3 September 1869).

When Clemens wrote Mary Fairbanks three weeks later, he presented the matter quite differently: "I'm not settled yet," he said. "My partners want me to lecture some this winter, though, & it seemed necessary anyhow, since I could not get all my engagements canceled" (27 September 1869). According to this version of the story, Clemens's Express partners, the very people who should have been looking out most jealously for the paper's wel-

fare, were the active agents urging him back out on the road. Just what gave rise to this rendition is a matter open to speculation. It is possible that when they learned of Clemens's "opportunity" to return to lecturing his partners united in encouraging him to do so, conjecturally in the belief that his platform performances would enhance his reputation, something that would in turn benefit the newspaper he edited. It might even be that after only a few weeks' association they welcomed the prospect of his leaving town. But it seems more likely that when he raised the matter of his lecture obligations with them his partners sought to ease his tender conscience by assuring him that the paper could survive his absence. That being the case, Clemens's choosing to represent the other Express owners—to moral censor Mother Fairbanks, anyway, and perhaps to the Langdons—as "wanting" him to lecture amounts to a small manipulation of the facts whose likely purpose was to protect him from charges of dereliction or lingering wanderlust. On 11 September 1869, just three weeks after his "Salutatory," the Express ran the following announcement, headed "Personal" and signed by Mark Twain: "This is to inform lyceums that, after recently withdrawing from the lecture field for next Winter, I have entered it again ... because I was not able to cancel all my appointments, it being too late, now, to find lecturers to fill them."

Whatever Mother Fairbanks or the Langdons may have thought of Clemens's intention to leave Buffalo and the Express for a three-point lecture tour, critics have typically regarded his taking to the platform as evidence of his frustration with the city and with his new vocation.^[6] It is sometimes adduced quite casually as a demonstration of Mark Twain's mythic untameability. The truth is that Clemens did grow exquisitely weary of Buffalo and of his circumstances there, but it seems very unlikely that even he could have managed to do so by the time he decided to lecture during the 1869–70 season. He moved to the city on 8 August 1869; his 3 September letter to Olivia ("Redpath says he can't get me free ...") shows that by that time—less than a month after arriving—he had already committed himself to lecturing. Nothing in the extant correspondence indicates that he had begun to sour on Buffalo or the Express during that month. Had Redpath been able or willing to release him from his obligations to lecture, there is good reason to believe that Clemens would have spent the fall and winter of 1869

as he had spent the late summer, working dutifully on the paper through the week and commuting to the Langdon home in Elmira almost every weekend.

Clearly, Clemens's dominant feelings at the time had only indirectly to do with Buffalo or with his new vocation. His heart and most of his attention were fixed on Olivia, a predicament he lightly acknowledged in a note to New York Tribune editor Whitelaw Reid. "When you happen to be at Buffalo or Elmira," he wrote Reid, "you must come & see me—half of me is at Mr. Langdon's in Elmira, you know" (7 September 1869). Whatever restiveness and impatience he felt had less to do with his situation in Buffalo than with Buffalo's distance from Elmira. Becoming a lecturer once again was hardly a cure for that frustration, since his itinerary would make Olivia less accessible to him than she was while he was fixed in Buffalo, but he did take leave of his newspaper duties a month before the lecture tour was to begin—in order, he said, to ready himself for the tour—and he spent that month, October 1869, as a guest of the Langdons. When he departed for Elmira in early October he had spent all of six weeks as an Express editor. Just before leaving Buffalo, he wrote Elisha Bliss, "I like newspapering very well, as far as I have got—but I adjourn, a week hence, to commence preparing my lecture, & shall not be here again till the middle of February" (27 September 1869). His short initial stint in Buffalo would hardly have given him much of a chance to draw any important conclusions about newspapering even if he hadn't been distracted all the while by the pleasures and pinings of courtship.

Although he went to Buffalo determined to take his new vocation seriously, Clemens produced little memorable copy during his first six-weeks' residence there. After the "Salutatory" of 21 August 1869, a beginning which promised well enough, his Express writing was often typified by a kind of forced, uninspired humor that might reflect either his preoccupation with Olivia at the time or his uncertain ability to find an appropriate voice for Mark Twain, given his new audience and station. The most sustained pieces he produced during the period, the signed Saturday articles, were uneven attempts to be funny sometimes characterized by their comparative witlessness and immaturity. At their worst, Clemens's Saturday efforts fall gracelessly, resoundingly flat.

Dixon Wecter saw fit to label "The Last Words of Great Men," which appeared 11 September 1869, "a sophomoric and flippant travesty upon deathbed speeches," and "The Latest Novelty" (2 October 1869), which directs a similar adolescent glibness at the fad of taking "Mental Photographs," is just as much a failure even though its subject matter is light and topical.^[7]

The problem with "The Latest Novelty" is not Clemens's irreverence, as Wecter's judgment about "Last Words" might be mistakenly generalized to imply, but the dimensionlessness of his pose as an overaged adolescent ignoramus—a kind of no-frills version of the Innocents Abroad narrator. In answering the questions which constitute Mental Photography, Mark Twain comes across as indolent (Favorite hour in the day? "The leisure hour"), unsavory (Favorite tree? "Any that bears forbidden fruit." Occupation? "... lying." What do you most dread? "Exposure"), uncultured (Favorite painters? "Sign-painters." Musicians? "Harper & Bros." Character in history? "Jack, the Giant Killer"), itinerant (If not yourself, who would you rather be? "The Wandering Jew, with a nice annuity"), mercenary (Favorite perfume? "Cent. per cent." Book to take up for an hour? "Vanderbilt's pocket-book"), and not altogether respectful of women (Favorite object in nature? "The dumb belle"). In other places, including The Innocents Abroad , Clemens was able to make good, sometimes hilarious, use of most of these shortcomings and opacities, but in the Express they typically remained unleavened and therefore unfunny.

Many of Clemens's early Express pieces reflect his confusion about, or perhaps his inattention to, the problem of reconstituting Mark Twain in such a way as to make him a serviceable feature of a daily newspaper. Taken together, they offer an array of postures and attitudes but no unified personality and no obvious agenda apart from occasional attempts to chronicle and satirize "the Byron scandal."^[8] For all their ostensible discontinuity, however, quite a few of these first efforts do concern themselves in one way or another with a matter in which Clemens found himself taking sharp and sudden interest: a criticism of the working press. His comments on the Byron matter, for instance, whether direct or oblique, focus on the public's appetite for gossip and the newspapers' willingness to pander to it. More generally, he pillories the press for its vulgarity, its bias, and especially its sensationalism.

In the third of his Saturday features, "Journalism in Tennessee" (4 September 1869), Mark Twain tells the story of his arrival as a new editor not at the Buffalo Express but at the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop . His first assignment is to skim the exchanges and write up the "Spirit of the Tennessee Press," a job that he dispatches in five paragraphs of humdrum and rather genteel prose. Of a competing newspaperman, for instance, he writes, "We are pained to learn that Col. Bascom, chief editor of the Dying Shriek for Liberty , fell in the street a few evenings since and broke his leg. He has lately been suffering with debility, caused by overwork and anxiety on account of sickness in his family." When he hands his work over to his own chief editor for improvement, the chief scowls his disapproval, shouts, "Thunder and lightning!" and slashes away at the manuscript contemptuously. "I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously," says the bewildered newcomer, "or plough through another man's verbs and adjectives so relentlessly." The result of the chief's ploughing is a bona-fide instance of Tennessee journalism: "That degraded ruffian, Bascom, of the Dying Shriek for Liberty , fell down and broke his leg yesterday—pity it wasn't his neck. He says it was 'debility caused by overwork and anxiety!' It was debility caused by trying to lug six gallons of forty-rod whisky around town when his hide is only gauged for four, and anxiety about where he was going to bum another six." While he claims to admire "that sort of energy of expression," the narrator quickly discovers that it "has its inconveniences," the most pressing of which is having to deal with the outraged targets of the libel it routinely practices. His first day on the job begins with someone taking a potshot into the editorial room; then a hand grenade demolishes the stove; next a brick shatters the window. The smoke and glass have hardly settled when a Colonel Blatherskite Tecumseh appears to challenge the chief to a duel and is obliged. As the Colonel totters away toward the undertaker's, the chief excuses himself to prepare for dinner guests and instructs the narrator on tending to business in his absence: "Jones will be here at 3. Cowhide him. Gillespie will call earlier, perhaps—throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be along about 4—kill him. That is all for to-day, I believe."

Backwater Tennessee, where newspapers have names like the Moral Volcano , the Semi-Weekly Earthquake , the Thunderbolt and

Battle-Cry of Freedom , and the Morning Howl , turns out to be a place where the excesses of nineteenth-century journalism are practiced with savage enthusiasm and met with savage consequences. "Mush-and-milk journalism," the chief tells the narrator, "gives me the fan-tods." When the narrator quits after his first day—"for my health," he says—he acts, comically, on a principle that Clemens held in earnest: "Tennessee journalism is too stirring for me."

Although he took pains to distance the narrator's circumstances in back-country Tennessee from his own in metropolitan Buffalo, Clemens felt that the Express and its competitors were by no means innocent, in their somewhat subtler way, of the kinds of abuses that were the order of the day at the War-Whoop and the Moral Volcano . In fact, the impulse to satirize newspaper malpractice in "Journalism in Tennessee" may well have grown out of his early experience in Buffalo. Before he had been even a week on the job at the Express he wrote Olivia of steps he was taking to curb practices there that would have been encouraged at the Morning Howl . "I am simply working late at night in these first days," he told her, "until I get the reporters accustomed & habituated to doing things my way.... I simply want to educate them to modify the adjectives, curtail their philosophical reflections & leave out the slang." The newspaper would also be made to look less stirring:

I have annihilated all the glaring thunder-&-lightning headings over the telegraphic news & made that department look quiet & respectable. Once in two months, hereafter, when anything astounding does happen, a grand display of headings will attract immediate attention to it—but where one uses them every day , they soon cease to have any force. We are not astonished to hear a drunken rowdy swear, because he does it on great & trivial occasions alike—but when we hear a staid clergyman rip out an oath, we know it means something. (19 August 1869)

It is a telling analogy. In his capacity as editor Clemens promoted the staid clergyman as a kind of personification of journalistic restraint and civility even while, as Mark Twain, he inclined toward the company of the drunken rowdy. That is only to say that Clemens was able to internalize the tension upon which his best humor depended. Mark Twain needed a context of staid sobriety against or within which to function effectively; if his newspaper behaved no better than the War-Whoop , where was he to find that sense of decorum he needed for the sake of juxtaposition? And if his readers

were bludgeoned by screaming headlines and overemphatic writing, how could he expect them to be alert to the subtle as well as the broad strokes of his humor?

So Clemens had a vested, unhypocritical interest in the civility of the press, not just as the would-be-genteel suitor of Olivia Langdon but as a humorist who played during some of his best moments against the boundaries of civility. Two weeks after the appearance of "Journalism in Tennessee," on 18 September 1869, he again devoted a Saturday feature to indicting fellow newspapermen, this time focusing on their eagerness to capitalize on things tawdry, venal, or scandalous. The piece is entitled "The 'Wild Man' Interviewed," and in it the narrator—Mark Twain, according to the byline—searches out a Yeti-like creature "represented as being hairy, long-armed, and of great strength and stature; ugly and cumbrous." The two meet and talk, the Wild Man revealing himself to be a figure as old as human history, his early augusthess and serenity now fallen on hard times. "I have helped to celebrate the triumphs of genius," he tells his interviewer. "Once I was the honored servitor of the noble and the illustrious ..., but in these degenerate days I am become the slave of quack doctors and newspapers." When the interviewer asks his subject his name, the Wild Man responds, "SENSATION!" and cries that he has just been summoned "TO DIG UP THE BYRON FAMILY!"

Clemens inveighed a bit more genially against the press's weakness for gossip the following Saturday in treating the "Private Habits" of prominent preacher Henry Ward Beecher, the gimmick in this case being to cite instances of very ordinary behavior on Beecher's part as if they revealed something shocking or lurid or iconoclastic about him. "The great preacher never sleeps with his clothes on," we are told. "Mr. Beecher never wears his hat at dinner.... He always goes to bed promptly between nine and three o'clock, and ... is just as particular about getting up, which he does the next day, generally." The reader comes to understand the gimmick—that a lot is being made of a little, sometimes of nothing—and in that understanding he or she is made to confront in an exaggerated form the essence of gossip itself. Here as in other September Saturday features the new Express editor was wasting no time in lodging a complaint against the press and its patrons. Gently in "Private Habits" and more aggressively in "Wild Man" and "Journalism in Tennessee," he held up to ridicule the press's

willingness to exploit sensationalism and, at least tacitly, the public's apparently bottomless capacity for more. Something of dignity was wanting on both sides of this complicity, but Clemens held journalists of the day particularly culpable. His Wild Man, in a poignant moment, broods that he has only recently been dragged down from his former eminence "and all to gratify the whim of a bedlam of crazy newspaper scribblers." Finding himself for the first time in charge of a battery of those scribblers as well as one of them, Clemens began his Express tenure with an unsystematic but fairly consistent criticism of his new profession's sins and excesses. Taken in concert these pieces offer, as his "Salutatory" did not, something of the credo or ethic the new editor brought with him, together, perhaps rather surprisingly, with the notoriety and appeal of Mark Twain.

Clemens's early work at the Express is that of a man scrambling and often straining to find his creative and professional identity. The writer of these pieces is sometimes the clever self-parodist, sometimes the Wild Humorist, sometimes the ironic critic, sometimes the leering adolescent, and sometimes the hapless innocent—as, for instance, when he is flung over Niagara Falls ("A Day at Niagara") or inadvertently shot full of holes during another man's duel ("Journalism in Tennessee"). The stance or status of the persona can fluctuate befuddlingly. By the end of "A Day at Niagara," for example, "Mark Twain" is a kind of schlemiel, the cartoon victim of a tribe of Irish "Indians" who attack him ("They tore all the clothes off me, they broke my arms and legs, they gave me a thump that dented the top of my head till it would hold coffee like a saucer") and hurl him to perdition. At the beginning of the following week's "English Festivities," however, he is a worldly misanthrope who regards tourists at the falls with the same Olympian scorn that would become a signature of Clemens's meditations three and four decades later:

Any day ... you may see stately pictures of papa, and mamma, and Johnny, and Bub, and Sis, or a couple of country cousins, all smiling hideously, and ... all looming up in their grand and awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of that majestic presence whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds—who was monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this hack-full of small reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world's unnoted myriads, and

will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood-relations the other worms and been mingled with the unremembering dust.

A Saturday article like that containing "English Festivities," one that begins with a brooding invective directed at the "marvelous insignificance" of the human reptile and ends in broad physical comedy involving drinking bouts with fusileers, compactly demonstrates the jumble of moods and methods that characterized Clemens's initial output as a Buffalo editorialist. Perhaps more than anything else, these uneven performances suggest how unsettled he remained during his first try at settling down. He was, after all, barely installed in Buffalo before he determined to leave it for the lecture circuit, so in effect he came to conduct a kind of holding action there. Real settling would come later, after the wedding, with Olivia to serve as guide and tether. In the meantime his writing understandably mirrored his uncertainty about his present circumstances, his preoccupation with the future, and an eagerness to suspend critical judgment of his work.

However willing Clemens may have been to overlook weaknesses in his newspaper writing, Mother Fairbanks, to whom he had directed an Express subscription, was not. Taking in earnest her charge to caution him on matters of taste and literary decorum, she raised questions about the Saturday features, probably because of the unflattering light some of them shed on Mark Twain. While she could be merely censorious or conventional in her criticism, Mary Fairbanks often served Clemens valuably by prodding him to allow his audience the chance to appreciate the seriousness and complexity of his character in his work. When he drifted toward the simpleminded buffoonery of the literary comedian, as he did in some Express pieces, she was often there to check him. "I don't wonder you are a trifle uneasy about the Saturday articles," he wrote her toward the end of his initial stay in Buffalo, "for I am. You see, I am worried about getting ready to lecture, & so I fidget & fume & sweat, & I can't write serenely. Therefore I don't write Saturday articles that are satisfactory to me" (27 September 1869).

Like his Saturday articles, his initial stint in Buffalo proved less than satisfactory. It had not been a failure, exactly, but neither had it measured up to the hopes he had held for it when he arrived in the city in early August. His expectations, typically, had been spa-

cious. He was to be a model of industry and diligence at the Express as well as the newspaper's chief celebrity and drawing card. Self-inflicted responsibilities of this kind inevitably persecuted him, but the demands in this case were particularly maddening because they pitted the editor's work ethic, personified in Clemens's colleague J. N. Larned, against the humorist's pose of lazy indifference. The consequence of these conflicting pressures seems to have been a characteristic mix of fire and ice in Clemens's office demeanor. "He was a man of wonderful charm," Larned recalled four decades later. "His disposition was to be genial and companionable; but the geniality was easily frosted, and he could bristle with repulsions as readily as anybody I have ever known."^[9] Earl D. Berry, another Express writer at the time, had a similar recollection of his cooler side. "Samuel L. Clemens was not a rollicking soul," he claimed, "not a verbal joke-maker. He was chary of conversation even with personal acquaintances and positively repellent to strangers."^[10]

The delightful situation Clemens had spoken of finding upon his arrival at the Express proved, as his early days there passed, to be subject to its share of strain and frustration. Buffalo turned out to be not quite the promised land, at least not yet. He could hardly find real satisfaction there, a genuine sense of ease and belonging, while, as he put it, half of him remained in Elmira. His circumstances provided him with another instance of doubleness in his life, in this case of trying emotionally and otherwise to be in two places at once. But the real harbor he had found in Olivia's "great heart" proved far more snug and attractive than the Buffalo breakwater he hoped would eventually provide the two of them an anchorage, and he came naturally to associate the Langdon family home in Elmira rather than his rooming-house on Swan Street with shelter and a sense of well-being. This dividedness or preoccupation on Clemens's part contributed to his uneven presentation of Mark Twain to the Buffalo reading public, but it was not wholly or even chiefly responsible for his deeper confusion about reconciling himself and his persona to the grind of a daily job. The 1869–70 lecture tour forestalled the necessity of that reconciliation and offered a month's vacation at the Langdon mansion in the bargain. He would attend to settling and editing in due time. Now, again, the road beckoned.