1. Quotations from Clemens's letters bearing dates before 1867 are drawn from Mark Twain's Letters , Volume 1: 1853-1866 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988). Those from letters dated 1867-68 are drawn from Mark Twain's Letters , Volume 2: 1867-1868 , ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Richard Bucci (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1990). Those from letters dated 1869 and later are drawn from printer's copy of later volumes in the series, prepared by the Mark Twain Project in the Bancroft Library for publication by the University of California Press. Dates of letters cited appear in the text. All previously unpublished material by Mark Twain is © 1991 by Edward J. Willi and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company as trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation, which reserves all reproduction or dramatization rights in every medium. Previously published letters by Mark Twain quoted from Collected Letters have been correctly established from the authoritative documents for the first time and are © 1991 by the Regents of the University of California. All quotations from Mark Twain are published here with the permission of the University of California Press and Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project.

1. An early version of this chapter appeared as "How Mark Twain Survived Sam Clemens' Reformation," in American Literature 55 (October continue

      1983): 299-315, and was reprinted in On Mark Twain: The Best from American Literature , ed. Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 259-75.

2. Dixon Wecter makes a similar observation about Clemens's susceptibility to Mary Fairbanks's ministrations and generalizes that "he enjoyed a touch of feminine domination all his life—believing ... that woman with her finer sensibilities was the true arbiter of taste, manners, and morals." Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1949), p. xxiii.

3. A year after their first meeting, Clemens explained to Olivia how he had resisted falling immediately in love with her: "I did have such a struggle, the first day I saw you at the St Nicholas [Hotel], to keep from loving you with all my heart! But you seemed to my bewildered vision, a visiting Spirit from the upper air—a something to worship , reverently & at a distance—& not a creature of common human clay, to be profaned by the love of such as I" (6 January 1869).

4. See Leon T. Dickinson, "Mark Twain's Revisions in Writing The Innocents Abroad ," American Literature 19 (1947): 139-57. For a later consideration of these changes see Robert H. Hirst, "The Making of The Innocents Abroad : 1867-1872," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1975, pp. 112-67. Robert Regan has shown that Clemens's revisions did nothing to mitigate his indictment of the more sanctimonious of his fellow Quaker City passengers, the so-called pilgrims. In fact, Regan observes, "In the process of revising and expanding his travel letters to produce The Innocents Abroad , Mark Twain roughly doubled the number of attacks on the pilgrims and trebled their aggregate length." ''The Reprobate Elect in The Innocents Abroad ," American Literature 54 (May 1982): 257.

5. The letters quoted here are from Clemens to Charles Henry Webb (26 November 1870) and to Thomas Bailey Aldrich (27 January 1871), respectively. Writing of Harte's editorial suggestions in the letter to Webb, Clemens said, "I followed orders strictly." Hirst maintains that in doing so Clemens cut more than one thousand pages from the manuscript. For his account of Harte's role in the book's revision, see "The Making of The Innocents Abroad ," pp. 156-66.

6. Holograph letter in MTP.

7. Max Eastman defends the Langdons and their Elmira community from such charges in "Mark Twain's Elmira," Harper's Monthly Magazine 176 (1938): 629. Henry Nash Smith makes a related, more general, comment about the roots of Clemens's impulse to reform in Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 3. break

8. A few months later Olivia wrote Mary Fairbanks that she "felt proud and humble" to receive an encouraging letter from her, "proud that you should feel that I might help Mr. Clemens—Humble when I remembered how much I must strive to do, as a Christian woman, in order to accomplish what you believe me capable of accomplishing." Letter dated 15 January 1869; holograph in MTM.

9. Clipping in MTP.

10. Quoted in Smith and Bucci, ed., Mark Twain's Letters , Volume 2, p. 286n.

11. Cleveland Herald , 18 November 1868, p. 8; clipping in MTP.

12. "Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins," Packard's Monthly , n.s. 1 (1869): 249.

13. This claim is substantiated by a letter from Mrs. Langdon to Mrs. Fairbanks dated 25 November 1869. There Mrs. Langdon wrote, "It is just a twelve-month since Mr Clemens first talked with me of his love for Livia, now he seems so incorporated into our whole being that I seem hardly to remember when it was not so.... We are all increasingly attached to Mr. Clemens, every time he leaves us loving him better than when he came" (quoted in Wecter, Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks , p. 112n).

14. Letter dated 13 November 1869; holograph in MTP.

1. See, e.g., Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), pp. 113-14.

2. Alta California , 3 March 1868; reprinted in "'American Travel Letters Series Two,' Ninth in Series in 'Alta California,'" Twainian 7 (September-October 1948): 3-4.

3. Clemens claimed in a letter to Olivia that from the beginning of their slight acquaintance he instinctively regarded Bowles as "a born & bred cur ," only to have that impression borne out when he learned later from Twichell "that last June both Hawley & Warner were full of the idea of having me on the Courant, but ran to consult Bowles ..., & he advised them not to do it" (24 November 1869).

4. Holograph letter in MTP.

5. Perhaps to protect her feelings and to mask his own, Clemens dwelt in his letter to Mary Fairbanks not on her husband's financial manipulations but on his stipulation that Clemens join the Herald as its political editor. "The more I thought of trying to transform myself into a political editor," he said, "the more incongruous & the more hazardous the thing looked. I always did hate politics, & the prospect of becoming its servant at last ... was anything but attractive. It just offered another apprentice- soft

      ship—another one, to be tacked on to the tail end of a foolish life made up of apprenticeships" (14 August 1869).

6. Albert Bigelow Paine sketches the terms of that transaction: "The Buffalo Express was at this time in the hands of three men—Col. George F. Selkirk, J. N. Larned, and Thomas A. Kennett. Colonel Selkirk was business manager, Larned was political editor. With the purchase of Kennett's share Clemens became a sort of general and contributing editor, with a more or less 'roving commission'—his hours and duties not very clearly defined." Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1912), 1:386-87.

7. Nor was this attitude entirely one-sided. On 1 December 1868 Olivia's mother wrote to Mary Fairbanks of the "utter surprise & almost astonishment with which Mr Langdon & myself listened to Mr Clemens declaration" of love, confessing that "at first our parental hearts said no.—to the bare thought of such a stranger, mining in our hearts for the possession of one of the few jewels we have." Holograph letter in University of Virginia Library; photocopy in MTP.

8. Buffalo Express , 16 August 1869; clipping in MTP.

1. Since this chapter begins a discussion of Clemens's work at the Buffalo Express , it might be well to acknowledge here the one book-length attempt to treat that work, Henry Duskis's Forgotten Writings of Mark Twain (New York: Philosophical Library, 1963). In his ambition to gather all of "Mark Twain's" Express articles, Duskis mistakenly attributes to Clemens a great deal of writing that Clemens clearly had no hand in producing, with the result that Duskis's conclusions about both the man and the material are often seriously flawed. Toward the end of the book, Duskis says, "Let the reader decide for himself—or herself—whether the writings herein contained are the works of Mark [Twain]" (p. 351). A number of knowledgeable readers have since shown good reason for deciding that many of them are not.

2. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1912), 1:398. Justin Kaplan echoes Paine's assessment, observing that Clemens "was at the start, ambitious for his paper, energetic, willing to work late hours." Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), p. 109.

3. Paine remarks of Clemens at about this time, "It is curious to reflect that Mark Twain still did not regard himself as a literary man. He had no literary plans for the future; he scarcely looked forward to the publication of another book.... He still regarded himself merely as a lecturer and journalist, temporarily popular, but with no warrant to a permanent seat continue

      in the world's literary congress. He thought his success something of an accident. The fact that he was prepared to settle down as an editorial contributor to a newspaper in what was then only a big village is the best evidence of a modest estimate of his talents." Mark Twain: A Biography , 1:385, 398.

4. Buffalo Commercial Advertiser , 19 August 1869; Buffalo Express , 20 August 1869. On 16 August 1869 the Commercial Advertiser had politely welcomed "the widely-known 'Mark Twain' ... to the editorial circle in Buffalo," describing him as "a gentleman of decided ability and of long experience in the newspaper business." These excerpts from the Commercial Advertiser and Express , and all future excerpts from the Express , are from clippings in the Mark Twain Papers.

5. I am grateful to editors at the Mark Twain Project for making this information available to me, chiefly in the form of a note to a letter from SLC to OL dated 19 August 1869. See also Martin B. Fried, "Mark Twain in Buffalo," Niagara Frontier 5 (1958): 92.

6. Consider, e.g., Dixon Wecter: "Never patient under routine, Clemens seems early to have grown bored with his editorial duties in Buffalo." The Love Letters of Mark Twain (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 112.

7. Wecter, p. 106.

8. Harriet Beecher Stowe had brought the matter of Byron's incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta to national attention in this country in an Atlantic Monthly article published in the summer of 1869. Clemens treated the matter, sometimes obliquely, in a number of early Express pieces, among them "More Byron Scandal" (7 September 1869), "The Last Words of Great Men" (11 September 1869), and "The 'Wild Man' Interviewed" (18 September 1869). His account of the "Private Habits" of Henry Ward Beecher (25 September 1869), mentioned later, is at least indirectly related to the controversy. Henry Ward Beecher was the brother not only of Harriet Beecher Stowe but also of Thomas K. Beecher, the Langdons' Congregationalist minister in Elmira.

9. J. N. Larned, "Mark Twain," Buffalo Express , 26 April 1910; clipping in MTP.

10. Earl D. Berry, "Mark Twain as a Newspaper Man," Illustrated Buff falo Express , 11 November 1917; clipping in MTP.

1. "'American Travel Letters Series Two,' Thirteenth in Series in 'Alta California,'" Twainian 8 (May-June 1949): 3.

2. Petroleum Nasby, Buffalo Express , 9 October 1869. This and all future excerpts from the Express are from clippings in MTP.

3. William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms continue

     (New York and London: Harper, 1910), p. 112; first published in Atlantic Monthly , December 1869.

4. See chap. 3.

5. Buffalo Express , 16 October 1869.

6. Holograph letter in MTP.

7. Letter dated 27 December 1869; holograph in MTP. The misspellings are Slee's.

8. Document in MTP.

9. Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), p. 113. As further evidence of the character of this indenture, Kaplan offers the following anecdote: "Not long after the marriage Jervis Langdon offered [Clemens] ten thousand dollars and a trip to Europe if, having already given up spirits, he would now give up drinking ale and smoking. Clemens rejected the bribe—'I can't sell myself,' he told Langdon—but he did cut down his smoking drastically, to Sunday afternoons.... 'If I had sold myself,' he said to James T. Fields in 1876, after telling him about Langdon's offer, 'I couldn't have written my book, or I couldn't have gone to sleep'" (p. 118).

10. The anecdote is passed along by Samuel Charles Webster, Annie Moffett's son, in Mark Twain, Business Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), p. 113. Its accuracy is impossible to verify. It would seem remarkable for Jervis Langdon to betray such a fear to a virtual stranger like young Annie Moffett, who was one of only two members of Clemens's family to attend the wedding, her mother, Pamela Moffett, being the other. It might seem equally remarkable, on the other hand, for Annie Moffett simply to invent the episode in later depicting the wedding to her son.

11. The familiar story of Langdon's accepting Clemens as his daughter's fiancé, even in the face of the skepticism expressed by pcople Clemens himself had named as references, is told, for instance, by Albert Bigelow Paine in Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1912), 1:376-78, and by Kaplan in Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain , pp. 88-92. According to Clemens's own account, "The friends that I referred to in California said with one accord that I got drunk oftener than was necessary and that I was wild and Godless, idle, lecherous and a discontented and unsettled rover & they would not recommend any girl of high character & social position to marry me—but as I had already said all that about myself beforehand there was nothing shocking or surprising about it to the family" (SLC to Charles Warren Stoddard, 25 August 1869).

12. Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark Twain's Autobiography (New York and London: Harper, 1924), 1:257. break

1. Cleveland Daily Herald , 8 February 1870. Excerpts from the Daily Herald and from other contemporaneous newspapers, including the Buffalo Express , are from clippings or photocopies in MTP.

2. Buffalo Express , 16 August 1869.

3. New York Tribune , 15 January 1870.

4. Elmira Saturday Evening Review , 5 February 1870.

5. Earl D. Berry, himself later a city editor of the Express , recalled that when the news broke that Mark Twain was to join the paper, "Bright visions of an immediate expansion of circulation were indulged in and every person on The Express staff confidently expected that the old locally restricted publication would be lifted into a nationwide prominence. 'Petroleum V. Nasby' (D. R. Locke) had done just that thing for the Toledo Blade.... Why should not the famous Mark Twain build up The Buffalo Express?" However, according to Berry, in the final analysis "the circulation and business prosperity of the paper did not respond, in the manner expected, to Mark Twain's work. The Buffalo Express did not achieve a nation-wide fame because of his connection with it." "Mark Twain as a Newspaper Man," Illustrated Buffalo Express , 11 November 1917, p. 40.

6. Holograph letter in MTM.

7. Letter dated 6 February 1870; holograph in MTM.

8. Letter dated 26 February 1870; holograph in MTP.

9. Letter dated 20 February 1870; holograph in MTM.

10. Letter dated 9 November 1869; holograph in MTP.

11. Holograph manuscript in MTP; to be published in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 4: 1869-1870 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, forthcoming), item 279.

12. Holograph manuscript in MTP; to be published in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 4: 1869-1870 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, forthcoming), item 280.

13. The three stories are "Experience of the McWilliamses with the Membranous Coup" (1875), "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning" (1880), and "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm" (1882).

1. Letter dated 22-24 March 1870; quoted in Dixon Wecter, ed., Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1949), p. 129.

2. Letter dated 17 March 1870; holograph in the Katherine S. Day Col- soft

      lection, Stowe-Day Library, Hartford, Connecticut. In the same letter Olivia goes on to give Alice Day an account of the discomforts of making calls in an unfamiliar city: "There is something very comical," she says, "about driving to a street and number and when the servant opens the door find that you have been only intent on the street and number and have no possible idea of the ladies name, so you hand your card in silence, and while your card is being taken to the lady of the house you look at your list to prepare yourself to address her by name when she enters."

3. Clipping in MTP.

4. Holograph manuscript in MTP; to be published in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 4: 1869-1870 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, forthcoming), item 283. That Clemens drafted "A Wail" on 7 or 8 March 1870 is indicated by its having been immediately precipitated by a letter he received from writer and stage performer Steven Massett dated 6 March 1870 (holograph in MTP). Massett wrote from Bloomer's Hotel in Buffalo to "thank" Mark Twain sarcastically for a slighting mention of him in the Express for 5 March. Clemens incorporated Massett's letter toward the end of "A Wail," clearly intending that the entire piece be set for publication in the newspaper. Perhaps he suppressed "A Wail" not only because it betrayed negative attitudes on his part toward the Express but also because it eventually dwindled into yet another slap at Massett. ''The idea," it concludes, "of a great overgrown thing like me attacking that lamb!"

5. See chap. 3.

6. Holograph manuscript in MTP; to be published in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 4: 1869-1870 , item 282. That "A Protest" was written at about the same time as "A Wail" is primarily suggested by their dealing in such closely related ways with the same subject matter and is reinforced by the observation that both were drafted in the same purple ink on identically embossed paper.

7. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr., ed., Contributions to the "Galaxy," 1868-1871, by Mark Twain (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1961), p. 37. All excerpts from the Galaxy are from this text.

8. The sketch appeared as "The Christmas Fireside" on 23 December 1865 in the San Francisco Californian , then edited by Bret Harte. The title Clemens assigns the piece here is actually a paraphrase of the original's subtitle, "The Story of the Bad Boy That Bore a Charmed Life." "The Christmas Fireside" is reprinted in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 2: 1864-65 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1981), item 148, pp. 405-10.

9. The timing of Clemens's "Memoranda" deadlines is made evident continue

      in his correspondence. On 26 April 1870, for example, Galaxy editor Francis P. Church requested copy for his June column "soon," stipulating, "I ought to have all in by May 3 ^d ." Observing a similar schedule, Clemens wrote Mary Fairbanks on 29 May 1870, "We were to have gone [to Elmira] yesterday, but being dissatisfied with the next Galaxy (July,) I begged a delay of Livy till I could make some changes in the MSS. before mailing them to N.Y.'' Clearly, "Memoranda" manuscript for any given month had to be in Church's hands by the very first days of the month preceding.

10. The notice, entitled "Mark Twain on Agriculture," appeared in the Buffalo Express for 12 April 1870 and was no doubt widely copied.

11. "Petrified Man" evidently appeared for the first time in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise for 4 October 1862; it is reprinted in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 1: 1851-1864 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1979), item 28, pp. 155-59. "A Bloody Massacre near Carson" was first published in the Territorial Enterprise for 28 October 1863; it is reprinted in Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 1, item 66, pp. 320-26.

12. Clemens's impatience with this practice dated back at least as far as 1854, when, at eighteen, he had worked as a compositor for the Philadelphia Ledger . Writing to the Muscatine, Iowa, Journal , then edited by his brother, Orion, he said, "The people here seem very fond of tacking a bit of poetry(?) to the notices of the death of friends." By way of example he included in his letter "a few lines of most villainous doggerel, and worse measure, which may be found in the 'death' column" (3 February 1854).

13. The suspicion is borne out by Express veteran Earl D. Berry, who witnessed Clemens's first encounter with a gathering of "enlightened politicians" encamped in the newspaper's offices on the day of his arrival. "The new editor frowned them down," Berry recalls, "and made no bones of letting them know that the nature of his work made it desirable that he be alone. Mark Twain and the politicians never affiliated." "Mark Twain as a Newspaper Man," Illustrated Buffalo Express , 11 November 1917, p. 40.

14. See chap. 3.

15. The phrase is a chapter title from Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 52-70.

16. David Gray, Buffalo Courier , 19 March 1870; clipping in MTP. When Clemens later recalled his time in Buffalo as one of stark and forbidding isolation, he allowed that "there was one exception—a single ex- soft

      ception. David Gray—poet, and editor of the principal newspaper,—was our intimate friend.... David had a young wife and a young baby. The Grays and the Clemenses visited back and forth frequently, and this was all the solace the Clemenses had in their captivity." "Autobiographical Dictation" for 16 February 1906; original in MTP.

17. Holograph letter in MTP.

18. More than three decades later, Clemens remembered Gray with the same fondness, a fondness that was made poignant by his own lingering bitterness about newspapering in Buffalo. David Gray, he said, "was a poet, but was doomed to grind out his living in a most uncongenial occupation—the editing of a daily political newspaper. He was a singing bird in a menagerie of monkeys, macaws, and hyenas. His life was wasted." "Autobiographical Dictation" for 22 February 1906; original in MTP.

1. Letter dated 17 June 1872; holograph in MTP.

2. Dixon Wecter cites Langdon's illness as the reason for Abel and Mary Fairbanks's postponing a visit to Elmira that had been planned for November 1868. Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1949), p. 48n. The diagnosis is specified in a letter from Susan Crane to Anna Dickinson dated 14 June 1870; holograph in the Anna Dickinson papers, Library of Congress, photocopy in MTP.

3. Letter dated 2 April 1870; holograph in MTP.

4. Susan Crane to Anna Dickinson, 14 June 1870.

5. This new arrangement is indicated in a letter from Clemens to Mary Fairbanks dated 25 June 1870.

6. Letter dated 25 April 1870; holograph in the Langdon Collection, MTM.

7. Susan Crane to Anna Dickinson, 14 June 1870.

8. See chap. 6, n 9.

9. Clemens's note of thanks to Langdon for the $1,000 gift is an interesting exercise in the politics of gratitude. He wrote, "We did enjoy the check father, just exactly as much as if we had found the money buried in a pot in the backyard, because a present from you never frets, or humiliates or loads one with the sense of having contracted a debt & given an invisible note for it secured by a lien on the recipient's pride & peace of mind" (13 May 1870).

10. The contrast between the apparently unremarkable circumstances of this brief Elmira visit and the breathless account of it Clemens gave continue

      his sister probably has less to do with the demands of Olivia's family than it does with those of his own. In April 1870, he helped arrange to move his mother, sister, niece, and nephew from St. Louis to Fredonia, New York, a village about forty-five miles from Buffalo. Once they were established there, he variously encountered and constructed a number of reasons for not visiting and did not make the trip until October.

11. "Autobiographical Dictation" for 15 February 1906; original in MTP. Albert Bigelow Paine quotes further portions of the dictation dealing with Clemens's recollections of Langdon's decline in Mark Twain: A Biography (New York and London: Harper, 1912), 1:415-16.

12. In his "Autobiographical Dictation," Clemens says that his father, John Marshall Clemens, "was exceedingly dignified in his carriage and speech, and in ... manner he was austere" (29 December 1906; original in MTP). Paine provides a similar characterization in Mark Twain: A Biography , 1:14. While John Marshall Clemens and the fictive father in ''A Memory" share much the same temperament, Clemens typically bends the facts of his own biography in the sketch. The narrator speaks of a halfbrother named Orrin Johnson; Clemens's full brother was named Orion. Moreover, as Bruce R. McElderry, Jr., points out, "Hiawatha," the fictive father's favorite poem, was published in 1855, eight years after John Marshall Clemens's death. Contributions to the "Galaxy," 1868-1871, by Mark Twain (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1961), p. 146.

13. The second of these speculations about Clemens's reasons for involving himself in the passage of Senate Bill 1025 was brought to my attention by a note accompanying his letter to Olivia dated 6 July 1870 in Mark Twain's Letters , Volume 3, forthcoming.

14. Signed holograph contract in MTP.

15. Clemens's view of the terms of the Roughing It contract, and of Elisha Bliss, eventually darkened. His later appraisal of both is included in his "Autobiographical Dictation" for 23 May 1906, published in Mark Twain in Eruption , ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York and London: Harper, 1922), pp. 151-55. Interestingly, Clemens claimed to have discussed the terms of the contract in theory with Jervis Langdon early in the day on 15 July and then because of Bliss's misrepresentations to have settled for what turned out to be far less than what he and his father-in-law had agreed was fair. See Mark Twain's Autobiography , ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York and London: Harper, 1924), 2:126-28.

16. Clipping in MTP.

17. This is the kind of generalization that invites qualification or outright refutation, but grounds for either are hard to discover, except per- soft

      haps in the later, blatantly autobiographical writing. There are later pieces—the McWilliams stories, for instance—in which more-or-less fictive characters dramatize aspects of Clemens's (or, conjecturally, of Twain's) domestic circumstances, but none in which either Clemens or Twain identifies himself as a householder or a husband or a father. This does not apply, of course, to the two unpublished fragments he attempted on housekeeping (see chap. 5). Some might consider "A Mysterious Visit" (Buffalo Express , 18 March 1870) an exception to this generalization since it begins, "The first notice that was taken of me when I 'settled down,' recently ...," but the sketch makes no further reference to the narrator's domesticity.

18. See, in particular, James C. McNutt, "Mark Twain and the American Indian: Earthly Realism and Heavenly Idealism," American Indian Quarterly 4 (August 1978): 223-42.

19. The phrase is from William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (New York and London: Harper, 1910), p. 101.

20. On the matter of the abolitionist and humanitarian elements in Olivia Clemens's training, see Max Eastman, "Mark Twain's Elmira," Harper's Monthly , 176 (May 1938): 620-32.

21. Clipping in MTP.

22. Letter dated 25 January 1871; holograph in the Katharine S. Day Collection, Stowe-Day Library, Hartford, Connecticut. The Clemenses' own daughter Susy put the matter succinctly in writing a biography of her father based on stories she had been told as a girl: "About six months after papa and mamma were married grandpa died; it was a terrible blow on mamma, and papa told Aunt Sue he thought Livy would never smile again, she was so broken hearted." Quoted in Mark Twain's Autobiography , 2:113.

23. Letter dated 16 April 1885; quoted in Mark Twain's Autobiography , 2:129.

1. Holograph MS in MTP. The three pages were apparently rejected; they were not transcribed as part of the published book. One of them is discussed in chap. 10.

2. The letters appeared in the Express between 27 September 1869 and 22 January 1870. Several months earlier, in late May 1869, he had written to his agent, James Redpath, to propose a lecture for the 1869-70 season entitled "Curiosities of California." "There is scope to the subject," he urged, "for the country is a curiosity." Among the topics he promised to continue

      treat were "the fluctuations of fortunes in the mines, where men grow rich in a day & poor in another; ... Lake Tahoe, whose wonders are little known & less appreciated here; ... [and] the never-mentioned strange Dead Sea of California." Despite these intentions, Clemens lectured on the Sandwich Islands, not the American West, during the 1869-70 season.

3. The letter was published in the New York Tribune for 14 October 1869 and appeared in the Buffalo Express five days later.

4. Clemens did in fact draw upon his western newspaper exploits in his early "Memoranda" pieces, for example in "The Petrified Man," "My Famous 'Bloody Massacre,'" and "The Facts in the Great Land Slide Case," all of which had to have been prepared by very early May in order to appear in the June 1870 Galaxy .

5. Signed holograph contract in MTP; a transcription of the contract appeared in Mark Twain Quarterly 6 (Summer/Fall 1944): 5.

6. The letter is dated only "Bur., 1870," but was pretty certainly written in July or August of that year because Clemens had asked for the memorandum book on 15 July. Orion's memoranda were a sufficiently valuable and timely aid to his memory to prompt Clemens to promise his brother $1,000 from the new book's royalties in return for his help. Although the memorandum book itself has been lost, a portion of it is preserved—was perhaps transcribed—in a letter Orion wrote his wife, Mollie, on 8 September 1861. The text of the letter is reproduced as "Supplement D" in Roughing It , ed. Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 546-50.

7. "Autobiographical Dictation" for 15 February 1906; original in MTP.

8. "Autobiographical Dictation" for 15 February 1906; typescript in MTP. Other renditions of the map's creation offer interesting variations. Clemens's 1906 version implies that executing the woodcut was a kind of involuntary and irrational response to the torment he was undergoing at the time, a "half insane tempest ... of humorous possession" that caused him to send for the block, which he then apparently carved at home. In 1910 his Express co-editor, Josephus N. Larned, recalled the incident differently: "I doubt if he ever enjoyed anything more than the jacknife engraving that he did on a piece of board for a military Map of the Siege of Paris, which was printed in The Express from his original 'plate,' with accompanying explanations and comments. Half his day of whittling and the laughter that went with it are something that I find pleasant to remember" (Buffalo Express , 26 April 1910; quoted in Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography [New York and London: Harper, 1912], 1: 399). Larned pretty clearly places Clemens in the Express offices during continue

      the map's creation and makes the occasion seem more like a lark than an instance of tempestuous possession.

      A more contemporaneous account of the event casts it in another light still. In 1871 fellow humorist Donn Piatt shared with a reporter the description Clemens had given him of the day the map came into being. "Only think," Platt recalled him saying, "with a dear friend [Jervis Langdon, apparently, given that Emma Nye was still alive at the time] lying dead before me, and my wife half distracted over the loss, I had to get off my articles so as not to disappoint my publishers; and when I sat down with a board and pen-knife to engrave that map of Paris, I did so with a heavy heart and in a house of lamentation" ("Funny in Spite of Himself," Every Saturday 2, no. 71 [6 May 1871]: 415).

9. Holograph letter in MTP. The letter also contains Colfax's tribute to Jervis Langdon. "I heard of the death of your excellent father in law with deepest sorrow," he wrote. "He will long be missed by all."

10. Mark Twain, Roughing It , ed. Franklin R. Rogers, p. 43. Future references to this edition, abbreviated RI , will appear parenthetically in the text.

11. On 4 September Clemens had written Bliss, "During the past week have written first four chapters of the book."

12. See chap. 7.

13. SLC to Orion Clemens, 5 November 1870. Clemens initiated the matter of Bliss's hiring Orion by putting it to his publisher as a pointblank favor: "Say, for instance—I have a brother about 45—an old & able writer & editor," he wrote. "Have you got a place for him?" (31 October 1870). Bliss responded on exactly those terms: "You see we have no real place for him just now, but would like for your sake to create a position for him if possible—would this do?" (2 November 1870; holograph letter in MTP). Clemens did not hesitate to burden Orion with a sense of obligation, pointing out that Bliss's whole purpose in undertaking the arrangement was to win his—Clemens's—gratitude and loyalty. "But all right," he grumbled to his brother, ''I am willing" (5 November 1870).

14. The line is from Mark Twain's "Valedictory" in the Galaxy "Memoranda" for April 1871. Of the engraving Clemens himself later admitted to Webb, "Yes sir —King William was a mistake & a big one, for it was repeating a joke" (14 January 1871).

15. For a discussion of the diamond-book agreement and its collapse, see Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals , Volume 2: 1877-1883 , ed. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1975), p. 291 n 4. The story is also told in Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), pp. 124-28. break

1. Holograph letter in MTP.

2. Holograph letter in MTP.

3. Holograph letter in MTP.

4. Holograph letter in MTP.

5. The "Memoranda" column Clemens wrote for the March issue of the Galaxy has been entirely or substantially lost, even though it was at one time actually set in print. On 2 March 1871 Church suggested that some material from the column might be salvaged for later publication in the magazine. "But I will have the plates of those pages destroyed," he said, "so that they need never arise to bother you if you dont want them." It is possible that the one piece signed by Mark Twain that later appeared in the Galaxy —"About Barbers," in the August 1871 issue—was part of the March submission.

6. In the two most recent editions of Roughing It , for example, Franklin R. Rogers and Hamlin Hill at least tacitly imply that Clemens made such progress on the manuscript. See Rogers, introduction to Roughing It (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 7-8; and Hill, introduction to Roughing It (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 13-14. In other places, too, both Rogers and Hill argue plausibly, but not necessarily convincingly, that Clemens worked substantially on the Roughing It manuscript during the winter of 1870-71. Rogers believes that nearly all of the overland section—through chapter 19 of the first edition—was written before March 1871 ( The Pattern for Mark Twain's "Roughing It": Letters from Nevada by Samuel and Orion Clemens, 1861-62 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961], pp. 16-21). Hill maintains that during this time Clemens was recasting his Sandwich Islands letters for inclusion in Roughing It ( Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1964], pp. 47-50).

7. Rogers observes that "most scholars ... have believed that the character [to be changed] was the narrator," and is himself inclined to agree, both in his introduction to Roughing It (p. 10) and in The Pattern for Mark Twain's "Roughing It" (pp. 16-17). Henry Nash Smith made this argument early and placed it in a thoughtful critical context ("Mark Twain as an Interpreter of the Far West: The Structure of Roughing It ," in The Frontier in Perspective , ed. Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957], p. 210). Justin Kaplan simply asserts, without discussion or substantiation, that "the character [Clemens] rewrote was that of the narrator himself" ( Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966], p. 135). DeLancey continue

      Ferguson was perhaps responsible for stimulating these conjectures as rebuttals to an assertion he made decades ago that the altered character was the narrator's brother, the Secretary ( Mark Twain: Man and Legend [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943], p. 157).

8. Holograph letter in MTM.

9. Typescript of letter in MTP.

10. See chap. 8.

11. The text of Orion's 11 March 1871 letter is published in Roughing It , ed. Franklin R. Rogers, pp. 542-45. Hill discusses Clemens's adaptation of this material in Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss , pp. 45-47.

12. Of the dainty palace on Delaware Avenue Clemens wrote John Henry Riley, "The man that comes forward & pays us what it cost a year of ago, ($25,000,) can take it." As for his share of the Express , "The man that will pay me $10,000 less than I gave can take that " (3 March 1871). A week later he wrote his brother, "We won't take less than $25,000 for the house, ... & so it may take us 6 months to a year to sell it" (10 March 1871). After six months of advertising the house on the front page of the Express , he sold it to Mrs. J. Condit Smith on 23 September 1871 for $19,000 (title search owned by J. W. Bayliss [document in MTP]; the selling price is given in Martin B. Fried, "Mark Twain in Buffalo," Niagara Frontier 5 [1958]: 109). On 1 March 1871 Clemens sold his shares in the Express Printing Company to George H. Selkirk for $15,000. He had paid $25,000 for the shares the preceding August (articles of agreement in MTM).

13. Ironically, the fame Bret Harte was at the time enjoying rested very largely on his poem "The Heathen Chinee," which had appeared in the September 1870 Overland Monthly and was subsequently copied by many papers. Hardly more than a jingle, "The Heathen Chinee" seems in retrospect to epitomize the kind of journalistic ephemerality Clemens here disparages.

14. "Have you ever seen anything from us that has placed you in any difficult position, or thrust you prominently forward?" Bliss went on. " We have in no way intimated that you were sponsor or father to the paper or that you had any connection with it, except as above in common with other authors and contributors ." Quoted in Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers, 1867-1894 , ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 60n. In Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss Hill refers to this as "another of those remarkable letters that succeeded in keeping Twain in line for an entire decade" (p. 51).

15. "Autobiographical Dictation" for 16 February 1906; original in MTP.

16. "Autobiographical Dictation" for 15 February 1906; original in MTP. break

1. Letter dated 25 January 1871; holograph in Katharine S. Day Collection, Stowe-Day Library, Hartford, Connecticut.

2. For a useful gathering of materials relating to the Elmira community and Clemens's association with it, see Mark Twain in Elmira , ed. Robert D. Jerome and Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr. (Elmira, N.Y.: Mark Twain Society, 1977).

3. See chap. 9.

4. See chap. 8.

5. Letter dated 4 August 1869; holograph in MTP.

6. Holograph letter in MTP.

7. Holograph manuscript (DV79) in MTP.

8. Within a few years, when they had made it their summer home, the Cranes were inspired by the freedom and informality of Quarry Farm to christen it "Go-as-you-please Hall," in a way perpetuating those aspects of the place Clemens had earlier mined. In 1874, after the Crane and Clemens families had taken over the house at the farm as a summer retreat, Susan Crane surprised her brother-in-law by having an octagonal study built for him on a nearby crest of land, thus recapitulating the circumstances that had drawn him to the farm in the first place by allowing him an amiable escape from domestic cares and distractions.

9. The only surviving record of Goodman's criticism, apparently, is Paine's. He credits Goodman with reviving Clemens's confidence by reviewing the manuscript of Roughing It and pronouncing it "a great book!" Mark Twain: A Biography , 1:435-36.

10. Holograph letter in MTP.

11. The full publication history of Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography is given in The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches , Volume 1, 1851-1864 , ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 561-71. Branch and Hirst observe that "reviews were relatively scarce, invariably brief, and, with few exceptions, negative in tone," citing a number of contemporary instances. The Chicago Tribune , e.g., judged that "the work is not up to Twain's average of humor, and suggests, perhaps, that the well has been pumped too long." Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine imagined that "the necessity of making a book must have borne very heavily upon him to compel him to send before the public such a collection of weak jokes and mild witticisms as this." Boston's Literary World maintained that the author's name aroused the "suspicion that the work is one of humor; but the book itself affords not the feeblest fibre of corroboration" (pp. 568-69).

12. See chap. 9. break

13. Letter dated 17 May 1871; holograph in MTP.

14. Paine mentions other self-inflicted distractions from the same period, including Clemens's plan to co-write a book with Goodman, his beginning a western play, and his inventing and patenting an adjustable vest strap. Mark Twain: A Biography , 1:440.

15. These observations tie into and benefit from fuller discussions of the initiation motif in Roughing It and of Clemens's presentation of the West in the book. See, in particular, Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 52-70, and "Mark Twain as an Interpreter of the Far West: The Structure of Roughing It ," in The Frontier in Perspective , ed. Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 210-25. Smith argues that the book's narrator is initiated into a system of western vernacular values which ultimately prove unsatisfying. Hamlin Hill agrees essentially with Smith and extends his judgments to include Clemens's personal circumstances and his implied critique of the American Dream. " Roughing It ," he says, "is Mark Twain's renunciation of his footloose bachelorhood [and] his rejection of that myth of the frontier West that obsessed the American imagination in the nineteenth century." Introduction to Roughing It (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 19. Hill also acknowledges William M. Gibson's assertion that a primary theme of the book is "that luck is for the lucky, who are few, and that work and a vocation are for the many, of whom Mark Twain counted himself one." The Art of Mark Twain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 35. William C. Spengemann cites the narrator's eventual disillusionment with the West as an instance of Twain's exploiting the tension between ''adventure" and "domesticity." The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 217. James M. Cox dissents, in a way, maintaining that the narrator is never truly initiated but rather is made to experience the same western disillusionment over and over. Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 98.

1. Alta California for 6 September 1868; reprinted in "'American Travel Letters Series Two,' Tenth in Series in 'Alta California,'" Twainian 7 (November—December 1948): 6.

2. "American Travel Letters Series Two," p. 7.

3. The letter appeared in the New York World on 18 February 1877.