2 January 1869 • Fort Wayne, Ind. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00217)
I wish I had written you long ago that I was to come here, instead of absurdly forgetting it, for I might have a letter from you to read tonight, just as well as not. I must go without, now, till Monday. How they have abused me in this town!, for the last two or three days! But they couldn’t get the newspapers to do it. They said there was some mistake, & steadfastly refused—for which I am grateful.1explanatory note The night I should have lectured here, the house was crowded, & p yet there was not room for all who came. To-night it was rainy, slushy & sloppy, & only two-thirds of a house came. They were very cool, & did not welcome me to the stage. They were still offended, & showed it. But I as soon as I saw that, all my distress of mind, all my wavering confidence, all my down-heartedness vanished, & I never felt happier or better satisfied on a stage before. And so, within ten minutes we were splendid friends—they unbent, banished their frowns, & the affair went off gallantly. A really hearty opposition is inspiring, sometimes. The Ⓐemendationtown dignitaries have called with their congratulations & spent an hour with me & have just gone. The Society Association are jolly, now, for after all the trouble, they had a better house than usual. But what a pity it was we hadn’t the big house that assembled before.2explanatory note
Now I am sitting up again to write, Livy, in disobedience to your orders, but then I must—for if I didn’t write you wouldn’t answer, & I never, never, never could enjoy that, you know. And besides, I want to write, & so I had rather write & be scolded for it than go to bed & have a good sleep. Even if I only wrote nonsense it would still be pleasant, since it would be chatting with you. in margin: No ink, Livy—pardon. 3explanatory note
Oh, let me praise you, Livy, & don’t take it to heart so. You mustn’t deprive me of so harmless a pleasure as that. Even if you prove to me that you have the blemishes you think you have, it cannot appal me any, because with them you will still be better, & nobler & lovelier than any woman I have known. I will help you to weed out your fail faults when they are revealed to me, but don’t you be troubled about the matter, for you have a harder task before you, which is the helping me to weed out mine. Think of that, Livy—think of that, & leave the other to time & circumstances. Now please don’t feel hurt when I praise you, Livy, for I know that in so doing I speak only the truth. At last I grant you one fault—& its is self-depreciation. And isn’t it wrong—isn’t it showing ingratitude toward the Creator, who has put so little into your nature & your character to find fault with? And yet, after all, it s your self-depreciation is a virtue & a merit, for it comes of the absence of egotism, which is one of the gravest of faults. {It isn’t any use. I no sooner accuse you than I hasten to take it back again. It isn’t in me to find a fault of any importance in you & believe in it, Livy, & so where is the use in trying? Scold Ⓐemendationme—scold me hard, dear—& then forgive me.}
I was just delighted with Mr & Mrs Langdon’s letters—& I saw what an idiot I had been to hurry & apologize for my Christmas letter before they had found any fault with it. But the apology was already gone, & I couldn’t stop it.4explanatory note But never mind—I thank them from my heart; & next time I write them I will be sagacious & put a little apology in with the letter. Mr. Langdon speaks of my gettin the good policy of my getting achieving Mrs. L.’s favor “if I ever get permission to come again.” Commence on him now Livy! Don’t let him get used to harboring such threatening notions as that. Obtain his consent early, & clinch it. If you use proper diligence & enterprise, you can easily make yourself so troublesome that he will be glad to grant it in order to have peace. I could. I saw that Mrs. Langdon’s hearty invitation had its effect on Mrs. Fairbanks. She notified me to come & take her to Elmira whenever all circumstances should be favorable.5explanatory note {I didn’t read your letters to her, Livy—but I suppose I ought to have done it.} She sends her love to all of you, & says she is going to describe how impatient I was for Severance to come, New Year’s, & how suddenly it died away when your letter came, & how serene I looked, in the rocking-chair, with my feet on the table, mantel-piece, reading it! {I didn’t have my feet there, at all—but I looked comfortable, no doubt.}
And you had a delightful philosophy lesson, Livy.—& wished that we might study it together some day.6explanatory note It is the echo of a wish that speaks in my heart many & many a time. I think, sometimes, how pleasant it would be to sit, lon just us two, long winter evenings, & study together, & read favorite authors aloud & comment on them & so imprint them upon our memories. It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage & have no one you love, at hand to share the happiness with you. And it is unsatisfactory to read to one’s self, anyhow—for the uttered voice so heightens the expression. I think you & I would never tire of reading together. At Mrs. Fairbanks’s they make selections against my coming, & so I have a great deal of reading aloud to do during my visits.
Scold me all you please, Livy—I love to hear you scold, because you are such an earnest little body. And it does some good, too. But for your scolding I should have written other letters to-night—but now I shall write only this one. You Ⓐemendationcan’t imagine how how dreadfully wearing this lecturing is, Livy. I begin to be appalled at the idea of doing it another season. I shall try hard to get into the Herald on such terms as will save me from it.7explanatory note If I were to confess how few hours I have slept since I saw you last, you could not easily believe it. — 1explanatory note But Ⓐemendationit can’t be helped, Livy—it can not. I have so many visitors, & they don’t know the circumstances, you know—& the railway trips are very long & tedious—very seldom less than 8 hours. I feel a thousand years old, sometimes. But it don’t make a so very much difference—I recuperate easily. I thought I was going to sleep, sleep, sleep—& rest, rest, rest—at for days, at Mrs. F.,’s, Ⓐemendation & see nobody but the family, & have such a peaceful, quiet, homelike Ⓐemendationsort of a time, & never go out of the house, for I was very tired—but they didn’t know, & so I found visits & parties already fixed when I arrived, & so I rushed, day & night without ceasing & made my fatigue infinitely worse. But Ⓐemendationwhen it was all done, I told them, & so hereafter I am to be at home there, which is to say I am not to drive out, nor walk out, nor v visit, nor receive company at all, but am to lead a jolly, rejuvenating, restful life in the very heart of the home circle, & forget that there is a driving, toiling world outside. , if possible. Then I can come away a new man—a young giant refreshed with new wine—& plunge into business again with vim & energy. Besides, you know, we can have visits & visiting, anywhere—what we want at home is the home folks & nobody else. It will be splendid, won’t it, next time?
I thank you for all you say, for everything you say, about religion, Livy, & I have as much confidence as yourself that I shall succeed at last, but Oh, it is slow & often discouraging. I am happy in conducting myself rightly—but the emotion, the revealing religious emotion, Livy, will not come, it seems to me. I pray for it—it is all I can do. I know not how to compel an emotion. And I pray every day that you may not be impatient or lose confidence in my final conversion—I pray that you may keep your courage & be of good heart. And I pray that my poisonous & besetting apathy may pass from me. It is hard to be a Christian in spirit, Livy, though the let mere letter of the law seems not very difficult as a general thing. I have hope. Send me the Plymouth Pulpits, Livy—I looked for one yesterday, but it did not come.9explanatory note
Good-night & good-bye. Thank you for the kiss, Livy dear. I send you a dozen herewith! {Livy—Livy—the picture.}10explanatory note I love you, Livy. I love you more than I can tell.
Livy, put Decatur, Ill., (care Mrs. H. O. Johns,) in place of Bloomington, Ill.11explanatory note
docketed by OLL: 20 th
Clemens had forgotten both to record his 29 December appointment in Fort Wayne and to tell Olivia to add it to her copy of his itinerary. After he missed the engagement, and before he could explain himself by telegraph, the Fort Wayne Gazette declined the usual recriminations: “It is one of those unfortunate circumstances where you cannot blame any one, and when there is no use crying over spilt milk” (“Mark Twain,” 30 Dec 68, 4). On Thursday, 31 December, the Gazette reported that a “dispatch received from the lecturer, this morning, announces that he mistook the evening, and that he will be here on Saturday next, positively” (“Mark Twain,” 4). That day Clemens also informed Olivia of his mistake, adding that he had been “requested by telegraph to talk there Jan 2, & shall do it” ( L2 , 368). But he recognized that even if she received this news on Saturday, a reply could not reach him before he left Fort Wayne, and he therefore did not expect to receive her next letter until Monday, 4 January, in Indianapolis.
The Fort Wayne Democrat called Clemens’s lecture in Hamilton’s Hall, for the local Library and Lecture Association, “one of the finest, of the character, that it has ever been our pleasure to listen to. The artistic style in which the lecturer mingled the sublime and the ridiculous, the pathetic and the humorous, we have never heard excelled. We thank Mr. Clemens, and the Association who afforded us the opportunity, for the exquisite pleasure we enjoyed in listening to his faultless entertainment. The entire absence of all vulgarism, which all the latter day sons of Momus seem to think so indispensable to wit, constituted a marked feature in Mr. Clemens’ lecture” (“The Lecture Course,” 4 Jan 69, 4). And the Fort Wayne Gazette remarked that the lecture “kept the audience in alternate states of laughter and close attention. It was a kind of literary hash, (not in the least like boarding house hash), made up of the very best materials. ... It was a string of pearls from which the string had been lost. ... In any event it was a very amusing and interesting lecture; containing passages of great beauty and eloquence, mixed with a spice of wit which was irresistable... and pleasing by its novelty as well as by its intrinsic merit” (“The Lecture,” 4 Jan 69, 4).
The entire letter is written in pencil.
Clemens’s Christmas morning letter to the Langdons, mailed in Lansing, Michigan, is not known to survive, but it was evidently high-spirited. His 29 December apology—“no harm was meant, no undue levity, no disrespect, no lack of reverence”—was part of a letter in which he also apologized for having inadvertently offended Jervis Langdon with “the harmless overflow of a happy frame of mind” on a previous occasion ( L2 , 357, 359).
The allusion is to the 1 December 1868 letter in which Mrs. Langdon, expressing “utter surprise & almost astonishment” at Clemens’s 25 November declaration of love of her daughter, requested Mrs. Fairbanks’s “opinion of him as a man; what the kind of man he has been, and what the man he now is, or is to become.” Mrs. Langdon had prefaced her request with this wish: “I WOULD that I could see you for an hour!” And in closing she remarked: “We do feel very anxious to see you & Mr Fairbanks here & to have a good long visit from you both, then will it not be delightful to rehearse every thing that interests us all” (see L2 , 286–87 n. 3, where the letter is transcribed in full). Perhaps the most important circumstance affecting such a visit was the health of Jervis Langdon. He had been suffering for several months with stomach cancer, as yet undiagnosed, which caused his death on 6 August 1870. On 15 January, Olivia invited the Fairbankses to come to Elmira in February as part of a planned Quaker City reunion (see 14 Jan 69 to OLL, n. 8click to open link).
Olivia was tutored at home, twice a week, by Darius Reynolds Ford (b. 1825), a Baptist minister and professor of physical science, mathematics, and astronomy at Elmira Female College. In October 1869, after Ford set off on a trip around the world as tutor to Olivia’s brother, Charles, Clemens described him in the Buffalo Express as:
a scholarly man; a man whose attainments cover a vast field of knowledge. His knowledge is singularly accurate, too; what he knows he is certain of, and likewise what he knows he has a happy faculty of communicating to others. He is a man of high social standing and unspotted character. He is a warm personal friend of mine—which is to his discredit, perhaps, but would you have a man perfect? He is a minister of the Gospel, and a live one—a man whose religion broadens and adorns his nature; not a religion that dates a man back into the last century and saps his charity and makes him a bigot. (SLC 1869)
Including Ford, Elmira Female College, founded in 1855, had a faculty of eleven and claimed to be “the first in this country, and, so far as known, the first in the world, that offered to women the same advantages and adopted the same standard for graduation with colleges and universities for the other sex” (“Elmira Female College,” Elmira Saturday Evening Review, 11 Sept 69, 5; OLL to Alice B. Hooker, 16 Dec 68, 3 Mar 69, CtHSD; Towner 1892, 609–10, 700–701).
Since late 1868 Clemens had been negotiating to buy a share in the Cleveland Herald, owned by Abel W. Fairbanks in partnership with father and son George A. and George S. Benedict ( L2 , 284, 298, 360).
Clemens had last seen Olivia, in Elmira, on 18 December ( L2 , 348).
Plymouth Pulpit, a weekly pamphlet, published each of Henry Ward Beecher’s sermons after he gave it at Plymouth Church, in Brooklyn. In a letter of 27 December, Clemens had told Olivia he would be “glad to receive the Plymouth Pulpit as often as you will send it” ( L2 , 353).
Olivia had first sent Clemens her photograph in September 1868. On 28 November, two days after she accepted his marriage proposal, Clemens appealed to her for a more satisfactory likeness. He repeated the request in most of the letters he sent her in the month of December ( L2 , 250, 283–84, 291, 293–94, 308–64 passim).
Mrs. Johns was evidently a member of the recently formed “library association” in Decatur, which sponsored Clemens’s lecture there on the evening of 12 January. According to the Decatur Republican, the association had had an uplifting effect:
The literary and intellectual faculties of the people have been developed until the polished and beautiful utterances of accomplished and eloquent orators are relished in preference to the coarse and stale jests of the “end man” in the burnt cork concert, or the smutty buffoonery of the clown tumbling in the sawdust ring of the circus. For this refining influence and most gratifying result, we are solely indebted to the ladies of Decatur, and we are truly proud to thus acknowledge their services in the cause of literature, christianity and refinement. ... All honor then, say we once more, to the ladies of the library association. (“Mark Twain,” 14 Jan 69, 1)
“Present” and “Politeness of” were conventional terms of address for letters entrusted to a third party—in this case Olivia’s brother, Charles. Clemens’s practice was to seal his letters to Olivia in envelopes inscribed as this one is, then to send them to Charles enclosed in second envelopes, none of which survive. Clemens followed this stratagem for privacy from late November 1868, just after Olivia accepted his marriage proposal, until early March 1869 (see 8 and 9 Mar 69 to OLL, n. 6click to open link). Olivia docketed Clemens’s letters by numbering them consecutively, usually on the envelope she received, but sometimes on the letter itself. In writing to Clemens she also used the double envelope stratagem, by having her brother address the outer envelopes (see 14 Jan 69 to OLLclick to open link, p. 38).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L3 , 2–8; MFMT , 21–22, brief excerpt; LLMT , 356, brief paraphrase; MTMF , 61, brief quotation; Harnsberger, 58, brief excerpt.
see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.