14 January 1869 • Davenport, Iowa (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00232)
Livy, darling, I greet you. We did have a splendid house tonight, & everything went off handsomely.1explanatory note Now I begin to fear that I shan’t get a chance to see your loved face between Jan. 22 & Feb. 13 as I was hoping & longing I should. Because I have just received some new appointments by telegraph—the ones I expected. Please add them to your list—carefully, & don’t make any mistake: Thus:
| Marshall, Mich., | Jan. 25. | |
| Batavia, Ill., | Jan. 26 | |
| Freeport, Ill., | Jan. 27 | |
| Waterloo, Iowa, | Jan. 28 | |
| Galena, Ill | Jan. 29 | |
| Jacksonville, Ill., | Feb. 1. |
Others are to come, the dispatch says. {Did I tell you I am to lecture in Norwalk, Ohio, Jan. 21, & in Cleveland, Jan. 22? Put those down too, Livy.[}] If they don’t send me the names of the Secretaries of these added societies, you will have to tell Charlie to direct your letters to my nom de plume, & then the Secretaries will get them anyhow. Will you try to remember that, dear? And now, since misfortune has overtaken me & I am not to see you for such a long, long time, won’t you please write me every day? I wish you would try, Livy. I don’t think you can, & I don’t expect it, either, for it is a great labor—but still I do wish you could, if it wouldn’t interfere with your duties or pleasures, or tire you too much. I find it next to impossible to get the opportunity to write to you every day, though I would most certainly like to do it—& being forced, as I am, to devote to it simply such time as I can snatch from sleep, my letters can’t naturally be anything more than mere hasty, chatty paragraphs, with nothing in them, as a general thing. in margin: I wrote Charlie from Ottawa—did he get it?
Where was I on Sunday, Jan. 3? In Fort Wayne. Had my breakfast brought up, & lay in bed till 1 P.M. I did want to go to church, & the bells sounded very inviting, but it seemed a plain duty to rest all I could. {Besides, I don’t like to see people nudge each other when I enter a church, & call attention to me. Funny things happen sometimes, though. In Tecumseh, Mich., the preacher got to talking about the mysterious grave of Moses—& there was a broad smile all over the house in a moment—they thought of “Moses Who?” The poor Ⓐemendation preacher was not at the lecture, & could not understand why his well-delivered & w er earnest Ⓐemendation pathos should provoke mirth.}2explanatory note
Yes I lay abed till 1 P.M, & read your Akron & Cleveland letters several times3explanatory note —& read the Testament—& re-read Beecher’s sermon on the love of riches being the root of evil4explanatory note —and read G Ⓐemendation Prof. Goldwin Smith’s lecture on Cromwell5explanatory note —& a most entertaining volume containing the Grecian & other Mythologies in a condensed form6explanatory note —& smoked thousands of cigars, & was excessively happy—that is, as happy as I could b Ⓐemendation well be, without you there to make it complete. Then I got up & ate dinner with some friends—& went to bed again at 4 in the afternoon & read & smoked again—& got up long, long before daylight in bottom margin: {See back of page 3}} 7explanatory note & took the cars for the endless trip to Indianapolis via & Chicago. That is the history of Jan. 3, Livy dear, & I remember it ever so pleasantly.
I have seen your young gentlemen women-haters often—I know them intimately. They are infallibly & invariably unimportant whelps with vest vast Ⓐemendation self-conceit & a skull full of oysters, which they take a harmless satisfaction in regarding as brains. They are day-dreamers, & intensely romantic, though they would have the world think otherwise. They Their pet vanity is to be considered “men of the world”—& they generally know about as much of the world as a horse knows about metaphysics. They are powerfully sustained in their woman-hating Ⓐemendation & kept well up to the mark by the secret chagrin of observing that no woman above mediocrity ever manifests the slightest interest in them—they come without creating a sensation, & go again without anybody seeming to know it. They are coarse, & vulgar, & mean—these people—& they know it. Neither men or women I admire them much or love them—& they know that, also. in margin: I wish I could see you, Livy. They thirst Ⓐemendation for applause—any poor cheap applause of their “eccentricity” is manna in the desert to them—& they suffer in noticing that the world is unc stupidly unconscious of them & exasperatingly indifferent to them. When sense dawns upon these creatures, how suddenly they h discover that they have been pitif pitiable fools—but they are full forty years old, then, & they sigh to feel that those years & their Ⓐemendation pleasures they might have borne, are wasted, & lost to them for all time. I do pity a woman-hater with all my heart. —even The spleen he suffers is beyond comprehension.
Why yes, Livy, you ought to have sent me Mother Fairbanks’ letter, by all means. Send it now, won’t you, please?8explanatory note She’s a noble woman. It will be splendid for her to have you & me both to bother about & scold at, some day. W Ⓐemendation She will make a fine row with me when she sees me coming back on the 22d with a new lot of baggage after all her trouble convincing me that I needed nothing more than a valise to travel with. I shall find my lost baggage again at Toledo, I think.
The lady you wrote of was singularly unfortunate—judging at a first glance—but considering that it brought such Christianity, & such happy content in doing good, it seems only rare good fortune after all. Ten millions of years from now she will shudder to think what a frightful calamity it would have been, not to have lost her wealth.9explanatory note Did it never occur to you what a particularly trifling & insignificant breath of time this now long & vastly important earthly existence of ours will seem to us whenever we shall happen accidentally to have it called to our minds ten awful millions of years from now? Will not we smile, then, to remember that we used at times to shrink from doing certain duties to God & man because the world might jeer at us?—& Ⓐemendation were so apt to forget that the world & its trifling opinions would scarce rise Ⓐemendation to the dignity of a passing memory at that distant day? Brainless husbandmen that we are, we sow for time, seldom comprehending that we are to reap in Eternity. We are all idiots, much as we vaunt our wisdom. Good-bye. I kiss you good-night, darling. I do love you, Livy!
docketed by OLL: 27th
Clemens spoke at Burtis Opera House under the auspices of the Davenport Library Association. In announcing the performance, the Davenport Democrat predicted that it would be “a rich feast of mirth to our lecture going people. Twain is witty without the vulgarity of Nasby, and is possessed of fine descriptive powers, and is purely original in style and delivery” (“Mark Twain’s Lecture,” 11 Jan 69, 1). The lecture, before an audience the Democrat reviewer called “quite select and the largest that has greeted any lecture of the course,” fulfilled these expectations. Mark Twain spoke for “nearly two hours,” offering “fine descriptions, interspersed with anecdotes, comparisons and incidents, which were highly interesting, and frequently utterly ridiculous and absurd. The lecture was a success—a thing to be enjoyed, not remembered. It also paid handsomely and everybody were satisfied” (“‘The American Vandal Abroad,’” 15 Jan 69, 1).
Clemens lectured in Tecumseh on Saturday, 26 December 1868, and attended church the next day. The anecdote that discomfited the local cleric figured in the “Vandal” lecture on at least two other occasions. Clemens did not publish it until 1872, as part of chapter 6 in Roughing It ( L2 , 299–300 n. 2).
That is, letters from Olivia that were intended to reach Clemens at Cleveland, where he arrived on 28 December, and at Akron, where he lectured two days later. He returned to Cleveland immediately after the Akron lecture and remained until he left for Fort Wayne on 2 January.
Olivia had sent the issue of the Plymouth Pulpit that published Henry Ward Beecher’s “The Love of Money,” delivered at Plymouth Church, on 22 November 1868. (Probably it was the 5 December issue; at least by late December, the Plymouth Pulpit was publishing Beecher’s sermons thirteen days after delivery.) Beecher said in part:
We are not to understand that money is the root of all evil; but the love of it—bestowing that which we have a right to bestow only on undying and immortal qualities, upon God, and angels, and men—bestowing love, idolatrously, upon material gain. It is not true that all evil in the world springs, in some way, directly or indirectly, from money; but it is true that there is no evil to which at one time or another love of money has not tempted men. ...
If God calls you to a way of making wealth, make it; but remember do not love money. (Henry Ward Beecher 1869, 171, 179)
Before leaving England for Ithaca, New York, in October 1868, Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), was a professor of law and history at Oxford. He was also a journalist, lecturer, political activist, and prominent champion of liberal causes. In November 1868 he became professor of English history and constitutional history at newly opened Cornell University, an appointment he held until he resigned in 1872. Clemens presumably read Smith’s lecture on Oliver Cromwell—first delivered in Manchester, England, on 21 January 1867—in Three English Statesmen: A Course of Lectures on the Political History of England (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1867). The book also included talks on John Pym and William Pitt (“Mr. Goldwin Smith on Cromwell,” London Times, 22 Jan 67, 9; Gribben, 2:649).
Probably Thomas Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable; Or, Beauties of Mythology, a collection of Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental myths, first published in 1855. Olivia had had an edition of that work since January 1864 (Gribben, 1:110). Clemens’s failure to refer to the book by title—if in fact The Age of Fable was the “most entertaining volume”—suggests that he was unaware that she was familiar with it.
Having inadvertently left one side of the second leaf blank, Clemens filled it with page 6. His pagination ultimately ran as follows: 1–2, 3–6, 4–5, 7–8, 9–10.
Fairbanks’s letter—presumably written on 6 January (as indicated in her 5 January letter to Clemens: see 7 Jan 69 to OLLclick to open link from Chicago)—does not survive, although Olivia’s reply does (CtHMTH):
Dear Mrs Fairbanks
Your very welcome letter reached me the 9th—I was very glad of the little visit from you which it gave me—Two or three times during the last six weeks, I have been strongly moved to write you, then I did not know quite how to express with pen and paper, the thoughts that were in my heart mind, I longed rather for the opportunity to speak with you face to face, to talk with you as only women can talk together, and as it is the blessed privilege to of a young woman to talk with an older one—
I felt proud and humble, both at the same time by your letter—proud that you did not consider me unworthy to receive the love of a strong, noble man, (I remember how very slight a knowledge you have of me)—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, humbled, even painfully humbled, when I remembered how weak I was, and how utterly and entirely helpless, unless there comes into my soul a strength from above—Then I was again raised up, remembering the power and willingness of Him in whom m I put my trust—
I believe that two people who are to unite their lives should feel as sanguine about their future, as you feel about ours—so I do not think that you are too sanguine—I cannot understand, how, their chief aim in life being the same, a christian walk and conversation, knowing the uncertainty of human effort, the liability to stumble and fall, how it can be otherwise, than that they shall help and strengthen each other—
I quite envy you the sight that you are to have of Mr Clemens next week, but then a month from now I hope that he will be with us—Mother and I have been wondering whether we could not have the “Quaker City” reunion at that time—Could you and your husband, with Allie and Mr Stillwel come to us about the 18th of next month? Mother will try and write Mrs Severance, regarding it, before many days—We look forward with a great deal of pleasure to that meeting of Charlie’s friends—
I want to thank you for persuading Mr C. to put that extract from your Christmas letter in print, I want the public, who know him now, only as “the wild humorist of the Pacific slope”, to know something of his deeper, larger nature—I remember being quite incensed by a ladie ys asking, “Is there any thing of Mr Clemens, except his humour”, yet as she knew of him it was not an unnatural question—
Cousin Hattie Lewis, rec’d a letter two or three days ago from Mr Clemens telling her the truth with regard to his feelings, he came out frankly with her and “broke her heart”, I think that she will find it a great relief to have it done, now that she has lived through it—
We had heard of Mollies accident, and were very glad to learn that she was doing well—Give my love to her please, also to Allie, and kind regards to the rest of your family—Hoping that I shall see you next month, I am lovingly
in Charles J. Langdon’s hand: I am well too.
The Quaker City reunion, repeatedly postponed, never took place. Olivia may have found the phrase “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” in Charles Henry Webb’s prefatory “Advertisement” to Clemens’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches (New York: C. H. Webb, 1867), which, much to Clemens’s dismay, she had been reading in December ( L2 , 369–70; for the text of Webb’s “Advertisement,” see ET&S1 , 429).
This fortunate woman, evidently a “sea-Captain’s wife,” has not been further identified (see 17 Jan 69 to OLLclick to open link and CJL, p. 46).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L3 , 38–42; LLMT , 357, brief paraphrase; MTMF , 66, brief quotation.
see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.