17 and 18 May 1869 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00305)
I can’t resist the temptation to write you a line or two, even though I sneeze myself to death before I get through with it. What Ⓐemendation a bewitching little darling you are, Livy. You were going to come. It seems almost a misfortune that it I wasn’t dangerously sick, so that I might see the dear face again. I Ⓐemendation used to think of sickness with dread—for I always had visions of dreary hospitals—solitude—shut out from friends & the wor great world—dragging, uneventful minutes, hours, weeks—hated faces of hired nurses and harsh physicians—& then an unmourned death, a dog’s burial, and—dissection by the doctors!1explanatory note But with you at the bedside—it seems to me that sickness would be luxury! You are a noble, true-hearted little darling, Livy. And I love you.
The printing is proceeding, & the bright, clean pages look handsome. I sent you to-day a duplicate of the only proofs I have had since those I read when I first arrived here (except one little trifle of a few pages.)
No, I haven’t seen Mr. Beecher.2explanatory note As I passed up the street yesterday, John Day bowed to me from the Allyn House steps, & I returned his salutation, though I did not remember who he was, at first.3explanatory note I didn’t feel like crossing over, & he didn’t, either, & so we both of us didn’t cross of us over at all., Ⓐemendation neither of us which. Somehow that sentence don’t sound right, but I guess you can make it out. Colds always make me stupid & blundersome.
“The little throat trouble that you have is nothing at all serious.” Oh, Livy! You are not doing anything at all for that throat. Now why will you distress me so? That dreaded disease. Livy, do please doctor it until it is entirely cured, just to please me. It is not a trifling sore throat that lasts two weeks. It is the first foot-hold of that awful disease that lasts for life. I lay this thing up against Mrs. Corey & I never will forgive her for it, if one sign or symptom of it is left four days after you get this.4explanatory note It can be cured in that time, with care & attention, if it is not that frightful permanent disease. Up to this time I have prayed night & day like a hypocrite & a liar—for I have thought of that trip every day, & always with a spasm of anger against that woman. I wish she had been in Jericho before she took it into her head to drag you out to that dismal valley & leave you to stare at vacancy & freeze yourself to death for an hour & a quarter while she cavorted through the woods, never caring two cents how you put in the dreary time. Livy, I am angry (but not at you, my precious). You are all good, & true, & generous & forgiving & unselfish—all things that are a glory to womanhood find meet & blend themselves together in the matchless mosaic of your character—& a single day’s health to you is m worth more than the eternal salvation of—— I am just running away with myself. Livy, your inoffensive sore throat is nothing to you, & you can afford to be indifferent about it—but it is misery & death to me—& so, won’t you make a sacrifice for me & doctor it night & day faithfully & without shirking, till it is entirely cured, so that I can breathe again & be at rest? Livy, if you knew how this spectre goads, me, tortures me, you would not be so thoughtless as to be indifferent to it. There—have I hurt her? God forbid that I should ever, by word or deed, hurt you Livy, my beautiful, my pride, my darling. But I am distressed. I never, never will leave you again when you are not well. My conscience upbraided me cruelly when I did leave you so. But you said it was nothing—& you thought it, else you would not have said it; & I believed it, because I would believe your simple word against the oaths of the world. But my mind was full of bodings.
Later in the Evening.—If I can kep keep Ⓐemendation that torturing subject out of my mind, I shall remain in the good humor I am now in. Theodore was just right in that fight, & I am glad he won. We cannot have Mrs. Sue running around town acting Florence Nightingale in a hospital for decayed carpets.5explanatory note {Except it be at the request of Mrs. Corey.}
Mr. Beecher robs himself of the best happiness of his life when he enjoys a pl his pleasures in solitude. What is a splendid sunset worth when there is nobody to see it with you—no sympathetic ear to pour your raptures into? And what is any joy (except the miser’s,) without companionship? And then the glaring wrong of the thing: for Mrs. Beecher shares his sorrows, & this earns the right to share his pleasures. But it seems that when the two are done carrying all the burdens of the day, he has no more use for her—she may sit down in sadness & weariness, while he loses the memory of the drudgery in the happy relief of pleasure. It don’t suit is selfish—though, superbly gifted as he is, let us charitably try to fancy that he don’t know. it. Only, my dear, I will suggest that his heart & his brain would not have been so dull in these matters with his first wife. I think he possesses a very fr Ⓐemendation good brotherly love for his present wife—& you furnish me ample proofs that he possesses nothing more. Therefore, with such a love, let us not expect of his him Ⓐemendation the noble things that are born only of a far higher & sublimer passion. It is the native instinct of our love to have no secrets, no concealments—therefore it is no merit in us to avoid this misfortune of his—we never will have to reason ourselves into doing a thing that necessarily comes natural to us. We shan’t be able to comprehend this thing of having secrets. But the brotherly instinct is to conceal more things than it reveals—nothing but the cold, dismal reasoning faculty can enable Mr. Beecher to change this—& then he will have the corpse of the marital love,—but with no pulse in its temples, no light in its eyes, no tenderness in its heart.6explanatory note
You little rascal, you slurred over Noyes’s names, because you knew very well you didn’t know how to spell it! Never mind, Livy darling, you know your spelling is perfectly safe in my “deluded” eyes, because I love everything you do, whether it be good, bad, or indifferent. Let Mrs. Sue be troubled no more about her memoir. rial. I will write it—(with pleasure, I came near saying, but it seems like rather a doubtful compliment, & so I withhold the words.) I will write it, & I will do it do it with such grace & such felicity that the ghost of the late William Lord Noyes shall tear its filmy garments with envy & chagrin.7explanatory note I will put in tasty congratulations from each member of the family, & from all the admirals & brigadier generals, & even from the President, the Emperor of the French, & Queen Victoria—for both of you—both of you in the same volume—& I will write all these felicitations myself—every one of them—so that I shall know that they are just exactly as they ought to be. I’ And I’ll have some poetry in—some of those sublime conundrums from Young’s Night Thoughts8explanatory note which only Livy can guess the cipher out the meaning of, & some dark & bloody mystery out of the Widow Browning9explanatory note—& some also some poetry of my own composition— Ⓐemendation &construction— between the three I guess we’ll “hive” the gentle reader. And I shall have in a lot of smart remarks made by both of you when you were teething (after the “load of hay” pattern) & I shall get up these remarks myself, so as to be sure that they are not insipid like the late Wm. L.’s, (which I regard as altogether “too thin.”) And I will put speeches into your maturer mouths which shall astonish the nations.—profound remarks upon agriculture, commerce, diplomacy, war, chemistry, afghans for babies at $15 a day,10explanatory note geog geology Ⓐemendation, theology, cut-throat,11explanatory note painting, sculpture, niggers, poetry, politics,—everything that erudition loves & intellectuality revels in. And there shall be a picture of both of you two & Jim for a frontispiece, with your autographs underneath, which I will write myself, so that people can read them. And I will have pictures of the Spaulding girls (together with their regrets,) & pictures of Mr. & Mrs. Langdon & Hattie & the mocking-bird in a group, & a portrait of the late Jep engaged in his favorite study (landscape gardening,)—& toward the end a handsome likeness of your grandmother, along with her letter announcing her exasperation at the sad news. And away over at the extreme back-end Ⓐemendation of the book I shall wind up with a weeping & disconsolate picture of Theodore’s friend, going for the eternal flying with a basket, going for flying arbutus—& “HOOFING IT,” as Charley says.12explanatory note
There you are. I’m no compiler of Wm Lord Noyes bosh. When I gr get Ⓐemendation up memoirs I make the deceased get up too—at least turn over. How many copies do you want issued, young women?
But my dears, it is my fervent hope that I shall be dust spared the sad office I have so banteringly assumed, by being already dust & ashes when “memoirs” of you shall have become possible & proper.
“Lovingly YOUR Ⓐemendation Livy”—the very dearest words to me that ever illuminated paper & gave it a glory as of a vision. How the words seem to nestle up to me!—& put arms about me, & a loved head upon my shoulder, & the hymning of the angels in my heart! You are my Livy—& you I am grateful that it is so, beyond all power of lan Ⓐemendation speech to express—& I pray God you may remain my Livy always.
I secured the rooms for you—& felt all the time that I was doing a thing that somehow would prevent my seeing you. And so I was not cheerful over it. But I must see you. There are only one or two suits of rooms on the second floor (all stores on first, you know,) & those are occupied by permanent families; but they will dig out a family, or, failing that, give you their best on the 3d floor.13explanatory note
I haven’t half finished my letter, darling, but I suppose I n ought to quit for tonight & snort & sneeze a while.
Give my love to all the household gods & goddesses. Good-night, little darling—blessings, & kisses & pleasant dreams.
on back of page 1:
Livy, I love you! And I’ve got a perfectly awful cold. Took to my bed in pure desperation to-day. Would I was afraid to stay there, though—had to get up & attend to business, anyhow. I not Ⓐemendation going to take the slightest care of this cold till your throat is well. So there now! I shall take off my underclothes to-night; & tomorrow I shall not wear any socks. I will not get well till you do. So there now, again!14explanatory note
I love you, Livy.
Miss Olivia L. Langdon | Elmira | New York. postmarked: hartford conn. may 18 docketed by OLL: 73rd and in pencil: The removal rendered unnecesary
A disturbing prospect indeed for someone who, at the age of eleven, had witnessed the autopsy performed on his father (see Inds , 105, 286).
Apparently Olivia had advised Clemens that the Reverend Thomas K. Beecher was, or was about to be, in Hartford.
The “awful disease” was diphtheria, which threatened Olivia more than once in later years. Mrs. Corey probably was Ella J. Corey, who first met Olivia in 1858 and remained her lifelong friend (Ella J. Corey to SLC, 23 Oct 1904, CU-MARK).
Nothing is known of the enterprise, presumably charitable, which seemed threatening to Susan Crane’s health.
Thomas K. Beecher’s first wife, Olivia Day (1826–53), died less than two years after their marriage. In 1857 Beecher married her cousin and closest friend, Julia Jones (1826–1905). The Reverend Annis Ford Eastman, one of Beecher’s associate pastors at Park Congregational Church recalled: “‘We were made one,’ Mr. Beecher said long afterward, ‘first in love of Livy, and then in grief for her.’” But, Eastman observed:
It was a strange marriage for the girl who had been sought by so many others of high character and unusual gifts, strange also for the man who all his life long frankly declared that in Livy’s death he died to this world. A common sorrow at first, then a common work for the world, drew these two in a union which, through forty-three years, blessed the world as few of the most auspicious marriages have done. The home of these two became a school of virtue, a living illustration of the power of true religion to harmonize warring temperaments, to make the peace of God rule where many of the natural conditions of concord were lacking. Nothing was greater in the lives of these two intense and contradictory natures than their triumphant struggle to keep the unity of the spirit; their success was due to the inherent unselfishness of both. None of those “disobediences” on Mrs. Beecher’s part, which she used to bewail even while she held to their necessity, were for selfish ends; none were prompted by a woman’s petty vanity or pique, all were in the service of some moral ideal. And on Mr. Beecher’s part, though he used humorously to say that he was as well as a man could be who had been hitched to a steam engine for so many years, there was always the most generous appreciation of her share in all that he had done and become. (Annis Ford Eastman, 16, 35–36)
(“Nook Farm Genealogy,” 7, 12; Max Eastman, 620; Jerome and Wisbey, 116.)
Noyes (1846–66), of Corning, New York, about ten miles from Elmira, had died suddenly of “congestion of the brain” just before his twentieth birthday. His grandfather, Thomas, and his father, Henry Babcock Noyes, were partners of Sylvester G. Andrus and Jervis Langdon in the Elmira lumber firm of Andrus, Langdon and Company, which was founded in 1845 and dissolved in 1855 (Corning Journal: “Died,” 15 Mar 66, no page; “Henry B. Noyes. ..,” 1 Aug 89, 3; Elmira Saturday Evening Review: “In Memoriam,” 13 Aug 70, 5). Susan Crane, who like Olivia had known Noyes as a child, had evidently seen a memoir of him that moved her to wonder how her own memorial might read, prompting Clemens’s facetious promise to write it. Olivia’s note on the envelope of this letter suggests that Noyes’s family was contemplating reinterment at this time.
Edward Young’s lengthy poem The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, originally published 1742–45.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was never a widow; Robert Browning, who died in 1889, outlived her by twenty-eight years. Clemens liked to pretend that he found Mrs. Browning’s poetry mystifying (see 12 Jan 69 to OLL and CJLclick to open link, p. 26).
Possibly another allusion to Susan Crane’s charitable work with “decayed carpets.”
A name applied to a number of games of chance, but especially, at this time, to forms of poker and euchre ( OED , 4:182–83).
In addition to Mr. and Mrs. Jervis Langdon, the identifiable individuals mentioned in this passage are: Clara and Alice Spaulding, Harriet Lewis, Theodore Crane, and Charles Langdon. Jep, evidently banished for destroying the Langdon garden, seems to have been a dog, whereas Jim was a horse (see 12 May 69 to OLLclick to open link, p. 221).
The Langdons had asked Clemens to reserve rooms for them in Hartford for their June visit to attend the wedding of Alice Hooker. Since he here indicates that the arrangements might keep him from seeing Olivia, it is likely that the family had decided, for decorum’s sake, that he should not stay at the same hotel with them.
Clemens must have added these closing remarks on 18 May, probably just before mailing the letter, since enough time had evidently passed for his “Monday Night” anxiety about Olivia to become mere playful concern.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L3 , 239–244; Wecter 1947, 68–69, with omissions; LLMT , 93–97.
see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.