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Mark Twain, A Literary Life. Everett Emerson
Читать онлайн.Название Mark Twain, A Literary Life
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isbn 9781512821550
Автор произведения Everett Emerson
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Take these tracts. This one, entitled, “The Doomed Drunkard, or the Wages of Sin,” teaches how the insidious monster that lurks in the wine-cup, drags souls to perdition. This one, entitled, “Deuces and, or the Gamester’s Last Throw,” tells how the almost ruined gambler, playing at the dreadful game of poker, made a ten strike & a spare, & thus encouraged, drew two cards & pocketed the deep red; urged on by the demon of destruction, he ordered it up & went alone on a double run of eight, with two for his heels, & then, just as fortune seemed at last to have turned in his favor, his opponent coppered the ace & won. The fated gamester blew his brains out & perished. Ah, poker is a dreadful, dreadful game. You will see in this book how well our theological students are qualified to teach understandingly all classes that come within their reach. Gamblers’ souls are worthy to be saved, & so the holy students even acquaint themselves with the science & technicalities of their horrid games in order to be able to talk to them for the saving of their souls in language which they are accustomed to.
The census-taker has had enough and makes a quick departure.24 But Mark Twain, who saw his own future in the East, already sensed such brazen irreverence was not likely to advance his career: “Mamie Grant” was not offered for publication.
Arriving in New York on July 29, Clemens once again benefited from Anson Burlingame’s assistance, and with much help from him and his staff a piece appeared on the front page of the New York Tribune of August 4, “The Treaty with China.” More significantly, when he visited Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York, that summer, he promptly fell in love. Very likely Burlingame had something to do with his interest in the Langdons, for it was Burlingame who had told him, “Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character: always climb.” If it is not clear that the Langdons were superior in intellect and character, they were certainly superior socially. Clemens extended his visit and was a house guest from August 21 to September 8, during which time he proposed marriage but met discouragement. Olivia’s father, Jervis Langdon, had become wealthy chiefly from the coal business. His business, J. Langdon and Company, included as a partner both his son, Charles Langdon, and his son-in-law, Theodore W. Crane, who had married Jervis’s adopted daughter, Susan. In antebellum days the Langdons had been dedicated abolitionists and had assisted escaping slaves by means of the “Underground Railroad.” Among others, they had assisted Frederick Douglass while he was a fugitive. Clemens now became a frequent visitor to Elmira, a city of some 15,000 people just south of the Finger Lakes area of central New York. The Langdons were in many ways the kind of people whom Mark Twain had been satirizing: distinctly genteel and respectable. They were devout churchgoers whose minister, Thomas Beecher, was a member of the noted Beecher family.
Olivia, twenty-two when she met thirty-two-year-old Samuel Clemens, had formerly been an invalid as the result of severe back pains. She was unable to walk for some time, but by early 1867 she was much improved. It took a great deal of persistence on Clemens’s part to persuade her family that he was “respectable”—a very convincing case could have been made that he was not—and to persuade Olivia to accept him.25 When he could not be in her company, he wrote to her nearly every day, with the result that by the end of November they were “provisionally” engaged. Readers of the letters to Olivia find someone quite different from the person presented heretofore in these pages. Specifically, the letter-writer thought that he needed to become a Christian in order to win Olivia, and after a great deal of mental effort, he was able to write to her mother on February 13,1869, “I now claim to be a Christian.”
Clemens had several occasions to visit Hartford to see his publisher; there he discovered the huckleberry. The little-known passage in which he announces this discovery is in his best humorous style.
I never saw any place before where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here. I do not know which has the ascendency. Possibly the huckleberries, in their season, but the morality holds out the longest. The huckleberries are in season now. They are a new beverage to me. This is my first acquaintance with them, and certainly it is a pleasant one. They are excellent. I had always thought a huckleberry was something like a turnip. On the contrary, they are no larger than buckshot. They are better than buckshot, though, and more digestible.26
Strange that Mark Twain was to use the name of a berry he discovered in Hartford for a character intimately associated with his boyhood in Missouri and worth noting that from the beginning he linked the berry with moral issues.
In the Spirit of the Times for November 7,1868, one of his funniest pieces yet written made its appearance, though he did not select it for republication in his American collections. It shows his ability to make much of little on the subject of the “Private Habits of Horace Greeley.” While expressing admiration for the eminent man, he manages to find a way to make much good-natured fun. He notes, for example, that Greeley “snores awfully.” “In a moment of irritation, once, I was rash enough to say I would never sleep with him until he broke himself of the unfortunate habit. I have kept my word with bigoted and unwavering determination.”27
Suggestive as an indication of how Clemens was sensing his uncertain identity is an amusing sketch he called “A Mystery,” published on November 16, 1868, in the Cleveland Herald (partly owned by Mary Fairbanks’s husband), in which he tells how he has been burdened by a double who runs up costly hotel bills in the name of Mark Twain and then absconds, gets “persistently and eternally drunk,” and even imitates Mark Twain in presenting himself as a lecturer, with his topic “The Moral Impossibility of Doughnuts.” A few of the double’s characteristics suggest that he represents the Mark Twain of the West: “It is a careless, free and easy Double. It is a double which don’t care whether school keeps or not, if I may use such an expression.” “A Mystery” demonstrates that just ten days before his provisional engagement, and probably while he was a guest in Mother Fairbanks’s home, Clemens was expressing sorrow over the demise of his fresher, freer side.28
In the fall of 1868, Clemens worked on his book in Hartford, where he was pleased to meet the Rev. Joseph Twichell, who was to have a role in Clemens’s marriage and become a longtime friend. Clemens also gave some time to the lecture circuit. He took on the aggressive James Redpath of Boston as his booking agent; Redpath scheduled forty engagements at one hundred dollars each.29 Mark Twain’s topic was announced as “The American Vandal Abroad,” permitting him to draw on the whole range of his experiences in Europe and the Holy Land and making use of his book manuscript. He portrayed “that class of traveling Americans who are not elaborately educated, cultivated, refined, and gilded and filigreed with the ineffable graces of the first society.” When he characterized the vandal as “always self-possessed, always untouched, unabashed—even in the presence of the Sphinx,”30 it might be said he was making fun of himself. The tour lasted till early March and provided him some “eight or nine thousand dollars,” but expenses were so high that in June he told his mother that he had “less than three thousand six hundred dollars in [the] bank.” He had been able to visit Elmira from time to time and even to lecture there. The final revisions of The Innocents Abroad were made while Clemens was courting Olivia Langdon, who helped with the proofreading and began her long career as his editor. It was for her, for his fellow voyager Mrs. Fairbanks, and for the genteel audience they represented that Mark Twain composed passages of sentimental rhetoric, such as the descriptions of the Sphinx and of the Sea of Galilee at night.
Now Clemens needed to concentrate on establishing his relationship with Olivia and with her parents. By late November