Amenia, N. Y., 6th
Jan., Midnight.1
Click to add citation to My Citations.
Well, Mother Dear—
You ought to see Livy & me, now-a-days—you never saw such a serenely satisfied couple of doves in all your life. I spent Jan 1, 2, 3 & 5 there, & left at 8 last night.2 With my vile temper & variable moods, it seems an incomprehensible miracle that we two have been right together in the same house half the time for a year & [a] half, & yet have never had a cross word, or a lover’s “tiff,” or a pouting spell, or a misunderstanding, or the faintest shadow of a jealous suspicion. Now isn’t that absolutely wonderful? Could I have had such an experience with any other girl on earth? I am perfectly certain I could not. And yet she has attacked my tenderest peculiarities & routed them. She has stopped my drinking, entirely. She has cut down my smoking considerably.3 She has reduced my slang & my [boisterousness ] a good deal. She has exterminated my habit of carrying my hands in my pantaloons pockets, & has otherwise civilized me & well nigh taught me to behave in company. These reforms were calculated to make a man fractious & irritable, but bless you she has a way of instituting them that swindles one into the belief that she is doing him a favor instead of curtailing his freedom & doing him a fatal damage. She is the best girl that ever lived—& you spoke truly a year & four months ago when you said that I was not worthy of her—nor any other man.4 Now that the frenzy, the lunacy of love, has gone by, & I can contemplate her critically as a human being instead of an angel, I see more clearly than ever, & more surely, how excellent she is. I used to say she was faultless (& said it with a suspicion that she had her proper share of faults, only I was too blind to see them,) but I am thoroughly in my right mind, now, & I do maintain in all seriousness, that I can find no fault in her.5 When you come to know her as I do, Mother, you will hold exactly this opinion yourself.
We are to be married on Feb. 2d, instead of the 4th—the latter date was too near the end of the week for Mrs. Langdon’s housekeeping convenience. We shall take the train for Buffalo after the marriage, & that will constitute our bridal trip. We shall not be likely to stir from that town for several months, for neither of us are fond of traveling. I doubt if we ever stir again, except to visit home & you. I lecture no more after this [ sa season ], unless dire necessity shall compel me. My book is waltzing me out of debt so fast that I shan’t owe any man a cent by this time next year. By the 1st of February I will have paid $15,000 out of my own pocket on two or three indebtednesses, & shall still have since the first of last August, & shall still have three or four thousand left in bank—for a rainy day. It has been quite a [money-making ] year to me—most of it came from the book—I have not drawn a penny from the Express.6 I have been able to give my mother pay my mother & sister a thousand dollars during the last two months. And I got my life insured for $10,000 for my mother’s benefit.7
I mean to write another book during the summer. This one has proven such a surprising success that I feel encouraged. We keep six steam presses & a paper mill going night & day on it, & still we can’t catch up on the orders. The gross sales of the book, reached for 27 days during December, amounted to $50,000. (That is 12,000 copies,) (Various styles of binding—we sell about as many at $5 apiece as at $3.50.)8
Greer is Blucher. The oyster-brained ass, couldn’t he tell that? Now what the mischief did any banker, or any banker’s daughter, want with that innocent?9
You must come to the wedding—so, that ends that question. I want to see you—& we want to see you. I love you & honor you, & you shan’t be burned up on a funeral pyre at all, for we are not done with you, & never shall be. Bring our Severances along, too—I want to see Solon & I want to see Mrs. Solon, too, & right badly. Tell Solon I am not “trembling in my boots,” & I feel entirely able to “bear it like a man,” & glad of the chance.10
(Yes, I think of getting one more satchel, for my trousseau is pretty voluminous—I have bought more high-toned [store-clothes ] than any other man has got. But you ought to see Livy’s harness—Oh my! And wasn’t it a lively bill the Governor had to [ fot foot ]? But you never saw such a good father as Mr. L. He insisted on going around day after day, shopping with Livy in New York, [& night ] he would go through the list & check off the purchases & straighten everything up—& when dresses arrived even at 11 at night he would not go to bed till he had opened all the packages & seen that everything was right—took a living interest in the whole trousseau business from beginning to end, & [so ] touched Livy with this loving unbending to her little womanly affairs that she could not tell me of it without moistened eyes.11
I saw Charley in Philadelphia & played some billiards & had some talk with him, but some strange instinct kept arresting my tongue, & I actually was with him two hours & yet never asked him one question about any of you—never even mentioned any of you—& yet you were all in my mind from the first to the last. I am glad, now, that I was silent. Long ago you told me enough to lead me to fear that the matter had gone as far as it ever [would. If ] it were me I could not live. It is awful.12
I send a world of love to Mollie my darling, & to all of you.13 Tell Mollie I shall come & see her yet, & bring her new sister along—a young woman whom Mollie will delight to love.
Good-bye. Always your loving cub—
Sam.
P. S.—I always write to Livy in this way—in my note-book, after I go to bed.14
(over.)
P. S.—My widowed sister & her young daughter Annie Moffett, are coming to the exhibi coming to the [ execu ] to the wedding, & I have written her to be sure to stop over a whole 24 hours at Chicago & rest, & another 24 at Cleveland. Told her to stop at the Kennard15 & send her card to the Herald & the Cleveland Mother she has heard so much about will call on her, & maybe come along with her. My sister should reach Elmira about Jan. 25. But I didn’t know about your going to Norwich (what Norwich?—there’s a 1,000 of them) after Allie.16 So I guess you will not be in Cleveland when she comes cavorting through there.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
On 4 January Clemens traveled with Olivia thirty miles east of Elmira to
Owego, where he lectured. They returned together that night (10 Jan 70 to OLL
[1st]).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 3
See L2, 284, 354; L3, 436; and 13 Jan 70 to OLL.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 4
That is, in early September 1868, just after Olivia rejected
Clemens’s first proposal (L2, 249 n. 1).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 6
These “two or three indebtednesses” included
$12,500 owed to Jervis Langdon and $10,000 owed to
Thomas A. Kennett for the purchase of Kennett’s share in the
Buffalo Express in mid-August 1869. They probably
also included $1,000 owed to Elisha Bliss for an 1868 advance
against royalties on The Innocents Abroad. In
November 1869 Clemens’s plan for the larger debts was to pay
them off “within two years” (L3, 387), so by his current reckoning he was ten months ahead of
schedule. But his known assets and income between August 1869 and
February 1870 were not quite adequate to this accelerated rate
($15,000 in six months’ time). In August, he had
about $3,000 in two cash accounts (one with Charles Langdon,
one with Slote, Woodman and Company). Between August and February Innocents royalties were about $7,400;
the Express paid him about $2,500; the
lecture tour brought another $2,500 in profit (estimated at
half the fees on fifty lectures at $100 each), for a total of
$15,400. The advance against royalties doubtless claimed
$1,000 of that, but Clemens did not finally pay down these
debts as rapidly as anticipated here. He did, in fact, draw
$567.09 in cash from his Express
earnings in 1869, and his income from royalties proved somewhat less
than he was counting on (L2, 176–77; L3, 43, 261 n. 2, 294 n. 2, 384 n. 9, 385–86,
483–86; 2 and 3 Mar 70 to Langdon, n. 4;
SLC’s account statements from the Express Printing Company
for 9 Aug 69–1 Jan 70 and 1 Jan–19 May 70, from
Charles J. Langdon dated 9 Aug 69, and from Slote, Woodman and Company
for 1 Jan 70, all in CU-MARK; Hirst 1975, 314–16; 28 Jan 70 to
Bliss).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 7
Jane Clemens recorded payments from her son of $25 on 24
November, 1 or 2 December, and 18 December 1869, as well as
$500 on 6 January 1870. Clemens also sent $100 to
pay Pamela and Annie Moffett’s rail fares to Elmira (for his
wedding), for a total of $675. In November 1869 he had paid
$200 to have his life insured (JLC, 4; 15 Jan 70 to PAM; L3, 387).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 8
Bliss gave these figures to Clemens as he passed through Hartford on 27
December (L3, 439–40). Mrs. Fairbanks used one of them in the
Cleveland Herald of 10 January: “The
sale of Mark Twain’s new book, ‘The New
Pilgrim’s Progress,’ amounted to
$5[0],000 in December. Mark is making
some progress toward a fortune” (“Personal
Intelligence,” 4).
when The Innocents Abroad came
out she was delighted with it, but she did feel badly over the
transparent caricature of one of the passengers. Later, when this
man came to see her, she could hardly bear to go downstairs, and
when he began talking about Mark’s book her heart was in
her mouth. But he went on: “The only thing I
didn’t like was ——” and
he mentioned the character that was clearly himself. But he went on:
“That was so obviously meant
for——” and he mentioned a fellow
passenger. Mrs. Fairbanks told Annie: “The next time I
saw Mark I said, ‘Mark, if I’m in that book I
want to know it!’” (MTBus, 108) Greer’s connection with “any
banker, or any banker’s daughter” has not been
documented.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 9
In March 1869 Clemens told Mrs. Fairbanks that Frederick H. Greer, from
Boston, was the prototype of the “Interrogation
Point,” described in Innocents as
“young and green, and not bright, not learned and not wise.
He will be, though, some day, if he recollects the answers to all his
questions.” But the engraving of this character resembled
Charles Langdon (chapter 7; L2, 386; L3, 169). Mr. Blucher was characterized as “confiding,
good-natured, unsophisticated, companionable; but he was not a man to
set the river on fire” (chapter 2). Evidently both
descriptions were apt, except to Greer himself. Mrs. Fairbanks told
Pamela and Annie Moffett that
Click to add citation to My Citations. 10
See 8
Jan 70 to OLL (1st), n. 4.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 11
See L3, 406 n. 1.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 12
Twenty-two-year-old Alice Holmes Fairbanks (Mrs. Fairbanks’s
step-daughter) and Charles B. Stilwell had broken their engagement.
Clemens probably saw Stilwell while in Philadelphia to lecture on 7
December, or while passing through the city at the end of the month
(L2, 132 n. 10; L3, 485).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 13
That is, in addition to Alice and Mrs. Fairbanks, to: Frank Fairbanks,
twenty-four, Mrs. Fairbanks’s stepson; Abel Fairbanks, her
husband; and Charles Mason and Mary Paine (Mollie) Fairbanks, their
children, fourteen and thirteen, respectively (Lorenzo Sayles Fairbanks, 552).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 14
Clemens wrote eight such letters to Olivia in late 1869, and two to
members of his family (L3, 381–82 n. 1, 542–47). In 1870 he used
notebook pages for his letters to Olivia on 8 January (1st), 10
January (both), 13 January, and 14 January.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 15
Cleveland’s Kennard House had opened in 1866 and was
patronized by “statesmen, theatrical artists, and
prominent businessmen” (Rose, 335).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 16
Norwich, New York, where Mrs. Fairbanks’s cousin William
N. Mason lived. Clemens had stayed with Mason in December 1868
(L2, 326). See 15 Jan 70 to PAM, n. 2.
Source text(s):MS, Huntington Library, San Marino (CSmH, call no. HM 14259). This letter, written on seven leaves torn
from a pocket notebook, was the first of six surviving letters (five of them to
Olivia Langdon) written on notebook pages in 1870. The notebook, larger than the
one Clemens had used for letters in 1869, no longer survives (see p. 7, n.
14).
Previous publication:
L4, 3–7; MTMF, 112–17.
Provenance:see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
boisterousness • [possibly ‘bousisterousness’]
sa season • saeason
money-making • money-|making
store-clothes • store-|clothes
fot foot • fotot [‘t’ partly formed]
& night • [sic]
so • s so [corrected miswriting]
would. If • would.— | If
execu • execu- |
