To Olivia L. Langdon
18 and 19 December 1869 • Boston, Mass.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00391)

Boston, Dec. 18 PM

Sweetheart, I wrote you this morning, & dated the letter [ yesterday. So] you must never pay any attention to my dates—they are hardly ever right.1

I have a letter from Mrs. Barstow in which she says Joe Goodman has gone to New York & will go from there to Elmira. She does not mention Joe’s wife—& so Mrs. G. is not with him. I am glad.

I have no doubt Joe has already gone to Elmira, but I do not know whether he has or not, & so I hardly know how to get an invitation to him to send his card to your home. I must think up some way of managing it.2

And right away I will write to the Alta for those two letters for my darling. I will not neglect it longer, Livy dear.3

19th—I haven’t anything to write, to-day, except that I love you Livy—nothing to write but that——except that my breast is better, nearly well, in fact, the soreness in my throat is gone, & amounted to nothing in the first place—I have staid in my room all day long & think I shall be entirely ready for the stump again to-morrow night.

Last night I went to bed at 8 o’clock, & Gov. Hawley came in shortly after (we were at the “Burd dinner” during the afternoon)4 & sat reading till a late hour, & [ them then] Lyman Beecher came in & I made him stay till 1 o’clock, for I had gone to bed to rest & read, not sleep. Lyman’s mother is at the point of death.5

Kittie Barstow wants me to write to some of the Senators to get a place in the Treasury clerkships for her well-meaning but useless husband—& I shall do it, though it is fearfully disagreeable to help to make one’s government a [poorhouse] for idle & worthless people like Billy Barstow. I shall ask the favor as a kindness to his wife, & not as a recognition of any sort of merit in him.6

Goodbye, my idol, & God bless you & protect you. I shall see you once more, twelve days from now.

Sam.

[in ink:] Miss Olivia L. Langdon | Elmira | N. Y. [postmarked:] [boston mass. ]dec. [20.] 3 a.m. [docketed by OLL:] [158th | 159th] 18th Dec 7

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Presumably Olivia had remarked, in a 17 December letter, on Clemens’s erroneous dating of his letter of 15 and 16 December. His misdated morning letter of 18 December was the second of two missing at this point (docket numbers 157 and 158). The other probably was a letter of 17 December.

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2 Goodman had left California by overland rail on 1 December, bound for Washington, D.C., New York, and then Europe for several months. Arriving in Washington by 8 or 9 December, he evidently visited his and Clemens’s old Nevada friends, Kate D. Barstow and her husband, William, at their home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, near the capital. Although the Langdons would be meeting Goodman for the first time, they may have corresponded with him after Clemens offered him as a character reference in December 1868 (L2, 358). Goodman and Clemens were about to see each other as well—possibly in New York in late December or in New York or Elmira in early January 1870—as indicated by the following commentary on Goodman’s relationship with his wife, Ellen (1837?–93), which Clemens sent to Olivia shortly afterward:

I plainly see, now, why Joe Goodman gradually lost all interest in his poetry (he was a born poet) & finally lost all ambition in that direction & ceased to write. The one whose applause would have been dearer to him & more potent than that of all the world beside, could not help him, or encourage him or spur him, because she was far below his intellectual level & could not appreciate the work of his brain or feel an interest in it. When I told him you took care of my sketches for me & listened with a lively interest to any manuscript of mine before it was printed, he dropped an unconscious remark that was so full of pathos—so fraught with “It might have been”—that my heart ached for him. He could have been so honored of men, & so loved by all who for whom poetry has a charm, but for the dead weight o & clog of a wife upon his winged genius, of a wife whose soul could have no companionship save with the things of the dull earth. (10 Jan 70 to OLL [2nd of 2], CU-MARK, published in part in MFMT, 209–10)

(“For Europe,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 2 Dec 69, 2; 21 Dec 69 to OLL; Goodman, 5.)

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3 In pursuing her “commission” to collect and save articles by Clemens (see 28 Feb 69 to OLL), Olivia had asked for his two 1869 letters to the San Francisco Alta California. Published on 25 July and 1 August, they are his last known contributions to the paper (SLC 1869 [MT00764], 1869 [MT00767]). In January 1870, in response to prompting from Olivia, Clemens again promised to provide her with the second of them (10 Jan 70 to OLL [2nd of 2], CU-MARK, published in part in MFMT, 209–10). The fragment of it that survives in the Mark Twain Papers may have been from the clipping that she eventually received.

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4 The dinner Clemens attended with Joseph R. Hawley, former governor of Connecticut, was in honor of “the Sage of Walpole,” Francis W. Bird (1809–94). A Republican with a strong anti-slavery record, Bird had been denied re-election to the Massachusetts legislature on 2 November as a result of “a split in the republican ranks on prohibition and local issues.” He had opposed absolute prohibition because, as he told the Lyceum Association of East Walpole on 15 December: “He must be very blind to the signs of the times who believes it possible to sustain and enforce the present Prohibitory Law” (“The State Election,” Boston Advertiser, 4 Nov 69, 1; “Walpole,” Boston Evening Transcript, 16 Dec 69, 4; “Francis W. Bird,” New York Times, 24 May 94, 4).

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5 Katherine Edes Beecher, mother of Lyman Beecher (see 9 Nov 69 to PAM, n. 6), died in 1870.

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6 Clemens had already done a kindness for Kate D. Barstow and soon wrote at least one letter on behalf of her husband (see 7 Sept 69 to Bliss [two letters] and 25 Dec 69 to OLL).

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7 Clemens’s morning letter of 18 December, no longer extant, must have reached Olivia after the present one, occasioning her revision of this docket number.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK); written on three leaves of the same notebook paper as 30, 31 October, 1 November to Olivia Langdon.

Previous publication: L3, 431–433; LLMT, 360, brief paraphrase.

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.

Emendations and textual notes:

yesterday. So • yesterday.— |So

them then • themn

poorhouse • poor- |house

boston mass. • [] oston [mass]. [badly inked]

20. • [2]0. [badly inked]

158th | 159th • 1589 th | 159th [revision rewritten for clarity]