To Olivia L. Langdon
8 May 1869 • New York, N.Y.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00291)

N. Y. 8th .—

It has been a long, long time since I saw you, little darling. When they handed Charley a letter last night, my heart gave a great bound, for some instinct suggested that it might be from you & contain a postscript for [me. ]—but it was not so. It was only a hardware letter, I suppose—at any rate it was not from Livy, & did not even mention murmur the music of her name.1 But tonight at 9 oclock I shall hear from the darling, in Hartford—& as the [Bliss’s] will have gone home to supper for the night by that time, I mean to telegraph them, presently, to send my letters to the hotel,2 so that they may be there when I arrive.

(I love you, Livy.) Charley got up at the usual hour & went to his doctor’, but I lay abed till 12 (it is 20 minutes after 12, now,) & I feel pretty [brisk] this morning & shall feel still brisker when I shall have had my breakfast. Charley & I went to Booth’, last night, to see Othello, the great miscegenationist. The acting was good, of course, Edwin Adams playing Othello, Booth Iago, & Booth’ affianced, Miss Mc Vicker, Desdemona. And I never saw such noble scenery in my life before—the [sunsets] & sunrises behind the hills, with little shreds of tinted & silvered cloud floating in the dreamy mid-air, counterfeited nature rarely. As I have said, the acting was good.3 I think less of Othello, now, than I ever did before. I wouldn’t be jealous of my wife. And I cannot approve of his friend Iago. I begin to think Iago was a villain. I am sure that much of his conduct was questionable, & some little of it open to the grave suspicion. I believe Desdemona to have been foully murdered. They have [added] added a good deal to the interest, as well as the naturalness of this play by having a jury sit on Desdemona & return a [t] Verdict that she “came to her death from [ woul wounds] wounds inflicted by some blunt instrument, supposed to have been a pillow, in the hands of a party by the name of Othello, husband of the deceased.” And with this the play closed.4

My dearie, you will scold, maybe, but we didn’t get to Mrs. Brooks’ yesterday, as we had intended to do. We were at Dan’ store & the Tribune office till 2 P.M., & then it seemed useless to go all the way to 53d street when the chances were we would find her absent driving in the park.5 And we didn’t go to Beecher’ church6 for several reasons, about the strongest of which was, that other things intervened.

I am stupid. I am [hungry] (but not much.) I will to breakfast. I kiss my darling & bless her.

Good-bye

Sam

Miss Olivia L. [Langdon] | Elmira | New [York] [return address:] st. nicholas hotelbroadwaynew york [hotel stamp:] st. nicholas hotel,new [york. may 8 ] [postmarked:] new york[may 84 p.m.] [docketed by OLL:] 61st

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Accompanied by Charles Langdon, Clemens left Elmira for New York City on 5 May. Both men checked into the St. Nicholas Hotel on the following day (“Personal,” New York Evening Mail , 7 May 69, 3; “Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express , 7 May 69, 3). Langdon, a partner in the Elmira hardware firm of Ayrault, Rose and Company, was in New York to receive medical treatment for an unidentified ailment (L2 , 342 n. 3). Clemens ended his seven-week stay in Elmira partly to work on his book in Hartford, and partly because Mary Mason Fairbanks, Mrs. Langdon, and even his own mother had questioned the propriety of his staying under the same roof with his fiancée (see 15 Apr 69 and 10 May 69, both to Fairbanks).

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2 The Allyn House.

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3 Booth’ Theatre, at Twenty-third Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, was opened by renowned actor Edwin Booth (1833–93) on 3 February 1869. It boasted luxurious seating for seventeen hundred (with standing room for three hundred more), elaborate studios for creating the kind of stage scenery Clemens described, and complex machinery for changing sets during a performance, including a thirty-two-foot-deep pit into which an entire set could be lowered out of sight. Called “the stateliest, the handsomest, and the best appointed structure of its class that can now be found on the American continent,” the theater remained under Booth’ control until his financial reverses during the panic of 1873 forced him to relinquish it (“The Drama,” New York Tribune , 18 Nov 68, 5,4 Feb 69,5). The production of Othello that Clemens saw on 7 May had opened on 26 April to mixed reviews. The New York Tribune pronounced it “the best representation of a Shakespearean play that has been given here for years,” with Booth himself a “triumphant success,” Edwin Adams (1834–77) a “true work of art,” and Mary McVicker (d. 1881), whom Booth married on 7 June, “sweet and charming.” The New York Herald disagreed, dismissing it as “not a striking performance” and finding Booth perfunctory, Adams “common place,” and McVicker “no Desdemona at all” (“The Drama,” New York Tribune , 28 Apr 69, 5; “Amusements,” New York Herald , 27 Apr 69, 9).

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4 This spurious conclusion was Clemens’ “snapper” to his deadpan account of the plot. No such addition was reported by the reviewers, either of this production or of the one immediately preceding it, with Booth as Othello and Adams as Iago. On the contrary, the New York Tribune remarked that “Mr. Booth’ restorations of the text of ‘Othello’ are numerous and commendable” (“The Drama,” 13 Apr 69, 5).

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5 Slote, Woodman and Company, the blank-book and stationery manufacturing firm co-owned by Daniel Slote, was located at 119 and 121 William Street, at the tip of Manhattan, only a short distance from the New York Tribune offices at 154 Nassau Street. The Brookses’ home—at 675 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Fifty-third Street, a few blocks from Central Park—was an inconvenient distance from both (H. Wilson 1869, 821, 1023). While at the Tribune office, Clemens probably read proof of the “squib” he published in the paper on 8 May (see the next letter, n. 2).

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6 Henry Ward Beecher’ Plymouth Church, in Brooklyn, where the regular Friday evening prayer meeting was held on 7 May (Noyes L. Thompson, 299).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).

Previous publication: L3, 204–206.

Provenance:see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.

Emendations and textual notes:

me. • [deletion implied]

Bliss’s • [sic]

brisk • brishk

sunsets • sun-|sets

added • adde[d] [torn]

t • [partly formed]

woul wounds • woulnds

hungry • [‘un’ conflated]

Langdon • Langdo[n] [torn]

York • Yor[k] [torn]

york. may 8 • [yo] rk. [m] ay 8 [badly inked]

may 8 4 p.m. • may [8] [4] p.m [] [badly inked]