black [sic] hair leaked out of a battered old slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance.4
Another sketch of a devil-may-care Clemens is provided by a journalist who visited him in his Washington room and later reported in the New York Evening Post on “How ‘Innocents Abroad’ Was Written.”
The little drum stove was full of ashes, running over on the zinc sheet; the bed seemed to be unmade for a week, the slops not having been carried out for a fortnight, the room foul with tobacco smoke, the floor, dirty enough to begin with, was littered with newspapers, from which Twain had cut his letters…. And there was tobacco, and tobacco everywhere. One thing, there were no flies. The smoke killed them, and I am now surprised that the smoke did not kill me too.5
Expecting the experience in the nation’s capital to be “better than lecturing for $50. a night for a Literary Society in Chicago & paying my own expenses” (as he wrote to his old friend Frank Fuller), he spent the winter in Washington, where in addition to his work as private secretary for Senator Stewart, he gave a lecture on his trip abroad, “The Frozen Truth.” His familiarity with the political scene was to prove useful in the writing of a novel. He also gave a humorous account of his Washington activities in “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship.”6 Continuing to act as a journalist, he made the New York Tribune office in Washington his headquarters. By December 4 he was writing a new series of letters for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, eleven letters in all, the last dated March 2, 1868. He identified himself in a letter to Mrs. Fairbanks as a “Tribune ‘occasional,’ Alta ‘special,’ “with “propositions from the Herald.” For the Alta he wrote fourteen letters, the earliest on the day after his arrival in New York, later ones in July 1868, and two in July 1869. He was soon to begin a series of letters for the Chicago Republican as well as some for the New York Herald.7 He was open to anything, for he was by now a highly ambitious journalist who could augment his income on the lecture platform. The successful Western journalist was becoming a successful Eastern one. His trip abroad had cured his depression, but it had not yet changed his life.
What he wrote is worth describing as a way of indicating his literary personality at this time, especially his little-known letters to the Enterprise. They are much better than the letters written at the same time for the Alta. According to his first letter, “To write ‘EDS. ENTERPRISE’ seems a good deal like coming home again.” Mark Twain is full of admiration for Washington, particularly the Capitol, which he has examined several times, “almost to worship it, for surely it must be the most exquisitely beautiful edifice that exists on earth to-day”8—this from his vantage point as recent world traveler. He is soon exploring political corruption and problems of poverty in New York. After describing life in a tenement, the struggles of a sixty-year-old ex-circus clown, now a “rag-picker and a searcher after old bones and broken bottles,” and the plight of poor little girls who nevertheless enjoy showing off their wretched “rusty rag dolls,” he presents the lessons he has learned about the possibilities of political action to redress social injustice.
In this city, with its scores of millionaires, there are to-day a hundred thousand men out of employment. It is an item of threatening portent. Many apprehend bread riots, and certainly there is a serious danger that they may occur. If this army of men had a leader, New York would be in an unenviable situation. It has been proposed in the Legislature to appropriate $500,000 to the relief of the New York poor, but of course the thing is cried down by every body—the money would never get further than the pockets of a gang of thieving politicians. They would represent the “poor” to the best of their ability, and there the State’s charity would stop.9
The longer he made Washington his headquarters, the more disenchanted Clemens became. In particular, he found the Democratic Party thoroughly corrupt, as he reported in a piece he wrote for the New York Tribune, “The White House Funeral.” Now identifying himself with both the Republican Party and the North, he satirized Andrew Johnson by providing his imagined farewell address: “My great deeds speak for themselves. I vetoed the Reconstruction Acts; I vetoed the Freedman’s Bureau; I vetoed civil liberty;… I vetoed everything & everybody that the malignant Northern hordes approved; I hugged traitors to my bosom;… I smiled upon the Ku-Klux;… I rescued the bones of the patriot martyr, Booth.”10
In the letters that he wrote for the Chicago Republican in January and February, Mark Twain worked hard at being funny. Valentine’s Day, he explained in one letter, has special meaning for him. “For the last sixty years I have never seen this day approach without emotion.” He is moved by the valentines he receives, especially those intended “to conceal the real passion that is consuming the young women who send them.” One such reads in part: “SIR: Our metallic burial cases have taken the premium at six State Fairs in this country, and also at the great Paris Exposition. Parties who have used them have been in each instance charmed with them. Not one has yet entered a complaint.… Families supplied at reduced rates.” Other “Valentines” received on February 14 deal with a “patent Cancer-Eradicator,” a “double-back action, chronometer-balance, incombustible wooden legs,” gravestones, and one “fraught with a world of happiness for me. It—it says: ‘SIR: YOU better pay for your washing. BRIDGET.’”11
Two other pieces from Washington, D.C., are sketches. The earlier, published in the New York Citizen of December 21, 1867, and entitled “The Facts in the Case of the Senate Doorkeeper,” is signed “Mark Twain, Doorkeeper ad interim.” He tells how as doorkeeper he was “snubbed” every time he attempted to speak on the Senate floor. Eventually he was impeached for a variety of causes, among them charging senators fifty cents admission.12 Here the writer posed as what can only be termed an inspired lunatic. In “The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation,” published in the New York Tribune of December 27, 1867, he tells how as secretary of the Senate Committee on Conchology he never enjoyed the courtesy due him from other members of the cabinet.13 Again it is the inspired idiot who writes. This persona, in which the writer presented himself as a humorist and nothing more, suggested that “Mark Twain” was at a loss for fresh inspiration.
In late December 1867, Clemens met Olivia Langdon, who was visiting New York with her parents. She was twenty-two, ten years younger than Clemens. Her brother, Charles, had been Clemens’s Quaker City companion; all five attended a reading by Charles Dickens on December 31. In a letter to the Alta California dated January 11, the writer took pleasure in reporting that “there was a beautiful young lady with me—a highly respectable young white woman.” Although Clemens was to see his bride-to-be twice more within a few weeks, he did not begin his formal courtship until August, when he visited the Langdons in Elmira. By then his situation had changed significantly.
Just after Clemens arrived in New York following his trip abroad, a man who was to play a crucial role in his life, Elisha Bliss Jr. of the American Publishing Company of Hartford, wrote to ask Clemens for “a work of some kind, perhaps compiled from your letters from the East, &c., with such interesting additions as may be proper.”14 Clemens replied on December 2 that he could “make a volume that would be more acceptable in many respects than any I could now write.” He believed that he could revise the letters, “weed them of their chief faults of construction & inelegancies of expression,” drop some and write others in their place. He sought more information, especially concerning “what amount of money I might possibly make out of it”; clearly, he was enticed by Bliss’s invitation. Early in January 1868, he wrote to his mother and sister to request that they “cut my letters out of the Alta’s and send them to me in an envelop.”
For a conference with Bliss in late January, Clemens visited Hartford. He stayed with the Hooker family at Nook Farm, where he was later to make his home. (Alice Hooker had been with Olivia Langdon at the Dickens reading.)
