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 1868, he won a conditional consent that they would be married, but questions remained. Olivia’s mother wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks on December 1: If “a great change had taken place in Mr Clemens,” “from what standard of conduct,—from what habitual life, did this change, or improvement, or reformation; commence?”31 Olivia’s father, Jervis Langdon, asked Clemens for the names of people in the West who might serve as references. When Clemens supplied six, Langdon asked a former employee living in San Francisco to interview the six, as well as some others Clemens had not named. Feeling uneasy about what Langdon might hear, Clemens confessed to him, “I think that much of my conduct on the Pacific Coast was not of a character to recommend me to the respectful regard of a high eastern civilization, but it was not considered blameworthy there, perhaps.” He then provided the names of additional references. One result of Langdon’s inquiry was this comment from a Presbyterian deacon: “I would rather bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow.”32 Meanwhile, Clemens was assuring Olivia of his transformation: “I am striving & shall still strive to reach the highest altitude of worth, the highest Christian excellence.” Ultimately Clemens was able to present himself in a way that both of Olivia’s parents found they could accept, and a formal engagement was announced. Clemens told his family, “She said she never could or would love me—but she set herself the task of making a Christian of me. I said she would succeed, but in the meantime she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit & end by tumbling into it—& lo! the prophecy is fulfilled.”
After finishing proofreading on the Innocents, Clemens devoted some attention to the question of where he would settle. “I want to get located in life,” he told Olivia in May, 1869. In his thirty-fourth year, he did not have much to show for his years thus far, or so it clearly seemed to the man approaching marriage. For a time Cleveland attracted him; there Mrs. Fairbanks’s husband was publisher of the Herald. But he decided against it because, as he told them in August, “It just offered another apprenticeship—another one, to be tacked on to the tail end of a foolish life made up of apprenticeships. I believe I have been apprentice to pretty much everything—& just as I was about to graduate as a journeyman I always had to go apprentice to something else.” Instead, with a large loan from Jervis Langdon and with installments to be paid later, Clemens purchased a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express and became its associate editor, to “do a little of everything,” as he reported to the Fairbankses. For a time Clemens supposed that he was making a real commitment to the paper. In September 1869, he received a letter asking if he would still be lecturing. He replied, “I hope to get out of the lecture-field forever.… I mean to make this newspaper support me hereafter.”
Finally, in August 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, substantially different from the Alta letters from which it was derived. New sections had been added about Paris and Egypt and notably one on the Sphinx. Also inserted were accounts of the narrator’s movement from place to place. The changes were made for several reasons. The most obvious resulted from Mark Twain’s recognition
