to avoid smoking when he was a house guest among nonsmokers. (He quite lacked the modern-day awareness that secondhand smoke is distasteful to some people.) Even in an age when smoking was common, Clemens’s immoderate smoking was the subject of comment. He once wrote, in self-defense, to his clergyman friend Joseph Twichell, “When they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon—they little knew how trivial & valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!”
Late in 1869, Clemens met William Dean Howells, whose review of The Innocents Abroad had just appeared, in the office of James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, where Clemens had gone to express his appreciation for the review. Howells was two years younger than Clemens but was already married, the father of two children, and author of two books based on his experiences as American consul in Venice. Then a mere subeditor of the Atlantic, Howells began a ten-year stint as editor in 1871. The two men soon became close friends; Howells was frequently able to be of assistance to his highly individualistic associate; he recognized Mark Twain’s genius early and was able to encourage him to become a major writer. Clemens fully recognized how valuable Howells was to him; he wrote Howells as early as March 1878, “I owe as much to your training as the rude country printer owes to the city boss who takes him in hand & teaches him the right way to handle his art.” Howells provided assistance both before publication by his editing and after by reviewing many of his books, including Roughing It, The Gilded Age, A Tramp Abroad, and Joan of Arc. He also edited Tom Sawyer, and after his friend’s death in 1910, Howells wrote a series of pieces that appeared as “My Memories of Mark Twain,” later published in book form with his reviews and other pieces on the author as My Mark Twain (1910). Here he called his friend a profoundly truthful man, with “a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth.”44 Howells’s deeply admiring account of his experiences with his dear friend is a classic appreciation that ought to be better known. A superb edition also exists of the voluminous and articulate correspondence of the two men.
At the end of his lecture tour, on February 2,1870, Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon were married in Elmira. Joseph Twichell and the Langdons’ minister, Thomas Beecher, officiated. As planned, the couple settled in Buffalo, to Clemens’s surprise not in a boardinghouse but in a large and handsome house of their own, with three servants, a stable, horse and carriage—a generous gift from Jervis Langdon.
Clemens now limited his smoking at home. He wrote to Twichell in December 1870:
Smoke? I always smoke from 3 to 5 on Sunday afternoons—& in New York the other day I smoked a week, day & night. But when Livy is well I smoke only those 2 hours on Sunday. I’m “boss” of the habit. Originally, I quit solely on Livy’s account (not that I believed there was the faintest reason in the matter, but just as I would deprive myself of sugar in my coffee if she wished it, or quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral), & I stick to it on Livy’s account, & shall always continue to do so, without a pang.
He found a plausible excuse to return to regular smoking when he began to write his next book: after suffering from writer’s block, “I began to smoke, and I wrote my book.”45 Thereafter till the end of his life he smoked a great deal. According to a letter he wrote in March 1885, he was smoking three hundred cigars a month. Since he especially enjoyed smoking in bed, Olivia was to experience quantities of secondhand smoke for years. The result was, in time, a weakened heart.46
For a time after their marriage, the Clemenses read the Bible together and went to church. But soon Sam found difficult the notion that reading the Bible was for the sake of his soul. Moreover, after his experiences in the Holy Land, he found the Bible full of mythology. Judging his practice to be hypocritical, he gave up trying to be a Christian, and in time Olivia gave up her Christianity, too, although she felt obliged on occasion to attend church with her mother.47
As to his position at the newspaper, soon Clemens was visiting the Express office only twice a week. An indication that he was not much interested in being a newspaperman is that he soon signed up to write a series of pieces to appear in the Galaxy, a monthly magazine to which he had already contributed two sketches. On March 11, he wrote to the editor, Francis P. Church, “If I can have entire ownership & disposal of what I write for the Galaxy, after it has appeared in the magazine, I will edit your humorous department for two thousand dollars ($2,000) a year.” But first he had to meet his obligations to the Express, and after his lecture tour he dutifully produced a spate of pieces for the newspaper—ten during February, March, and April, and thereafter an occasional piece, only four during the remainder of his tenure as associate editor.
For the Galaxy, Mark Twain had to supply material for ten pages of printed copy a month. Thinking that he might write about his experiences in the West, he wrote to his family in St. Louis to retrieve his files of what he had written for the Territorial Express. In a piece called “Introductory,” he told his readers what they might expect, noting that he would not limit himself to humor: “I would always prefer to have the privilege of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to me, without the reader’s feeling obliged to consider himself outraged.”48 In all he produced eighty-seven pieces, many slight, several flimsy, and a number of gems. Certain of the pieces are reminiscences, of “My First Literary Venture” as a contributor to the Hannibal Journal; on “A Couple of Sad Experiences,” his publication of the petrified man and bloody massacre hoaxes; some memories of Hawaii; and some on his experiences in the San Francisco police courts. In addition, he capitalized on his California memories to write a series of seven “serious and sensible” imaginary letters from “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” in which—following the example of Oliver Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World” letters—he has his letter-writer, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, tell the woeful story of his American experiences. Ah Song Hi’s reports, in the face of great expectations, are uniformly painful. He who “wanted to dance, shout, sing, worship the generous Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” is beaten from his very arrival in San Francisco. He is imprisoned, attacked by his fellow prisoners (whose wickedness and crimes he catalogs), then found guilty of disorderly conduct after a farcical trial. Other pieces of social criticism appeared in the Galaxy. They include “About Smells,” which concerns a Brooklyn clergyman’s objections to the odors of common working people in his church, and a critique of a minister who would not officiate at the funeral of an actor. Most of the pieces, however, fulfill his assignment as a humorist, such as his account of how he edited an agricultural paper despite abysmal ignorance. He ludicrously discusses oyster beds under the heading “Landscape Gardening” and recommends the importation of the guano, “a fine bird.”
Perhaps the most amusing piece is a putative review of The Innocents Abroad, ascribed to the London Saturday Review (that journal had reviewed the book favorably with great condescension). Mark Twain fooled many readers into believing that his hoax had actually appeared in England. Mark Twain’s mock review finds much exaggeration in the Innocents and expresses astonishment at the author’s “stupefying simplicity and innocence,” “his colossal ignorance.” For example, “He did not know, until he got to Rome, that Michael Angelo was dead! And then, instead of crawling away and hiding his shameful ignorance somewhere, he proceeds to express a pious, grateful satisfaction that he is gone and out of his troubles!” The reviewer continues, “The book is absolutely dangerous, considering the magnitude of the misstatements, and the convincing confidence with which they are made…. The poor blunderer mouses among the sublime creations of the Old Masters, trying to acquire the elegant proficiency in art-knowledge, which he has a groping sort of comprehension is a proper thing for the travelled man to display.” The author of The Innocents Abroad proves to be the ideal victim of Mark Twain’s irony.
Some thirty-three of the Express and Galaxy pieces were preserved—mostly in revised form—in Sketches, New and Old, the selection from
