Clemens and his wife traveled to Boston for one of those happy
fore-gatherings with the Howellses, which continued, at one end of
the journey or another, for so many years. There was a luncheon with
Longfellow at Craigie House, and, on the return to Hartford, Clemens
reported to Howells how Mrs. Clemens had thrived on the happiness of the
visit. Also he confesses his punishment for the usual crimes:
I “caught it” for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her
coffee, when it was a “good deal better than we get at home.” I
“caught it” for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing
her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS.
when the printers are done with it. I “caught it” once more for
personating that drunken Colonel James. I “caught it” for
mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and
when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I
had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that
if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the
madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she
said:
“How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his
sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er--”
“Oh, Howells won't mind it! You don't know Howells. Howells is a
man who--”
She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in
the hall, so she took it out of George. I am glad of that, because
it saved the babies.
Clemens used to admit, at a later day, that his education did not
advance by leaps and bounds, but gradually, very gradually; and it used
to give him a pathetic relief in those after-years, when that sweet
presence had gone out of his life, to tell the way of it, to confess
over-fully, perhaps, what a responsibility he had been to her.
He used to tell how, for a long time, he concealed his profanity from
her; how one morning, when he thought the door was shut between
their bedroom and the bathroom, he was in there dressing and shaving,
accompanying these trying things with language intended only for the
strictest privacy; how presently, when he discovered a button off the
shirt he intended to put on, he hurled it through the window into the
yard with appropriate remarks, followed it with another shirt that
was in the same condition, and added certain collars and neckties and
bath-room requisites, decorating the shrubbery outside, where the people
were going by to church; how in this extreme moment he heard a slight
cough and turned to find that the door was open! There was only one door
to the bath-room, and he knew he had to pass her. He felt pale and sick,
and sat down for a few moments to consider. He decided to assume that
she was asleep, and to walk out and through the room, head up, as if
he had nothing on his conscience. He attempted it, but without success.
Half-way across the room he heard a voice suddenly repeat his last
terrific remark. He turned to see her sitting up in bed, regarding him
with a look as withering as she could find in her gentle soul. The humor
of it struck him.
“Livy,” he said, “did it sound like that?”
“Of course it did,” she said, “only worse. I wanted you to hear just how
it sounded.”
“Livy,” he said, “it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds
like that. You got the words right, Livy, but you don't know the tune.”
Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in
her dominion, his life long. Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender
loyalty to her as the “most moving quality of his most faithful soul.”
It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,
and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all
the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.
She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which
he was induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a
partial idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens. Of the
discarded manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there
are a multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof
of her sanity and high regard for his literary honor. They are
amusing--some of them; they are interesting--some of them; they are
strong and virile--some of them; but they are unworthy--most of them,
though a number remain unfinished because theme or interest failed.
Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up
hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as
with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding
release. As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea
of what he proposed to do. He would start with a few characters and
situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed. So he
was likely to run ashore any time. As for those other attempts--stories
“unavailable” for one reason or another--he was just as apt to
begin those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the
difference. That is one of the hall-marks of genius--the thing which
sharply differentiates genius from talent. Genius is likely to rate a
literary disaster as its best work. Talent rarely makes that mistake.
Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of
authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to
become a book, “The Second Advent,” a story which opens with a
very doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to
grotesquery and literary disorder. There is another, “The Autobiography
of a Damn Fool,” a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible;
yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see
the manuscript, thought it especially good. “Livy wouldn't have it,”
he said, “so I gave it up.” There is another, “The Mysterious Chamber,”
strong and fine in conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the
story of a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door
in an old castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down
into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this
isolation for twenty years. The question of sustenance was the weak
point in the story. Clemens could invent no way of providing it, except
by means of a waste or conduit from the kitchen into which scraps of
meat, bread, and other items of garbage were thrown. This he thought
sufficient, but Mrs. Clemens did not highly regard such a literary
device. Clemens could think of no good way to improve upon it, so this
effort too was consigned to the penal colony, a set of pigeonholes kept
in his study. To Howells and others, when they came along, he would read
the discarded yarns, and they were delightful enough for such a purpose,
as delightful as the sketches which every artist has, turned face to the
wall.
“Captain Stormfield” lay under the ban for many a year, though never
entirely abandoned. This manuscript was even recommended for publication
by Howells, who has since admitted that it would not have done then; and
indeed, in its original, primitive nakedness it would hardly have done
even in this day of wider toleration.
It should be said here that there is not the least evidence (and
the manuscripts are full of evidence) that Mrs. Clemens was ever
super-sensitive, or narrow, or unliterary in her restraints. She
became his public, as it were, and no man ever had a more open-minded,
clear-headed public than that. For Mark Twain's reputation it would
have been better had she exercised her editorial prerogative even more
actively--if, in her love for him and her jealousy of his reputation,
she had been even more severe. She did all that lay in her strength,
from the beginning to the end, and if we dwell upon this phase of
their life together it is because it is so large a part of Mark Twain's
literary story. On her birthday in the year we are now closing (1875) he
wrote her a letter which conveys an acknowledgment of his debt.
LIVY DARLING,--Six years have gone by since I made my first great
success in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since
Providence made preparation for that happy success by sending you
into the world. Every day we live together adds to the security of my
confidence that we can never any more wish to be separated than we can
imagine a regret that we were ever joined. You are dearer to me to-day,
my child, than you were upon the last anniversary of this birthday; you
were dearer then than you were a year before; you have grown more and
more dear from the first of those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that
this precious progression will continue on to the end.
Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and
their gray hairs, without fear and without depression, trusting and
believing that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make
them blessed.
So, with abounding affection for you and our babies I hail this day that
brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!