The Love Letters of Mark Twain

Edited by Dixon Wecter

IN Salisbury when a gentleman remarked upon my taking the trouble to telegraph a Merry Christmas to my wife, saying it was the sort of thing to do with a sweetheart, I dosed him up very promptly, and said I did not allow any man to refer to my wife jestingly, however respectful he might intend to be. He apologized profusely.” Thus wrote Mark Twain from an English lecture tour, to Livy in Hartford, some years after their marriage.

The love letters of Mark Twain did not cease when the girl was won. During the separations of a few weeks or months enforced by business trips at home and abroad, or an occasional week in New York while she remained at home, he resumed the courtship by correspondence begun long ago in 1868 and rewarded by their union in February, 1870. Believing, all his life, that most men are unworthy of most women — and understanding, as he did, the chivalry of King Arthur’s Court and the Middle Ages and the cult of Saint Joan because they proceeded on the same assumption — he was cast by nature in the role of cavaliere servente. “I am very much obliged to you for marrying me,” he once wrote Livy in the middle years. Most poignant of all are the little notes he scribbled to Livy in her last illness, of which Clara Clemens in My Father Mark Twain has given a few samples scraps of paper sent in on meal trays or delivered by the nurse, after the doctor had forbidden his visits.

Some hitherto unpublished letters from their married life, a sampling of the almost daily messages he sent when journeys kept them apart, will help to round out this portrait of Mark Twain in love. To do more than skim the surface is manifestly impossible; occasionally he wrote as often as four times a day.

The first year of their life together was dogged by family illness, grief, and distractions. After devoted nursing by the young couple, Livy’s father died in the summer of 1870; a few weeks later, a school friend who had come to visit Livy in Buffalo sickened and died there of typhoid fever. Mark and Livy’s first child and only son, Langdon, was born prematurely in November; his delicate health and that of his mother for many months afterward remained a constant source of worry in the family. For Mark the editorial routine of the Buffalo Express meant drudgery, midnight labor, and harassing deadlines. After the bleak winter of 1870-1871 in Buffalo, in disgust he sold out his newspaper interest, put up the honeymoon house for sale, took Livy and the baby to Elmira, and a few months later moved them permanently to Hartford, where his publishers and many of his new friends lived.

Copyright 1947, by the Mark Twain Company

Henceforth the picture brightened. The mother and child gained strength; a new book about Mark’s Western years, called Roughing It, rapidly took shape. When it was done, he set to work writing some lectures about Artemus Ward and other picturesque characters he had known. In mid-October he started once more on the Redpath circuit, beginning at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He loved the momentary successes of the platform, when speaker and audience kindled together, but disliked the irregular hours, tedious hosts and callers, and above all the lack of Livy’s care and companionship.

His metropolitan opening of the season was in Boston, on November 1, and about this ordeal he grew more than a little nervous. “Boston must sit up and behave, and do right by me. As Boston goes, so goes New England,” he noted on the eve of this date. But the next night, before falling exhausted into bed, he took pen in hand to share his triumph with Livy: “People say Boston audiences ain’t responsive. People lie. Boston audiences get perfectly uproarious when they get started. I am satisfied with tonight.” Using this city as his main base, he embarked upon a strenuous tour of the New England towns, Portland he loved, but ruefully found in Worcester “the staidest, puritanical people you ever saw — one of the hardest gangs to move that ever was. By George the next time I come here I mean to put some cathartic pills in my lecture.” The critical mood was still upon him a couple of days later, when he attended a Press Club dinner on November 11, and wrote home the next day.

BOSTON,Sunday, [Nov. 12, 1871]
Livy darling, I missed church by waking up too late, tho’ I intended to go.
Went to the Press dinner last night. The responses to the regular toasts were tip-top; but as it was a cold-water dinner (the absurdity of it!) the flow of impromptu wit and wisdom on the irregular call was the flattest I ever heard. The thing got so melancholy that it broke up at 10.30 — and with a sigh instead of a hurrah. I dearly love a public dinner — but next time I’ll inquire whether the inspiration is to be cold water or champagne.
I kind of look for a letter from you to-day — it’s about time. Kiss the cubbie and mother for me. With unfailing love.
SAML

HAVERHILL, [Nov. 16, 1871]
Livy darling, it was a dreadfully stormy night, the train was delayed a while, and when I got to the hall it was half an hour after the time for the lecture to begin. But not a soul had left the house. I went right through the audience in my overcoat and overshoes with carpet bag in hand, and undressed on the stage in full view. It was no time to stand on ceremony. I told them I knew they were indignant with me, and righteously so — and that if any aggrieved gentleman would rise in his place and abuse me for 15 minutes, I would feel better, would take it as a great kindness, and would do as much for him some time. That broke the ice and we went through with colors flying and drums beating. . . .
Confound the confounded cooks. Offer five dollars a week, and see if that won’t fetch one. Advertise again.
I don’t get a chance to read anything, my old darling—am patching at my lecture all the time — trying to weed Artemus out of it and work myself in. What I say, fetches ‘em — but what he says — don’t. But I’m going to mark Lowell for you — pity, too, to mar such dainty pages.
Bless your heart, I appreciate the cubbie — and shall more and more as he develops and becomes vicious and interesting. To me he is a very very dear little rip. Kiss him for me, sweetheart. I have ordered the song book for him. . . .
Sleepy!
Lovingly
SAML

A swing through upstate New York, and then on into Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. To Mark’s intense vexation, a newspaper published most of his Artemus Ward lecture; by sitting up till all hours and writing furiously on the railway cars, he arrived in Chicago with a brand-new one based upon his next book, called “Roughing It.” It mingled the humors of the frontier with a fine “word-painting” of his favorite bit of scenery, Lake Tahoe, on whose shore Sam the tenderfoot had staked out a timber claim and then inadvertently set the woods ablaze from his campfire. Chicago too had seen the ravages of fire. The great conflagration which began on October 9 had left the city blackened and desolate, its two-monthold scars still unhealed.

CHICAGO, Dec. 16, [1871]
My dear dear old darling, I went to bed considerably after midnight yesterday morning, got up again at 4 o’clock and went down (breakfastless) to the depot, and found, with unspeakable gladness, that there stood a sleeping car which I might have been occupying all night — but as usual nobody about the hotel or among the lecture committee knew anything certain about any train. I took a berth — the train left immediately, and of course I couldn’t go to sleep. We were due here in two hours — we fooled along and got here in eleven hours — 3 P.M. Could get nothing to eat, all that time. Not a vehicle at the station, nor a man or a boy. Had to carry my two satchels half a mile, to Mr. Robert Law’s house, and it did seem to me they weighed a couple of tons apiece before I got through. I then ate a perfectly enormous dinner (a roast turkey and 8 gallons of Oolong tea — well it was “long” something — it was the longest tea that ever went down my throat — it was hours in passing a given point).
Then Mr. Law and I immediately hopped into his buggy and for 2 steady hours we capered among the solemn ruins, on both sides of the river a crisp, bitter day, but all days are alike to my sealskin coat — I can only tell it is cold by my nose and by seeing other people’s actions. There is literally no Chicago here. I recognize nothing here that ever I saw before.
We sat up and talked till 10 and all went to bed. I worked till after midnight amending and altering my lecture, and then turned in and slept like a log — I don’t mean a brisk, fresh, green log, but an old dead, soggy, rotten one, that never turns over or gives a yelp. All night long. Awoke 20 minutes ago — it is now 11 A.M., and there is a gentleman up yonder at the depot with a carriage, ready to receive me as I step out of the cars from Kalamazoo. I telegraphed him I would be in Chicago promptly at 11 o’clock this morning, and I have kept my word — here I am. But I can easily explain to him that the reason he missed me was that I mean 11 o’clock in a general way, and not any particular way, and that I don’t blame him — particularly.
I shall now get up and go to Dr. Jackson’s house and be his guest for 2 days. I feel perfectly splendid. One night’s rest always renews me, restores me, makes my life and vigor perfect. I wish I could see my darling this morning, and rest her head on my breast and make her forget this dismal lecture business and its long separations. But time moves along, honey! Not so very many days yet!
With a world of love,
SAML

The new lecture, given twice in this city, proved vastly successful, as the Chicago Evening Post reported it, praising the skill of this “thin man of five feet ten,” with “eyes that penetrate like a new gimlet” and carroty hair, who with a melancholy expression “cranes and cranes his long neck around the house like a bereaved Vermonter who has just come from the death-bed of his mother-in-law, and is looking for a sexton” — and affects enormous surprise at the audience’s laughter. Another wellknown journal did him great disservice, however, as he told Livy, with news that he was frantically writing another lecture. “I shall begin talking it the moment I get out of the range of the cursed Chicago Tribune that printed my new lecture and so made it impossible for me to talk it with any spirit in Illinois. If these devils incarnate only appreciated what suffering they inflict with their infernal synopses, maybe they would try to have humanity enough to refrain.”

The year 1872 brought both grief and joy. Little Langdon died of diphtheria, and Mark never ceased to blame himself for having neglected to keep the little fellow warmly bundled up during a morning carriage-ride, and for the cold which developed and contributed perhaps to the fatal illness. Self-reproach was always a habit of Mark Twain’s tormenting conscience. But in this year a second child was born, Olivia Susan or “Susie,” who in her parents’ eyes soon shone a prodigy of charm and brilliance. Roughing It was published, and became a best-seller. To copyright it against the English pirates who had raided his earlier books, and incidentally to give some lectures in London, Mark crossed the Atlantic alone in late August. After a few weeks of public dinners, lectures, and fraternizing at the Savage Club, he came to be hailed as “the Belle of London” — a character whose unique Americanism lent savor to all he said and did.

The following letter spotlights some of his activities. He alludes first to his elder brother Orion, a kindly, bumbling ne’er-do-well who had lately lost his job with Mark Twain’s publishers and had precariously landed another as a proofreader in New York City. Mark also refers to the Clemenses’ Hartford neighbor, Isabella Beecher Hooker, at this time a doughty champion of woman suffrage.

LONDON, Oct. 3, [1872]
Livy darling, it is indeed pleasant to learn that Orion is happy and progressing. Now if he can only keep the place and continue to give satisfaction, all the better. It is no trouble for a man to get any situation he wants — by working at first for nothing — but of course to hold it firmly against all comers — after the wages begin — is the trick. . . .
Mrs. Hooker’s solemn retirement from public life is news which is as grateful as it is humorous — but the tremendousness of her reason for retiring (because “her work is done” and her great end accomplished) surpasses the mere humanly humorous — it is the awful humor of the gods. For all these long months, this pleasant lady, under the impression that she was helping along a great and good cause, has been blandly pulling down the temple of Woman’s Emancipation and shying the bricks at the builders; for all these long months she has moved sublimely among the conventions and congresses of the sex a very Spirit of Calamity; and whatsoever principle she breathed upon oratorically, perished; and whatsoever convert she took by the hand, that convert returned unto his sin again; and unto whatsoever political thing she lavished her love upon, there came sickness, and suffering, and speedy death; after all these long months, wherein she never rested from making enemies to her cause save when she was asleep, she retires serenely from her slaughter-house and says, in effect, Let the nations sing hosannah, let the spinning spheres applaud — my work is done!
She is a good woman — she is a good woman — but it is so like her to do these things — she does derive such a satisfaction from everything her tangled brain conceives and her relentless hand demolishes. Well, anyway, I am glad she is out of “public life,” and I have no doubt that all of her best friends are, also.
Livy darling, I have been shopping and bought you a cloak, and if I don’t lose it I will fetch it home to you. I shall probably buy no other present while here — they are too troublesome — but after hunting London over for a present for you, I found this thing and I liked it.
Been to Oxford for a day and a half— and if you could only see that piece of landscape (between here and Oxford) in its summer garb, you would have to confess that there is nothing even in New England that equals it for pure loveliness, and nothing outside of New England that even remotely approaches it. And if you could see the turf in the quadrangles of some of the colleges, and the Virginian creeper that pours its cataract of green and golden and crimson leaves down a quaint old gothic tower of Magdalen College — clear from the topmost pinnacle it. comes flooding down over pointed windows and battered statues, and grotesque stone faces projecting from the wall — a wasteful, graceful, gorgeous little Niagara — and whosoever looks upon it will miss his train sure. That was the darlingest, loveliest picture I ever saw.
Good-bye sweethearts, good-bye. Good-bye sweetheart, good-bye. I love you.
SAML

P.S. Mr. Tyler, of Hatch and Tyler, promised to send you your winter supply of coal — at $7 I think. Send to him when you need it.

Returning home in November, Mark gave an occasional lecture but began no new book until February, 1873, when chance dinner-table talk between the Clemenses and their neighbors, the Charles Dudley Warners, about the stupidity of current novels, led the two wives to challenge their husbands to write a better one. In high glee they set to work over what became The Gilded Age. Clemens supplied the backwoods scenes and the superb character of Colonel Sellers, based upon the visionary vagaries of his Missouri cousin James Lampion. Warner furnished a conventional plot of romance, pluck and luck. In attempting to draw the femme fatale of the novel, Laura Hawkins, as the next letter indicates, he fell back too obviously on one of the heroines of Constance Fenimore Woolson. Also noteworthy is Mark Twain’s account of his discovery, in the Revue des Deux Maudes for July 15, 1872, of “La Grenouille Sauteuse,” a translation which he “clawed back” into literal English and later published as a postscript to his famous yarn of Calaveras County. Postmarked “Hartford,” this letter was written to Livy, who had taken Susie on a visit to Elmira.

Apr. 26, 10.30 P.M., [1873]
Livy darling, I have finished trimming and revamping all my MS, and to-day we began the work of critically reading the book, line by line and numbering the chapters and working them in together in their appropriate places. It is perfectly fascinating work. All of the first eleven chapters are mine, and when I came to read them right straight along without breaking, I got really interested; and when I got to Sellers’ eye-water and his clock and his fireless stove and his turnip dinner, I could hardly read for laughing. The turnip dinner is powerful good — and is satisfactory now.
Warner failed on his description of Laura as a school-girl — as a picture of her, I mean. He had simply copied Miss Woolson’s pretty description almost word for word — the plagiarism would have been detected in a moment. I told him so — he saw it and yet I’m hanged if he didn’t hate to lose it because there was a “nip” and pungency about that woman’s phrases that he hated to lose — and so did I, only they weren’t ours and we couldn’t take them. So I set him to create a picture and he went at it. I finally took paper and pencil, had a thought, (as to phraseology) and scratched it down. I had already told him what the details of the picture should be, and so only choice language was needed to dress them in. Then we read our two efforts, and mine being rather the best, we used it. And so it ought to have been the best. If I had been trying to describe a picture that was in his mind, I would have botched it.
We both think this is going to be no slouch of a novel, as Solomon said to the Hebrew Children.
Dined with Warner yesterday—at home today — lunch with Twichell noon tomorrow. The kitties are very frisky, now. They and the old cat sleep with me, nights, and have the run of the house. I wouldn’t take thousands of dollars for them. Next to a wife whom I idolise, give me cat — an old cat, with kittens. How is the Muggins, now, by the way? It is very melancholy here, but I don’t notice it. I’m pretty sad, but I’m used to it — it can’t phaze me. I’m an old hand at grief. Grief makes me hump myself when I’m alone, but that is taking advantages. When my family is around I am superior to it.
But I am not grieving tonight, honey. I’ve pegged away all day till this hour and done a big day’s work, and I feel as gay as a hymn.
Got a French version of the Jumping Frog— fun is no name for it. I am going to translate it literarally, French construction and all (apologising in parenthesis where a word is too many for me), and publish it in the Atlantic as the grave effort of a man who does not know but what he is as good a French scholar as there is — and sign my name to it, without another word. It will be toothsome reading.
Good-bye my darling, I love you and I love the Muggins. — It is bed time, now — I got to go down and roust out the cats.
SAML

Livy’s trip to Elmira in late April, 1873, was a farewell call upon her family before she and Susie went abroad with Mark Twain in May. The Clemenses were feted in England and Scotland, took a short tour of the Continent, and came back to London for Mark’s lectures in Hanover Square. When homesickness overtook Livy in the early autumn, Mark accompanied her and the child back to the United States. But with his lecture series unfinished, he returned by the next boat and plunged into two months of almost nightly public speaking at the Queen’s Concert Rooms. Just after his arrival, on November 23 he wrote her the following letter. His old friend of San Francisco days, the poet Charles Warren Stoddard, was nowacting as his secretary.

[LONDON,] Sunday, [Nov. 23, 1873]
Sweetheart, it is a rather handsome day for London — very sunny and bright and cheery, and I heartily wish you were here to enjoy it. Stoddard and I walked through Regent’s Park and up on top of Primrose Hill and back again.
Stoddard has been spending some days at Oxford with the students, and they swear that if I will come there and lecture they will entertain me like a duke, and will also cram the largest hall in the town, for me. — I would like it — and at a lecture they would come in evening dress and behave with the utmost decorum — with that thorough and complete decorum which noblemen’s sons know so well how to practise when they choose — but at a common theatre what a queer lot they are! — and how they do behave, these scions of the bluest aristocratic blood of Great Britain! Stoddard attended the theatre there — a company of traveling actors. The house was full — both sexes — and all the students were there — or at least several hundred of them. They wore their hats all through the performance, and they all smoked pipes and cigars. Every individual devil of them had on an Ulster overcoat like mine, that came down to his heels; and every rascal of them brought a bull pup or a terrier pup under his arm, and they would set those creatures up on the broad-topped balustrades, and allow them to amuse themselves by barking at anybody or anything they chose to. Some Davenport Brothers tied themselves up with ropes, and people were requested to come on the stage and examine the trick; whereupon, several students, in their long coats, their hats on, their pups under their arms and their pipes in their mouths, stepped out over the balustrades of private boxes, and gravely sauntered around and around the tied man on the stage examining the knots and expressing their opinions — and the audience never smiled or said a word but took the whole thing as a matter of course. . . .
SAML

From the steady stream of letters that flowed until his sailing for home on January 13, 1874 — filled with nostalgia which the whirl of activities could not banish — the following is typical.

LONDON, Jan. 2, [1874]
Livy my darling, I want you to be sure and remember to have in the bathroom, when I arrive, a bottle of Scotch whisky, a lemon, some crushed sugar, and a bottle of Angostura Bitters. Ever since I have been in London I have taken in a wine-glass what is called a cock-tail (made with those ingredients) before breakfast, before dinner, and just before going to bed. It was recommended by the surgeon of the “City of Chester” and was a most happy thought. To it I attribute the fact that up to this day my digestion has been wonderful — simply perfect. It remains day after day and week after week as regular as a clock. Now my dear, if you will give the order now, to have those things put in the bath-room and left there till I come, they will be there when I arrive. Will you? I love to write about arriving — it seems as if it were to be tomorrow. And I love to picture myself ringing the bell, at midnight — then a pause of a second or two — then the turning of the bolt, and “Who is it?” — then ever so many kisses — then you and I in the bath-room, I drinking my cock-tail and undressing, and you standing by — then to bed, and — everything happy and jolly as it should be. I do love and honor you, my darling.
SAML

Nothing but Angostura Bitters will do.

Samuel Clemens the devoted father appears in scores of unpublished letters written to his daughters. From childhood they too were lapped in that mantle of playful affection, drollery, and chivalry with which their mother had long since been invested. To Susie and her baby sister Clara (“Bay”), who were spending the summer at Quarry Farm, he wrote the following note from New York — on his way to Hartford to investigate a suspicious character reported hanging around the house (he turned out to be the second maid’s furtive but recalcitrant beau, who married the girl when Mark dramatically produced the license and the Reverend Joseph Twichell and a two-hundred-dollar check as wedding present).

Monday A.M.
Susie dear, you and Rosa and Bay must keep a sharp lookout on the young birdlings up at the pond and see them begin life. They arc ready to fly, now. Keep the squirrel supplied with nuts, if he comes around. If you have a very fine sunset, put a blanket over it and keep it till I come. Aunt Sue will give you one. I saw a lovely sunset yesterday, reflected in the water of New Jersey marshes. It was a beautiful, still evening — no sound but just one cow singing, and some frogs — (frosches.)
There are some bells close here and a man who rings chimes. That man will die some day, and then he will wish he had behaved himself. I saw a cat yesterday, with 4 legs — and yet it was only a yellow cat, and rather small, too, for its size. They were not all fore legs — several of them were hind legs; indeed almost a majority of them were.
Write me.
PAPA

A third daughter, Jean, was born in 1880, and the same tender affection was lavished upon her. These years brought little save happiness to the Clemens family, and increasing fame to its senior member — as he published successively Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and Life on the Mississippi. In the winter of 1884-1885 he undertook a joint lecture tour with George W. Cable, from which Mark Twain wrote daily letters home. He called on General Grant in New York to urge completion of his memoirs, and by special request dropped in to see President-elect Grover Cleveland at the Governor’s mansion in Albany: “I sat on four electric bells (as the cats used to do at the farm) and summoned four page boys whom nobody had any use for.” He also visited his boyhood Hannibal (“you can never imagine the infinite great deeps of pathos that have rolled their tides over me”), and in Keokuk found that his mother, aged eighty-two, “is her old beautiful self.” At South Bend his friend Stoddard turned up for the lecture in company with the president of Notre Dame. “Did I tell you, Stoddard is Professor of Literature there?” Mark wrote Livy. “He says they don’t require that the Professor of Literature shall know how to spell. Charley can’t spell any better than Jean.” In late January, Livy wrote to him: “This letter will reach you not far from our anniversaries. . . . Fifteen years married, sixteen years engaged. And I do love you just a scrap even now. I don’t much fancy having you away on our anniversaries. . . . Good-bye Youth, I love you with my whole heart.”

Mid-February found him in Toronto, both for lecturing and for the securing in person of his Canadian copyright on Huckleberry Finn.

TORONTO, Feb. 15, 1885
Livy darling, I did not get a chance to write yesterday— first omission for a long time. A sleigh called for us early and took us out 21/2 miles to a Young Ladies’ College and there each of us wrote 74 autographs in the midst of the pack of girls representing them; then we all went out on the hill — thermometer 12 below zero, and went tobogganing. It is tremendous sport, and no danger. You sit in the midst of a row of girls on a long broad board with its front end curled up, and away you go, like lightning. Climbing back up the hill through deep snow with a thin crust on it is not fun, and in fact it was very fatiguing. Still the sport was so prodigiously exciting and entertaining that it was well for us it was cut short by a telephonic message that the train was being held for us; otherwise we should have tired ourselves clear to death. I had my shoes full of snow and was wet to my knees when we left. . . .
SAML

The year 1885, which saw the whole Englishspeaking world reading Huckleberry Finn, his greatest. book, may be taken as the crest of Mark Twain’s powers as creative artist. Later seasons would bring the slow ebbing of his genius, together with the thickening shadows of financial disaster, and deaths in the ranks of those he dearly loved. In retrospect, the mid-eighties would seem the golden era of his happiness and achievement, although the onset of time and sorrow did no more than deepen his affection for the woman who shared his life. On her fortieth birthday and the seventeenth anniversary of their secret engagement, November 27, 1885, he was at home, but wrote her one of those little billets doux which Livy preserved among the bundles and bundles of letters he had sent her over the years.

HARTFORD, Nov. 27, 1885
We have reached another milestone, my darling, and a very, very remote one from the place whence we started; but we look back over a pleasant landscape — valleys that are still green, plains that still bear flowers, hills that still sleep in the soft light of that far morning of blessed memory. And here we have company on the journey — ah, such precious company, such inspiring, such lovely, and gracious company! and how they lighten the march! Our faces are toward the sunset, now, but these are with us, to hold our hands, and stay our feet, and while they abide, and our old love grows and never diminishes, our march shall still be through flowers and green fields, and the evening light as pleasant as that old soft morning glow yonder behind.
YOUR HUSBAND

(The End)