Twain Perspective ‘Mark Twain’s Letters: Vol. 4’ Provides Insight Into His Happy Home Life And The Man Himself

It was 1870 and the fledgling author - four days a married man - was boasting of his wedded state in a letter to a friend.

“I am 34 & she is 24; I am young & very handsome (I make the statement with the fullest confidence, for I got it from her,)” he wrote. “She is the very most perfect gem of womankind that ever I saw in my life - & I will stand by that remark till I die.”

The writer was that famously irascible American man of letters, Mark Twain. The subject of his raptures was the little-known love of his life - his wife.

Letters written around the time of Twain’s marriage reveal new dimensions to the sometimes shadowy figure of his lifelong partner.

“The old image of her was of … your typical fainting Victorian woman with kind of continuing hysterical illnesses, and that was combined with the sense of her as someone who repressed her husband,” said Michael B. Frank, co-editor with Victor Fischer of a new volume of Twain letters.

“In fact, we now know that none of that is accurate. She was really quite a robust, active woman with a lively mind, and they had a great and strong marriage in which he regarded her as his intellectual partner as much as anything else.”

“She really wasn’t this proponent of Victorian gentility,” agreed Laura Skandera-Trombley, author of “Mark Twain in the Company of Women,” which examined the influence of the women surrounding Twain.

In fact, “Mark Twain’s Letters: Vol. 4,” published by the University of California Press, portrays a vibrant partnership between Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens.

“I am glad & proud that my little wife takes such an interest in my scribblings,” Twain wrote to Olivia in January 1870, a month before they were actually married.

Six days after the wedding, he dashed off a note to an acquaintance: “Am just married, & don’t take an interest in anything out of doors,” with “any” emphasized.

To Olivia’s parents, he wrote tongue-in-cheek of tamer pursuits. “I read poetry - & every now & then I come to a passage that brings the tears to my eyes, & I look up to her for loving sympathy, & she inquires whether they sell sirloin steaks by the pound or by the yard.”

Olivia was a bit more formal in her letters home, referring to her new husband as “Mr. Clemens.”

But she, too, alludes to married happiness, telling her parents four days after the wedding: “The time of not eating and not sleeping has gone by for both of us - we eat and sleep now …”

Passion among Victorians shouldn’t be a surprise, said Frank, noting that “every generation thinks it invented sex.”

“What surprised me is the candor about it,” he said.

The book, which covers 1870-71, is the latest installment from the University of California at Berkeley’s Mark Twain Project, at work on a vast collection of Twain papers willed to the university in 1962.

In addition to the portrait of home life, there are glimpses of the up-and-coming author.

In January 1870, he writes: “My book is waltzing me out of debt so fast that I shan’t owe any man a cent by this time next year.” He goes on to say, “I mean to write another book during the summer. This one has proven such a surprising success that I feel encouraged.”

The hot-selling book was “The Innocents Abroad.” The next work turned out to be “Roughing It.”

“The great thing about looking back into this period is we know who he’s going to be, but he doesn’t,” said Jeffrey Steinbrink, professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.

“For anybody who would care to sit down and read Mark Twain’s mail over his shoulder - this is it,” said Steinbrink, author of “Getting to Be Mark Twain.”

“They’re just wonderful pieces of writing … he could have an off day, but he didn’t have many.”

Twain’s tart wit enlivens even routine notes.

In a complaint to a company that was late in sending Twain books he’d requested, he writes: “Will you be so kind as to kill the person who is to blame, & appoint a more reliable officer in the murdered man’s place? We do not like to intrude, but really it is utterly impossible to get along without books.”

Some of the funniest letters were written in tandem by the newlyweds. In one, Twain boasts that he has got his wife trained so that “she tones down and (almost, crossed out) stops talking … at the word of command.”

“I deny it, I am woman’s rights,” Olivia retorts in an insert.