Scribblin’ for a Livin’: Mark Twain’s Pivotal Period in Buffalo by Thomas J. Reigstad

In a short sketch that would be his last written effort for publication, “The Turning Point of My Life,” Sam Clemens pretends to recount the most important event in his literary career as Mark Twain, one that lead to all the other important events. Though the sketch can be read as a burlesque of deterministic thinking, scholars and biographers might use it to authorize their own candidates for the most important event in creating Mark Twain. Thomas Reigstad’s candidate is the time Clemens spent living in Buffalo and writing for the Buffalo Express as part owner, from August 1869 to March 1871. This short period in Clemens’s life has received scrutiny in the past from Jeffrey Steinbrink in his biography Getting to Be Mark Twain (1991), and from Joseph McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasburg, editors of Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express: Articles and Sketches by America’s Favorite Humorist (1999). More recently, the residency in Buffalo has been spotlighted by Robert Hirst and Patrick Martin in Mark Twain in Buffalo (2010), a project of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library meant to provide context for how the entire manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came to be housed at the library.

Reigstad makes no mention of these previous efforts to claim the time in Buffalo as pivotal to the career of Sam Clemens as Mark Twain, but Scribblin’ for a Livin’ eschews literary scholarship and minimizes literary analysis. Instead, the strength of the book is its own biographical and historical focus, painting in details of Clemens working at the Express and setting up housekeeping with Livy in the elegant residence Jervis Langdon had presented to the couple as a wedding present. Reigstad adeptly employs letters to fill in the scene with people’s attitudes and feelings, complementing the minute physical details of Buffalo circa 1870: for example, the boardinghouse where Sam first lived before his marriage, the street it sat upon, the buildings around it, the look of the street where the building that housed the Buffalo Express could be found, its interior, the interior and exterior of Sam and Livy’s house, as well as other residences on their fashionable street. Reigstad also features vignettes of just about everyone who worked at the Express, from Clemens’s partners, Josephus Larned and George Selkirk, to the African American janitor, Philip Lee. Occasionally, snippets from Mark Twain’s works are used as links to images or events, or emotions generated by images and events, but there is no in-depth effort to weave biography and literary work together.

In addition to chapters that focus on Clemens’s first days working at the Express, the men who worked on the paper with him, the boardinghouse where he lived before his marriage as well as the people with whom he associated as a bachelor, and the house he and Livy owned after his marriage, Reigstad spotlights three key time frames for Clemens building his reputation as Mark Twain. The first one is the initial six weeks of his stint at the newspaper, during which he published “over one-third of the work he produced in the entire seventy-six weeks he was affiliated with the Buffalo Express” (59). Second is the lecture tour of 1869–70. Third is the post-lecture, post-wedding period at the Express, during which time Clemens’s efforts for the paper dwindled and were even superseded by his agreeing to write a monthly column for the New York Galaxy. Reigstad concludes by recounting visits to Buffalo after Sam and Livy’s residency, detailing links to the city’s society people, and discussing the land in Buffalo that Livy inherited from her father. The book also features several appendices that reprint material from the Express: sketches by Mark Twain (including one about an impromptu visit to Buffalo by Prince Arthur of England), illustrations that originally accompanied work signed “Mark Twain,” examples from departments of the newspaper that became more humorous under the guidance of Clemens, a mock review of one of Mark Twain’s lectures that Reigstad offers as possibly being written by Clemens, and a facsimile of the Buffalo Express front page. Finally, the book includes many photographs of people and places discussed as well as of two hotel registries in the Buffalo area in which Clemens had signed his name, once as “Mark Twain” and once as “S. L. Clemens and Family.” There is also a reproduction of the page in the 1870 Buffalo city directory listing “Clemens, S. L. editor Buffalo Express, h. 472 Delaware.”

The book notates the rhythm of Clemens’s creative and business engagement with the newspaper, a rhythm alternating between manic bursts of energy pre-marriage, which included innovations for the paper, and a post-honeymoon precipitous lack of energy in carrying out his duties, which meant no follow-up to the innovations he had made, not to mention leaving routine editorial work to his partners. The hiatus created by the wedding also enabled a pretext for Clemens writing mostly from his house during the next six months, his creative work focusing on domestic and neighborhood experiences. Other conclusions to be drawn from Mark Twain appearing in the Buffalo Express should be familiar from Clemens’s earlier newspaper days: for example, some of his comic rants were motivated by social issues, such as a neglected cemetery and a greedy coroner.

At times the book’s narrative turns myopic when it isolates the Buffalo experience from these earlier phases of Clemens’s career as Mark Twain, so that the decision to write his best stuff for the Galaxy rather than for the Express is presented as though a new phase had begun in the career of Mark Twain, rather than Clemens replicating what had happened before in Nevada and California when his alter ego was featured in The Californian after his employment by the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and the San Francisco Call. Thus it is an overstatement to say that Clemens decided to be a “literary author” in Buffalo, or that Buffalo was “the place where he decided to stop writing for newspapers and start writing books” (205). He had made that decision before, and in fact had already written a best-selling book before moving to Buffalo, and arguably would not become a “literary author” until he collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner to write The Gilded Age after leaving Buffalo and moving to Hartford.

However, one can forgive pride of place in this case, for there is much information in Reigstad’s account. Moreover, the book is well-written, giving the reader the general effect of a close-up shot of a particular environment for Sam Clemens as he continued his long transition from itinerant journalist to author, businessman, and married man.