NONFICTION - Sept. 20, 1992

MARK AND LIVY: The Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him by Resa Willis (Atheneum: $25; 334 pp.). That Livy Clemens, wife to Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain for 34 years, was an intelligent and deeply conscientious woman may be gauged from her thoughts in the wake of the writer’s declaration of bankruptcy in 1894. When Clemens wrote gleefully that his financial adviser, Standard Oil executive Henry Rogers, was saying “caustic and telling things” to creditors, Livy responded, “It is money honestly owed and I cannot understand the tone which both you & Mr. Rogers seem to take. . . . I should think it was the creditors place to say caustic things to us.” As literature professor Resa Willis makes clear, this was a union of complementary parts: To Clemens, Livy was “my dear little gravity,” the stable center of his impulsive world, while Clemens to Livy was impetuous “youth,” the eternal spark of life. Livy read and edited virtually all of Clemens’ manuscripts, and although Willis exaggerates her editorial role--Livy served primarily as Twain’s bowdlerizer, according to the evidence presented--there’s no question about her importance in his life. She was a fine hostess, and a ready conversationalist and sounding board, despite poor health: Livy suffered from neurasthenia for most of her life, the “nervous prostration” that afflicted upper-class women in the 19th Century (undoubtedly because they were so woefully underutilized as individuals). Clemens, writes Willis, “erred to be pardoned,” and in Livy he found the tolerant, indulgent helpmeet who seemed to know just when to pull in his lead and when to let him run.