The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete


Aug. 25th.
Didn't finish yesterday. Something called me away. I am most
comfortably situated here. This is the pleasantest family I ever knew.
I only have one trouble, and that is they give me too much thought and
too much time and invention to the object of making my visit pass
delightfully. It needs----

Just how and when he left the Langdon home the letters do not
record. Early that fall he began a lecture engagement with James
Redpath, proprietor of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, and his engagements
were often within reach of Elmira. He had a standing invitation now
to the Langdon home, and the end of the week often found him there.
Yet when at last he proposed for the hand of Livy Langdon the
acceptance was by no means prompt. He was a favorite in the Langdon
household, but his suitability as a husband for the frail and gentle
daughter was questioned.

However, he was carrying everything, just then, by storm. The
largest houses everywhere were crowded to hear him. Papers spoke of
him as the coming man of the age, people came to their doors to see
him pass. There is but one letter of this period, but it gives us
the picture.


To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:

CLEVELAND, Nov. 20, 1868.
DEAR FOLKS,--I played against the Eastern favorite, Fanny Kemble, in
Pittsburgh, last night. She had 200 in her house, and I had upwards of
1,500. All the seats were sold (in a driving rain storm, 3 days ago,)
as reserved seats at 25 cents extra, even those in the second and third
tiers--and when the last seat was gone the box office had not been open
more than 2 hours. When I reached the theatre they were turning people
away and the house was crammed, 150 or 200 stood up, all the evening.

I go to Elmira tonight. I am simply lecturing for societies, at $100 a
pop.
Yrs
SAM.


It would be difficult for any family to refuse relationship with one
whose star was so clearly ascending, especially when every
inclination was in his favor, and the young lady herself encouraged
his suit. A provisional engagement was presently made, but it was
not finally ratified until February of the following year. Then in
a letter from one of his lecture points he tells his people
something of his happiness.


To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis:

LOCKPORT, N. Y. Feb. 27, 1868.
DEAR FOLKS,--I enclose $20 for Ma. I thought I was getting ahead of her
little assessments of $35 a month, but find I am falling behind with her
instead, and have let her go without money. Well, I did not mean to do
it. But you see when people have been getting ready for months in a
quiet way to get married, they are bound to grow stingy, and go to saving
up money against that awful day when it is sure to be needed. I am
particularly anxious to place myself in a position where I can carry on
my married life in good shape on my own hook, because I have paddled my
own canoe so long that I could not be satisfied now to let anybody help
me--and my proposed father-in-law is naturally so liberal that it would
be just like him to want to give us a start in life. But I don't want it
that way. I can start myself. I don't want any help. I can run this
institution without any outside assistance, and I shall have a wife who
will stand by me like a soldier through thick and thin, and never
complain. She is only a little body, but she hasn't her peer in
Christendom. I gave her only a plain gold engagement ring, when fashion
imperatively demands a two-hundred dollar diamond one, and told her it
was typical of her future lot--namely, that she would have to flourish on
substantials rather than luxuries. (But you see I know the girl--she
don't care anything about luxuries.) She is a splendid girl. She spends
no money but her usual year's allowance, and she spends nearly every cent
of that on other people. She will be a good sensible little wife,
without any airs about her. I don't make intercession for her beforehand
and ask you to love her, for there isn't any use in that--you couldn't
help it if you were to try.

I warn you that whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful
nature is her willing slave for evermore. I take my affidavit on that
statement. Her father and mother and brother embrace and pet her
constantly, precisely as if she were a sweetheart, instead of a blood
relation. She has unlimited power over her father, and yet she never
uses it except to make him help people who stand in need of help....

But if I get fairly started on the subject of my bride, I never shall get
through--and so I will quit right here. I went to Elmira a little over a
week ago, and staid four days and then had to go to New York on business.

......................

No further letters have been preserved until June, when he is in
Elmira and with his fiancee reading final proofs on the new book.
They were having an idyllic good time, of course, but it was a
useful time, too, for Olivia Langdon had a keen and refined literary
instinct, and the Innocents Abroad, as well as Mark Twain's other
books, are better to-day for her influence.

It has been stated that Mark Twain loved the lecture platform, but
from his letters we see that even at this early date, when he was at
the height of his first great vogue as a public entertainer, he had
no love for platform life. Undoubtedly he rejoiced in the brief
periods when he was actually before his audience and could play upon
it with his master touch, but the dreary intermissions of travel and
broken sleep were too heavy a price to pay.


To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis

ELMIRA, June 4. (1868)
DEAR FOLKS,--Livy sends you her love and loving good wishes, and I send
you mine. The last 3 chapters of the book came tonight--we shall read it
in the morning and then thank goodness, we are done.

In twelve months (or rather I believe it is fourteen,) I have earned just
eighty dollars by my pen--two little magazine squibs and one newspaper
letter--altogether the idlest, laziest 14 months I ever spent in my life.
And in that time my absolute and necessary expenses have been scorchingly
heavy--for I have now less than three thousand six hundred dollars in
bank out of the eight or nine thousand I have made during those months,
lecturing. My expenses were something frightful during the winter.
I feel ashamed of my idleness, and yet I have had really no inclination
to do anything but court Livy. I haven't any other inclination yet.
I have determined not to work as hard traveling, any more, as I did last
winter, and so I have resolved not to lecture outside of the 6 New
England States next winter. My Western course would easily amount to
$10,000, but I would rather make 2 or 3 thousand in New England than
submit again to so much wearing travel. (I have promised to talk ten
nights for a thousand dollars in the State of New York, provided the
places are close together.) But after all if I get located in a newspaper
in a way to suit me, in the meantime, I don't want to lecture at all next
winter, and probably shan't. I most cordially hate the lecture field.
And after all, I shudder to think that I may never get out of it.

In all conversations with Gough, and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips and the other old stagers, I could not
observe that they ever expected or hoped to get out of the business.
I don't want to get wedded to it as they are. Livy thinks we can live on
a very moderate sum and that we'll not need to lecture. I know very well
that she can live on a small allowance, but I am not so sure about
myself. I can't scare her by reminding her that her father's family
expenses are forty thousand dollars a year, because she produces the
documents at once to show that precious little of this outlay is on her
account. But I must not commence writing about Livy, else I shall never
stop. There isn't such another little piece of perfection in the world
as she is.

My time is become so short, now, that I doubt if I get to California this
summer. If I manage to buy into a paper, I think I will visit you a
while and not go to Cal. at all. I shall know something about it after
my next trip to Hartford. We all go there on the 10th--the whole family
--to attend a wedding, on the 17th. I am offered an interest in a
Cleveland paper which would pay me $2,300 to $2,500 a year, and a salary
added of $3,000. The salary is fair enough, but the interest is not
large enough, and so I must look a little further. The Cleveland folks
say they can be induced to do a little better by me, and urge me to come
out and talk business. But it don't strike me--I feel little or no
inclination to go.

I believe I haven't anything else to write, and it is bed-time. I want
to write to Orion, but I keep putting it off--I keep putting everything
off. Day after day Livy and I are together all day long and until 10 at
night, and then I feel dreadfully sleepy. If Orion will bear with me and
forgive me I will square up with him yet. I will even let him kiss Livy.

My love to Mollie and Annie and Sammie and all. Good-bye.
Affectionately,
SAM.


It is curious, with his tendency to optimism and general expansion
of futures, that he says nothing of the possible sales of the new
book, or of his expectations in that line. It was issued in July,
and by June the publishers must have had promising advance orders
from their canvassers; but apparently he includes none of these
chickens in his financial forecast. Even when the book had been out
a full month, and was being shipped at the rate of several hundreds
a day, he makes no reference to it in a letter to his sister, other
than to ask if she has not received a copy. This, however, was a
Mark Twain peculiarity. Writing was his trade; the returns from it
seldom excited him. It was only when he drifted into strange and
untried fields that he began to chase rainbows, to blow iridescent
bubbles, and count unmined gold.


To Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:

BUFFALO, Aug. 20, 1869.
MY DEAR SISTER,--I have only time to write a line. I got your letter
this morning and mailed it to Livy. She will be expecting me tonight and
I am sorry to disappoint her so, but then I couldn't well get away. I
will go next Saturday.

I have bundled up Livy's picture and will try and recollect to mail it
tomorrow. It is a porcelaintype and I think you will like it.

I am sorry I never got to St. Louis, because I may be too busy to go, for
a long time. But I have been busy all the time and St. Louis is clear
out of the way, and remote from the world and all ordinary routes of
travel. You must not place too much weight upon this idea of moving the
capital from Washington. St. Louis is in some respects a better place
for it than Washington, though there isn't more than a toss-up between
the two after all. One is dead and the other in a trance. Washington is
in the centre of population and business, while St. Louis is far removed
from both. And you know there is no geographical centre any more. The
railroads and telegraph have done away with all that. It is no longer
a matter of sufficient importance to be gravely considered by thinking
men. The only centres, now, are narrowed down to those of intelligence,
capital and population. As I said before Washington is the nearest to
those and you don't have to paddle across a river on ferry boats of a
pattern popular in the dark ages to get to it, nor have to clamber up
vilely paved hills in rascally omnibuses along with a herd of all sorts
of people after you are there. Secondly, the removal of the capital is
one of those old, regular, reliable dodges that are the bread-and meat of
back country congressmen. It is agitated every year. It always has
been, it always will be; It is not new in any respect. Thirdly. The
Capitol has cost $40,000,000 already and lacks a good deal of being
finished, yet. There are single stones in the Treasury building (and a
good many of them) that cost twenty-seven thousand dollars apiece--and
millions were spent in the construction of that and the Patent Office and
the other great government buildings. To move to St. Louis, the country
must throw away a hundred millions of capital invested in those
buildings, and go right to work to spend a hundred millions on new
buildings in St. Louis. Shall we ever have a Congress, a majority of
whose members are hopelessly insane? Probably not. But it is possible
--unquestionably such a thing is possible. Only I don't believe it will
happen in our time; and I am satisfied the capital will not be moved
until it does happen. But if St. Louis would donate the ground and the
buildings, it would be a different matter. No, Pamela, I don't see any
good reason to believe you or I will ever see the capital moved.

I have twice instructed the publishers to send you a book--it was the
first thing I did--long before the proofs were finished. Write me if it
is not yet done.

Livy says we must have you all at our marriage, and I say we can't.
It will be at Christmas or New Years, when such a trip across the country
would be equivalent to murder & arson & everything else.--And it would
cost five hundred dollars--an amount of money she don't know the value of
now, but will before a year is gone. She grieves over it, poor little
rascal, but it can't be helped. She must wait awhile, till I am firmly
on my legs, & then she shall see you. She says her father and mother
will invite you just as soon as the wedding date is definitely fixed,
anyway--& she thinks that's bound to settle it. But the ice & snow, &
the long hard journey, & the injudiciousness of laying out any money
except what we are obliged to part with while we are so much in debt,
settles the case differently. For it is a debt.

.....Mr. Langdon is just as good as bound for $25,000 for me, and has
already advanced half of it in cash. I wrote and asked whether I had
better send him my note, or a due-bill, or how he would prefer to have
the indebtedness made of record and he answered every other topic in the
letter pleasantly but never replied to that at all. Still, I shall give
my note into the hands of his business agent here, and pay him the
interest as it falls due. We must "go slow." We are not in the
Cleveland Herald. We are a hundred thousand times better off, but there
isn't so much money in it.

(Remainder missing.)


In spite of the immediate success of his book--a success the like of
which had scarcely been known in America-Mark Twain held himself to
be, not a literary man, but a journalist: He had no plans for
another book; as a newspaper owner and editor he expected, with his
marriage, to settle down and devote the rest of his life to
journalism. The paper was the Buffalo Express; his interest in it
was one-third--the purchase price, twenty-five thousand dollars, of
which he had paid a part, Jervis Langdon, his future father-in-law,
having furnished cash and security for the remainder. He was
already in possession in August, but he was not regularly in Buffalo
that autumn, for he had agreed with Redpath to deliver his Quaker
City lecture, and the tour would not end until a short time before
his wedding-day, February 2, 1870.

Our next letter hardly belongs in this collection; as it was
doubtless written with at least the possibility of publication in
view. But it is too amusing, too characteristic of Mark Twain, to
be omitted. It was sent in response to an invitation from the New
York Society of California Pioneers to attend a banquet given in New
York City, October 13, 1869, and was, of course, read to the
assembled diners.


To the New York Society of California Pioneers, in New York City:

ELMIRA, October 11, 1869.
GENTLEMEN,--Circumstances render it out of my power to take advantage of
the invitation extended to me through Mr. Simonton, and be present at
your dinner at New York. I regret this very much, for there are several
among you whom I would have a right to join hands with on the score of
old friendship, and I suppose I would have a sublime general right to
shake hands with the rest of you on the score of kinship in California
ups and downs in search of fortune.

If I were to tell some of my experience, you would recognize California
blood in me; I fancy the old, old story would sound familiar, no doubt.
I have the usual stock of reminiscences. For instance: I went to
Esmeralda early. I purchased largely in the "Wide West," "Winnemucca,"
and other fine claims, and was very wealthy. I fared sumptuously on
bread when flour was $200 a barrel and had beans for dinner every Sunday,
when none but bloated aristocrats could afford such grandeur. But I
finished by feeding batteries in a quartz mill at $15 a week, and wishing
I was a battery myself and had somebody to feed me. My claims in
Esmeralda are there yet. I suppose I could be persuaded to sell.

I went to Humboldt District when it was new; I became largely interested
in the "Alba Nueva" and other claims with gorgeous names, and was rich
again--in prospect. I owned a vast mining property there. I would not
have sold out for less than $400,000 at that time. But I will now.
Finally I walked home--200 miles partly for exercise, and partly because
stage fare was expensive. Next I entered upon an affluent career in
Virginia City, and by a judicious investment of labor and the capital of
friends, became the owner of about all the worthless wild cat mines there
were in that part of the country. Assessments did the business for me
there. There were a hundred and seventeen assessments to one dividend,
and the proportion of income to outlay was a little against me. My
financial barometer went down to 32 Fahrenheit, and the subscriber was
frozen out.

I took up extensions on the main lead-extensions that reached to British
America, in one direction, and to the Isthmus of Panama in the other--and
I verily believe I would have been a rich man if I had ever found those
infernal extensions. But I didn't. I ran tunnels till I tapped the
Arctic Ocean, and I sunk shafts till I broke through the roof of
perdition; but those extensions turned up missing every time. I am
willing to sell all that property and throw in the improvements.

Perhaps you remember that celebrated "North Ophir?" I bought that mine.
It was very rich in pure silver. You could take it out in lumps as large
as a filbert. But when it was discovered that those lumps were melted
half dollars, and hardly melted at that, a painful case of "salting" was
apparent, and the undersigned adjourned to the poorhouse again.

I paid assessments on "Hale and Norcross" until they sold me out, and I
had to take in washing for a living--and the next month that infamous
stock went up to $7,000 a foot.

I own millions and millions of feet of affluent silver leads in Nevada
--in fact the entire undercrust of that country nearly, and if Congress
would move that State off my property so that I could get at it, I would
be wealthy yet. But no, there she squats--and here am I. Failing health
persuades me to sell. If you know of any one desiring a permanent
investment, I can furnish one that will have the virtue of being eternal.

I have been through the California mill, with all its "dips, spurs and
angles, variations and sinuosities." I have worked there at all the
different trades and professions known to the catalogues. I have been
everything, from a newspaper editor down to a cow-catcher on a
locomotive, and I am encouraged to believe that if there had been a few
more occupations to experiment on, I might have made a dazzling success
at last, and found out what mysterious designs Providence had in creating
me.

But you perceive that although I am not a Pioneer, I have had a
sufficiently variegated time of it to enable me to talk Pioneer like a
native, and feel like a Forty-Niner. Therefore, I cordially welcome you
to your old-remembered homes and your long deserted firesides, and close
this screed with the sincere hope that your visit here will be a happy
one, and not embittered by the sorrowful surprises that absence and lapse
of years are wont to prepare for wanderers; surprises which come in the
form of old friends missed from their places; silence where familiar
voices should be; the young grown old; change and decay everywhere; home
a delusion and a disappointment; strangers at hearthstone; sorrow where
gladness was; tears for laughter; the melancholy-pomp of death where the
grace of life has been!

With all good wishes for the Returned Prodigals, and regrets that I
cannot partake of a small piece of the fatted calf (rare and no gravy,)
I am yours, cordially,
MARK TWAIN.


In the next letter we find him in the midst of a sort of confusion
of affairs, which, in one form or another, would follow him
throughout the rest of his life. It was the price of his success
and popularity, combined with his general gift for being concerned
with a number of things, and a natural tendency for getting into hot
water, which becomes more evident as the years and letters pass in
review. Orion Clemens, in his attempt to save money for the
government, had employed methods and agents which the officials at
Washington did not understand, and refused to recognize. Instead of
winning the credit and commendation he had expected, he now found
himself pursued by claims of considerable proportions. The "land"
referred to is the Tennessee tract, the heritage which John Clemens
had provided for his children. Mark Twain had long since lost faith
in it, and was not only willing, but eager to renounce his rights.

"Nasby" is, of course, David R. Locke, of the Toledo Blade, whose
popularity at this time both as a lecturer and writer was very
great. Clemens had met him here and there on their platform tour,
and they had become good friends. Clemens, in fact, had once
proposed to Nasby a joint trip to the Pacific coast.

The California idea had been given up, but both Mark Twain and Nasby
found engagements enough, and sufficient profit east of the
Mississippi. Boston was often their headquarters that winter ('69
and '70), and they were much together. "Josh Billings," another of
Redpath's lecturers, was likewise often to be found in the Lyceum
offices. There is a photograph of Mark Twain, Nasby, and Josh
Billings together.

Clemens also, that winter, met William Dean Howells, then in the
early days of his association with the Atlantic Monthly. The two
men, so widely different, became firm friends at sight, and it was
to Howells in the years to come that Mark Twain would write more
letters, and more characteristic letters, than to any other living
man. Howells had favorably reviewed 'The Innocents Abroad,' and
after the first moment of their introduction had passed Clemens
said: "When I read that review of yours I felt like the woman who
said that she was so glad that her baby had come white." It was not
the sort of thing that Howells would have said, but it was the sort
of thing that he could understand and appreciate from Mark Twain.

In company with Nasby Clemens, that season, also met Oliver Wendell
Holmes. Later he had sent Holmes a copy of his book and received a
pleasantly appreciative reply. "I always like," wrote Holmes, "to
hear what one of my fellow countrymen, who is not a Hebrew scholar,
or a reader of hiero-glyphics, but a good-humored traveler with a
pair of sharp, twinkling Yankee (in the broader sense) eyes in his
head, has to say about the things that learned travelers often make
unintelligible, and sentimental ones ridiculous or absurd .... I
hope your booksellers will sell a hundred thousand copies of your
travels." A wish that was realized in due time, though it is
doubtful if Doctor Holmes or any one else at the moment believed
that a book of that nature and price (it was $3.50 a copy) would
ever reach such a sale.