The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete

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


I send you No. 5 today. I have written and re-written the first half of
it three different times, yesterday and today, and at last Mrs. Clemens
says it will do. I never saw a woman so hard to please about things she
doesn't know anything about.
Yours ever,
MARK.


Of course, the reference to his wife's criticism in this is tenderly
playful, as always--of a pattern with the severity which he pretends
for her in the next.


To Mrs. W. D. Howells, in Boston:

1875
DEAR MRS. HOWELLS,--Mrs. Clemens is delighted to get the pictures, and so
am I. I can perceive in the group, that Mr. Howells is feeling as I so
often feel, viz: "Well, no doubt I am in the wrong, though I do not know
how or where or why--but anyway it will be safest to look meek, and walk
circumspectly for a while, and not discuss the thing." And you look
exactly as Mrs. Clemens does after she has said, "Indeed I do not wonder
that you can frame no reply: for you know only too well, that your
conduct admits of no excuse, palliation or argument--none!"

I shall just delight in that group on account of the good old human
domestic spirit that pervades it--bother these family groups that put on
a state aspect to get their pictures taken in.

We want a heliotype made of our eldest daughter. How soft and rich and
lovely the picture is. Mr. Howells must tell me how to proceed in the
matter.
Truly Yours
SAM. L. CLEMENS.


In the next letter we have a picture of Susy--[This spelling of the
name was adopted somewhat later and much preferred. It appears as
"Susie" in most of the earlier letters.]--Clemens's third birthday,
certainly a pretty picture, and as sweet and luminous and tender
today as it was forty years ago-as it will be a hundred years hence,
if these lines should survive that long. The letter is to her uncle
Charles Langdon, the "Charlie" of the Quaker City. "Atwater" was
associated with the Langdon coal interests in Elmira. "The play"
is, of course, "The Gilded Age."


To Charles Langdon, in Elmira:

Mch. 19, 1875.
DEAR CHARLIE,--Livy, after reading your letter, used her severest form of
expression about Mr. Atwater--to wit: She did not "approve" of his
conduct. This made me shudder; for it was equivalent to Allie
Spaulding's saying "Mr. Atwater is a mean thing;" or Rev. Thomas
Beecher's saying "Damn that Atwater," or my saying "I wish Atwater was
three hundred million miles in----!"

However, Livy does not often get into one of these furies, God be
thanked.

In Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Chicago,
the play paid me an average of nine hundred dollars a week. In smaller
towns the average is $400 to $500.

This is Susie's birth-day. Lizzie brought her in at 8.30 this morning
(before we were up) hooded with a blanket, red curl-papers in her hair, a
great red japonica, in one hand (for Livy) and a yellow rose-bud nestled
in violets (for my buttonhole) in the other--and she looked wonderfully
pretty. She delivered her memorials and received her birth-day kisses.
Livy laid her japonica, down to get a better "holt" for kissing-which
Susie presently perceived, and became thoughtful: then said sorrowfully,
turning the great deeps of her eyes upon her mother: "Don't you care for
you wow?"

Right after breakfast we got up a rousing wood fire in the main hall
(it is a cold morning) illuminated the place with a rich glow from all
the globes of the newell chandelier, spread a bright rug before the fire,
set a circling row of chairs (pink ones and dove-colored) and in the
midst a low invalid-table covered with a fanciful cloth and laden with
the presents--a pink azalia in lavish bloom from Rosa; a gold inscribed
Russia-leather bible from Patrick and Mary; a gold ring (inscribed) from
"Maggy Cook;" a silver thimble (inscribed with motto and initials) from
Lizzie; a rattling mob of Sunday clad dolls from Livy and Annie, and a
Noah's Ark from me, containing 200 wooden animals such as only a human
being could create and only God call by name without referring to the
passenger list. Then the family and the seven servants assembled there,
and Susie and the "Bay" arrived in state from above, the Bay's head being
fearfully and wonderfully decorated with a profusion of blazing red
flowers and overflowing cataracts of lycopodium. Wee congratulatory
notes accompanied the presents of the servants. I tell you it was a
great occasion and a striking and cheery group, taking all the
surroundings into account and the wintry aspect outside.

(Remainder missing.)


There was to be a centennial celebration that year of the battles of
Lexington and Concord, and Howells wrote, urging Clemens and his
wife to visit them and attend it. Mrs. Clemens did not go, and
Clemens and Howells did not go, either--to the celebration. They
had their own ideas about getting there, but found themselves unable
to board the thronged train at Concord, and went tramping about in
the cold and mud, hunting a conveyance, only to return at length to
the cheer of the home, defeated and rather low in spirits.

Twichell, who went on his own hook, had no such difficulties. To
Howells, Mark Twain wrote the adventures of this athletic and
strenuous exponent of the gospel.

The "Winnie" mentioned in this letter was Howells's daughter
Winifred. She had unusual gifts, but did not live to develop them.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD. Apl. 23, 1875.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I've got Mrs. Clemens's picture before me, and hope I
shall not forget to send it with this.

Joe Twichell preached morning and evening here last Sunday; took midnight
train for Boston; got an early breakfast and started by rail at 7.30
A. M. for Concord; swelled around there until 1 P. M., seeing
everything; then traveled on top of a train to Lexington; saw everything
there; traveled on top of a train to Boston, (with hundreds in company)
deluged with dust, smoke and cinders; yelled and hurrahed all the way
like a schoolboy; lay flat down to dodge numerous bridges, and sailed
into the depot, howling with excitement and as black as a chimney-sweep;
got to Young's Hotel at 7 P. M.; sat down in reading-room and immediately
fell asleep; was promptly awakened by a porter who supposed he was drunk;
wandered around an hour and a half; then took 9 P. M. train, sat down in
smoking car and remembered nothing more until awakened by conductor as
the train came into Hartford at 1.30 A. M. Thinks he had simply a
glorious time--and wouldn't have missed the Centennial for the world.
He would have run out to see us a moment at Cambridge, but was too dirty.
I wouldn't have wanted him there--his appalling energy would have been an
insufferable reproach to mild adventurers like you and me.

Well, he is welcome to the good time he had--I had a deal better one.
My narrative has made Mrs. Clemens wish she could have been there.--When
I think over what a splendid good sociable time I had in your house I
feel ever so thankful to the wise providence that thwarted our several
ably-planned and ingenious attempts to get to Lexington. I am coming
again before long, and then she shall be of the party.

Now you said that you and Mrs. Howells could run down here nearly any
Saturday. Very well then, let us call it next Saturday, for a "starter."
Can you do that? By that time it will really be spring and you won't
freeze. The birds are already out; a small one paid us a visit
yesterday. We entertained it and let it go again, Susie protesting.

The spring laziness is already upon me--insomuch that the spirit begins
to move me to cease from Mississippi articles and everything else and
give myself over to idleness until we go to New Orleans. I have one
article already finished, but somehow it doesn't seem as proper a chapter
to close with as the one already in your hands. I hope to get in a mood
and rattle off a good one to finish with--but just now all my moods are
lazy ones.

Winnie's literature sings through me yet! Surely that child has one of
these "futures" before her.

Now try to come--will you?

With the warmest regards of the two of us--
Yrs ever,
S. L. CLEMENS.

Mrs. Clemens sent a note to Mrs. Howells, which will serve as a pendant
to the foregoing.


From Mrs. Clemens to Mrs. Howells, in Boston:

MY DEAR MRS. HOWELLS,--Don't dream for one instant that my not getting a
letter from you kept me from Boston. I am too anxious to go to let such
a thing as that keep me.

Mr. Clemens did have such a good time with you and Mr. Howells.
He evidently has no regret that he did not get to the Centennial. I was
driven nearly distracted by his long account of Mr. Howells and his
wanderings. I would keep asking if they ever got there, he would never
answer but made me listen to a very minute account of everything that
they did. At last I found them back where they started from.

If you find misspelled words in this note, you will remember my infirmity
and not hold me responsible.
Affectionately yours,
LIVY L. CLEMENS.

In spite of his success with the Sellers play and his itch to follow it
up, Mark Twain realized what he believed to be his literary limitations.
All his life he was inclined to consider himself wanting in the finer
gifts of character-shading and delicate portrayal. Remembering Huck
Finn, and the rare presentation of Joan of Arc, we may not altogether
agree with him. Certainly, he was never qualified to delineate those
fine artificialities of life which we are likely to associate with
culture, and perhaps it was something of this sort that caused the
hesitation confessed in the letter that follows. Whether the plan
suggested interested Howells or not we do not know. In later years
Howells wrote a novel called The Story of a Play; this may have been its
beginning.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

FARMINGTON AVENUE, HARTFORD, Apl. 26, 1875.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--An actor named D. H. Harkins has been here to ask me to
put upon paper a 5-act play which he has been mapping out in his mind for
3 or 4 years. He sat down and told me his plot all through, in a clear,
bright way, and I was a deal taken with it; but it is a line of
characters whose fine shading and artistic development requires an abler
hand than mine; so I easily perceived that I must not make the attempt.
But I liked the man, and thought there was a good deal of stuff in him;
and therefore I wanted his play to be written, and by a capable hand,
too. So I suggested you, and said I would write and see if you would be
willing to undertake it. If you like the idea, he will call upon you in
the course of two or three weeks and describe his plot and his
characters. Then if it doesn't strike you favorably, of course you can
simply decline; but it seems to me well worth while that you should hear
what he has to say. You could also "average" him while he talks, and
judge whether he could play your priest--though I doubt if any man can do
that justice.

Shan't I write him and say he may call? If you wish to communicate
directly with him instead, his address is "Larchmont Manor, Westchester
Co., N. Y."

Do you know, the chill of that 19th of April seems to be in my bones yet?
I am inert and drowsy all the time. That was villainous weather for a
couple of wandering children to be out in.
Ys ever
MARK.


The sinister typewriter did not find its way to Howells for nearly a
year. Meantime, Mark Twain had refused to allow the manufacturers
to advertise his ownership. He wrote to them:


HARTFORD, March 19, 1875.
Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the
fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the typewriter,
for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody
without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe
the machine, but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc.,
etc. I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want people to know
I own this curiosity-breeding little joker.


Three months later the machine was still in his possession. Bliss
had traded a twelve-dollar saddle for it, but apparently showed
little enthusiasm in his new possession.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

June 25, 1875.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I told Patrick to get some carpenters and box the
machine and send it to you--and found that Bliss had sent for the machine
and earned it off.

I have been talking to you and writing to you as if you were present when
I traded the machine to Bliss for a twelve-dollar saddle worth $25
(cheating him outrageously, of course--but conscience got the upper hand
again and I told him before I left the premises that I'd pay for the
saddle if he didn't like the machine--on condition that he donate said
machine to a charity)

This was a little over five weeks ago--so I had long ago concluded that
Bliss didn't want the machine and did want the saddle--wherefore I jumped
at the chance of shoving the machine off onto you, saddle or no saddle so
I got the blamed thing out of my sight.

The saddle hangs on Tara's walls down below in the stable, and the
machine is at Bliss's grimly pursuing its appointed mission, slowly and
implacably rotting away another man's chances for salvation.

I have sent Bliss word not to donate it to a charity (though it is a pity
to fool away a chance to do a charity an ill turn,) but to let me know
when he has got his dose, because I've got another candidate for
damnation. You just wait a couple of weeks and if you don't see the
Type-Writer come tilting along toward Cambridge with an unsatisfied
appetite in its eye, I lose my guess.

Don't you be mad about this blunder, Howells--it only comes of a bad
memory, and the stupidity which is inseparable from true genius. Nothing
intentionally criminal in it.
Yrs ever
MARK.


It was November when Howells finally fell under the baleful
influence of the machine. He wrote:

"The typewriter came Wednesday night, and is already beginning to
have its effect on me. Of course, it doesn't work: if I can
persuade some of the letters to get up against the ribbon they won't
get down again without digital assistance. The treadle refuses to
have any part or parcel in the performance; and I don't know how to
get the roller to turn with the paper. Nevertheless I have begun
several letters to My d-a-r lemans, as it prefers to spell your
respected name, and I don't despair yet of sending you something in
its beautiful handwriting--after I've had a man out from the agent's
to put it in order. It's fascinating in the meantime, and it wastes
my time like an old friend."

The Clemens family remained in Hartford that summer, with the
exception of a brief season at Bateman's Point, R. I., near
Newport. By this time Mark Twain had taken up and finished the Tom
Sawyer story begun two years before. Naturally he wished Howells to
consider the MS.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, July 5th, 1875.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have finished the story and didn't take the chap
beyond boyhood. I believe it would be fatal to do it in any shape but
autobiographically--like Gil Blas. I perhaps made a mistake in not
writing it in the first person. If I went on, now, and took him into
manhood, he would just like like all the one-horse men in literature and
the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him. It is not a boy's
book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for
adults.

Moreover the book is plenty long enough as it stands. It is about 900
pages of MS, and may be 1000 when I shall have finished "working up"
vague places; so it would make from 130 to 150 pages of the Atlantic
--about what the Foregone Conclusion made, isn't it?

I would dearly like to see it in the Atlantic, but I doubt if it would
pay the publishers to buy the privilege, or me to sell it. Bret Harte
has sold his novel (same size as mine, I should say) to Scribner's
Monthly for $6,500 (publication to begin in September, I think,) and he
gets a royalty of 7 1/2 per cent from Bliss in book form afterwards. He
gets a royalty of ten per cent on it in England (issued in serial
numbers) and the same royalty on it in book form afterwards, and is to
receive an advance payment of five hundred pounds the day the first No.
of the serial appears. If I could do as well, here, and there, with
mine, it might possibly pay me, but I seriously doubt it though it is
likely I could do better in England than Bret, who is not widely known
there.

You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things--but then my household
expenses are something almost ghastly.

By and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him on through life (in
the first person) but not Tom Sawyer--he would not be a good character
for it.

I wish you would promise to read the MS of Tom Sawyer some time, and see
if you don't really decide that I am right in closing with him as a boy
--and point out the most glaring defects for me. It is a tremendous favor
to ask, and I expect you to refuse and would be ashamed to expect you to
do otherwise. But the thing has been so many months in my mind that it
seems a relief to snake it out. I don't know any other person whose
judgment I could venture to take fully and entirely. Don't hesitate
about saying no, for I know how your time is taxed, and I would have
honest need to blush if you said yes.

Osgood and I are "going for" the puppy G---- on infringement of
trademark. To win one or two suits of this kind will set literary folks
on a firmer bottom. I wish Osgood would sue for stealing Holmes's poem.
Wouldn't it be gorgeous to sue R---- for petty larceny? I will promise
to go into court and swear I think him capable of stealing pea-nuts from
a blind pedlar.
Yrs ever,
CLEMENS.


Of course Howells promptly replied that he would read the story,
adding: "You've no idea what I may ask you to do for me, some day.
I'm sorry that you can't do it for the Atlantic, but I
succumb. Perhaps you will do Boy No. 2 for us." Clemens,
conscience-stricken, meantime, hastily put the MS. out of reach
of temptation.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

July 13, 1875
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Just as soon as you consented I realized all the
atrocity of my request, and straightway blushed and weakened.
I telegraphed my theatrical agent to come here and carry off the MS and
copy it.

But I will gladly send it to you if you will do as follows: dramatize it,
if you perceive that you can, and take, for your remuneration, half of
the first $6000 which I receive for its representation on the stage. You
could alter the plot entirely, if you chose. I could help in the work,
most cheerfully, after you had arranged the plot. I have my eye upon two
young girls who can play "Tom" and "Huck." I believe a good deal of a
drama can be made of it. Come--can't you tackle this in the odd hours of
your vacation? or later, if you prefer?

I do wish you could come down once more before your holiday. I'd give
anything!
Yrs ever,
MARK.


Howells wrote that he had no time for the dramatization and urged Clemens
to undertake it himself. He was ready to read the story, whenever it
should arrive. Clemens did not hurry, however, The publication of Tom
Sawyer could wait. He already had a book in press--the volume of
Sketches New and Old, which he had prepared for Bliss several years
before.

Sketches was issued that autumn, and Howells gave it a good notice
--possibly better than it deserved.

Considered among Mark Twain's books to-day, the collection of sketches
does not seem especially important. With the exception of the frog story
and the "True Story" most of those included--might be spared. Clemens
himself confessed to Howells that He wished, when it was too late, that
he had destroyed a number of them. The book, however, was distinguished
in a special way: it contains Mark Twain's first utterance in print on
the subject of copyright, a matter in which he never again lost interest.
The absurdity and injustice of the copyright laws both amused and
irritated him, and in the course of time he would be largely instrumental
in their improvement. In the book his open petition to Congress that all
property rights, as well as literary ownership, should be put on the
copyright basis and limited to a "beneficent term of forty-two years,"
was more or less of a joke, but, like so many of Mark Twain's jokes, it
was founded on reason and justice.

He had another idea, that was not a joke: an early plan in the direction
of international copyright. It was to be a petition signed by the
leading American authors, asking the United States to declare itself to
be the first to stand for right and justice by enacting laws against the
piracy of foreign books. It was a rather utopian scheme, as most schemes
for moral progress are, in their beginning. It would not be likely ever
to reach Congress, but it would appeal to Howells and his Cambridge
friends. Clemens wrote, outlining his plan of action.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Sept. 18, 1875.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--My plan is this--you are to get Mr. Lowell and Mr.
Longfellow to be the first signers of my copyright petition; you must
sign it yourself and get Mr. Whittier to do likewise. Then Holmes will
sign--he said he would if he didn't have to stand at the head. Then I'm
fixed. I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages and send him
personally to every author of distinction in the country, and corral the
rest of the signatures. Then I'll have the whole thing lithographed
(about a thousand copies) and move upon the President and Congress in
person, but in the subordinate capacity of a party who is merely the
agent of better and wiser men--men whom the country cannot venture to
laugh at.

I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he
should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush
--but still I would frame it.)

Next I would get a prime leader in Congress: I would also see that votes
enough to carry the measure were privately secured before the bill was
offered. This I would try through my leader and my friends there.

And then if Europe chose to go on stealing from us, we would say with
noble enthusiasm, "American lawmakers do steal but not from foreign
authors--Not from foreign authors!"

You see, what I want to drive into the Congressional mind is the simple
fact that the moral law is "Thou shalt not steal"--no matter what Europe
may do.

I swear I can't see any use in robbing European authors for the benefit
of American booksellers, anyway.

If we can ever get this thing through Congress, we can try making
copyright perpetual, some day. There would be no sort of use in it,
since only one book in a hundred millions outlives the present copyright
term--no sort of use except that the writer of that one book have his
rights--which is something.

If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a
sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.

The only man who ever signed my petition with alacrity, and said that the
fact that a thing was right was all-sufficient, was Rev. Dr. Bushnell.

I have lost my old petition, (which was brief) but will draft and enclose
another--not in the words it ought to be, but in the substance. I want
Mr. Lowell to furnish the words (and the ideas too,) if he will do it.

Say--Redpath beseeches me to lecture in Boston in November--telegraphs
that Beecher's and Nast's withdrawal has put him in the tightest kind of
a place. So I guess I'll do that old "Roughing It" lecture over again in
November and repeat it 2 or 3 times in New York while I am at it.

Can I take a carriage after the lecture and go out and stay with you that
night, provided you find at that distant time that it will not
inconvenience you? Is Aldrich home yet?
With love to you all
Yrs ever,
S. L. C.