The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete

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


"I judge the X-X notation to be a rational mode of representing music, in
place of the prevailing fashion, which was the invention of an idiot."

Next mail he asked permission to print that meaningless remark.
I answered, no--courteously, but still, no; explaining that I could not
afford to be placed in the attitude of trying to influence people with a
mere worthless guess. What a scorcher I got, next mail! Such irony!
such sarcasm, such caustic praise of my superhonorable loyalty to the
public! And withal, such compassion for my stupidity, too, in not being
able to understand my own language. I cannot remember the words of this
letter broadside, but there was about a page used up in turning this idea
round and round and exposing it in different lights.

Unmailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--What is the trouble with you? If it is your viscera, you
cannot have them taken out and reorganized a moment too soon. I mean,
if they are inside. But if you are composed of them, that is another
matter. Is it your brain? But it could not be your brain. Possibly it
is your skull: you want to look out for that. Some people, when they get
an idea, it pries the structure apart. Your system of notation has got
in there, and couldn't find room, without a doubt that is what the
trouble is. Your skull was not made to put ideas in, it was made to
throw potatoes at.
Yours Truly.


Mailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--Come, come--take a walk; you disturb the children.
Yours Truly.


There was a day, now happily nearly over, when certain newspapers made a
practice of inviting men distinguished in any walk of life to give their
time and effort without charge to express themselves on some subject of
the day, or perhaps they were asked to send their favorite passages in
prose or verse, with the reasons why. Such symposiums were "features"
that cost the newspapers only the writing of a number of letters,
stationery, and postage. To one such invitation Mark Twain wrote two
replies. They follow herewith:

Unmailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--I have received your proposition--which you have imitated from
a pauper London periodical which had previously imitated the idea of this
sort of mendicancy from seventh-rate American journalism, where it
originated as a variation of the inexpensive "interview."

Why do you buy Associated Press dispatches? To make your paper the more
salable, you answer. But why don't you try to beg them? Why do you
discriminate? I can sell my stuff; why should I give it to you? Why
don't you ask me for a shirt? What is the difference between asking me
for the worth of a shirt and asking me for the shirt itself? Perhaps you
didn't know you were begging. I would not use that argument--it makes
the user a fool. The passage of poetry--or prose, if you will--which has
taken deepest root in my thought, and which I oftenest return to and
dwell upon with keenest no matter what, is this: That the proper place
for journalists who solicit literary charity is on the street corner with
their hats in their hands.


Mailed Answer:

DEAR SIR,--Your favor of recent date is received, but I am obliged by
press of work to decline.


The manager of a traveling theatrical company wrote that he had
taken the liberty of dramatizing Tom Sawyer, and would like also the
use of the author's name--the idea being to convey to the public
that it was a Mark Twain play. In return for this slight favor the
manager sent an invitation for Mark Twain to come and see the play
--to be present on the opening night, as it were, at his (the
manager's) expense. He added that if the play should be a go in the
cities there might be some "arrangement" of profits. Apparently
these inducements did not appeal to Mark Twain. The long unmailed
reply is the more interesting, but probably the briefer one that
follows it was quite as effective.

Unmailed Answer:

HARTFORD, Sept. 8, '87.
DEAR SIR,--And so it has got around to you, at last; and you also have
"taken the liberty." You are No. 1365. When 1364 sweeter and better
people, including the author, have "tried" to dramatize Tom Sawyer and
did not arrive, what sort of show do you suppose you stand? That is a
book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One might as well try to
dramatize any other hymn. Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose
form to give it a worldly air.

Why the pale doubt that flitteth dim and nebulous athwart the forecastle
of your third sentence? Have no fears. Your piece will be a Go.
It will go out the back door on the first night. They've all done it
--the 1364. So will 1365. Not one of us ever thought of the simple
device of half-soling himself with a stove-lid. Ah, what suffering a
little hindsight would have saved us. Treasure this hint.

How kind of you to invite me to the funeral. Go to; I have attended a
thousand of them. I have seen Tom Sawyer's remains in all the different
kinds of dramatic shrouds there are. You cannot start anything fresh.
Are you serious when you propose to pay my expence--if that is the
Susquehannian way of spelling it? And can you be aware that I charge a
hundred dollars a mile when I travel for pleasure? Do you realize that
it is 432 miles to Susquehanna? Would it be handy for you to send me the
$43,200 first, so I could be counting it as I come along; because
railroading is pretty dreary to a sensitive nature when there's nothing
sordid to buck at for Zeitvertreib.

Now as I understand it, dear and magnanimous 1365, you are going to
recreate Tom Sawyer dramatically, and then do me the compliment to put me
in the bills as father of this shady offspring. Sir, do you know that
this kind of a compliment has destroyed people before now? Listen.

Twenty-four years ago, I was strangely handsome. The remains of it are
still visible through the rifts of time. I was so handsome that human
activities ceased as if spellbound when I came in view, and even
inanimate things stopped to look--like locomotives, and district
messenger boys and so-on. In San Francisco, in the rainy season I was
often mistaken for fair weather. Upon one occasion I was traveling in
the Sonora region, and stopped for an hour's nooning, to rest my horse
and myself. All the town came out to look. The tribes of Indians
gathered to look. A Piute squaw named her baby for me,--a voluntary
compliment which pleased me greatly. Other attentions were paid me.
Last of all arrived the president and faculty of Sonora University and
offered me the post of Professor of Moral Culture and the Dogmatic
Humanities; which I accepted gratefully, and entered at once upon my
duties. But my name had pleased the Indians, and in the deadly kindness
of their hearts they went on naming their babies after me. I tried to
stop it, but the Indians could not understand why I should object to so
manifest a compliment. The thing grew and grew and spread and spread and
became exceedingly embarrassing. The University stood it a couple of
years; but then for the sake of the college they felt obliged to call a
halt, although I had the sympathy of the whole faculty. The president
himself said to me, "I am as sorry as I can be for you, and would still
hold out if there were any hope ahead; but you see how it is: there are a
hundred and thirty-two of them already, and fourteen precincts to hear
from. The circumstance has brought your name into most wide and
unfortunate renown. It causes much comment--I believe that that is not
an over-statement. Some of this comment is palliative, but some of it
--by patrons at a distance, who only know the statistics without the
explanation,--is offensive, and in some cases even violent. Nine
students have been called home. The trustees of the college have been
growing more and more uneasy all these last months--steadily along with
the implacable increase in your census--and I will not conceal from you
that more than once they have touched upon the expediency of a change in
the Professorship of Moral Culture. The coarsely sarcastic editorial in
yesterday's Alta, headed Give the Moral Acrobat a Rest--has brought
things to a crisis, and I am charged with the unpleasant duty of
receiving your resignation."

I know you only mean me a kindness, dear 1365, but it is a most deadly
mistake. Please do not name your Injun for me. Truly Yours.


Mailed Answer:

NEW YORK, Sept. 8. 1887.
DEAR SIR,--Necessarily I cannot assent to so strange a proposition. And
I think it but fair to warn you that if you put the piece on the stage,
you must take the legal consequences.
Yours respectfully,
S. L. CLEMENS.


Before the days of international copyright no American author's
books were pirated more freely by Canadian publishers than those of
Mark Twain. It was always a sore point with him that these books,
cheaply printed, found their way into the United States, and were
sold in competition with his better editions. The law on the
subject seemed to be rather hazy, and its various interpretations
exasperating. In the next unmailed letter Mark Twain relieves
himself to a misguided official. The letter is worth reading today,
if for no other reason, to show the absurdity of copyright
conditions which prevailed at that time.


Unmailed Letter to H. C. Christiancy, on book Piracy:

HARTFORD, Dec. 18, '87.
H. C. CHRISTIANCY, ESQ.

DEAR SIR,--As I understand it, the position of the U. S. Government is
this: If a person be captured on the border with counterfeit bonds in his
hands--bonds of the N. Y. Central Railway, for instance--the procedure in
his case shall be as follows:

1. If the N. Y. C. have not previously filed in the several police
offices along the border, proof of ownership of the originals of the
bonds, the government officials must collect a duty on the counterfeits,
and then let them go ahead and circulate in this country.

2. But if there is proof already on file, then the N. Y. C. may pay the
duty and take the counterfeits.

But in no case will the United States consent to go without its share of
the swag. It is delicious. The biggest and proudest government on earth
turned sneak-thief; collecting pennies on stolen property, and pocketing
them with a greasy and libidinous leer; going into partnership with
foreign thieves to rob its own children; and when the child escapes the
foreigner, descending to the abysmal baseness of hanging on and robbing
the infant all alone by itself! Dear sir, this is not any more
respectable than for a father to collect toll on the forced prostitution
of his own daughter; in fact it is the same thing. Upon these terms,
what is a U. S. custom house but a "fence?" That is all it is: a
legalized trader in stolen goods.

And this nasty law, this filthy law, this unspeakable law calls itself a
"regulation for the protection of owners of copyright!" Can sarcasm go
further than that? In what way does it protect them? Inspiration itself
could not furnish a rational answer to that question. Whom does it
protect, then? Nobody, as far as I can see, but the foreign thief
--sometimes--and his fellow-footpad the U. S. government, all the time.
What could the Central Company do with the counterfeit bonds after it had
bought them of the star spangled banner Master-thief? Sell them at a
dollar apiece and fetch down the market for the genuine hundred-dollar
bond? What could I do with that 20-cent copy of "Roughing It" which the
United States has collared on the border and is waiting to release to me
for cash in case I am willing to come down to its moral level and help
rob myself? Sell it at ten or fifteen cents--duty added--and destroy the
market for the original $3,50 book? Who ever did invent that law? I
would like to know the name of that immortal jackass.

Dear sir, I appreciate your courtesy in stretching your authority in the
desire to do me a kindness, and I sincerely thank you for it. But I have
no use for that book; and if I were even starving for it I would not pay
duty on in either to get it or suppress it. No doubt there are ways in
which I might consent to go into partnership with thieves and fences,
but this is not one of them. This one revolts the remains of my
self-respect; turns my stomach. I think I could companion with a
highwayman who carried a shot-gun and took many risks; yes, I think
I should like that if I were younger; but to go in with a big rich
government that robs paupers, and the widows and orphans of paupers and
takes no risk--why the thought just gags me.

Oh, no, I shall never pay any duties on pirated books of mine. I am much
too respectable for that--yet awhile. But here--one thing that grovels
me is this: as far as I can discover--while freely granting that the
U. S. copyright laws are far and away the most idiotic that exist
anywhere on the face of the earth--they don't authorize the government to
admit pirated books into this country, toll or no toll. And so I think
that that regulation is the invention of one of those people--as a rule,
early stricken of God, intellectually--the departmental interpreters of
the laws, in Washington. They can always be depended on to take any
reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it. They
can be depended on, every time, to defeat a good law, and make it
inoperative--yes, and utterly grotesque, too, mere matter for laughter
and derision. Take some of the decisions of the Post-office Department,
for instance--though I do not mean to suggest that that asylum is any
worse than the others for the breeding and nourishing of incredible
lunatics--I merely instance it because it happens to be the first to come
into my mind. Take that case of a few years ago where the P. M. General
suddenly issued an edict requiring you to add the name of the State after
Boston, New York, Chicago, &c, in your superscriptions, on pain of having
your letter stopped and forwarded to the dead-letter office; yes, and I
believe he required the county, too. He made one little concession in
favor of New York: you could say "New York City," and stop there; but if
you left off the "city," you must add "N. Y." to your "New York." Why,
it threw the business of the whole country into chaos and brought
commerce almost to a stand-still. Now think of that! When that man goes
to--to--well, wherever he is going to--we shan't want the microscopic
details of his address. I guess we can find him.

Well, as I was saying, I believe that this whole paltry and ridiculous
swindle is a pure creation of one of those cabbages that used to be at
the head of one of those Retreats down there--Departments, you know--and
that you will find it so, if you will look into it. And moreover--but
land, I reckon we are both tired by this time.
Truly Yours,
MARK TWAIN.





XXVII

MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS OF 1887. LITERARY ARTICLES. PEACEFUL DAYS AT THE
FARM. FAVORITE READING. APOLOGY TO MRS. CLEVELAND, ETC.

We have seen in the preceding chapter how unknown aspirants in one field
or another were always seeking to benefit by Mark Twain's reputation.
Once he remarked, "The symbol of the human race ought to be an ax; every
human being has one concealed about him somewhere." He declared when a
stranger called on him, or wrote to him, in nine cases out of ten he
could distinguish the gleam of the ax almost immediately. The following
letter is closely related to those of the foregoing chapter, only that
this one was mailed--not once, but many times, in some form adapted to
the specific applicant. It does not matter to whom it was originally
written, the name would not be recognized.


To Mrs. T. Concerning unearned credentials, etc.

HARTFORD, 1887.
MY DEAR MADAM,--It is an idea which many people have had, but it is of no
value. I have seen it tried out many and many a time. I have seen a
lady lecturer urged and urged upon the public in a lavishly complimentary
document signed by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and some others of
supreme celebrity, but--there was nothing in her and she failed. If
there had been any great merit in her she never would have needed those
men's help and (at her rather mature age,) would never have consented to
ask for it.

There is an unwritten law about human successes, and your sister must bow
to that law, she must submit to its requirements. In brief this law is:

1. No occupation without an apprenticeship.

2. No pay to the apprentice.

This law stands right in the way of the subaltern who wants to be a
General before he has smelt powder; and it stands (and should stand) in
everybody's way who applies for pay or position before he has served his
apprenticeship and proved himself. Your sister's course is perfectly
plain. Let her enclose this letter to Maj. J. B. Pond, and offer to
lecture a year for $10 a week and her expenses, the contract to be
annullable by him at any time, after a month's notice, but not annullable
by her at all. The second year, he to have her services, if he wants
them, at a trifle under the best price offered her by anybody else.

She can learn her trade in those two years, and then be entitled to
remuneration--but she can not learn it in any less time than that, unless
she is a human miracle.

Try it, and do not be afraid. It is the fair and right thing. If she
wins, she will win squarely and righteously, and never have to blush.
Truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.


Howells wrote, in February, offering to get a publisher to take the
Library of Humor off Mark Twain's hands. Howells had been paid
twenty-six hundred dollars for the work on it, and his conscience
hurt him when he reflected that the book might never be used. In
this letter he also refers to one of the disastrous inventions in
which Clemens had invested--a method of casting brass dies for
stamping book-covers and wall-paper. Howells's purpose was to
introduce something of the matter into his next story. Mark Twain's
reply gives us a light on this particular invention.


HARTFORD, Feb. 15, '87.
DEAR HOWELLS,--I was in New York five days ago, and Webster mentioned the
Library, and proposed to publish it a year or a year and half hence.
I have written him your proposition to-day. (The Library is part of the
property of the C. L. W. & Co. firm.)

I don't remember what that technical phrase was, but I think you will
find it in any Cyclopedia under the head of "Brass." The thing I best
remember is, that the self-styled "inventor" had a very ingenious way of
keeping me from seeing him apply his invention: the first appointment was
spoiled by his burning down the man's shop in which it was to be done,
the night before; the second was spoiled by his burning down his own shop
the night before. He unquestionably did both of these things. He really
had no invention; the whole project was a blackmailing swindle, and cost
me several thousand dollars.

The slip you sent me from the May "Study" has delighted Mrs. Clemens and
me to the marrow. To think that thing might be possible to many; but to
be brave enough to say it is possible to you only, I certainly believe.
The longer I live the clearer I perceive how unmatchable, how
unapproachable, a compliment one pays when he says of a man "he has the
courage (to utter) his convictions." Haven't you had reviewers talk Alps
to you, and then print potato hills?

I haven't as good an opinion of my work as you hold of it, but I've
always done what I could to secure and enlarge my good opinion of it.
I've always said to myself, "Everybody reads it and that's something--it
surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable people would get pretty
tired of it." And when a critic said by implication that it wasn't high
and fine, through the remark "High and fine literature is wine" I
retorted (confidentially, to myself,) "yes, high and fine literature is
wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water."

You didn't tell me to return that proof-slip, so I have pasted it into my
private scrap-book. None will see it there. With a thousand thanks.
Ys Ever
MARK.


Our next letter is an unmailed answer, but it does not belong with
the others, having been withheld for reasons of quite a different
sort. Jeanette Gilder, then of the Critic, was one of Mark Twain's
valued friends. In the comment which he made, when it was shown to
him twenty-two years later, he tells us why he thinks this letter
was not sent. The name, "Rest-and-be-Thankful," was the official
title given to the summer place at Elmira, but it was more often
known as "Quarry Farm."


To Jeannette Gilder (not mailed):

HARTFORD, May 14, '87.
MY DEAR MISS GILDER,--We shall spend the summer at the same old place-the
remote farm called "Rest-and-be-Thankful," on top of the hills three
miles from Elmira, N. Y. Your other question is harder to answer. It is
my habit to keep four or five books in process of erection all the time,
and every summer add a few courses of bricks to two or three of them; but
I cannot forecast which of the two or three it is going to be. It takes
seven years to complete a book by this method, but still it is a good
method: gives the public a rest. I have been accused of "rushing into
print" prematurely, moved thereto by greediness for money; but in truth
I have never done that. Do you care for trifles of information? (Well,
then, "Tom Sawyer" and "The Prince and the Pauper" were each on the
stocks two or three years, and "Old Times on the Mississippi" eight.)
One of my unfinished books has been on the stocks sixteen years; another
seventeen. This latter book could have been finished in a day, at any
time during the past five years. But as in the first of these two
narratives all the action takes place in Noah's ark, and as in the other
the action takes place in heaven, there seemed to be no hurry, and so I
have not hurried. Tales of stirring adventure in those localities do not
need to be rushed to publication lest they get stale by waiting. In
twenty-one years, with all my time at my free disposal I have written and
completed only eleven books, whereas with half the labor that a
journalist does I could have written sixty in that time. I do not
greatly mind being accused of a proclivity for rushing into print, but
at the same time I don't believe that the charge is really well founded.
Suppose I did write eleven books, have you nothing to be grateful for?
Go to---remember the forty-nine which I didn't write.
Truly Yours
S. L. CLEMENS.


Notes (added twenty-two years later):

Stormfield, April 30, 1909. It seems the letter was not sent. I
probably feared she might print it, and I couldn't find a way to say so
without running a risk of hurting her. No one would hurt Jeannette
Gilder purposely, and no one would want to run the risk of doing it
unintentionally. She is my neighbor, six miles away, now, and I must
ask her about this ancient letter.

I note with pride and pleasure that I told no untruths in my unsent
answer. I still have the habit of keeping unfinished books lying around
years and years, waiting. I have four or five novels on hand at present
in a half-finished condition, and it is more than three years since I
have looked at any of them. I have no intention of finishing them.
I could complete all of them in less than a year, if the impulse should
come powerfully upon me: Long, long ago money-necessity furnished that
impulse once, ("Following the Equator"), but mere desire for money has
never furnished it, so far as I remember. Not even money-necessity was
able to overcome me on a couple of occasions when perhaps I ought to have
allowed it to succeed. While I was a bankrupt and in debt two offers
were made me for weekly literary contributions to continue during a year,
and they would have made a debtless man of me, but I declined them, with
my wife's full approval, for I had known of no instance where a man had
pumped himself out once a week and failed to run "emptyings" before the
year was finished.