The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete

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


Yes, she is remarkable, Joe. Her rheumatic attack set me to cursing and
swearing, without limit as to time or energy, but it merely concentrated
her patience and her unconquerable fortitude. It is the difference
between us. I can't count the different kinds of ailments which have
assaulted her in this fiendish year and a half--and I forgive none of
them--but here she comes up again as bright and fresh and enterprising as
ever, and goes to planning about Egypt, with a hope and a confidence
which are to me amazing.

Clara is calling for me--we have to go into town and pay calls.

MARK.


In Florence, that winter, Clemens began dictating to his secretary
some autobiographical chapters. This was the work which was "not to
see print until I am dead." He found it a pleasant, lazy occupation
and wrote his delight in it to Howells in a letter which seems not
to have survived. In his reply, Howells wrote: "You do stir me
mightily with the hope of dictating and I will try it when I get the
chance. But there is the tempermental difference. You are dramatic
and unconscious; you count the thing more than yourself; I am cursed
with consciousness to the core, and can't say myself out; I am
always saying myself in, and setting myself above all that I say, as
of more worth. Lately I have felt as if I were rotting with
egotism. I don't admire myself; I am sick of myself; but I can't
think of anything else. Here I am at it now, when I ought to be
rejoicing with you at the blessing you have found .... I'd like,
immensely, to read your autobiography. You always rather bewildered
me by your veracity, and I fancy you may tell the truth about
yourself. But all of it? The black truth which we all know of
ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-brown truth of the
pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even
you won't tell the black heart's--truth. The man who could do it
would be famed to the last day the sun shone upon."

We gather from Mark Twain's answer that he was not deceiving himself
in the matter of his confessions.


To W. D. Howells, in New York:

VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,
March 14, '04.
DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, I set up the safeguards, in the first day's
dictating; taking this position: that an autobiography is the truest of
all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the
truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with
hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is
there, between the lines, where the author is raking dust upon it, the
result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily
diligences.

The summer in England! you can't ask better luck than that. Then you
will run over to Florence; we shall all be hungry to see you-all. We are
hunting for another villa, (this one is plenty large enough but has no
room in it) but even if we find it I am afraid it will be months before
we can move Mrs. Clemens. Of course it will. But it comforts us to let
on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive
in her.
Good-bye, with love, Amen.
Yours ever
MARK.


News came of the death of Henry M. Stanley, one of Mark Twain's
oldest friends. Clemens once said that he had met Stanley in St.
Louis where he (Clemens) had delivered a lecture which Stanley had
reported. In the following letter he fixes the date of their
meeting as early in 1867, which would be immediately after Mark
Twain's return from California, and just prior to the Quaker City
excursion--a fact which is interesting only because it places the
two men together when each was at the very beginning of a great
career.


To Lady Stanley, in England:

VILLA DI QUARTO, FIRENZE, May 11, '04.
DEAR LADY STANLEY,--I have lost a dear and honored friend--how fast they
fall about me now, in my age! The world has lost a tried and proved
hero. And you--what have you lost? It is beyond estimate--we who know
you, and what he was to you, know that. How far he stretches across my
life! I knew him when his work was all before him five years before the
great day that he wrote his name far-away up on the blue of the sky for
the world to see and applaud and remember; I have known him as friend and
intimate ever since. It is 37 years. I have known no other friend and
intimate so long, except John Hay--a friendship which dates from the same
year and the same half of it, the first half of 1867. I grieve with you
and with your family, dear Lady Stanley, it is all I can do; but that I
do out of my heart. It would be we, instead of I, if Mrs. Clemens knew,
but in all these 20 months that she has lain a prisoner in her bed we
have hidden from her all things that could sadden her. Many a friend is
gone whom she still asks about and still thinks is living.

In deepest sympathy I beg the privilege of signing myself
Your friend,
S. L. CLEMENS.


To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

VILLA DI QUARTO, May 11, '04
DEAR JOE,--Yours has this moment arrived--just as I was finishing a note
to poor Lady Stanley. I believe the last country-house visit we paid in
England was to Stanley's. Lord, how my friends and acquaintances fall
about me now, in my gray-headed days! Vereschagin, Mommsen, Dvorak,
Lenbach, Jokai--all so recently, and now Stanley. I had known Stanley 37
years. Goodness, who is it I haven't known! As a rule the necrologies
find me personally interested--when they treat of old stagers. Generally
when a man dies who is worth cabling, it happens that I have run across
him somewhere, some time or other.

Oh, say! Down by the Laurentian Library there's a marble image that has
been sitting on its pedestal some 450 Years, if my dates are right
--Cosimo I. I've seen the back of it many a time, but not the front; but
yesterday I twisted my head around after we had driven by, and the
profane exclamation burst from my mouth before I could think: "there's
Chauncey Depew!"

I mean to get a photo of it--and use it if it confirms yesterday's
conviction. That's a very nice word from the Catholic Magazine and I am
glad you sent it. I mean to show it to my priest--we are very fond of
him. He is a stealing man, and is also learnedly scientific. He
invented the thing which records the seismatic disturbances, for the
peoples of the earth. And he's an astronomer and has an observatory of
his own.

Ah, many's the cry I have, over reflecting that maybe we could have had
Young Harmony for Livy, and didn't have wit enough to think of it.

Speaking of Livy reminds me that your inquiry arrives at a good time
(unberufen) It has been weeks (I don't know how many!) since we could
have said a hopeful word, but this morning Katy came the minute the
day-nurse came on watch and said words of a strange and long-forgotten
sound: "Mr. Clemens, Mrs. Clemens is really and truly better!--anybody
can see it; she sees it herself; and last night at 9 o'clock she said
it."

There--it is heart-warming, it is splendid, it is sublime; let us enjoy
it, let us make the most of it today--and bet not a farthing on tomorrow.
The tomorrows have nothing for us. Too many times they have breathed the
word of promise to our ear and broken it to our hope. We take no
tomorrow's word any more.

You've done a wonder, Joe: you've written a letter that can be sent in to
Livy--that doesn't often happen, when either a friend or a stranger
writes. You did whirl in a P. S. that wouldn't do, but you wrote it on a
margin of a page in such a way that I was able to clip off the margin
clear across both pages, and now Livy won't perceive that the sheet isn't
the same size it used to was. It was about Aldrich's son, and I came
near forgetting to remove it. It should have been written on a loose
strip and enclosed. That son died on the 5th of March and Aldrich wrote
me on the night before that his minutes were numbered. On the 18th Livy
asked after that patient, and I was prepared, and able to give her a
grateful surprise by telling her "the Aldriches are no longer uneasy
about him."

I do wish I could have been present and heard Charley Clark. When he
can't light up a dark place nobody can.
With lots of love to you all.
MARK.


Mrs. Clemens had her bad days and her good days-days when there
seemed no ray of light, and others that seemed almost to promise
recovery. The foregoing letter to Twichell, and the one which
follows, to Richard Watson Gilder, reflect the hope and fear that
daily and hourly alternated at Villa Quarto


To Richard Watson Gilder, in New York:

VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,
May 12, '04.
DEAR GILDER,--A friend of ours (the Baroness de Nolda) was here this
afternoon and wanted a note of introduction to the Century, for she has
something to sell to you in case you'll want to make her an offer after
seeing a sample of the goods. I said "With pleasure: get the goods
ready, send the same to me, I will have Jean type-write them, then I will
mail them to the Century and tonight I will write the note to Mr. Gilder
and start it along. Also write me a letter embodying what you have been
saying to me about the goods and your proposed plan of arranging and
explaining them, and I will forward that to Gilder too."

As to the Baroness. She is a German; 30 years old; was married at 17; is
very pretty-indeed I might say very pretty; has a lot of sons (5) running
up from seven to 12 years old. Her husband is a Russian. They live half
the time in Russia and the other half in Florence, and supply population
alternately to the one country and then to the other. Of course it is a
family that speaks languages. This occurs at their table--I know it by
experience: It is Babel come again. The other day, when no guests were
present to keep order, the tribes were all talking at once, and 6
languages were being traded in; at last the littlest boy lost his temper
and screamed out at the top of his voice, with angry sobs: "Mais,
vraiment, io non capisco gar nichts."

The Baroness is a little afraid of her English, therefore she will write
her remarks in French--I said there's a plenty of translators in New
York. Examine her samples and drop her a line.

For two entire days, now, we have not been anxious about Mrs. Clemens
(unberufen). After 20 months of bed-ridden solitude and bodily misery
she all of a sudden ceases to be a pallid shrunken shadow, and looks
bright and young and pretty. She remains what she always was, the most
wonderful creature of fortitude, patience, endurance and recuperative
power that ever was. But ah, dear, it won't last; this fiendish malady
will play new treacheries upon her, and I shall go back to my prayers
again--unutterable from any pulpit!
With love to you and yours,
S. L. C.

May 13 10 A.M. I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2 minutes
visits per day to the sick room. And found what I have learned to
expect--retrogression, and that pathetic something in the eye which
betrays the secret of a waning hope.


The year of the World's Fair had come, and an invitation from Gov.
Francis, of Missouri, came to Mark Twain in Florence, personally
inviting him to attend the great celebration and carry off first
prize. We may believe that Clemens felt little in the spirit of
humor, but to such an invitation he must send a cheerful, even if
disappointing, answer.


To Gov. Francis, of Missouri:

VILLA DI QUARTO, FIRENZE,
May 26, 1904.
DEAR GOVERNOR FRANCIS,--It has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself
at the Great Fair and get a prize, but circumstances beyond my control
have interfered, and I must remain in Florence. Although I have never
taken prizes anywhere else I used to take them at school in Missouri half
a century ago, and I ought to be able to repeat, now, if I could have a
chance. I used to get the medal for good spelling, every week, and I
could have had the medal for good conduct if there hadn't been so much
curruption in Missouri in those days; still, I got it several times by
trading medals and giving boot. I am willing to give boot now, if
--however, those days are forever gone by in Missouri, and perhaps it is
better so. Nothing ever stops the way it was in this changeable world.
Although I cannot be at the Fair, I am going to be represented there
anyway, by a portrait, by Professor Gelli. You will find it excellent.
Good judges here say it is better than the original. They say it has all
the merits of the original and keeps still, besides. It sounds like
flattery, but it is just true.

I suppose you will get a prize, because you have created the most
prodigious and in all ways most wonderful Fair the planet has ever seen.
Very well, you have indeed earned it: and with it the gratitude of the
State and the nation.
Sincerely yours,
MARK TWAIN

It was only a few days after the foregoing was written that death
entered Villa Quarto--unexpectedly at last--for with the first June
days Mrs. Clemens had seemed really to improve. It was on Sunday,
June 5th, that the end came. Clemens, with his daughter Jean, had
returned from a long drive, during which they had visited a Villa
with the thought of purchase. On their return they were told that
their patient had been better that afternoon than for three months.
Yet it was only a few hours later that she left them, so suddenly
and quietly that even those near her did not at first realize that
she was gone.


To W. D. Howells, in New York.

VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,
June 6, '94. [1904]
DEAR HOWELLS,--Last night at 9.20 I entered Mrs. Clemens's room to say
the usual goodnight--and she was dead--tho' no one knew it. She had been
cheerfully talking, a moment before. She was sitting up in bed--she had
not lain down for months--and Katie and the nurse were supporting her.
They supposed she had fainted, and they were holding the oxygen pipe to
her mouth, expecting to revive her. I bent over her and looked in her
face, and I think I spoke--I was surprised and troubled that she did not
notice me. Then we understood, and our hearts broke. How poor we are
today!

But how thankful I am that her persecutions are ended. I would not call
her back if I could.

Today, treasured in her worn old Testament, I found a dear and gentle
letter from you, dated Far Rockaway, Sept. 13, 1896, about our poor
Susy's death. I am tired and old; I wish I were with Livy.

I send my love-and hers-to you all.
S. L. C.


In a letter to Twichell he wrote: "How sweet she was in death; how
young, how beautiful, how like her dear, girlish self cf thirty
years ago; not a gray hair showing."

The family was now without plans for the future until they
remembered the summer home of R. W. Gilder, at Tyringham,
Massachusetts, and the possibility of finding lodgment for
themselves in that secluded corner of New England. Clemens wrote
without delay, as follows:


To R. W. Gilder, in New York:

VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,
June 7, '04.
DEAR GILDER FAMILY,--I have been worrying and worrying to know what to
do: at last I went to the girls with an idea: to ask the Gilders to get
us shelter near their summer home. It was the first time they have not
shaken their heads. So to-morrow I will cable to you and shall hope to
be in time.

An hour ago the best heart that ever beat for me and mine went silent
out of this house, and I am as one who wanders and has lost his way. She
who is gone was our head, she was our hands. We are now trying to make
plans--we: we who have never made a plan before, nor ever needed to. If
she could speak to us she would make it all simple and easy with a word,
and our perplexities would vanish away. If she had known she was near to
death she would have told us where to go and what to do: but she was not
suspecting, neither were we. (She had been chatting cheerfully a moment
before, and in an instant she was gone from us and we did not know it.
We were not alarmed, we did not know anything had happened. It was a
blessed death--she passed away without knowing it.) She was all our
riches and she is gone: she was our breath, she was our life and now we
are nothing.

We send you our love--and with it the love of you that was in her heart
when she died.
S. L. CLEMENS.


Howells wrote his words of sympathy, adding: "The character which
now remains a memory was one of the most perfect ever formed on the
earth," and again, after having received Clemens's letter: "I cannot
speak of your wife's having kept that letter of mine where she did.
You know how it must humiliate a man in his unworthiness to have
anything of his so consecrated. She hallowed what she touched, far
beyond priests."


To W. D. Howells, in New York:

VILLA DI QUARTO, '04.
June 12, 6 p. m.
DEAR HOWELLS,--We have to sit and hold our hands and wait--in the silence
and solitude of this prodigious house; wait until June 25, then we go to
Naples and sail in the Prince Oscar the 26th. There is a ship 12 days
earlier (but we came in that one.) I see Clara twice a day--morning and
evening--greeting--nothing more is allowed. She keeps her bed, and says
nothing. She has not cried yet. I wish she could cry. It would break
Livy's heart to see Clara. We excuse ourselves from all the friends that
call--though of course only intimates come. Intimates--but they are not
the old old friends, the friends of the old, old times when we laughed.

Shall we ever laugh again? If I could only see a dog that I knew in the
old times! and could put my arms around his neck and tell him all,
everything, and ease my heart.

Think--in 3 hours it will be a week!--and soon a month; and by and by a
year. How fast our dead fly from us.

She loved you so, and was always as pleased as a child with any notice
you took of her.

Soon your wife will be with you, oh fortunate man! And John, whom mine
was so fond of. The sight of him was such a delight to her. Lord, the
old friends, how dear they are.
S. L. C.


To Rev. J. R. Twichell, in Hartford:

VILLA DI QUARTO, FLORENCE,
June 18, '04.
DEAR JOE,--It is 13 days. I am bewildered and must remain so for a time
longer. It was so sudden, so unexpected. Imagine a man worth a hundred
millions who finds himself suddenly penniless and fifty million in debt
in his old age.

I was richer than any other person in the world, and now I am that pauper
without peer. Some day I will tell you about it, not now.
MARK.


A tide of condolence flowed in from all parts of the world. It was
impossible to answer all. Only a few who had been their closest
friends received a written line, but the little printed
acknowledgment which was returned was no mere formality. It was a
heartfelt, personal word.

They arrived in America in July, and were accompanied by Twichell to
Elmira, and on the 14th Mrs. Clemens was laid to rest by the side of
Susy and little Langdon. R. W. Gilder had arranged for them to
occupy, for the summer, a cottage on his place at Tyringham, in the
Berkshire Hills. By November they were at the Grosvenor, in New
York, preparing to establish themselves in a house which they had
taken on the corner of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue--Number 21.


To F. N. Doubleday, in New York:

DEAR DOUBLEDAY,--I did not know you were going to England: I would have
freighted you with such messages of homage and affection to Kipling.
And I would have pressed his hand, through you, for his sympathy with
me in my crushing loss, as expressed by him in his letter to Gilder.
You know my feeling for Kipling and that it antedates that expression.

I was glad that the boys came here to invite me to the house-warming and
I think they understood why a man in the shadow of a calamity like mine
could not go.

It has taken three months to repair and renovate our house--corner of 9th
and 5th Avenue, but I shall be in it in io or 15 days hence. Much of the
furniture went into it today (from Hartford). We have not seen it for 13
years. Katy Leary, our old housekeeper, who has been in our service more
than 24 years, cried when she told me about it to-day. She said "I had
forgotten it was so beautiful, and it brought Mrs. Clemens right back to
me--in that old time when she was so young and lovely."

Jean and my secretary and the servants whom we brought from Italy because
Mrs. Clemens liked them so well, are still keeping house in the Berkshire
hills--and waiting. Clara (nervously wrecked by her mother's death) is
in the hands of a specialist in 69th St., and I shall not be allowed to
have any communication with her--even telephone--for a year. I am in
this comfortable little hotel, and still in bed--for I dasn't budge till
I'm safe from my pet devil, bronchitis.

Isn't it pathetic? One hour and ten minutes before Mrs. Clemens died I
was saying to her "To-day, after five months search, I've found the villa
that will content you: to-morrow you will examine the plans and give it
your consent and I will buy it." Her eyes danced with pleasure, for she
longed for a home of her own. And there, on that morrow, she lay white
and cold. And unresponsive to my reverent caresses--a new thing to me
and a new thing to her; that had not happened before in five and thirty
years.

I am coming to see you and Mrs. Doubleday by and bye. She loved and
honored Mrs. Doubleday and her work.
Always yours,
MARK.


It was a presidential year and the air was thick with politics.
Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political
situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense
of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general.
Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when
all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in
outspoken and rather somber protest.


To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:

THE GROSVENOR, Nov. 4, '04.
Oh, dear! get out of that sewer--party politics--dear Joe. At least
with your mouth. We hail only two men who could make speeches for their
parties and preserve their honor and their dignity. One of them is dead.
Possibly there were four. I am sorry for John Hay; sorry and ashamed.
And yet I know he couldn't help it. He wears the collar, and he had to
pay the penalty. Certainly he had no more desire to stand up before a
mob of confiding human incapables and debauch them than you had.
Certainly he took no more real pleasure in distorting history, concealing
facts, propagating immoralities, and appealing to the sordid side of
human nature than did you; but he was his party's property, and he had to
climb away down and do it.

It is interesting, wonderfully interesting--the miracles which
party-politics can do with a man's mental and moral make-up. Look at
McKinley, Roosevelt, and yourself: in private life spotless in character;
honorable, honest, just, humane, generous; scorning trickeries,
treacheries, suppressions of the truth, mistranslations of the meanings
of facts, the filching of credit earned by another, the condoning of
crime, the glorifying of base acts: in public political life the reverse
of all this.