The Letters Of Mark Twain, Volume 3

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Letters Of Mark Twain, Volume 3


"You have pinned a proud feather in Uncle-Remus's cap," replied
Harris. "I do not know what higher honor he could have than to
appear before the Hartford public arm in arm with Mark Twain."

He disclaimed any originality for the stories, adding, "I understand
that my relations toward Uncle Remus are similar to those that exist
between an almanac maker and the calendar." He had not heard the
"Golden Arm" story and asked for the outlines; also for some
publishing advice, out of Mark Twain's long experience.


To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta:

ELMIRA, N.Y., Aug. 10.
MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--You can argue yourself into the delusion that the
principle of life is in the stories themselves and not in their setting;
but you will save labor by stopping with that solitary convert, for he is
the only intelligent one you will bag. In reality the stories are only
alligator pears--one merely eats them for the sake of the salad-dressing.
Uncle Remus is most deftly drawn, and is a lovable and delightful
creation; he, and the little boy, and their relations with each other,
are high and fine literature, and worthy to live, for their own sakes;
and certainly the stories are not to be credited with them. But enough
of this; I seem to be proving to the man that made the multiplication
table that twice one are two.

I have been thinking, yesterday and to-day (plenty of chance to think, as
I am abed with lumbago at our little summering farm among the solitudes
of the Mountaintops,) and I have concluded that I can answer one of your
questions with full confidence--thus: Make it a subscription book.
Mighty few books that come strictly under the head of literature will
sell by subscription; but if Uncle Remus won't, the gift of prophecy has
departed out of me. When a book will sell by subscription, it will sell
two or three times as many copies as it would in the trade; and the
profit is bulkier because the retail price is greater.....

You didn't ask me for a subscription-publisher. If you had, I should
have recommended Osgood to you. He inaugurates his subscription
department with my new book in the fall.....

Now the doctor has been here and tried to interrupt my yarn about "The
Golden Arm," but I've got through, anyway.

Of course I tell it in the negro dialect--that is necessary; but I have
not written it so, for I can't spell it in your matchless way. It is
marvelous the way you and Cable spell the negro and creole dialects.

Two grand features are lost in print: the weird wailing, the rising and
falling cadences of the wind, so easily mimicked with one's mouth; and
the impressive pauses and eloquent silences, and subdued utterances,
toward the end of the yarn (which chain the attention of the children
hand and foot, and they sit with parted lips and breathless, to be
wrenched limb from limb with the sudden and appalling "You got it").

Old Uncle Dan'l, a slave of my uncle's' aged 60, used to tell us children
yarns every night by the kitchen fire (no other light;) and the last yarn
demanded, every night, was this one. By this time there was but a
ghastly blaze or two flickering about the back-log. We would huddle
close about the old man, and begin to shudder with the first familiar
words; and under the spell of his impressive delivery we always fell a
prey to that climax at the end when the rigid black shape in the twilight
sprang at us with a shout.

When you come to glance at the tale you will recollect it--it is as
common and familiar as the Tar Baby. Work up the atmosphere with your
customary skill and it will "go" in print.

Lumbago seems to make a body garrulous--but you'll forgive it.
Truly yours
S. L. CLEMENS


The "Golden Arm" story was one that Clemens often used in his public
readings, and was very effective as he gave it.

In his sketch, "How to Tell a Story," it appears about as he used to
tell it. Harris, receiving the outlines of the old Missouri tale,
presently announced that he had dug up its Georgia relative, an
interesting variant, as we gather from Mark Twain's reply.


To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta:

HARTFORD, '81.
MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--I was very sure you would run across that Story
somewhere, and am glad you have. A Drummond light--no, I mean a Brush
light--is thrown upon the negro estimate of values by his willingness to
risk his soul and his mighty peace forever for the sake of a silver
sev'm-punce. And this form of the story seems rather nearer the true
field-hand standard than that achieved by my Florida, Mo., negroes with
their sumptuous arm of solid gold.

I judge you haven't received my new book yet--however, you will in a day
or two. Meantime you must not take it ill if I drop Osgood a hint about
your proposed story of slave life.....

When you come north I wish you would drop me a line and then follow it in
person and give me a day or two at our house in Hartford. If you will,
I will snatch Osgood down from Boston, and you won't have to go there at
all unless you want to. Please to bear this strictly in mind, and don't
forget it.
Sincerely yours
S. L. CLEMENS.


Charles Warren Stoddard, to whom the next letter is written, was one
of the old California literary crowd, a graceful writer of verse and
prose, never quite arriving at the success believed by his friends
to be his due. He was a gentle, irresponsible soul, well loved by
all who knew him, and always, by one or another, provided against
want. The reader may remember that during Mark Twain's great
lecture engagement in London, winter of 1873-74, Stoddard lived with
him, acting as his secretary. At a later period in his life he
lived for several years with the great telephone magnate, Theodore
N. Vail. At the time of this letter, Stoddard had decided that in
the warm light and comfort of the Sandwich Islands he could survive
on his literary earnings.


To Charles Warren Stoddard, in the Sandwich Islands:

HARTFORD, Oct. 26 '81.
MY DEAR CHARLIE,--Now what have I ever done to you that you should not
only slide off to Heaven before you have earned a right to go, but must
add the gratuitous villainy of informing me of it?...

The house is full of carpenters and decorators; whereas, what we really
need here, is an incendiary. If the house would only burn down, we would
pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up
in the healing solitudes of the crater of Haleakala and get a good rest;
for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the
telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece
and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and
give thanks to whom all thanks belong, for these privileges, and never
house-keep any more.

I think my wife would be twice as strong as she is, but for this wearing
and wearying slavery of house-keeping. However, she thinks she must
submit to it for the sake of the children; whereas, I have always had a
tenderness for parents too, so, for her sake and mine, I sigh for the
incendiary. When the evening comes and the gas is lit and the wear and
tear of life ceases, we want to keep house always; but next morning we
wish, once more, that we were free and irresponsible boarders.

Work?--one can't you know, to any purpose. I don't really get anything
done worth speaking of, except during the three or four months that we
are away in the Summer. I wish the Summer were seven years long. I keep
three or four books on the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a
satisfactory chapter to one of them at home. Yes, and it is all because
my time is taken up with answering the letters of strangers. It can't be
done through a short hand amanuensis--I've tried that--it wouldn't work
--I couldn't learn to dictate. What does possess strangers to write so
many letters? I never could find that out. However, I suppose I did it
myself when I was a stranger. But I will never do it again.

Maybe you think I am not happy? the very thing that gravels me is that I
am. I don't want to be happy when I can't work; I am resolved that
hereafter I won't be. What I have always longed for, was the privilege
of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich
Islands overlooking the sea.
Yours ever
MARK.

That magazine article of yours was mighty good: up to your very best I
think. I enclose a book review written by Howells.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Oct. 26 '81.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am delighted with your review, and so is Mrs.
Clemens. What you have said, there, will convince anybody that reads it;
a body cannot help being convinced by it. That is the kind of a review
to have; the doubtful man; even the prejudiced man, is persuaded and
succumbs.

What a queer blunder that was, about the baronet. I can't quite see how
I ever made it. There was an opulent abundance of things I didn't know;
and consequently no need to trench upon the vest-pocketful of things I
did know, to get material for a blunder.

Charley Warren Stoddard has gone to the Sandwich Islands permanently.
Lucky devil. It is the only supremely delightful place on earth. It
does seem that the more advantage a body doesn't earn, here, the more of
them God throws at his head. This fellow's postal card has set the
vision of those gracious islands before my mind, again, with not a leaf
withered, nor a rainbow vanished, nor a sun-flash missing from the waves,
and now it will be months, I reckon, before I can drive it away again.
It is beautiful company, but it makes one restless and dissatisfied.

With love and thanks,
Yrs ever,
MARK.


The review mentioned in this letter was of The Prince and the
Pauper. What the queer "blunder" about the baronet was, the present
writer confesses he does not know; but perhaps a careful reader
could find it, at least in the early edition; very likely it was
corrected without loss of time.

Clemens now and then found it necessary to pay a visit to Canada in
the effort to protect his copyright. He usually had a grand time on
these trips, being lavishly entertained by the Canadian literary
fraternity. In November, 1881, he made one of these journeys in the
interest of The Prince and the Pauper, this time with Osgood, who
was now his publisher. In letters written home we get a hint of his
diversions. The Monsieur Frechette mentioned was a Canadian poet of
considerable distinction. "Clara" was Miss Clara Spaulding, of
Elmira, who had accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Clemens to Europe in 1873,
and again in 1878. Later she became Mrs. John B. Staachfield, of
New York City. Her name has already appeared in these letters many
times.


To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:

MONTREAL, Nov. 28 '81.
Livy darling, you and Clara ought to have been at breakfast in the great
dining room this morning. English female faces, distinctive English
costumes, strange and marvelous English gaits--and yet such honest,
honorable, clean-souled countenances, just as these English women almost
always have, you know. Right away--

But they've come to take me to the top of Mount Royal, it being a cold,
dry, sunny, magnificent day. Going in a sleigh.
Yours lovingly,
SAML.


To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:

MONTREAL, Sunday, November 27, 1881.
Livy dear, a mouse kept me awake last night till 3 or 4 o'clock--so I am
lying abed this morning. I would not give sixpence to be out yonder in
the storm, although it is only snow.

[The above paragraph is written in the form of a rebus illustrated with
various sketches.]

There--that's for the children--was not sure that they could read
writing; especially jean, who is strangely ignorant in some things.

I can not only look out upon the beautiful snow-storm, past the vigorous
blaze of my fire; and upon the snow-veiled buildings which I have
sketched; and upon the churchward drifting umbrellas; and upon the
buffalo-clad cabmen stamping their feet and thrashing their arms on the
corner yonder: but I also look out upon the spot where the first white
men stood, in the neighborhood of four hundred years ago, admiring the
mighty stretch of leafy solitudes, and being admired and marveled at by
an eager multitude of naked savages. The discoverer of this region, and
namer of it, Jacques Cartier, has a square named for him in the city. I
wish you were here; you would enjoy your birthday, I think.

I hoped for a letter, and thought I had one when the mail was handed in,
a minute ago, but it was only that note from Sylvester Baxter. You must
write--do you hear?--or I will be remiss myself.

Give my love and a kiss to the children, and ask them to give you my love
and a kiss from
SAML.


To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:

QUEBEC, Sunday. '81.
Livy darling, I received a letter from Monsieur Frechette this morning,
in which certain citizens of Montreal tendered me a public dinner next
Thursday, and by Osgood's advice I accepted it. I would have accepted
anyway, and very cheerfully but for the delay of two days--for I was
purposing to go to Boston Tuesday and home Wednesday; whereas, now I go
to Boston Friday and home Saturday. I have to go by Boston on account of
business.

We drove about the steep hills and narrow, crooked streets of this old
town during three hours, yesterday, in a sleigh, in a driving snow-storm.
The people here don't mind snow; they were all out, plodding around on
their affairs--especially the children, who were wallowing around
everywhere, like snow images, and having a mighty good time. I wish I
could describe the winter costume of the young girls, but I can't. It is
grave and simple, but graceful and pretty--the top of it is a brimless
fur cap. Maybe it is the costume that makes pretty girls seem so
monotonously plenty here. It was a kind of relief to strike a homely
face occasionally.

You descend into some of the streets by long, deep stairways; and in the
strong moonlight, last night, these were very picturesque. I did wish
you were here to see these things. You couldn't by any possibility sleep
in these beds, though, or enjoy the food.

Good night, sweetheart, and give my respects to the cubs.

SAML.


It had been hoped that W. D. Howells would join the Canadian
excursion, but Howells was not very well that autumn. He wrote that
he had been in bed five weeks, "most of the time recovering; so you
see how bad I must have been to begin with. But now I am out of any
first-class pain; I have a good appetite, and I am as abusive and
peremptory as Guiteau." Clemens, returning to Hartford, wrote him a
letter that explains itself.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Dec. 16 '81.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--It was a sharp disappointment--your inability to
connect, on the Canadian raid. What a gaudy good time we should have
had!

Disappointed, again, when I got back to Boston; for I was promising
myself half an hour's look at you, in Belmont; but your note to Osgood
showed that that could not be allowed out yet.

The Atlantic arrived an hour ago, and your faultless and delicious Police
Report brought that blamed Joe Twichell powerfully before me. There's a
man who can tell such things himself (by word of mouth,) and has as sure
an eye for detecting a thing that is before his eyes, as any man in the
world, perhaps--then why in the nation doesn't he report himself with a
pen?

One of those drenching days last week, he slopped down town with his
cubs, and visited a poor little beggarly shed where were a dwarf, a fat
woman, and a giant of honest eight feet, on exhibition behind tawdry
show-canvases, but with nobody to exhibit to. The giant had a broom, and
was cleaning up and fixing around, diligently. Joe conceived the idea of
getting some talk out of him. Now that never would have occurred to me.
So he dropped in under the man's elbow, dogged him patiently around,
prodding him with questions and getting irritated snarls in return which
would have finished me early--but at last one of Joe's random shafts
drove the centre of that giant's sympathies somehow, and fetched him.
The fountains of his great deep were broken up, and he rained a flood of
personal history that was unspeakably entertaining.

Among other things it turned out that he had been a Turkish (native)
colonel, and had fought all through the Crimean war--and so, for the
first time, Joe got a picture of the Charge of the Six Hundred that made
him see the living spectacle, the flash of flag and tongue-flame, the
rolling smoke, and hear the booming of the guns; and for the first time
also, he heard the reasons for that wild charge delivered from the mouth
of a master, and realized that nobody had "blundered," but that a cold,
logical, military brain had perceived this one and sole way to win an
already lost battle, and so gave the command and did achieve the victory.

And mind you Joe was able to come up here, days afterwards, and reproduce
that giant's picturesque and admirable history. But dern him, he can't
write it--which is all wrong, and not as it should be.

And he has gone and raked up the MS autobiography (written in 1848,) of
Mrs. Phebe Brown, (author of "I Love to Steal a While Away,") who
educated Yung Wing in her family when he was a little boy; and I came
near not getting to bed at all, last night, on account of the lurid
fascinations of it. Why in the nation it has never got into print, I
can't understand.

But, by jings! the postman will be here in a minute; so, congratulations
upon your mending health, and gratitude that it is mending; and love to
you all.
Yrs Ever
MARK.

Don't answer--I spare the sick.




XXII.

LETTERS, 1882, MAINLY TO HOWELLS. WASTED FURY. OLD SCENES REVISITED.
THE MISSISSIPPI BOOK.

A man of Mark Twain's profession and prominence must necessarily be
the subject of much newspaper comment. Jest, compliment, criticism
--none of these things disturbed him, as a rule. He was pleased
that his books should receive favorable notices by men whose opinion
he respected, but he was not grieved by adverse expressions. Jests
at his expense, if well written, usually amused him; cheap jokes
only made him sad; but sarcasms and innuendoes were likely to enrage
him, particularly if he believed them prompted by malice. Perhaps
among all the letters he ever wrote, there is none more
characteristic than this confession of violence and eagerness for
reprisal, followed by his acknowledgment of error and a manifest
appreciation of his own weakness. It should be said that Mark Twain
and Whitelaw Reid were generally very good friends, and perhaps for
the moment this fact seemed to magnify the offense.


To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Jan. 28 '82.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Nobody knows better than I, that there are times when
swearing cannot meet the emergency. How sharply I feel that, at this
moment. Not a single profane word has issued from my lips this mornin
--I have not even had the impulse to swear, so wholly ineffectual would
swearing have manifestly been, in the circumstances. But I will tell you
about it.

About three weeks ago, a sensitive friend, approaching his revelation
cautiously, intimated that the N. Y. Tribune was engaged in a kind of
crusade against me. This seemed a higher compliment than I deserved; but
no matter, it made me very angry. I asked many questions, and gathered,
in substance, this: Since Reid's return from Europe, the Tribune had
been flinging sneers and brutalities at me with such persistent frequency
"as to attract general remark." I was an angered--which is just as good
an expression, I take it, as an hungered. Next, I learned that Osgood,
among the rest of the "general," was worrying over these constant and
pitiless attacks. Next came the testimony of another friend, that the
attacks were not merely "frequent," but "almost daily." Reflect upon
that: "Almost daily" insults, for two months on a stretch. What would
you have done?

As for me, I did the thing which was the natural thing for me to do, that
is, I set about contriving a plan to accomplish one or the other of two
things: 1. Force a peace; or 2. Get revenge. When I got my plan
finished, it pleased me marvelously. It was in six or seven sections,
each section to be used in its turn and by itself; the assault to begin
at once with No. 1, and the rest to follow, one after the other, to keep
the communication open while I wrote my biography of Reid. I meant to
wind up with this latter great work, and then dismiss the subject for
good.

Well, ever since then I have worked day and night making notes and
collecting and classifying material. I've got collectors at work in
England. I went to New York and sat three hours taking evidence while a
stenographer set it down. As my labors grew, so also grew my
fascination. Malice and malignity faded out of me--or maybe I drove them
out of me, knowing that a malignant book would hurt nobody but the fool
who wrote it. I got thoroughly in love with this work; for I saw that I
was going to write a book which the very devils and angels themselves
would delight to read, and which would draw disapproval from nobody but
the hero of it, (and Mrs. Clemens, who was bitter against the whole
thing.) One part of my plan was so delicious that I had to try my hand
on it right away, just for the luxury of it. I set about it, and sure
enough it panned out to admiration. I wrote that chapter most carefully,
and I couldn't find a fault with it. (It was not for the biography--no,
it belonged to an immediate and deadlier project.)

Well, five days ago, this thought came into my mind (from Mrs. Clemens's):
"Wouldn't it be well to make sure that the attacks have been 'almost
daily'?--and to also make sure that their number and character will
justify me in doing what I am proposing to do?"

I at once set a man to work in New York to seek out and copy every
unpleasant reference which had been made to me in the Tribune from Nov.
1st to date. On my own part I began to watch the current numbers, for I
had subscribed for the paper.

The result arrived from my New York man this morning. O, what a pitiable
wreck of high hopes! The "almost daily" assaults, for two months,
consist of--1. Adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the
London Atheneum; 2. Paragraph from some indignant Englishman in the Pall
Mall Gazette who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some
imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais; 3. A
remark of the Tribune's about the Montreal dinner, touched with an almost
invisible satire; 4. A remark of the Tribune's about refusal of Canadian
copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious--and of
course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but
fools irritate themselves about.

There--that is the prodigious bugaboo, in its entirety! Can you conceive
of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a provocation?
I am sure I can't. What the devil can those friends of mine have been
thinking about, to spread these 3 or 4 harmless things out into two
months of daily sneers and affronts? The whole offense, boiled down,
amounts to just this: one uncourteous remark of the Tribune about my
book--not me between Nov. 1 and Dec. 20; and a couple of foreign
criticisms (of my writings, not me,) between Nov. 1 and Jan. 26! If I
can't stand that amount of friction, I certainly need reconstruction.
Further boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply
this: one jest from the Tribune (one can make nothing more serious than
that out of it.) One jest--and that is all; for the foreign criticisms do
not count, they being matters of news, and proper for publication in
anybody's newspaper.