The Letters Of Mark Twain, Volume 3

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


And to offset that one jest, the Tribune paid me one compliment Dec. 23,
by publishing my note declining the New York New England dinner, while
merely (in the same breath,) mentioning that similar letters were read
from General Sherman and other men whom we all know to be persons of real
consequence.

Well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently small
mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks' hard work have got to go
into the ignominious pigeon-hole. Confound it, I could have earned ten
thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble. However, I shouldn't have
done it, for I am too lazy, now, in my sere and yellow leaf, to be
willing to work for anything but love..... I kind of envy you people who
are permitted for your righteousness' sake to dwell in a boarding house;
not that I should always want to live in one, but I should like the
change occasionally from this housekeeping slavery to that wild
independence. A life of don't-care-a-damn in a boarding house is what I
have asked for in many a secret prayer. I shall come by and by and
require of you what you have offered me there.
Yours ever,
MARK.


Howells, who had already known something of the gathering storm,
replied: "Your letter was an immense relief to me, for although I
had an abiding faith that you would get sick of your enterprise,
I wasn't easy until I knew that you had given it up."

Joel Chandler Harris appears again in the letters of this period.
Twichell, during a trip South about this time, had called on Harris
with some sort of proposition or suggestion from Clemens that Harris
appear with him in public, and tell, or read, the Remus stories from
the platform. But Harris was abnormally diffident. Clemens later
pronounced him "the shyest full-grown man" he had ever met, and the
word which Twichell brought home evidently did not encourage the
platform idea.


To Joel Chandler Harris, in Atlanta:

HARTFORD, Apl. 2, '82.
Private.

MY DEAR MR. HARRIS,--Jo Twichell brought me your note and told me of his
talk with you. He said you didn't believe you would ever be able to
muster a sufficiency of reckless daring to make you comfortable and at
ease before an audience. Well, I have thought out a device whereby I
believe we can get around that difficulty. I will explain when I see
you.

Jo says you want to go to Canada within a month or six weeks--I forget
just exactly what he did say; but he intimated the trip could be delayed
a while, if necessary. If this is so, suppose you meet Osgood and me in
New Orleans early in May--say somewhere between the 1st and 6th?

It will be well worth your while to do this, because the author who goes
to Canada unposted, will not know what course to pursue [to secure
copyright] when he gets there; he will find himself in a hopeless
confusion as to what is the correct thing to do. Now Osgood is the only
man in America, who can lay out your course for you and tell you exactly
what to do. Therefore, you just come to New Orleans and have a talk with
him.

Our idea is to strike across lots and reach St. Louis the 20th of April
--thence we propose to drift southward, stopping at some town a few
hours or a night, every day, and making notes.

To escape the interviewers, I shall follow my usual course and use a
fictitious name (C. L. Samuel, of New York.) I don't know what Osgood's
name will be, but he can't use his own.

If you see your way to meet us in New Orleans, drop me a line, now, and
as we approach that city I will telegraph you what day we shall arrive
there.

I would go to Atlanta if I could, but shan't be able. We shall go back
up the river to St. Paul, and thence by rail X-lots home.

(I am making this letter so dreadfully private and confidential because
my movements must be kept secret, else I shan't be able to pick up the
kind of book-material I want.)

If you are diffident, I suspect that you ought to let Osgood be your
magazine-agent. He makes those people pay three or four times as much as
an article is worth, whereas I never had the cheek to make them pay more
than double.
Yrs Sincerely
S. L. CLEMENS.


"My backwardness is an affliction," wrote Harris..... "The ordeal
of appearing on the stage would be a terrible one, but my experience
is that when a diffident man does become familiar with his
surroundings he has more impudence than his neighbors. Extremes
meet."

He was sorely tempted, but his courage became as water at the
thought of footlights and assembled listeners. Once in New York he
appears to have been caught unawares at a Tile Club dinner and made
to tell a story, but his agony was such that at the prospect of a
similar ordeal in Boston he avoided that city and headed straight
for Georgia and safety.

The New Orleans excursion with Osgood, as planned by Clemens, proved
a great success. The little party took the steamer Gold Dust from
St. Louis down river toward New Orleans. Clemens was quickly
recognized, of course, and his assumed name laid aside. The author
of "Uncle Remus" made the trip to New Orleans. George W. Cable was
there at the time, and we may believe that in the company of Mark
Twain and Osgood those Southern authors passed two or three
delightful days. Clemens also met his old teacher Bixby in New
Orleans, and came back up the river with him, spending most of his
time in the pilot-house, as in the old days. It was a glorious
trip, and, reaching St. Louis, he continued it northward, stopping
off at Hannibal and Quincy.'


To Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:

QUINCY, ILL. May 17, '82.
Livy darling, I am desperately homesick. But I have promised Osgood, and
must stick it out; otherwise I would take the train at once and break for
home.

I have spent three delightful days in Hannibal, loitering around all day
long, examining the old localities and talking with the grey-heads who
were boys and girls with me 30 or 40 years ago. It has been a moving
time. I spent my nights with John and Helen Garth, three miles from
town, in their spacious and beautiful house. They were children with me,
and afterwards schoolmates. Now they have a daughter 19 or 20 years old.
Spent an hour, yesterday, with A. W. Lamb, who was not married when I saw
him last. He married a young lady whom I knew. And now I have been
talking with their grown-up sons and daughters. Lieutenant Hickman, the
spruce young handsomely-uniformed volunteer of 1846, called on me--a
grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his grace all vanished.

That world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and
melancholy, now; its soft cheeks are leathery and wrinkled, the fire is
gone out in its eyes, and the spring from its step. It will be dust and
ashes when I come again. I have been clasping hands with the moribund
--and usually they said, "It is for the last time."

Now I am under way again, upon this hideous trip to St. Paul, with a
heart brimming full of thoughts and images of you and Susie and Bay and
the peerless Jean. And so good night, my love.

SAML.


Clemens's trip had been saddened by learning, in New Orleans, the
news of the death of Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh. To Doctor
Brown's son, whom he had known as "Jock," he wrote immediately on
his return to Hartford.


To Mr. John Brown, in Edinburgh

HARTFORD, June 1, 1882.
MY DEAR MR. BROWN,--I was three thousand miles from home, at breakfast in
New Orleans, when the damp morning paper revealed the sorrowful news
among the cable dispatches. There was no place in America, however
remote, or however rich, or poor or high or humble where words of
mourning for your father were not uttered that morning, for his works had
made him known and loved all over the land. To Mrs. Clemens and me,
the loss is personal; and our grief the grief one feels for one who was
peculiarly near and dear. Mrs. Clemens has never ceased to express
regret that we came away from England the last time without going to see
him, and often we have since projected a voyage across the Atlantic for
the sole purpose of taking him by the hand and looking into his kind eyes
once more before he should be called to his rest.

We both thank you greatly for the Edinburgh papers which you sent. My
wife and I join in affectionate remembrances and greetings to yourself
and your aunt, and in the sincere tender of our sympathies.

Faithfully yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.

Our Susie is still "Megalops." He gave her that name:

Can you spare a photograph of your father? We have none but the one
taken in a group with ourselves.


William Dean Howells, at the age of forty-five, reached what many
still regard his highest point of achievement in American realism.
His novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which was running as a Century
serial during the summer of 1882, attracted wide attention, and upon
its issue in book form took first place among his published novels.
Mark Twain, to the end of his life, loved all that Howells wrote.
Once, long afterward, he said: "Most authors give us glimpses of a
radiant moon, but Howells's moon shines and sails all night long."
When the instalments of The Rise of Silas Lapham began to appear, he
overflowed in adjectives, the sincerity of which we need not doubt,
in view of his quite open criticisms of the author's reading
delivery.


To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.:

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I am in a state of wild enthusiasm over this July
instalment of your story. It's perfectly dazzling--it's masterly
--incomparable. Yet I heard you read it--without losing my balance.
Well, the difference between your reading and your writing is-remarkable.
I mean, in the effects produced and the impression left behind. Why, the
one is to the other as is one of Joe Twichell's yarns repeated by a
somnambulist. Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter, and it is a
gentle, pearly dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it; but by and by
I strike it in print, and shout to myself, "God bless us, how has that
pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous sunset
splendors!"

Well, I don't care how much you read your truck to me, you can't
permanently damage it for me that way. It is always perfectly fresh and
dazzling when I come on it in the magazine. Of course I recognize the
form of it as being familiar--but that is all. That is, I remember it as
pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead and cold, but ready
for the match--and now I see them touched off and all ablaze with
blinding fires. You can read, if you want to, but you don't read worth a
damn. I know you can read, because your readings of Cable and your
repeatings of the German doctor's remarks prove that.

That's the best drunk scene--because the truest--that I ever read. There
are touches in it that I never saw any writer take note of before. And
they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy. How very drunk,
and how recently drunk, and how altogether admirably drunk you must have
been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece!

Why I didn't notice that that religious interview between Marcia and Mrs.
Halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me--but dear me,
it's just too lovely for anything. (Wrote Clark to collar it for the
"Library.")

Hang it, I know where the mystery is, now; when you are reading, you
glide right along, and I don't get a chance to let the things soak home;
but when I catch it in the magazine, I give a page 20 or 30 minutes in
which to gently and thoroughly filter into me. Your humor is so very
subtle, and elusive--(well, often it's just a vanishing breath of perfume
which a body isn't certain he smelt till he stops and takes another
smell) whereas you can smell other...

(Remainder obliterated.)


Among Mark Twain's old schoolmates in Hannibal was little Helen
Kercheval, for whom in those early days he had a very tender spot
indeed. But she married another schoolmate, John Garth, who in time
became a banker, highly respected and a great influence. John and
Helen Garth have already been mentioned in the letter of May 17th.


To John Garth, in Hannibal:

HARTFORD, July 3 '82.
DEAR JOHN,--Your letter of June 19 arrived just one day after we ought to
have been in Elmira, N. Y. for the summer: but at the last moment the
baby was seized with scarlet fever. I had to telegraph and countermand
the order for special sleeping car; and in fact we all had to fly around
in a lively way and undo the patient preparations of weeks--rehabilitate
the dismantled house, unpack the trunks, and so on. A couple of days
later, the eldest child was taken down with so fierce a fever that she
was soon delirious--not scarlet fever, however. Next, I myself was
stretched on the bed with three diseases at once, and all of them fatal.
But I never did care for fatal diseases if I could only have privacy and
room to express myself concerning them.

We gave early warning, and of course nobody has entered the house in all
this time but one or two reckless old bachelors--and they probably wanted
to carry the disease to the children of former flames of theirs. The
house is still in quarantine and must remain so for a week or two yet--at
which time we are hoping to leave for Elmira.
Always your friend
S. L. CLEMENS.


By the end of summer Howells was in Europe, and Clemens, in Elmira,
was trying to finish his Mississippi book, which was giving him a
great deal of trouble. It was usually so with his non-fiction
books; his interest in them was not cumulative; he was prone to grow
weary of them, while the menace of his publisher's contract was
maddening. Howells's letters, meant to be comforting, or at least
entertaining, did not always contribute to his peace of mind. The
Library of American Humor which they had planned was an added
burden. Before sailing, Howells had written: "Do you suppose you
can do your share of the reading at Elmira, while you are writing at
the Mississippi book?"

In a letter from London, Howells writes of the good times he is
having over there with Osgood, Hutton, John Hay, Aldrich, and Alma
Tadema, excursioning to Oxford, feasting, especially "at the Mitre
Tavern, where they let you choose your dinner from the joints
hanging from the rafter, and have passages that you lose yourself in
every time you try to go to your room.... Couldn't you and Mrs.
Clemens step over for a little while?... We have seen lots of
nice people and have been most pleasantly made of; but I would
rather have you smoke in my face, and talk for half a day just for
pleasure, than to go to the best house or club in London." The
reader will gather that this could not be entirely soothing to a man
shackled by a contract and a book that refused to come to an end.


To W. D. Howells, in London:

HARTFORD, CONN. Oct 30, 1882.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I do not expect to find you, so I shan't spend many
words on you to wind up in the perdition of some European dead-letter
office. I only just want to say that the closing installments of the
story are prodigious. All along I was afraid it would be impossible for
you to keep up so splendidly to the end; but you were only, I see now,
striking eleven. It is in these last chapters that you struck twelve.
Go on and write; you can write good books yet, but you can never match
this one. And speaking of the book, I inclose something which has been
happening here lately.

We have only just arrived at home, and I have not seen Clark on our
matters. I cannot see him or any one else, until I get my book finished.
The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home, while I still lacked
thirty thousand words. I had been sick and got delayed. I am going to
write all day and two thirds of the night, until the thing is done, or
break down at it. The spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to
me. I can endure the irritation of it no longer. I went to work at nine
o'clock yesterday morning, and went to bed an hour after midnight.
Result of the day, (mainly stolen from books, tho' credit given,) 9500
words, so I reduced my burden by one third in one day. It was five days
work in one. I have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all
be written. It is ten days work, and unless something breaks, it will be
finished in five. We all send love to you and Mrs. Howells, and all the
family.
Yours as ever,
MARK.


Again, from Villeneuve, on lake Geneva, Howells wrote urging him this
time to spend the winter with them in Florence, where they would write
their great American Comedy of 'Orme's Motor,' "which is to enrich us
beyond the dreams of avarice.... We could have a lot of fun writing it,
and you could go home with some of the good old Etruscan malaria in your
bones, instead of the wretched pinch-beck Hartford article that you are
suffering from now.... it's a great opportunity for you. Besides,
nobody over there likes you half as well as I do."

It should be added that 'Orme's Motor' was the provisional title that
Clemens and Howells had selected for their comedy, which was to be built,
in some measure, at least, around the character, or rather from the
peculiarities, of Orion Clemens. The Cable mentioned in Mark Twain's
reply is, of course, George W. Cable, who only a little while before had
come up from New Orleans to conquer the North with his wonderful tales
and readings.


To W. D. Howells, in Switzerland:

HARTFORD, Nov. 4th, 1882.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Yes, it would be profitable for me to do that, because
with your society to help me, I should swiftly finish this now apparently
interminable book. But I cannot come, because I am not Boss here, and
nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in the winter
season.

I never had such a fight over a book in my life before. And the
foolishest part of the whole business is, that I started Osgood to
editing it before I had finished writing it. As a consequence, large
areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder, and I have the
burden of these unfilled gaps harassing me and the thought of the broken
continuity of the work, while I am at the same time trying to build the
last quarter of the book. However, at last I have said with sufficient
positiveness that I will finish the book at no particular date; that I
will not hurry it; that I will not hurry myself; that I will take things
easy and comfortably, write when I choose to write, leave it alone when I
so prefer. The printers must wait, the artists, the canvassers, and all
the rest. I have got everything at a dead standstill, and that is where
it ought to be, and that is where it must remain; to follow any other
policy would be to make the book worse than it already is. I ought to
have finished it before showing to anybody, and then sent it across the
ocean to you to be edited, as usual; for you seem to be a great many
shades happier than you deserve to be, and if I had thought of this thing
earlier, I would have acted upon it and taken the tuck somewhat out of
your joyousness.

In the same mail with your letter, arrived the enclosed from Orme the
motor man. You will observe that he has an office. I will explain that
this is a law office and I think it probably does him as much good to
have a law office without anything to do in it, as it would another man
to have one with an active business attached. You see he is on the
electric light lay now. Going to light the city and allow me to take all
the stock if I want to. And he will manage it free of charge. It never
would occur to this simple soul how much less costly it would be to me,
to hire him on a good salary not to manage it. Do you observe the same
old eagerness, the same old hurry, springing from the fear that if he
does not move with the utmost swiftness, that colossal opportunity will
escape him? Now just fancy this same frantic plunging after vast
opportunities, going on week after week with this same man, during fifty
entire years, and he has not yet learned, in the slightest degree, that
there isn't any occasion to hurry; that his vast opportunity will always
wait; and that whether it waits or flies, he certainly will never catch
it. This immortal hopefulness, fortified by its immortal and unteachable
misjudgment, is the immortal feature of this character, for a play; and
we will write that play. We should be fools else. That staccato
postscript reads as if some new and mighty business were imminent, for it
is slung on the paper telegraphically, all the small words left out.
I am afraid something newer and bigger than the electric light is
swinging across his orbit. Save this letter for an inspiration. I have
got a hundred more.

Cable has been here, creating worshipers on all hands. He is a marvelous
talker on a deep subject. I do not see how even Spencer could unwind a
thought more smoothly or orderly, and do it in a cleaner, clearer,
crisper English. He astounded Twichell with his faculty. You know when
it comes down to moral honesty, limpid innocence, and utterly blemishless
piety, the Apostles were mere policemen to Cable; so with this in mind
you must imagine him at a midnight dinner in Boston the other night,
where we gathered around the board of the Summerset Club; Osgood, full,
Boyle O'Reilly, full, Fairchild responsively loaded, and Aldrich and
myself possessing the floor, and properly fortified. Cable told Mrs.
Clemens when he returned here, that he seemed to have been entertaining
himself with horses, and had a dreamy idea that he must have gone to
Boston in a cattle-car. It was a very large time. He called it an orgy.
And no doubt it was, viewed from his standpoint.

I wish I were in Switzerland, and I wish we could go to Florence; but we
have to leave these delights to you; there is no helping it. We all join
in love to you and all the family.
Yours as ever
MARK.




XXIII.

LETTERS, 1883, TO HOWELLS AND OTHERS. A GUEST OF THE MARQUIS OF LORNE.
THE HISTORY GAME. A PLAY BY HOWELLS AND MARK TWAIN.

Mark Twain, in due season, finished the Mississippi book and placed
it in Osgood's hands for publication. It was a sort of partnership
arrangement in which Clemens was to furnish the money to make the
book, and pay Osgood a percentage for handling it. It was, in fact,
the beginning of Mark Twain's adventures as a publisher.

Howells was not as happy in Florence as he had hoped to be. The
social life there overwhelmed him. In February he wrote: "Our two
months in Florence have been the most ridiculous time that ever even
half-witted people passed. We have spent them in chasing round
after people for whom we cared nothing, and being chased by them.
My story isn't finished yet, and what part of it is done bears the
fatal marks of haste and distraction. Of course, I haven't put pen
to paper yet on the play. I wring my hands and beat my breast when
I think of how these weeks have been wasted; and how I have been
forced to waste them by the infernal social circumstances from which
I couldn't escape."

Clemens, now free from the burden of his own book, was light of
heart and full of ideas and news; also of sympathy and appreciation.
Howells's story of this time was "A Woman's Reason." Governor
Jewell, of this letter, was Marshall Jewell, Governor of Connecticut
from 1871 to 1873. Later, he was Minister to Russia, and in 1874
was United States Postmaster-General.


To W. D. Howells, in Florence:

HARTFORD, March 1st, 1883.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--We got ourselves ground up in that same mill, once, in
London, and another time in Paris. It is a kind of foretaste of hell.
There is no way to avoid it except by the method which you have now
chosen. One must live secretly and cut himself utterly off from the
human race, or life in Europe becomes an unbearable burden and work an
impossibility. I learned something last night, and maybe it may
reconcile me to go to Europe again sometime. I attended one of the
astonishingly popular lectures of a man by the name of Stoddard, who
exhibits interesting stereopticon pictures and then knocks the interest
all out of them with his comments upon them. But all the world go there
to look and listen, and are apparently well satisfied. And they ought to
be fully satisfied, if the lecturer would only keep still, or die in the
first act. But he described how retired tradesmen and farmers in Holland
load a lazy scow with the family and the household effects, and then loaf
along the waterways of the low countries all the summer long, paying no
visits, receiving none, and just lazying a heavenly life out in their own
private unpestered society, and doing their literary work, if they have
any, wholly uninterrupted. If you had hired such a boat and sent for us
we should have a couple of satisfactory books ready for the press now
with no marks of interruption, vexatious wearinesses, and other
hellishnesses visible upon them anywhere. We shall have to do this
another time. We have lost an opportunity for the present. Do you
forget that Heaven is packed with a multitude of all nations and that
these people are all on the most familiar how-the-hell-are-you footing
with Talmage swinging around the circle to all eternity hugging the
saints and patriarchs and archangels, and forcing you to do the same
unless you choose to make yourself an object of remark if you refrain?
Then why do you try to get to Heaven? Be warned in time.