The Letters Of Mark Twain, Volume 5, 1901 to 1906

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Letters Of Mark Twain, Volume 5, 1901 to 1906


I like "In Our Town," particularly that Colonel, of the Lookout Mountain
Oration, and very particularly pages 212-16. I wrote and told White so.

After "After the Wedding" I read "The Mother" aloud and sounded its human
deeps with your deep-sea lead. I had not read it before, since it was
first published.

I have been dictating some fearful things, for 4 successive mornings--for
no eye but yours to see until I have been dead a century--if then. But
I got them out of my system, where they had been festering for years--and
that was the main thing. I feel better, now.

I came down today on business--from house to house in 12 1/2 hours, and
expected to arrive dead, but am neither tired nor sleepy.
Yours as always
MARK.


To William Allen White, in Emporia, Kans.:

DUBLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE,
June 24, 1906.
DEAR MR. WHITE,--Howells told me that "In Our Town" was a charming book,
and indeed it is. All of it is delightful when read one's self, parts of
it can score finely when subjected to the most exacting of tests--the
reading aloud. Pages 197 and 216 are of that grade. I have tried them a
couple of times on the family, and pages 212 and 216 are qualified to
fetch any house of any country, caste or color, endowed with those riches
which are denied to no nation on the planet--humor and feeling.

Talk again--the country is listening.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.


Witter Bynner, the poet, was one of the editors of McClure's
Magazine at this time, but was trying to muster the courage to give
up routine work for verse-making and the possibility of poverty.
Clemens was fond of Bynner and believed in his work. He did not
advise him, however, to break away entirely from a salaried
position--at least not immediately; but one day Bynner did so, and
reported the step he had taken, with some doubt as to the answer he
would receive.


To Witter Bynner, in New York:

DUBLIN, Oct. 5, 1906.
DEAR POET,--You have certainly done right for several good reasons; at
least, of them, I can name two:

1. With your reputation you can have your freedom and yet earn your
living. 2. if you fall short of succeeding to your wish, your
reputation will provide you another job. And so in high approval I
suppress the scolding and give you the saintly and fatherly pat instead.
MARK TWAIN.


On another occasion, when Bynner had written a poem to Clara
Clemens, her father pretended great indignation that the first poem
written by Bynner to any one in his household should not be to him,
and threatened revenge. At dinner shortly after he produced from
his pocket a slip of paper on which he had set down what he said was
"his only poem." He read the lines that follow:

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: It might have been.
Ah, say not so! as life grows longer, leaner, thinner,
We recognize, O God, it might have Bynner!"

He returned to New York in October and soon after was presented by
Mrs. H. H. Rogers with a handsome billiard-table.

He had a passion for the game, but had played comparatively little
since the old Hartford days of fifteen years before, when a group of
his friends used to assemble on Friday nights in the room at the top
of the house for long, strenuous games and much hilarity. Now the
old fever all came back; the fascinations of the game superseded
even his interest in the daily dictations.


To Mrs. H. H. Rogers, in New York:

21 FIFTH AVENUE, Monday, Nov., 1906.
DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--The billiard table is better than the doctors. It is
driving out the heartburn in a most promising way. I have a billiardist
on the premises, and I walk not less than ten miles every day with the
cue in my hand. And the walking is not the whole of the exercise, nor
the most health-giving part of it, I think. Through the multitude of the
positions and attitudes it brings into play every muscle in the body and
exercises them all.

The games begin right after luncheon, daily, and continue until midnight,
with 2 hours' intermission for dinner and music. And so it is 9 hours'
exercise per day, and 10 or 12 on Sunday. Yesterday and last night it
was 12--and I slept until 8 this morning without waking. The billiard
table, as a Sabbath breaker can beat any coal-breaker in Pennsylvania,
and give it 30 in, the game. If Mr. Rogers will take to daily billiards
he can do without doctors and the massageur, I think.

We are really going to build a house on my farm, an hour and a half from
New York. It is decided. It is to be built by contract, and is to come
within $25,000.
With love and many thanks.
S. L. C.

P.S. Clara is in the sanitarium--till January 28 when her western
concert tour will begin. She is getting to be a mighty competent singer.
You must know Clara better; she is one of the very finest and completest
and most satisfactory characters I have ever met. Others knew it before,
but I have always been busy with other matters.


The "billiardist on the premises" was the writer of these notes,
who, earlier in the year, had become his biographer, and, in the
course of time, his daily companion and friend. The farm mentioned
was one which he had bought at Redding, Connecticut, where, later,
he built the house known as "Stormfield."

Henry Mills Alden, for nearly forty years editor of Harper's
Magazine, arrived at his seventieth birthday on November 11th that
year, and Harper & Brothers had arranged to give him a great dinner
in the offices of Franklin Square, where, for half a century, he had
been an active force. Mark Twain, threatened with a cold, and
knowing the dinner would be strenuous, did not feel able to attend,
so wrote a letter which, if found suitable, could be read at the
gathering.


To Mr. Henry Alden:

ALDEN,--dear and ancient friend--it is a solemn moment. You have now
reached the age of discretion. You have been a long time arriving. Many
years ago you docked me on an article because the subject was too old;
later, you docked me on an article because the subject was too new; later
still, you docked me on an article because the subject was betwixt and
between. Once, when I wrote a Letter to Queen Victoria, you did not put
it in the respectable part of the Magazine, but interred it in that
potter's field, the Editor's Drawer. As a result, she never answered it.
How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine
editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember, with
charity, that his intentions were good.

You will reform, now, Alden. You will cease from these economies, and
you will be discharged. But in your retirement you will carry with you
the admiration and earnest good wishes of the oppressed and toiling
scribes. This will be better than bread. Let this console you when the
bread fails.

You will carry with you another thing, too--the affection of the scribes;
for they all love you in spite of your crimes. For you bear a kind heart
in your breast, and the sweet and winning spirit that charms away all
hostilities and animosities, and makes of your enemy your friend and
keeps him so. You have reigned over us thirty-six years, and, please
God, you shall reign another thirty-six--"and peace to Mahmoud on his
golden throne!"
Always yours
MARK


A copyright bill was coming up in Washington and a delegation of
authors went down to work for it. Clemens was not the head of the
delegation, but he was the most prominent member of it, as well as
the most useful. He invited the writer to accompany him, and
elsewhere I have told in detail the story of that excursion,--[See
Mark Twain; A Biography, chap. ccli,]--which need be but briefly
touched upon here.

His work was mainly done aside from that of the delegation. They
had him scheduled for a speech, however, which he made without notes
and with scarcely any preparation. Meantime he had applied to
Speaker Cannon for permission to allow him on the floor of the
House, where he could buttonhole the Congressmen. He was not
eligible to the floor without having received the thanks of
Congress, hence the following letter:


To Hon. Joseph Cannon, House of Representatives:

Dec. 7, 1906.
DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of the Congress--not next
week but right away. It is very necessary. Do accomplish this for your
affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can, by
violence if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that I get on the
floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in
behalf of the support, encouragement and protection of one of the
nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature. I have
arguments with me, also a barrel, with liquid in it.

Give me a chance. Get me the thanks of Congress. Don't wait for others;
there isn't time. I have stayed away and let Congress alone for
seventy-one years and I am entitled to thanks. Congress knows it
perfectly well and I have long felt hurt that this quite proper and
earned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the House and
never publicly uttered. Send me an order on the Sergeant-at-Arms quick.
When shall I come? With love and a benediction.
MARK TWAIN.


This was mainly a joke. Mark Twain did not expect any "thanks," but
he did hope for access to the floor, which once, in an earlier day,
had been accorded him. We drove to the Capitol and he delivered his
letter to "Uncle Joe" by hand. "Uncle Joe" could not give him the
privilege of the floor; the rules had become more stringent. He
declared they would hang him if he did such a thing. He added that
he had a private room down-stairs, where Mark Twain might establish
headquarters, and that he would assign his colored servant, Neal, of
long acquaintanceship with many of the members, to pass the word
that Mark Twain was receiving.

The result was a great success. All that afternoon members of
Congress poured into the Speaker's room and, in an atmosphere blue
with tobacco smoke, Mark Twain talked the gospel of copyright to his
heart's content.

The bill did not come up for passage that session, but Mark Twain
lived to see his afternoon's lobbying bring a return. In 1909,
Champ Clark, and those others who had gathered around him that
afternoon, passed a measure that added fourteen years to the
copyright term.

The next letter refers to a proposed lobby of quite a different
sort.


To Helen Keller, in Wrentham, Mass.:

21 FIFTH AVENUE,
Dec. 23, '06.
DEAR HELEN KELLER,--. . . You say, "As a reformer, you know that
ideas must be driven home again and again."

Yes, I know it; and by old experience I know that speeches and documents
and public meetings are a pretty poor and lame way of accomplishing it.
Last year I proposed a sane way--one which I had practiced with success
for a quarter of a century--but I wasn't expecting it to get any
attention, and it didn't.

Give me a battalion of 200 winsome young girls and matrons, and let me
tell them what to do and how to do it, and I will be responsible for
shining results. If I could mass them on the stage in front of the
audience and instruct them there, I could make a public meeting take hold
of itself and do something really valuable for once. Not that the real
instruction would be done there, for it wouldn't; it would be previously
done privately, and merely repeated there.

But it isn't going to happen--the good old way will be stuck to: there'll
be a public meeting: with music, and prayer, and a wearying report, and a
verbal description of the marvels the blind can do, and 17 speeches--then
the call upon all present who are still alive, to contribute. This hoary
program was invented in the idiot asylum, and will never be changed. Its
function is to breed hostility to good causes.

Some day somebody will recruit my 200--my dear beguilesome Knights of the
Golden Fleece--and you will see them make good their ominous name.

Mind, we must meet! not in the grim and ghastly air of the platform,
mayhap, but by the friendly fire--here at 21.
Affectionately your friend,
S. L. CLEMENS.


They did meet somewhat later that winter in the friendly parlors of
No. 21, and friends gathered in to meet the marvelous blind girl and
to pay tribute to Miss Sullivan (Mrs. Macy) for her almost
incredible achievement.