_ 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.
As to that "Noah's Ark" book, I began it in Edinburgh in 1873;--[This is
not quite correct. The "Noah's Ark" book was begun in Buffalo in 1870.]
I don't know where the manuscript is now. It was a Diary, which
professed to be the work of Shem, but wasn't. I began it again several
months ago, but only for recreation; I hadn't any intention of carrying
it to a finish
--or even to the end of the first chapter, in fact.
As to the book whose action "takes place in Heaven." That was a small
thing, ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.") It lay in my pigeon-
holes 40 years, then I took it out and printed it in Harper's Monthly
last year.
S. L. C.
In the next letter we get a pretty and peaceful picture of "Rest-and-be-
Thankful." These were Mark Twain's balmy days. The financial drain of
the type-machine was heavy but not yet exhausting, and the prospect of
vast returns from it seemed to grow brighter each day. His publishing
business, though less profitable, was still prosperous, his family life
was ideal. How gratefully, then, he could enter into the peace of that
"perfect day."
To Mrs. Orion Clemens, in Keokuk, Ia.:
ON THE HILL NEAR ELMIRA, July 10, '87.
DEAR MOLLIE,--This is a superb Sunday for weather--very cloudy, and the
thermometer as low as 65. The city in the valley is purple with shade,
as seen from up here at the study. The Cranes are reading and loafing in
the canvas-curtained summer-house 50 yards away on a higher (the highest)
point; the cats are loafing over at "Ellerslie" which is the children's
estate and dwellinghouse in their own private grounds (by deed from Susie
Crane) a hundred yards from the study, amongst the clover and young oaks
and willows. Livy is down at the house, but I shall now go and bring her
up to the Cranes to help us occupy the lounges and hammocks--whence a
great panorama of distant hill and valley and city is seeable. The
children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods.
It is a perfect day indeed.
With love to you all.
SAM.
Two days after this letter was written we get a hint of what was the
beginning of business trouble--that is to say, of the failing health of
Charles L. Webster. Webster was ambitious, nervous, and not robust.
He had overworked and was paying the penalty. His trouble was
neurasthenia, and he was presently obliged to retire altogether from the
business. The "Sam and Mary" mentioned were Samuel Moffet and his wife.
To Mrs. Pamela Moffett, in Fredonia, N. Y.
ELMIRA, July 12, '87
MY DEAR SISTER,--I had no idea that Charley's case was so serious.
I knew it was bad, and persistent, but I was not aware of the full size
of the matter.
I have just been writing to a friend in Hartford' who treated what I
imagine was a similar case surgically last fall, and produced a permanent
cure. If this is a like case, Charley must go to him.
If relief fails there, he must take the required rest, whether the
business can stand it or not.
It is most pleasant to hear such prosperous accounts of Sam and Mary,
I do not see how Sam could well be more advantageously fixed. He can
grow up with that paper, and achieve a successful life.
It is not all holiday here with Susie and Clara this time. They have to
put in some little time every day on their studies. Jean thinks she is
studying too, but I don't know what it is unless it is the horses; she
spends the day under their heels in the stables--and that is but a
continuation of her Hartford system of culture.
With love from us all to you all.
Affectionately
SAM.
Mark Twain had a few books that he read regularly every year or two.
Among these were 'Pepys's Diary', Suetonius's 'Lives of the Twelve
Caesars', and Thomas Carlyle's 'French Revolution'. He had a passion for
history, biography, and personal memoirs of any sort. In his early life
he had cared very little for poetry, but along in the middle eighties he
somehow acquired a taste for Browning and became absorbed in it.
A Browning club assembled as often as once a week at the Clemens home in
Hartford to listen to his readings of the master. He was an impressive
reader, and he carefully prepared himself for these occasions, indicating
by graduated underscorings, the exact values he wished to give to words
and phrases. Those were memorable gatherings, and they must have
continued through at least two winters. It is one of the puzzling phases
of Mark Twain's character that, notwithstanding his passion for direct
and lucid expression, he should have found pleasure in the poems of
Robert Browning.
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
ELMIRA, Aug. 22, '87.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man
while he sleeps. When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871,
I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it
differently being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and
environment (and Taine and St. Simon): and now I lay the book down once
more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--And not a pale,
characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Carlyle teaches no such gospel
so the change is in me--in my vision of the evidences.
People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at
all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so.
It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens's or
Scott's books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look
at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance
of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination
call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn't
altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.
Well, that's loss. To have house and Bible shrink so, under the
disillusioning corrected angle, is loss-for a moment. But there are
compensations. You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets
and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field.
Which I see you have done, and found Tolstoi. I haven't got him in focus
yet, but I've got Browning . . . .
Ys Ever
MARK.
Mention has been made already of Mark Twain's tendency to
absentmindedness. He was always forgetting engagements, or getting
them wrong. Once he hurried to an afternoon party, and finding the
mistress of the house alone, sat down and talked to her comfortably
for an hour or two, not remembering his errand at all. It was only
when he reached home that he learned that the party had taken place
the week before. It was always dangerous for him to make
engagements, and he never seemed to profit by sorrowful experience.
We, however, may profit now by one of his amusing apologies.
To Mrs. Grover Cleveland, in Washington:
HARTFORD, Nov. 6, 1887.
MY DEAR MADAM,--I do not know how it is in the White House, but in this
house of ours whenever the minor half of the administration tries to run
itself without the help of the major half it gets aground. Last night
when I was offered the opportunity to assist you in the throwing open the
Warner brothers superb benefaction in Bridgeport to those fortunate
women, I naturally appreciated the honor done me, and promptly seized my
chance. I had an engagement, but the circumstances washed it out of my
mind. If I had only laid the matter before the major half of the
administration on the spot, there would have been no blunder; but I never
thought of that. So when I did lay it before her, later, I realized once
more that it will not do for the literary fraction of a combination to
try to manage affairs which properly belong in the office of the business
bulk of it. I suppose the President often acts just like that: goes and
makes an impossible promise, and you never find it out until it is next
to impossible to break it up and set things straight again. Well, that
is just our way, exactly-one half of the administration always busy
getting the family into trouble, and the other half busy getting it out
again. And so we do seem to be all pretty much alike, after all. The
fact is, I had forgotten that we were to have a dinner party on that
Bridgeport date--I thought it was the next day: which is a good deal of
an improvement for me, because I am more used to being behind a day or
two than ahead. But that is just the difference between one end of this
kind of an administration and the other end of it, as you have noticed,
yourself--the other end does not forget these things. Just so with a
funeral; if it is the man's funeral, he is most always there, of course-
but that is no credit to him, he wouldn't be there if you depended on
hint to remember about it; whereas, if on the other hand--but I seem to
have got off from my line of argument somehow; never mind about the
funeral. Of course I am not meaning to say anything against funerals--
that is, as occasions--mere occasions--for as diversions I don't think
they amount to much But as I was saying--if you are not busy I will look
back and see what it was I was saying.
I don't seem to find the place; but anyway she was as sorry as ever
anybody could be that I could not go to Bridgeport, but there was no help
for it. And I, I have been not only sorry but very sincerely ashamed of
having made an engagement to go without first making sure that I could
keep it, and I do not know how to apologize enough for my heedless breach
of good manners.
With the sincerest respect,
S. L. CLEMENS.
Samuel Clemens was one of the very few authors to copyright a book
in England before the enactment of the international copyright law.
As early as 1872 he copyrighted 'Roughing It' in England, and
piratical publishers there respected his rights. Finally, in 1887,
the inland revenue office assessed him with income tax, which he
very willingly paid, instructing his London publishers, Chatto &
Windus, to pay on the full amount he had received from them. But
when the receipt for his taxes came it was nearly a yard square with
due postage of considerable amount. Then he wrote:
To Mr. Chatto, of Chatto & Windus, in London:
HARTFORD, Dec. 5, '87.
MY DEAR CHATTO,--Look here, I don't mind paying the tax, but don't you
let the Inland Revenue Office send me any more receipts for it, for the
postage is something perfectly demoralizing. If they feel obliged to
print a receipt on a horse-blanket, why don't they hire a ship and send
it over at their own expense?
Wasn't it good that they caught me out with an old book instead of a new
one? The tax on a new book would bankrupt a body. It was my purpose to
go to England next May and stay the rest of the year, but I've found that
tax office out just in time. My new book would issue in March, and they
would tax the sale in both countries. Come, we must get up a compromise
somehow. You go and work in on the good side of those revenue people and
get them to take the profits and give me the tax. Then I will come over
and we will divide the swag and have a good time.
I wish you to thank Mr. Christmas for me; but we won't resist. The
country that allows me copyright has a right to tax me.
Sincerely Yours
S. L. CLEMENS.
Another English tax assessment came that year, based on the report
that it was understood that he was going to become an English
resident, and had leased Buckenham Hall, Norwich, for a year.
Clemens wrote his publishers: "I will explain that all that about
Buckenham Hall was an English newspaper's mistake. I was not in
England, and if I had been I wouldn't have been at Buckenham Hall,
anyway, but at Buckingham Palace, or I would have endeavored to find
out the reason why." Clemens made literature out of this tax
experience. He wrote an open letter to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.
Such a letter has no place in this collection. It was published in
the "Drawer" of Harper's Magazine, December, 1887, and is now
included in the uniform edition of his works under the title of,
"A Petition to the Queen of England."
From the following letter, written at the end of the year, we gather
that the type-setter costs were beginning to make a difference in
the Clemens economies.
To Mrs. Moffett, in Fredonia:
HARTFORD, Dec. 18, '87.
DEAR PAMELA,--will you take this $15 and buy some candy or some other
trifle for yourself and Sam and his wife to remember that we remember
you, by?
If we weren't a little crowded this year by the typesetter, I'd send a
check large enough to buy a family Bible or some other useful thing like
that. However we go on and on, but the type-setter goes on forever--at
$3,000 a month; which is much more satisfactory than was the case the
first seventeen months, when the bill only averaged $2,000, and promised
to take a thousand years. We'll be through, now, in 3 or 4 months, I
reckon, and then the strain will let up and we can breathe freely once
more, whether success ensues or failure.
Even with a type-setter on hand we ought not to be in the least scrimped-
but it would take a long letter to explain why and who is to blame.
All the family send love to all of you and best Christmas wishes for your
prosperity.
Affectionately,
SAM. _