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Complete Letters of Mark Twain
I do wish you could come down once more before your holiday. I’d give anything!
Yrs ever,
Mark.
Howells wrote that he had no time for the dramatization and urged Clemens to undertake it himself. He was ready to read the story, whenever it should arrive. Clemens did not hurry, however, The publication of Tom Sawyer could wait. He already had a book in press – the volume of Sketches New and Old, which he had prepared for Bliss several years before.
Sketches was issued that autumn, and Howells gave it a good notice – possibly better than it deserved.
Considered among Mark Twain’s books to-day, the collection of sketches does not seem especially important. With the exception of the frog story and the “True Story” most of those included – might be spared. Clemens himself confessed to Howells that He wished, when it was too late, that he had destroyed a number of them. The book, however, was distinguished in a special way: it contains Mark Twain’s first utterance in print on the subject of copyright, a matter in which he never again lost interest. The absurdity and injustice of the copyright laws both amused and irritated him, and in the course of time he would be largely instrumental in their improvement. In the book his open petition to Congress that all property rights, as well as literary ownership, should be put on the copyright basis and limited to a “beneficent term of forty-two years,” was more or less of a joke, but, like so many of Mark Twain’s jokes, it was founded on reason and justice.
He had another idea, that was not a joke: an early plan in the direction of international copyright. It was to be a petition signed by the leading American authors, asking the United States to declare itself to be the first to stand for right and justice by enacting laws against the piracy of foreign books. It was a rather utopian scheme, as most schemes for moral progress are, in their beginning. It would not be likely ever to reach Congress, but it would appeal to Howells and his Cambridge friends. Clemens wrote, outlining his plan of action.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Hartford, Sept. 18, 1875.
My dear Howells, – My plan is this – you are to get Mr. Lowell and Mr. Longfellow to be the first signers of my copyright petition; you must sign it yourself and get Mr. Whittier to do likewise. Then Holmes will sign – he said he would if he didn’t have to stand at the head. Then I’m fixed. I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages and send him personally to every author of distinction in the country, and corral the rest of the signatures. Then I’ll have the whole thing lithographed (about a thousand copies) and move upon the President and Congress in person, but in the subordinate capacity of a party who is merely the agent of better and wiser men – men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at.
I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and if he should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should blush – but still I would frame it.)
Next I would get a prime leader in Congress: I would also see that votes enough to carry the measure were privately secured before the bill was offered. This I would try through my leader and my friends there.
And then if Europe chose to go on stealing from us, we would say with noble enthusiasm, “American lawmakers do steal but not from foreign authors – Not from foreign authors!”
You see, what I want to drive into the Congressional mind is the simple fact that the moral law is “Thou shalt not steal”—no matter what Europe may do.
I swear I can’t see any use in robbing European authors for the benefit of American booksellers, anyway.
If we can ever get this thing through Congress, we can try making copyright perpetual, some day. There would be no sort of use in it, since only one book in a hundred millions outlives the present copyright term – no sort of use except that the writer of that one book have his rights – which is something.
If we only had some God in the country’s laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
The only man who ever signed my petition with alacrity, and said that the fact that a thing was right was all-sufficient, was Rev. Dr. Bushnell.
I have lost my old petition, (which was brief) but will draft and enclose another – not in the words it ought to be, but in the substance. I want Mr. Lowell to furnish the words (and the ideas too,) if he will do it.
Say – Redpath beseeches me to lecture in Boston in November – telegraphs that Beecher’s and Nast’s withdrawal has put him in the tightest kind of a place. So I guess I’ll do that old “Roughing It” lecture over again in November and repeat it 2 or 3 times in New York while I am at it.
Can I take a carriage after the lecture and go out and stay with you that night, provided you find at that distant time that it will not inconvenience you? Is Aldrich home yet?
With love to you all,
Yrs ever,
S. L. C.
Of course the petition never reached Congress. Holmes’s comment that governments were not in the habit of setting themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue, was shared by too many others. The petition was tabled, but Clemens never abandoned his purpose and lived to see most of his dream fulfilled. Meantime, Howells’s notice of the Sketches appeared in the Atlantic, and brought grateful acknowledgment from the author.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Hartford, Oct. 19, 1875.
My dear Howells, – That is a perfectly superb notice. You can easily believe that nothing ever gratified me so much before. The newspaper praises bestowed upon the “Innocents Abroad” were large and generous, but somehow I hadn’t confidence in the critical judgement of the parties who furnished them. You know how that is, yourself, from reading the newspaper notices of your own books. They gratify a body, but they always leave a small pang behind in the shape of a fear that the critic’s good words could not safely be depended upon as authority. Yours is the recognized critical Court of Last Resort in this country; from its decision there is no appeal; and so, to have gained this decree of yours before I am forty years old, I regard as a thing to be right down proud of. Mrs. Clemens says, “Tell him I am just as grateful to him as I can be.” (It sounds as if she were grateful to you for heroically trampling the truth under foot in order to praise me but in reality it means that she is grateful to you for being bold enough to utter a truth which she fully believes all competent people know, but which none has heretofore been brave enough to utter.) You see, the thing that gravels her is that I am so persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely covered my case – which she denies with venom.
The other day Mrs. Clemens was planning a visit to you, and so I am waiting with a pleasurable hope for the result of her deliberations. We are expecting visitors every day, now, from New York; and afterward some are to come from Elmira. I judge that we shall then be free to go Bostonward. I should be just delighted; because we could visit in comfort, since we shouldn’t have to do any shopping – did it all in New York last week, and a tremendous pull it was too.
Mrs. C. said the other day, “We will go to Cambridge if we have to walk; for I don’t believe we can ever get the Howellses to come here again until we have been there.” I was gratified to see that there was one string, anyway, that could take her to Cambridge. But I will do her the justice to say that she is always wanting to go to Cambridge, independent of the selfish desire to get a visit out of you by it. I want her to get started, now, before children’s diseases are fashionable again, because they always play such hob with visiting arrangements.
With love to you all,
Yrs Ever,
S. L. Clemens.
Mark Twain’s trips to Boston were usually made alone. Women require more preparation to go visiting, and Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Howells seem to have exchanged visits infrequently. For Mark Twain, perhaps, it was just as well that his wife did not always go with him; his absent-mindedness and boyish ingenuousness often led him into difficulties which Mrs. Clemens sometimes found embarrassing. In the foregoing letter they were planning a visit to Cambridge. In the one that follows they seem to have made it – with certain results, perhaps not altogether amusing at the moment.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Oct. 4, ’75.
My dear Howells, – We had a royal good time at your house, and have had a royal good time ever since, talking about it, both privately and with the neighbors.
Mrs. Clemens’s bodily strength came up handsomely under that cheery respite from household and nursery cares. I do hope that Mrs. Howells’s didn’t go correspondingly down, under the added burden to her cares and responsibilities. Of course I didn’t expect to get through without committing some crimes and hearing of them afterwards, so I have taken the inevitable lashings and been able to hum a tune while the punishment went on. I “caught it” for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her coffee when it was “a good deal better than we get at home.” I “caught it” for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that Ms when the printers are done with it. I “caught it” once more for personating that drunken Col. James. I “caught it” for mentioning that Mr. Longfellow’s picture was slightly damaged; and when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shame-facedly, that I had privately suggested to you that we hadn’t any frames, and that if you wouldn’t mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, &c., &c., &c., the Madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said:
“How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er—”
“Oh, Howells won’t mind it! You don’t know Howells. Howells is a man who—” She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in the hall, so she took it out of George. I was glad of that, because it saved the babies.
I’ve got another rattling good character for my novel! That great work is mulling itself into shape gradually.
Mrs. Clemens sends love to Mrs. Howells – meantime she is diligently laying up material for a letter to her.
Yrs ever,
Mark.
The “George” of this letter was Mark Twain’s colored butler, a valued and even beloved member of the household – a most picturesque character, who “one day came to wash windows,” as Clemens used to say, “and remained eighteen years.” The fiction of Mrs. Clemens’s severity he always found amusing, because of its entire contrast with the reality of her gentle heart.
Clemens carried the Tom Sawyer Ms. to Boston himself and placed it in Howells’s hands. Howells had begged to be allowed to see the story, and Mrs. Clemens was especially anxious that he should do so. She had doubts as to certain portions of it, and had the fullest faith in Howells’s opinion.
It was a gratifying one when it came. Howells wrote: “I finished reading Tom Sawyer a week ago, sitting up till one A.M. to get to the end, simply because it was impossible to leave off. It’s altogether the best boy’s story I ever read. It will be an immense success. But I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy’s story. Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do; and if you should put it forth as a study of boy character from the grown-up point of view, you give the wrong key to it…. The adventures are enchanting. I wish I had been on that island. The treasure-hunting, the loss in the cave – it’s all exciting and splendid. I shouldn’t think of publishing this story serially. Give me a hint when it’s to be out, and I’ll start the sheep to jumping in the right places”—meaning that he would have an advance review ready for publication in the Atlantic, which was a leader of criticism in America.
Mark Twain was writing a great deal at this time. Howells was always urging him to send something to the Atlantic, declaring a willingness to have his name appear every month in their pages, and Clemens was generally contributing some story or sketch. The “proof” referred to in the next letter was of one of these articles.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Hartford, Nov. 23, ’75.
My dear Howells, – Herewith is the proof. In spite of myself, how awkwardly I do jumble words together; and how often I do use three words where one would answer – a thing I am always trying to guard against. I shall become as slovenly a writer as Charles Francis Adams, if I don’t look out. (That is said in jest; because of course I do not seriously fear getting so bad as that. I never shall drop so far toward his and Bret Harte’s level as to catch myself saying “It must have been wiser to have believed that he might have accomplished it if he could have felt that he would have been supported by those who should have &c. &c. &c.”) The reference to Bret Harte reminds me that I often accuse him of being a deliberate imitator of Dickens; and this in turn reminds me that I have charged unconscious plagiarism upon Charley Warner; and this in turn reminds me that I have been delighting my soul for two weeks over a bran new and ingenious way of beginning a novel – and behold, all at once it flashes upon me that Charley Warner originated the idea 3 years ago and told me about it! Aha! So much for self-righteousness! I am well repaid. Here are 108 pages of Ms, new and clean, lying disgraced in the waste paper basket, and I am beginning the novel over again in an unstolen way. I would not wonder if I am the worst literary thief in the world, without knowing it.
It is glorious news that you like Tom Sawyer so well. I mean to see to it that your review of it shall have plenty of time to appear before the other notices. Mrs. Clemens decides with you that the book should issue as a book for boys, pure and simple – and so do I. It is surely the correct idea. As to that last chapter, I think of just leaving it off and adding nothing in its place. Something told me that the book was done when I got to that point – and so the strong temptation to put Huck’s life at the Widow’s into detail, instead of generalizing it in a paragraph was resisted. Just send Sawyer to me by express – I enclose money for it. If it should get lost it will be no great matter.
Company interfered last night, and so “Private Theatricals” goes over till this evening, to be read aloud. Mrs. Clemens is mad, but the story will take that all out. This is going to be a splendid winter night for fireside reading, anyway.
I am almost at a dead stand-still with my new story, on account of the misery of having to do it all over again. We – all send love to you – all.
Yrs ever,
Mark.
The “story” referred to may have been any one of several begun by him at this time. His head was full of ideas for literature of every sort. Many of his beginnings came to nothing, for the reason that he started wrong, or with no definitely formed plan. Others of his literary enterprises were condemned by his wife for their grotesqueness or for the offense they might give in one way or another, however worthy the intention behind them. Once he wrote a burlesque on family history “The Autobiography of a Damned Fool.” “Livy wouldn’t have it,” he said later, “so I gave it up.” The world is indebted to Mark Twain’s wife for the check she put upon his fantastic or violent impulses. She was his public, his best public – clearheaded and wise. That he realized this, and was willing to yield, was by no means the least of his good fortunes. We may believe that he did not always yield easily, and perhaps sometimes only out of love for her. In the letter which he wrote her on her thirtieth birthday we realize something of what she had come to mean in his life.
*****
To Mrs. Clemens on her Thirtieth Birthday:
Hartford, November 27, 1875.
Livy darling, six years have gone by since I made my first great success in life and won you, and thirty years have passed since Providence made preparation for that happy success by sending you into the world. Every day we live together adds to the security of my confidence, that we can never any more wish to be separated than that we can ever imagine a regret that we were ever joined. You are dearer to me to-day, my child, than you were upon the last anniversary of this birth-day; you were dearer then than you were a year before – you have grown more and more dear from the first of those anniversaries, and I do not doubt that this precious progression will continue on to the end.
Let us look forward to the coming anniversaries, with their age and their gray hairs without fear and without depression, trusting and believing that the love we bear each other will be sufficient to make them blessed.
So, with abounding affection for you and our babies, I hail this day that brings you the matronly grace and dignity of three decades!
Always Yours,
S. L. C.
XVI. Letters, 1876, Chiefly To W. D. Howells. Literature And Politics. Planning A Play With Bret Harte
The Monday Evening Club of Hartford was an association of most of the literary talent of that city, and it included a number of very distinguished members. The writers, the editors, the lawyers, and the ministers of the gospel who composed it were more often than not men of national or international distinction. There was but one paper at each meeting, and it was likely to be a paper that would later find its way into some magazine.
Naturally Mark Twain was one of its favorite members, and his contributions never failed to arouse interest and discussion. A “Mark Twain night” brought out every member. In the next letter we find the first mention of one of his most memorable contributions – a story of one of life’s moral aspects. The tale, now included in his collected works, is, for some reason, little read to-day; yet the curious allegory, so vivid in its seeming reality, is well worth consideration.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Hartford, Jan. 11, ’76.
My dear Howells, – Indeed we haven’t forgotten the Howellses, nor scored up a grudge of any kind against them; but the fact is I was under the doctor’s hands for four weeks on a stretch and have been disabled from working for a week or so beside. I thought I was well, about ten days ago, so I sent for a short-hand writer and dictated answers to a bushel or so of letters that had been accumulating during my illness. Getting everything shipshape and cleared up, I went to work next day upon an Atlantic article, which ought to be worth $20 per page (which is the price they usually pay for my work, I believe) for although it is only 70 pages Ms (less than two days work, counting by bulk,) I have spent 3 more days trimming, altering and working at it. I shall put in one more day’s polishing on it, and then read it before our Club, which is to meet at our house Monday evening, the 24th inst. I think it will bring out considerable discussion among the gentlemen of the Club – though the title of the article will not give them much notion of what is to follow, – this title being “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut”—which reminds me that today’s Tribune says there will be a startling article in the current Atlantic, in which a being which is tangible bud invisible will figure-exactly the case with the sketch of mine which I am talking about! However, mine can lie unpublished a year or two as well as not – though I wish that contributor of yours had not interfered with his coincidence of heroes.
But what I am coming at, is this: won’t you and Mrs. Howells come down Saturday the 22nd and remain to the Club on Monday night? We always have a rattling good time at the Club and we do want you to come, ever so much. Will you? Now say you will. Mrs. Clemens and I are persuading ourselves that you twain will come.
My volume of sketches is doing very well, considering the times; received my quarterly statement today from Bliss, by which I perceive that 20,000 copies have been sold – or rather, 20,000 had been sold 3 weeks ago; a lot more, by this time, no doubt.
I am on the sick list again – and was, day before yesterday – but on the whole I am getting along.
Yrs ever,
Mark.
Howells wrote that he could not come down to the club meeting, adding that sickness was “quite out of character” for Mark Twain, and hardly fair on a man who had made so many other people feel well. He closed by urging that Bliss “hurry out” ‘Tom Sawyer.’ “That boy is going to make a prodigious hit.” Clemens answered:
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston.
Hartford, Jan. 18, ’76.
My dear Howells, – Thanks, and ever so many, for the good opinion of ’Tom Sawyer.’ Williams has made about 300 rattling pictures for it – some of them very dainty. Poor devil, what a genius he has and how he does murder it with rum. He takes a book of mine, and without suggestion from anybody builds no end of pictures just from his reading of it.
There was never a man in the world so grateful to another as I was to you day before yesterday, when I sat down (in still rather wretched health) to set myself to the dreary and hateful task of making final revision of Tom Sawyer, and discovered, upon opening the package of Ms that your pencil mark were scattered all along. This was splendid, and swept away all labor. Instead of reading the Ms, I simply hunted out the pencil mark and made the emendations which they suggested. I reduced the boy battle to a curt paragraph; I finally concluded to cut the Sunday school speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls; I tamed the various obscenities until I judged that they no longer carried offense. So, at a single sitting I began and finished a revision which I had supposed would occupy 3 or 4 days and leave me mentally and physically fagged out at the end. I was careful not to inflict the Ms upon you until I had thoroughly and painstakingly revised it. Therefore, the only faults left were those that would discover themselves to others, not me – and these you had pointed out.
There was one expression which perhaps you overlooked. When Huck is complaining to Tom of the rigorous system in vogue at the widow’s, he says the servants harass him with all manner of compulsory decencies, and he winds up by saying: “and they comb me all to hell.” (No exclamation point.) Long ago, when I read that to Mrs. Clemens, she made no comment; another time I created occasion to read that chapter to her aunt and her mother (both sensitive and loyal subjects of the kingdom of heaven, so to speak) and they let it pass. I was glad, for it was the most natural remarkin the world for that boy to make (and he had been allowed few privileges of speech in the book;) when I saw that you, too, had let it go without protest, I was glad, and afraid; too – afraid you hadn’t observed it. Did you? And did you question the propriety of it? Since the book is now professedly and confessedly a boy’s and girl’s hook, that darn word bothers me some, nights, but it never did until I had ceased to regard the volume as being for adults.
Don’t bother to answer now, (for you’ve writing enough to do without allowing me to add to the burden,) but tell me when you see me again!
Which we do hope will be next Saturday or Sunday or Monday. Couldn’t you come now and mull over the alterations which you are going to make in your Ms, and make them after you go back? Wouldn’t it assist the work if you dropped out of harness and routine for a day or two and have that sort of revivification which comes of a holiday-forgetfulness of the work-shop? I can always work after I’ve been to your house; and if you will come to mine, now, and hear the club toot their various horns over the exasperating metaphysical question which I mean to lay before them in the disguise of a literary extravaganza, it would just brace you up like a cordial.
(I feel sort of mean trying to persuade a man to put down a critical piece of work at a critical time, but yet I am honest in thinking it would not hurt the work nor impair your interest in it to come under the circumstances.) Mrs. Clemens says, “Maybe the Howellses could come Monday if they cannot come Saturday; ask them; it is worth trying.” Well, how’s that? Could you? It would be splendid if you could. Drop me a postal card – I should have a twinge of conscience if I forced you to write a letter, (I am honest about that,) – and if you find you can’t make out to come, tell me that you bodies will come the next Saturday if the thing is possible, and stay over Sunday.
Yrs ever,
Mark.
Howells, however, did not come to the club meeting, but promised to come soon when they could have a quiet time to themselves together.
As to Huck’s language, he declared:
“I’d have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn’t notice it because the locution was so familiar to my Western sense, and so exactly the thing that Huck would say.” Clemens changed the phrase to, “They comb me all to thunder,” and so it stands to-day.
The “Carnival of Crime,” having served its purpose at the club, found quick acceptance by Howells for the Atlantic. He was so pleased with it, in fact, that somewhat later he wrote, urging that its author allow it to be printed in a dainty book, by Osgood, who made a specialty of fine publishing. Meantime Howells had written his Atlantic notice of Tom Sawyer, and now inclosed Clemens a proof of it. We may judge from the reply that it was satisfactory.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Apl 3, ’76.
My dear Howells, – It is a splendid notice and will embolden weak-kneed journalistic admirers to speak out, and will modify or shut up the unfriendly. To “fear God and dread the Sunday school” exactly described that old feeling which I used to have, but I couldn’t have formulated it. I want to enclose one of the illustrations in this letter, if I do not forget it. Of course the book is to be elaborately illustrated, and I think that many of the pictures are considerably above the American average, in conception if not in execution.
I do not re-enclose your review to you, for you have evidently read and corrected it, and so I judge you do not need it. About two days after the Atlantic issues I mean to begin to send books to principal journals and magazines.
I read the “Carnival of Crime” proof in New York when worn and witless and so left some things unamended which I might possibly have altered had I been at home. For instance, “I shall always address you in your own S-n-i-v-e-l-i-n-g d-r-a-w-l, baby.” I saw that you objected to something there, but I did not understand what! Was it that it was too personal? Should the language be altered? – or the hyphens taken out? Won’t you please fix it the way it ought to be, altering the language as you choose, only making it bitter and contemptuous?
“Deuced” was not strong enough; so I met you halfway with “devilish.”
Mrs. Clemens has returned from New York with dreadful sore throat, and bones racked with rheumatism. She keeps her bed. “Aloha nui!” as the Kanakas say. Mark.
Henry Irving once said to Mark Twain: “You made a mistake by not adopting the stage as a profession. You would have made even a greater actor than a writer.”
Mark Twain would have made an actor, certainly, but not a very tractable one. His appearance in Hartford in “The Loan of a Lover” was a distinguished event, and his success complete, though he made so many extemporaneous improvements on the lines of thick-headed Peter Spuyk, that he kept the other actors guessing as to their cues, and nearly broke up the performance. It was, of course, an amateur benefit, though Augustin Daly promptly wrote, offering to put it on for a long run.
The “skeleton novelette” mentioned in the next letter refers to a plan concocted by Howells and Clemens, by which each of twelve authors was to write a story, using the same plot, “blindfolded” as to what the others had written. It was a regular “Mark Twain” notion, and it is hard to-day to imagine Howells’s continued enthusiasm in it. Neither he nor Clemens gave up the idea for a long time. It appears in their letters again and again, though perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried out.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Apl. 22, 1876.
My dear Howells, You’ll see per enclosed slip that I appear for the first time on the stage next Wednesday. You and Mrs. H. come down and you shall skip in free.
I wrote my skeleton novelette yesterday and today. It will make a little under 12 pages.
Please tell Aldrich I’ve got a photographer engaged, and tri-weekly issue is about to begin. Show him the canvassing specimens and beseech him to subscribe.
Ever yours,
S. L. C.
In his next letter Mark Twain explains why Tom Sawyer is not to appear as soon as planned. The reference to “The Literary Nightmare” refers to the “Punch, Conductor, Punch with Care” sketch, which had recently appeared in the Atlantic. Many other versifiers had had their turn at horse-car poetry, and now a publisher was anxious to collect it in a book, provided he could use the Atlantic sketch. Clemens does not tell us here the nature of Carlton’s insult, forgiveness of which he was not yet qualified to grant, but there are at least two stories about it, or two halves of the same incident, as related afterward by Clemens and Canton. Clemens said that when he took the Jumping Frog book to Carlton, in 1867, the latter, pointing to his stock, said, rather scornfully: “Books? I don’t want your book; my shelves are full of books now,” though the reader may remember that it was Carlton himself who had given the frog story to the Saturday Press and had seen it become famous. Carlton’s half of the story was that he did not accept Mark Twain’s book because the author looked so disreputable. Long afterward, when the two men met in Europe, the publisher said to the now rich and famous author: “Mr. Clemens, my one claim on immortality is that I declined your first book.”
