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Complete Letters of Mark Twain
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 mark 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 mark 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.
We have all read your two opening numbers in the Century, and consider them almost beyond praise. I hear no dissent from this verdict. I did not know there was an untouched personage in American life, but I had forgotten the auctioneer. You have photographed him accurately.
I have been an utterly free person for a month or two; and I do not believe I ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed – and realized the absence of the chains of slavery as I do this time. Usually my first waking thought in the morning is, “I have nothing to do to-day, I belong to nobody, I have ceased from being a slave.” Of course the highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor. Therefore I labor. But I take my time about it. I work one hour or four as happens to suit my mind, and quit when I please. And so these days are days of entire enjoyment. I told Clark the other day, to jog along comfortable and not get in a sweat. I said I believed you would not be able to enjoy editing that library over there, where you have your own legitimate work to do and be pestered to death by society besides; therefore I thought if he got it ready for you against your return, that that would be best and pleasantest.
You remember Governor Jewell, and the night he told about Russia, down in the library. He was taken with a cold about three weeks ago, and I stepped over one evening, proposing to beguile an idle hour for him with a yarn or two, but was received at the door with whispers, and the information that he was dying. His case had been dangerous during that day only and he died that night, two hours after I left. His taking off was a prodigious surprise, and his death has been most widely and sincerely regretted. Win. E. Dodge, the father-in-law of one of Jewell’s daughters, dropped suddenly dead the day before Jewell died, but Jewell died without knowing that. Jewell’s widow went down to New York, to Dodge’s house, the day after Jewell’s funeral, and was to return here day before yesterday, and she did – in a coffin. She fell dead, of heart disease, while her trunks were being packed for her return home. Florence Strong, one of Jewell’s daughters, who lives in Detroit, started East on an urgent telegram, but missed a connection somewhere, and did not arrive here in time to see her father alive. She was his favorite child, and they had always been like lovers together. He always sent her a box of fresh flowers once a week to the day of his death; a custom which he never suspended even when he was in Russia. Mrs. Strong had only just reached her Western home again when she was summoned to Hartford to attend her mother’s funeral.
I have had the impulse to write you several times. I shall try to remember better henceforth.
With sincerest regards to all of you,
Yours as ever,
Mark.
Mark Twain made another trip to Canada in the interest of copyright – this time to protect the Mississippi book. When his journey was announced by the press, the Marquis of Lorne telegraphed an invitation inviting him to be his guest at Rideau Hall, in Ottawa. Clemens accepted, of course, and was handsomely entertained by the daughter of Queen Victoria and her husband, then Governor-General of Canada.
On his return to Hartford he found that Osgood had issued a curious little book, for which Clemens had prepared an introduction. It was an absurd volume, though originally issued with serious intent, its title being The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English.[27] Evidently the “New Guide” was prepared by some simple Portuguese soul with but slight knowledge of English beyond that which could be obtained from a dictionary, and his literal translation of English idioms are often startling, as, for instance, this one, taken at random:
“A little learneds are happies enough for to may to satisfy their fancies on the literature.”
Mark Twain thought this quaint book might amuse his royal hostess, and forwarded a copy in what he considered to be the safe and proper form.
*****
To Col. De Winton, in Ottawa, Canada:
Hartford, June 4, ’83.
Dear colonel de Winton, – I very much want to send a little book to her Royal Highness – the famous Portuguese phrase book; but I do not know the etiquette of the matter, and I would not wittingly infringe any rule of propriety. It is a book which I perfectly well know will amuse her “some at most” if she has not seen it before, and will still amuse her “some at least,” even if she has inspected it a hundred times already. So I will send the book to you, and you who know all about the proper observances will protect me from indiscretion, in case of need, by putting the said book in the fire, and remaining as dumb as I generally was when I was up there. I do not rebind the thing, because that would look as if I thought it worth keeping, whereas it is only worth glancing at and casting aside.
Will you please present my compliments to Mrs. De Winton and Mrs. Mackenzie? – and I beg to make my sincere compliments to you, also, for your infinite kindnesses to me. I did have a delightful time up there, most certainly.
Truly yours,
S. L. Clemens.
P. S. Although the introduction dates a year back, the book is only just now issued. A good long delay.
S. L. C.
Howells, writing from Venice, in April, manifested special interest in the play project: “Something that would run like Scheherazade, for a thousand and one nights,” so perhaps his book was going better. He proposed that they devote the month of October to the work, and inclosed a letter from Mallory, who owned not only a religious paper, The Churchman, but also the Madison Square Theater, and was anxious for a Howells play. Twenty years before Howells had been Consul to Venice, and he wrote, now: “The idea of my being here is benumbing and silencing. I feel like the Wandering Jew, or the ghost of the Cardiff giant.”
He returned to America in July. Clemens sent him word of welcome, with glowing reports of his own undertakings. The story on which he was piling up Ms. was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, begun seven years before at Quarry Farm. He had no great faith in it then, and though he had taken it up again in 1880, his interest had not lasted to its conclusion. This time, however, he was in the proper spirit, and the story would be finished.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Elmira, July 20, ’83.
My dear Howells, – We are desperately glad you and your gang are home again – may you never travel again, till you go aloft or alow. Charley Clark has gone to the other side for a run – will be back in August. He has been sick, and needed the trip very much.
Mrs. Clemens had a long and wasting spell of sickness last Spring, but she is pulling up, now. The children are booming, and my health is ridiculous, it’s so robust, notwithstanding the newspaper misreports.
I haven’t piled up Ms so in years as I have done since we came here to the farm three weeks and a half ago. Why, it’s like old times, to step right into the study, damp from the breakfast table, and sail right in and sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short of stuff or words.
I wrote 4000 words to-day and I touch 3000 and upwards pretty often, and don’t fall below 1600 any working day. And when I get fagged out, I lie abed a couple of days and read and smoke, and then go it again for 6 or 7 days. I have finished one small book, and am away along in a big 433 one that I half-finished two or three years ago. I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more. And I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not.
It’s a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer. There’s a raft episode from it in second or third chapter of life on the Mississippi…..
I’m booming, these days – got health and spirits to waste – got an overplus; and if I were at home, we would write a play. But we must do it anyhow by and by.
We stay here till Sep. 10; then maybe a week at Indian Neck for sea air, then home.
We are powerful glad you are all back; and send love according.
Yrs Ever,
Mark.
*****
To Onion Clemens and family, in Keokuk, Id.:
Elmira, July 22, ’83.
Private.
Dear ma and Orion and Mollie, – I don’t know that I have anything new to report, except that Livy is still gaining, and all the rest of us flourishing. I haven’t had such booming working-days for many years. I am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way. I believe I shall complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for 7 years. This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie.
Day before yesterday I felt slightly warned to knock off work for one day. So I did it, and took the open air. Then I struck an idea for the instruction of the children, and went to work and carried it out. It took me all day. I measured off 817 feet of the road-way in our farm grounds, with a foot-rule, and then divided it up among the English reigns, from the Conqueror down to 1883, allowing one foot to the year. I whittled out a basket of little pegs and drove one in the ground at the beginning of each reign, and gave it that King’s name – thus:
I measured all the reigns exactly as many feet to the reign as there were years in it. You can look out over the grounds and see the little pegs from the front door – some of them close together, like Richard II, Richard Cromwell, James II, &c., and some prodigiously wide apart, like Henry III, Edward III, George III, &c. It gives the children a realizing sense of the length or brevity of a reign. Shall invent a violent game to go with it.
And in bed, last night, I invented a way to play it indoors – in a far more voluminous way, as to multiplicity of dates and events – on a cribbage board.
Hello, supper’s ready.
Love to all.
Good bye.
Saml.
Onion Clemens would naturally get excited over the idea of the game and its commercial possibilities. Not more so than his brother, however, who presently employed him to arrange a quantity of historical data which the game was to teach. For a season, indeed, interest in the game became a sort of midsummer madness which pervaded the two households, at Keokuk and at Quarry Farm. Howells wrote his approval of the idea of “learning history by the running foot,” which was a pun, even if unintentional, for in its out-door form it was a game of speed as well as knowledge.
Howells adds that he has noticed that the newspapers are exploiting Mark Twain’s new invention of a history game, and we shall presently see how this happened.
Also, in this letter, Howells speaks of an English nobleman to whom he has given a letter of introduction. “He seemed a simple, quiet, gentlemanly man, with a good taste in literature, which he evinced by going about with my books in his pockets, and talking of yours.”
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
My dear Howells, – How odd it seems, to sit down to write a letter with the feeling that you’ve got time to do it. But I’m done work, for this season, and so have got time. I’ve done two seasons’ work in one, and haven’t anything left to do, now, but revise. I’ve written eight or nine hundred Ms pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn’t name the number of days; I shouldn’t believe it myself, and of course couldn’t expect you to. I used to restrict myself to 4 or 5 hours a day and 5 days in the week, but this time I’ve wrought from breakfast till 5.15 p.m. six days in the week; and once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn’t looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, on the sly.
I wrote you and Twichell on the same night, about the game, and was appalled to get a note from him saying he was going to print part of my letter, and was going to do it before I could get a chance to forbid it. I telegraphed him, but was of course too late.
If you haven’t ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don’t. I’ve got the thing at last so it will work, I guess, but I don’t want any more tasks of that kind. When I wrote you, I thought I had it; whereas I was only merely entering upon the initiatory difficulties of it. I might have known it wouldn’t be an easy job, or somebody would have invented a decent historical game long ago – a thing which nobody had done. I think I’ve got it in pretty fair shape – so I have caveated it.
Earl of Onston – is that it? All right, we shall be very glad to receive them and get acquainted with them. And much obliged to you, too. There’s plenty of worse people than the nobilities. I went up and spent a week with the Marquis and the Princess Louise, and had as good a time as I want.
I’m powerful glad you are all back again; and we will come up there if our little tribe will give us the necessary furlough; and if we can’t get it, you folks must come to us and give us an extension of time. We get home Sept. 11.
Hello, I think I see Waring coming!
Good-by-letter from Clark, which explains for him.
Love to you all from the
Clemenses.
No – it wasn’t Waring. I wonder what the devil has become of that man. He was to spend to-day with us, and the day’s most gone, now.
We are enjoying your story with our usual unspeakableness; and I’m right glad you threw in the shipwreck and the mystery – I like it. Mrs. Crane thinks it’s the best story you’ve written yet. We – but we always think the last one is the best. And why shouldn’t it be? Practice helps.
P. S. I thought I had sent all our loves to all of you, but Mrs. Clemens says I haven’t. Damn it, a body can’t think of everything; but a woman thinks you can. I better seal this, now – else there’ll be more criticism.
I perceive I haven’t got the love in, yet. Well, we do send the love of all the family to all the Howellses.
S. L. C.
There had been some delay and postponement in the matter of the play which Howells and Clemens agreed to write. They did not put in the entire month of October as they had planned, but they did put in a portion of that month, the latter half, working out their old idea. In the end it became a revival of Colonel Sellers, or rather a caricature of that gentle hearted old visionary. Clemens had always complained that the actor Raymond had never brought out the finer shades of Colonel Sellers’s character, but Raymond in his worst performance never belied his original as did Howells and Clemens in his dramatic revival. These two, working together, let their imaginations run riot with disastrous results. The reader can judge something of this himself, from The American Claimant the book which Mark Twain would later build from the play.
But at this time they thought it a great triumph. They had “cracked their sides” laughing over its construction, as Howells once said, and they thought the world would do the same over its performance. They decided to offer it to Raymond, but rather haughtily, indifferently, because any number of other actors would be waiting for it.
But this was a miscalculation. Raymond now turned the tables. Though favorable to the idea of a new play, he declared this one did not present his old Sellers at all, but a lunatic. In the end he returned the Ms. with a brief note. Attempts had already been made to interest other actors, and would continue for some time.
Volume II
XXIV. Letters, 1884, To Howells And Others. Cable’s Great April Fool. “Huck Finn” In Press. Mark Twain For Cleveland. Clemens And Cable
Mark Twain had a lingering attack of the dramatic fever that winter. He made a play of the Prince and Pauper, which Howells pronounced “too thin and slight and not half long enough.” He made another of Tom Sawyer, and probably destroyed it, for no trace of the Ms. exists to-day. Howells could not join in these ventures, for he was otherwise occupied and had sickness in his household.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Jan. 7, ’84.
My dear Howells, – “O my goodn’s”, as Jean says. You have now encountered at last the heaviest calamity that can befall an author. The scarlet fever, once domesticated, is a permanent member of the family. Money may desert you, friends forsake you, enemies grow indifferent to you, but the scarlet fever will be true to you, through thick and thin, till you be all saved or damned, down to the last one. I say these things to cheer you.
The bare suggestion of scarlet fever in the family makes me shudder; I believe I would almost rather have Osgood publish a book for me.
You folks have our most sincere sympathy. Oh, the intrusion of this hideous disease is an unspeakable disaster.
My billiard table is stacked up with books relating to the Sandwich Islands: the walls axe upholstered with scraps of paper penciled with notes drawn from them. I have saturated myself with knowledge of that unimaginably beautiful land and that most strange and fascinating people. And I have begun a story. Its hidden motive will illustrate a but-little considered fact in human nature; that the religious folly you are born in you will die in, no matter what apparently reasonabler religious folly may seem to have taken its place meanwhile, and abolished and obliterated it. I start Bill Ragsdale at 12 years of age, and the heroine at 4, in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system, with its picturesque and amazing customs and superstitions, 3 months before the arrival of the missionaries and the erection of a shallow Christianity upon the ruins of the old paganism. Then these two will become educated Christians, and highly civilized.
And then I will jump 15 years, and do Ragsdale’s leper business. When we came to dramatize, we can draw a deal of matter from the story, all ready to our hand.
Yrs Ever,
Mark.
He never finished the Sandwich Islands story which he and Howells were to dramatize later. His head filled up with other projects, such as publishing plans, reading-tours, and the like. The type-setting machine does not appear in the letters of this period, but it was an important factor, nevertheless. It was costing several thousand dollars a month for construction and becoming a heavy drain on Mark Twain’s finances. It was necessary to recuperate, and the anxiety for a profitable play, or some other adventure that would bring a quick and generous return, grew out of this need.
Clemens had established Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage, in a New York office, as selling agent for the Mississippi book and for his plays. He was also planning to let Webster publish the new book, Huck Finn.
George W. Cable had proven his ability as a reader, and Clemens saw possibilities in a reading combination, which was first planned to include Aldrich, and Howells, and a private car.
But Aldrich and Howells did not warm to the idea, and the car was eliminated from the plan. Cable came to visit Clemens in Hartford, and was taken with the mumps, so that the reading-trip was postponed.
The fortunes of the Sellers play were most uncertain and becoming daily more doubtful. In February, Howells wrote: “If you have got any comfort in regard to our play I wish you would heave it into my bosom.”
Cable recovered in time, and out of gratitude planned a great April-fool surprise for his host. He was a systematic man, and did it in his usual thorough way. He sent a “private and confidential” suggestion to a hundred and fifty of Mark Twain’s friends and admirers, nearly all distinguished literary men. The suggestion was that each one of them should send a request for Mark Twain’s autograph, timing it so that it would arrive on the 1st of April. All seemed to have responded. Mark Twain’s writing-table on April Fool morning was heaped with letters, asking in every ridiculous fashion for his “valuable autograph.” The one from Aldrich was a fair sample. He wrote: “I am making a collection of autographs of our distinguished writers, and having read one of your works, Gabriel Convoy, I would like to add your name to the list.”
Of course, the joke in this was that Gabriel Convoy was by Bret Harte, who by this time was thoroughly detested by Mark Twain. The first one or two of the letters puzzled the victim; then he comprehended the size and character of the joke and entered into it thoroughly. One of the letters was from Bloodgood H. Cutter, the “Poet Lariat” of Innocents Abroad. Cutter, of course, wrote in “poetry,” that is to say, doggerel. Mark Twain’s April Fool was a most pleasant one.
*****
Rhymed letter by Bloodgood H. Cutter to Mark Twain:
Little neck, Long island.
Long island farmer, to his friend and pilgrim brother,
Samuel L. Clemens, Esq.
Friends, suggest in each one’s behalf
To write, and ask your autograph.
To refuse that, I will not do,
After the long voyage had with you.
That was a memorable time
You wrote in prose,
I wrote in Rhyme
To describe the wonders of each place,
And the queer customs of each race.
That is in my memory yet
For while I live I’ll not forget.
I often think of that affair
And the many that were with us there.
As your friends think it for the best
I ask your Autograph with the rest,
Hoping you will it to me send
’Twill please and cheer your dear old friend:
Yours truly,
Bloodgood H. Cutter.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Hartford, Apl 8, ’84.
My dear Howells, It took my breath away, and I haven’t recovered it yet, entirely – I mean the generosity of your proposal to read the proofs of Huck Finn.
Now if you mean it, old man – if you are in earnest – proceed, in God’s name, and be by me forever blest. I cannot conceive of a rational man deliberately piling such an atrocious job upon himself; but if there is such a man and you be that man, why then pile it on. It will cost me a pang every time I think of it, but this anguish will be eingebüßt to me in the joy and comfort I shall get out of the not having to read the verfluchtete proofs myself. But if you have repented of your augenblichlicher Tobsucht and got back to calm cold reason again, I won’t hold you to it unless I find I have got you down in writing somewhere. Herr, I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair and reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it.
The proof-reading on the P & P cost me the last rags of my religion.
M.
Howells had written that he would be glad to help out in the reading of the proofs of Huck Finn, which book Webster by this time had in hand. Replying to Clemens’s eager and grateful acceptance now, he wrote: “It is all perfectly true about the generosity, unless I am going to read your proofs from one of the shabby motives which I always find at the bottom of my soul if I examine it.” A characteristic utterance, though we may be permitted to believe that his shabby motives were fewer and less shabby than those of mankind in general.
The proofs which Howells was reading pleased him mightily. Once, during the summer, he wrote: “if I had written half as good a book as Huck Finn I shouldn’t ask anything better than to read the proofs; even as it is, I don’t, so send them on; they will always find me somewhere.”
This was the summer of the Blaine-Cleveland campaign. Mark Twain, in company with many other leading men, had mugwumped, and was supporting Cleveland. From the next letter we gather something of the aspects of that memorable campaign, which was one of scandal and vituperation. We learn, too, that the young sculptor, Karl Gerhardt, having completed a three years’ study in Paris, had returned to America a qualified artist.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Elmira, Aug. 21, ’84.
My dear Howells, – This presidential campaign is too delicious for anything. Isn’t human nature the most consummate sham and lie that was ever invented? Isn’t man a creature to be ashamed of in pretty much all his aspects? Man, “know thyself “—and then thou wilt despise thyself, to a dead moral certainty. Take three quite good specimens – Hawley, Warner, and Charley Clark. Even I do not loathe Blaine more than they do; yet Hawley is howling for Blaine, Warner and Clark are eating their daily crow in the paper for him, and all three will vote for him. O Stultification, where is thy sting, O slave where is thy hickory!
I suppose you heard how a marble monument for which St. Gaudens was pecuniarily responsible, burned down in Hartford the other day, uninsured – for who in the world would ever think of insuring a marble shaft in a cemetery against a fire? – and left St. Gauden out of pocket $15,000.
It was a bad day for artists. Gerhardt finished my bust that day, and the work was pronounced admirable by all the kin and friends; but in putting it in plaster (or rather taking it out) next day it got ruined. It was four or five weeks hard work gone to the dogs. The news flew, and everybody on the farm flocked to the arbor and grouped themselves about the wreck in a profound and moving silence – the farm-help, the colored servants, the German nurse, the children, everybody – a silence interrupted at wide intervals by absent-minded ejaculations wising from unconscious breasts as the whole size of the disaster gradually worked its way home to the realization of one spirit after another.
Some burst out with one thing, some another; the German nurse put up her hands and said, “Oh, Schade! oh, schrecklich!” But Gerhardt said nothing; or almost that. He couldn’t word it, I suppose. But he went to work, and by dark had everything thoroughly well under way for a fresh start in the morning; and in three days’ time had built a new bust which was a trifle better than the old one – and to-morrow we shall put the finishing touches on it, and it will be about as good a one as nearly anybody can make.
Yrs Ever,
Mark.
If you run across anybody who wants a bust, be sure and recommend Gerhardt on my say-so.
But Howells was determinedly for Blaine. “I shall vote for Blaine,” he replied. “I do not believe he is guilty of the things they accuse him of, and I know they are not proved against him. As for Cleveland, his private life may be no worse than that of most men, but as an enemy of that contemptible, hypocritical, lop-sided morality which says a woman shall suffer all the shame of unchastity and man none, I want to see him destroyed politically by his past. The men who defend him would take their wives to the White House if he were president, but if he married his concubine—’made her an honest woman’ they would not go near him. I can’t stand that.”
Certainly this was sound logic, in that day, at least. But it left Clemens far from satisfied.
