by Mark Twain
Letters
To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:
SAN FRANCISCO, JAN. 20, 1866.
MY DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,—I do not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.
To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!—“Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward, and then it reached New York too late to appear in his book.
But no matter. His book was a wretchedly poor one, generally speaking, and it could be no credit to either of us to appear between its covers. . . .
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
H’T’F’D. DEC. 8, 1874.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,—It isn’t the Atlantic audience that distresses me; for it is the only audience that I sit down before in perfect serenity (for the simple reason that it doesn’t require a “humorist” to paint himself stripèd and stand on his head every fifteen minutes.) The trouble was, that I was only bent on “working up an atmosphere” and that is to me a most fidgety and irksome thing, sometimes. I avoid it, usually, but in this case it was absolutely necessary, else every reader would be applying the atmosphere of his own or sea experiences, and that shirt wouldn’t fit, you know.
I could have sent this Article II a week ago, or more, but I couldn’t bring myself to the drudgery of revising and correcting it. I have been at that tedious work 3 hours, now, and by George but I am glad it is over.
Say—I am as prompt as a clock, if I only know the day a thing is wanted—otherwise I am a natural procrastinaturalist. Tell me what day and date you want Nos. 3 and 4, and I will tackle and revise them and they’ll be there to the minute.
I could wind up with No. 4, but there are some things more which I am powerfully moved to write. Which is natural enough, since I am a person who would quit authorizing in a minute to go to piloting, if the madam would stand it. I would rather sink a steamboat than eat, any time.
My wife was afraid to write you—so I said with simplicity, “I will give you the language—and ideas.” Through the infinite grace of God there has not been such another insurrection in the family before as followed this. However, the letter was written, and promptly, too—whereas, heretofore she has remained afraid to do such things.
With kind regards to Mrs. Howells,
Yrs ever,
MARK
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
ELMIRA, AUG. 9, 1876.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,—I was just about to write you when your letter came—and not one of those obscene postal cards, either, but reverently, upon paper.
I shall read that biography, though the letter of acceptance was amply sufficient to corral my vote without any further knowledge of the man. Which reminds me that a campaign club in Jersey City wrote a few days ago and invited me to be present at the raising of a Tilden and Hendricks flag there, and to take the stand and give them some “counsel.” Well, I could not go, but gave them counsel and advice by letter, and in the kindliest terms as to the raising of the flag—advised them “not to raise it.”
Get your book out quick, for this is a momentous time. If Tilden is elected I think the entire country will go pretty straight to—Mrs. Howells’s bad place.
I am infringing on your patent—I started a record of our children’s sayings, last night. Which reminds me that last week I sat down and got Susie a vast pair of shoes of a most villainous pattern, for I discovered that her feet were being twisted and cramped out of shape by a smaller and prettier article. She did not complain, but looked degraded and injured. At night her mamma gave her the usual admonition when she was about to say her prayers—to wit:
“Now, Susie—think about God.”
“Mamma, I can’t, with those shoes.”
The farm is perfectly delightful this season. It is as quiet and peaceful as a South Sea Island. Some of the sunsets which we have witnessed from this commanding eminence were marvelous. One evening a rainbow spanned an entire range of hills with its mighty arch, and from a black hub resting upon the hilltop in the exact centre, black rays diverged upward in perfect regularity to the rainbow’s arch and created a very strongly defined and altogether the most majestic, magnificent and startling half-sunk wagon wheel you can imagine. After that, a world of tumbling and prodigious clouds came drifting up out of the West and took to themselves a wonderfully rich and brilliant green color—the decided green of new spring foliage. Close by them we saw the intense blue of the skies, through rents in the cloud-rack, and away off in another quarter were drifting clouds of a delicate pink color. In one place hung a pall of dense black clouds, like compacted pitch-smoke. And the stupendous wagon wheel was still in the supremacy of its unspeakable grandeur. So you see, the colors present in the sky at once and the same time were blue, green, pink, black, and the vari-colored splendors of the rainbow. All strong and decided colors, too. I don’t know whether this weird and astounding spectacle most suggested heaven, or hell. The wonder, with its constant, stately, and always surprising changes, lasted upwards of two hours, and we all stood on the top of the hill by my study till the final miracle was complete and the greatest day ended that we ever saw.
Our farmer, who is a grave man, watched that spectacle, to the end, and then observed that it was “dam funny.”
The double-barreled novel lies torpid. I found I could not go on with it. The chapters I had written were still too new and familiar to me. I may take it up next winter, but cannot tell yet; I waited and waited to see if my interest in it would not revive, but gave it up a month ago and began another boys’ book—more to be at work than anything else. I have written 400 pages on it—therefore it is very nearly half done. It is Huck Finn’s Autobiography. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.
So the comedy is done, and with a “fair degree of satisfaction.” That rejoices me, and makes me mad, too—for I can’t plan a comedy, and what have you done that God should be so good to you? I have racked myself bald-headed trying to plan a comedy harness for some promising characters of mine to work in, and had to give it up. It is a noble lot of blooded stock and worth no end of money, but they must stand in the stable and be profitless. I want to be present when the comedy is produced and help enjoy the success.
Warner’s book is mighty readable, I think.
Love to yez.
Yrs ever
MARK
To J. H. Burrough of Cape Girardeau, Missouri
HARTFORD, NOVEMBER 1, 1876.
MY DEAR BURROUGH:
As you describe me I can picture myself as I was 22 years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung and imagining he is re-molding the world and is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness—and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19-20, and that is what the average Southerner is at 60 today. Northerners too, of a certain grade. It is of children like this that voters are made. And such is the primal source of our government! A man hardly knows whether to swear or cry over it.
I think I comprehend their position there—perfect freedom to vote just as you choose, provided you choose to vote as other people think, social ostracism otherwise. The same thing exists here among the Irish. An Irish Republican is a pariah among his people. Yet that race find fault with the same spirit in Know-Nothingism.
Fortunately a good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my residence wisely. I live in the freest corner of the country. There are no social disabilities between me and my d
emocratic personal friends. We break the bread and eat the salt of hospitality freely together and never dream of such a thing as offering impertinent interference in each other’s political opinions. . . .
Yes, Will Bowen and I have exchanged letters now and then for several years but I suspect that I made him mad with my last—shortly after you saw him in St. Louis, I judge. There is one thing which I can’t stand, and won’t stand from many people. That is sham sentimentality—the kind a school-girl puts into her graduation composition; the sort that makes up the Original Poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals in “the happy days of yore,” “the sweet yet melancholy past,” with its “blighted hopes” and its “vanished dreams”—and all that sort of drivel. Will’s were always of this stamp. I stood it years. When I get a letter like that from a grown man and he a widower with a family, it gives me the bowel complaint. And I just told Will Bowen so, last summer. I told him to stop being 16 at 40; told him to stop drooling about the sweet yet melancholy past and take a pill. I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering and that was the fact that it is the past—can’t be restored. Well, I exaggerated some of these truths a little—but only a little—but my idea was to kill his nasty sham sentimentality once and forever and so make a good fellow of him again. I went to the unheard of trouble of re-writing the letter and saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sugar-coat the anguish and make it a little more endurable, and I asked him to write and thank me honestly for doing him the best and kindliest favor that any friend ever had done him—but he hasn’t done it yet. Maybe he will some time. I am grateful to God that I got that letter off before he was married (I get that news from you), else he would just have slobbered all over me and drowned me when that event happened.
I enclose photograph for the young ladies. I will remark that I do not wear seal-skin for grandeur but because I found, when I used to lecture in the winter, that nothing else was able to keep a man warm sometimes, in these high latitudes. I wish you had sent pictures of yourself and family—I’ll trade picture for picture with you, straight through, if you are commercially inclined.
Your old friend
SAML L. CLEMENS
To the Reverend J. H. Twichell
MUNICH, JANUARY 26, 1879.
DEAR OLD JOE:
Sunday. Your delicious letter arrived exactly at the right time. It was laid by my plate as I was finishing breakfast at 12 noon. Livy and Clara [Spaulding] arrived from church 5 minutes later; I took a pipe and spread myself out on the sofa and Livy sat by and read, and I warmed to that butcher the moment he began to swear. There is more than one way of praying and I like the butcher’s way because the petitioner is so apt to be in earnest. I was peculiarly alive to his performance just at this time for another reason, to wit: Last night I awoke at 3 this morning and after raging to myself for 2 interminable hours, I gave it up. I rose, assumed a catlike stealthiness, to keep from waking Livy, and proceeded to dress in the pitch dark. Slowly but surely I got on garment after garment—all down to one sock; I had one slipper on and the other in my hand. Well, on my hands and knees I crept softly around, pawing and feeling and scooping along the carpet and among chair-legs for the missing sock; I kept that up;—and still kept it up and kept it up. At first I only said to myself “Blame that sock,” but that soon ceased to answer; my expletives grew steadily stronger and stronger and at last, when I found I was lost, I had to sit flat down on the floor and take hold of something to keep from lifting the roof off with the profane explosion that was trying to get out of me. I could see the dim blur of the window, but of course it was in the wrong place and could give me no information as to where I was. But I had one comfort, I had not waked Livy; I believed I could find that sock in silence if the night lasted long enough. So I started again and softly pawed all over the place, and sure enough at the end of half an hour I laid my hand on the missing article. I rose joyfully up and butted the wash-bowl and pitcher off the stand and simply raised—so to speak. Livy screamed, then said, “Who is that? what is the matter?” I said “There ain’t anything the matter—I’m hunting for my sock.” She said, “Are you hunting for it with a club?” . . .
To Orion Clemens and family, in Keokuk, Ia.:
ELMIRA, JULY 21, ’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 of 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 roadway 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.
To Frank A. Nichols, Secretary, Concord Free Trade Club
[Previously published only in part]
HARTFORD, MARCH, 1885.
DEAR SIR:
I am in receipt of your favor of the 24th inst., conveying the gratifying intelligence that I have been made an honorary member of the Free Trade Club of Concord, Massachusetts, and I desire to express to the Club, through you, my grateful sense of the high compliment thus paid me.
It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place a Massachusetts Judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but may also as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me—property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge’s homestead for sale; and if I make as good a sum out of it as I expect I shall go on and sell the rest of his property.
In the next place, a committee of the public library of your town has condemned and excommunicated my last book, and doubled its sale. This generous action of theirs must necessarily benefit me in one or two additional ways. For instance, it will deter other libraries from buying the book and you are doubtless aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and possible hundred of its mates. And secondly it will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so after the usual way of the world and library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectional in the book, after all.
And finally, the Free Trade Club of Concord comes forward and adds to the splendid burden of obligations already conferred upon me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, an honorary membership which is more worth than all the rest since it endorses me as worthy to associate with certain gentlemen whom even the moral icebergs of the Concord library committee are bound to respect.
May the Commonwealth of Massachusetts endure forever, is the heartfelt prayer of one who, long a recipient of her mere gene
ral good will, is proud to realize that he is at last become her pet.
Thanking you again, dear sir and gentlemen, I remain
Your obliged servant
S. L. CLEMENS
(known to the Concord Winter School of Philosophy as “Mark Twain.”)
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 seems 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
