Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  I was helpless. I was persuadable, but I didn’t lose all of my mind, and I begged him to take a very small hall, and reduce the rates to side-show prices. No, he would not hear of that—said he would have the biggest hall in New York City. He would have the basement hall in Cooper Institute, which seated three thousand people and there was room for half as many more to stand up; and he said he would fill that place so full, at a dollar a head, that those people would smother and he could charge two dollars apiece to let them out. Oh, he was all on fire with his project. He went ahead with it. He said it shouldn’t cost me anything. I said there would be no profit. He said,

  “Leave that alone. If there is no profit that is my affair. If there is profit it is yours. If it is loss, I stand the loss myself, and you will never hear of it.”

  He hired Cooper Institute, and he began to advertise this lecture in the usual way—a small paragraph in the advertising columns of the newspapers. When this had continued about three days I had not yet heard anybody or any newspaper say anything about that lecture, and I got nervous.

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s working around underneath. You don’t see it on the surface.” He said “Let it alone, now, let it work.”

  Very well, I allowed it to work—until about the sixth or seventh day. The lecture would be due in three or four days more—still I was not able to get down underneath, where it was working, and so I was filled with doubt and distress. I went to Fuller and said he must advertise more energetically.

  He said he would. So he got a barrel of little things printed that you hang on a string—fifty in a bunch. They were for the omnibuses. You could see them swinging and dangling around in every omnibus. My anxiety forced me to haunt those omnibuses. I did nothing for one or two days but sit in ’buses and travel from one end of New York to the other and watch those things dangle, and wait to catch somebody pulling one loose to read it. It never happened—at least it happened only once. A man reached up and pulled one of those things loose, said to his friend,

  “Lecture on the Sandwich Islands by Mark Twain. Who can that be, I wonder”—and he threw it away and changed the subject.

  I couldn’t travel in the omnibuses any more. I was sick. I went to Fuller and said,

  “Fuller, there is not going to be anybody in Cooper Institute that night, but you and me. It will be a dead loss, for we shall both have free tickets. Something must be done. I am on the verge of suicide. I would commit suicide if I had the pluck, and the outfit.” I said, “You must paper the house, Fuller. You must issue thousands of complimentary tickets. You must do this. I shall die if I have to go before an empty house that is not acquainted with me and that has never heard of me, and that has never traveled in the ’bus and seen those things dangle.”

  “Well,” he said, with his customary enthusiasm, “I’ll attend to it. It shall be done. I will paper that house, and when you step on the platform you shall find yourself in the presence of the choicest audience, the most intelligent audience, that ever a man stood before in this world.”

  And he was as good as his word. He sent whole basketsful of complimentary tickets to every public-school teacher within a radius of thirty miles of New York—he deluged those people with complimentary tickets—and on the appointed night they all came. There wasn’t room in Cooper Institute for a third of them. The lecture was to begin at half past seven. I was so anxious that I had to go to that place at seven. I couldn’t keep away. I wanted to see that vast vacant Mammoth Cave and die. But when I got near the building I found that all the streets for a quarter of a mile around were blocked with people, and traffic was stopped. I couldn’t believe that those people were trying to get into Cooper Institute, and yet that was just what was happening. I found my way around to the back of the building and got in there by the stage door. And sure enough, the seats, the aisles, the great stage itself, were packed with bright-looking human beings raked in from the centres of intelligence—the schools. I had a deal of difficulty to shoulder my way through the mass of people on the stage, and when I had managed it and stood before the audience, that stage was full. There wasn’t room enough left for a child.

  I was happy, and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the Sandwich Islands out onto those people with a free hand, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradise. From every pore I exuded a divine delight—and when we came to count up we had thirty-five dollars in the house.

  Fuller was just as jubilant over it as if it had furnished the fame and the fortune of his prophecy. He was perfectly delighted, perfectly enchanted. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut for several days.

  “Oh,” he said, “the fortune didn’t come in—that didn’t come in—that’s all right. That’s coming in later. The fame is already here, Mark. Why, in a week you’ll be the best known man in the United States. This is no failure. This is a prodigious success.”

  That episode must have cost him four or five hundred dollars, but he never said a word about that. He was as happy, as satisfied, as proud, as delighted, as if he had laid the fabled golden egg and hatched it.

  He was right about the fame. I certainly did get a working quantity of fame out of that lecture. The New York newspapers praised it. The country newspapers copied those praises. The lyceums of the country—it was right in the heyday of the old lyceum lecture system—began to call for me. I put myself in Redpath’s hands, and I caught the tail-end of the lecture season. I went West and lectured every night, for six or eight weeks, at a hundred dollars a night—and I now considered that the whole of the prophecy was fulfilled. I had acquired fame, and also fortune. I don’t believe these details are right, but I don’t care a rap. They will do just as well as the facts. What I mean to say is, that I don’t know whether I made that lecturing excursion in that year or whether it was the following year. But the main thing is that I made it, and that the opportunity to make it was created by that wild Frank Fuller and his insane and immortal project.

  All this was thirty-eight or thirty-nine years ago. Two or three times since then, at intervals of years, I have run across Frank Fuller for a moment—only a moment, and no more. But he was always young. Never a gray hair; never a suggestion of age about him; always enthusiastic; always happy, and glad to be alive. Last fall his wife’s brother was murdered in a horrible way. Apparently a robber had concealed himself in Mr. Thompson’s room, and in the night had beaten him to death with a club. A couple of months ago I ran across Fuller on the street, and he was looking so very, very old, so withered, so mouldy, that I could hardly recognize him. He said his wife was dying of the shock caused by the murder of her brother; that nervous prostration was carrying her off, and she could not live more than a few days—so I went with him to see her.

  She was sitting upright on a sofa, and was supported all about with pillows. Now and then she leaned her head for a little while on a support. Breathing was difficult for her. It touched me, for I had seen that picture so many, many times. During two or three months Mrs. Clemens sat up like that, night and day, struggling for breath. When she was made drowsy by opiates and exhaustion she rested her head a little while on a support, just as Mrs. Fuller was doing, and got naps of two minutes’ or three minutes’ duration.

  I did not see Mrs. Fuller alive again. She passed to her rest about three days later.

  The thing which has brought Frank Fuller into my mind is this half-column of matter which I have scissored from this morning’s paper. I never get a chance to hunt among my old note-books for texts for this autobiography, for the reason that every day the newspaper furnishes me a couple of dozen, and I never can catch up at this rate.

  STRANGE SEQUEL TO BLACKMAILING CASE.

  * * *

  Louis R. Fuller Learns for First Time that He Is Not Rich Dr. Fuller’s Son.

  * * *

  When Louis R. Fuller, Yale graduate and society favorite in New York and Boston, appeared in the Centre Street Police Court yesterday as c
omplainant against Homer Hawkins, No. 101 West Eighty-eighth street, whom he accused of attempted blackmail and assault, he learned for the first time that he is only the adopted son of Dr. Frank Fuller, millionaire president of the Health Food Company, No. 61 Fifth avenue.

  Hawkins had sent a letter to Louis R. Fuller, demanding $500 under penalty of disclosing confidential information to a Mr. Rowbotham, whose daughter is engaged to marry Fuller. His arrest followed. When Hawkins was arraigned yesterday, Magistrate Whitman held him in $2,500 bail on the blackmail charge and in an additional $500 bail on a charge of carrying concealed weapons. Mrs. Ellen Faxon, mother of Homer Hawkins, was in court to aid her son. It was the first time she had seen Louis R. Fuller, her brother by adoption. She begged him not to press the charge.

  “Don’t you know that he is of Dr. Fuller’s own flesh and blood?” she exclaimed, “and that you are his uncle only by adoption?”

  Louis R. Fuller did not know at first what to say. It was the first intimation he had ever had that he was not Dr. Fuller’s own son. Then looking the woman straight in the eye he said:

  “Your son had no business to do what he did; I am going to press the charge.”

  Mrs. Faxon’s Story.

  When Mrs. Faxon was seen by a World reporter at her home, after a futile effort to get bail for her son, she said:

  “While I do not approve of my boy’s action, when the true facts come out very few persons will blame him for what he did. My father and my mother separated in 1868. Two years later my mother died. I married, and with my husband and an only sister went to California to live. There Homer was born. His father died shortly after his birth. A few years later I married my present husband, Frank Faxon, who is now in Southern California.

  “Twenty years ago I learned that my father had married Miss Anna Thompson, of Portsmouth, N.H. She was a sister of the late Jacob H. Thompson, who was found murdered in his room in the St. James Hotel. One child was born to them. This child died and a year later a boy, now known as Louis R. Fuller, was adopted. Who he was or where he came from I do not know.

  “As my boy neared manhood he began to ask about his grandparents. I told him the true story. Three years ago Homer came to New York and visited his grandfather. He then learned that his uncle by adoption was being educated at Yale. From that day to this he has been a changed boy. His grandfather sent him back to California to keep him from meeting Louis.

  Meets Father After Thirty Years.

  “When I found myself almost penniless two years ago I went to my father’s summer home at Madison, N.J., and met him for the first time in thirty years. My stepmother told me that New York was not big enough for us both. Since then I have been earning a living as a seamstress.

  “It made Homer’s heart bleed to think that another was usurping the comfort and love that belonged to us.”

  Dr. Fuller and his adopted son occupy fine apartments at the Allston, No. 17 East Thirty-eighth street. They were not at home last night. Mrs. Fuller died of nervous prostration last February, never having recovered from the shock following her brother’s death.

  New York World.

  That clipping is full of mystery for me. The lady says “My father and my mother separated in 1868.” It was in the previous year that Fuller showed me his wife—the one that died the other day—and also astonished me with those portly and matronly daughters of his. I seem to gather, now, that there had been an earlier Mrs. Fuller, and that the unexplained daughters were of that vintage. Fuller didn’t tell me he had ever had another wife. I think this lady must be wrong in her dates. I think the separation must have occurred before 1867, and not in 1868. The lady says “separated.” She doesn’t say divorced. Well, let it go. I can’t straighten it out. According to my reading of this account Louis Fuller is not entirely accounted for. But let that go. It is no matter. If he was adopted by Fuller, or by anybody else, it must have been in his infancy—because if the adopter had waited, he would have considered the developed Louis not much of an asset and would have left him for some other speculator. But never mind. Let the whole thing go. It is beginning to tangle my head. The most that I get out of the whole matter is that the Fuller life, like all other lives that climb up into old age or thereabouts, is a tragedy. It is a pity to grow old, because you know that the tragedy is always hanging over you, and if you don’t get out of life by some fortunate accident it will fall on you pretty surely. I wonder how old Fuller is. More than eighty, I imagine—yet he never looked old until lately.

  I will disengage my mind from this dismal subject and see if I can’t find a cheerfuler one among this morning’s clippings.

  No, it is a failure. There is nothing very cheerful about the one I hold in my hand. It is headed “Olive Logan has Husband Arrested.” I doubt if I have thought of Olive Logan or encountered her name for a good thirty years and more. She belongs ’way back yonder in that brief period among the lyceum days, when a new kind of female lecturer invaded the platform. The previous kind had been the Anna Dickinson kind, women who had something to say; and could say it well; women who were full of talent; women who talked straight out of their hearts and could powerfully move an audience with their eloquence. Then came the Olive Logan kind: women who hadn’t anything to say, and couldn’t have said it if they had had anything to say; women who invaded the platform to show their clothes. They were living fashion-plates. All over the country the women filled the lecture halls to look at those clothes, and they brought their husbands along. The men didn’t want to go, but they had to.

  A woman had to have a name before Redpath would launch her upon the lecture platform. Olive Logan set herself the task of manufacturing a reputation. For a season or two she wrote inane, affected, and valueless stuff for obscure periodicals. As a method of creating fame that proved to be a dead failure. Then she began the most curious—the most curious—well, I can’t think of the word I want—let it go. What she began was this. She married a penny-a-liner (whose name I have forgotten) and he handed around little two-line items amongst the newspapers and got them inserted—like this:

  “Olive Logan has taken the Hunter mansion at Cohasset for the summer.”

  Now why should that interest anybody? But it did. There wasn’t any truth in it, but the reader couldn’t know that. He had never heard of Olive Logan, but surely Olive Logan wouldn’t be mentioned in that matter-of-course way unless she was a celebrity, and therefore the reader found himself in the unsatisfactory position of being ignorant of a thing he ought to know. Dear me, Olive Logan couldn’t take the Hunter mansion, or any other mansion. She couldn’t take a shack, and pay the rent.

  Then there would be another item presently:

  “Olive Logan is at least independent. She has boldly deserted the world-famous Parisian male milliner, Worth, and has ordered her gowns for next season from his new but prosperous rival, Savarin.”

  That item would flit from paper to paper throughout the United States. Persons reading it would take it for granted that Olive Logan was a celebrated and important person, although he had not been quite aware of it before, so far as he could remember. But that item would impress him, if he was a woman, and do it every time. A person who could boldly desert Worth must be something not far short of a duchess.

  These items followed each other in procession straight along, week by week, through the year. There was never a word of explanation of who Olive Logan might be or of what she had done to earn fame. The items were never of the slightest consequence to any one, since they merely referred to Olive Logan’s clothes and the summer residences she was supposed to take, with now and then an opinion on some subject which she was not acquainted with. These opinions were flung out in the same matter-of-course way that distinguished the items about the clothes:

  “Olive Logan has expressed the opinion that transcendentalism, even as a Bostonian interest, is passing away.”

  Now this curious thing actually happened—and I am alive to swear to it—that at the end of this ki
nd of persistent itemizing of this unknown adventuress, Redpath was able to put her on the platform at a hundred dollars a night and send her all over this country. She wasn’t worth ten cents a week, but she soared from town to town throughout the United States for three or four or five years, at the regular lecture rate of a hundred dollars a night. She was actually famous. There is no doubt about it. Her name was familiar to everybody. Every man was familiar with Olive Logan’s name; every woman was familiar with it—and there wasn’t a human being in the entire United States who could answer if you asked him “What is her fame based on? What is it that she has done?” You would paralyse a person by asking him that question. He would think for an instant that he could easily tell what her fame rested upon, but just a single second of reflection was sure to convince him that whereas he never had thought of it before, the fact was that he hadn’t any idea in the world who Olive Logan was or what she had done. She had built up a great, a commercially valuable name, on absolute emptiness; built it up upon mere remarks about her clothes and where she was going to spend the summer, and her opinions about things that nobody had asked her to express herself about. It was the emptiest reputation that was ever invented in this world. Of course she couldn’t go to the same town the third time. The first time her house would be filled. The audience would go away aware that they had got nothing whatever for their money. The second time the house would be filled with the rest of the people who hadn’t seen her, but that exhausted that town. There were no more idiots left. The Lyceum Committee of the town would know that as an attraction Olive Logan had ceased to exist. She was not sent for again. And, as I have said, I haven’t heard of Olive Logan for a whole lifetime. And now she turns up in this morning’s paper under that heading, “Olive Logan has Husband Arrested.”