by Mark Twain
OLIVE LOGAN HAS HUSBAND ARRESTED.
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Famous Lecturer, Authoress and Actress Declares that He Drinks and Neglects Her.
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Olive Logan, lecturer, authoress, actress, stage beauty of thirty years ago, appeared as a suppliant in the Harlem police court yesterday afternoon. She is sixty-seven years old, white-haired, tottering and very deaf. Magistrate Cornell did not catch her name, but her charming voice and exquisite use of the English language caught his attention. He sent a policeman with her into an adjoining corridor to shout into her ear-trumpet and get her story.
“I want a warrant,” said the aged woman, “for my husband, James O’Neill Logan. We live at No. 2568 Seventh avenue. He is always drinking.”
The magistrate issued a summons, and when the man was brought to court in the afternoon his condition was so bad that he was ordered into custody until to-day.
“We are terribly in debt,” said Mrs. Logan to the reporters. “My husband is employed at Ellis Island, but the saloons get his money, and he often comes home without a cent. We are in danger of being dispossessed. We have no money to buy food. I am so weak with the infirmities of age that I can no longer write. It is only as a last resort that I have appealed to the court.”
Magistrate Cornell will make an order in the case to-day.
Olive Logan was born in Elmira, N.Y., on April 22, 1839. She gained fame as a writer and lecturer, and in 1872 she was married to William Wirt Sikes, appointed by President Grant Consul to Cardiff, Wales. He died in London in 1883. Mrs. Sikes always clung to her first name. She was a protege of the late Augustin Daly, who trained her for the stage. She wrote “Surf; or, Life at Long Branch,” dramatized Wilkie Collins’s “Armadale” and made a metrical translation of Francois Coppee’s “Le Passant.”
Mrs. Logan said James O’Neill was her office boy in London twenty-five years ago. When he grew up he became her secretary.
“He came to America with me,” she said, “and we decided to be married, although I was twenty-two years older than he. The first ten years of our married life were a dream of happiness. He is a fine fellow, and I love him still. His drinking has ruined us.”
Why, dear me, she was born in Elmira, New York, it appears—the town where my wife was born and where we spent our summers for sixteen years. The town where was also born the first distinctly and rollickingly humorous book that was ever written by an American woman, “The Widow Bedott.” That book was written by a girl eighteen years old. It is now forgotten, but it swept this continent with a hurricane of laughter when it first came out.
And here I find the name of that husband of hers, that penny-a-liner without salary or local habitation or name, who did the itemizing and created Olive Logan’s fame. I remember his name perfectly now, William Wirt Sikes. And of course he would be appointed a Consul to some part of this planet, because he was not needed in this country. We have certainly furnished this world with whole regiments, battalions, and divisions of ignorant, characterless, and chuckle-headed Consuls who have exhibited the United States to a wondering foreign public, and who ought not to have had any salary. Nor fees. They ought to have charged admission—a shilling, say, to foreigners desiring to examine our political product. Olive Logan’s present husband, it appears, is named James O’Neill, and was her office boy in London a quarter of a century ago. She was twenty-two years older than he was. The first ten years of their married life was “a dream of happiness.” He has taken to hard drinking.
Well, you see it is another tragedy. You’ve only got to live long enough and your tragedy will arrive. I didn’t think, thirty-five years ago, that the day could ever come when my heart would soften toward Olive Logan, and that I would put my hands before my eyes if she were drowning, so as not to see it; but now I do pity her—I do pity her. Her tragedy has come, and I have to be sorry for her, and I am sorry. If she were drowning I would not look—but I would not pull her out. I would not be a party to that last and meanest unkindness, treachery to a would-be suicide. My sympathies have been with the suicides for many, many years. I am always glad when the suicide succeeds in his undertaking. I always feel a genuine pain in my heart, a genuine grief, a genuine pity, when some scoundrel stays the suicide’s hand and compels him to continue his life.
In this morning’s paper, a woman living in California—her husband living in Washington, an employee of the Government—takes the life of her son, fourteen years old, with gas; tries to die with him; is found on her knees at his bedside, unconscious, nearly gone. The people who thus find her, instead of going out and shutting the door, as I would have done, drag her out of the place and into the fresh air and summon a doctor, and that doctor commits the crime of bringing her back to life, with all that that means for her. Her husband lost to her through the fascinations of some department clerk in Washington; her boy gone out of this world, and happy; nothing left in this world of a penny’s value for her—the tragedy of her life brought upon her when she has not yet reached the tragedy age. And look at that doctor’s comment! He says he “entertains hopes of her recovery.” He ought to be shot. I entertain hopes that to-morrow morning’s paper will bring news that she is on her way to the cemetery, where she can have peace.
Dublin, New Hampshire, Monday, May 21, 1906
Early experiences as an author—Publishing of “The Jumping Frog” in volume of sketches—Meeting Carleton in Lucerne—His apology for having refused to publish Mr. Clemens’s book of sketches—Difficulties attending the bringing out of “The Innocents Abroad.”
We are to abide here in the green solitude of the woods and hills for the next five months.
My experiences as an author began early in 1867. I came to New York from San Francisco in the first month of that year and presently Charles H. Webb, whom I had known in San Francisco as a reporter on the Bulletin, and afterward editor of The Californian, suggested that I publish a volume of sketches. I had but a slender reputation to publish it on, but I was charmed and excited by the suggestion and quite willing to venture it if some industrious person would save me the trouble of gathering the sketches together. I was loth to do it myself, for from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this.)
Webb said I had some reputation in the Atlantic States, but I knew quite well that it must be of a very attenuated sort. What there was of it rested upon the story of “The Jumping Frog.” When Artemus Ward passed through California on a lecturing tour, in 1865 or ’66, I told him the “Jumping Frog” story, in San Francisco, and he asked me to write it out and send it to his publisher, Carleton, in New York, to be used in padding out a small book which Artemus had prepared for the press and which needed some more stuffing to make it big enough for the price which was to be charged for it.
It reached Carleton in time, but he didn’t think much of it, and was not willing to go to the type-setting expense of adding it to the book. He did not put it in the wastebasket, but made Henry Clapp a present of it, and Clapp used it to help out the funeral of his dying literary journal, The Saturday Press. “The Jumping Frog” appeared in the last number of that paper, was the most joyous feature of the obsequies, and was at once copied in the newspapers of America and England. It certainly had a wide celebrity, and it still had it at the time that I am speaking of—but I was aware that it was only the frog that was celebrated. It wasn’t I. I was still an obscurity.
Webb undertook to collate the sketches. He performed this office, then handed the result to me, and I went to Carleton’s establishment with it. I approached a clerk and he bent eagerly over the counter to inquire into my needs; but when he found that I had come to sell a book and not to buy one, his temperature fell sixty degrees and the old-gold intrenchments in the roof of my mouth contracted three-quarters of an inch and my teeth fell out. I meekly asked the privilege of a word with Mr. Carleton, and
was coldly informed that he was in his private office. Discouragements and difficulties followed, but after a while I got by the frontier and entered the holy of holies. Ah, now I remember how I managed it! Webb had made an appointment for me with Carleton; otherwise I never should have gotten over that frontier. Carleton rose and said brusquely and aggressively,
“Well, what can I do for you?”
I reminded him that I was there by appointment to offer him my book for publication. He began to swell, and went on swelling and swelling and swelling until he had reached the dimensions of a god of about the second or third degree. Then the fountains of his great deep were broken up, and for two or three minutes I couldn’t see him for the rain. It was words, only words, but they fell so densely that they darkened the atmosphere. Finally he made an imposing sweep with his right hand which comprehended the whole room and said,
“Books—look at those shelves! Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I don’t. Good morning.”
Twenty-one years elapsed before I saw Carleton again. I was then sojourning with my family at the Schweitzerhof, in Lucerne. He called on me, shook hands cordially, and said at once, without any preliminaries,
“I am substantially an obscure person, but I have at least one distinction to my credit of such colossal dimensions that it entitles me to immortality—to wit: I refused a book of yours, and for this I stand without competitor as the prize ass of the nineteenth century.”
It was a most handsome apology, and I told him so, and said it was a long delayed revenge but was sweeter to me than any other that could be devised; that during the lapsed twenty-one years I had in fancy taken his life several times every year, and always in new and increasingly cruel and inhuman ways, but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy, even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued friend and never kill him again.
I reported my adventure to Webb, and he bravely said that not all the Carletons in the universe should defeat that book; he would publish it himself on a 10 per cent royalty. And so he did. He brought it out in blue and gold, and made a very pretty little book of it. I think he named it “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches,” price $1.25. He made the plates and printed and bound the book through a job printing-house, and published it through the American News Company.
In June I sailed in the Quaker City Excursion. I returned in November, and in Washington found a letter from Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company of Hartford, offering me 5 per cent royalty on a book which should recount the adventures of the excursion. In lieu of the royalty, I was offered the alternative of ten thousand dollars cash upon delivery of the manuscript. I consulted A.D. Richardson and he said “take the royalty.” I followed his advice and closed with Bliss. By my contract I was to deliver the manuscript in July of 1868. I wrote the book in San Francisco and delivered the manuscript within contract time. Bliss provided a multitude of illustrations for the book, and then stopped work on it. The contract date for the issue went by, and there was no explanation of this. Time drifted along and still there was no explanation. I was lecturing all over the country; and about thirty times a day, on an average, I was trying to answer this conundrum:
“When is your book coming out?”
I got tired of inventing new answers to that question, and by and by I got horribly tired of the question itself. Whoever asked it became my enemy at once, and I was usually almost eager to make that appear.
As soon as I was free of the lecture field I hastened to Hartford to make inquiries. Bliss said that the fault was not his; that he wanted to publish the book but the directors of his Company were staid old fossils and were afraid of it. They had examined the book, and the majority of them were of the opinion that there were places in it of a humorous character. Bliss said the house had never published a book that had a suspicion like that attaching to it, and that the directors were afraid that a departure of this kind could seriously injure the house’s reputation; that he was tied hand and foot, and was not permitted to carry out his contract. One of the directors, a Mr. Drake—at least he was the remains of what had once been a Mr. Drake—invited me to take a ride with him in his buggy, and I went along. He was a pathetic old relic, and his ways and his talk were also pathetic. He had a delicate purpose in view and it took him some time to hearten himself sufficiently to carry it out, but at last he accomplished it. He explained the house’s difficulty and distress, as Bliss had already explained it. Then he frankly threw himself and the house upon my mercy and begged me to take away “The Innocents Abroad” and release the concern from the contract. I said I wouldn’t—and so ended the interview and the buggy excursion. Then I warned Bliss that he must get to work or I should make trouble. He acted upon the warning, and set up the book and I read the proofs. Then there was another long wait and no explanation. At last toward the end of July (1869 I think), I lost patience and telegraphed Bliss that if the book was not on sale in twenty-four hours I should bring suit for damages.
That ended the trouble. Half a dozen copies were bound and placed on sale within the required time. Then the canvassing began, and went briskly forward. In nine months the book took the publishing house out of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, and left seventy thousand dollars’ profit to the good. It was Bliss that told me this—but if it was true, it was the first time that he had told the truth in sixty-five years. He was born in 1804.
Wednesday, May 23, 1906
Webb states that “Jumping Frog” has been favorably received but that he has made nothing on it because of dishonesty of American News Company—Mr. Clemens makes contract with American Publishing Company for “The Innocents Abroad” and suppresses the publication of “Jumping Frog” by Webb—Afterwards discovers from the American News Company that Webb had swindled him—Terms of contract with Bliss for “Roughing It” and “A Tramp Abroad.”
But I must go back to Webb. When I got back from the Quaker City Excursion, in November 1867, Webb told me that the “Jumping Frog” book had been favorably received by the press and that he believed it had sold fairly well, but that he had found it impossible to get a statement of account from the American News Company. He said the book had been something of a disaster to him, since he had manufactured it with his own private funds and was now not able to get any of the money back because of the dishonest and dodging ways of the News Company.
I was very sincerely sorry for Webb; sorry that he had lost money by befriending me; also, in some degree sorry that he was not able to pay me my royalties.
I made my contract for “The Innocents Abroad” with the American Publishing Company. Then, after two or three months had gone by, it occurred to me that perhaps I was violating that contract, there being a clause in it forbidding me to publish books with any other firm during a term of a year or so. Of course that clause could not cover a book which had been published before the contract was made; anybody else would have known that. But I didn’t know it, for I was not in the habit of knowing anything that was valuable; and I was also not in the habit of asking other people for information. It was my ignorant opinion that I was violating the Bliss contract, and that I was in honor bound to suppress the “Jumping Frog” book and take it permanently out of print. So I went to Webb with the matter. He was willing to accommodate me upon these terms: that I should surrender to him such royalties as might be due me; that I should also surrender to him, free of royalty, all bound and unbound copies which might be in the News Company’s hands; also that I should hand him eight hundred dollars cash; also that he should superintend the breaking up of the plates of the book, and for that service should receive such bounty as the type founders should pay for the broken plates as old type-metal. Type-metal was worth nine cents a pound, and the weight of the plates was about forty pounds. One may perceive by these details that Webb had some talent as a trader.
After this Webb p
assed out of the field of my vision for a long time. But meantime chance threw me in the way of the manager of the American News Company, and I asked him about Webb’s difficulties with the concern and how they had come about. He said he didn’t know of any difficulties. I then explained to him that Webb had never been able to collect anything from the Company. In turn, he explained to me that my explanation was not sound. He said the Company had always furnished statements to Webb, at the usual intervals, and had accompanied them with the Company’s check to date. By his invitation, I went with him to his office, and by his books and accounts he proved to me that what he had said was true. Webb had collected his dues and mine, regularly, from the beginning, and had pocketed the money. At the time that Webb and I had settled, he was owing me six hundred dollars on royalties. The bound and unbound “Jumping Frogs” which he had inherited from me at that time had since been sold, and the result had gone into his pocket—part of it being six hundred more that should have come to me on royalties.
