Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  There has been no falling-out between General Grant and The Century, and their relations are in every way cordial and pleasant. The Century Publishing Company entered into competition for the publication of General Grant’s books and its failure to obtain the contract was simply a business incident, the General being better satisfied with the arrangements made with Webster & Co. In the negotiation for the publication of the book the question of giving his son a position was not a matter of consideration.

  The contract between Webster & Co. and General Grant was signed on February 28, and it is denied at the publishers’ office that taking Jesse Grant into partnership, as The World alleged, had anything to do with awarding them the contract, for the reason that such an arrangement has not been made. Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) is a silent partner in the firm of Webster & Co., but entrusts the management of the business to his nephew, Charles L. Webster, who conducted all the negotiations with General Grant. The book is to be complete in two volumes. The manuscript for the first is completed and will be delivered to Mr. Webster, the latter part of this week. The General is working as much as possible on the materials for the second volume, which is also nearly finished, the principal labor now being that of revision. The book will be sold by subscription, and the price will probably be $3 50 a volume. It is expected that the two volumes will be ready for delivery in October or November.

  N. Y. Tribune

  GEN. GRANT AND HIS BOOK.

  Over 100,000 Orders for the Set Received by His Publishers.

  Gen. Grant has done much towards completing his book during his period of convalescence and expects to finish it within the next few days. The first volume is written and revised. Only about one hundred pages are needed to complete the second, though only a portion of it has been revised. The story of Lee’s surrender was finished on Monday and revised yesterday. The General’s connection with Lincoln’s assassination has been related. It is his intention to begin work to-day on a description of the grand review of the Federal armies in Washington at the close of the war. He writes little himself, but dictates to a stenographer. Not only is his mind clear, but the story as he dictates it is lucid and requires but little revision. His daily average is about thirty pages and the work apparently fatigues him little, if any.

  The title of the book is “The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant.” It tells the story of his life from childhood down to the grand review. It is replete with interesting sketches and anecdote of Lincoln and other great men, with whom Gen. Grant came in contact in civil and military life. Each volume will contain about 500 pages with numerous illustrations and maps. Charles L. Webster & Co., of this city, are the publishers. The work will be published simultaneously by them in the United States, England, France, Germany and Canada. Mr. Webster will go abroad in July to arrange for translating and publishing it in foreign countries. The first volume will be issued Dec. 1, and the second about March 1, 1886. Already orders for over 100,000 sets of the “Memoirs” have been received without solicitation or advertising. At least 50,000 additional orders have come in which have not yet been accepted. It is expected that the sales will be unprecedentedly large. If nothing unforeseen happens the publishers expect to have all the manuscript in hand inside of a month. It will require but a few days to finish the second volume, after which it will be leisurely revised. Nearly all of volume II. has been written since the General was confined to the house by his present illness.

  Gen. Grant yesterday sent the following letter to his publishers:

  NEW YORK, May 2,1885.

  To Charles L. Webster & Co.

  DEAR SIRS: My attention has been called to a paragraph in a letter published in THE WORLD newspaper of this city of Wednesday, April 29, of which the following is a part:

  “The work upon his new book, about which so much has been said, is the work of Gen. Adam Badeau. Gen. Grant, I have no doubt, has furnished all of the material and all of the ideas in the memoirs as far as they have been prepared, but Badeau has done the work of composition. The most that Gen. Grant has done upon this book has been to prepare the rough notes and memoranda for its various chapters.”

  I will divide this into four parts and answer each of them.

  First—“The work upon his new book, about which so much has been said, is the work of Gen. Adam Badeau.” This is false. The composition is entirely my own.

  Second—“Gen. Grant, I have no doubt, has furnished all of the material and all of the ideas in the memoirs as far as they have been prepared.” This is true.

  Third—“But Badeau has done the work of composition.” The composition is entirely my own.

  Fourth—“The most that Gen. Grant has done upon this book has been to prepare the rough notes and memoranda for its various chapters.” This is false. I have not only prepared myself whatever rough notes were made, but, as above stated, have done the entire work of composition and preparing notes, and no one but myself has ever used one of such notes in any composition.

  You may take such measures as you see fit to correct this report, which places me in the attitude of claiming the authorship of a book which I did not write, and is also injurious to you who are publishing and advertising such book as my work.

  Yours truly,

  U.S.GRANT.

  N. Y. World

  [The Rev. Dr. Newman]

  1885.

  Extract from my note book:

  April 4, 1885. General Grant is still living, this morning. Many a person between the two oceans lay hours awake, last night, listening for the booming of the fire-bells that should speak to the nation in simultaneous voice and tell it its calamity. The bell-strokes are to be thirty seconds apart and there will be sixty-three—the General’s age. They will be striking in every town in the United States at the same moment—the first time in the world’s history that the bells of a nation have tolled in unison, beginning at the same moment and ending at the same moment.

  More than once during two weeks, the nation stood watching with bated breath expecting the news of General Grant’s death.

  The family in their distress desired spiritual help and one Rev. Dr. Newman was sent for to furnish it. Newman had lately gone to California where he had got a ten-thousand-dollar job to preach a funeral sermon over the son of ex-Governor Stanford, the millionaire, and a most remarkable sermon it was—and worth the money. If Newman got the facts right, neither he nor anybody else—any ordinary human being—was worthy to preach that youth’s funeral sermon and it was manifest that one of the disciples ought to have been imported into California for the occasion. Newman came on from California at once, and began his ministration at the General’s bedside; and if one might trust his daily reports the General had conceived a new and perfect interest in spiritual things. It is fair to presume that the most of Newman’s daily reports originated in his own imagination.

  Colonel Fred Grant told me that his father was, in this matter, what he was in all matters and at all times—that is to say, perfectly willing to have family prayers going on, or anything else that could be satisfactory to anybody, or increase anybody’s comfort in any way; but he also said that while his father was a good man, and indeed as good as any man, Christian or otherwise, he was not a praying man.

  Some of the speeches put into General Grant’s mouth were to the last degree incredible to people who knew the General, since they were such gaudy and flowery misrepresentations of that plain-spoken man’s utterances.

  About the 14th or 15th of April, Rev. Mr. Newman reported that upon visiting the General in his sick chamber, the General pressed his hand and delivered himself of this astounding remark:

  “Thrice have I been in the shadow of the valley of death and thrice have I come out again.”

  General Grant never used flowers of speech, and dead or alive he never could have uttered anything like that, either as a quotation or otherwise.

  About that time I came across a gentleman in the railway train who had been connected with our embassy
in China during the past sixteen years and was now at home on leave of absence, and he told me something about Newman. He said that once, when General Grant was President, Newman wanted to travel about the world a little and he was given the post of Inspector of Consulates. It was a salaried position and the salary was paid out of an appropriation set apart for that purpose. Whenever an inspector’s time expired, whatever might be left unexpended of that appropriation had to be turned in to the Treasury.

  This Secretary of Legation tried to make me understand how there was some crookedness about Newman’s expenditures, but I am not able to call to mind in what the crookedness consisted, so I will not make the attempt. The Secretary was mainly interested in showing not that Newman was a knave but that he was simply an ass. He said he came out to China and proceeded to investigate the legation, and hauled it vigorously over the coals, and was getting along very satisfactorily with his work when the American Minister spoiled it all by calling his attention to the fact that the legation was not a consulate and did not come within the jurisdiction of his powers.

  There was a social club there, composed of American ladies and gentlemen, who met occasionally to discuss things, and Newman showed a good deal of anxiety to get an invitation to address it and to furnish an essay for one of their discussions. His hints were not favorably received. So he compacted them into a clear form: in fact he invited himself. In introducing him the chairman almost apologized to the company and said in substance that Rev. Mr. Newman had asked permission to address the club.

  This chilly introduction didn’t distress the essayist a bit apparently. He opened his remarks with a graceful reference to the urgency which had been brought to bear upon him to address the club and which he could not politely decline.

  The Secretary of Legation may have exaggerated the case, but from what I can gather Dr. Newman is really about that kind of a man.

  Clemens’s unsparing account of his own beguilement into financially supporting James W. Paige’s development of an automatic typesetter is so manifestly autobiographical that it is judged to be among the chapters Clemens drafted for the autobiography, although he did not explicitly identify it that way. The manuscript, now in the Mark Twain Papers, was written in two separately paginated stages. The first part (twenty manuscript pages) was written in December 1890, almost ten years after Clemens began investing in the typesetter and at a point when his total investment had reached or exceeded $170,000, despite Paige’s failure to produce a successful prototype. The second part (nine manuscript pages) starts with “End of 1885” and was written in late 1893 or early 1894, when Clemens had left his family in Europe and traveled to New York to participate in negotiations concerning the typesetter. He must have written it before 1 February 1894, when he reached a new agreement with Paige that he believed would make him wealthy (Notebook 33, TS pp. 47, 51, CU-MARK).

  Paine quoted from the manuscript in his biography (MTB, 2:903–5, 913), and in his edition of the autobiography he published most of the first part (with the usual silent omissions), but only four paragraphs of the second part (MTA, 1:70–78). Neider did not include any part of this text in his edition. Clemens continued to excoriate Paige in the Autobiographical Dictation of 2 June 1906.

  The Machine Episode

  [Written in the closing days of 1890.]

  This episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my life—a considerable stretch of time, as I am now fifty-five years old.

  Ten or eleven years ago, Dwight Buell, a jeweler, called at our house and was shown up to the billiard room—which was my study; and the game got more study than the other sciences. He wanted me to take some stock in a type-setting machine. He said it was at the Colt Arms factory, and was about finished. I took $2,000 of the stock. I was always taking little chances like that; and almost always losing by it, too—a thing which I did not greatly mind, because I was always careful to risk only such amounts as I could easily afford to lose. Some time afterward I was invited to go down to the factory and see the machine. I went, promising myself nothing; for I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or retire defeated. So, the performance I witnessed did most thoroughly amaze me. Here was a machine that was really setting type; and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. Moreover, it was distributing its case at the same time. The distribution was automatic: the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter, and without human help or suggestion; for it began its work of its own accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own accord when they were full enough. The machine was almost a complete compositor; it lacked but one feature—it did not “justify” the lines; this was done by the operator’s assistant.

  I saw the operator set at the rate of 3,000 ems an hour, which, counting distribution, was but little short of four case-men’s work.

  William Hamersley was there. I had known him long, I thought I knew him well. I had great respect for him, and full confidence in him. He said he was already a considerable owner, and was now going to take as much more of the stock as he could afford. Wherefore I set down my name for an additional $3,000. It is here that the music begins.

  Footnote. Hamersley now says we never had any such agreement. He will revise that remark presently.

  Before very long Hamersley called on me and asked me what I would charge to raise a capital of $500,000 for the manufacture of the machines. I said I would undertake it for $100,000. He said, raise $600,000, then, and take $100,000. I agreed. I sent for my partner, Webster; he came up from New York and went back with the project. There was some correspondence. Hamersley wrote Webster a letter which will be inserted later on.

  I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and— But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated by some converse characteristic. There is another point or two worth mentioning: he can persuade anybody; he can convince nobody. He has a crystal-clear mind, as regards the grasping and concreting of an idea which has been lost and smothered under a chaos of baffling legal language; and yet it can always be depended upon to take the simplest half dozen facts and draw from them a conclusion that will astonish the idiots in the asylum. It is because he is a dreamer, a visionary. His imagination runs utterly away with him. He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel. He is the Shakespeare of mechanical invention. In all the ages he has no peer. Indeed, there is none that even approaches him. Whoever is qualified to fully comprehend his marvelous machine will grant that its place is upon the loftiest summit of human invention, with no kindred between it and the far foothills below.

  But I must explain these strange contradictions above listed, or the man will be misunderstood and wronged. His business thrift is remarkable, and it is also of a peculiar cut. He has worked at his expensive machine for more than twenty years, but always at somebody else’s cost. He spent hundreds and thousands of other folk’s money, yet always kept his machine and its possible patents in his own possession, unencumbered by an embarrassing lien of any kind—except once, which will be referred to by and by. He could never be beguiled into putting a penny of his own into his work. Once he had a brilliant idea in the way of a wonderfully valuable application of electricity. To test it, he said, would cos
t but $25. I was paying him a salary of nearly $600 a month and was spending $1,200 on the machine besides; yet he asked me to risk the $25 and take half of the result. I declined, and he dropped the matter. Another time he was sure he was on the track of a splendid thing in electricity. It would cost only a trifle—possibly $200—to try some experiments; I was asked to furnish the money and take half of the result. I furnished money until the sum had grown to about $1,000, and everything was pronounced ready for the grand exposition. The electric current was turned on—the thing declined to go. Two years later the same thing was successfully worked out and patented by a man in the State of New York and was at once sold for a huge sum of money and a royalty-reserve besides. The drawings in the electrical journal showing the stages by which that inventor had approached the consummation of his idea, proving his way step by step as he went, were almost the twins of Paige’s drawings of two years before. It was almost as if the same hand had drawn both sets. Paige said we had had it, and we should have known it if we had only tried an alternating current after failing with the direct current; said he had felt sure, at the time, that at cost of $100 he could apply the alternating test and come out triumphant. Then he added, in tones absolutely sodden with self-sacrifice, and just barely touched with reproach,

  “But you had already spent so much money on the thing that I hadn’t the heart to ask you to spend any more.”