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

by Mark Twain

  As ever affectionately your friend,

  Livy L. Clemens.

  (1875)

  Dear Doctor Brown,

  We had grown so very anxious about you that it was a great pleasure to see the dear, familiar handwriting again, but the contents of the letter did make us inexpressibly sad. We have talked so much since about your coming to see us. Would not the change do you good? Could you not trust yourself with us? We would do everything to make you comfortable and happy that we could, and you have so many admirers in America that would be so happy and proud to welcome you. Is it not possible for you to come? Could not your son bring you? Perhaps the entire change would give you a new and healthier lease of life.

  Our children are both well and happy; I wish that you could see them. Susy is very motherly to the little one. Mr. Clemens is hard at work on a new book now. He has a new book of sketches recently out, which he is going to send you in a few days; most of the sketches are old, but some few are new.

  Oh Doctor Brown how can you speak of your life as a wasted one? What you have written has alone done an immense amount of good, and I know for I speak from experience that one must get good every time they meet and chat with you. I receive good every time I even think of you. Can a life that produces such an effect on others be a wasted life? I feel that while you live the world is sweeter and better. You ask if Clara is “queer and wistful and commanding,” like your Susy. We think she is more queer, (more quaint) perhaps more commanding, but not nearly so wistful in her ways as “your Susy.” The nurse that we had with us in Edinburgh had to leave me to take care of a sister ill with consumption. We have had ever since a quiet lady-like German girl. I must leave a place for Mr. C. Do think about coming to us. Give my love to your sister and your son.

  Affectionately,

  Livy L. Clemens.

  Dear Doctor, if you and your son Jock only would run over here! What a welcome we would give you! and besides, you would forget cares and the troubles that come of them. To forget pain is to be painless; to forget care is to be rid of it; to go abroad is to accomplish both. Do try the prescription!

  Always with love,

  Saml. L. Clemens.

  P.S. Livy, you haven’t signed your letter. Don’t forget that. S.L.C.

  P.P.S. I hope you will excuse Mr. Clemens’s P. S. to me; it is characteristic for him to put it right on the letter. Livy L.C.

  Hartford, June 1, 1882.

  My dear Mr. Brown,

  I was three thousand miles from home, at breakfast in New Orleans, when the damp morning paper revealed the sorrowful news among the cable dispatches. There was no place in America, however remote, or however rich or poor or high or humble, where words of mourning for your honored father were not uttered that morning, for his works had made him known and loved all over the land. To Mrs. Clemens and me, the loss is a personal one, and our grief the grief which one feels for one who was peculiarly near and dear. Mrs. Clemens has never ceased to express regret that we came away from England the last time without going to see him, and often we have since projected a voyage across the Atlantic for the sole purpose of taking him by the hand and looking into his kind eyes once more before he should be called to his rest.

  We both thank you greatly for the Edinburgh papers which you sent. My wife and I join in affectionate remembrances and greetings to yourself and your aunt, and in the sincere tender of our sympathies.

  Faithfully yours,

  S. L. Clemens.

  P.S. Our Susy is still “Megalopis.” He gave her that name.

  Can you spare us a photograph of your father? We have none but the one taken in group with ourselves.

  It was my fault that she never saw Doctor John in life again. How many crimes I committed against that gentle and patient and forgiving spirit! I always told her that if she died first, the rest of my life would be made up of self-reproaches for the tears I had made her shed. And she always replied that if I should pass from life first, she would never have to reproach herself without having loved me the less devotedly or the less constantly because of those tears. We had this conversation again, and for the thousandth time, when the night of death was closing about her—though we did not suspect that.

  In the letter last quoted above, I say “Mrs. Clemens has never ceased to express regret that we came away from England the last time without going to see him.” I think that that was intended to convey the impression that she was a party concerned in our leaving England without going to see him. It is not so. She urged me, she begged me, she implored me to take her to Edinburgh to see Doctor John—but I was in one of my devil moods, and I would not do it. I would not do it because I should have been obliged to continue the courier in service until we got back to Liverpool. It seemed to me that I had endured him as long as I could. I wanted to get aboard ship and be done with him. How childish it all seems now! And how brutal—that I could not be moved to confer upon my wife a precious and lasting joy because it would cause me a small inconvenience. I have known few meaner men than I am. By good fortune this feature of my nature does not often get to the surface, and so I doubt if any member of my family except my wife ever suspected how much of that feature there was in me. I suppose it never failed to arrive at the surface when there was opportunity, but it was as I have said—the opportunities have been so infrequent that this worst detail of my character has never been known to any but two persons—Mrs. Clemens, who suffered from it, and I, who suffer from the remembrance of the tears it caused her.

  Friday, March 23, 1906

  Some curious letter superscriptions which have come to Mr. Clemens—Our

  inefficient postal system under Postmaster-General Key—Reminiscences of

  Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe—Story of Reverend Charley Stowe’s little boy.

  1874

  A good many years ago Mrs. Clemens used to keep as curiosities some of the odd and strange superscriptions that decorated letters that came to me from strangers in out-of-the-way corners of the earth. One of these superscriptions was the work of Dr. John Brown, and the letter must have been the first one he wrote me after we came home from Europe in August or September, ’74. Evidently the Doctor was guessing at our address from memory, for he made an amusing mess of it. The superscription was as follows:

  Mr. S. L. Clemens.

  (Mark Twain),

  Hartford, N.Y.

  Near Boston, U.S.A.

  Now then comes a fact which is almost incredible, to wit: the New York postoffice which did not contain a single salaried idiot who could not have stated promptly who the letter was for and to what town it should go, actually sent that letter to a wee little hamlet hidden away in the remotenesses of the vast State of New York—for what reason? Because that lost and never previously heard-of hamlet was named Hartford. The letter was returned to the New York postoffice from that hamlet. It was returned innocent of the suggestion “Try Hartford Connecticut,” although the hamlet’s postmaster knew quite well that that was the Hartford the writer of the letter was seeking. Then the New York postoffice opened the envelope, got Doctor John’s address out of it, then enclosed it in a fresh envelope and sent it back to Edinburgh. Doctor John then got my address from Menzies, the publisher, and sent the letter to me again. He also enclosed the former envelope—the one that had had the adventures—and his anger at our postal system was like the fury of an angel. He came the nearest to being bitter and offensive that ever he came in his life, I suppose. He said that in Great Britain it was the Postal Department’s boast that by no ingenuity could a man so disguise and conceal a Smith or a Jones or a Robinson in a letter address that the department couldn’t find that man, whereas—then he let fly at our system, which was apparently designed to defeat a letter’s attempts to get to its destination when humanly possible.

  Doctor John was right about our department—at that time. But that time did not last long. I think Postmaster-General Key was in office then. He was a new broom, and he did some astonishing sweeping
for a while. He made some cast-iron rules which worked great havoc with the nation’s correspondence. It did not occur to him—rational things seldom occurred to him—that there were several millions of people among us who seldom wrote letters; who were utterly ignorant of postal rules, and who were quite sure to make blunders in writing letter addresses whenever blunders were possible, and that it was the Government’s business to do the very best it could by the letters of these innocents and help them get to their destinations, instead of inventing ways to block the road. Key suddenly issued some boiler-iron rules—one of them was that a letter must go to the place named on the envelope, and the effort to find its man must stop there. He must not be searched for. If he wasn’t at the place indicated the letter must be returned to the sender. In the case of Doctor John’s letter the postoffice had a wide discretion—not so very wide either. It must go to a Hartford. That Hartford must be near Boston; it must also be in the State of New York. It went to the Hartford that was furthest from Boston, but it filled the requirement of being in the State of New York—and it got defeated.

  Another rule instituted by Key was that letter superscriptions could not end with “Philadelphia”—or “Chicago,” or “San Francisco,” or “Boston,” or “New York,” but, in every case, must add the State, or go to the Dead Letter Office. Also, you could not say “New York, N.Y.,” you must add the word City to the first “New York” or the letter must go to the Dead Letter Office.

  During the first thirty days of the dominion of this singular rule sixteen hundred thousand tons of letters went to the Dead Letter Office from the New York postoffice alone. The Dead Letter Office could not contain them and they had to be stacked up outside the building. There was not room outside the building inside the city, so they were formed into a rampart around the city; and if they had had it there during the Civil War we should not have had so much trouble and uneasiness about an invasion of Washington by the Confederate armies. They could neither have climbed over nor under that breastwork nor bored nor blasted through it. Mr. Key was soon brought to a more rational frame of mind.

  Then a letter arrived for me enclosed in a fresh envelope. It was from a village priest in Bohemia or Galicia, and was boldly addressed:

  Mark Twain,

  Somewhere.

  It had traveled over several European countries; it had met with hospitality and with every possible assistance during its wide journey; it was ringed all over, on both sides, with a chain-mail mesh of postmarks—there were nineteen of them altogether. And one of them was a New York postmark. The postal hospitalities had ceased at New York—within three hours and a half of my home. There the letter had been opened, the priest’s address ascertained, and the letter had then been returned to him, as in the case of Dr. John Brown.

  Among Mrs. Clemens’s collection of odd addresses was one on a letter from Australia, worded thus:

  Mark Twain,

  God knows where.

  That superscription was noted by newspapers, here and there and yonder while it was on its travels, and doubtless suggested another odd superscription invented by some stranger in a far-off land—and this was the wording of it:

  Mark Twain.

  Somewhere,

  (Try Satan).

  That stranger’s trust was not misplaced. Satan courteously sent it along.

  This morning’s mail brings another of these novelties. It comes from France—from a young English girl—and is addressed:

  Mark Twain

  c/o President Roosevelt.

  The White House

  Washington

  America

  U.S.A.

  It was not delayed, but came straight along bearing the Washington postmark of yesterday.

  In a diary which Mrs. Clemens kept for a little while, a great many years ago, I find various mentions of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a near neighbor of ours in Hartford, with no fences between. And in those days she made as much use of our grounds as of her own, in pleasant weather. Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irish woman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect.

  Her husband, old Professor Stowe, was a picturesque figure. He wore a broad slouch hat. He was a large man, and solemn. His beard was white and thick and hung far down on his breast. His nose was enlarged and broken up by a disease which made it look like a cauliflower. The first time our little Susy ever saw him she encountered him on the street near our house and came flying wide-eyed to her mother and said “Santa Claus has got loose!”

  Which reminds me of Reverend Charley Stowe’s little boy—a little boy of seven years. I met Reverend Charley crossing his mother’s grounds one morning and he told me this little tale. He had been out to Chicago to attend a Convention of Congregational clergymen, and had taken his little boy with him. During the trip he reminded the little chap, every now and then, that he must be on his very best behavior there in Chicago. He said “We shall be the guests of a clergyman, there will be other guests—clergymen and their wives—and you must be careful to let those people see by your walk and conversation that you are of a godly household. Be very careful about this.” The admonition bore fruit. At the first breakfast which they ate in the Chicago clergyman’s house he heard his little son say in the meekest and most reverent way to the lady opposite him,

  “Please, won’t you, for Christ’s sake, pass the butter?”

  Monday, March 26, 1906

  John D.’s Bible Class again—Mr. Clemens comments on several newspaper clippings—Tells Mr. Howells the scheme of this autobiography—Tells the

  newspaper account of girl who tried to commit suicide—Newspapers in remote villages and in great cities contrasted—Remarks about Captain E. L.

  Marsh and Dick Higham—Higbie’s letter, and Herald letter to Higbie.

  ROCKEFELLER, JR., ON WEALTH

  Not to be Put Before God, but All Right as a Goal for the Ambitious.

  John D. Rockefeller, Jr., apologized yesterday to the members of his Bible class for having monopolized all the time of the Sunday hour heretofore, and promised never to do so again, unless his subject should be such that discussion of it would not be practical.

  “It is better,” he said, “that we have a general discussion, and as many of us as possible express our views.”

  Then Mr. Rockefeller raised a question calculated to give the members opportunity for discussion. He took up the Ten Commandments, and after dividing them into the first five as relating to man’s obligations to God and the second five as relating to man’s obligation to his neighbor, he said:

  “We are so in the habit of following and obeying most of the Commandments that it is useless to take them up. Let us take the First and Fourth Commandments. Let us now consider the First Commandment, and see if we worship only one God. Many of us give our first thought to our pleasures, and it is very frequently the case to-day that our first thought is for worldly possessions. A stranger coming here would say that the God of New York was the God of Wealth. When we think of pleasure or of wealth before we think of God, then we violate the First Commandment.

  “I do not mean to say that we should not be moved by ambition or be given to innocent pleasure, but I mean to say that when we put God second to these aims, we are then not worshipping Him as we should.

  “When the rich young man was told to go and give all his possessions to the poor, it was because Christ realized that the rich young man was thinking first
of his wealth and then of God, and violating the First Commandment.

  “In the consideration of the Fourth Commandment, let us try to discover what is the proper way to observe the Sabbath. How far are we justified in violating the restrictions put down in that commandment?”

  Several discussed Sabbath observance. Then Mr. Rockefeller said:

  “The subject is one that should give rise to general and helpful discussion. Is it right for me to play golf, to ride a bicycle, or go to the country on Sunday? That is what we want to know. We are here seeking truth. Let us think it over during the week and next Sunday be prepared with our views. Then we may reach a just conclusion.”

  Young John D., you see, has been dripping theology again, yesterday. I missed his reunion of the honorary membership of his Bible Class last Thursday night, through illness, and I was very sincerely sorry. I had to telephone him not to come for me. However, perhaps it was of profit to me to be obliged to stay away, for I was going to say some things about lying which would have been too nakedly true for Bible Class consumption. That Bible Class is so uninured to anything resembling either truth or sense that I think a clean straight truth falling in its midst would make as much havoc as a bombshell.