Complete Letters of Mark Twain
TextXXXV. Letters, 1895-96, To H. H. Rogers And Others. Finishing “Joan Of Arc.” The Trip Around The World. Death Of Susy Clemens
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To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:
(No date)
Dear Mr. Rogers, – Yours of Dec. 21 has arrived, containing the circular to stockholders and I guess the Co. will really quit – there doesn’t seem to be any other wise course.
There’s one thing which makes it difficult for me to soberly realize that my ten year dream is actually dissolved; and that is, that it reveries my horoscope. The proverb says, “Born lucky, always lucky,” and I am very superstitious. As a small boy I was notoriously lucky. It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a 2/3 drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise. When the “Pennsylvania” blew up and the telegraph reported my brother as fatally injured (with 60 others) but made no mention of me, my uncle said to my mother “It means that Sam was somewhere else, after being on that boat a year and a half – he was born lucky.” Yes, I was somewhere else. I am so superstitious that I have always been afraid to have business dealings with certain relatives and friends of mine because they were unlucky people. All my life I have stumbled upon lucky chances of large size, and whenever they were wasted it was because of my own stupidity and carelessness. And so I have felt entirely certain that that machine would turn up trumps eventually. It disappointed me lots of times, but I couldn’t shake off the confidence of a life-time in my luck.
Well, whatever I get out of the wreckage will be due to good luck – the good luck of getting you into the scheme – for, but for that, there wouldn’t be any wreckage; it would be total loss.
I wish you had been in at the beginning. Then we should have had the good luck to step promptly ashore.
Miss Harrison has had a dream which promises me a large bank account, and I want her to go ahead and dream it twice more, so as to make the prediction sure to be fulfilled.
I’ve got a first rate subject for a book. It kept me awake all night, and I began it and completed it in my mind. The minute I finish Joan I will take it up.
Love and Happy New Year to you all.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.
This was about the end of the machine interests so far as Clemens was concerned. Paige succeeded in getting some new people interested, but nothing important happened, or that in any way affected Mark Twain. Characteristically he put the whole matter behind him and plunged into his work, facing comparative poverty and a burden of debts with a stout heart. The beginning of the new year found him really poorer in purse than he had ever been in his life, but certainly not crushed, or even discouraged – at least, not permanently – and never more industrious or capable.
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To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:
169 Rue de L’UNIVERSITE,
Paris, Jan. 23, ’95.
Dear Mr. Rogers, – After I wrote you, two or three days ago I thought I would make a holiday of the rest of the day – the second deliberate holiday since I had the gout. On the first holiday I wrote a tale of about 6,000 words, which was 3 days’ work in one; and this time I did 8,000 before midnight. I got nothing out of that first holiday but the recreation of it, for I condemned the work after careful reading and some revision; but this time I fared better – I finished the Huck Finn tale that lies in your safe, and am satisfied with it.
The Bacheller syndicate (117 Tribune Building) want a story of 5,000 words (lowest limit of their London agent) for $1,000 and offer to plank the check on delivery, and it was partly to meet that demand that I took that other holiday. So as I have no short story that suits me (and can’t and shan’t make promises), the best I can do is to offer the longer one which I finished on my second holiday—“Tom Sawyer, Detective.”
It makes 27 or 28,000 words, and is really written for grown folks, though I expect young folk to read it, too. It transfers to the banks of the Mississippi the incidents of a strange murder which was committed in Sweden in old times.
I’ll refer applicants for a sight of the story to you or Miss Harrison.[39]
Yours sincerely,
S. L. Clemens.
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To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:
169 Rue de L’UNIVERSITE,
Apr. 29, ’95.
Dear Mr. Rogers, – Your felicitous delightful letter of the 15th arrived three days ago, and brought great pleasure into the house.
There is one thing that weighs heavily on Mrs. Clemens and me. That is Brusnahan’s money. If he is satisfied to have it invested in the Chicago enterprise, well and good; if not, we would like to have the money paid back to him. I will give him as many months to decide in as he pleases – let him name 6 or 10 or 12—and we will let the money stay where it is in your hands till the time is up. Will Miss Harrison tell him so? I mean if you approve. I would like him to have a good investment, but would meantime prefer to protect him against loss.
At 6 minutes past 7, yesterday evening, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.
With the long strain gone, I am in a sort of physical collapse today, but it will be gone tomorrow. I judged that this end of the book would be hard work, and it turned out so. I have never done any work before that cost so much thinking and weighing and measuring and planning and cramming, or so much cautious and painstaking execution. For I wanted the whole Rouen trial in, if it could be got in in such a way that the reader’s interest would not flag – in fact I wanted the reader’s interest to increase; and so I stuck to it with that determination in view – with the result that I have left nothing out but unimportant repetitions. Although it is mere history – history pure and simple – history stripped naked of flowers, embroideries, colorings, exaggerations, invention – the family agree that I have succeeded. It was a perilous thing to try in a tale, but I never believed it a doubtful one – provided I stuck strictly to business and didn’t weaken and give up: or didn’t get lazy and skimp the work. The first two-thirds of the book were easy; for I only needed to keep my historical road straight; therefore I used for reference only one French history and one English one – and shoveled in as much fancy work and invention on both sides of the historical road as I pleased. But on this last third I have constantly used five French sources and five English ones and I think no telling historical nugget in any of them has escaped me.
Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing – it was written for love.
There – I’m called to see company. The family seldom require this of me, but they know I am not working today.
Yours sincerely,
S. L. Clemens.
“Brusnahan,” of the foregoing letter, was an employee of the New York Herald, superintendent of the press-room – who had invested some of his savings in the type-setter.
In February Clemens returned to New York to look after matters connected with his failure and to close arrangements for a reading-tour around the world. He was nearly sixty years old, and time had not lessened his loathing for the platform. More than once, however, in earlier years, he had turned to it as a debt-payer, and never yet had his burden been so great as now. He concluded arrangements with Major Pond to take him as far as the Pacific Coast, and with R. S. Smythe, of Australia, for the rest of the tour. In April we find him once more back in Paris preparing to bring the family to America, He had returned by way of London, where he had visited Stanley the explorer – an old friend.
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To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:
169 Rue de L’UNIVERSITE,
Sunday, Apr.7,’95.
Dear Mr. Rogers, – ….. Stanley is magnificently housed in London, in a grand mansion in the midst of the official world, right off Downing Street and Whitehall. He had an extraordinary assemblage of brains and fame there to meet me – thirty or forty (both sexes) at dinner, and more than a hundred came in, after dinner. Kept it up till after midnight. There were cabinet ministers, ambassadors, admirals, generals, canons, Oxford professors, novelists, playwrights, poets, and a number of people equipped with rank and brains. I told some yarns and made some speeches. I promised to call on all those people next time I come to London, and show them the wife and the daughters. If I were younger and very strong I would dearly love to spend a season in London – provided I had no work on hand, or no work more exacting than lecturing. I think I will lecture there a month or two when I return from Australia.
There were many delightful ladies in that company. One was the wife of His Excellency Admiral Bridge, Commander-in Chief of the Australian Station, and she said her husband was able to throw wide all doors to me in that part of the world and would be glad to do it, and would yacht me and my party around, and excursion us in his flag-ship and make us have a great time; and she said she would write him we were coming, and we would find him ready. I have a letter from her this morning enclosing a letter of introduction to the Admiral. I already know the Admiral commanding in the China Seas and have promised to look in on him out there. He sleeps with my books under his pillow. P’raps it is the only way he can sleep.
According to Mrs. Clemens’s present plans – subject to modification, of course – we sail in May; stay one day, or two days in New York, spend June, July and August in Elmira and prepare my lectures; then lecture in San Francisco and thereabouts during September and sail for Australia before the middle of October and open the show there about the middle of November. We don’t take the girls along; it would be too expensive and they are quite willing to remain behind anyway.
Mrs. C. is feeling so well that she is not going to try the New York doctor till we have gone around the world and robbed it and made the finances a little easier.
With a power of love to you all,
S. L. Clemens.
There would come moments of depression, of course, and a week later he wrote: “I am tired to death all the time:” To a man of less vitality, less vigor of mind and body, it is easy to believe that under such circumstances this condition would have remained permanent. But perhaps, after all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief life-saver.
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To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:
169 Rue de L’UNIVERSITE, Apr. 29, ’95.
Dear Mr. Rogers, – I have been hidden an hour or two, reading proof of Joan and now I think I am a lost child. I can’t find anybody on the place. The baggage has all disappeared, including the family. I reckon that in the hurry and bustle of moving to the hotel they forgot me. But it is no matter. It is peacefuller now than I have known it for days and days and days.
In these Joan proofs which I have been reading for the September Harper I find a couple of tip-top platform readings – and I mean to read them on our trip. If the authorship is known by then; and if it isn’t, I will reveal it. The fact is, there is more good platform-stuff in Joan than in any previous book of mine, by a long sight.
Yes, every danged member of the tribe has gone to the hotel and left me lost. I wonder how they can be so careless with property. I have got to try to get there by myself now.
All the trunks are going over as luggage; then I’ve got to find somebody on the dock who will agree to ship 6 of them to the Hartford Customhouse. If it is difficult I will dump them into the river. It is very careless of Mrs. Clemens to trust trunks and things to me.
Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.
By the latter part of May they were at Quarry Farm, and Clemens, laid up there with a carbuncle, was preparing for his long tour. The outlook was not a pleasant one. To Mr. Rogers he wrote: “I sha’n’t be able to stand on the platform before we start west. I sha’n’t get a single chance to practice my reading; but will have to appear in Cleveland without the essential preparation. Nothing in this world can save it from being a shabby, poor disgusting performance. I’ve got to stand; I can’t do it and talk to a house, and how in the nation am I going to sit? Land of Goshen, it’s this night week! Pray for me.”
The opening at Cleveland July 15th appears not to have been much of a success, though from another reason, one that doubtless seemed amusing to him later.
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To H. H. Rogers, in New York City:
(Forenoon)
Cleveland, July 16, ’95.
Dear Mr. Rogers, – Had a roaring success at the Elmira reformatory Sunday night. But here, last night, I suffered defeat – There were a couple of hundred little boys behind me on the stage, on a lofty tier of benches which made them the most conspicuous objects in the house. And there was nobody to watch them or keep them quiet. Why, with their scufflings and horse-play and noise, it was just a menagerie. Besides, a concert of amateurs had been smuggled into the program (to precede me,) and their families and friends (say ten per cent of the audience) kept encoring them and they always responded. So it was 20 minutes to 9 before I got the platform in front of those 2,600 people who had paid a dollar apiece for a chance to go to hell in this fashion.
I got started magnificently, but inside of half an hour the scuffling boys had the audience’s maddened attention and I saw it was a gone case; so I skipped a third of my program and quit. The newspapers are kind, but between you and me it was a defeat. There ain’t going to be any more concerts at my lectures. I care nothing for this defeat, because it was not my fault. My first half hour showed that I had the house, and I could have kept it if I hadn’t been so handicapped.
Yours sincerely,
S. L. Clemens.
P. S. Had a satisfactory time at Petoskey. Crammed the house and turned away a crowd. We had $548 in the house, which was $300 more than it had ever had in it before. I believe I don’t care to have a talk go off better than that one did.
Mark Twain, on this long tour, was accompanied by his wife and his daughter Clara – Susy and Jean Clemens remaining with their aunt at Quarry Farm. The tour was a financial success from the start. By the time they were ready to sail from Vancouver five thousand dollars had been remitted to Mr. Rogers against that day of settlement when the debts of Webster & Co. were to be paid. Perhaps it should be stated here that a legal settlement had been arranged on a basis of fifty cents on the dollar, but neither Clemens nor his wife consented to this as final. They would pay in full.
They sailed from Vancouver August 23, 1895. About the only letter of this time is an amusing note to Rudyard Kipling, written at the moment of departure.
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To Rudyard Kipling, in England:
August, 1895.
Dear Kipling, – It is reported that you are about to visit India. This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. Years ago you came from India to Elmira to visit me, as you said at the time. It has always been my purpose to return that visit and that great compliment some day. I shall arrive next January and you must be ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.
Affectionately,
S. L. Clemens.
Clemens, platforming in Australia, was too busy to write letters. Everywhere he was welcomed by great audiences, and everywhere lavishly entertained. He was beset by other carbuncles, but would seem not to have been seriously delayed by them. A letter to his old friend Twichell carries the story.
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To Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
FrankMOELLER’S Masonic hotel,
Napier, new Zealand,
November 29, ’95.
Dear Joe, – Your welcome letter of two months and five days ago has just arrived, and finds me in bed with another carbuncle. It is No. 3. Not a serious one this time. I lectured last night without inconvenience, but the doctors thought best to forbid to-night’s lecture. My second one kept me in bed a week in Melbourne.
… We are all glad it is you who is to write the article, it delights us all through.
I think it was a good stroke of luck that knocked me on my back here at Napier, instead of some hotel in the centre of a noisy city. Here we have the smooth and placidly-complaining sea at our door, with nothing between us and it but 20 yards of shingle – and hardly a suggestion of life in that space to mar it or make a noise. Away down here fifty-five degrees south of the Equator this sea seems to murmur in an unfamiliar tongue – a foreign tongue – tongue bred among the ice-fields of the Antarctic – a murmur with a note of melancholy in it proper to the vast unvisited solitudes it has come from. It was very delicious and solacing to wake in the night and find it still pulsing there. I wish you were here – land, but it would be fine!
Livy and Clara enjoy this nomadic life pretty well; certainly better than one could have expected they would. They have tough experiences, in the way of food and beds and frantic little ships, but they put up with the worst that befalls with heroic endurance that resembles contentment.
No doubt I shall be on the platform next Monday. A week later we shall reach Wellington; talk there 3 nights, then sail back to Australia. We sailed for New Zealand October 30.
Day before yesterday was Livy’s birthday (under world time), and tomorrow will be mine. I shall be 60—no thanks for it.
I and the others send worlds and worlds of love to all you dear ones.
Mark.
The article mentioned in the foregoing letter was one which Twichell had been engaged by Harper’s Magazine to write concerning the home life and characteristics of Mark Twain. By the time the Clemens party had completed their tour of India – a splendid, triumphant tour, too full of work and recreation for letter-writing – and had reached South Africa, the article had appeared, a satisfactory one, if we may judge by Mark Twain’s next.
This letter, however, has a special interest in the account it gives of Mark Twain’s visit to the Jameson raiders, then imprisoned at Pretoria.
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To Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
Pretoria, south African republic,
The Queen’s Birthday, ’96.
(May 24)
Dear old Joe, – Harper for May was given to me yesterday in Johannesburg by an American lady who lives there, and I read your article on me while coming up in the train with her and an old friend and fellow-Missourian of mine, Mrs. John Hays Hammond, the handsome and spirited wife of the chief of the 4 Reformers, who lies in prison here under a 15-year sentence, along with 50 minor Reformers who are in for 1 and 5-year terms. Thank you a thousand times Joe, you have praised me away above my deserts, but I am not the man to quarrel with you for that; and as for Livy, she will take your very hardiest statements at par, and be grateful to you to the bottom of her heart. Between you and Punch and Brander Matthews, I am like to have my opinion of myself raised sufficiently high; and I guess the children will be after you, for it is the study of their lives to keep my self-appreciation down somewhere within bounds.
I had a note from Mrs. Rev. Gray (nee Tyler) yesterday, and called on her to-day. She is well.
Yesterday I was allowed to enter the prison with Mrs. Hammond. A Boer guard was at my elbow all the time, but was courteous and polite, only he barred the way in the compound (quadrangle or big open court) and wouldn’t let me cross a white Mark.that was on the ground – the “death-line” one of the prisoners called it. Not in earnest, though, I think. I found that I had met Hammond once when he was a Yale senior and a guest of Gen. Franklin’s. I also found that I had known Capt. Mein intimately 32 years ago. One of the English prisoners had heard me lecture in London 23 years ago. After being introduced in turn to all the prisoners, I was allowed to see some of the cells and examine their food, beds, etc. I was told in Johannesburg that Hammond’s salary of $150,000 a year is not stopped, and that the salaries of some of the others are still continued. Hammond was looking very well indeed, and I can say the same of all the others. When the trouble first fell upon them it hit some of them very hard; several fell sick (Hammond among them), two or three had to be removed to the hospital, and one of the favorites lost his mind and killed himself, poor fellow, last week. His funeral, with a sorrowing following of 10,000, took the place of the public demonstration the Americans were getting up for me.
These prisoners are strong men, prominent men, and I believe they are all educated men. They are well off; some of them are wealthy. They have a lot of books to read, they play games and smoke, and for awhile they will be able to bear up in their captivity; but not for long, not for very long, I take it. I am told they have times of deadly brooding and depression. I made them a speech – sitting down. It just happened so. I don’t prefer that attitude. Still, it has one advantage – it is only a talk, it doesn’t take the form of a speech. I have tried it once before on this trip. However, if a body wants to make sure of having “liberty,” and feeling at home, he had better stand up, of course. I advised them at considerable length to stay where they were – they would get used to it and like it presently; if they got out they would only get in again somewhere else, by the look of their countenances; and I promised to go and see the President and do what I could to get him to double their jail-terms.
We had a very good sociable time till the permitted time was up and a little over, and we outsiders had to go. I went again to-day, but the Rev. Mr. Gray had just arrived, and the warden, a genial, elderly Boer named Du Plessis – explained that his orders wouldn’t allow him to admit saint and sinner at the same time, particularly on a Sunday. Du Plessis – descended from the Huguenot fugitives, you see, of 200 years ago – but he hasn’t any French left in him now – all Dutch.
It gravels me to think what a goose I was to make Livy and Clara remain in Durban; but I wanted to save them the 30-hour railway trip to Johannesburg. And Durban and its climate and opulent foliage were so lovely, and the friends there were so choice and so hearty that I sacrificed myself in their interests, as I thought. It is just the beginning of winter, and although the days are hot, the nights are cool. But it’s lovely weather in these regions, too; and the friends are as lovely as the weather, and Johannesburg and Pretoria are brimming with interest. I talk here twice more, then return to Johannesburg next Wednesday for a fifth talk there; then to the Orange Free State capital, then to some town on the way to Port Elizabeth, where the two will join us by sea from Durban; then the gang will go to Kimberley and presently to the Cape – and so, in the course of time, we shall get through and sail for England; and then we will hunt up a quiet village and I will write and Livy edit, for a few months, while Clara and Susy and Jean study music and things in London.
We have had noble good times everywhere and every day, from Cleveland, July 15, to Pretoria, May 24, and never a dull day either on sea or land, notwithstanding the carbuncles and things. Even when I was laid up 10 days at Jeypore in India we had the charmingest times with English friends. All over India the English well, you will never know how good and fine they are till you see them.
Midnight and after! and I must do many things to-day, and lecture tonight.
A world of thanks to you, Joe dear, and a world of love to all of you.
Mark.
Perhaps for readers of a later day a word as to what constituted the Jameson raid would not be out of place here. Dr. Leander Starr Jameson was an English physician, located at Kimberley. President Kruger (Oom Paul), head of the South African Republic, was one of his patients; also, Lobengula, the Matabele chief. From Lobengula concessions were obtained which led to the formation of the South African Company. Jameson gave up his profession and went in for conquest, associating himself with the projects of Cecil Rhodes. In time he became administrator of Rhodesia. By the end of 1894 he was in high feather, and during a visit to England was feted as a sort of romantic conqueror of the olden time. Perhaps this turned his head; at all events at the end of 1895 came the startling news that “Dr. Jim,” as he was called, at the head of six hundred men, had ridden into the Transvaal in support of a Rhodes scheme for an uprising at Johannesburg. The raid was a failure. Jameson, and those other knights of adventure, were captured by the forces of “Oom Paul,” and some of them barely escaped execution. The Boer president handed them over to the English Government for punishment, and they received varying sentences, but all were eventually released. Jameson, later, became again prominent in South-African politics, but there is no record of any further raids.
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The Clemens party sailed from South Africa the middle of July, 1896, and on the last day of the month reached England. They had not planned to return to America, but to spend the winter in or near London in some quiet place where Clemens could write the book of his travels.
The two daughters in America, Susy and Jean, were expected to arrive August 12th, but on that day there came, instead, a letter saying that Susy Clemens was not well enough to sail. A cable inquiry was immediately sent, but the reply when it came was not satisfactory, and Mrs. Clemens and Clara sailed for America without further delay. This was on August 15th. Three days later, in the old home at Hartford, Susy Clemens died of cerebral fever. She had been visiting Mrs. Charles Dudley Warner, but by the physician’s advice had been removed to the comfort and quiet of her own home, only a few steps away.
Mark Twain, returning from his triumphant tour of the world in the hope that soon, now, he might be free from debt, with his family happily gathered about him, had to face alone this cruel blow. There was no purpose in his going to America; Susy would be buried long before his arrival. He awaited in England the return of his broken family. They lived that winter in a quiet corner of Chelsea, No. 23 Tedworth Square.
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To Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, in Hartford, Conn.:
Permanent address:
Chatto & Windus
111 T. MARTIN’S Lane, London,
Sept. 27, ’96.
Through Livy and Katy I have learned, dear old Joe, how loyally you stood poor Susy’s friend, and mine, and Livy’s: how you came all the way down, twice, from your summer refuge on your merciful errands to bring the peace and comfort of your beloved presence, first to that poor child, and again to the broken heart of her poor desolate mother. It was like you; like your good great heart, like your matchless and unmatchable self. It was no surprise to me to learn that you stayed by Susy long hours, careless of fatigue and heat, it was no surprise to me to learn that you could still the storms that swept her spirit when no other could; for she loved you, revered you, trusted you, and “Uncle Joe” was no empty phrase upon her lips! I am grateful to you, Joe, grateful to the bottom of my heart, which has always been filled with love for you, and respect and admiration; and I would have chosen you out of all the world to take my place at Susy’s side and Livy’s in those black hours.
Susy was a rare creature; the rarest that has been reared in Hartford in this generation. And Livy knew it, and you knew it, and Charley Warner and George, and Harmony, and the Hillyers and the Dunhams and the Cheneys, and Susy and Lilly, and the Bunces, and Henry Robinson and Dick Burton, and perhaps others. And I also was of the number, but not in the same degree – for she was above my duller comprehension. I merely knew that she was my superior in fineness of mind, in the delicacy and subtlety of her intellect, but to fully measure her I was not competent. I know her better now; for I have read her private writings and sounded the deeps of her mind; and I know better, now, the treasure that was mine than I knew it when I had it. But I have this consolation: that dull as I was, I always knew enough to be proud when she commended me or my work – as proud as if Livy had done it herself – and I took it as the accolade from the hand of genius. I see now – as Livy always saw – that she had greatness in her; and that she herself was dimly conscious of it.
And now she is dead – and I can never tell her.
God bless you Joe – and all of your house.
S. L. C.
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To Mr. Henry C. Robinson, Hartford, Conn.:
London, Sept. 28, ’96.
It is as you say, dear old friend, “the pathos of it” yes, it was a piteous thing – as piteous a tragedy as any the year can furnish. When we started westward upon our long trip at half past ten at night, July 14, 1895, at Elmira, Susy stood on the platform in the blaze of the electric light waving her good-byes to us as the train glided away, her mother throwing back kisses and watching her through her tears. One year, one month, and one week later, Clara and her mother having exactly completed the circuit of the globe, drew up at that platform at the same hour of the night, in the same train and the same car – and again Susy had come a journey and was near at hand to meet them. She was waiting in the house she was born in, in her coffin.
All the circumstances of this death were pathetic – my brain is worn to rags rehearsing them. The mere death would have been cruelty enough, without overloading it and emphasizing it with that score of harsh and wanton details. The child was taken away when her mother was within three days of her, and would have given three decades for sight of her.