The Portable Mark Twain (85 page)

I surely have the equipment, a wide culture, and all of it real, none of it artificial, for I don't know anything about books.

[NO SIGNATURE.]

Susy dear, this is Susy [Clemens]'s birth day & she is 21—facts which will be drifting through your mind as you sit at your breakfast three hours from now—& there will be pictures drifting with the facts,—& ghosts. Well-a-day!

I dreamed I was born, & grew up, & was a pilot on the Mississippi, & a miner & journalist in Nevada, & a pilgrim in the Quaker City, & had a wife & children & went to live in a Villa out of Florence—& this dream goes on &
on
& sometimes seems
so
real that I almost believe it
is
real. I wonder if it is? But there is no way to tell, for if one applied tests,
they
would be part of the dream, too, & so would simply aid the deceit. I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real.

Betty the perfect-tempered left last night for Bad-Nauheim—her mother is dying. It is only a dream, probably, & doubtless there is no Betty & no mother; but it all has the effect of reality. Jean cried a good deal. . . .

Love to you & all.

SAML.*

 

 

 

HOTEL KRANTZ, WEIN, I, NEUER MARKT 6,

FEB. 26, 1899.

DEAR MAJOR,—No; it was to Bixby that I was apprenticed. He was to teach me the river for a certain specified sum. I have forgotten what it was, but I paid it. I steered a trip for Bart Bowen, of Keokuk, on the A. T. Lacy, and I was partner with Will Bowen

 

*Permission to publish from The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut. on the A. B. Chambers (one trip), and with Sam Bowen a whole summer on a small Memphis packet.

The newspaper report you sent me is incorrect. Bixby is not 67: he is 97. I am 63 myself, and I couldn't talk plain and had just begun to walk when I apprenticed myself to Bixby who was then passing himself off for 57—and successfully too, for he always looked 60 or 70 years younger than he really was. At that time he was piloting the Mississippi on a Potomac commission granted him by George Washington who was a personal friend of his before the Revolution. He has piloted every important river in America on that commission, he has also used it as a passport in Russia. I have never revealed these facts before. I notice, too, that you are deceiving the people concerning
your
age. The printed portrait which you have enclosed is not a portrait of you, but a portrait of me when I was 19. I remember very well when it was common for people to mistake Bixby for your grandson. Is it spreading, I wonder—this disposition of pilots to renew their youth by doubtful methods? Beck Jolly and Joe Bryan—they probably go to Sunday school now—but it will not deceive.

Yes, it is as you say. All of the procession but a fraction has passed. It is time for us all to fall in.

Sincerely yours,

S. L. CLEMENS

 

 

 

HOTEL KRANTZ

WIEN I. NEUER MARKT 6

APRIL 2, '99.

DEAR HOWELLS,—I am waiting for the April Harper, which is about due now; waiting, and strongly interested. You are old enough to be a weary man, with paling interests, but you do not show it. You do your work in the same old delicate and delicious and forceful and searching and perfect way. I don't know how you can—but I suspect. I suspect that to you there is still dignity in human life, and that Man is not a joke—a poor joke—the poorest that was ever contrived. Since I wrote my Bible, (last year)—which Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it, Man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before; and so I have lost my pride in him, and can't write gaily nor praise-fully about him any more. And I don't intend to try. I mean to go on writing, for that is my best amusement, but I shan't print much. (for I don't wish to be scalped, any more than another.)

April
5.
The Harper has come. I have been in Leipzig with your party, and then went on to Karlsbad and saw Mrs. Marsh's encounter with the swine with the toothpick and the other manners. —At this point Jean carried the magazine away.

Is it imagination, or—Anyway I seem to get furtive and fleeting glimpses which I take to be the weariness and condolence of age; indifference to sights and things once brisk with interest; tasteless stale stuff which used to be champagne; the boredom of travel: the secret sigh behind the public smile, the private What-in-hell-did-I-come-for!

But maybe that is your art. Maybe that is what you intend the reader to detect and think he has made a Columbus-discovery. Then it is well done, perfectly done. I wrote my last travel book—in hell; but I let on, the best I could, that it was an excursion through heaven. Some day I will read it, and if its lying cheerfulness fools me, then I shall believe it fooled the reader. How I did loathe that journey around the world!—except the sea-part and India. . . .

Sincerely yours,

S. L. CLEMENS

 

 

 

RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON.

FEB. '02.

 

DEAR JOE,—“After compliments.” From Bridgeport to New York; thence to home; and continuously until near midnight I wallowed and reeked with Jonathan [Edwards] in his insane debauch; rose immediately refreshed and fine at 10 this morning, but with a strange and haunting sense of having been on a three days' tear with a drunken lunatic. It is years since I have known these sensations. All through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad—a marvelous spectacle. No, not
all
through the book—the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism and its God begins to show up and shine red and hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment. By God I was ashamed to be in such company.

Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Arminian position) that the Man (or his Soul or his Will) never creates an impulse itself, but is moved to action by an impulse back of it. That's sound!

Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infalliably chooses the one which for the moment is most pleasing to ITSELF.
Perfectly
correct! An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.

Up to that point he could have written chapters III and IV of my suppressed “Gospel.” But there we seem to separate. He seems to concede the indisputable and unshakable dominion of Motive and Necessity (call them what he may, these are
exterior
forces and not under the man's authority, guidance or even suggestion) —then he suddenly flies the logic track and (to all seeming) makes the
man
and not these exterior forces responsible to God for the man's thoughts, words and acts. It is frank insanity.

I think that when he conceded the autocratic dominion of Motive and Necessity he grants a
third
position of mine—that man's mind is a mere machine—an
automatic
machine—which is handled entirely from the
outside,
the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing: not an ounce of its fuel, and not so much as a bare
suggestion
to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do, nor how it shall do it nor
when.

After that concession, it was time for him to get alarmed and
shirk
—for he was pointing straight for the only rational and possible next-station on
that
piece of road: the irresponsibility of man to God.

And so he shirked. Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result:

Man is commanded to do so-and-so;

It has been ordained from the beginning of time that some men
shan't
and others
can't.

I enjoy the Colonel very much, and shall enjoy the rest of him with an obscene delight.

Joe, the whole tribe shout love to you and yours!

MARK

 

 

 

RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON, FEBRUARY 22, 1902. DEAR MISS HELENE,—If you will let me call you so, considering that my head is white and that I have grown-up daughters. Your beautiful letter has given me such deep pleasure! I will make bold to claim you for a friend and lock you up with the rest of my riches; for I am a miser who counts his spoil every day and hoards it secretly and adds to it when he can, and is grateful to see it grow.

Some of that gold comes, like yourself, in a sealed package, and I can't see it and may never have the happiness; but I know its value without that, and by what sum it increases my wealth.

I have a Club, a private Club, which is all my own. I appoint the Members myself, and they can't help themselves, because I don't allow them to vote on their own appointment and I don't allow them to resign! They are all friends whom I have never seen (save one), but who have written friendly letters to me.

By the laws of my Club there can be only one Member in each country, and there can be no male Member but myself. Some day I may admit males, but I don't know—they are capricious and inharmonious, and their ways provoke me a good deal. It is a matter which the Club shall decide.

I have made four appointments in the past three or four months: You as Member for France, a young Highland girl as Member for Scotland, a Mohammedan girl as Member for Bengal, and a dear and bright young niece of mine as Member for the United States—for I do not represent a country myself, but am merely Member at Large for the Human Race.

You must not try to resign, for the laws of the Club do not allow that. You must console yourself by remembering that you are in the best of company; that nobody knows of your membership except myself—that no Member knows another's name, but only her country; that no taxes are levied and no meetings held (but how dearly I should like to attend one!).

One of my Members is a Princess of a royal house, another is the daughter of a village book-seller on the continent of Europe. For the only qualification for Membership is intellect and the spirit of good will; other distinctions, hereditary or acquired, do not count.

May I send you the Constitution and Laws of the Club? I shall be so pleased if I may. It is a document which one of my daughters typewrites for me when I need one for a new Member, and she would give her eyebrows to know what it is all about, but I strangle her curiosity by saying: “There are much cheaper typewriters than you are, my dear, and if you try to pry into the sacred mysteries of this Club one of your prosperities will perish sure.”

My favorite? It is “Joan of Arc.” My next is “Huckleberry Finn,” but the family's next is “The Prince and the Pauper.” (Yes, you are right—I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions.)

I wish you every good fortune and happiness and I thank you so much for your letter.

Sincerely yours,

S. L. CLEMENS

 

 

 

IN THE MOUNTAINS,

MAY 24, 1905.

DEAR MR. FULTON,—I remember, as if it were yesterday, that when I disembarked from the overland stage in front of the Ormsby in Carson City in August, 1861, I was not expecting to be asked to come again. I was tired, discouraged, white with alkali dust, and did not know anybody; and if you had said then, “Cheer up, desolate stranger, don't be down-hearted—pass on, and come again in 1905,” you cannot think how grateful I would have been and how gladly I would have closed the contract. Although I was not expecting to be invited, I was watching out for it, and was hurt and disappointed when you started to ask me and changed it to, “How soon are you going away?”

But you have made it all right, now, the wound is closed. And so I thank you sincerely for the invitation; and with you, all Reno, and if I were a few years younger I would accept it, and promptly. I would go. I would let somebody else do the oration, but, as for me, I would talk—just talk. I would renew my youth; and talk—and talk—and talk—and have the time of my life! I would march the unforgotten and unforgettable antiques by, and name their names, and give them reverent Hail-and-farewell as they passed: Goodman, McCarthy, Gillis, Curry, Baldwin, Winters, Howard, Nye, Stewart; Neely Johnson, Hal Clayton, North, Root,—and my brother, upon whom be peace!—and then the desperadoes, who make life a joy and the “Slaughterhouse” a precious possession: Sam Brown, Farmer Pete, Bill Mayfield, Six-fingered Jake, Jack Williams and the rest of the crimson discipleship—and so on and so on. Believe me, I would start a resurrection it would do you more good to look at than the next one will, if you go on the way you are doing now.

Those were the days!—those old ones. They will come no more. Youth will come no more. They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there have been no others like them. It chokes me up to think of them. Would you like me to come out there and cry? It would not beseem my white head.

Good-bye. I drink to you all. Have a good time—and take an old man's blessing.

MARK TWAIN

Biographical List of Correspondents

Burrough, Jacob H. (1825-1883).
Clemens's friend from the time they roomed together in St. Louis, 1854-55. He was impressed by Burrough's wide reading and literary judgment. Burrough later became a lawyer and judge in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.