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*****
To George Iles, far the Toque Blew Snow-shoe Club, Montreal:
Detroit, February 12, 1885.
Midnight, P.S.
My dear Iles, – I got your other telegram a while ago, and answered it, explaining that I get only a couple of hours in the middle of the day for social life. I know it doesn’t seem rational that a man should have to lie abed all day in order to be rested and equipped for talking an hour at night, and yet in my case and Cable’s it is so. Unless I get a great deal of rest, a ghastly dulness settles down upon me on the platform, and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment. Usually it is just this latter, but that is because I take my rest faithfully, and prepare myself to do my duty by my audience.
I am the obliged and appreciative servant of my brethren of the Snow-shoe Club, and nothing in the world would delight me more than to come to their house without naming time or terms on my own part – but you see how it is. My cast iron duty is to my audience – it leaves me no liberty and no option.
With kindest regards to the Club, and to you,
I am Sincerely yours,
S. L. Clemens.
In the next letter we reach the end of the Clemens-Cable venture and get a characteristic summing up of Mark Twain’s general attitude toward the companion of his travels. It must be read only in the clear realization of Mark Twain’s attitude toward orthodoxy, and his habit of humor. Cable was as rigidly orthodox as Mark Twain was revolutionary. The two were never anything but the best of friends.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Philada. Feb. 27, ’85.
My dear Howells, – To-night in Baltimore, to-morrow afternoon and night in Washington, and my four-months platform campaign is ended at last. It has been a curious experience. It has taught me that Cable’s gifts of mind are greater and higher than I had suspected. But—
That “But” is pointing toward his religion. You will never, never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly. Mind you, I like him; he is pleasant company; I rage and swear at him sometimes, but we do not quarrel; we get along mighty happily together; but in him and his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.
Nat Goodwin was on the train yesterday. He plays in Washington all the coming week. He is very anxious to get our Sellers play and play it under changed names. I said the only thing I could do would be to write to you. Well, I’ve done it.
Ys Ever,
Mark.
Clemens and Webster were often at the house of General Grant during these early days of 1885, and it must have been Webster who was present with Clemens on the great occasion described in the following telegram. It was on the last day and hour of President Arthur’s administration that the bill was passed which placed Ulysses S. Grant as full General with full pay on the retired list, and it is said that the congressional clock was set back in order that this enactment might become a law before the administration changed. General Grant had by this time developed cancer and was already in feeble health.
*****
Telegram to Mrs. Clemens, in Hartford:
New York, Mar. 4, 1885.
To Mrs. S. L. Clemens, We were at General Grant’s at noon and a telegram arrived that the last act of the expiring congress late this morning retired him with full General’s rank and accompanying emoluments. The effect upon him was like raising the dead. We were present when the telegram was put in his hand.
S. L. Clemens.
Something has been mentioned before of Mark Twain’s investments and the generally unprofitable habit of them. He had a trusting nature, and was usually willing to invest money on any plausible recommendation. He was one of thousands such, and being a person of distinction he now and then received letters of inquiry, complaint, or condolence. A minister wrote him that he had bought some stocks recommended by a Hartford banker and advertised in a religious paper. He added, “After I made that purchase they wrote me that you had just bought a hundred shares and that you were a ‘shrewd’ man.” The writer closed by asking for further information. He received it, as follows:
*****
To the Rev. J—, in Baltimore:
Washington, Mch. 2,’85.
My dear sir, – I take my earliest opportunity to answer your favor of Feb. B– was premature in calling me a “shrewd man.” I wasn’t one at that time, but am one now – that is, I am at least too shrewd to ever again invest in anything put on the Mark.t by B—. I know nothing whatever about the Bank Note Co., and never did know anything about it. B– sold me about $4,000 or $5,000 worth of the stock at $110, and I own it yet. He sold me $10,000 worth of another rose-tinted stock about the same time. I have got that yet, also. I judge that a peculiarity of B—’s stocks is that they are of the staying kind. I think you should have asked somebody else whether I was a shrewd man or not for two reasons: the stock was advertised in a religious paper, a circumstance which was very suspicious; and the compliment came to you from a man who was interested to make a purchaser of you. I am afraid you deserve your loss. A financial scheme advertised in any religious paper is a thing which any living person ought to know enough to avoid; and when the factor is added that M. runs that religious paper, a dead person ought to know enough to avoid it.
Very Truly Yours,
S. L. Clemens.
The story of Huck Finn was having a wide success. Webster handled it skillfully, and the sales were large. In almost every quarter its welcome was enthusiastic. Here and there, however, could be found an exception; Huck’s morals were not always approved of by library reading-committees. The first instance of this kind was reported from Concord; and would seem not to have depressed the author-publisher.
*****
To Chas. L. Webster, in New York:
Mch 18, ’85.
Dear Charley, – The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass, have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as “trash and suitable only for the slums.” That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.
S. L. C.
Perhaps the Concord Free Trade Club had some idea of making amends to Mark Twain for the slight put upon his book by their librarians, for immediately after the Huck Finn incident they notified him of his election to honorary membership.
Those were the days of “authors’ readings,” and Clemens and Howells not infrequently assisted at these functions, usually given as benefits of one kind or another. From the next letter, written following an entertainment given for the Longfellow memorial, we gather that Mark Twain’s opinion of Howells’s reading was steadily improving.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Hartford, May 5, ’85.
My dear Howells,—…. Who taught you to read? Observation and thought, I guess. And practice at the Tavern Club? – yes; and that was the best teaching of all:
Well, you sent even your daintiest and most delicate and fleeting points home to that audience – absolute proof of good reading. But you couldn’t read worth a damn a few years ago. I do not say this to flatter. It is true I looked around for you when I was leaving, but you had already gone.
Alas, Osgood has failed at last. It was easy to see that he was on the very verge of it a year ago, and it was also easy to see that he was still on the verge of it a month or two ago; but I continued to hope – but not expect that he would pull through. The Library of Humor is at his dwelling house, and he will hand it to you whenever you want it.
To save it from any possibility of getting mixed up in the failure, perhaps you had better send down and get it. I told him, the other day, that an order of any kind from you would be his sufficient warrant for its delivery to you.
In two days General Grant has dictated 50 pages of foolscap, and thus the Wilderness and Appomattox stand for all time in his own words. This makes the second volume of his book as valuable as the first.
He looks mighty well, these latter days.
Yrs Ever,
Mark.
“I am exceedingly glad,” wrote Howells, “that you approve of my reading, for it gives me some hope that I may do something on the platform next winter…. but I would never read within a hundred miles of you, if I could help it. You simply straddled down to the footlights and took that house up in the hollow of your hand and tickled it.”
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Elmira, July 21, 1885.
My dear Howells, – You are really my only author; I am restricted to you, I wouldn’t give a damn for the rest.
I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored and tedious analyses of feelings and motives, its paltry and tiresome people, its unexciting and uninteresting story, and its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, and what not, and nearly died from the overwork. I wouldn’t read another of those books for a farm. I did try to read one other – Daniel Deronda. I dragged through three chapters, losing flesh all the time, and then was honest enough to quit, and confess to myself that I haven’t any romance literature appetite, as far as I can see, except for your books.
But what I started to say, was, that I have just read Part II of Indian Summer, and to my mind there isn’t a waste line in it, or one that could be improved. I read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; and read it again to-day, ending with the same opinion emphasized. I haven’t read Part I yet, because that number must have reached Hartford after we left; but we are going to send down town for a copy, and when it comes I am to read both parts aloud to the family. It is a beautiful story, and makes a body laugh all the time, and cry inside, and feel so old and so forlorn; and gives him gracious glimpses of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless regret, and build up in him a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate – and Lord, no chance ever to get back there again! That is the thing that hurts. Well, you have done it with marvelous facility and you make all the motives and feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does. I can’t stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people; I see what they are at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me to death. And as for “The Bostonians,” I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that.
Yrs Ever,
Mark.
It is as easy to understand Mark Twain’s enjoyment of Indian Summer as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians. He cared little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest and most direct terms. It is interesting to note that in thanking Clemens for his compliment Howells wrote: “What people cannot see is that I analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the analytical school, which I am supposed to belong to, and I want to thank you for using your eyes….. Did you ever read De Foe’s ‘Roxana’? If not, then read it, not merely for some of the deepest insights into the lying, suffering, sinning, well-meaning human soul, but for the best and most natural English that a book was ever written in.”
General Grant worked steadily on his book, dictating when he could, making brief notes on slips of paper when he could no longer speak. Clemens visited him at Mt. McGregor and brought the dying soldier the comforting news that enough of his books were already sold to provide generously for his family, and that the sales would aggregate at least twice as much by the end of the year.
This was some time in July. On the 23d of that month General Grant died. Immediately there was a newspaper discussion as to the most suitable place for the great chieftain to lie. Mark Twain’s contribution to this debate, though in the form of an open letter, seems worthy of preservation here.
*****
To the New York “Sun,” on the proper place for Grant’s Tomb:
To the editor op’ the sun – Sir, – The newspaper atmosphere is charged with objections to New York as a place of sepulchre for General Grant, and the objectors are strenuous that Washington is the right place. They offer good reasons – good temporary reasons – for both of these positions.
But it seems to me that temporary reasons are not mete for the occasion. We need to consider posterity rather than our own generation. We should select a grave which will not merely be in the right place now, but will still be in the right place 500 years from now.
How does Washington promise as to that? You have only to hit it in one place to kill it. Some day the west will be numerically strong enough to move the seat of government; her past attempts are a fair warning that when the day comes she will do it. Then the city of Washington will lose its consequence and pass out of the public view and public talk. It is quite within the possibilities that, a century hence, people would wonder and say, “How did your predecessors come to bury their great dead in this deserted place?”
But as long as American civilisation lasts New York will last. I cannot but think she has been well and wisely chosen as the guardian of a grave which is destined to become almost the most conspicuous in the world’s history. Twenty centuries from now New York will still be New York, still a vast city, and the most notable object in it will still be the tomb and monument of General Grant.
I observe that the common and strongest objection to New York is that she is not “national ground.” Let us give ourselves no uneasiness about that. Wherever General Grant’s body lies, that is national ground.
S. L. Clemens.
Elmira, July 27.
The letter that follows is very long, but it seems too important and too interesting to be omitted in any part. General Grant’s early indulgence in liquors had long been a matter of wide, though not very definite, knowledge. Every one had heard how Lincoln, on being told that Grant drank, remarked something to the effect that he would like to know what kind of whisky Grant used so that he might get some of it for his other generals. Henry Ward Beecher, selected to deliver a eulogy on the dead soldier, and doubtless wishing neither to ignore the matter nor to make too much of it, naturally turned for information to the publisher of Grant’s own memoirs, hoping from an advance copy to obtain light.
*****
To Henry Ward Beecher, Brooklyn:
Elmira, N. Y. Sept. 11, ’85.
My dear Mr. Beecher, – My nephew Webster is in Europe making contracts for the Memoirs. Before he sailed he came to me with a writing, directed to the printers and binders, to this effect:
“Honor no order for a sight or copy of the Memoirs while I am absent, even though it be signed by Mr. Clemens himself.”
I gave my permission. There were weighty reasons why I should not only give my permission, but hold it a matter of honor to not dissolve the order or modify it at any time. So I did all of that – said the order should stand undisturbed to the end. If a principal could dissolve his promise as innocently as he can dissolve his written order unguarded by his promise, I would send you a copy of the Memoirs instantly. I did not foresee you, or I would have made an exception.
………………………
My idea gained from army men, is that the drunkenness (and sometimes pretty reckless spreeing, nights,) ceased before he came East to be Lt. General. (Refer especially to Gen. Wm. B. Franklin[29]) It was while Grant was still in the West that Mr. Lincoln said he wished he could find out what brand of whisky that fellow used, so he could furnish it to some of the other generals. Franklin saw Grant tumble from his horse drunk, while reviewing troops in New Orleans. The fall gave him a good deal of a hurt. He was then on the point of leaving for the Chattanooga region. I naturally put “that and that together” when I read Gen. O. O. Howards’s article in the Christian Union, three or four weeks ago – where he mentions that the new General arrived lame from a recent accident. (See that article.) And why not write Howard?
Franklin spoke positively of the frequent spreeing. In camp – in time of war.
…………………….
Captain Grant was frequently threatened by the Commandant of his Oregon post with a report to the War Department of his conduct unless he modified his intemperance. The report would mean dismissal from the service. At last the report had to be made out; and then, so greatly was the captain beloved, that he was privately informed, and was thus enabled to rush his resignation to Washington ahead of the report. Did the report go, nevertheless? I don’t know. If it did, it is in the War Department now, possibly, and seeable. I got all this from a regular army man, but I can’t name him to save me.
The only time General Grant ever mentioned liquor to me was about last April or possibly May. He said:
“If I could only build up my strength! The doctors urge whisky and champagne; but I can’t take them; I can’t abide the taste of any kind of liquor.”
Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was become an offense? Or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others and likewise himself that he hadn’t even ever had any taste for it? It sounded like the latter, but that’s no evidence.
He told me in the fall of ’84 that there was something the matter with his throat, and that at the suggestion of his physicians he had reduced his smoking to one cigar a day. Then he added, in a casual fashion, that he didn’t care for that one, and seldom smoked it.
I could understand that feeling. He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination – the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk. It’s the perfect way and the only true way (I speak from experience.) How I do hate those enemies of the human race who go around enslaving God’s free people with pledges – to quit drinking instead of to quit wanting to drink.
But Sherman and Van Vliet know everything concerning Grant; and if you tell them how you want to use the facts, both of them will testify. Regular army men have no concealments about each other; and yet they make their awful statements without shade or color or malice with a frankness and a child-like naivety, indeed, which is enchanting-and stupefying. West Point seems to teach them that, among other priceless things not to be got in any other college in this world. If we talked about our guild-mates as I have heard Sherman, Grant, Van Vliet and others talk about theirs – mates with whom they were on the best possible terms – we could never expect them to speak to us again.
…………………..
I am reminded, now, of another matter. The day of the funeral I sat an hour over a single drink and several cigars with Van Vliet and Sherman and Senator Sherman; and among other things Gen. Sherman said, with impatient scorn:
“The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude language and indelicate stories! Why Grant was full of humor, and full of the appreciation of it. I have sat with him by the hour listening to Jim Nye’s yarns, and I reckon you know the style of Jim Nye’s histories, Clemens. It makes me sick – that newspaper nonsense. Grant was no namby-pamby fool, he was a man – all over – rounded and complete.”
I wish I had thought of it! I would have said to General Grant: “Put the drunkenness in the Memoirs – and the repentance and reform. Trust the people.”
But I will wager there is not a hint in the book. He was sore, there. As much of the book as I have read gives no hint, as far as I recollect.
The sick-room brought out the points of Gen. Grant’s character – some of them particularly, to wit:
His patience; his indestructible equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, “Save your labor, I know him; he is in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not – and, he will give the thing the benefit of the doubt; he will fulfill that half-promise or kill himself trying;” Fred Grant was right – he did fulfill it;) his aggravatingly trustful nature; his genuineness, simplicity, modesty, diffidence, self-depreciation, poverty in the quality of vanity-and, in no contradiction of this last, his simple pleasure in the flowers and general ruck sent to him by Tom, Dick and Harry from everywhere – a pleasure that suggested a perennial surprise that he should be the object of so much fine attention – he was the most lovable great child in the world; (I mentioned his loyalty: you remember Harrison, the colored body-servant? the whole family hated him, but that did not make any difference, the General always stood at his back, wouldn’t allow him to be scolded; always excused his failures and deficiencies with the one unvarying formula, “We are responsible for these things in his race – it is not fair to visit our fault upon them – let him alone;” so they did let him alone, under compulsion, until the great heart that was his shield was taken away; then – well they simply couldn’t stand him, and so they were excusable for determining to discharge him – a thing which they mortally hated to do, and by lucky accident were saved from the necessity of doing;) his toughness as a bargainer when doing business for other people or for his country (witness his “terms” at Donelson, Vicksburg, etc.; Fred Grant told me his father wound up an estate for the widow and orphans of a friend in St. Louis – it took several years; at the end every complication had been straightened out, and the property put upon a prosperous basis; great sums had passed through his hands, and when he handed over the papers there were vouchers to show what had been done with every penny) and his trusting, easy, unexacting fashion when doing business for himself (at that same time he was paying out money in driblets to a man who was running his farm for him – and in his first Presidency he paid every one of those driblets again (total, $3,000 F. said,) for he hadn’t a scrap of paper to show that he had ever paid them before; in his dealings with me he would not listen to terms which would place my money at risk and leave him protected – the thought plainly gave him pain, and he put it from him, waved it off with his hands, as one does accounts of crushings and mutilations – wouldn’t listen, changed the subject;) and his fortitude! He was under, sentence of death last spring; he sat thinking, musing, several days – nobody knows what about; then he pulled himself together and set to work to finish that book, a colossal task for a dying man. Presently his hand gave out; fate seemed to have got him checkmated. Dictation was suggested. No, he never could do that; had never tried it; too old to learn, now. By and by – if he could only do Appomattox-well. So he sent for a stenographer, and dictated 9,000 words at a single sitting! – never pausing, never hesitating for a word, never repeating – and in the written-out copy he made hardly a correction. He dictated again, every two or three days – the intervals were intervals of exhaustion and slow recuperation – and at last he was able to tell me that he had written more matter than could be got into the book. I then enlarged the book – had to. Then he lost his voice. He was not quite done yet, however – there was no end of little plums and spices to be stuck in, here and there; and this work he patiently continued, a few lines a day, with pad and pencil, till far into July, at Mt. McGregor. One day he put his pencil aside, and said he was done – there was nothing more to do. If I had been there I could have foretold the shock that struck the world three days later.