It was during the winter of '96, in London, that Clemens took an active
interest in the education of Helen Keller and enlisted the most valuable
adherent in that cause, that is to say, Henry H. Rogers. It was to Mrs.
Rogers that he wrote, heading his letter:
For & in behalf
of Helen Keller,
Stone blind & deaf,
& formerly dumb.
DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--Experience has convinced me that when one
wished to set a hard-worked man at something which he mightn't
prefer to be bothered with it is best to move upon him behind his
wife. If she can't convince him it isn't worth while for other
people to try.
Mr. Rogers will remember our visit with that astonishing girl at
Lawrence Hutton's house when she was fourteen years old. Last July,
in Boston, when she was 16 she underwent the Harvard examination for
admission to Radcliffe College. She passed without a single
condition. She was allowed only the same amount of time that is
granted to other applicants, & this was shortened in her case by the
fact that the question-papers had to be read to her. Yet she scored
an average of 90, as against an average of 78 on the part of the
other applicants.
It won't do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from
her studies because of poverty. If she can go on with them she will
make a fame that will endure in history for centuries. Along her
special lines she is the most extraordinary product of all the ages.
There is danger that she must retire from the struggle for a college
degree for lack of support for herself & for Miss Sullivan (the
teacher who has been with her from the start--Mr. Rogers will
remember her). Mrs. Hutton writes to ask me to interest rich
Englishmen in her case, & I would gladly try, but my secluded life
will not permit it. I see nobody. Nobody knows my address.
Nothing but the strictest hiding can enable me to write my book in
time.
So I thought of this scheme: Beg you to lay siege to your husband &
get him to interest himself and Messrs. John D. & William
Rockefeller & the other Standard Oil chiefs in Helen's case; get
them to subscribe an annual aggregate of six or seven hundred or a
thousand dollars--& agree to continue this for three or four years,
until she has completed her college course. I'm not trying to limit
their generosity--indeed no; they may pile that Standard Oil Helen
Keller College Fund as high as they please; they have my consent.
Mrs. Hutton's idea is to raise a permanent fund, the interest upon
which shall support Helen & her teacher & put them out of the fear
of want. I sha'n't say a word against it, but she will find it a
difficult & disheartening job, & meanwhile what is to become of that
miraculous girl?
No, for immediate and sound effectiveness, the thing is for you to
plead with Mr. Rogers for this hampered wonder of your sex, & send
him clothed with plenary powers to plead with the other chiefs--they
have spent mountains of money upon the worthiest benevolences, & I
think that the same spirit which moved them to put their hands down
through their hearts into their pockets in those cases will answer.
“Here!” when its name is called in this one.
There--I don't need to apologize to you or to H. H. for this appeal
that I am making; I know you too well for that:
Good-by, with love to all of you,
S. L. CLEMENS.
The result of this letter was that Mr. Rogers personally took charge of
Helen Keller's fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for
her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring
fame which Mark Twain had foreseen.
Mr. Rogers wrote that, by a curious coincidence, a letter had come to
him from Mrs. Hutton on the same morning that Mrs. Rogers had received
hers from Tedworth Square. Clemens sent grateful acknowledgments to Mrs.
Rogers.
DEAR MRS. ROGERS,--It is superb! And I am beyond measure grateful
to you both. I knew you would be interested in that wonderful girl,
& that Mr. Rogers was already interested in her & touched by her; &
I was sure that if nobody else helped her you two would; but you
have gone far & away beyond the sum I expected--may your lines fall
in pleasant places here, & Hereafter for it!
The Huttons are as glad & grateful as they can be, & I am glad for
their sakes as well as for Helen's.
I want to thank Mr. Rogers for crucifying himself on the same old
cross between Bliss & Harper; & goodness knows I hope he will come
to enjoy it above all other dissipations yet, seeing that it has
about it the elements of stability & permanency. However, at any
time that he says sign we're going to do it.
Ever sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
CXCVII. FINISHING THE BOOK OF TRAVEL. One reading the Equator book
to-day, and knowing the circumstances under which it was written, might
be puzzled to reconcile the secluded household and its atmosphere of
sorrow with certain gaieties of the subject matter. The author himself
wondered at it, and to Howells wrote:
I don't mean that I am miserable; no-worse than that--indifferent.
Indifferent to nearly everything but work. I like that; I enjoy it,
& stick to it. I do it without purpose & without ambition; merely
for the love of it. Indeed, I am a mud-image; & it puzzles me to
know what it is in me that writes & has comedy fancies & finds
pleasure in phrasing them. It is the law of our nature, of course,
or it wouldn't happen; the thing in me forgets the presence of the
mud-image, goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of
no kinship with it.
He saw little company. Now and, then a good friend, J.Y.W. MacAlister,
came in for a smoke with him. Once Clemens sent this line:
You speak a language which I understand. I would like to see you.
Could you come and smoke some manilas; I would, of course, say dine,
but my family are hermits & cannot see any one, but I would have a
fire in my study, & if you came at any time after your dinner that
might be most convenient for you you would find me & a welcome.
Clemens occasionally went out to dinner, but very privately. He dined
with Bram Stoker, who invited Anthony Hope and one or two others, and
with the Chattos and Mr. Percy Spalding; also with Andrew Lang, who
wrote, “Your old friend, Lord Lome, wants to see you again”; with the
Henry M. Stanleys and Poultney Bigelow, and with Francis H. Skrine, a
government official he had met in India. But in all such affairs he
was protected from strangers and his address was kept a secret from the
public. Finally, the new-found cousin, Dr. Jim Clemens, fell ill, and
the newspapers had it presently that Mark Twain was lying at the point
of death. A reporter ferreted him out and appeared at Tedworth Square
with cabled instructions from his paper. He was a young man, and
innocently enough exhibited his credentials. His orders read:
“If Mark Twain very ill, five hundred words. If dead, send one
thousand.”
Clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable.
“You don't need as much as that,” he said. “Just say the report of my
death has been grossly exaggerated.”
The young man went away quite seriously, and it was not until he was
nearly to his office that he saw the joke. Then, of course, it was
flashed all over the world.
Clemens kept grinding steadily at the book, for it was to be a very
large volume--larger than he had ever written before. To MacAlister,
April 6, 1897, he wrote, replying to some invitation:
Ah, but I mustn't stir from my desk before night now when the
publisher is hurrying me & I am almost through. I am up at work
now--4 o'clock in the morning-and a few more spurts will pull me
through. You come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting a
working-man to strike & go to tea.
And it would move me too deeply to see Miss Corelli. When I saw her
last it was on the street in Homburg, & Susy was walking with me.
On April 13th he makes a note-book entry: “I finished my book to-day,”
and on the 15th he wrote MacAlister, inclosing some bits of manuscript:
I finished my book yesterday, and the madam edited this stuff out of
it--on the ground that the first part is not delicate & the last
part is indelicate. Now, there's a nice distinction for you--&
correctly stated, too, & perfectly true.
It may interest the reader to consider briefly the manner in which Mark
Twain's “editor” dealt with his manuscript, and a few pages of this
particular book remain as examples. That he was not always entirely
tractable, or at least submissive, but that he did yield, and
graciously, is clearly shown.
In one of her comments Mrs. Clemens wrote:
Page 597. I hate to say it, but it seems to me that you go too
minutely into particulars in describing the feats of the
aboriginals. I felt it in the boomerang-throwing.
And Clemens just below has written:
Boomerang has been furnished with a special train--that is, I've
turned it into “Appendix.” Will that answer?
Page 1002. I don't like the “shady-principled cat that has a family
in every port.”
Then I'll modify him just a little.
Page 1020. 9th line from the top. I think some other word would be
better than “stench.” You have used that pretty often.
But can't I get it in anywhere? You've knocked it out every time.
Out it goes again. And yet “stench” is a noble, good word.
Page 1038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave
boy.
It's out, and my father is whitewashed.
Page 1050. 2d line from the bottom. Change breech-clout. It's a
word that you love and I abominate. I would take that and “offal”
out of the language.
You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy.
Page 1095. Perhaps you don't care, but whoever told you that the
Prince's green stones were rubies told an untruth. They were superb
emeralds. Those strings of pearls and emeralds were famous all over
Bombay.
All right, I'll make them emeralds, but it loses force. Green
rubies is a fresh thing. And besides it was one of the Prince's own
staff liars that told me.
That the book was not quite done, even after the triumphant entry of
April 13th, is shown by another note which followed something more than
a month later:
May 18, 1897. Finished the book again--addition of 30,000 words.
And to MacAlister he wrote:
I have finished the book at last--and finished it for good this
time. Now I am ready for dissipation with a good conscience. What
night will you come down & smoke?
His book finished, Clemens went out rather more freely, and one evening
allowed MacAlister to take him around to the Savage Club. There happened
to be a majority of the club committee present, and on motion Mark Twain
was elected an honorary life member. There were but three others on whom
this distinction had been conferred--Stanley, Nansen, and the Prince of
Wales. When they told Mark Twain this he said:
“Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine.”--[In a volume of
Savage Club anecdotes the date of Mark Twain's election to honorary
membership is given as 1899. Clemens's notebook gives it in 1897.]
He did not intend to rest; in another entry we find:
May 23, 1897. Wrote first chapter of above story to-day.
The “above story” is a synopsis of a tale which he tried then and later
in various forms--a tale based on a scientific idea that one may dream
an episode covering a period of years in minute detail in what, by our
reckoning, may be no more than a few brief seconds. In this particular
form of the story a man sits down to write some memories and falls into
a doze. The smell of his cigarette smoke causes him to dream of the
burning of his home, the destruction of his family, and of a long period
of years following. Awakening a few seconds later, and confronted by his
wife and children, he refuses to believe in their reality, maintaining
that this condition, and not the other, is the dream. Clemens tried the
psychological literary experiment in as many as three different ways
during the next two or three years, and each at considerable length; but
he developed none of them to his satisfaction, or at least he brought
none of them to conclusion. Perhaps the most weird of these attempts,
and the most intensely interesting, so long as the verisimilitude is
maintained, is a dream adventure in a drop of water which, through an
incredible human reduction to microbic, even atomic, proportions, has
become a vast tempestuous sea. Mark Twain had the imagination for these
undertakings and the literary workmanship, lacking only a definite plan
for development of his tale--a lack which had brought so many of his
literary ventures to the rocks.