MY DEAR MR. BROWN,--During all the 15 months we have been spending on
the continent, we have been promising ourselves a sight of you as our
latest and most prized delight in a foreign land--but our hope has
failed, our plan has miscarried. One obstruction after another intruded
itself, and our short sojourn of three or four weeks on English soil was
thus frittered gradually away, and we were at last obliged to give up
the idea of seeing you at all. It is a great disappointment, for we
wanted to show you how much “Megalopis” has grown (she is 7 now) and
what a fine creature her sister is, and how prettily they both speak
German. There are six persons in my party, and they are as difficult
to cart around as nearly any other menagerie would be. My wife and Miss
Spaulding are along, and you may imagine how they take to heart this
failure of our long promised Edinburgh trip. We never even wrote you,
because we were always so sure, from day to day, that our affairs
would finally so shape themselves as to let us get to Scotland. But
no,--everything went wrong we had only flying trips here and there in
place of the leisurely ones which we had planned.
We arrived in Liverpool an hour ago very tired, and have halted at
this hotel (by the advice of misguided friends)--and if my instinct
and experience are worth anything, it is the very worst hotel on earth,
without any exception. We shall move to another hotel early in the
morning to spend to-morrow. We sail for America next day in the
“Gallic.”
We all join in the sincerest love to you, and in the kindest remembrance
to “Jock”--[Son of Doctor Brown.]--and your sister.
Truly yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
It was September 3, 1879, that Mark Twain returned to America by the
steamer Gallic. In the seventeen months of his absence he had taken
on a “traveled look” and had added gray hairs. A New York paper
said of his arrival that he looked older than when he went to
Germany, and that his hair had turned quite gray.
Mark Twain had not finished his book of travel in Paris--in fact,
it seemed to him far from complete--and he settled down rather
grimly to work on it at Quarry Farm. When, after a few days no word
of greeting came from Howells, Clemens wrote to ask if he were dead
or only sleeping. Howells hastily sent a line to say that he had
been sleeping “The sleep of a torpid conscience. I will feign that
I did not know where to write you; but I love you and all of yours,
and I am tremendously glad that you are home again. When and where
shall we meet? Have you come home with your pockets full of
Atlantic papers?” Clemens, toiling away at his book, was, as usual,
not without the prospect of other plans. Orion, as literary
material, never failed to excite him.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
ELMIRA, Sept. 15, 1879.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--When and where? Here on the farm would be an elegant
place to meet, but of course you cannot come so far. So we will say
Hartford or Belmont, about the beginning of November. The date of our
return to Hartford is uncertain, but will be three or four weeks hence,
I judge. I hope to finish my book here before migrating.
I think maybe I've got some Atlantic stuff in my head, but there's none
in MS, I believe.
Say--a friend of mine wants to write a play with me, I to furnish the
broad-comedy cuss. I don't know anything about his ability, but his
letter serves to remind me of our old projects. If you haven't used
Orion or Old Wakeman, don't you think you and I can get together and
grind out a play with one of those fellows in it? Orion is a field
which grows richer and richer the more he mulches it with each new
top-dressing of religion or other guano. Drop me an immediate line about
this, won't you? I imagine I see Orion on the stage, always gentle,
always melancholy, always changing his politics and religion, and trying
to reform the world, always inventing something, and losing a limb by
a new kind of explosion at the end of each of the four acts. Poor old
chap, he is good material. I can imagine his wife or his sweetheart
reluctantly adopting each of his new religious in turn, just in time to
see him waltz into the next one and leave her isolated once more.
(Mem. Orion's wife has followed him into the outer darkness, after 30
years' rabid membership in the Presbyterian Church.)
Well, with the sincerest and most abounding love to you and yours, from
all this family, I am,
Yrs ever
MARK.
The idea of the play interested Howells, but he had twinges of
conscience in the matter of using Orion as material. He wrote:
“More than once I have taken the skeleton of that comedy of ours and
viewed it with tears..... I really have a compunction or two about
helping to put your brother into drama. You can say that he is your
brother, to do what you like with him, but the alien hand might
inflict an incurable hurt on his tender heart.”
As a matter of fact, Orion Clemens had a keen appreciation of his
own shortcomings, and would have enjoyed himself in a play as much
as any observer of it. Indeed, it is more than likely that he would
have been pleased at the thought of such distinguished
dramatization. From the next letter one might almost conclude that
he had received a hint of this plan, and was bent upon supplying
rich material.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
ELMIRA, Oct. 9 '79.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Since my return, the mail facilities have enabled
Orion to keep me informed as to his intentions. Twenty-eight days ago
it was his purpose to complete a work aimed at religion, the preface
to which he had already written. Afterward he began to sell off
his furniture, with the idea of hurrying to Leadville and tackling
silver-mining--threw up his law den and took in his sign. Then he
wrote to Chicago and St. Louis newspapers asking for a situation as
“paragrapher”--enclosing a taste of his quality in the shape of two
stanzas of “humorous rhymes.” By a later mail on the same day he applied
to New York and Hartford insurance companies for copying to do.
However, it would take too long to detail all his projects. They
comprise a removal to south-west Missouri; application for a reporter's
berth on a Keokuk paper; application for a compositor's berth on a St.
Louis paper; a re-hanging of his attorney's sign, “though it only creaks
and catches no flies;” but last night's letter informs me that he has
retackled the religious question, hired a distant den to write in,
applied to my mother for $50 to re-buy his furniture, which has advanced
in value since the sale--purposes buying $25 worth of books necessary to
his labors which he had previously been borrowing, and his first chapter
is already on its way to me for my decision as to whether it has enough
ungodliness in it or not. Poor Orion!
Your letter struck me while I was meditating a project to beguile you,
and John Hay and Joe Twichell, into a descent upon Chicago which I
dream of making, to witness the re-union of the great Commanders of the
Western Army Corps on the 9th of next month. My sluggish soul needs
a fierce upstirring, and if it would not get it when Grant enters the
meeting place I must doubtless “lay” for the final resurrection. Can you
and Hay go? At the same time, confound it, I doubt if I can go myself,
for this book isn't done yet. But I would give a heap to be there. I
mean to heave some holiness into the Hartford primaries when I go back;
and if there was a solitary office in the land which majestic ignorance
and incapacity, coupled with purity of heart, could fill, I would run
for it. This naturally reminds me of Bret Harte--but let him pass.
We propose to leave here for New York Oct. 21, reaching Hartford 24th or
25th. If, upon reflection, you Howellses find, you can stop over here
on your way, I wish you would do it, and telegraph me. Getting pretty
hungry to see you. I had an idea that this was your shortest way home,
but like as not my geography is crippled again--it usually is.
Yrs ever
MARK.
The “Reunion of the Great Commanders,” mentioned in the foregoing,
was a welcome to General Grant after his journey around the world.
Grant's trip had been one continuous ovation--a triumphal march.
In '79 most of his old commanders were still alive, and they had
planned to assemble in Chicago to do him honor. A Presidential year
was coming on, but if there was anything political in the project
there were no surface indications. Mark Twain, once a Confederate
soldier, had long since been completely “desouthernized”--at least
to the point where he felt that the sight of old comrades paying
tribute to the Union commander would stir his blood as perhaps it
had not been stirred, even in that earlier time, when that same
commander had chased him through the Missouri swamps. Grant,
indeed, had long since become a hero to Mark Twain, though it is
highly unlikely that Clemens favored the idea of a third term. Some
days following the preceding letter an invitation came for him to be
present at the Chicago reunion; but by this time he had decided not
to go. The letter he wrote has been preserved.
*****
To Gen. William E. Strong, in Chicago: