They were spending the summer at Kaltenleutgeben, a pleasant village
near Vienna, but apparently not entirely quiet. Many friends came
out from Vienna, including a number of visiting Americans. Clemens,
however, appears to have had considerable time for writing, as we
gather from the next to Howells.
*****
To W. D. Howells, in America:
KALTENLEUTGEBEN, BEI WIEN,
Aug. 16, '98.
DEAR HOWELLS,--Your letter came yesterday. It then occurred to me that I
might have known (per mental telegraph) that it was due; for a couple of
weeks ago when the Weekly came containing that handsome reference to
me I was powerfully moved to write you; and my letter went on writing
itself while I was at work at my other literature during the day. But
next day my other literature was still urgent--and so on and so on; so
my letter didn't get put into ink at all. But I see now, that you were
writing, about that time, therefore a part of my stir could have come
across the Atlantic per mental telegraph. In 1876 or '75 I wrote
40,000 words of a story called “Simon Wheeler” wherein the nub was
the preventing of an execution through testimony furnished by mental
telegraph from the other side of the globe. I had a lot of people
scattered about the globe who carried in their pockets something like
the old mesmerizer-button, made of different metals, and when they
wanted to call up each other and have a talk, they “pressed the button”
or did something, I don't remember what, and communication was at once
opened. I didn't finish the story, though I re-began it in several new
ways, and spent altogether 70,000 words on it, then gave it up and threw
it aside.
This much as preliminary to this remark: some day people will be able
to call each other up from any part of the world and talk by mental
telegraph--and not merely by impression, the impression will be
articulated into words. It could be a terrible thing, but it won't be,
because in the upper civilizations everything like sentimentality (I was
going to say sentiment) will presently get materialized out of people
along with the already fading spiritualities; and so when a man is
called who doesn't wish to talk he will be like those visitors you
mention: “not chosen”--and will be frankly damned and shut off.
Speaking of the ill luck of starting a piece of literary work wrong-and
again and again; always aware that there is a way, if you could only
think it out, which would make the thing slide effortless from the
pen--the one right way, the sole form for you, the other forms being for
men whose line those forms are, or who are capabler than yourself: I've
had no end of experience in that (and maybe I am the only one--let us
hope so.) Last summer I started 16 things wrong--3 books and 13
mag. articles--and could only make 2 little wee things, 1500
words altogether, succeed:--only that out of piles and stacks of
diligently-wrought MS., the labor of 6 weeks' unremitting effort.
I could make all of those things go if I would take the trouble to
re-begin each one half a dozen times on a new plan. But none of them was
important enough except one: the story I (in the wrong form) mapped out
in Paris three or four years ago and told you about in New York under
seal of confidence--no other person knows of it but Mrs. Clemens--the
story to be called “Which was the Dream?”
A week ago I examined the MS--10,000 words--and saw that the plan was
a totally impossible one-for me; but a new plan suggested itself,
and straightway the tale began to slide from the pen with ease and
confidence. I think I've struck the right one this time. I have already
put 12,000 words of it on paper and Mrs. Clemens is pretty outspokenly
satisfied with it-a hard critic to content. I feel sure that all of the
first half of the story--and I hope three-fourths--will be comedy; but
by the former plan the whole of it (except the first 3 chapters) would
have been tragedy and unendurable, almost. I think I can carry the
reader a long way before he suspects that I am laying a tragedy-trap. In
the present form I could spin 16 books out of it with comfort and joy;
but I shall deny myself and restrict it to one. (If you should see
a little short story in a magazine in the autumn called “My Platonic
Sweetheart” written 3 weeks ago) that is not this one. It may have been
a suggester, though.
I expect all these singular privacies to interest you, and you are not
to let on that they don't.
We are leaving, this afternoon, for Ischl, to use that as a base for the
baggage, and then gad around ten days among the lakes and mountains to
rest-up Mrs. Clemens, who is jaded with housekeeping. I hope I can get a
chance to work a little in spots--I can't tell. But you do it--therefore
why should you think I can't?
[Remainder missing.]
The dream story was never completed. It was the same that he had
worked on in London, and perhaps again in Switzerland. It would be
tried at other times and in other forms, but it never seemed to
accommodate itself to a central idea, so that the good writing in it
eventually went to waste. The short story mentioned, “My Platonic
Sweetheart,” a charming, idyllic tale, was not published during Mark
Twain's lifetime. Two years after his death it appeared in Harper's
Magazine.
The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva was the
startling event of that summer. In a letter to Twichell Clemens
presents the tragedy in a few vivid paragraphs. Later he treated it
at some length in a magazine article which, very likely because of
personal relations with members of the Austrian court, he withheld
from print. It has since been included in a volume of essays, What
Is Man, etc.
*****
To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford:
KALTENLEUTGEBEN, Sep. 13, '98.
DEAR JOE,--You are mistaken; people don't send us the magazines.
No--Harper, Century and McClure do; an example I should like to
recommend to other publishers. And so I thank you very much for
sending me Brander's article. When you say “I like Brander Matthews; he
impresses me as a man of parts and power,” I back you, right up to
the hub--I feel the same way--. And when you say he has earned your
gratitude for cuffing me for my crimes against the Leather stockings and
the Vicar, I ain't making any objection. Dern your gratitude!
His article is as sound as a nut. Brander knows literature, and loves
it; he can talk about it and keep his temper; he can state his case so
lucidly and so fairly and so forcibly that you have to agree with him,
even when you don't agree with him; and he can discover and praise such
merits as a book has, even when they are half a dozen diamonds scattered
through an acre of mud. And so he has a right to be a critic.
To detail just the opposite of the above invoice is to describe me. I
haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I
hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden
me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I
have to stop every time I begin.
That good and unoffending lady the Empress is killed by a mad-man, and I
am living in the midst of world-history again. The Queen's jubilee last
year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and now this murder,
which will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years
from now. To have a personal friend of the wearer of the crown burst in
at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening and say in a voice broken
with tears, “My God the Empress is murdered,” and fly toward her home
before we can utter a question-why, it brings the giant event home to
you, makes you a part of it and personally interested; it is as if your
neighbor Antony should come flying and say “Caesar is butchered--the
head of the world is fallen!”
Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and
genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see, by next Saturday,
when the funeral cortege marches. We are invited to occupy a room in the
sumptuous new hotel (the “Krantz” where we are to live during the Fall
and Winter) and view it, and we shall go.
Speaking of Mrs. Leiter, there is a noble dame in Vienna, about whom
they retail similar slanders. She said in French--she is weak in
French--that she had been spending a Sunday afternoon in a gathering of
the “demimonde.” Meaning the unknown land, that mercantile land,
that mysterious half-world which underlies the aristocracy. But these
Malaproperies are always inventions--they don't happen.
Yes, I wish we could have some talks; I'm full to the eye-lids. Had a
noble good one with Parker and Dunham--land, but we were grateful for
that visit!
Yours with all our loves.
MARK.
[Inclosed with the foregoing.]
Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination we must
concede high rank to the German Emperor's. He justly describes it as
a “deed unparalleled for ruthlessness,” and then adds that it was
“ordained from above.”
I think this verdict will not be popular “above.” A man is either a
free agent or he isn't. If a man is a free agent, this prisoner is
responsible for what he has done; but if a man is not a free agent, if
the deed was ordained from above, there is no rational way of making
this prisoner even partially responsible for it, and the German court
cannot condemn him without manifestly committing a crime. Logic is
logic; and by disregarding its laws even Emperors as capable and acute
as William II can be beguiled into making charges which should not be
ventured upon except in the shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.