31 August 1876 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS, draft: CU-MARK, UCCL 01360)
(SUPERSEDED)
Damnation, (if you will allow the expression,) get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls—I mean the maudlin article, of course. Real sentiment is a very rare & godlike thing. y YouⒶemendation do not know anybody that has it; neither do I.
You are petting & pitying & admiring yourself over your years of patient endeavor,
& sole individual unassisted achievements, & g
your good fight against misfortune & disaster, & your readiness to continue the
conflict with brave heart & willing hands. O, relegate all that to the days of callow
adolescence, where it belongs. It is
the commonest of the commonplaceⒶemendation experiences of life. It is every man’s history, consequently it hasn’t a remarkable feature
in it. There is no merit or virtue possible to it but one—& that is, to neither think
about it nor talk about it.
To think about it makes a man his own hero; to talk about it exposes that inglorious
fact.
Have you a monopoly in of misfortune & possible beggary? I think not.
Every demi-year threatens me—& most of the people that I know. Then why think & talk
about it, since
that won’t alter the case?
As to the past, there is but one good thing about it, & that is, that it is
the past—we don’t have to see it again. There is nothing in it worth pickling for
present or future use. Each day
that is added to the past is but an old boot added to a pile of rubbish. I have no
tears for my pile, no respect, no reverence, no
des pleasure in taking, a rag-picker’s hook.
Ⓐemendation
&Ⓐemendation exploring it. If you can find valuables in your pile, lucky boy you—that is all.
And by jings I think you & Orion ought to have my future pile, Will. Both of you are always climbing a rainbow that has
t a pot of coin buried at the other end. That is to say, your reckless imaginations
are always eating feasts that are never
to be cooked. Your Evansville lawsuit was nothing but a dream; your richest widow in St Louis was
another.2explanatory note Come, now, don’t imagine that I am objecting to these gorgeous futures of yours &
Orion’s. It
is not the case. I simply don’t believe in them, & I question the solidity of men who deal
in them.
It is the strangest, the most incomprehensible thing to me, that you are still 16,
while I have aged to 41. What
is the secret of your eternal youth?—not that I want to try it; far from it—I only ask out of
curiosity. I can see by your manner of speech, that for more than twenty years you
have stood still dead still in the midst
of the dreaminess, the melancholy, the romance, the heroics, of sweet but sappy sixteen.
Man, do you know that this is simply mental
& moral masturbation? It belongs eminently to the period usually devoted to physical masturbation, & should be left there & outgrown. Will, you must forgive me, but I
have not
the slightest sympathy with what the world calls Sentiment—not the slightest. Last week
a lawyer talked it to me in a letter, from the Nevada mines; yesterday a quondam
Hannibal girl talked it to me in a letter, from California;3explanatory note to-day, you talk it to me in a letter. I shan’t answer the others, for I don’t care whether
they are ever cured or not; but I owe it to myself & to you to come frankly forward
& cure you—if I
can.
That is the object of this letter. You need a dose of salts, & I am trying to give
it you. It
isn’t a stab; “Sentiment” would call it a “stab”—a
“disloyal stab in the back of a trusting friend”—& all that sort of romantic rot
& high-sounding phrase that Sentiment delights to deal in. No, it isn’t anything so
grandiose as a stab; it is
nothing but a humble 15-cent dose of salts; but if you will take it in good part & good faith, as it is
intended, it will scour out your mental & moral bowels., & you will feel like a
man; you will
feel robust & fine & healthy—& then if you are as grateful as you ought to
be, you will thank me. You will say, “Thanks be to God I have passed my Sentimental
worms, & have no longer the
moral belly-acheⒶemendation.”
You try it—on the faith of
(who is a better friend to you
than you are to yourself,)
P. S. Do give my love to your mother, whom I still, as always, hold in the highest esteem & most loving remembrance.
We go hence, tomorrow, with a g vague general idea of trave visiting various friends for 5 or 6 weeks, & then home to Hartford.
Clemens answered the following letter from Bowen (1836–93), his boyhood friend (CU-MARK):
Bowen’s first wife, the former Mary Cunningham, whom he married in 1857, had died in 1873. They had four children: Mattie Bowen (1859–67); William Bowen, Jr. (1861–1915); Clinton Cunningham Bowen (1868–1911); and Mary Clemens Bowen (1871–72). Bowen remarried in 1876. His second wife was Dora Church Goff, of St. Louis. His mother, Amanda Warren Stone Bowen (1802–81), had been a widow since 1853. His sister Mary Russell Bowen (b. 1827?) was the wife of Hannibal attorney and former mayor Moses P. Green (b. 1820?). His sister Elizabeth Campbell Bowen (1834?–76?) evidently was retarded. His brother, Samuel Adams Bowen, Jr. (1838?–78), apparently no longer a Mississippi River pilot, had borrowed money from Clemens in 1875, failed to repay it, and then tried, unsuccessfully, to borrow again in April 1876 (Hornberger 1941, 7; L2 , 56 n. 6; Inds , 304–5, 321; L6 , 422–23). Clemens kept Bowen’s letter and this drafted response in the envelope from an unrecovered letter, not by Bowen, sent to him from Hartford on 26 July. On it he wrote “Will Bowen’s sentimental letter & answer.” The revised version of this response that he sent to Bowen has not been found (see 1 Nov 76 to Burroughclick to open link).
Presumably someone Bowen had previously hoped to marry. Dora Church Goff was not a widow.
Neither of these letters survive; their writers remain unidentified.
Hornberger 1941, 23–25; MicroML, reel 4.
See Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenanceclick to open link. Albert Bigelow Paine made the following penciled notes on the first page of the MS: “(To Will Bowen, but seems never to have been sent)” and, following the date, “77”. Some version of the letter was, in fact, sent: see SLC to Jacob H. Burrough, 1 November 1876, UCCL 01384click to open link.