15 May 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NBuU-PO, UCCL 12172)
(SUPERSEDED)
Of course I don’t know what you hold, but I “call” you anyway! This being translated, means: Tell me all about this thing. Really & truly, now, is there a Twain Club?
I’ll compel your generosity by being candid with you. To wit: I thought you were chaffing me, just for fun; & inasmuch as good-natured chaffing is a pleasant thing, I dropped into the spirit of it. I took you to be the Twain Club, in your individual self—never dreamed of anything else; but when you spring forth with the official “proceedings,” all in detail & due & ◇◇ Ⓐemendation form, I confess I am unsettled. They have a most matter-of-fact & genuine look. They deal in proper names, speeches, actions, votes, resolutions—& all in the easiest & handiest way. Plainly, one of two things is the truth: 1. There is a Club; or, 2‸—you yourself are competent to be a club, & have exciting times, & vote things, & discuss matters from all points of view, & disagree, & finally arrive at conclusions, through warring difficulties,—all in your single person!1explanatory note
Now without “fanning your tail with adjectives” (that’s good,) which is the fact?2explanatory note
Either way will satisfy me, for I propose to come over next year & drink with the Club, in any case—& I can’t lose a glass, even if you be the Club all by yourself, because in that case I should insist upon drinking with all the imaginary members.
Now you play fair & answer my conundrum, & I’ll wrestle with your next conundrum like a Hercules.
Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK):
Clemens wrote “From the Mark Twain Club” on Casey’s envelope, which enclosed nine closely written pages purporting to be the minutes of a 28 April 1876 meeting of that club, of which Casey was president. The chief business of the meeting was the reading and discussion of Clemens’s no longer extant letter of 17 April 1876. In it Clemens belatedly replied to a letter of 20 March 1875 from Casey requesting that he gloss “Historically . . . Metaphysically . . . Theologically . . . Conundrumically” a sentence misquoted from chapter 45 of The Innocents Abroad : “‘The women of Syria are so sinfully ugly that they cannot smile after 10.06 on Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath.’—” (CU-MARK). (Actually: “She was the only Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she couldn’t smile after ten o’clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath.”) Clemens had saved Casey’s 1875 letter, doubtless as a specimen of the “queer” letters he was fond of collecting (see 3 Feb 75 to Barnumclick to open link, nn. 1, 2; 19 Feb 75 to Barnumclick to open link; 24 May 75 to Barnumclick to open link), noting on its envelope: “From an unknown idiot in Ireland.” No further correspondence between Casey and Clemens is known to survive. But in 1897, in chapter 25 of Following the Equator , Clemens described meeting, in Bendigo, Australia, an Irishman he called “Mr. Blank,” former president of a “Mark Twain Club” of “Corrigan Castle” whose secretary, he claimed, had tormented him for five years in the 1870s with long monthly reports, accompanied by numerous queries about his works. Now, however, Mr. Blank confessed
that he was the Mark Twain Club, and the only member it had ever had!
Why, it was matter for anger, but I didn’t feel any. He said he never had to work for a living, and that by the time he was thirty life had become a bore and a weariness to him. He had no interests left; they had paled and perished, one by one, and left him desolate. He had begun to think of suicide. Then all of a sudden he thought of that happy idea of starting an imaginary club, and went straightway to work at it, with enthusiasm and love. He was charmed with it; it gave him something to do. It elaborated itself on his hands; it became twenty times more complex and formidable than was his first rude draft of it. Every new addition to his original plan which cropped up in his mind gave him a fresh interest and a new pleasure. He designed the Club badge himself, and worked over it, altering and improving it, a number of days and nights; then sent to London and had it made. It was the only one that was made. It was made for me; the “rest of the Club” went without.
He invented the thirty-two members and their names. He invented the five favorite speakers and their five separate styles. He invented their speeches, and reported them himself. He would have kept that Club going until now, if I hadn’t deserted, he said. He said he worked like a slave over those reports; each of them cost him from a week to a fortnight’s work, and the work gave him pleasure and kept him alive and willing to be alive. It was a bitter blow to him when the Club died.
Finally, there wasn’t any Corrigan Castle. He had invented that, too. (SLC 1897, 249–50)
An allusion to the following in Casey’s minutes:
Mr G. Langran (of the “Sentinel”) dissented from the last speaker in every particular—as he had persistently done—under a strong sense of duty on every occasion during the meetings of the past year—and as he hoped to do during the sessions of the coming one—during which it would seem the members were doomed to wait for an authoritative decision on the secret meaning of that passage—which had on so many occasions nearly led to a passage of arms. Mr Flannagans solution had at most but a favourable mention by Mr Twain, which afforded no grounds for Mr F. strutting round like a peacock and fanning his tail with adjectives. . . .
Clemens underlined in black ink the words shown here in italics.
MicroPUL, reel 1.