20 February 1868 • Washington, D.C. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00196)
Your most welcome letter is by me, & I must hurry & write while your barometer is at “fair,” but for it isn’t within the range of possibility that I can refrain long from doing something that will fetch it down to “stormy. ,” again.
I acknowledge—I acknowledge—that I can be most laceratingly “funny without being vulgar.” In proof whereof, I responded again to the regular toast to Woman at a grand banquet night before last, & was frigidly proper in language & sentiment. Read the enclosed notice & see if they accuse me once.1explanatory note Now haven’t I nobly vindicated myself & shed honor upon my teacher & done credit to my lessons her teachings? With head uncovered, & in attitude unostentatious suppliant but yet expressive of conscious merit, I stand before you in spirit & await my earned “Well done,” & augmented emolument of bread & butter—to the end that I may go & slide on the cellar door & be happy.
You just smother me with compliments about that book!2explanatory note There is nothing that makes me prouder than to be regarded by intelligent people as “authentic.” A name I have coveted so long—& secured at last! I don’t care anything about being humorous, or poetical, or eloquent, or anything of that kind—the end & aim of my ambition is to be authentic—is to be considered authentic. But don’t italicise it—don’t do that—such a there isn’t any need of it—such a compliment as that, wouldn’t have escaped my notice, even without the underscore.
So far, I believe I haven’t indulged in any “flings” that people will mind much. Only one occurs to me just now that I revel in with peculiar ecstasy. It is in the first chapter & just touches Dr. Gibson on a raw place. If he were a man of any appreciation, it would be a royal pleasure to see him waltz around when he reads that. But bless you it will all be lost. That complacent imbecile will take it for a compliment. I do not mention his name, but I think all the passengers will know who is meant. Now I know that you will begin to worry about this, & so I will just put in a part of it here so that you may see that it really amounts to nothing. You will not find any fault with it:
{I am supposed to be reading the passenger list at 117 Wall st.}
“I was proud to observe that among our excursionists were three ministers of the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, several military & naval chef chieftainsⒶemendation with sounding titles, an ample crop of ProffessorsⒶemendation of various kinds, & a gentleman who had “Commissioner of the United States of America to Europe, Asia & Africa” thundering after his name in one awful blast! I had carefully prepared myself to take rather a back seat in that ship, because of the uncommonly select material that would only be permitted to pass through the camel’s eye3explanatory note of that committee on credentials; I had schooled myself to expect an imposing array of military & naval heroes, & to have to set that back seat still further back in consequence of it, maybe; but I state frankly that I was all unprepared for this crusher! ◇ Ⓐemendation I fell under that titular avalanche a torn & blighted thing. I said that if that potentate must go over in our ship, why, I supposed he must—but that to my thinking, when the United States considered it necessary to send a dignitary of that tonnage across theⒶemendation ocean, it would be in better taste, & safer, to cart him over in several ships.
“Ah, if I had only known, then, that he was only a common mortal, & that his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of seeds, and uncommon yams, & extraordinary cabbages for that poor useless, innocent, harmless old fossil, the Smithsonian Institute, I would have felt so much relieved.”4explanatory note
Now there is all of it, instead of part—& it is so mean, & depreciative, & rascally, that I just turn it over as a sweet morsel under my tongue! {Barometer swinging surely around to “Stormy.”} Goodness, how I would like to see that fellow skip! But he won’t—he won’t—I shall lose all that. He will think it is a compliment, & go around spelling it over to his asinine neighbors. Now you think I bear that man male maliceⒶemendation—but upon my sacred word I don’t. I would ask him to dinner with me in a minute if I were to meet him—& what he did there or said there, I never would mention disrespectfully, of course—but what he did in the ship is fair pray prey, & don’t you plead for him .—you nor Mrs. Severance either—I have your pictures, & I’ll distort them & put them in the book. And I’ll represent old Mr. Severance as propelling donkeys in the Azores with a g stick with a nail in the end of it at forty cents a day.5explanatory note
No, I don’t need a guardian now, because I am reformed, now—I have finished up since I wrote last. As soon as I got well enough I began a regular system of working all day long & taking the whole night for recreation—and sleep. I don’t write anythingⒶemendation at night, now. I can write about ten pages of the book a day, pretty comfortably—fifteen, if necessary. Unless I get too much pushed for timeⒶemendation I think I will write the almost the entire book new—I don’t like any of those letters that have reached me from California so far.6explanatory note I may think better of those you weeded of slang, though. There will not be any slang in this book except it should occur in a mild form in dialogues.
You are right. One should not bring sympathy to a sick man. It is always kindly meant, & of course it has to be taken—but it isn’t much of an improvement on castor oil. One who has a sick man’s true interest at heart will forbear spoken sympathy, & bring him, surreptitiously soup, & fried oysters & other trifles that the doctor has tabooed. That is much better than saying, “O, I am so sorry you are so ill; you look meaner & meaner all the time, poor man; your eyes are turning yellow & your nose looks like a wen; O, if you were to be taken away from us in your present state, how sad it would be; I will make you some weak gruel & send you up some tracts.” Gruel & tracts for a spirit that is famishing for salt-horse & duff!7explanatory note
Yes, I want your Herald letters, of course. I have Dr Jackson’s, & Foster is trying to collect his for me. I only want to steal the ideas—I am not going to steal the language. Now please hurry them up—there’s a good mother.8explanatory note
What has Beach done? Why he has been a regular Good Samaritan in hunting up employment & giving material aid to the bankrupt cabin crew of the Quaker City—& I am sure they deserved little kindness at his hands.9explanatory note
You wasn’t one of the “frisky old veterans”—don’t insinuate such a thing.10explanatory note Remember me to Mr & Mrs S.11explanatory note & all your family—whereof I shall be proud to be “Head Cub.”
The “grand banquet” at which Clemens spoke took place on 14 February, not on the “night before last,” as he indicated. In an Enterprise letter dated merely “February” (but presumably written on the fifteenth) Clemens enclosed another copy of the flattering “notice,” explaining that he
was at a banquet given to the honorable “Society of Good Fellows,” last night, and it was a particularly cheerful affair. I mention this subject more particularly, because I wish to introduce in this connection what I consider to be a genuine, uncompromising and unmitigated “first-rate notice.” Let the Washington Express be your model in matters of this kind hereafter. (SLC 1868)
The notice appeared on the fourth page of the Washington Evening Express, edited by J. D. and A. P. Hoover, where it was part of a much longer report, “Ye Banquet,” published on 15 February. The quatrain to which Clemens was asked to respond was “the last poetical production” of Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867), inscribed “in a lady’s album,” presumably shortly before his death in November 1867; it had apparently been widely quoted in print since then (Rowell, 15; “A Bachelor-Poet’s Idea of Woman,” New York Ledger 23 1 Feb 68: 4). Although the clipping enclosed here was pinned, then pasted, to the first leaf of the manuscript, it is unlikely that Clemens attached it in either way, and it therefore appears as a simple enclosure after his signature.
Matthew 19:24: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
Months before the Quaker City departed in June, William Gibson, M.D. (1813–87), of Jamestown, Pennsylvania, had written to the Department of Agriculture and the Smithsonian Institution, offering to collect specimens and information while traveling with the excursion party. On 5 April Commissioner Isaac Newton accepted on behalf of the agriculture department, sending Gibson a letter of introduction addressed “To the United States Ministers & Consuls in Europe, Asia & Africa.” The letter stated that Gibson was “hereby commissioned, and accredited by this Department, during his tour through Europe and Asia, to make investigations, observe and collect facts in all matters that may in his opinion be of interest to the Agriculture of the United States.” In a letter of further instructions on 24 April Newton directed Gibson to collect data on such things as “the appearances of crops, prices of food and labor,” as well as “specimens of cereals and sea shells, etc.” On 2 May Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution declined to receive articles such as these, of which it already had “an abundant supply,” but added that “we shall be most happy to obtain by your aid any additions or rare of choice mineral specimens, to be deposited in the National Museum under our charge” (Pommer, 386–87). Somewhat later in May, when Gibson appeared in the passenger list posted at Duncan’s office, he had not quite become a “Commissioner of the United States of America,” but he was identified as “Wm. Gibson, Esq., of the State-Department, special agent of the government.” And when in September he and the other passengers received a copy of the Arabic Test Testament (see 1–2 Oct 67 to Moffettclick to open link), the printed inscription in his copy read, in part: “Wm. Gibson M.D., Jamestown, Pa. Special Commissioner, commissioned by the State Department Washington, D.C. U.S.A. To Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt” (“The Mediterranean Excursion,” New York World, 10 May 67, 2; Leamington Book Shop, lot 131). Gibson proved to be a zealous collector of mementoes and specimens. Although there is no evidence that he ever contributed anything to the Smithsonian or to the Department of Agriculture, in late 1868 or early 1869 he donated his Quaker City collection to the “Historic Relic and Geological Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association” in Erie, Pennsylvania, not far from Jamestown. In reporting his gift early in 1869, tge Erie Dispatch characterized his appointment as “commission of the late administration” and explained that as “an official he possessed many facilities for collecting geological specimens, curiosities and relics not possessed by the ordinary tourist, and which were well improved.” A list of the “most interesting” items consisted of some forty specimens of water, rock, pebbles, mosaics, broken sculpture, petrifactions, and other samples—including “specimens from the highest point of the Pyramid Cheops, Egypt,” “specimen from the Rock of Gibraltar,” and “specimen from a broken column in front of the Amphitheatre, where stood the temple of the goddess Diana at Ephesus” (“Historical Relics,” Erie Pa. Dispatch, undated clipping, probably Jan–June 69, CU-MARK; Pommer, 389). The paragraphs that Clemens quoted here from his manuscript of The Innocents Abroad (now lost) appeared in chapter 2 virtually without change.
Like most of the passengers, Clemens exchanged photographic cartes de visite with several of his friends, and he undoubtedly had such photographs of Mrs. Fairbanks and the Severances. He also collected commercially produced photographs of historical figures, buildings, and sites, as well as at least some of the stereographic photographs made by the ship’s photographer, William E. James, of the actual sights witnessed by the travelers. Clemens evidently turned this collection over to Bliss in October 1868 to be engraved as illustrations for The Innocents Abroad. Pictures of several passengers appeared in the book, clearly engraved from their photographs, but neither Mrs. Fairbanks nor the Severances were among them. (See Hirst and Rowles, 15–33, and (Hirst 1975, 198–222, 390–412, which reproduces photographic cartes de visite of some forty-five Quaker City passengers and crew from the collection of William R. Denny.)
In 1883 and unidentified journalist who knew Clemens in Washington at this time provided a description of him at work on his book in his “room in Indiana Avenue”:
And there was Mark Twain in a little back room, with a sheet-iron stove, a dirty, musty carpet of the cheapest description, a bed, and two or three common chairs. The little drum stove was full of ashes, running over on the zinc sheet; the bed seemed to be unmade for a week, the slops had not been carried out for a fortnight, the room was foul with tobacco smoke, the floor, dirty enough to begin with, was littered with newspapers, from which Twain had cut his letters. Then there were hundreds of pieces of torn manuscripts which had been written and then rejected by the author. A dozen pipes were about the apartment—on the wash-stand, on the mantel, on the writing table, on the chairs—everywhere that room could be found. And there was tobacco, and tobacco everywhere. One thing, there were no flies. The smoke killed them, and I am now surprised the smoke did not kill me too. Twain would not let a servant come into his room. He would strip down his suspenders (his coat and vest, of course, being off) and walk back and forward in slippers in his little room and swear and smoke the whole day long. Of course, at times he would work, and when he did work it was like a steam engine at full head. I do believe that if Clemens had not been under contract to write for the Hartford firm his “Innocents Abroad,” he never would have done it.
Of course, at that time, we never thought that Twain’s book would amount to anything, and probably he did not think it would either, but he was writing for the money his naked MS. would bring from his Hartford publishers. He needed that money, and so he wrote. (“How ‘Innocents Abroad’ Was Written,” New York Evening Post, 20 Jan 83, 3)
Salt horse was the “standard army ration of pickled beef preserved in brine so strong that it was inedible unless soaked thoroughly in water before cooking. Often the pickling process was not successful” (Boatner, 719). “Duff” was a slang term for “any sweet food, such as candy, cake, or cookies” (Wentworth and Flexner, 166).
See 24 Jan 68 to Fairbanks, n. 4. Clemens had secured copies of Dr. Jackson’s letters to the Monroe County (Pa.) Democrat, and was hoping to obtain the letters that Colonel J. Heron Foster, owner and chief editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, sent to his own newspaper. Clemens probably did find some remarks to jog his memory in both Jackson’s and Mrs. Fairbanks’ letters. The burlesque of the address to the tsar performed by the Quaker City’s crew was a detail mentioned only by her which found its way into chapter 38. Jackson’s descriptions of the glove-buying incident in Gibraltar (chapter 7), and the hiring of a guide in Paris (chapter 13), may also have supplied useful hints for Clemens (Hirst 1975, 132–33, 153–54; Mary Mason Fairbanks 1867; Abraham Reeves Jackson 1867, Abraham Reeves Jackson 1867). But it is not known whether Clemens ever saw Foster’s letters: the Dispatch files are lost, and Foster himself was fatally ill, succumbing to tuberculosis on 21 April at the age of forty-six. When Clemens read a report of his death in the 20 May San Francisco Morning Call, he drafted a long footnote for chapter 20 of Innocents (later reduced to two brief sentences) in which he described Foster as a “firm friend & a genial comrade,” praising his “sparkling wit, his cheerful spirit & his soldierly will” (SLC 1868, 1–2; “Death of an Old Californian,” San Francisco Morning Call, 20 May 68, 1; “Death of J. Heron Foster,” Pittsburgh Commercial, 22 April 68, 1).
Mrs. Fairbanks, aged thirty-nine, had evidently identified herself with the passengers as Clemens described them in his summary letter to the New York Herald (see 20 Nov 67 to JLC and family 2nd of 2, n. 4click to open link). There he had said:
Three-fourths of the Quaker City’s passengers were between forty and seventy years of age! ... Let us average the ages of the Quaker City’s pilgrims and set the figure down at fifty years. Is any man insane enough to imagine that this picnic of patriarchs sang, made love, danced, laughed, told anecdotes, dealt in ungodly levity? In my experience they sinned little in these matters. No doubt it was presumed here at home that these frolicsome veterans laughed and sang and romped all day.... If these things were presumed, the presumption was at fault. The venerable excursionists were not gay and frisky. (SLC 1867)
Solon and Emily Severance.
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14223).
L2 , 188–95; MTMF , 18–23.
See Huntington Library, p. 512.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.