27 and 28 February 1869 • Lockport, N.Y. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00261)
I would have written you long ago, but about all of that “long ago” was spent in Elmira, & somehow I never could find time to write letters while there. All the time was exhausted in talking with Livy about the weather. The ring came safely to hand—& to us it will be a perpetual reminder of your goodness & your love, since your memory will always be pleasantly associated with it—it came safely to hand, & l Livy is manacled with it now, a hapless prisoner for life. She writes, “The ring continues to be the largest piece of furniture in the house, & so in company I am oppressively conscious of it.” She disposes her that hand in such awkward & unnatural positions that Hattie, always ready for any cussedness that offers, whispered the question in company, “if her shoulder was dislocated?” —& Livy the conscious Livy blushed. I shall scalp Hattie yet, if she don’t go mighty slow. I forgot to tell Livy, but I have written her, that I promised you a large photograph to hang up in your library as a companion to mine—but I told her to hold on till I come, & I will “sit” her myself. In fact she ought to hold on till some time when she is in New York, for she has amply proved by sitting five times for a photograph for me that they can’t take even passable photographs in Elmira. I want her to look her best, because she isn’t as comely as she was a year ago. But she is just as lovely—she is every bit as good & lovely as Mrs. Severance,—which, I take it, is saying a good deal.1explanatory note
You remark:
“I am lovely in the midst of confusion. Allie & my husband are gone, & I am reveling in dust & paint.”2explanatory note
Why you are always lovely, Mother dear. I don’t say but what you are peculiarly lovely when you are in the midst of dust & confusion, but what I do maintain is, that in confusion or out of it you are always lovely. There, now—don’t that cheer you up?
Considering all things, I came out well enough with my appointments, notwithstanding my entanglements gave a power of dissatisfaction. I was in honor bound to go to Alliance from Ravenna, because in dismissing the Alliance audience the night I failed to appear, they had held on to the money, and had promised that the lecture should come off within a week. So I telegraphed Franklin that I would not be there till Wednesday. I pai Ⓐemendation I paid Alliance their extra expenses, amounting to $20; I paid Franklin their extra expenses, amounting to $10—& then found that while I could have made Geneseo easily enough from Titusville, I couldn’t do it from Franklin. So I telegraphed them to stop the lecture & send my bill, which they did. I paid it— $22.5 $22.25Ⓐemendation. So that out of those extras cost me $52 altogether, & over thirty several dollars extra traveling expenses, & four or five valuable days’ time—for I have to go to Geneseo at last, to satisfy those people. Alliance cost me much more than a hundred dollars, & only paid me eighty. But don’t you know that the hand of Providence is in it somewhere? You can depend upon it. I never yet had what seemed at the time to be a particularly aggravating streak of bad luck but that it revealed itself to me later as a royal piece of royal good-fortune. Who am I, mother, that I should take it upon myself to determine what is good fortune & what is evil? For about a week, Providence headed me off at every turn. The real object of it, & the real result, may not transpire till you & I are old, & these days are forgotten—& therefore is it not premature, now, to call it bad luck? We can’t tell, yet. You ought to have heard me rave & storm at a piece of “bad luck” wi which Ⓐemendation befel me a year ago—& yet it was the very individual means of introducing me to Livy!3explanatory note—& behold, now am I become a philosopher who, when sober reflection comes, hesitateth to rail at what seemeth to feeble finite vision ill luck, conscious that “the end is not yet.”4explanatory note
Yes I did receive your letter at Franklin—& answered it, too. 5explanatory note—notwithstanding you think that possibly I have “soared beyond the reach of human sympathy at its need.” And I don’t forget, “in all my bright hours & in all my happiness” that you are my “faithful friend & Mother.” I should be a faithless ingrate to do such a thing. So far am I from it, that I remember you & recall you without effort, without exercise of will;—that is, by natural impulse, undictated by a sense of duty, or of obligation. And that, I take it, is the only sort of remembering worth worth the having. When we think of friends, & call their faces out Ⓐemendation of the shadows y & their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, & do it without knowing why, but save that we love to do it, we may content out ourselves Ⓐemendation that that friendship is a Reality, & not a Fancy—that it is builded upon a rock, & not upon the sands that dissolve away with the a ebbing tides & carry their monuments with them.6explanatory note
I shall reach Hartford about the 5th of March & go to work on the book again—My address will be “148 Asylum street, Hartford”—& on the 17th, if nothing happens, I shall arrive in Elmira again, to stay a week torn in order to cancel: or two, n◇ do◇◇◇◇ And Ⓐemendation
two lines (about 15 words) torn away 7explanatory note
I ought not to say anything about staying a week or two, either—for their there Ⓐemendation is a possibility that business will so hurry me that I may not even be able to stay a day or two. Whatever time I spend there will have to be taken from my visits in Cleveland & St. Louis on my way to Califora. Ⓐemendation, & my time is so cut down, now, the that Ⓐemendation there is scarcely any of it left. I had hoped to be in San Francisco by the end of March.
Remember me to all the home Ⓐemendation folks, & receive thoug the love & the blessing of thy eldest son—
Did you see my Vanderbilt letter in the last issue of Packard’s Monthly?8explanatory note
For a photograph of Emily A. Severance, see L2 , 433.
Mrs. Fairbanks was supervising repairs to the family’s Cleveland home, damaged by fire on 1 February (see 5 Feb 69 to Fairbanks, n.3click to open link). “Lovely” was possibly Clemens’s mischievous misreading of “lonely,” but this cannot be confirmed since Fairbanks’s letter is now lost.
Clemens’s reference cannot be to the first time he was literally introduced to Olivia, since that occurred two months before the “bad luck” that struck him just “a year ago.” The bad luck he had in mind was probably a crisis that developed between 22 February and 8 March 1868, and that seemed for a while to imperil his plans for a book about the Quaker City excursion. In those two weeks, the proprietors of the San Francisco Alta California firmly declined to give him permission to reuse the newspaper letters that he had written, and they had published, about the excursion. Their refusal forced him to sail for San Francisco on 11 March, where he soon resolved the problem, and proceeded to finish his manuscript. Shortly after delivering his manuscript to his Hartford publisher, in August 1868, Clemens visited the Langdons in Elmira, where he was introduced to Olivia in the sense that is meant here ( L2 , 198–200, 242–43, 247; compare MTMF , 79–80 n. 1).
Matthew 24:6: “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”
See 17 Feb 69 to Fairbanks from Franklinclick to open link, Pennsylvania.
Compare Luke 6:48–49:
He is like a man which built a house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock: and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house, and could not shake it; for it was founded upon a rock.
But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built a house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.
Clemens tore off all but a few words of the last three lines on the page. The excised passage probably began: “or two, no doubt. And”. It may have been at this point that Clemens returned to his letter and revised it on the morning of 28 February.
“Open Letter to Com. Vanderbilt” was a sarcastic attack on steamship and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, written in reaction to the uncritical admiration his shrewd practices usually received from the press. It was published in the March issue of Packard’s Monthly: The Young Men’s Magazine, which appeared about the middle of February. Begun in May 1868, Packard’s Monthly predicted that its circulation by the end of 1869 would be 100,000, and boasted of grappling “with the evils of the day” and presenting them “as they are, without mitigation or remorse” (“The Magazine” and advertisement, Packard’s Monthly 2 Jan 69: 31 and back cover). It was founded, edited, and published by Silas Sadler Packard (1826–98), who was also the founder and principal of Packard’s Business College in New York, as well as the author and publisher of numerous books on penmanship, bookkeeping, and other business skills. On 22 October 1868 Clemens wrote to the San Francisco Alta California that he had met Packard while “coming down the street in New York the other day”—a meeting very likely engineered, on about 1 October, by Clemens’s Quaker City friend and cabin mate, Daniel Slote, whose firm published Packard’s “school copy books” (SLC 1868; advertisement, Packard’s Monthly 2 Mar 69: inside front cover). “Open Letter to Com. Vanderbilt” was the first of Clemens’s three contributions to Packard’s Monthly in 1869 (SLC 1869 [MT02039], 1869 [MT02217], 1869 [MT00766]). Clemens never reprinted it, although he did take steps to preserve it: see 13 May 69 to OLLclick to open link.
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call no. HM 14244).
L3 , 122–125; MTMF , 77–81; LaVigne, 6, brief excerpt.
see Huntington Library, pp. 582–83.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.