26 and 27 September 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 00359)
I’ll love you, & reverence you, both. And ⒶemendationI will try & be as dutiful & tractable a “child” as any you have got in your collection. I don’t wonder you are a trifle uneasy about the Saturday articles, for I am. You see, I am worried about getting ready to lecture, & so I fidget & fume & sweat, & I can’t write serenely. Therefore I don’t write Saturday articles that are satisfactory to me.1explanatory note I’m not v Ⓐemendation settled yet. My partners wanted me to lecture some this winter, though, & it seemed necessary anyhow, since I could not get all my engagements canceled.
You have about made me give up the “pictures.” I hate pictures like these, myself. But as they cost nothing, my partners thought we might as well have them. I am to leave, next week, to begin to cook up my lecture, & so we’ll not have any moreⒶemendation, I guess.2explanatory note
Me “getting cross over your talk?” No—bang away—I li enjoy it. No, I don’t mean that—I mean I don’t mind it—or rather, I mean that I like it. Now ⒶemendationI have got it. I like your criticisms, because they nearly always convince me—always, I guess, is nearer the truth. And because I love you, I would like the criticisms, even if they didn’t convince me.
Well, I’ll let Death alone. I will, mother—honest—if I won’t bother him if he don’t bother me. No, but really, I will be more reverential, if you want me to, though I tell you it don’t jibe with my principles. There is a fascination about meddling with forbidden things.3explanatory note
I can’t come to see you till spring., because on account of lecturing & such things—but if Livy invites you you will come to our wedding, won’t you? I think she’ll either invite both of my not mothersⒶemendation 4explanatory note—I would invite hers, if she had a million. And then we’ll get a chance to see you. Feb. 4 is the wedding-day—the anniversary of the engagement. I chose that date on the score of economy—shan’t have to buy another ring—shall simply put add “Feb. 4, 1870” on the inside of the engagement ring. No—that is Livy’s idea, & I think it is good, & neat, & sensible. The lecturing caused the postponement. Can’t tell yet, whether we are going to keep house, but I have made up my mind that it has got to be one or the other. I’m not particular. Suppose we shall board till spring.
Did Charley write you that he is going around the globe? Prof. Ford is sent along with him as tutor & traveling companion. They start next Thursday & go overland to California & Denver & Salt Lake & Nevada mines & Big Trees & Yo Semite,—then a 25-day voyage to Japan—then China—then India,—Egypt & away up the Nile—the Holy Land all over again—Russia & the Emperor all over again—& we are all to meet them in Paris 12 or 13 months months Ⓐemendationhence & make the tour of England, ⒶemendationGermany, &c., with them. They are to travel leisurely, & take the world easy. {I feel a sort of itching in my feet, mother—& if my life were as aimless as of old, my trunk would be packed, now.}5explanatory note
But really & truly I must write to that girl to-night before ever I go to bed—& in order to do it I must cut this note short. Goodbye. I embrace the householdⒶemendation.
Your Eldest,
on different paper:
PS.
Dear Mother—
In writting Ⓐemendationyou last night,6explanatory note I forgot to ask you to thank the Herald reviewer for his handsome notice of my book, & Frank or Mr Fairbanks for sending me copies. They just came in good time, for I was compiling a few notices to make up into an advertising supplement.7explanatory note
We had Prince Arthur in town a little while this afternoon, but he never called on me, & so I threw myself back on my dignity & never called on him. He is too stuck-up, altogether. I am on too familiar terms with his betters in Russia to go browsing around after mere princes. I let him shin around town as long as he wanted to, & shin out of again when he got ready. But I wrote him up. 8explanatory note
Lovingly
Sam.
The only Buffalo Express articles that Clemens regularly signed “Mark Twain” appeared on Saturdays. To date he had published six such pieces: “A Day at Niagara,” “English Festivities. And Minor Matters,” “Journalism in Tennessee,” “The Last Words of Great Men,” “The ‘Wild Man.’ ‘Interviewed,’” and “Rev. H. W. Beecher. His Private Habits.” The record of Clemens’s cash account with the Express Printing Company indicates that the paper paid him $25 for each of these (SLC 1869 [MT00782], 1869 [MT00796], 1869 [MT00808], 1869 [MT00819], 1869 [MT00827], 1869 [MT00834]; “Statement of S. L. Clemens’s a/c from Aug 9’ 1869 to Jany 1st 1870,” CU-MARK).
Of the first six Saturday articles only the fourth and sixth were published without crudely drawn and printed illustrations. “I am obliged to leave out the illustrations, this time,” Mark Twain explained on 11 September. “The artist finds it impossible to make pictures of people’s last words” (SLC 1869 [MT00819]). The drawings presumably “cost nothing” because they were prepared by John Harrison Mills, the Buffalo artist who was on the staff of the Express. All subsequent sketches were unillustrated.
Mrs. Fairbanks had objected to the irreverent treatment of death in “The Last Words of Great Men”: “A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur” (SLC 1869 [MT00819]).
Clemens apparently neglected to cancel “either” when he changed the direction of his sentence.
Repeated reports in the Elmira press suggest that Clemens let it be understood that he would go with Ford and Langdon, at least to California. The day before he wrote this letter the Elmira Saturday Evening Review said: “Mark Twain will accompany the round the world travelers, Prof. D. R. Ford and Charles J. Langdon, as far as San Francisco.” Two days before Ford and Langdon actually left it said: “Prof. Ford, Mark Twain, and C. J. Langdon leave for westward ho! on Monday” (“Local Happenings,” 25 Sept, 2 Oct 69, 8). And on Monday, 4 October, the Elmira Advertiser reported: “Prof. Ford and Mr. C. J. Langdon leave this city to-day at 12:20 by the Northern Central line for their trip around the world. At Rochester they will take a Pullman Sleeping Coach for Chicago, and thence by the Pacific Road for California. They will be accompanied on their journey as far as San Francisco by Mark Twain” (“The College Reunion,” 4). Although Clemens had abandoned his own plans for a California trip in mid-August, when he purchased his interest in the Buffalo Express, he may have considered accompanying Langdon and Ford. But by 27 September he decided to stay in the East to prepare a replacement for the “Curiosities of California” lecture he had planned to use on his 1869–70 tour (see 27 Sept 69 to Bliss, n. 2click to open link). Whether or not he planted the reports in the Elmira papers, he soon determined how to turn them to good use. On 13, 14, and 15 October the Buffalo Express carried the following advertisement on its front and back pages:
MARK TWAIN
in
SATURDAY’S EXPRESS.
a voyage
AROUND THE WORLD,
by proxy.
first of a series of letters.
The initial letter, published on 16 October, began with a note to the reader dated “New York, October 10,” in which Clemens said in part: “I am just starting on a pleasure trip around the globe, by proxy. That is to say, Professor D. R. Ford, of Elmira College, is now making the journey for me, and will write the newspaper account of his (our) trip. No, not that exactly—but he will travel and write letters, and I shall stay at home and add a dozen pages each to each of his letters. One of us will furnish the fancy and the jokes, and the other will furnish the facts. I am equal to either department, though statistics are my best hold” (SLC 1869 [MT00842]). Eight such letters, all written entirely by Mark Twain, were published in the Express between 16 October 1869 and 29 January 1870: their subjects were nearly identical to what Clemens had earlier told James Redpath he would cover in “Curiosities of California.” Ford published two letters, both initialed by him, on 12 February and 5 March 1870 (10 May 69 to Redpathclick to open link; SLC 1869 [MT00842], 1869 [MT00845], 1869 [MT00849], 1869 [MT00856], 1869 [MT00857], 1870 [MT00871], 1870 [MT00873], 1870 [MT00874]; Ford 1870 [bib00366], 1870 [bib00367]). Langdon and Ford were called home in late June 1870, when Jervis Langdon’s stomach cancer became critical, so that the planned family meeting in Paris never occurred.
Clemens misdated the first part of his letter by one day. The events discussed in the next paragraph occurred on 27 September.
Clemens included a long excerpt from the Cleveland Herald review, published on 23 September (“The Innocents Abroad,” 1), in his 9 October Buffalo Express “Advertising Supplement” (1). The unidentified reviewer emphasized that Mark Twain was not “a mere buffoon or professional joke maker. He has eyes to see and a mind to appreciate the beautiful and the sublime as well as the absurd, and when his deeper feelings overmaster his jesting mood he can describe what he saw and felt in eloquent and earnest words.” Frank was Abel Fairbanks’s twenty-four-year-old son from his first marriage (Fairbanks, 552).
Prince Arthur William Patrick Albert (1850–1942)—seventh child and third son of Queen Victoria and later Duke of Connaught and Strathearn and Earl of Essex—who was stationed with the British army in Montreal, was briefly in Buffalo on 27 September. Of his visit, Clemens said in part:
He made no remarks to us; did not ask us to dinner; walked right by us just the same as if he didn’t see us; never inquired our opinion about any subject under the sun; and when his luncheon was over got into his carriage and drove off in the coolest way in the world without ever saying a word—and yet he could not know but that that was the last time he might ever see us. But if he can stand it, we can.
Prince Arthur looks pleasant and agreeable, however. He has a good, reliable, tenacious appetite, of about two-king capacity. He was the last man to lay down his knife and fork.
This is absolutely all that England’s princely son did in Buffalo—absolutely all! We shall go on and make all the parade we can about it, but none of his acts in Buffalo were noisy enough for future historical record. It was Veni, Vidi, Vici, with him. He came—he saw that lunch—he conquered it. (SLC 1869 [MT00836])
In fact, after lunching at the Tifft House, Arthur made a quick tour of the city. Among his stops was the local headquarters of the Fenians. The Irish revolutionary movement had launched one abortive invasion of Canada in 1866 and was to launch another, which the prince helped repel, in 1870 (“Prince Arthur,” Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 28 Sept 69, 3; DNB , 16–17). For Clemens’s acquaintance with Arthur’s “betters in Russia,” see L2 , 80–85.
MS, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (CSmH, call nos. HM 14254 and HM 14258).
L3 , 358–361; MTMF , 106–9.
see Huntington Library, pp. 582–83.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.