to Jervis Langdon
2 and 3 March 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: CtHMTH, UCCL 00437)
Polishing Irons.
Got your dispatch, & shall talk no business with my partners1explanatory note till Mr. Slee gets back.
The “Peace” has arrived, but Livy don’t know it, for she has got some eternal company in the drawing-roomⒶemendation & it is considerably after dinner-time. But I have spread the fringed red dinner-table spread over the big rocking-chair & set up the beautiful thing on it, & in a prominent place, & it will be the first thing Livy sees when she comes in.
Later—She went into convulsions of delight when she entered. And I don’t wonder, for we both so mourned the loss of the first Peace that it did not seem possible we could do without it—& for you to send another in this delightful & unexpected way was intensely gratifying. You have our most sincere gratitudeⒶemendation—Livy’s for the present itself, & mine because I shall enj so much enjoy looking at it.2explanatory note
Your two letters came this morning, father, & your dispatch yesterday afternoonⒶemendation. {Mem.— En Ellen’sⒶemendation in the stable & the horse in the attic looking at the scenery.}3explanatory note
We think it cannot be worth while to enter into an explanation of the Express figures, for the reason that Mr. Slee must have arrived in Elmira after your letter was written, & he would explain them to you much more clearly & understandingly than I could.
I thank you ever so much for your offer to take my money & pay me interest on it until we decide whether to add it to the Kennett purchase or not. I was going to avail myself of it at once, but waited to see if Mr. Slee & MacWilliams couldn’t make Selkirk’s figures show a little more favorably. As I hoped, so it has resulted. And now, upon thorough conviction that the Express is not a swindle, I will pay some more on the Kennett indebtedness.4explanatory note
I am very glad to begin to see my way through this business, for figures confuse & craze me in a little while.5explanatory note I haven’t Livy’s tranquil nerve in the presence of a financial complexity—when her cash account don’t balance (which do Ⓐemendation is about does not happen oftener than once a day) false she just increases the item of “Butter 78 cents” to “Butter 97 cents”—or reduces the item of “Gas, $6.45” to “Gas, $2.35” & makes that account balanceⒶemendation. She keeps books with the most inexorable accuracy that ever mortal man beheld.
Father it is not true— Samuel slanders me—
I wrote “Polishing Irons” at the head of this letter the other night to remind either Livy or me to write about them—didn’t put it there for a tet text to preach from.6explanatory note
The report of my intending to leave Buffalo w Ⓐemendation Livy & I have concluded emanates from Hartford, for the reason that it really started in the newspapers only a very little while after my last visit & your last letter to Hartford, & has been afloat ever since.7explanatory note
Josephus N. Larned and George H. Selkirk ( L3 , 300 n. 2, 401–2 n. 2).
In a 16 February letter to her mother, Olivia reported (CtHMTH):
I have had a grief this morning! The beautiful statuett of Piece Peace is all broken to pieces—the head and arm are both severed from the body, I do not want to believe my own eyes— I had put the Piece Peace in about half a doz. different places in the house, and now that its exquisite beauty should be destroyed,— That it was a gift from Mr and Mrs Diven made it especially dear to me, and that Mr Diven should have taken the care of it himself—
It seemed well packed—every thing has seemed well packed, and we have as yet found nothing else broken—
I feel almost like having a good hard cry now, and wishing that all the rest of my things had been broken and that saved—
After receiving the replacement she wrote (CtHMTH):
lc
Dear Father or Mother which ever of you did it, I do thank you for the “Peace”, the beautiful Peach Peace, it came this afternoon— How could you do it, how good you were to do it, every thing— I don’t know what to say—
I came out from the drawing room this afternoon from a caller and found the scarlet table spread fixed on a chair and the “Peace” standing on it, the effect was charming, and of course I cried out with delight, at first I thought that my old statuette was made whole, but looked immediately to the top of the clock where the head of my poor broken Peace had been put, and there the head still was—of course the truth all dawned upon me then then— I wakened wakened this morning thinking that you could not have rec’d the letter telling about the disaster as you had none of you refered to it in any way— The Peace is as exquisite as it can be and I do thank you with all my heart— If you were here I think that I could tell you about it a little better than I can write—
As I write Samuel is playing and singing—
Tell me about everything when you write— We love you all at Elmira
Mr Clemens is very anxious to have the polishing irons come I should get some here but they do not seem to keep them, I could not get any— I do not know whether there is any way to hurry them, but the Youth does not like to wear his shirts done up without them—
Mr and Mrs Selkirk are coming in this evening, I believe I must not write more this time—
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for your last loving token that you would have no mar on the perfection of everything in my life if you could order it—
The statuette has not been identified; for the Divens, see p. 44.
Only one of these communications is known to survive (PH in CU-MARK):
The anecdote about Jane Clemens that Langdon referred to has not been identified.
Although the first payment on the $10,000 Clemens owed to Thomas A. Kennett was not due until August, he planned here to use at least part of his second quarter Innocents royalties to pay “some more on the Kennett indebtedness.” Within a few days, however, he changed his mind. Apparently he did pay Kennett $2,500 in August, with subsequent payments in 1871 and 1872. John James McWilliams, a bookkeeper in the Buffalo office of Langdon’s coal firm, was one of Clemens’s first Buffalo friends. He had assisted Slee in the “boarding house” ruse after the wedding (28 Jan 70 to Bliss, n. 5click to open link; 3 Mar 71 to Riley, n. 3click to open link; L3 , 316–17, 333, 334 n. 4).
The Express figures were not the only ones to agitate Clemens. On 16 February Olivia wrote her mother: “Mr Clemens says that I had presents and a good time when I was married, and when I reached here people came to see me me, but his first salutation was a paper enquiring about his income tax— That income tax has been a matter of most intense anxiety to him, he could not possibly comprehend it—” (CtHMTH). Clemens turned his anxiety into a sketch, “A Mysterious Visit,” published on 19 March in the Express. In it he told how an unfortunate boast to the tax assessor—“Two hundred and fourteen thousand, cash, is my income for this year if I know how to cipher”—threatened financial calamity until he learned to manipulate the “eleven saving clauses under the head of ‘Deductions’” (SLC 1870). The sketch was reprinted in “the Revenue Record, the official organ of the Internal Revenue Department,” at the suggestion of
an Assistant Assessor of Internal Revenue, who writes that it is the unanimous opinion of the Assistant Assessors of the Thirtieth District that it ought to be published in the Record. It is suggestive, he adds, “of some fun, and any amount of truth in reference to the assessment of incomes, and we think it would be interesting to revenue officers generally.” (“The last number . . . ,” Buffalo Express, 12 Apr 70, 2)
Olivia’s 2 March letter was her second reminder about these irons—used for polishing starched shirtfronts, collars, and cuffs. She had first written to her mother about them on 20 February: “This Youth of mine does not want his shirts ironed till the polishing irons come— We ordered them from Roes Charlies store, if it will not trouble Sue [Crane] to enquire about them some time when she is down town I should like to get her to do so—” (CtHMTH). With his father’s backing, Charles Langdon became a partner in Ayrault, Rose and Company, an Elmira hardware store, in 1868 (Whitney and Smith, 4:4594; L2 , 341–42 n. 3).
Clemens was last in Hartford on 27 December 1869, at which time he informed Olivia that Isabella Beecher Hooker had been writing to “Mr. Langdon to make us sell out in Buffalo & come here” ( L3 , 440). No report of Clemens leaving Buffalo has been found in a Hartford paper. On 13 January 1870, however, the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser announced: “Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemons,) formerly of this city, lectures in Fredonia on Wednesday evening of next week” (“Brevities,” 3). On 21 January the Cleveland Herald made the point explicit: “The Buffalo Commercial intimates that Mark Twain has left that city” (“Personal Intelligence,” 4). Clemens evidently saw even more decided versions of the rumor among the Buffalo Express’s exchanges, leading him to publish a disclaimer (7 Mar 70 to the Publicclick to open link)
MS, Mark Twain House, Hartford (CtHMTH).
L4 , 81–84; LLMT , 147–48.
donated to CtHMTH in 1963 by Ida Langdon.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.