26 April 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (Transcripts: WU and AAA 1924, lot 64, UCCL 00460)
I was powerful glad to hear from you &Ⓐemendation sorry that I can’t insure with you—am insured for $10,000 in the old Continental, Hartford, & I reckon it is about all this frail tenement is worth. But after I collect that, count me in for the Hope.1explanatory note
I sent that Newark gentleman a paper with a joke in it.2explanatory note
Yes, we print a Weekly, but not to outrage our friends with—its legitimate prey are the public. I don’t write for it much. Its price is only a dollar & a half & so the swindle isn’t heavy. I send it to your brother John free of charge—confound him, it keeps him still a little, once a week, & gives some of the Bostonians a chance to edge in a word.3explanatory note I’ll not send it to you, because you don’t talk enough anyhow. You never talked enough to satisfy me, my boy, & I would like to be listening to you this very moment.
Now say—between you & me, you have got aⒶemendation literary sneak thiefⒶemendation inⒶemendation Philadelphia who signs himself “John Quill” & I want you to keep a sharp lookout on him after the June Galaxy comes out. He sent me a newspaper article the other day signed with his name & purporting to be the original of the blowing up of the boy with nitro-glycerine (a catastrophe which I credited to some “unknown but exceedingly ingenious author”) in the May Galaxy. Without mentioning his name, I have salted him down in my MSS.Ⓐemendation for June as “A LiteraryⒶemendation Old OffenderⒶemendation in Court with Suspicious Property in his Possession”—&Ⓐemendationdeclining to accept of his testimony. SendⒶemendation me his reply a month hence or perish. May 13 or 14 or along there.4explanatory note
Frank, if you think there is any likelihood of your remaining in Philadelphia several months longer, before you sell out & start something fresh, I shall be glad to send you our Weekly & not even charge you what any calm, dispassionate rag-man will tell you it is worth.5explanatory note What do you say? For notwithstanding I am so willing to do this, I do not want to do it to you unless you are willing.
See other side. I’m out of the lecture field permanently, I hope. It is a dismal sort of business, even to a lazy man like me—it would kill a nervous thunderbolt like you.
Yrs Ever
Frank, don’t you ever dare to stop at any hotel in Buffalo except this one of mine, 472 Delaware Street.Ⓐemendation
Fuller, who was now living in Philadelphia, apparently represented the Hope Insurance Company, of Providence, Rhode Island, purveyors of life, fire, and marine insurance (“Insurance,” Buffalo Express, 26 Apr 70, 4; Wilson 1869, 526). For Clemens’s insurance, see L3 , 387.
Unidentified.
In a footnote to “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper,” Clemens acknowledged that he borrowed its climax “(without the unknown but most ingenious owner’s permission) from a stray newspaper item” (SLC 1870 [MT00901], 726). He was now completing his manuscript (due on 3 May) for the June “Memoranda.” In the “Literary ‘Old Offender’” segment of it he explained that he found that climax “drifting about the sea of journalism, in the shape of a simple statement of the catastrophe in a single sentence, and attributed to a California paper.” He added that a “Philadelphia person” had since sent him
a half-column newspaper article, dated December 22, signed with his name, and being what he says is the original draft of the nitro-glycerine catastrophe.
The impulse to make pleasant mention of this person’s name and give him the credit he claims, is crippled by the fact that I, or any one else acquainted with his literary history, would feel obliged to decline to accept any evidence coming from him, upon any matter, and especially upon a question of authorship. His simple word is worthless; and to embellish it with his oath would merely make it picturesque, not valuable. This person several of us know of our own personal knowledge to be a poor little purloiner of other men’s ideas and handicraft. . . . Anybody capturing the subject of these remarks and overhauling the catalogue of what he calls his “writings,” will find in it two very good articles of mine, and if the rest were advertised as “strayed or stolen,” they would doubtless be called for by journalists residing in all the different States of the Union. (SLC 1870 [MT00917], 863)
Although Clemens therefore knew that the original had appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, no evidence has been found that he was also aware that the “purloiner’s” claim had already been published there too. On 22 April, in reviewing the May Galaxy, the Bulletin had remarked:
Mr. Twain’s efforts begin this week; he is not in his very freshest vein. . . . By the by, as he terminates his wildest story with a catastrophe confessedly borrowed, we may properly help him to the authorship of the fancy he appropriates. The citizens of Philadelphia remember well enough, what Mr. Twain, in his journey to the sanctum in New York, has dropped the knowledge of, that his boy exploded with nitro-glycerine was an invention of “John Quill,” of the Philadelphia Bulletin. (“New Periodicals,” 2)
Clemens may even have been unaware that John Quill was a pseudonym for Charles Heber Clark (1841–1915), a Bulletin editor who became better known as Max Adeler (Dussere, 44, 93–130, 357). Clark had published his exploding boy story, “The Fate of Joe M’Ginnis: A Warning to Mothers,” in the Bulletin of 22 December 1869 (Clark 1869 [bib11738]). As in Clemens’s story, the title character sits in spilled nitroglycerine and then is inadvertently dispatched by a spanking. Clark’s version had been reprinted in the weekly San Francisco Golden City for 23 January 1870, possibly the “California paper” that Clemens’s source (presumably one of the Buffalo Express’s numerous exchanges) had summarized. The “two very good articles” that Clark may have borrowed were “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man” and “The Steed ‘Oahu,’” which he could have found in the 1867 Jumping Frog book. Clark’s similar sketches were “How Wm. McGinley Suffered” and “That Horse of Mine,” in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin of 26 November and 4 December 1869, respectively (SLC 1864 [MT00322], 1866 [MT00451]; Clark 1869 [bib11736], 1869 [bib11737]). The Bulletin did not respond to Clemens’s June “Memoranda”: in its condescending review of that month’s Galaxy the “Memoranda” were never mentioned (“New Periodicals,” 21 May 70, 6). In 1889, however, Clark renewed hostilities by accusing Clemens of having appropriated much of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court from a short story that, as Max Adeler, he had twice published—in 1881 as “Professor Baffin’s Adventures” and in 1882 as “The Fortunate Island” (Clark 1881, 1882). For interpretation of the entire Clemens-Clark embroglio, see: Ketterer; Kruse 1990, 1991.
Fuller, whose locations and occupations had been varied, did not remain long in Philadelphia. There is no listing for him in city directories for 1871–72, and by 1874 he was in the health food business in New York City ( L2 , 5–6, 241 n. 7; “Frank Fuller Dead; Utah War Governor,” New York Times, 20 Feb 1915, 5).
Adopted readings followed by ‘(C)’ are editorial emendations of the source readings.
No copy-text. Except for the form letter text, which is taken from 8 Feb 70 to John Fullerclick to open link (and identical to 16 Mar 70click to open link and 13 Feb 71 to Unidentifiedclick to open link), the text is based on two transcripts, each of which derived independently from the MS.
P1, a typescript at the Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU), was probably copied by George Brownell from a handwritten transcription (now lost) of the MS by Dana Ayer (see Brownell Collection in Description of Provenance); P2 was transcribed directly from the MS when it was put on sale in 1924. It describes the MS as ‘Autograph Letter Signed:—“Mark,” 4 pp. 8vo.’ Two other typescripts, one at CtHMTH and the other made by Bernard DeVoto (CU-MARK) derive from P1. A second auction catalog, AAA 1927, lot 43, while it may have been transcribed from the MS, quotes only the salutation and signature and contributes no independent readings. Presumably referring to a clipping from the May Galaxy, P2 indicates that ‘Accompanying the letter is the article from the Galaxy to which Clemens refers.’ The 1927 catalog notes that ‘Accompanying the letter are the articles in question, included in the “Memoranda” for May and June.’ While it is possible that Clemens enclosed a clipping from the May Galaxy, he could not have enclosed one from the June number, which did not issue until mid-May. Most likely the earlier clipping, like the later, was not an original enclosure but was supplied by a collector or dealer as an association item.
L4 , 119–22; see Copy-text; a transcription of the form letter text was published in Will M. Clemens 1900, 27.