18 July 1872 • New Saybrook, Conn. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 00769
New Saybrook,
July 18.
It is pleasant to be called for by so many towns so early in the season, but I have decided not to lecture all at all this season; but shall spend the fall & winter either in England or in Florida & Cuba.1explanatory note I never shall lecture again more than one month in one season, & then only in the large cities—this, of course, is supposing that I remain pecuniarily able to follow such a course.2explanatory note
Why yes—I do want you to say one thing about me in that article. I very much desire it. It is this: that I have been offered $10,000 to lecture one month, next winter, before the associations of the principal cities, or $5,000 for 12 nights3explanatory note —& have declined both offers because I am under contract to write a book4explanatory note & shall not get it done as soon as I desire, if I drift off to other things.
Can you say that? Because I am “going for” Timothy Titcomb in one of the magazines & I would like him to chaw over that little evidence that “buffoons & triflers” are not scorned by everybody.5explanatory note
My wife is hurrying me to dinner. We are summering here all season Ⓐemendation.
letter docketed: Clemens S. L. | New Saybrook | July 18th ’72. and boston lyceum bureau. redpath & fall. jul 23 1872
Clemens’s interest in visiting Cuba—ravaged since 1868 by a war of rebellion against the Spanish government—may have been roused by Whitelaw Reid and Bret Harte, who had been guests on a cruise to the island in January. Clemens apparently hoped to gather material for a book (“A Distinguished Excursion Party,” New York Tribune, 26 Jan 72, 5; see 21 July 72 to Blamire, n. 3click to open link).
Redpath’s article, signed “Berwick” (a pen name derived from his birthplace of Berwick-upon-Tweed, in England near the Scottish border), appeared in the New York Independent, a religious weekly, on 11 July. Redpath warmly championed “the men who laugh and who make their fellows laugh” as possessors of a “rare and divine” gift especially effective in exposing prejudice, superstition, and political folly (Redpath 1872). No further articles in the proposed series have been discovered. Clemens included the information about his lucrative lecture offers in “An Appeal from One That Is Persecuted” (see note 5). The lecture offers have not been documented.
J. G. Holland (Timothy Titcomb) first decried the lecture circuit’s “buffoons and triflers” in the Atlantic Monthly for March 1865. He enlarged on this theme in the March 1871 issue of Scribner’s Monthly, blaming the lecture bureau system for the growing number of “literary jesters and mountebanks” to be found on lyceum rosters (Holland: 1865, 366; 1871, 560). (Redpath reprinted the latter article, with his own rebuttal, in the 1871 Lyceum Magazine Redpath 1871 .) More recently, Holland had returned to the attack in “Triflers on the Platform” in the February 1872 Scribner’s Monthly, rousing Clemens to tell Redpath on 20 April that he would “go for Timothy one of these days.” Holland singled out Artemus Ward as a particularly pernicious influence on the lyceum:
Artemus Ward “lectured;” and he was right royally paid for acting the literary buffoon. He has had many imitators; and the damage that he and they have inflicted upon the institution of the lyceum is incalculable. The better class that once attended the lecture courses have been driven away in disgust, and among the remainder such a greed for inferior entertainments has been excited that lecture managers have become afraid to offer a first-class, old-fashioned course of lectures to the public patronage. Accordingly, one will find upon nearly every list, offered by the various committees and managers, the names of triflers and buffoons who are a constant disgrace to the lecturing guild, and a constantly degrading influence upon the public taste. Their popularity is usually exhausted by a single performance, but they rove from platform to platform, retailing their stale jokes, and doing their best and worst to destroy the institution to which they cling for a hearing and a living. ... Wit and humor are always good as condiments, but never as food. The stupidest book in the world is a book of jokes, and the stupidest man in the world is one who surrenders himself to the single purpose of making men laugh. ... When our lyceums ... at last become agents of buffoonery and low literary entertainments, they dishonor their early record and the idea which gave them birth. Let them banish triflers from the platform, and go back to the plan which gave them their original prosperity and influence. (Holland 1872, 489)
In July Holland followed up with “The Literary Bureaus Again” (Holland 1872). This article goaded Clemens into “going for” Holland, in a nineteen-page essay entitled “An Appeal from One That Is Persecuted,” which, however, he never published. The “Appeal” shows that Clemens took Holland’s remarks personally: “He must mean me in those paragraphs, because the language fits me like my own skin” (SLC 1872, 10). In reply he claimed that Holland had over-looked the real villain:
It is not I & my craft that des bankrupt & destroy the lecture societies, but it is Dr Holland himself & the other “first-class old fashioned” disseminators of “instruction” that do it. ... Dr. Holland says the buffoons charge so much for their services that they have are breaking up the lecture system by making the thing unbearably expensive. How can he talk so when with the memory of bleeding Jersey City in his mind, where he charged a hundred dollars and had only a hundred & fifty people in the house? I shudder to think what might have happened to that lyceum if I if one or two “literary buffoons” had not happened along in the nick of time and drummed up twenty-five hundred people two or three thousand people who were willing to be have their taste “degraded” but did not need any threadbare “instruction.” The real truth is, that the doctor & his people go about the country massacreing lecture associations, & the buffoons follow after and resurrect them. It sounds strangely enough to hear Dr. Holland ab accusing us of killing the lecture business. ... He moves through the lecture field a remorseless intellectual cholera; & wherever he goes—figuratively speaking,—“death & hell follow after.”
Dr. Holland’s plaintive complainings and thin illogical reasoning aside, what do these things most more probably betoken? Simply, that in the old ignorant times, people had little or nothing to read, & so they talked nothing but crops & the weather, & needed a little tedious miscellaneous “instruction;” even from rather but in these days when newspapers and free libraries cram everybody to suffocation with instruction on every possible subject, the thing their overburdened heads pine for is the wholesome relief in the shape of amusement, entertainment, care-conquering -banishing laughter—not a further stuffing at the hands of a blessed old perambulating sack of chloroform. ... But Dr. Holland’s day has gone by. Holland, to speak candidly & without malice or any shade of ill feeling, is the very incarnation of the Commonplace. Now that That is to say, when he is on the platform., or in the editorial chair. spelling out his manuscript. Now that will not do in these vigorous progressive & exacting times. Why will he not take a seat peaceably in the rear, along with the rest of the condemned mediocre instructors, & stop wailing?
And just to glorify myself & the other buffoons, & just to make him feel how unjust he is toward us when he says we are killing the lecture business, I will state here that I am one of two “literary buffoons” who were a few days since offered $10,000 apiece to lecture one month, or $5,000 apiece to lecture twelve nights. The other buffoon has accepted, I believe, but I—what sacrifice do you suppose I am about to make? am I about to make? Anxious as I am to accept, & t Tempting as the offer is, I hereby withdraw totally from the field (declining in good earnest,) & tender this splendid month’s work to the Raw-Head-&-Bloody-Bones of the lecture arena, Dr. Timothy Titcomb Holland, the Moral Instructor! There is a noble magnanimity in this act, if I do say it myself, that shouldn’t. (And I should think the doctor would sink into the earth for shame, after the way in which he has treated me & the other “literary triflers.”) Now the public shall see how that speculator will finish will come out with a lecturer of the only true & legitimate stamp. (SLC 1872, 10–19)
Clemens’s defensive statements and sarcasms failed to address the most troubling part of Holland’s view—his dismissal of all claim by the “triflers” to be taken seriously in literary matters. Clemens remained sensitive on this point: a year later, in his letter of 20 April 1873 to Whitelaw Reid, he asserted—again defensively—“I am not a man of trifling literary consequence.”
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L5 , 121–24.
The MS was owned by businessman William T. H. Howe (1874–1939); in 1940 Dr. A. A. Berg bought and donated the Howe Collection to NN.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.