4 February 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: Craven, UCCL 01046)
Thanks for the kind words now, & thanks for the speech when it comes.1explanatory note
I wish I could run down there. I meant to go there & lecture, but the wife can’t travel very well, & I won’t travel any more without her. So I don’t lecture this winter.2explanatory note
Our new house is progressing steadily—hope to sleep you & eat you under its roof when it is finished, next autumn.3explanatory note Livy sends kindest regards & best wishes.
Cox, a Democratic congressman from New York, had been a friend of Clemens’s since at least July 1870 and a friend of Olivia’s even longer ( L4 , 164, 166 n. 3, 328, 347). His “kind words” may have been for The Gilded Age. He did not mention Mark Twain in his recorded remarks in the House of Representatives in 1874, so the “speech” was probably his “frequently delivered” talk, “American Humor,” which became “one of Mr. Cox’s standing lectures” (“Aid for Mississippi,” New York Herald, 29 May 74, 7). No full text of it has been found, but Cox, known for his own wit, expanded and published it as Why We Laugh in 1876. There he alluded to Mark Twain several times, in particular praising his Gilded Age play (see 15 and 16 July 74 to Wattclick to open link), and calling the “tomb of Adam” passage in chapter 53 of The Innocents Abroad “the humorous sublime” (Cox, 39, 42, 52, 56, 58–59, 94; “American Humor,” New York Tribune, 29 May 74, 5).
Clemens had included New York, but not Washington, on his tentative abbreviated lecture itinerary for the winter of 1874 (27–31 Jan 74 to Redpath, n. 1click to open link). Olivia’s activities were restricted by her pregnancy.
The new house, even in its incomplete state, had begun drawing comment. A correspondent of the Titusville (Pa.) Herald had recently called it
the greatest strain of Mr. Twain in his outreaching for oddity. It stands on one of the finest avenues and sites in the city, and looks as if put there to snub the neighboring aristocracy. It is built of brick, which material enters into its composition in every possible position. The red parallelograms stand end-wise, side-wise, corner-wise, projecting here, depressed there, and ornamented nowhere. It is a small brick-kiln gone crazy, the outside ginger breaded with woodwork, as a baker sugar-ornaments the top and sides of a fruit loaf. Of the several tall brick chimneys, no two are alike, and a good strong gale would be apt to topple them. The house has evidently followed the Irish general’s command of “front to the rear,” and although the position puts a beautiful grove in the front, it leaves the kitchen with its barn wall and no windows only a couple of yards from the street. Years hence, if the building still stands, then the passer by will account for its facing toward the street by saying that the road must have been laid out after the house was built. There is positively no style, unless it is “conglomeration,” or that which architects have been trying to invent the last year as purely American architecture. (“Mark Twain’s House,” Elmira Advertiser, 30 Jan 74, reprinting the Titusville Herald of unknown date)
This account of the house may have been among those Clemens’s friend Mary Mason Fairbanks had in mind when she wrote her more flattering description (25 Feb 74 to Fairbanks, n. 2click to open link).
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned in 1969 by Mrs. Robin Craven, who provided a photocopy to the Mark Twain Papers.
L6 , 29–30.