12 May 1868 • San Francisco, Calif. (Transcripts: CU-MARK and Parke-Bernet Galleries 1956, lot 90, UCCL 02782)
I Ⓐemendation want to preach in the States Ⓐemendationall winter. I mean to get up a lecture on California, another on “Paris & Pompeii,” Ⓐemendation& revamp my Sandwich Is-lands talk & put in this superb eruption 3 weeks ago.1explanatory note I go east the 1st of July.Ⓐemendation 2explanatory note My book, (subscription, Ⓐemendationonly—$4.50 Ⓐemendationper copy, 600 pages octavo, illustrated,) Ⓐemendationwill be issued from the press early in December Ⓐemendation & the canvassers will be all over the country two or three months before that. Had $1605 in the house first night here. In haste,
No trace of a lecture on “Paris & Pompeii” has been found. Clemens had planned to write a lecture about California as early as January 1867 (see 15 Jan 67 to Hingstonclick to open link), but is not known to have done so until May 1869, when he wrote to his agent, James Redpath of the Boston Lyceum Bureau, about a lecture to be called “Curiosities of California,” saying that he had not “written it yet, but it is mapped out, & suits me very well.... Nearly all the societies wanted a Cal. lecture last year” (SLC to Redpath, 10 May 69click to open link, CtY-BR; Lorch 1952; SLC 1869). “Curiosities of California,” which included a description of Clemens’s 1868 experiences in crossing the Sierra, was only partly drafted and never performed. Instead, Clemens substituted a reworked version of his original Sandwich Islands lecture, calling it “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” (MTSpk , 14). This lecture, however, apparently did not include details of the March–April 1868 volcanic and seismic activity on the island of Hawaii, vividly described in the Alta on 7 May. A crater near the summit of Mauna Loa erupted on 7 March, spewing forth fountains of lava; this spectacular but brief eruption was followed by ten days of severe earthquakes, mud flows, and tidal waves, which in combination destroyed several villages and killed over a hundred people. On 7 April the volcano again erupted, and rivers of lava flowed for five days from the lower slopes of the mountain into the ocean (“From Hawaii. Grand and Terrible Convulsions of Nature,” San Francisco Alta California, 7 May 68, 1; Coan, 556–59). Clemens had visited Kilauea, an active crater on the eastern slope of Mauna Loa, in June 1866, and routinely included a description of it in his Sandwich Islands lecture (see 21 June 66 to JLC and PAMclick to open link, L1 , 343–46).
Like many catalogs, P2 uses italic type for text quoted from MS, a convention silently normalized here.
No source text. The text is based on two transcripts, both of which derive independently from the lost MS:
As editor of the Mark Twain Papers, Dixon Wecter was actively engaged in collecting letters for publication, usually by carefully transcribing the MS. Lacking the MS in this case (P1), he transcribed the letter on a standard 3” × 5” card, in pencil, from a (now lost) 1937 catalog entry of New York book and manuscript dealer James F. Drake. Wecter identified the letter as “SLC to Gov. Frank Fuller” and noted at the end of his copy: “1½ pp., sold by James F. Drake | March 11, 1937.” The 1956 Parke-Bernet catalog (P2) might also have derived from the lost Drake catalog, but retranscription from the MS itself, which was then being resold by Parke-Bernet, seems at least as likely. On the one hand, P2 quoted no words from the letter which were not earlier quoted in P1, and all description of the MS in P2 had earlier appeared in P1, save only the notation “12mo.” On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the 1956 Parke-Bernet cataloger would, contrary to modern usage, add commas to clarify the parentheses at 217.2–3. The appearance of commas together with parentheses in P2 seems more likely the result of retranscribing the MS, for in other letters from this period, Clemens sometimes used commas before closing and (less frequently) opening parentheses. But whether P2 transcribed the Drake catalog or retranscribed the MS, it derived from the MS independently of P1. Both texts have been judged to contain variants that reproduce the reading of the lost MS, and are therefore adopted here.
L2 , 216–217; see Source text.
This letter was sold by James F. Drake in March 1937, possibly to Alan N. Mendleson; the Mendleson collection, including this letter, was sold in December 1956. The present location of the MS is not known.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.