enclosing a sketch for the Buffalo Bazaar Bulletin
17 November 1880 • Hartford, Conn. (MS and transcript: NHyF and Buffalo Express,
10 December 1880, UCCL 11407 and 12659)
Once I swore a great oath that I never never would do it again—& so I wrote & published in the “Contributors’ Club” (8 or 10 months ago), my reasons for so resolving. Well, when your letter came, I drew a check for ten dollars, & was going to compromise on that; but then it occurred to me that a man who wouldn’t break an oath for a friend’s sake must be made of a mighty mean quality of clay—so I broke it without a pang (maybe a pang might have been worth something toward sponging out the sin, but I didn’t think of that card in time to play it), & wrote a little Tale around the check to enhance its value—to you, if not to the paper & the public. But between you & me the check is the only valuable thing about it, for articles in those Fair papers don’t count for much. I put in a word there (“inoffensive”) which you may strike out with perfect freedom—I couldn’t quite resist the temptation to heave that little slur at the Fair papers; but the pleasure of writing it was sufficient, I should not mind its absence from print. In fact it ought to be out, for it wouldn’t have any point if you are going to write as brightly in print your paper as you do in a private letter. I perceive that you swing a mighty facile & practiced pen; why is it that you are not known to the world? is it that you don’t print what you write? If so, where did you get this ease & grace & dash, which come only of long practice? You must have surely have an inspiring audience of correspondents somewhere, & a rattling lot of corresponding to do, too.
Consound it, why don’t you desert David & come & see us, since he won’t come with you? If you’ll do it I’ll go to New Jersey City any time and engineer you over the ferry & through the troublesome city & thence to Hartford. Come! make it a bargain; & do drag David along, too, if you can. And I’ll read “The Little Prince & the Little Pauper” (please don’t mention that title—I may publish it in a magazine without any signature appended) to you—just finished it & throu thoroughly revised & re-revised it last week. Mrs. Clemens & Mrs. Warner are so lavish in their praises of it that they make even me blush—& that is hard to do, with compliments. It has 30 chapters, & is & contains just the same amount of matter that “Tom Sawyer” contains.
Mrs. Clemens joins me in love to you & David, & begs earnestly that you will come, & that you will try every way you can think of to make David come, too. The children are well, & Jean is as fat & gross as a goose that is getting ready to be paté de fois gras’d.
enclosure:
a tale
For Struggling Young Poets.
Well, sir, once there was a young fellow who believed he was a poet; but the main difficulty with him was to get anybody else to believe it. Many &Ⓐemendation many a poet has split on that rock—if it is a rock. Many &Ⓐemendation many a poet will split on it yet, thank God. The young fellow I speak of used all the customary devices—&Ⓐemendation with the customary results—to wit: he competed for prizes, &Ⓐemendation didn’t take any; he sent specimens of his poetry to famous people &Ⓐemendation asked for a “candid opinion,” meaning a puff, &Ⓐemendation didn’t get it; he took advantage of dead persons &Ⓐemendation obituaried them in ostensible poetry, but it made him no friends—certainly none among the dead. But at last he heard of another chance; there was going to be a Homeopathic fair in Buffalo, accompanied by the usual inoffensive paper, &Ⓐemendation the editor of that paper offered a prize of two dollars for the best original poem on the usual topic of “Spring”—no poem to be considered unless it should possess positive value.
Well, sir, he shook up his muse, he introduced into her a rousing charge of inspiration from his jug, &Ⓐemendation then sat down &Ⓐemendation dashed off the following madrigal just as easy as lying:
HAIL! BEAUTEOUS, BOUNTEOUS, GLADSOME SPRING. a poem by s. l. clemens.
Did he take the prize? Yes, he took the prize. The poem &Ⓐemendation its title didn’t seem to go together very well, but no matter, that sort of thing has happened before; it didn’t rhyme, neither was it blank verse, for the blanks were all filled—yet it took the prize. For this reason; no other poem offered was really worth more than about four dollars &Ⓐemendation a half, whereas there was no getting around the petrified fact that this one was worth ten. In truth there was not a banker in that whole town who was willing to invest a cent in those other poems, but every one of them said this one was good, sound, sea-worthy poetry, &Ⓐemendation worth its face.
Such is the way in which that struggling young poet achieved recognition at last &Ⓐemendation got a start along the road that leads to lyric eminence—whatever that may mean.
Therefore, let other struggling young poets be encouraged by this to go on striving.
HartfordⒶemendation, Nov. 17, 1880.
The letter MS is in the David Gray Papers, General Services Administration National Archives and Record Service, NHyF. The text of the enclosed sketch has been transcribed from a microfilm copy of the Buffalo Express, 10 December 1880, 4, in NBuBE.
“Mark Twain’s Poem,” Hartford Courant, 13 December 1880, 2; MicroPUL, reel 1.
The David Gray Papers—donated to NHyF by David Gray, Jr.—include several dozen letters written to his father and mother. Among these are nine letters from Clemens, one from Clemens and Olivia, and one from Olivia alone.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.