Mr. Clemens tells how he became a business man— Mentions his brother Orion’s autobiography.
During the previous yearⒶapparatus note or year and a half, Mr. Langdon had suffered some severe losses through a Mr. Talmage Brown, who was an annex of the family by marriage. BrownⒶapparatus note had paved Memphis, Tennessee, with the wooden pavement so popular in that day. He had done this as Mr. Langdon’s agent. Well managed, the contract would have yielded a sufficient profit, but through Brown’s mismanagement it had merelyⒶapparatus note yielded a large lossⒺexplanatory note. With Mr. Langdon alive, this loss was not a matter of consequence, and could not cripple the business. But with Mr. Langdon’s brain and hand and credit and high character removed, it was another matter. He was a dealer in anthracite coal. He sold this coal over a stretch of country extending as far as Chicago, and he had important branches of his business in a number of cities. His agents were usually considerably in debt to him, and he was correspondingly in debt to the owners of the mines. His death left three young men in charge of the business—young Charley Langdon,Ⓐapparatus note Theodore Crane, and Mr. Slee. He had recently made them partners in the business, by gift. But they were unknown. The business world knew J. Langdon, a name that was a power, but these three young men were ciphers without a unit. Slee turned out afterward to be a very able man, and a most capable and persuasive negotiator, but at the time that I speak of his qualities were quite unknown. Mr. Langdon had trained him, and he was well equipped for his headship of the little firm. Theodore Crane was competent in his line—that of head clerk and superintendentⒶapparatus note of the subordinateⒶapparatus note clerks. No better man could have been found for that place; but his capacities were limited to that position. He was good and upright and indestructibly honest and honorable, but he had neither desire nor ambition to be anything above chief clerk. He was much too timid for larger work or larger responsibilities. Young CharleyⒶapparatus note was twenty-one,Ⓐapparatus note and not any older than his age—that is to say, he was a boy. His mother had indulged him from the cradle up, and had stood between him and such discomforts as duties, studies, work, responsibility, and so on. He had gone to school only when he wanted to, as a rule, and he didn’t want to often enough for his desire to be mistaken for a passion. He was not obliged to study at home when he had the headache, and he usually had the headache—the thing that was to be expected. He was allowed to play when his health and his predilections required it, and they required it with a good deal of frequency, because he was the judge in the matter. He was not required to read books, and he never read them. The results of this kind of bringing up can be imagined. But he was not to blame for them. His mother was his worst enemy, and she became this merely through her love for him, which was an intense and steadily burning passion. It was a most pathetic case. He had an unusually bright mind; a fertile mind; a mind that should have been fruitful. But because of his mother’s calamitous indulgence, it got no cultivation and was a desert. Outside of business, it is a desert yet.
Charley’s deadly training had made him conceited, arrogant, and overbearing. Slee and Theodore had a heavier burden to carry than had been the case with Mr. Langdon. Mr. Langdon had hadⒶapparatus note nothing to do but manage the business, whereas Slee and Crane had to manage the business and CharleyⒶapparatus note besides. CharleyⒶapparatus note was the most difficult part of the enterprise. He was a [begin page 377] good deal given to reorganizing and upsetting Mr. Slee’s most promising arrangements and negotiations. Then the work had to be all done over again.
However, I started to tell how I became, all of a sudden, a business person—a matter which was entirely out of my line. A careful statement of Mr. Langdon’s affairs showed that the assets were worth eight hundred thousand dollars, and that against them was merely the ordinary obligations of the business. Bills aggregating perhaps three hundred thousand dollars—possibly fourⒶapparatus note hundred thousand—would have to be paid; half in about a month, the other half in about two months. The collections to meet these obligations would come in further along. With Mr. Langdon alive, these debts could be no embarrassment. He could go to the Bank in the town, or in New York, and borrow the money without any trouble, but these boys couldn’t do that. They could get one hundred and fifty thousand dollars cash, at once, but that was all. It was Mr. Langdon’s life insurance. It was paidⒶapparatus note promptly, but it could not go far—that is it could not go far enough. It did not fall short much—in fact only fifty thousand dollars, but where to get the fifty thousand dollars was a puzzle. They wrote to Mr. Henry W.Ⓐapparatus note Sage, of IthacaⒺexplanatory note, an old and warm friend and former business partner of Mr. Langdon, and begged him to come to Elmira and give them advice and help. He replied that he would come. Then, to my consternation, the young firm appointed me to do the negotiating with him. It was like asking me to calculate an eclipse. I had no idea of how to begin nor what to say. But they brought the big balance-sheet to the house and sat down with me in the library and explained, and explained, and explained, until at last I did get a fairly clear idea of what I must say to Mr. Sage.
When Mr. Sage came he and I went to the library to examine that balance-sheet, and the firm waited and trembled in some other part of the house. When I got through explaining the situation to Mr. Sage I got struck by lightning again—that is to say, he furnished me a fresh astonishment. He was a man with a straight mouth and a wonderfully firm jaw. He was the kind of man who puts his whole mind on a thing and keeps that kind of a mouth shut and locked all the way through, while the other man states the case. On this occasion I should have been grateful for some slight indication from him, during my long explanation, which might indicate that I was making at least some kind of an impression upon him, favorable or unfavorable. But he kept my heart on the strain all the way through, and I never could catch any hint of what was passing through his mind. But at the finish he spoke out with that robust decision which was a part of his character and said:
“Mr. Clemens,Ⓐapparatus note you’ve got as clear a business head on your shoulders as I have come in contact with for years. What are you an author for? You ought to be a business man.”
I knew better, but it was not diplomatic to say so, and I didn’t. Then he said,Ⓐapparatus note
“All you boysⒶapparatus note need is my note for fifty thousand dollars, at three months, handed in at the Bank, and with that support you will not need the money. If it shall be necessary to extend the note, tell Mr. Arnot it will be extended. The business is all right. Go ahead with it and have no fears. It is my opinion that this note will come back to me without your having extracted a dollar from it, at the end of the three months.”
It happened just as he had said. Old Mr. ArnotⒺexplanatory note, the Scotch banker, a very rich and very careful man and life-long friend of Mr. Langdon, watched the young firm and advised it out of his rich store of commercial wisdom, and at the end of the three months the firm was an [begin page 378] established and growing concern, and the note was sent back to Mr. Sage without our having needed to extract anything from it. It was a small piece of paper, insignificant in its dimensions, insignificant in the sum which itⒶapparatus note represented, but formidable was its influence, and formidable was its power, because of the man who stood behind it.
The Sages and the TwichellsⒶapparatus note were very intimate. One or two years later, Mr. Sage came to Hartford on a visit to Joe, and as soon as he had gone away TwichellⒶapparatus note rushed over to our house eager to tell me something; somethingⒶapparatus note which had astonished him, and which he believed would astonish me. He said,
“Why Mark, you know, Mr. Sage, one of the best business men in America, says that you have quite extraordinary business talents.”
Again I didn’t deny it. I would not have had that superstition dissipated for anything. It supplied a long felt want. We are alwaysⒶapparatus note more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we doⒶapparatus note possess.
All this was in 1870. Thirty-five years drifted by, and a year ago, in this house, CharleyⒶapparatus note sat by this bed and casually remarked that if he were going to select what he considered the proudest moment of his life he should say that it was after he had explained the balance-sheet to Mr. Sage and had heard him say “Boy as you are, you carry on your shoulders one of the most remarkable business heads I have ever encountered.”
Again I didn’t say anything. What could be the use? That appropriation of my great achievement had without doubt been embedded in Charley’sⒶapparatus note mind for a good many years, and I never could have gotten it out by argument and persuasion. Nothing but dynamite could do it.
I wonder if we are not all constructed like that. I think it likely that we all get to admiring other people’s achievements and then go on telling about them and telling about them, until insensibly, and without our suspecting it, we shove the achiever out and take his place. I know of one instance of this. In the other room you will find a bulky manuscript, an autobiography of my brother Orion, who was ten years my senior in age. He wrote that autobiography at my suggestion, twenty years ago, and brought it to me in Hartford, from Keokuk, IowaⒺexplanatory note. I had urged him to put upon paper all the well remembered incidents of his life, and to not confine himself to those which he was proud of, but to put in also those which he was ashamed of. I said I did not suppose he could do it, because if anybody could do that thing it would have been done long ago. The fact that it has never been done is very good proof that it can’t be done. Benvenuto tells a number of things that any otherⒶapparatus note human being would be ashamed of, but the fact that he tells them seems to be very good evidence that he was not ashamed of them; and the same, I think, must be the case with Rousseau and his “Confessions.”Ⓔexplanatory note
I urged Orion to try to tell the truth, and tell the whole of it. I said he couldn’t tell the truth of course—that is, he could not lie successfully about a shameful experience of his, because the truth would sneak out between the lies and he couldn’t help it—that an autobiography is always two things: it is an absolute lie and it is an absolute truth. The author of it furnishes the lie, the reader of it furnishes the truth—that is, he gets at the truth by insight. In that autobiography my brother adopts and makes his own an incident which occurred in my life when I was two and a half years old. I suppose he had often heard me tell it. I suppose that by and by he got to telling it himself and told it a few times too often—told it so often that at last it became [begin page 379] his own adventure and not mine. I think perhaps I have already mentioned this incident, but I will state it again briefly.
When our family moved by wagon from the hamlet of Florida, Missouri, thirty miles to Hannibal, on the Mississippi, they did not count the children, and I was left behind. I was two and a half years old. I was playing in the kitchen. I was all alone. I was playing with a little pyramid of meal which had sifted to the floor from the meal barrel through a hole contributed by a rat. By and by I noticed how still it was; how solemn it was; and my soul was filled with nameless terrors. I ran through the house; found it empty, still, silent—awfully silent, frightfully still and lifeless. Every living creature gone; I the one and sole living inhabitant of the globe, and the sun going down. Then an uncle of mine arrived on horseback to fetch me. The family had traveled peacefully along, I don’t know how many hours, before at last some one had discovered the calamity that had befallen it.
My brother tells that incident in his autobiographyⒺexplanatory note gravely, tells it as an experience of his own, whereas if he had stopped to think a minute, it could properly be a striking and picturesque adventure in the life of a toddling child of two and a halfⒶapparatus note, but when he makes it an experience of his own, it does not make a hero of the person it happened to, because there could be nothing heroic or blood-curdling about the leaving behind of a young man twelve and a half years old. My brother did not notice that discrepancy. It seems incredible that he could write it down as his adventure and not cipher a little on the circumstances—but evidently he didn’t, and there it stands in his autobiography as the impressive adventure of a child of twelve and a half.
Mr. Talmage Brown, who was an annex of the family by marriage . . . yielded a large loss] Brown (d. 1891), a Des Moines, Iowa, attorney, real estate developer, and paving contractor, was married to Olivia’s first cousin, the former Anna Marsh. In 1869 Langdon brought suit against the city of Memphis, which owed him five hundred thousand dollars. After Brown’s death, Clemens preserved three obituary clippings from Des Moines newspapers that eulogized him for his generosity, business acumen, devotion to family, and religious enthusiasm. In the notebook he was using at the time, Clemens indicated that these tributes made him question his own negative view ( N&J3, 635; L4: link note following 28–31 Jan 1870 to Twichell, 43; 6 July 1870 to OLC, 165 n. 1; see also AD, 26 Mar 1906).
Mr. Henry W. Sage, of Ithaca] Sage (1814–97) was a highly successful businessman whose lumber enterprises made him one of the largest landholders in the state. He was a generous benefactor of Cornell University, and built and endowed many libraries, churches, and schools. His son, Dean Sage, was a good friend of Clemens’s ( L6: 28 Mar 1875 to Sage, 431 n. 1; 22 Apr 1875 to Sage, 453 n. 5).
Mr. Arnot] John Arnot (1793–1873) emigrated with his family from Scotland in 1801. He was an Elmira merchant and foundry owner before taking a position as cashier at the Chemung Canal Bank, becoming president in 1852 (Peirce and Hurd 1879, 284; Boyd and Boyd 1872, 41).
bulky manuscript, an autobiography of my brother Orion . . . from Keokuk, Iowa] Clemens suggested to Orion two possible plans of writing a ruthlessly honest memoir in a letter of 26 February 1880. Orion, excited rather than insulted by the prospect of writing “The Autobiography of a Coward” or “Confessions of a Life that was a Failure” (Clemens’s suggested titles), went straight to work, and by June 1880 Clemens was able to offer Howells a sample for publication in the Atlantic Monthly. Howells declined: “It wrung my heart, and I felt haggard after I had finished it. . . . But the writer’s soul is laid too bare: it is shocking” (Howells to SLC, 14 June 1880, CU-MARK, in MTHL, 1:315). Orion sent his brother the finished manuscript of 2,523 pages, retitled “The Autobiography of a Crank,” on 18 January 1882; but it would never see print. Here Clemens claims that Orion’s manuscript was “in the other room”; in the Autobiographical Dictation of 6 April 1906, he claims to have “destroyed a considerable part” of it at an early date. The manuscript, whether whole or fragmentary, was apparently lost by Paine in Grand Central Station on 11 July 1907. After Clemens’s death, Paine gave inconsistent accounts of the fate of the autobiography, claiming variously that it had been deposited in a vault, lost, or destroyed at Clemens’s behest; Paine quotes from it, however, in Mark Twain: A Biography, saying there that the earliest chapters had been preserved. Apart from those quotations, Orion’s autobiography is extant only as a few stray leaves in the Mark Twain Papers, and some items of correspondence that Orion annotated for inclusion ( Letters 1876–1880 : 26 Feb 1880 to OC, 9 June 1880 to Howells; OC to SLC: 29 Feb and 1 Mar 1880, 18 Jan 1882, 19 Jan 1882, CU-MARK; MTB, 1:24, 44, 85, 2:674–77; MS fragments in DV 391, CU-MARK; Orion’s note on 6 Feb 1861 to OC and MEC, NPV; Schmidt 2008b).
Benvenuto tells a number of things . . . Rousseau and his “Confessions.”] The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini was for Clemens the “most entertaining of books” ( N&J2, 229); he referred to it in his letters and notebooks as well as in chapter 35 of Huckleberry Finn, and in chapter 17 of A Connecticut Yankee. In his letter of 26 February 1880 he told Orion that “Rousseau confesses to masturbation, theft, lying, shameful treachery” ( Letters 1876–1880 ; the letter is quoted more fully in the Introduction, p. 6).
I think perhaps I have already mentioned . . . My brother tells that incident in his autobiography] See “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” 209.24–33 and note. Orion’s account, in which he rather than Samuel is left behind, is less dramatic; he was fourteen (1839–40) and his “abandonment” was brief: “The wagon had gone a few feet when I was discovered and invited to enter” ( MTB, 1:24).
Source documents.
TS1 (incomplete) Typescript, leaves numbered 368–69, 371–75 (370 and 376–79 are missing; number 367 was omitted in the typed pagination sequence), made from Hobby’s notes and revised: ‘Friday . . . him from’ (376 title–376.25); ‘arrogant . . . it out’ (376.37–378.21).TS2 Typescript, leaves numbered 509–20, made from the revised TS1 and further revised.
TS4 Typescript, leaves numbered 759–70, made from the revised TS1.
Clemens apparently considered but then rejected this dictation for possible publication through Samuel McClure’s newspaper syndicate, writing ‘Not Mc’ in blue pencil, and then deleting it, on the first page of TS1; that notation was later partially erased (see the Introduction, p. 29). The pages missing from TS1 were discarded by Paine when he edited the dictation for MTA. Hobby incorporated the revisions that Clemens made on TS1 into TS2, and they were incorporated into TS4 as well. TS4 has no authority for the text that survives in TS1. Where TS1 is missing, however, TS4 was collated and its variants reported, because TS2 and TS4 derive independently from TS1 and therefore either may incorporate authorial readings not present in the other. When TS2 and TS4 agree, they confirm the readings of the missing portion of TS1.
Clemens marked TS2 as if he intended to publish an excerpt in the NAR, but ultimately did not do so, probably because of the unflattering portraits of his brother-in-law, Charley Langdon, and his brother Orion.
Marginal Notes on TS2 Concerning Publication in the NAR