Mr. Frank Fuller and his enthusiastic launching of Mr. Clemens’s first New York lecture—Results not in fortune but in fame—Leads to a lecture tour under direction of Redpath—Clipping in regard to Frank Fuller, and Mr. Clemens’s comments—Olive Logan clipping and Mr. Clemens’s comments—Mr. Clemens’s feeling toward suicides.
I am not glancing through my books to find out what I have said in them. I refrain from glancing through those books for two reasons; first—and this reason always comes first in every matter connected with my life—laziness. I am too lazy to examine the books. The other reason is—well, let it go. I had another reason, but it has slipped out of my mind while I was arranging the first one. I think it likely that in the book called “Roughing It” I have mentioned Frank FullerⒺexplanatory note. But I don’t know, and it isn’t any matter.
When Orion and I crossed the continent in the overland stage-coach, in the summer of 1861, we stopped two or three days in Great Salt Lake City. I do not remember who the Governor of Utah Territory was at that time, but I remember that he was absent—which is a common habit of TerritorialⒶtextual note Governors, who are nothing but politicians who go out to the outskirts of countries and suffer the privations there in order to build up States and come back as United States SenatorsⒶtextual note. But the man who was acting in the Governor’s place was the Secretary of the Territory, Frank Fuller—called Governor, of courseⒺexplanatory note, just as Orion was in the great days when he got that accident-titleⒶtextual note through Governor Nye’s absences. Titles of honor and dignity once acquired in a democracy, even by accident and properly usable for only forty-eight hours, are as permanent here as eternity is in heaven. You can never take away those titles. Once a justice of the peace for a week, always “judge”Ⓐtextual note afterward. Once a major of militia for a campaign on the Fourth of July, always a major. To be called colonel, purely by mistake and without intention, confers that dignity on a man for the rest of his life. We adore titles and heredities in our hearts, and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.
Well, Fuller was Acting Governor, and he gave us a very good time during those two [begin page 38] or three days that we rested in Great Salt Lake City. He was an alert and energetic man; a pushing man; a man who was able to take an interest in anything that was going—and not only that, but take five times as much interest in it as it was worth, and ten times as much as anybody else could take in it—a very live man.
I was on the Pacific coastⒶtextual note thereafter five or six years, and returned to the States by the way of the Isthmus in January ’67. In the previous year I had spent several months in the Sandwich Islands for the Sacramento Union, and had returned to San Francisco empty as to cash but full of information—information proper for delivery from the lecture platform. My letters from the Islands had given me a large notoriety—local notoriety. It did not extend eastward more than aⒶtextual note hundred miles or so, but it was a good notoriety to lecture on, and I made use of it on the platform in San FranciscoⒺexplanatory note and amassed twelve or fifteen hundred dollars in the few nights that I labored for the instruction and amusement of my public. Fifteen hundred dollars was about half—the doorkeeper got the rest. He was an old circus man and knew how to keep door.
When I arrived in New York I found Fuller there in some kind of business. He was very hearty, very glad to see me, and wanted to show me his wife. I had not heard of a wife before; had not been aware that he had one. Well he showed me his wife, a sweet and gentle woman with most hospitable and kindly and winning ways. Then he astonished me by showing me his daughters. Upon my word, they were large and matronly of aspect, and marriedⒺexplanatory note—he didn’t say how long. Oh, Fuller was full of surprises. If he had shown me some little children, that would have been well enough, and reasonable. But he was too young-lookingⒶtextual note a man to have grown children. Well, I couldn’t fathom the mystery and I let it go. Apparently it was a case where a man was well along in life but had a handsome gift of not showing his age on the outside.
Governor Fuller—it is what all his New York friends calledⒶtextual note him now, of course—was in the full storm of one of his enthusiasms. He had one enthusiasm per day, and it was always a storm. He said I must take the biggest hall in New York and deliver that lecture of mine on the Sandwich Islands—said that people would be wild to hear me. There was something catching about that man’s prodigious energy. For a moment he almost convinced me that New York was wild to hear me. I knew better. I was well aware that New York had never heard of me, was not expecting to hear of me, and didn’t want to hearⒶtextual note of me—yet that man almost persuaded me. I protested, as soon as the fire which he had kindled in me had cooled a little, and went on protesting. It did no good. Fuller was sure that I should make fame and fortune right away without any trouble. He said leave it to him—just leave everything to him—go to the hotel and sit down and be comfortable—he would lay fame and fortune at my feet in ten days.
I was helpless. I was persuadable, but I didn’t lose all of my mind, and I begged him to take a very small hall, and reduce the rates to side-show prices. No, he would not hear of that—said he would have the biggest hall in New York City. He would have the basement hall in Cooper InstituteⒺexplanatory note, which seated three thousand people and there was room for half as many more to stand up; and he said he would fill that place so full, at a dollar a head, that those people would smother and he could charge two dollars apiece [begin page 39] to let them out. Oh, he was all on fire with his projectⒺexplanatory note. He went ahead with it. He said it shouldn’t cost me anything. I said there would be no profit. He said,
“LeaveⒶtextual note that alone. If there is no profit that is my affair. If there is profit it is yours. If it is loss, I stand the loss myself, and you will never hear of it.”
He hired Cooper Institute, and he began to advertise this lecture in the usual way—a small paragraph in the advertising columns of the newspapers. When this had continued about three days I had not yet heard anybody or any newspaper say anything about that lecture, and I got nervous.
“Oh,”Ⓐtextual note he said, “it’s working around underneath. You don’t see it on the surface.” He said “Let it aloneⒶtextual note, now, let it work.”
Very well, I allowed it to work—until about the sixth or seventh day. The lecture would be due in three or four days more—still I was not able to get down underneath, where it was working, and so I was filled with doubt and distress. I went to Fuller and said he must advertise more energetically.
He said he would. So he got a barrel of little things printed that you hang on a string—fifty in a bunch. They were for the omnibuses. You could see them swinging and dangling around in every omnibus. My anxiety forced me to haunt those omnibuses. I did nothing for one or two days but sit in ’busesⒶtextual note and travel from one end of New York to the other and watch those things dangle, and wait to catch somebody pulling one loose to read it. It never happened—at least it happened only once. A man reached up and pulled one of those things loose, said to his friend,
“LectureⒶtextual note on the Sandwich Islands by Mark Twain. Who can that be, I wonder”—and he threw it away and changed the subject.
I couldn’t travel in the omnibuses any more. I was sick. I went to Fuller and said,
“Fuller,Ⓐtextual note there is not going to be anybody in Cooper Institute that night, but you and me. It will be a dead loss, for we shallⒶtextual note both have free tickets. Something must be done. I am on the verge of suicide. I would commit suicide if I had the pluck, and the outfit.”Ⓐtextual note I said,Ⓐtextual note “You must paper the house, Fuller. You must issue thousands of complimentary tickets. You must Ⓐtextual note do this. I shall die if I have to go before an empty house that is not acquainted with me and that has never heard of me, and that has never traveled in the ’busⒶtextual note and seen those things dangle.”
“Well,” he said, with his customary enthusiasm, “I’ll attend to it. It shall be done. I will paper that house, and when you step on the platform you shall find yourself in the presence of the choicest audience, the most intelligent audience, that ever a man stood before in this world.”
And he was as good as his word. He sent whole basketsful of complimentary tickets to every public-school teacher within a radius of thirty miles of New York—he deluged those people with complimentary tickets—and on the appointed night they all came. There wasn’t room in Cooper Institute for a third of them. The lecture was to begin at half pastⒶtextual note seven. I was so anxious that I had to go to that place at seven. I couldn’t keep away. I wanted to see that vast vacant Mammoth Cave and die. But when I got near the building I found that all the streets for a quarter of a mile around were blocked with [begin page 40] people, and traffic was stopped. I couldn’t believe that those people were trying to get into Cooper Institute, and yet that was just what was happening. I found my way around to the back of the building and got in there by the stage door. And sure enough, the seats, the aisles, the great stage itself, wereⒶtextual note packed with bright-looking human beings raked in from the centresⒶtextual note of intelligence—the schools. I had a deal of difficulty to shoulder my way through the mass of people on the stage, and when I had managed it and stood before the audience, that stage was full. There wasn’t room enough left for a child.
I was happy, and I was excited beyond expression. I poured the Sandwich Islands out ontoⒶtextual note those people with a free hand, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in paradiseⒶtextual note. From every pore I exuded a divine delight—and when we came to count up we had thirty-five dollars in the house.
Fuller was just as jubilant over it as if it had furnished the fame and the fortune of his prophecyⒶtextual note. He was perfectly delighted, perfectly enchanted. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut for several days.
“Oh,”Ⓐtextual note he said,Ⓐtextual note “the fortune didn’t come in—that didn’t come in—that’s all right. That’s coming in later. The fame is already here, Mark. Why, in a week you’ll be the best known man in the United States. This is no failure. This is a prodigious success.”
That episode must have cost him four or five hundred dollarsⒺexplanatory note, but he never said a word about that. He was as happy, as satisfied, as proud, as delighted, as if he had laid the fabled golden egg and hatched it.
He was right about the fame. I certainly did get aⒶtextual note working quantity of fame out of that lecture. The New York newspapers praised it. The country newspapers copied those praises. The lyceums of the country—it was right in the heyday of the old lyceum lecture system—began to call for me. I put myself in Redpath’s hands, and I caught the tail-end of the lecture season. I went West and lectured every night, for six or eight weeks, at aⒶtextual note hundred dollars a night—and I now considered that the whole of the prophecyⒶtextual note was fulfilled. I had acquired fame, and also fortune. I don’t believe these details are right, but I don’t care a rap. They will do just as well as the facts. What I mean to say is, that I don’t know whether I made that lecturing excursion in that year or whether it was the following yearⒺexplanatory note. But the main thing is that I made it, and that the opportunity to make it was created by that wild Frank Fuller and his insane and immortal project.
All this was thirty-eight or thirty-nine years ago. Two or three times since then, at intervals of years, I have run across Frank Fuller for a moment—only a moment, and no more. But he was always young. Never a gray hair; never a suggestion of age about him; always enthusiastic; always happy,Ⓐtextual note and glad to be alive. Last fall his wife’s brother was murdered in a horrible way. Apparently a robber had concealed himself in Mr. Thompson’s room, and in the night had beaten him to death with a clubⒺexplanatory note. A couple of months ago I ran across Fuller on the street, and he was looking so very, very old, so withered, so mouldyⒶtextual note, that I could hardly recognize him. He said his wife was dying of the shock caused by the murder of her brother; that nervous prostration was carrying her off, and she could not live more than a few days—so I went with him to see her.
She was sitting upright on a sofa, and was supported all about with pillows. Now and [begin page 41] then she leaned her head for a little while on a support. BreathingⒶtextual note was difficult for her. It touched me, for I had seen that picture so many, many times. During two or three months Mrs. Clemens sat up like that, night and day, struggling for breath. When she was made drowsy by opiates and exhaustion she rested her head a little while on a support, just as Mrs. Fuller was doing, and got naps of two minutes’Ⓐtextual note or three minutes’ duration.
I did not see Mrs. Fuller alive again. She passed to her rest about three days laterⒺexplanatory note.
The thing which has brought Frank Fuller into my mind is this half-column of matter which I have scissored from this morning’s paper. I never get a chance to hunt among my old note-books for texts for this autobiography, for the reason that every day the newspaper furnishes me a couple of dozen, and I never can catch up at this rate.
STRANGE SEQUEL TO BLACKMAILING CASE.
Louis R. Fuller Learns for First Time that He Is Not Rich Dr. Fuller’s Son.
When Louis R. Fuller, Yale graduate and society favorite in New York and Boston, appeared in the Centre Street Police Court yesterday as complainant against Homer HawkinsⒺexplanatory note, No. 101 West Eighty-eighth street, whom he accused of attempted blackmail and assault, he learned for the first time that he is only the adopted son of Dr. Frank FullerⒺexplanatory note, millionaire president of the Health Food Company, No. 61 Fifth avenue.
HawkinsⒶtextual note had sent a letter to Louis R. Fuller, demanding $500 under penalty of disclosing confidential information to a Mr. Rowbotham, whose daughter is engaged to marry FullerⒺexplanatory note. His arrest followed. When Hawkins was arraigned yesterday, Magistrate Whitman held him in $2,500 bail on the blackmail charge and in an additional $500 bail on a charge of carrying concealed weapons. Mrs. Ellen FaxonⒺexplanatory note, mother of Homer Hawkins, was in court to aid her son. It was the first time she had seen Louis R. Fuller, her brother by adoption. She begged him not to press the charge.
“Don’t you know that he is of Dr. Fuller’s own flesh and blood?” she exclaimed, “and that you are his uncle only by adoption?”
Louis R. Fuller did not know at first what to say. It was the first intimation he had ever had that he was not Dr. Fuller’s own son. Then looking the woman straight in the eye he said:
“Your son had no business to do what he did; I am going to press the charge.”
Mrs. Faxon’s Story.
When Mrs. Faxon was seen by a World reporter at her home, after a futile effort to get bail for her son, she said:
“While I do not approve of my boy’s action, when the true facts come out very few persons will blame him for what he did. My father and my mother separated in 1868. Two years later my mother died. I married, and with my husband and an only sister went to California to live. There Homer was born. His father died shortly after his birth. A few years later I married my present husband, Frank Faxon, who is now in Southern California.
[begin page 42]“Twenty years ago I learned that my father had married Miss Anna Thompson, of Portsmouth, N.H. She was a sister of the late Jacob H. Thompson, who was found murdered in his room in the St. James Hotel. One child was born to them. This child died and a year later a boy, now known as Louis R. Fuller, was adopted. Who he was or where he came from I do not know.
“As my boy neared manhood he began to ask about his grandparents. I told him the true story. Three years ago Homer came to New York and visited his grandfather. He then learned that his uncle by adoption was being educated at YaleⒺexplanatory note. From that day to this he has been a changed boy. His grandfather sent him back to California to keep him from meeting Louis.
Meets Father After Thirty Years.
“When I found myself almost penniless two years ago I went to my father’s summer home at Madison, N.J., and met him for the first time in thirty years. My stepmother told me that New York was not big enough for us both. Since then I have been earning a living as a seamstress.
“It made Homer’s heart bleed to think that another was usurping the comfort and love that belonged to us.”
Dr. Fuller and his adopted son occupy fine apartments at the Allston, No. 17 East Thirty-eighth street. They were not at home last night. Mrs. Fuller died of nervous prostration last February, never having recovered from the shock following her brother’s death.
New York World.
That clipping is full of mystery for me. The lady saysⒶtextual note “My father and my mother separated in 1868.” It was in the previous year that Fuller showed me his wife—the one that died the other day—and also astonished me with those portly and matronly daughters of his. I seem to gather, now, that there had been an earlier Mrs. Fuller, and that the unexplained daughters were of that vintage. Fuller didn’t tell me he had ever had another wife. I think this lady must be wrong in her dates. I think the separation must have occurred before 1867, and not in 1868. The lady says “separated.” She doesn’t say divorced. Well, let it go. I can’t straighten it out. According to my reading of this account Louis Fuller is not entirely accounted for. But let that go. It is no matter. If he was adopted by Fuller, or by anybody else, it must have been in his infancy—because if the adopter had waited, he would have considered the developed Louis not much of an asset and would have left him for some other speculator. But never mind. Let the whole thing go. It is beginning to tangle my head. The most that I get out of the whole matter is that the Fuller life, like all other lives that climb up into old age or thereabouts, is a tragedy. It is a pity to grow old, because you know that the tragedy is always hanging over you, and if you don’t get out of life by some fortunate accident it will fall on you pretty surely. I wonder how old Fuller is. More than eighty, I imagine—yet he never looked old until lately.
I will disengage my mind from this dismal subject and see if I can’t find a cheerfuler one among this morning’s clippings.
No, it is a failure. There is nothing very cheerful about the one I hold in my hand. [begin page 43] It is headed “Olive Logan has Husband Arrested.” I doubt if I have thought of Olive Logan or encountered her name for a good thirty years and moreⒺexplanatory note. She belongs ’wayⒶtextual note back yonder in that brief period among the lyceum days, when a new kind of female lecturer invaded the platform. The previous kind had been the Anna Dickinson kind, women who had something to say; and could say it well; women who were full of talent; women who talked straight out of their hearts and could powerfully move an audience with their eloquenceⒺexplanatory note. Then came the Olive Logan kind: women who hadn’t anything to say, and couldn’t have said it if they had had anything to say; women who invaded the platform to show their clothes. They were living fashion-plates. All over the country the women filled the lecture halls to look at those clothes, and they brought their husbands along. The men didn’t want to go, but they had to.
A woman had to have a name before Redpath would launch her upon the lecture platform. Olive Logan set herself the task of manufacturing a reputation. For a season or two she wrote inane, affected, and valueless stuff for obscure periodicals. As a method of creating fame that proved to be a dead failure. Then she began the most curious—the most curious—well, I can’t think of the word I want—let it go. What she began was this. She married a penny-a-liner (whose name I have forgotten) and he handed around little two-line items amongst the newspapers and got them inserted—like this:
“Olive Logan has taken the Hunter mansion at Cohasset for the summer.”
Now why should that interest anybody? But it did. There wasn’t any truth in it, but the reader couldn’t know that. He had never heard of Olive Logan, but surely Olive Logan wouldn’t be mentioned in that matter-of-course way unless she was a celebrity, and therefore the reader found himself in the unsatisfactory position of being ignorant of a thing he ought to know. Dear me, Olive Logan couldn’t take the Hunter mansion, or any other mansion. She couldn’tⒶtextual note take a shack,Ⓐtextual note and pay the rent.
Then there would be another item presently:
“Olive Logan is at least independent. She has boldly deserted the world-famous Parisian male milliner, Worth, and has ordered her gowns for next season from his new but prosperous rival, SavarinⒺexplanatory note.”
That item would flit from paper to paper throughout the United States. Persons reading it would take it for granted that Olive Logan was a celebrated and important person, although he had not been quite aware of it before, so far as he could remember. But that item would impress him, if he was a woman, and do it every time. A person who could boldly desert Worth must be something not far short of a duchess.
These items followed each other in procession straight along, week by week, through the year. There was never a word of explanation of who Olive LoganⒶtextual note might be or of what she had done to earn fame. The items were never of the slightest consequence to any one, since they merely referred to Olive Logan’s clothes and the summer residences she was supposed to take, with now and then an opinion on some subject which she was not acquainted with. These opinions were flung out in the same matter-of-course way that distinguished the items about the clothes:
[begin page 44]“Olive Logan has expressed the opinion that transcendentalism, even as a BostonianⒶtextual note interest, is passing away.”
Now this curious thing actually happened—and I am alive to swear to it—that at the end of this kind of persistent itemizing of this unknown adventuress, Redpath was able to put her on the platform at a hundred dollarsⒶtextual note a night and send her all over this country. She wasn’t worth ten cents a week, but she soared from town to town throughout the United States for three or four or five years, at the regular lecture rate of a hundred dollars a night. She was actually famous. There is no doubt about it. Her name was familiar to everybody. Every man was familiar with Olive Logan’s name; every woman was familiar with it—and there wasn’t a human being in the entire United States who could answer if you asked himⒶtextual note “What is her fame based on? What is it that she has done?” You would paralyseⒶtextual note a person by asking him that question. He would think for an instant that he could easily tell what her fame rested upon, but just a single second of reflection was sure to convince him that whereas he never had thought of it before, the fact was that he hadn’t any idea in the world who Olive Logan was or what she had done. She had built up a great, a commercially valuable name, on absolute emptiness; built it up upon mere remarks about her clothes and where she was going to spend the summer, and her opinions about things that nobody had asked her to express herself about. It was the emptiest reputation that was ever invented in this world. Of course she couldn’t go to the same town the third time. The first time her house would be filled. The audience would go away aware that they had got nothing whatever for their money. The second time the house would be filled with the rest of the people who hadn’t seen her, but that exhausted that town. There were no more idiots left. The Lyceum Committee of the town would know that as an attraction Olive Logan had ceased to exist. She was not sent for again. And, as I have said, I haven’t heard of Olive Logan for a whole lifetime. And now she turns up in this morning’s paper under that heading, “Olive Logan has Husband Arrested.”
OLIVE LOGAN HAS HUSBAND ARRESTED.
Famous Lecturer, Authoress and Actress Declares that He Drinks and Neglects Her.
Olive Logan, lecturer, authoress, actress, stage beauty of thirty years ago, appeared as a suppliant in the Harlem police court yesterday afternoon. She is sixty-seven years old, white-haired, tottering and very deaf. Magistrate Cornell did not catch her name, but her charming voice and exquisite use of the English language caught his attention. He sent a policeman with her into an adjoining corridor to shout into her ear-trumpet and get her story.
“I want a warrant,” said the aged woman, “for my husband, James O’Neill Logan. We live at No. 2568 Seventh avenue. He is always drinking.”
The magistrate issued a summons, and when the man was brought to court in the afternoon his condition was so bad that he was ordered into custody until to-day.
“We are terribly in debt,” said Mrs. Logan to the reporters. “My husband is employed at Ellis Island, but the saloons get his money, and he often comes home [begin page 45] without a cent. We are in danger of being dispossessed. We have no money to buy food. I am so weak with the infirmities of age that I can no longer write. It is only as a last resort that I have appealed to the court.”
Magistrate Cornell will make an order in the case to-day.
Olive Logan was born in Elmira, N.Y., on April 22, 1839. She gained fame as a writer and lecturer, and in 1872 she was married to William Wirt Sikes, appointed by President Grant Consul to Cardiff, Wales. He died in London in 1883. Mrs. Sikes always clung to her first name. She was a protege of the late Augustin Daly, who trained her for the stage. She wrote “Surf; or, Life at Long Branch,” dramatized Wilkie Collins’s “Armadale” and made a metrical translation of Francois Coppee’s “LeⒶtextual note Passant.”Ⓔexplanatory note
Mrs. Logan said James O’Neill was her office boy in London twenty-five years ago. When he grew up he became her secretary.
“He came to America with me,” she said, “and we decided to be married, although I was twenty-two years older than he. The first ten years of our married life were a dream of happiness. He is a fine fellow, and I love him still. His drinking has ruined us.”
Why, dear me, she was born in Elmira, New York, it appears—the town where my wife was born and where we spent our summers for sixteen years. The town where was also born the first distinctly and rollickingly humorous book that was ever written by an American woman, “The Widow Bedott.” That book was written by a girl eighteen years old. It is now forgotten, but it swept this continent with a hurricane of laughterⒺexplanatory note when it first came out.
And here I find the name of that husband of hers, that penny-a-liner without salary or local habitation or name, who did the itemizing and created Olive Logan’s fame. I remember his name perfectly now, William Wirt Sikes. And of course he would be appointed a ConsulⒶtextual note to some part of this planet, because he was not needed in this country. We have certainly furnished this world with whole regiments, battalions, and divisions of ignorant, characterless, and chuckle-headed ConsulsⒶtextual note who have exhibited the United States to a wondering foreign public, and who ought not to have had any salary. Nor feesⒶtextual note. They ought to have charged admission—a shilling, say, to foreigners desiring to examine our political product. Olive Logan’s present husband, it appears, is named James O’Neill, and was her office boy in London a quarter of a century ago. She was twenty-two years older than he was. The first ten years of their married life was “a dream of happiness.” He has taken to hard drinking.
Well, you see it is another tragedyⒺexplanatory note. You’ve only got to live long enough and your tragedy will arrive. I didn’t think, thirty-five years ago, that the day could ever come when my heart would soften toward Olive Logan, and that I would put my hands before my eyes if she were drowning, so as not to see it; but now I do pity her—I do pity her. Her tragedy has come, and I have to be sorry for her, and I am sorry. If she were drowning I would not look—but I would not pull her out. I would not be a party to that last and meanest unkindness, treachery to a would-be suicide. My sympathies have been with the suicides for many, many years. I am always glad when the suicide succeeds in his [begin page 46] undertaking. I always feel a genuine pain in my heart, a genuine grief, a genuine pity, when some scoundrel stays the suicide’s hand and compels him to continue his life.
In this morning’s paper, a woman living in California—her husband living in Washington, an employeeⒶtextual note of the GovernmentⒶtextual note—takes the life of her son, fourteen years old, with gas; tries to die with him; is found on her knees at his bedside, unconscious, nearly gone. The people who thus find her, instead of going out and shutting the door, as I would have done, drag her out of the place and into the fresh air and summon a doctor, and that doctor commits the crime of bringing her back to life, with all that that means for her. Her husband lost to her through the fascinations of some department clerk in Washington; her boy gone out of this world, and happy; nothing left in this world of a penny’s value for her—the tragedy of her life brought upon her when she has not yet reached the tragedy age. And look at that doctor’s comment! He says he “entertains hopes of her recovery.” He ought to be shot. I entertain hopes that to-morrow morning’s paper will bring news that she is on her way to the cemeteryⒺexplanatory note, where she can have peace.
I think it likely that in . . . “Roughing It” I have mentioned Frank Fuller] Roughing It makes no mention of Fuller. See the note at 37.27.
the Secretary of the Territory, Frank Fuller—called Governor, of course] Fuller (1827–1915) had not yet arrived in Utah Territory in the summer of 1861 when the Clemens brothers passed through on their way to Carson City. Alfred Cumming, the current governor, was a secessionist, and had returned to his native Georgia the previous May, knowing that President Lincoln would not reappoint him. He was replaced by Territorial Secretary Francis H. Wootton, who also soon resigned. Fuller, appointed by Lincoln to replace Wootton, became the acting governor upon his arrival in Salt Lake City on 10 September 1861 and held the position for three months, until the newly appointed governor arrived in December (New York Times: “Affairs in Utah,” 17 June 1861, 5; 8 July 1861, 2). Clemens and Fuller actually met in Virginia City in 1862; they developed their acquaintance in San Francisco in 1863 or 1864 and then in New York in 1867, where Fuller acted as Clemens’s lecture manager. They remained lifelong friends. After his time in Utah, Fuller, who had studied medicine and dentistry, had a varied career as a newspaperman, dentist, broker of mining stocks, railroad official, insurance agent, entrepreneur, and indefatigable speculator. In 1906 he was still proprietor of the Health Food Company, which he had established in New York in 1874, and reportedly a millionaire ( L2: link note preceding 15 Jan 1867 to Hingston, 5; 23 Apr 1867 to Stoddard, 33–34 n. 7; RI 1993, notes on 591–92; Schmidt 2002; “Frank Fuller Dead,” New York Times, 20 Feb 1915, 5).
I had spent several months in the Sandwich Islands for the Sacramento Union . . . on the platform in San Francisco] See AutoMT1 , 128, 226–27, 501–2 n. 128.22–24, 536–37 nn. 225.29–31, 226.41–227.1.
I found Fuller there in some kind of business . . . matronly of aspect, and married] In January 1867 Fuller was vice-president of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, with offices at 57 Broadway. He was married to his first wife, Mary F. Fuller (1829?–70); his daughters, Ida F. and Anna Cora, were about seventeen and thirteen, respectively (Fuller 1911; Portsmouth Census 1860, 679:740).
He would have the basement hall in Cooper Institute] Fuller booked the hall, in the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, for 6 May 1867. This free educational institution had been established in 1859 by inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist Peter Cooper (1791–1883). Occupying an entire block between Third and Fourth avenues and Seventh and Eighth streets, in addition to its large basement lecture hall it included stores and offices, art galleries and studios, laboratories, and an extensive library, and offered diploma and degree programs for working-class men and women of all races. Today the Cooper Union continues its tuition-free tradition and is a leading college of art, architecture, and engineering (James Miller 1866, 49–50; Lossing 1884, 670–72; Cooper Union 2011).
Oh, he was all on fire with his project] In 1911 Fuller claimed that it was Clemens who was fired with the idea of a New York lecture and insisted upon Cooper Union as the venue. In 1895 Clemens recounted this episode in some detail for a lecture he wrote out but never gave, now published as “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture” (Fuller 1911; SLC 2009a, 5–17; for the contemporary details of this episode, including his letters at the time and reviews of the lecture, see L2: 23 Apr 1867 to Stoddard, 33–35 n. 7; 1 May 1867 to JLC and family through the link note preceding 14 May 1867 to Stanton, 38–44; and 28 Nov 1868 to OLL, 292–93, and “Enclosures with the Letters,” 417–19).
That episode must have cost him four or five hundred dollars] Fuller recalled that “the expense of the lecture was a little over $600; the receipts were not quite $300” (Fuller 1911).
I put myself in Redpath’s hands . . . whether it was the following year] Clemens did not undertake any lecture tour in the season of 1867–68, following his 6 May success at the Cooper Union and the Quaker City excursion, which took place from June to November. He did tour dozens of cities and towns in the Midwest and the East in 1868–69, but it was not until the following season that he signed with James Redpath’s Boston Lyceum Bureau, for an eastern tour that ran from 1 November 1869 through 21 January 1870. For Clemens’s 1898–99 accounts of his experiences on the lecture circuit see “Lecture-Times” and “Ralph Keeler” ( AutoMT1 , 146–49, 151–53, and notes on 506–12).
Last fall his wife’s brother was murdered . . . beaten him to death with a club] Fuller’s first wife died in 1870, and on 14 December of that year he married Annie Weeks Thompson (1840?–1906) ( Chatham Census 1880, 792:65C; “Married,” New York Times, 15 Dec 1870, 5). Her brother, Jacob Thompson (b. 1837?), exchange editor of the New York Times for nearly forty years, died on 8 September 1905. He had been found that morning, unconscious and severely injured, in his room at the Hotel St. James. The chambermaid who found Thompson reported that he “was almost covered with blood, which also stained the carpet around and spattered the wall above for about four feet” (“J. H. Thompson Found Dying in His Room,” New York Times, 9 Sept 1905, 6). An autopsy revealed that Thompson had died of three severe skull fractures. It was soon determined that he had been robbed of a gold watch and several hundred dollars. The suspected murderer, a St. James bellboy, died on 31 October, before he could be apprehended, from stab wounds received in a domestic altercation (New York Times: “Mr. Thompson Slain and Probably Robbed,” 10 Sept 1905, 5; “Mr. Thompson’s Lights Burning All the Night,” 12 Sept 1905, 2; “Seek Former Servant in Thompson Case,” 15 Sept 1905, 5; “Death Beats Police in Thompson Case,” 1 Nov 1905, 1).
She passed to her rest about three days later] Annie Fuller died on 10 February 1906. On 2 February Isabel Lyon wrote in her diary, “This afternoon a messenger came with a note from Mr. Frank Fuller asking, Mr. Clemens to call on Mr. Fuller’s ill ill wife. I telephoned to him that Mr. Clemens would be happy to do so, & tomorrow afternoon at 5 has been set for the call.” It seems likely that this visit is the same one that Clemens describes here. Lyon continued with a description of Fuller similar to the one in this dictation (“Died,” New York Times, 11 Feb 1906, 7; Lyon 1906, entry for 2 Feb).
Homer Hawkins] A twenty-two-year-old timekeeper for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (“Learns His Life Secret in Plot to Blackmail,” New York World, 12 Apr 1906, 2).
he is only the adopted son of Dr. Frank Fuller] Louis R. Fuller (b. 1878) was adopted at three months of age by Frank and Annie Fuller, after their own son died in infancy. Louis’s birth mother was a sixteen-year-old woman from a family “equal in birth and breeding” to the Fullers, and young Louis later came to know her as a family friend (“Learns His Life Secret in Plot to Blackmail,” New York World, 12 Apr 1906, 2).
Mr. Rowbotham, whose daughter is engaged to marry Fuller] George B. Rowbotham was president of the Bay State Belting Company in Boston (“Father of Fuller’s Fiancee Says Wedding Will Take Place,” New York World, 13 Apr 1906, 18).
Mrs. Ellen Faxon] No daughters of Fuller have been identified other than Ida and Anna (see the note at 38.15–20).
his uncle . . . was being educated at Yale] Louis Fuller was a 1905 graduate of Harvard University, not Yale ( Harvard Directory 1910, 250).
I doubt if I have thought of Olive Logan . . . for a good thirty years and more] Clemens had written about Logan in an 1898–99 autobiographical essay, describing her in the same way he does here (see “Ralph Keeler,” AutoMT1 , 151–52, 512 n. 152.3–7).
the Anna Dickinson kind . . . could powerfully move an audience with their eloquence] Dickinson (1842–1932), a powerful and eloquent speaker on abolition and women’s rights, was one of the best-paid performers on the lecture circuit, earning as much as $200 per appearance. She was a close friend of Clemens’s in-laws, the Langdon family of Elmira, and became an acquaintance of his as well, although their opinions of each other were not entirely positive. Dickinson was one of several “women who had something to say” who were represented by Clemens’s lecture manager, James Redpath, in the early 1870s (see L3: 12 Jan 1869 to Langdon, 30 n. 3; 22 Jan 1869 to Langdon, 63, 66 n. 2; “Enclosures with the Letters,” L4, 550 n. 8).
world-famous Parisian male milliner, Worth . . . his new but prosperous rival, Savarin] Charles Frederick Worth (1825–95) was an Anglo-French designer of women’s clothes, the leader of Paris fashion for many years. By “Savarin” Clemens presumably means the rival fashion house of L. Savarre (Thieme 1993, 2–3).
“Surf; or, Life at Long Branch,” dramatized Wilkie Collins’s “Armadale” . . . Francois Coppee’s “Le Passant.”] Logan’s play Surf, a melodramatic farce, opened in New York in January 1870. Her dramatization of Armadale, a novel by English author Wilkie Collins, was first produced in New York in December 1866. She made a metrical translation of Le Passant (The Stroller) by French poetic dramatist François Coppée, which was staged in London in 1887.
“The Widow Bedott.” . . . swept this continent with a hurricane of laughter] Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher (1812?–52) settled in Elmira with her minister husband in 1847. She began writing when very young, but didn’t publish her first story until 1839, when she was nearly thirty. Between 1846 and 1850 she wrote a highly popular series of satirical magazine sketches featuring her comic creation, the Widow Bedott. They were first collected in book form in 1855 as The Widow Bedott Papers, which sold over 100,000 copies and was reprinted many times (Gowdy 2003, 392–95).
you see it is another tragedy] Despite the assistance of a friend, who settled her in a New York apartment, Logan returned to England, where she died in a “pauper lunatic asylum” in 1909 (“Olive Logan in an Asylum,” New York Times, 27 Feb 1909, 5).
In this morning’s paper . . . news that she is on her way to the cemetery] Accounts of these events appeared in several newspapers; the particular one that Clemens read has not been identified. The woman, Katherine B. Raymond of Los Angeles, who had shown signs of mental illness for years, recovered from her near asphyxiation and was committed to an insane asylum. Because of her condition, she was not prosecuted for murder (San Francisco Chronicle: “May Not Be Prosecuted for Her Son’s Murder,” 18 Apr 1906, 2; “Committed to Highlands,” 28 Apr 1906, 1).
Source documents.
World Facsimile of the New York World (the original clippings that Hobby transcribed are now lost), 11 April 1906, 2, 5: ‘STRANGE SEQUEL . . . brother’s death.’ (41.11–42.21); ‘OLIVE LOGAN . . . ruined us.” ’ (44.27–45.17).TS1 (incomplete) Typescript, leaves numbered 692–703 (altered in ink to 704–15, and in pencil to 713–24; part of page 703 is missing, as is the remainder of TS1, an uncertain number of pages); made from Hobby’s notes and the World and revised: ‘Wednesday . . . days later.’ (37 title–41.6).
TS2 Typescript, leaves numbered 859–82, made from the revised TS1.
TS4 Typescript, leaves numbered 1094–1114, made from the revised TS1.
TS1 was revised by Clemens. It is incomplete, as a result of Paine’s discarding the portions he did not use in MTA. The text of the missing material (‘The thing . . . have peace.’, 41.7–46.14) is supplied by TS2, collated against TS4, which at one point remedies a TS2 eye-skip (see entry for 43.24–25). TS2 was typed by Hobby from the revised TS1. Clemens marked it on its first page in pencil, ‘Not usable yet’ and gave it no further attention.