Another stolen holiday, including banquet-speechⒶtextual note in New York and visit to Norfolk, ConnecticutⒶtextual note—In a letter receivedⒶtextual note this morning friend calls Mr. Clemens “the blessedest ‘accident’ I have yet met withⒶtextual note in my life”—Mr. Clemens reviews the series of “accidents” during his life which have led up to meeting this friend.
I have been to New York and to FairhavenⒶtextual note again on another stolen holiday—sixteen or seventeen days,Ⓐtextual note this time. My summer seems to have been passed mainly in stolen holidays; pretext-holidays. With the exception of a banquet-speechⒶtextual note in New York on the 19th of SeptemberⒺexplanatory note, and a visit to Norfolk, Connecticut, to witness my daughter Clara’s débutⒶtextual note as a singerⒺexplanatory note, I believe these many weeks of holidays were secured to me by pretext alone. The pretexts were pretty thin, as a rule—however,Ⓐtextual note I have no regrets. In all my seventy years I have not often had a holiday when I really wanted one.
[begin page 236] The morning mail brings me a letter from a young woman in New York, in which I find the remark,Ⓐtextual note “You are the blessedest ‘accident’ I have yet met withⒶtextual note in my life.” This brings back to my mind a conversation which I had with her a week ago, and I wish to recall some of the details of it, because they illustrate a philosophy of mine—or a superstition of mine, if you prefer that word. I had been able to do for her what she regarded as a great serviceⒺexplanatory note, and, frankly speaking, I realized that it was, although it was a service which had cost me so little in the way of effort that the time and labor involved did not entitle it to a compliment. She said:
“You have accomplished this for me, and I am not acquainted with another person who could have done it. It was a happy accident that I accidentally met you last April—no, not an accident, there being no such things as accidents—it was ordered.”
“Ordered by whom? Or by what?”
“By the PowerⒶtextual note that watches over us and commands all events.”
“Issuing the orders from day to day?”
“Perhaps so. Yes, I suppose that is the way.”
I said “I believe that only one command has ever been issued, and that that command was issued in the beginning of time—in the first second of time; that that command resulted in an act; in Adam’s first act—if there was an Adam—and that from that act sprangⒶtextual note another act as a natural and unavoidable consequence—let us say it was Eve’s act—and that from that Ⓐtextual note act proceeded another Ⓐtextual note act of one of these two persons as an unavoidable consequence; and that now the chain of natural and unavoidable happenings being started, there has never been a break in it from that day to thisⒺexplanatory note; and so, in my belief, Adam’s first act was the origin and cause of the service which I have been enabled to do for you, and I am quite sure that if Adam’s first act, howsoever trifling it may have been, had taken a different form, no matter how trifling a form, the entire chain of human events for all these thousands of years would have been changed;Ⓐtextual note in which case it is most unlikely that you and I would ever have met. Indeed it is most unlikely that both Ⓐtextual note of us would have been born in the same land. The very slightest change in Adam’s first act could have resulted in your being an Eskimo and I a Hottentot; and could also have resulted in your being born five centuries ago and in my birth being postponed until century after next.Ⓐtextual note
“IⒶtextual note am not jesting. I have studied these things a long time and I positively believe that the first circumstance that ever happened in this world was the parent of every circumstance that has happened in this world since; that God ordered that first circumstance and has never ordered another one from that day to this. Plainly, then, I am not able to conceive of such a thing as the thing which we call an accident Ⓐtextual note—that is to say, an event without a cause. Each event has its own place in the eternal chain of circumstances, and whether it be big or little it will infallibly cause the next Ⓐtextual note event, whether the next event be the breaking of a child’s toy or the destruction of a throne. According to this superstition of mine,Ⓐtextual note the breaking of the toy is fully as important an event as the destruction of the throne, since without the breaking of the toy the destruction of the throne would not have happened.
[begin page 237] “ButⒶtextual note I like that word accident, although it is, in my belief, absolutely destitute of meaning. I like it because it is short and handy, and because it answers so well and so conveniently, and so briefly, in designating happenings which we should otherwise have to describe as odd, curious, interesting, and so on, and then add some elaboration to help out our meaning. And so for convenience sake, let us say it was an accident that you and I met last April, and that out of that accident grew, in a quite natural way, the linked series of accidents which led up to and made possible the service which I have had the good fortune to render you. Accident is a word which I constantly make use of when I am talking to myself about the chain of incidents which has constituted my life.
“IⒶtextual note will undertake to go back, now,Ⓐtextual note and give name and date to some of these accidents. When I was six years old, and my brother Henry four, he had the erysipelas, and when he was getting well of it Nature provided him with a new skin. I liked the old one and I wished I could have it. I was prodigiously interested in the peeling process. The skin of one of his heels came off, and was tough and stiff and resembled a cup, and it hung by only a shred of skin. I wanted it to play with, but, young as I was, I had a good deal of judgment and I knew that I couldn’t get it by asking for it—therefore I must think up some more judicious way. When at last I was alone with him for a moment, there was my chance. The time was brief; there was no scissors handy, and I pulled that heel-cup loose by force. Henry was hurt by this operation and he cried—cried much louder than was necessary, as it seemed to me, considering how small was his loss and how great my gain; but I was mainly troubled because it attracted attention, and brought rebuke for me and punishment.
“IfⒶtextual note I had the kind of memory I would like to have,Ⓐtextual note I could recall what the punishment produced in the way of a next Ⓐtextual note link in my chain, and could then go on, link by link, all down my seventy years, and prove to my perfect satisfaction that nothing has ever happened to me in all that time which could have happened to me if I had let that heel-cup alone. I haven’t any idea what the links were that led down to the heel-cup event and produced it, neither can I supply from my memory the long series of events stretching down through the next six years and caused by it—but in my twelfthⒶtextual note year another incident happened. My father diedⒺexplanatory note, and I was taken from school and put in a printing-officeⒶtextual note. I was likely to remain there forever. I had to have an accident in order to get out of it. My elder brotherⒶtextual note came up from St. Louis and furnished it by providing me an equally unpromising place in a printing-officeⒶtextual note of his own.
“NothingⒶtextual note but another accident could get me free and give me another start. Circumstances enabled me to furnish it myself. I ran away from home and was gone a year. A series of accidents—that is to say, circumstances—shipped me to St. Louis, then to New York, then to Philadelphia, then to Muscatine, Iowa, then to Keokuk; and by this time I was twenty-oneⒶtextual note years old. I was likely to remain in Keokuk forever, but another accident, decreed by Adam’s first act and thereby made unavoidable, came to my rescue. I had been longing to explore the Amazon River and open its head-waters to a great trade in cocaⒶtextual note, but I hadn’t any money to get to the Amazon with. But for the accident thrown in my way, at this time, by Adam’s first act, I should never have even got started [begin page 238] toward the Amazon. That accident was a fifty-dollarⒶtextual note bill. I found it in the street on a winter’s morning. I advertised it in order to find the owner, and then I immediately left for Cincinnati for fear I might succeed if I waited. At Cincinnati I took passage in the Paul Jones for New Orleans, on my way to the Amazon. When I had been in New Orleans a couple of days my money was all gone and I had found out that there was no ship leaving for the Amazon that year,Ⓐtextual note nor any likelihood that a ship would be leaving for the Amazon during the next century.
“ItⒶtextual note was imperatively necessary that another accident should come to my help. Exactly at the moment foreordained by Adam’s first act it arrived. On the way down the river I had gotten acquainted with one of the pilots of the Paul Jones, Ⓔexplanatory note and I went to him now and begged him to make a pilot of me. It was by accident that I had made his acquaintance. Ordinarily he would not have wanted my society in the pilot-house, and would have enabled me to find it out; but on the day that I entered it one of his accidents happened to be due. He was suffering from a malady, or a pain of some kind, and was hardly able to stand at the wheel, so he was grateful for my advent. He gave the wheel to me and sat on the high bench and superintended my efforts while I learned how to steer. Thenceforth to New Orleans I steered for him every day all through his watch. If he hadn’t had that pain I should not have made his acquaintance, and my entire career, down to this day, would have been changed, and by a new train of accidents I should have drifted into the ministry or the penitentiary, or the grave, or somewhere, and should not have been heard of again.
“WhenⒶtextual note the war broke out, three or four years later, I had been a pilot a couple of years or more, and was receiving so sumptuous a wage that I regarded myself as a rich man. I was without occupation now; the river was closed to navigation; it was time for another accident to happen or I should be drifting toward the ministryⒺexplanatory note and the penitentiary again. Of course the accident happened. My elder brother was appointed Secretary of the new Territory of Nevada, and as I had to pay his passage across the continent I went along with him to see if I could find something to do out there on the frontier. By and by I went out to the Humboldt mines. The expedition was a failure. In the middle of ’61 I went down to the Esmeralda mines and scored another failure. By and by I found myself shoveling sand in a quartz mill at ten dollars a week and board. I lasted two weeks and was obliged to quit, the labor was so intolerably heavy and my muscles so incompetentⒺexplanatory note.
“OnceⒶtextual note more there was no outlook, and I stood upon the veryⒶtextual note verge of the ministry or the penitentiary—nothing could save me but a new accident. Of course it happened. In those days everybody that had a mining claimⒶtextual note wrote descriptions of it and prophecies concerning its future richness, and published them in the Virginia City Enterprise, Ⓐtextual note and I had been doing the like with my worthless mining claimsⒶtextual note. Now then, just as a new accident was imperatively necessary to save me from the ministry and the penitentiary, it happened. Chief JusticeⒶtextual note TurnerⒺexplanatory note came down there and delivered an oration. I was not present, but I knew his subjectⒶtextual note and I knew what he would say about it, and how he would say it, and that into it he would injectⒶtextual note all his pet quotations. I knew that he would scatter through it the remark about somebody’s lips having been sweetened by ‘theⒶtextual note honey of the bees of Hymettus,’Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note and the remark that ‘WhomⒶtextual note the gods would destroy they first make [begin page 239] mad,’Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note and the one which says ‘AgainstⒶtextual note the stupid,Ⓐtextual note even the gods strive in vain.’Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note He had a dozen other pet prettinesses and I knew them all, for I had heard him orate a good many times. He had an exceedingly flowery style,Ⓐtextual note and I knew how to imitate it. He could charm an audience an hour on aⒶtextual note stretch without ever getting rid of an idea. Every now and then he would wind up an empty sentence with a flourish and say,Ⓐtextual note ‘Again,’ Ⓐtextual note and then go on with another emptiness which he pretended was a confirmationⒶtextual note of the preceding one. At the end he would say,Ⓐtextual note ‘To sum up’ Ⓐtextual note—and then go on and smoothly and eloquently sum up everything he hadn’t said, and his audience would go away enchanted.
“IⒶtextual note didn’t hear his speech, as I have already said, but I made a report of it, anyway, and got in all the petⒶtextual note phrases; and although the burlesque was rather extravagant, it was easily recognizable by the whole Territory as being a smart imitation. It was published in the Enterprise, Ⓐtextual note and just in the nick of time to save me. That paper’s city editor was going East for three months and by return mailⒶtextual note I was offered his place for that intervalⒺexplanatory note.Ⓐtextual note
“ThatⒶtextual note accident had in it prodigious consequences for me, although I did not suspect it at the time, of course. Like all our other accidents, it happened on the minute, on the second, on the fraction of a second. No accident ever comes late; it always arrives precisely on time. When that one happened I had never been so near the ministry in my life.
“IⒶtextual note took that berthⒶtextual note, and during my occupancy of it I had to go to Carson City, the capital, and report the proceedings of the legislatureⒶtextual note. Every Sunday I wrote a letter to the paper, in which I made a resuméⒶtextual note of the week’s legislative work, and in order that it might be readable I put no end of seasoning into it. I signed these letters ‘Mark Twain.’Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note
“SigningⒶtextual note them in that way was another accident which had been decreed by Adam’s first act. It was the cause of my presently drifting out of journalism and into literature. I could go on, now, and trace everything that has ever happened to me since, in all these forty years, straight back to that accident. Out of it grew, two years later, the accident which gave me a correspondence-jobⒶtextual note to live on when I was discharged from the San Francisco Morning Call; out of that correspondence grew the accident of my being sent to the Sandwich Islands for the Sacramento Union; Ⓔexplanatory note out of that accident grew a notoriety which enabled me to mount the lecture platform when I was once more penniless and pointed for the ministry; outⒶtextual note of the lecture accident resulted my opportunity to join the Quaker City ExcursionⒶtextual note; out of that excursion grew the accident of an invitation to write ‘The Innocents Abroad’Ⓐtextual note and become profitably notorious all over America; out of that same accident grew the accident of my stepping into Charley Langdon’s stateroom one day when the ship lay at anchor in the Bay of Smyrna and finding on his table a likeness of his sister, whom I was to seek out within the year and marry two years later; outⒶtextual note of this happy accidentⒶtextual note resulted a thousand other happy accidents, link after link, year after year, until the chain reached down to you and your affairs, a week ago, and enabled me to do you a service which you believe could not have been done for you by any other person with whom you are acquainted. To my mind, it is absolutely certain that if ever a link, a single link, a link of the most apparently trifling sort,Ⓐtextual note in the chain that stretches back from me to Adam, had ever been broken, there is no likelihood, nor even a remote possibility, that you and I would ever have looked into each other’s faces in this life.”Ⓐtextual note
banquet-speech in New York on the 19th of September] Clemens’s speech, at the annual dinner of the Associated Press in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, was “an appeal to the nations in behalf of the simplified spelling” (“Spelling and Pictures and Twain at Dinner,” New York Times, 20 Sept 1906, 4). The text is included in the Autobiographical Dictation of 19 November 1906. According to Isabel Lyon, Clemens originally began to prepare a different speech, on a topic suggested by Melville Stone, the general manager of the Associated Press:
When I went to my study later, on the desk I found 8 closely written pages of Ms. A speech—Mr. Clemens explained to me at dinner—a speech to be given at a press banquet sometime in Sept. A speech in which he is taking up cudgels for the Standard Oil. It seems that when he was in N.Y. Mr. Melville Stone asked him to do just this thing & as Mr. Rogers’s intimate friend Mr. Clemens felt that he could not do it, and brought forward many sane reasons for not doing it, but Mr. Stone could see only the fact that he wanted Mr. Clemens to make that speech & make it so that it would attack the press for “muckraking” every corporation. (Lyon 1906, entry for 28 July)
visit to Norfolk, Connecticut, to witness my daughter Clara’s début as a singer] Clemens returns to this topic at greater length in the Autobiographical Dictations of 3 October and 4 October 1906.
young woman in New York . . . what she regarded as a great service] Clemens alludes to Charlotte Teller (1876–1953), a writer and socialist who had earned a degree from the University of Chicago. (Teller used her maiden name as a nom de plume; she had separated from her first husband, Frank Minitree Johnson, when she met Clemens, but continued to call herself “Mrs. Johnson”; in 1912 she married Gilbert Hirsch and adopted his surname.) She lived with her grandmother and a group of fellow writers at 3 Fifth Avenue, and was therefore a close neighbor of Clemens’s. In his Autobiographical Dictation of 30 March 1906 Clemens recalled their meeting, when she brought Nikolai Chaykovsky, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, to seek support for his cause ( AutoMT1 , 462, 647 n. 462.12). One of her works in progress, a play about Joan of Arc, caught his interest, and the two soon formed a warm friendship. Clemens was so impressed with her talent that he offered to read her manuscripts. On 13 April he wrote her, “If you yourself have had any doubts, brush them away; for there is greatness in you, Charlotte,—more of it than you suspect, I think. You are going to surpass your utmost anticipations” (NN-BGC). While on a trip to New York in late September he met with Joseph H. Sears to discuss a novel she had written, The Cage:
Mrs. Johnson was one of the happiest persons in America last night. I sent for Sears, (President & Manager of Appletons) yesterday afternoon, & he came here at once & we talked an hour. He likes her book & is going to publish it; & I asked him to sell the serial rights for her, & he said he would do it with pleasure & give it to the magazine that offers the most. He also said it is his policy to secure a dozen authors permanently—a new book per year—& he believed she was going to be one of them. (25 Sept 1906 to Lyon and JC, photocopy in CU-MARK)
The “great service” was Clemens’s offer to endorse The Cage, in the form of a letter addressed to the actress Maude Adams (famous for her role in Peter Pan). He described the novel as
the story of the heart of a woman so big that all worldly forms are gladly ignored for the love of one man. That is what a real woman would do; & in so doing she would really make the man, too, if he had character to start with. And all of this takes place amidst the familiar surroundings of the Chicago of to-day. It is a strong book, Peter Pan, & if you once begin it you will not be able to leave this man & woman until you have finished the story. (24? Sept 1906 to Adams, draft not sent, CU-MARK)
But in late October Lyon relayed a rumor that alarmed Clemens (Lyon 1906, entry for 22 Oct; Teller to SLC, 24 Oct 1906, CU-MARK). Many years later Teller described what occurred:
It was only a few days after that that Mr. Clemens, much agitated, told me he had heard people were gossiping about his seeing so much of me. He was at that time, as I remember, two years older than my grandmother who was living with me in New York. When I insisted on knowing just what the gossip was, he sent for his secretary, Miss Lyons, who said that someone at the Players’ Club had asked Mr. Paine (whom I never met,) who this Miss Teller was that Mark Twain was seeing so much of.
I did not see any reason for his being disturbed, but he was always peculiarly sensitive to public opinion. . . . He asked me if I would be willing to leave 3 Fifth Ave. with my grandmother, and live somewhere else conspicuously so he could come to see me; but I was unwilling to take that much notice of this gossip, nor did I think it was worthy of his position to give that much credence to what was an indifferent rumor. I asked him if he was worried about the letter he had given Mr. Seers which was to be photographed and used as advance notice, and while he did not ask that I should give it back to him, I insisted upon doing so, and I did not see him again. (Teller 1925, 5–6)
The rumor did not soon die away, however. Nearly a year later, on 2 July 1907, the San Francisco Morning Call reported that Clemens’s marriage to Teller was “considered a possibility” (“Mark Twain and Charlotte Teller,” 8). Then, even worse, on 4 July the New York Herald claimed that Clemens was engaged to Lyon. He responded with the following telegram from London: “I have not known, and shall never know, anyone who could fill the place of the wife I have lost. I shall not marry again” (“Mark Twain Will Not Marry Again,” Washington Post, 6 July 1907, 6). Lyon blamed Teller for the second rumor, but Clemens later came to believe that Lyon herself was responsible. Teller and Clemens exchanged several letters in 1907–9, but never resumed their friendship (Trombley 2010, 137–38; Hill 1973, 172–73, 230; Schmidt 2009). The Cage, published in 1907 by D. Appleton and Company, received mixed reviews (see, for example, Peattie 1907 and “The Haymarket Riots,” New York Times, 9 Mar 1907, BR142).
I believe that only one command has ever been issued . . . from that day to this] This “philosophy” became the basis of Clemens’s essay “The Turning Point of My Life,” published in 1910 (SLC 1910).
My father died] The account that begins here, of Clemens’s early career before his years in the West, repeats the one he gave in the Autobiographical Dictations of 28 March and 29 March 1906 (see AutoMT1 , 454–62 and notes on 644–47).
drifting toward the ministry] Although Clemens’s remarks about the ministry may seem entirely facetious, he told his brother Orion in October 1865—evidently in earnest—that he had wanted to become a preacher:
I never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, & the other a preacher of the gospel. I accomplished the one & failed in the other, because I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade—i.e. religion. I have given it up forever. I never had a “call” in that direction, anyhow, & my aspirations were the very ecstasy of presumption. But I have had a “call” to literature, of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit. . . .
But as I was saying, it is human nature to yearn to be what we were never intended for. It is singular, but it is so. I wanted to be a pilot or a preacher, & I was about as well calculated for either as is poor Emperor Norton for Chief Justice of the United States. (19 and 20 Oct 1865 to OC, L1, 322–23)
By and by I went out to the Humboldt mines . . . my muscles so incompetent] After silver and gold were discovered in the West Humboldt Mountains in 1860, the area became a center of mining activity. Clemens’s trip there lasted from early December 1861 until late January 1862. For highly readable accounts of this adventure see chapters 26–33 of Roughing It and the letter to Jane Clemens dated 30 January 1862 ( L1, 146–52). In early April Clemens departed for Aurora, in the Esmeralda mining region in southern Nevada; he worked briefly at Clayton’s quartz mill in late June (see AutoMT1 , 251, 543 n. 251.32–38).
Chief Justice Turner] George Enoch Turner (1828–85), an Ohio attorney, was appointed chief justice of Nevada Territory in 1861. He resigned that post in 1864, after the Nevada press accused him—and the rest of the judiciary—of corruption (Turner and SLC to OC, 18–30 Sept 1861, L1, 128–29 n. 2).
‘the honey of the bees of Hymettus,’] Hymettus, a mountain southeast of Athens, was renowned in the ancient world for its exceptional honey.
‘Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,’] This Latin saying is sometimes misattributed to Euripides (Householder 1936; Bartlett 1980, 78:1, 134:21).
‘Against the stupid, even the gods strive in vain.’] From The Maid of Orleans (1801) by Friedrich Schiller: “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens” (act 3, scene 6).
It was published in the Enterprise . . . I was offered his place for that interval] The burlesque was in one of several letters he signed “Josh” and sent gratis to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, probably beginning in April 1862, several months before he was hired as a local reporter. No text for any of the “Josh” letters has been found, but in 1893, Rollin Daggett, a colleague of Clemens’s on the staff of the newspaper, described this particular burlesque as a “bogus Fourth of July oration purporting to have been delivered near Owens’s Lake, where Mark was engaged in prospecting,” and he recalled that owner and editor Joseph T. Goodman “decided at once that the writer was a man worth cultivating” ( ET&S1, 13, 15, 17). Clemens traveled to Virginia City to begin his new job in September 1862 (for Daggett see AutoMT1 , 568 n. 294.28; for William Wright, the “paper’s city editor,” see AutoMT1 , 543 n. 251.32–38).
I had to go to Carson City . . . I signed these letters ‘Mark Twain.’] Clemens corresponded for the Territorial Enterprise during the second session of the Territorial Legislature, held from 11 November to 20 December 1862. Only two of his reports are known to survive, written on 5 and 12 December, but neither is signed “Mark Twain” (SLC 1862a, 1862b). Although Clemens may have used the pseudonym in work now lost, Joe Goodman reported that he first signed “Mark Twain” on “Letter from Carson City,” probably written on 31 January 1863 and published in the Enterprise a few days later. Goodman also remembered that the “first special article” signed “Mark Twain” was “Ye Sentimental Law Student,” published on 19 February (SLC 1863a, 1863b; MTEnt, 48; ET&S1, 18, 192–93, 215–16).
accident which gave me a correspondence-job . . . Sandwich Islands for the Sacramento Union] Clemens was fired from the Call in October 1864 (see AD, 13 June 1906). Joe Goodman of the Territorial Enterprise agreed to pay him for a daily letter from San Francisco in September or October 1865, which he wrote until he left for the Sandwich Islands in March 1866.
Source documents.
TS1 ribbon Typescript, leaves numbered 1284–96, made from Hobby’s notes and revised.TS1 carbon Typescript carbon, leaves numbered 1284–96, revised.
Clemens revised TS1 ribbon, then transferred his changes to TS1 carbon. In doing so, he overlooked a dozen of the easier-to-overlook revisions. He then further revised TS1 carbon by altering his age from ‘fifteenth’ to ‘twelfth’ at 237.29, and ‘twenty-two’ to ‘nineteen’ and finally to ‘21’ (emended to ‘twenty-one’) at 237.38. All revisions have been adopted.
Paine deleted an indelicate passage on TS1 ribbon (the anecdote about Henry’s ‘heel-cup’); this has the appearance of the kind of alteration Paine made after Clemens’s death, not during NAR preparation. Clemens wrote ‘Not usable now’ on the first page of TS1 carbon.