Item from Susy’s BiographyⒶtextual note about Sour Mash and the flies—Mrs. Clemens’s experiment for destroying the flies in the Hartford house—Soap-bubble item from Susy’s BiographyⒶtextual note; Mr. Clemens’s comments—Mr. Clemens’s experience in learning to ride high bicycle—Letters regarding his fiftieth birthday.
From Susy’s Biography. Ⓐtextual note
Mamma is teaching Jean a little natural history and is making a little collection of insects for her. But mamma does not allow Jean to kill any insects she only collects those insects that are found dead. Mamma has told us all, perticularly Jean, to bring her all the little dead insects that she finds. The other day as we were all sitting at supper Jean broke into the room and ran triumfantly up to Mamma and presented her with a plate full of dead flies. Mamma thanked Jean very enthusiastically although she with difficulty concealed her amusement. Just then Sour Mash entered the room and Jean believing her hungry asked Mamma for permission to give her the flies. Mamma laughingly consented and the flies almost immediately dissapeared.
9th, 1885 Ⓐtextual note
Sour Mash’s presence indicates that this adventure occurred at Quarry Farm. Susy’s BiographyⒶtextual note interests itself pretty exclusively with historical facts; where they happen is not a matter of much concern to her. When other historians refer to the Bunker Hill Monument they know it is not necessary to mention that that monument is in Boston. Susy recognizes that when she mentions Sour Mash it is not necessary to localize her. To Susy, Sour Mash is the Bunker Hill Monument of Quarry Farm.
Ordinary cats have some partiality for living flies, but none forⒶtextual note dead ones; but Susy does not trouble herself to apologize for Sour Mash’s eccentricities of taste. This BiographyⒶtextual note was for us Ⓐtextual note, and Susy knew that nothing that Sour Mash might do could startle us or need explanation, we being aware that she was not an ordinary cat, but moving upon a plane far above the prejudices and superstitions which are law to common catdom.
Once in Hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so troublesome, that Mrs.
Clemens
conceived the idea of paying
George*Ⓔexplanatory note a bounty on all the flies he might kill. The children saw an opportunity here for
the acquisition of sudden wealth. They
supposed that their mother merely wanted to accumulate dead flies, for some aesthetic
or
scientificⒶtextual note reason or other, and they judged that the more flies she could get,Ⓐtextual note the happier she would be; so they went into business with George on a commission.
Straightway the dead flies began to arrive in
such quantities that Mrs. Clemens was pleased beyond words with the success of her
idea. Next, she was astonished that one house could
furnish so many. She was paying an extravagantly high bounty, and it presently began
to look as if by this addition to our expenses we
were now probablyⒶtextual note living beyond our income. After a few days there was peace and comfort; not a fly
was discoverable in the house; there
wasn’t a
*The colored butler.Ⓐtextual note [begin page 258] straggler left. Still, to Mrs. Clemens’s surprise, the dead flies continued to arrive by the plateful, and the bounty-expenseⒶtextual note was as crushing as ever. Then she made inquiry, and found that our innocent little rascals had established a Fly Trust, and had hired all the children in the neighborhood to collect flies on a cheap and unburdensome commission.
Mrs. Clemens’s experience in this matter was a new one for her, but the governments of the world had tried it, and wept over it, and discarded it, every half-century since man was created. Any governmentⒶtextual note could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.
From Susy’s Biography. Ⓐtextual note
The other evening Clara and I brought down our new soap bubble water and we all blew soap bubles. Papa blew his soap bubles and filled them with tobaccoⒶtextual note smoke and as the light shone on them they took very beautiful opaline colors. Papa would hold them and then let us catch them in our hand and they felt delightful to the touch the mixture of the smoke and water had a singularly pleasant effect.Ⓐtextual note
10th, 1885 Ⓐtextual note
It is human life. We are blown upon the world,Ⓐtextual note we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory—and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemnⒶtextual note times when we wake in the deepsⒶtextual note of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and asⒶtextual note little worth the making.
I remember those days of twenty-one years ago, and a certain pathos clings about them. Susy, with her manifold young charms and her iridescent mind, was as lovely a bubble as any we made that day—and as transitoryⒶtextual note. She passed, as they passed,Ⓐtextual note in her youth and beauty, and nothing of her is left but a heart-breakⒶtextual note and a memory. That long-vanished day came vividly back to me a few weeks ago when, for the first time in twenty-one years, I found myself again amusing a child with smoke-charged soap-bubbles.
Susy’s next date is November 29th, 1885, the eve of my fiftieth birthday. It seems a good while ago. I must have been rather young for my age then, for I was tryingⒶtextual note to tame an old-fashioned bicycleⒶtextual note nine feet high. It is to me almost unbelievable, at my present stage of life, that there have really been people willing to trust themselves upon a dizzy and unstableⒶtextual note altitude like that, and that I was one of them. Twichell and I took lessons every dayⒺexplanatory note. He succeeded, and became a master of the art of riding that wild vehicle, but I had no gift in that direction and was never able to stay on mine long enough to get any satisfactory view of the planet.Ⓐtextual note Every time I tried to steal a look at a pretty girl, or any other kind of scenery, that single moment of inattention gave the bicycle the chance it had been waiting for, and I went over the front of it and struck the ground on my head or my back before I had time to realize that somethingⒶtextual note was happening. I didn’t always go over the front way; I had other ways, and practisedⒶtextual note them all; but no matter which way was chosen for me there was always one monotonous result—the bicycle skinned [begin page 259] my leg and leaptⒶtextual note up into the air and came down on top of me. Sometimes its wires were so sprung by this violent performance that it had the collapsed look of an umbrella that had had a misunderstanding with a cyclone. After each day’s practice I arrived at home with my skin hanging in ribbons, from my knees down. I plastered the ribbons on where they belonged,Ⓐtextual note and bound them there with handkerchiefs steeped in Pond’s ExtractⒺexplanatory note, and was ready for more adventures next day. It was always a surprise to me that I had so much skin, and thatⒶtextual note it held out so well. There was always plenty, and I soon came to understand that the supply was going to remain sufficient for all my needs. It turned out that I had nine skins, in layers, one on top of the other like the leaves of a book, and some of the doctors said it was quite remarkable.Ⓐtextual note
I was full of enthusiasm over this insane amusement. My teacher was a young German from the bicycle factory, a gentle, kindly, patient creature, with a pathetically grave face. He never smiled; neverⒶtextual note made a remark; he always gathered me tenderly up when I plungedⒶtextual note off, and helped me on again without a word. When he had been teaching me twice a day for three weeks I introduced a new gymnastic—one that he had never seen before—and so at last a compliment was wrung from him, a thing which I had been risking my life for days to achieve. He gathered me up and said mournfully:
“Mr.Ⓐtextual note Clemens,Ⓐtextual note you can fall off a bicycle in more different ways than any person I ever saw before.”
From Susy’s Biography. Ⓐtextual note
Papa will be fifty years old tomorrow, and among his numerous presents The Critick sent him a delightful notice of his semi centenial; containing a poem to him by Dr. Holmes a paragraph from Mr. F. R. Stockton, one from Mr. C. D. Warner, and one from Mr. J. C. Harris (Uncle Remus).
29th, 1885 Ⓐtextual note
Papa was very much pleased and so were we all. I will put the poem and paragraphs in hereⒺexplanatory note.
The Critic.
Mark Twain’s Semi-Centennial.
Mark Twain will be half-a-hundred years old on Monday. Within the past half-century he has done more than any other man to lengthen the lives of his contemporaries by making them merrier, and it looks as if he were going to do even more good in this way within the next fifty years than in those just ended. We print below a few letters of condolence from writers whose pens, like his, have increased ‘the stock of harmless pleasures,’ and whom we have reminded of the approach of Mr. Clemens’s first semi-centennial.
My dear Mr. Clemens:
In your first half-century you have made the world laugh more than any other man. May you repeat the whole performance and ‘mark twain!’ Yours very truly,
Frank R. StocktonⒺexplanatory note .
Charlottesville, Va.
[begin page 260] My dear Neighbor:
You may think it an easy thing to be fifty years old, but you will find it not so easy to stay there, and your next fifty years will slip away much faster than those just accomplished. After all, half a century is not much, and I wouldn’t throw it up to you now, only for the chance of saying that few living men have crowded so much into that space as you, and few have done so much for the entertainment and good-fellowship of the world. And I am glad to see that you wear your years as lightly as your more abundant honors. Having successfully turned this corner, I hope that we shall continue to be near neighbors and grow young together. Ever your friend,
Chas. Dudley Warner.
George] George Griffin.
I was trying to tame an old-fashioned bicycle . . . Twichell and I took lessons every day] Clemens and Twichell tried to master bicycle riding in the spring of 1884. Clemens described his experience in “Taming the Bicycle,” which he considered submitting to the New York Sun. After deciding that he “didn’t like it at all,” he tore up his manuscript, but he had already sent a copy to Charles Webster, who had it typed (31 May 1884 and 6 June 1884 to Webster, NPV, in MTBus, 258). A manuscript (presumably the copy sent to Webster) survives at Vassar, and an incomplete typescript, which Clemens revised, is in the Mark Twain Papers (SLC 1884; N&J3, 55 n. 123).
Pond’s Extract] A popular patent medicine made of witch hazel, marketed since 1846 as a topical remedy for bruises, cuts, burns, and a variety of other ailments.
Papa will be fifty years old tomorrow . . . I will put the poem and paragraphs in here] Into her biography Susy pasted a clipping from The Critic of 28 November 1885 (253), which contained a poem and three letters written in honor of Clemens’s fiftieth birthday. Clemens included two of these tributes, letters from Stockton and Warner, in the present dictation; he postponed the other two—a poem by Holmes and a letter from Harris—until the Autobiographical Dictation of 30 October 1906. Warner and Harris are described in the Autobiographical Dictation of 16 October 1906; for Stockton see the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 October 1906, note at 250.29.
Frank R. Stockton] Clemens thanked Stockton for his good wishes on 29 November 1885 (Pforzheimer):
My Dear Mr. Stockton:
Ah, but I am like the man who polished the pin-points: I am not going to repeat. For a different reason though: he could but wouldn’t, I would but can’t. And yet I thank you for the generous wish, all the same, & I value it to the utmost, coming from you.
Sincerely Yours
S. L. Clemens
The “man who polished the pin-points” is an allusion to Stockton’s story “His Wife’s Deceased Sister,” first published in the Century Magazine in January 1884. One of its characters is a writer who cannot repeat an early success and so ends up earning his living by “grinding points to pins.”
Source documents.
Critic Clipping from The Critic, 28 November 1885, 253, attached to OSC 1885–86: ‘Mark Twain’s . . . Warner.’ (259.29–260.13).TS1 ribbon Typescript, leaves numbered 1346–53, made from Hobby’s notes and The Critic and revised.
TS1 carbon Typescript carbon, leaves numbered 1346–53, revised.
NAR 17pf Galley proofs of NAR 17, typeset from the revised TS1 carbon and further revised (the same extent as NAR 17), ViU.
NAR 17 North American Review 185 (3 May 1907), 1–4: ‘Monday . . . 1906’ (257 title); ‘From Susy’s . . . saw before.” ’ (257.5–259.19).
Paine reviewed TS1 ribbon for possible use in NAR, and queried the inclusion of one indelicate passage. Clemens revised TS1 ribbon, then transferred most of his revisions to TS1 carbon. He then further revised TS1 carbon to serve as printer’s copy for NAR 17, where it is followed by the second part of “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX,” the first part of which had been published in NAR 2 in September 1906 (the complete text of “Scraps” is in AutoMT1, 155–63). On TS1 carbon NAR editor George Harvey marked a philosophical passage (3.5–10), writing ‘Good’ in the margin.
Susy Clemens pasted a clipping from The Critic for 28 November 1885 into her biography. The clipping includes the texts of three letters to the journal—from Frank Stockton, Charles Dudley Warner, and Joel Chandler Harris—plus a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hobby was evidently given the clipping to transcribe (the exactness of the transcription demonstrates that it was not read aloud to her, as were other parts of the biography), and so it forms the basis of our text. Two of the letters are in this dictation; the third letter and the poem are included in AD, 30 October 1906. Susy cut off the dateline at the bottom of Warner’s letter— ‘Hartford, Nov. 22, 1885.’—which is therefore omitted here as well.
Marginal Notes on TS1 ribbon and TS1 carbon Concerning Publication in NAR
(about 1000 words.)