I passed my seventy-third birthday a couple of weeks ago and the usual annual congratulations and condolences have followed by mail and telegraph. This time the unusual has happened; a letter has come to me from a once intimate friend whom I have not seen for forty-fiveⒶtextual note or fiftyⒶtextual note years,—Howard P. TaylorⒺexplanatory note.
My Dear Sam:Ⓐtextual note
I read in a ’Frisco paper yesterday that you had just celebrated your 73d birthday. Let your old friend of nearly 50 years ago throw a few congratulations over your old pompadour, with the fervent hope you may live to celebrate many more annuals, and continue to entertain the world with your pleasantriesⒶtextual note. I am but three years your junior, but feel fourteen years your senior, owing to a bunch of ingrowing rheumatism that has claimed most of my system since my advent among the “glorious fogs of California” shortly after the earthquake, and left me physically and financially “pinched” on a bargain-day mattress inⒶtextual note Oakland, with a second-hand typewriter for company. I have read, too, of your frequent illnesses, and can only wonder at your extraordinary vitality, for when we were doing time on the old Enterprise in Virginia,Ⓐtextual note you didn’t seem “bigger than a paragraph,”Ⓔexplanatory note nor stalwart enough to pry up a carpet tack. I don’t know your attitude on religion, or whether you ever had any (few of us had in the old days), but doubtless you are thankful to the Great Unseen for the blessed energies He has given you, for prolonging your days, and for making you the creature of cheerful usefulness to the world. It saddens “we old ’uns,” though, to know that so few of our comrades of the past remain. A new, and still newer, generation has sprung up, and only a bent form and wrinkled face from among our youthful friends is occasionally seen wandering listlessly alongⒶtextual note the streetsⒶtextual note of San Francisco and Oakland. It makes one feel like the proverbial cat in the strange garret.
Nearly all the old newspaper editors, reporters and compositors that we knew have passed to the beyond, except JoeⒶtextual note Goodman, whom I have been unable to locate, but hear he is somewhereⒶtextual note in Southern CaliforniaⒺexplanatory note. Jim TownsendⒺexplanatory note, I am told, died a year or two ago at Lodi, Cal., and Jim Gillis passed out last year—DanⒶtextual note de [begin page 288] QuilleⒺexplanatory note some time ago, as you know. Denis and Jack McCarthyⒺexplanatory note, Pit Taylor, Jack McGinn, Mike McCarthy, George ThurstonⒺexplanatory note, and other of the old office boys, have all been gathered in, leaving but fewⒶtextual note of the old Comstockers to face the inevitable. My brother Billy, whom I believe you knewⒶtextual note, is still on earth, here with me, but a paralytic. He is 76 years old. All very saddening; yet the retrospect is not so unpleasant, as I ponder over it, and doubtless the sanctitiesⒶtextual note are still slumbering within both of us that make this life worth the living.
I am more than rejoiced to know that you are still on fair terms with your health. WeⒶtextual note are both left for a purpose, doubtless—yet yours has been at least partially accomplished in the pleasureableⒶtextual note food you have furnished the world—while mine is still a speck on the disk of uncertainty, the difference being that you understood yourself—I didn’t.Ⓐtextual note
Let me again congratulate you.Ⓐtextual note
The letter makes me seem older than I am accustomed to feel because of the list of names it has dug up out of so remote a past. We were all young fellows then and there were twenty-sixⒶtextual note of us in the Virginia Enterprise Ⓐtextual note office, a most gay and cheerful and noisy lot. The paper went to pressⒶtextual note at two in the morning, then all the staff and all the compositors gathered themselves together in the composing-roomⒶtextual note, and drank beer and sang the popular war songs of the day until dawn. When I look back now, they do seem preposterously young, those boys; and now when I read what Taylor has said about the remnant of them in his letter they seem as preposterously and impossibly old. No doubt the great majority of them are in the cemetery long ago, and I suppose the rest of us will join them before long. Speaking for myself I am willing; in fact I believe I have been willing ever since I was eighteen years old; not urgent, but willing, merely willing.
Howard Taylor was a Southerner, with the pleasant South-twang in his speech; he was a handsome young fellow and graceful and full of life and jollity and good-natureⒶtextual note and I think he had the blackest hair I have ever seen on the head of a person not an Indian. It is probably white enough now. He was foreman of the composing-roomⒶtextual note, and I suppose he was the inventor of a word which I have often used in my books when I was talking about poor literary stuff that had a good opinion of itself—when I was talking about it disparagingly and wanted to compress my disparagement into a single word. I was city editorⒶtextual note and my duties kept me scribbling after the rest of the staff had finished theirs. Taylor used to come in and sit down near me and remark that the public were standing in ranks reaching from our front door to China and the rest of the corners of the earth waiting for my stuff, in fact crying for it and not willing to go to their beds until they got it. Presently he would take up a sheet of my manuscript, run his eye along down it, and then languidly ask:
“Aren’t you nearly done? Don’t you think this is enough hog-wash for to-day?”
A very good word. He never had any other name for my literature. Ten years ago, in London, Poultney A. BigelowⒺexplanatory note came to our house and said that an old, old and very affectionate friend of mine was living in handsome quarters at the West End and wanted me to come and dine with him and swap ancient reminiscences—name of the friend [begin page 289] Howard P. Taylor. I was electrified with joy. When Poultney and I arrived at the place, we entered an English lift of that day and generation—a lift which held the two of us and the lift boy by squeezing, and moved with impressive deliberation and solemnity—and when we stepped out on the fourth floor there stood Taylor eagerly waiting with his eyes sparkling and both hands out tended. We shook and shook and shook—most vigorously at first, less vigorously presently and with a quite pallid and failing energyⒶtextual note at the last. I mean that this was my case; it wasn’t Taylor’s; Taylor shook vigorously all the way through. We sat down at his sumptuous table, and I began to talk pretty gay old reminiscences of the early days in Virginia City, and he began to respond with equally gay reminiscences of old times in Keokuk, IowaⒶtextual note. Mine didn’t seem to hit him anywhere, and certainly his didn’t ever hit me. Neither of us wanted to spoil this happy renewal of a fond old friendship; and so I never came out brutally and said I had never seen him in Keokuk and did not know before that he had ever been there; also I didn’t say his reminiscences had never happened in my neighborhood. I pretended in a lame and poorly acted way to sort of dimly remember those things without being quite able to call back the particulars—“it was so long ago you know.” At the same time he was doing the same charitable thing by my Virginia City reminiscences; he only just vaguely remembered them and could not call to mind any distinct particular except that he had never been in Virginia City. When this condition of things became at last unbearable I broke out and said:
“Oh come now call a halt. Let us throw off this humbuggery and come to an understanding. Who are you anyway? Have we ever met before or is this all a blunder? I have been in Keokuk, I know what year it was when I left there. I have noticed that your reminiscences of those joyous Keokuk days all begin with the summer of 1857, whereas I have not seen Keokuk since the January of that yearⒺexplanatory note. Who are you? Who am I? Are you you, am I I? It looks to me as if it is neither of us.”
An explanation promptly cleared the atmosphere and made everything pleasant and agreeable for the rest of the evening. He had known my brother Orion in Keokuk and probably hadn’t known him well enough to notice so little a thing as the difference between his name and mine. When I had first begun to shake hands with him I was cordial and unsuspecting; unsuspecting and undoubting; but before the hand-shaking had been completedⒶtextual note I was saying to myself dubiously “But can this be Howard Taylor?”
The first reminiscence I dealt him from my hand fell so flat that I could hear it slap the floor. It was this. I said:
“How would you like to have some hog-wash now?”
I have never seen a person look blanker than he did. He didn’t look the kind of blankness that would indicate that he had forgotten about hog-wash, it was the kind of uncompromising blankness which indicated that he had never heard of hog-wash before in his life.
Now that three years have gone by and I am acclimated to old age and can look back upon its birth without any sentimental pangs, I think I will insert here (if I have [begin page 290] not inserted it in some earlier chapter of this autobiography) the grand account of the banquet which Colonel Harvey gave in celebration of my seventieth birthday, and which appeared in Harper’s Weekly Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note a week later.
Howard P. Taylor] Taylor (1838–1916), a native of Louisville, Kentucky, went to California while still a boy. There he worked as a printer’s devil for the San Francisco Argonaut, later becoming an editorial writer. In the early 1860s, when Clemens first knew him, he was a typesetter on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and then, briefly, part owner and publisher of the Virginia City Evening Bulletin. After relocating to New York City, Taylor wrote a number of popular plays. Clemens had last been in touch with him not “forty-five or fifty” years ago, but in 1889–90, when he agreed to let Taylor dramatize A Connecticut Yankee. By 15 July 1890 Taylor had finished his play, which he believed had “barrels of money” in it, but lacked the means to produce it. He struggled to find a theater manager willing to take it on, but met with objections that it was a “one-man piece” and too expensive to stage (Taylor to SLC, 15 July 1890, 16 Dec 1890, CU-MARK). In January 1891 Taylor informed Clemens of a proposal from a wealthy but faded Jewish comic actor, M. B. Curtis (1852–1921), who had enjoyed great success in the early 1880s with a comic melodrama entitled Sam’l of Posen; or, The Commercial Drummer. Curtis was willing to stage the Yankee play if he was allowed to “make a modern American Jew” of Hank Morgan and call the piece “Sam’l of Posen at King Arthur’s Court” (Taylor to SLC, 24 Jan 1891, CU-MARK). Although Clemens assented, the project was dropped. Finally, in April 1891, Taylor signed a production contract for his own dramatization with a New York management firm, but the play was never produced (Taylor to SLC, 29 Apr 1891, CU-MARK; Doten 1973, 3:2251; Angel 1881, 323; Kelly 1863, 286; “Howard P. Taylor Dead,” New York Times, 8 July 1916, 9; 29 Jan 1891, 9 Mar 1891, 30 Apr 1891 to Taylor, MS secretarial copies, CU-MARK; Erdman 1995, 28, 32, 41–43).
you didn’t seem “bigger than a paragraph,”] An allusion to A Connecticut Yankee, chapter 2 ( CY , 61).
Joe Goodman . . . somewhere in Southern California] Goodman had sold the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in 1874, then lived in San Francisco until 1880, when he became a raisin farmer in Fresno, California. In 1891 he moved to Alameda, California ( AutoMT1 , notes on 544–45).
Jim Townsend] James W. E. Townsend had been a staff member on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the San Francisco Golden Era, and other California newspapers. Known as “lying Jim” for his facility with the tall tale, he reportedly was the prototype for Truthful James in Bret Harte’s “The Heathen Chinee,” and has also been credited with originating Clemens’s “Jumping Frog” tale, a short version of which appeared in the Sonora Herald in 1853, during Townsend’s tenure on that paper ( N&J1 , 69 n. 3).
Jim Gillis . . . Dan de Quille] De Quille (William H. Wright) was Clemens’s predecessor and then his colleague on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise; Gillis was his Jackass Hill, California, mining friend ( AutoMT1 , 543 n. 251.32–38; see AD, 26 May 1907, and the note at 57.22–24, and AD, 29 May 1907).
Denis and Jack McCarthy] Denis McCarthy was co-owner of the Territorial Enterprise and Clemens’s lecture agent briefly in 1866. His brother Jack was a pressman on the Enterprise ( AutoMT1 , 537 n. 227.7–9 and notes on 544–45; Doten 1973, 3:2251).
Pit Taylor, Jack McGinn, Mike McCarthy, George Thurston] Pitney Taylor was an associate editor of the Virginia City Union; Mike McCarthy (not known to be related to Denis and Jack) and George Thurston were Enterprise typesetters (Doten 1973, 2:835–36, 3:2251). Jack McGinn has not been identified.
Poultney A. Bigelow] Bigelow (1855–1954) was a lawyer, Spanish-American War correspondent, and the author of several books on international politics and travel. He and the Clemenses saw each other socially in London in 1896–97, but the occasion described here has not been independently documented.
summer of 1857 . . . not seen Keokuk since the January of that year] Clemens lived in Keokuk, Iowa, most of the time from June 1855 until October 1856 (not until January 1857, as he says here), while working in his brother Orion’s Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. He subsequently visited in July 1860, while he was piloting on the Mississippi; in January 1885, while he was on his reading tour with George Washington Cable; and in July 1886, when he took his family to visit his mother (link notes following 5 Mar 1855 to the Muscatine Tri-Weekly Journal and 5 Aug 1856 to Henry Clemens, and 11 Aug 1860 to Stotts, L1 , 58–59, 69, 101 n. 1; AutoMT2 , 356–58, 591 n. 302.41–42; N&J3, 242 n. 60).
grand account of the banquet . . . which appeared in Harper’s Weekly] In his Autobiographical Dictation of 12 January 1906, Clemens discussed the banquet that George Harvey held in honor of his seventieth birthday at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York. He also considered inserting there the “grand account,” which filled a sizable portion of the 23 December 1905 issue of Harper’s Weekly, but did not do so. A facsimile of the magazine is available at MTPO ( AutoMT1 , 267–68, 558 n. 268.28, 657–61).
Source documents.
Taylor to SLC Typed letter, Howard P. Taylor to SLC, 1 December 1908 (CtHMTH): ‘My Dear Sam . . . congratulate you.’ (287.17–288.13).TS Typescript, five unnumbered leaves (the first a carbon copy, the rest ribbon copies), made from Howden’s notes and a now-lost copy of Taylor to SLC that was revised by SLC.
A typescript of Taylor’s letter of 1 December 1908 survives at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford. It was not, however, the actual document that Howden transcribed: her source must have been a second document on which Clemens had deleted several passages (see the list below). That second document has not been located, nor has its relationship to the typed letter at the Mark Twain House been discovered. Nevertheless, a comparison of the surviving letter with TS reveals that it is more authoritative in at least one instance: where the letter reads ‘along the streets’, TS has ‘among the street’, which is clearly a corruption. By adopting the letter as our source, we can report the passages in it that Clemens evidently deleted on the document he provided to Howden. The three mistyped words in the surviving source (‘inn’, ‘somewher’, and ‘sancities’) have not been retained, since it is unlikely that they were duplicated in the lost document that Clemens revised. Our text retains the variants in each document that are deemed most likely to be Taylor’s or Clemens’s, and rejects Howden’s unauthorized readings. All variants between the two source documents are listed below. TS was not further revised, although it shows several inked corrections of typing errors, presumably made by Howden.