To Orion Clemens
4 March 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00583)

Buffalo, 4th

My Dear Bro:

What I wanted with the “Liar” sketch, was to work it into the California book—which I shall do. But day before yesterday I concluded to go out of the Galaxy on the strength of it—& so I have turned it into the last Memoranda I shall ever write & published it as a “specimen chapter” of my forthcoming book.1

I have written Church the Galaxy people that I will never furnish them another article, long or short, for any price but $50000 cash—& have requested them not to ask me for contributions any more, even at that price. I hope that lets them out, for I will stick to that.2

Now do try & [leave ]me clear out of the Publisher for the present, for I am endangering my reputation by writing too much—I want to get out of the public view for a while. I will am still nursing Livy night & day & cannot write anything. I am nearly worn out. We shall go to Elmira ten days hence (if Livy can travel on a mattrass then,) & stay there till I have finished the California book—say three months. But I can’t begin work right away when I get there—must have a week’s rest, for I have been through 30 days’ terrific siege. That makes it after the middle of March before I can go fairly to work—& then I’ll have to hump myself & not lose a moment. You & Bliss just put yourselves in my place & you will see that my hands are full & more than full. When I told Bliss in N. Y. that I would write something for the Publisher I could not know that I was just about to lose fifty days. Do you see the difference it makes? [in margin: The Publisher is a gallant success.& a credit to you.] 3

Just as soon as ever I can, I will send some of the book MS., but right in the be first chapter I have got to alter the whole style of one of my characters & re-write him clear through to where I am now. It is no fool of a job I can tell you, but the book will be greatly bettered by [it. Hold ]on a few days—four or five,—& I will see if I can get a few chapters fixed & send to Bliss.4

I have offered [ the this ]dwelling house & the Express for sale, & when we go to Elmira we leave here for good. I shall not select a new home till the book is finished, but [ writing a book, & reap if it proves to be a poor book ]we have very little doubt that Hartford will be the place. We are almost certain of that.

Ask Bliss how it would do to ship our furniture to Hartford, rent an upper room in a building and [ st ]unbox it & store it there where somebody can frequently look after it. Is not the idea good? The furniture [ it is ]worth $10,000 or $12,000 & must not be jammed into any kind of a place & left unattended to for a year.5

The first man that offers $25,000 for our house can take it—it cost that.

What are taxes there? Here, all bunched together, of all kinds, they are 7 per cent—simply ruin. Personal property (city) tax is [4½ ] per cent here.—& we have ‸$55,000 or‸ $60,000 worth of personal property. On real estate it is a trifle easier—but you can see how they would scorch us if we staid here. We have not paid this personal tax & when it is due we shall no longer be citizens.6 Don’t let any of this stuff get into the papers—mind & be careful about that. It would make me smell pretty loud here.

The things you have written in the Publisher are tip-top.7

In haste

Yr Bro

Sam.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The “Liar” sketch was about Francis A. Oudinot (1822?–71), whom Clemens had met on the island of Maui in 1866. In returning the manuscript at Clemens’s request (22 Feb 71 to OC), Orion seems to have asked about his brother’s plans for it, perhaps because Bliss had already commissioned some illustrations for the sketchbook (24 Jan 71 to Bliss, n. 1). Clemens’s decision to publish the sketch in the April Galaxy (“About a Remarkable Stranger: Being a Sandwich Island Reminiscence”) followed his quarrel with Francis P. Church over when and how to announce his withdrawal from the magazine (see note 2). When he wrote this letter, he knew that the sketch would follow his “Valedictory” and a “postscript” to the “Valedictory” that he had added sometime early in February and that he first expected to appear in the March issue. The postscript was probably “My First Literary Venture,” which Clemens characterized as something that “dropped from my pen of its own accord and without any compulsion from me, and so it may as well go in” (SLC 1871 [MT01043], 615). On or about 2 March, Clemens sent Church “About a Remarkable Stranger,” providing the following introduction:

[On second thoughts I will extend my Memoranda a little, and insert the following chapter from the book I am writing. It will serve to show that the volume is not going to be merely entertaining, but will be glaringly instructive as well. I have related one or two of these incidents before lecture audiences, but have never printed any of them before.—M. T.] (SLC 1871 [MT01043], 616)

Later in the year he revised the sketch for Roughing It, chapter 77 (RI 1993, 526–31, 739–40, 1015–16).

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2 Clemens wrote this (now lost) letter to the “Galaxy people” shortly before he sent them “About a Remarkable Stranger”—that is, sometime after 21 February (when the March Galaxy was available in western New York) but no later than 1 March, since Church replied to it on 2 March. Beginning on 8 February there had been at least eleven telegrams and letters exchanged between Clemens, Church, and Isaac E. Sheldon, but texts for Clemens’s letter and three telegrams have not been found. Their existence and general import, however, can be inferred from Church’s and Sheldon’s replies (all in CU-MARK). Returning from Washington to find Olivia gravely ill, Clemens telegraphed Church on 8 February to ask that the “Memoranda” department be omitted from the March Galaxy, leaving (as he thought) only his notice of withdrawal, or “Valedictory,” the text of which he and Church had worked out in New York on 1 February, but to which he had recently sent a postscript, probably “My First Literary Venture.” He also asked that Sheldon delay publication of the (Burlesque) Autobiography. On the afternoon of 9 February, Church replied by telegraph: “All galaxy gone to Press impossible to do it notice of withdrawal not in department generally so quiet it need not disturb you my heartiest sympathy.” The same day he amplified the telegram in a letter:

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After speaking to Sheldon, however, Church wrote a second letter:

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Having as yet received only Church’s telegram, Clemens telegraphed a second time, perhaps to ask that some explanation of his situation be included in the front matter of the magazine. But on 10 February Church wrote in reply:

I have your last telegram, but I have already written that I succeeded in stopping Memoranda.

It will delay the Galaxy several days, but I keenly appreciate your feelings & honor you for it. I hope I should feel so myself under similar circumstances.

Sheldon also wrote on 10 February to “Friend Clemmens”:

I have spent all the afternoon in arranging to leave your department out of the March no & I assure you it has been no light task. It was part of a form on the press & all that comes after it in the March no had to be fixed over. Aside from the expense, it will cause us several days delay, which is peculiarly unfortunate as we were very much behind on this number. . . .

The pamphlet I can hold a few days if you desire it, but a few samples of it have got out. I might hold the Editors copies back, while the distant orders are on their way by freight lines & they will not reach their destination for some time to come. Of course it is universally understood that this book was written long ago & has been in the press for some time.

Probably after receiving at least Church’s two letters of 9 February, Clemens telegraphed a third time, on 10 or possibly 11 February, asking that an explanation of the absence of “Memoranda” be inserted in the March Galaxy. On 11 February, Sheldon responded by letter:

Your telegram just rec’d.

I write to you this morning.

A note is inserted in the Nebulae & also in Table of Contents giving the reason why your Memoranda is not in this time.

The note was inserted at the end of “Nebulæ,” the Galaxy editor’s own department, which always occupied the final pages of each issue: “The friends of Mr. Clemens (Mark Twain) will share our regret that the sudden and alarming illness of his wife deprives us this month of his usual contribution to ‘The Galaxy’” (Galaxy 11 [Mar 71]: 478; no copy of the March issue has yet been found with the table of contents intact). On or soon after 21 February, Clemens saw the published note, which seemed to him to imply that his “usual” contributions would resume, rather than cease, in April, probably because he remembered the 3 February notice in the New York Tribune that promised his continuance as “leading” contributor (see p. 325). He complained in his lost letter to “the Galaxy people,” and also made several other demands that can be inferred from Church’s reply on 2 March:

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By 4 March, Clemens had been sufficiently appeased by Church’s letter to allow publication of the “Valedictory” with its “postscript,” as well as “About a Remarkable Stranger.” Clemens did not immediately contribute to the new department, but in April or May he gave its editor, Donn Piatt, the first of two small contributions (27 Mar 71 to Piatt, n. 1).

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3 Orion had sent the first number of the American Publisher. Clemens’s contribution was “A Question Answered,” an excerpt from the first of six “Answers to Correspondents” columns he published in the Californian in 1865, and in 1867 reprinted, in part, in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And other Sketches, from which Orion supplied the text. Orion’s editorial commentary explained that “very dangerous illness in his (Mr. Clemens’s) family” prevented something more current. On the strength of a telegram from Clemens (now lost), Orion also promised “a contribution from him in the next number” (OC 1871 []; SLC 1865 [MT00337], 1865 [MT00339], 1865 [MT00340], 1865 [MT00342], 1865 [MT00345], 1865 [MT00347], 1867, 45–48). Having made that commitment in print, Bliss and Orion were alarmed by Clemens’s casual desire to be left out of the next issue as well. On 7 March, perhaps before he saw Clemens’s letter, Bliss wrote: “We trust you will not disappoint us this month[.] We have made a good start & got well underway & we want to keep on steadily. Send us on as soon a[s] possible something good for it” (transcript in CtHMTH). The following day Orion was more insistent (11 and 13 Mar 71 to OC, n. 1). Clemens dated the fifty lost days from his 1 February meeting with Bliss in New York. He underestimated the time it would take him to finish Roughing It.

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4 Clemens had drafted at least the first eight or nine chapters, plus chapter eleven and some later sections. The character he planned to rewrite was “almost certainly the narrator himself,” and, as the next letter shows, he finished this revision as predicted (RI 1993, 818–19, 822, 827, 834–35, 838).

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5 See 11 and 13 Mar 71 to OC, n. 1.

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6 Even if Clemens included the price of the house in his estimate, it is unclear how he arrived at the figures of $55,000 or $60,000 of personal property. Taxes at 4½; percent on those amounts would be $2,475 or $2,700; taxes at 2½; percent on $25,000 for the house alone would be $625. Before leaving Buffalo, the Clemenses did pay a city tax bill of $222.25, including interest and special fees, which was a far smaller amount than Clemens anticipated here. The total of all “National, State, county and municipal taxes” they paid in 1870 was $797 (“Income Tax, 1871,” draft of return by SLC, Mar 71, CU-MARK; “City Tax, 1871,” receipt to OLC, 27 Sept 71, CU-MARK). On 8 March, Orion reported that Bliss “says he wrote you about the taxes—that they are 1½ per cent” in Hartford (CU-MARK).

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7 Orion had evidently marked his own contributions in the copy of the American Publisher that he sent to Clemens, which does not survive. They included— presumably in addition to much of the editorial matter—“The American Publisher’s Proclamation,” a long introductory sketch about a genie who promises to “girdle the earth in thirty minutes; traverse either pole; dive to the centre of the globe; walk under the ocean; fly above the clouds; or make excursions into genii land or fairy land” to gather materials for “the children’s department of this paper” (OC 1871 [bib12050]; OC 1871 [bib12048], 1871 [bib12049], 1871 [bib12051]; Bliss to SLC, 15 Mar 71, CU-MARK).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).

Previous publication: L4, 341–46; MTL, 1:185–86, with omission; McElderry, xiv, brief excerpt; Hill, 47, 50, brief excerpts; MTMF, 149, brief excerpt.

Provenance:See McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

leave • [possibly ‘leasve’; ‘s’ partly formed]

it. Hold • it.—|Hold

the this • theis

writing . . . book • [The canceled passage is at the top of an MS page numbered 5. Clemens replaced the page with a new page 5, and then reused the canceled page as page 6, where the canceled passage appears out of place.]

st • [‘t’ partly formed]

it is • its

4½ • [underscored twice]