Elmira, Sunday.
My Dear Bro:
Everybody gets a taste of my venom these days—you among the rest.1 But you are responsible for precious little of my spiteful mood. I am harassed & made furious by many other things. A loafing vagabond swindles Dubuque in my name & that spiritless & dirty community let him go. I employ a lawyer here to plan the rascal’s capture, & the first move he makes proves him a fool. A sheriff starts after the culprit & he turns fool—& rascal, I judge.2
Then [with] every newspaper paragraph I [ wr ] or paragraph I write in my present petulant state I prove myself a fool, & make trouble.3
Then a fraud in San Francisco dran matizes the Gilded Age & make[s] a great hit with it—especially with the character of Col. Sellers. But I’ve got him foul, because I copyrighted the thing as a drama a year ago. He will have to lay down his stolen goods.4
My pamphlets are delayed [unreasonably.5 Everything] goes wrong & I’m in a never-ending state of harassment.
But no [matter. Bad ] luck always runs its course; to meddle with it & try to mend it only makes it worse. When I am in my right mind I fold my hands & stir not when it is raining bad luck. But I seem helpless to do it this time. However, all in good time the thing will change & then the current will flow serenely again.
I hope you & Mollie will thrive where you are going—& I hardly see how you can help it. Forty dollars a month from the houses on that farm is a living, in itself. So I hope the change is going to be a change to prosperity & contentment—for you are aging & it is high time to give over dreaming & buckle down to the simplicities & the realities of life.6
Yr Bro
Sam
Orion Clemens Esq
40 W. 9th st.
New York. [return address:] If not delivered within 5 days, please return to
S. L. Clemens, Elmira, N. Y.
[postmarked:] [elmira n. y. may 11]
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
It seems that Mark Twain had the idea of getting out
such a series, for sale by the news company on the trains; it will
be remembered that some of Dickens’s and
Thackeray’s novels were published serially in this way.
Twain got the first number all ready. A Hartford artist was engaged
to illustrate the magazine and the little pamphlet was put in type
and printed. Then Twain wandered one day into the office of the
American Publishing Company, his regular publishers, and told them
about his enterprise. “Why you can’t do
that,” they said. “You have signed a contract
to publish nothing for sale except through us.” So Mark
Twain was left with 100,000 copies of his Mark Twain’s
Sketches, No. 1, on his hands, and an expense of $4,000
to the bad. He went down to see Mr. Brush, who was manager of the
Hartford concern that did the printing, and told him sorrowfully to
destroy the whole batch. “Let me think it
over,” said Mr. Brush. He thought about it and finally
the idea came to him to print advertisements on the back page of the
cover, and sell the edition to the advertisers, who would give the
pamphlets away. The plan worked out all right; an insurance company,
or perhaps several, bought the edition, put their advertisements on
the back and gave the Sketches away. That did not violate the
contract, since the pamphlets were not sold—and Mark
Twain saved his $4,000. (“Memories of Mark
Twain,” Illustrated Buffalo
Express, 1 May 1910, sec. 1:3) Clemens’s 29 December 1870 contract with the
American Publishing Company, fulfilled in 1875 with Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, did not
prohibit publication with other firms. But his other current contract,
dated 22 June 1872 (for the abandoned project with John Henry Riley,
about the South African diamond mines), did have such a clause. It was
not fulfilled until 1876, with The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer. In 1870 Bliss had invoked a similar clause in his Roughing It contract to stop a proposed
“Mark Twain’s Annual,” and in 1871
Bliss barely refrained from invoking it to stop another small pamphlet,
Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography
and First Romance (SLC 1871; see ET&S1, 435–36; L4, 209, 212–13, 218, 247, 258–65, 268,
281–82, 320–21, 566–68; L6, 101–2, 633). Nothing is known about
Clemens’s financial investment in the Sketches. Number One pamphlet. The buyout proposal remembered
by Brush did not come until 22 August 1877, when William C. Hutchings,
the former owner of the Hartford print shop (which had since closed) and
now an agent of the Aetna Life Insurance Company of Hartford, wrote
Clemens: My dear Mark,—I have an opportunity
to realize $30000 by
disposing of the entire lot of “Sketches”
pamphlets to the Aetna Life Ins. Co. They will print their advertisement on back
cover page, as per enclosed sample, (nothing printed on the inside
covers,) and circulate the pamphlets at convenience. I hope you have no objection to my realizing as
above on what is absolutely dead property to me otherwise.
It’s a small amount, comparatively, but situated as I am
at present the $30000 will be
a perfect God-send. (CU-MARK) Hutchings’s sample does not survive, nor does
Clemens’s reply, which must have been affirmative. Jacob
Blanck reported two known states of the pamphlet: one with the back
cover blank, and a second with an advertisement for the Aetna Insurance
Company giving “assets for January 1, 1877” (BAL, 2:3360; Geer 1873, 39, 82).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L6, 143–145.
Provenance:see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
wr • [’r’ partly formed]
unreasonably. Everything • unreasonably.—|Everything
matter. Bad • matter.—|Bad
elmira n. y. may 11
•
[e
r]a n. y.
[a]y 11
