Veitch’s Hotel
Edinburgh, Monday.
Click to add citation to My Citations.
My Dear Yates:1
I am sincerely grieved to see that the Herald people have added a paragraph to one of my letters which puts me in a bad light. They describe me & the London correspondents as cheering the Shah at Ostend & conducting ourselves in anything but a proper way. It was a careless thing in the Herald people to do, after the kindly & gentlemanly way in which those correspondents [treated] me on board the Lively.2
Whenever you meet one of those correspondents, I would wish you would do me the real kindness to explain this thing to him & say that I am as sincerely grieved about it as if I had done the deed [myself. And] in truth it has worried me more than I could tell in many pages of manuscript.
I don’t think Hosmer could have done that. His [ im ] instincts would have been truer, I think.3
Ys Faithfully
Samℓ. L. Clemens.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Click to add citation to My Citations. 1
See 17 or 18 June 73 to Young, n. 1. After seeing
Clemens at Ostend in June, Yates had reported for the Herald on the shah’s July visit to
Paris, then made a quick trip to England: on 2 August he was in
London. Shortly thereafter he returned to Vienna to report on the
rewarding of prizes in the International Exhibition (Yates: 1885, 412; 1873, 10).
The Shah walked back alongside his fine cabin,
looking at the assemblage of silent, solemn Flounders; the
correspondent of the London Telegraph, was
hurrying along the pier and took off his hat and bowed to the
“King of Kings,” and the King of Kings gave a
polite military salute in return. This was the commencement of the
excitement. The success of the breathless Telegraph man made all the other London correspondents
mad, every man of whom flourished his stovepipe recklessly and
cheered lustily, some of the more enthusiastic varying the exercise
by lowering their heads and elevating their coattails. Seeing all
this, and feeling that if I was to “impress the
Shah” at all, now was my time, I ventured a little
squeaky yell, quite distinct from the other shouts, but just as
hearty. His Shah ship heard and saw and saluted me in a manner that
was, I considered, an acknowledgement of my superior importance. I
do not know that I ever felt so ostentatious and absurd before.
(SLC 1873)
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
The offensive remark was inserted into Clemens’s first letter
on the shah, which was published in the New York Herald on 1 July, but which he had only just seen in print
(see 2 Aug 73
to Bliss [2nd] ):
Click to add citation to My Citations. 3
George W. Hosmer (1830–1914), a practicing physician as well
as a noted journalist, reported for the New York Herald during the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. As
the London correspondent for the Herald he had
supervised Clemens’s assignment to report on the
shah’s visit (Joseph J. Mathews, 80; “Dr. George W.
Hosmer Is Dead,” New York Times, 14
June 1914, 11; see 2 Aug 73 to Bliss
[2nd], n. 1).
Source text(s):MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
Previous publication:
L5, 430–431; Waiting for Godot Books, item 6, with
omissions.
Provenance:The MS, owned at an unknown date by Raphael King (London) and in 1969 by Paul
H. North of Second Life Books (Columbus, Ohio), was purchased by CU-MARK in January 1995 from Waiting
for Godot Books through the James F. and Agnes R. Robb Memorial Fund.
Emendations and textual notes:
treated • treaited
myself. And • myself. —|And
im • im- |
