To Orion Clemens
27? June 1860 • City of Memphis en route
from Memphis, Tenn., to St. Louis, Mo.
(Transcript and MS: MTB, 1:146, and NPV, UCCL 00018)

. . . .

What is a government without energy? And what is a man without [energy? ]Nothing—nothing at all. What is the grandest thing in “Paradise Lost”—the Arch-Fiend’s terrible energy! What was the greatest feature in Napoleon’s character? His unconquerable energy! Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship it!

I want a man to—I want you to—take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil.1

. . . .

[yourself] from the reputation of a visionary. I am not talking nonsense, now—I am in earnest. I want you to keep your troubles and your plans out of the reach of [meddlers., ]—until the latter are consummated—so that, in case you fail, no one will know it but yourself. Above all things (between you and I,) never tell Ma [ and any ]of your troubles. She never slept a wink the night your last letter [came., ]and she looks distressed yet.2 Write only cheerful news to her. You know that she will not be satisfied so long as she thinks anything is going that she is ignorant of,—and she makes a bitter fuss about it when her suspicions are [ con awakened]:—but that makes no difference—I [ that know ]that it is better that she be kept in the dark concerning all things of an unpleasant nature. She upbraids me occasionally for giving her only the bright side of my affairs—(but unfortunately for her she has to put up with it, for I know that troubles which I curse awhile and forget, would disturb her slumbers for some time.) (Par. No. 2.—Possibly because she is deprived of the soothing consolation of swearing.) Tell [ me her ]the good news and me the bad.

Putting all things together, I begin to think I am rather lucky than otherwise—a notion which I was slow to [ e take ]up. The other night I was about to round to for a storm—but concluded [ to that ]I could find a smoother bank [somewhere. I ]landed 5 miles below. The storm came—passed away and did not injure us. I Coming up, day before yesterday, I looked at the spot I first chose, and half the trees on the bank were torn to shreds. We couldn’t have lived 5 minutes in such a tornado.3 And I am also lucky in having a berth, while all the other young pilots are idle. This is the luckiest circumstance that ever befell me. Not on account of the wages—for that is a secondary consideration—but from the fact that the City of Memphis is the largest boat in the trade and the hardest to pilot, and consequently I can get a reputation on her, which is a thing I never could accomplish on a transient boat. I can “bank” in the neighborhood of $100 a month on her, and that will satisfy me for the present (principally because the other youngsters are sucking their fingers.) Bless me! what a pleasure there is in revenge!—and what [ w vast ]respect [ p Prosperity ] commands! Why, six months ago, I could enter the “Rooms,”4 and receive only the customary fraternal greeting—but now they say, “Why how are you, old fellow—when did you get in?” And the young pilots, who used to tell me, patronisingly, that I could never learn the river, cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. Permit me to “blow my horn,” for I derive a living pleasure from these things. And I must confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d—d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions, whose faces I do not exhibit! You will despise this egotism, but I tell you there is a “stern joy” in it.5

. . . .

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1The two fragments printed here (connected by the editorial ellipsis) are probably, but not demonstrably, parts of a single letter, which remains incomplete. The first part survives only in Paine’s transcription; the second survives in manuscript, found among Pamela Moffett’s papers now at Vassar (NPV). As early as 1880, Orion Clemens noted on this manuscript that “the balance is lost.” Yet this may mean only that the beginning pages of the letter were misplaced with some other member of the family, and that Paine managed to see both fragments (separately), noticed their common theme, but did not recognize them as belonging to the same letter. Paine said of the first that it was “from a letter written toward the end of the year” (1858), ostensibly reflecting Clemens’s new-found confidence and wealth following upon his being licensed as a pilot. He gave a similar characterization of the second fragment, assigning it to 1859. But Paine was mistaken about when Clemens received his license, placing that event on 9 September 1858 instead of the correct date, 9 April 1859 (MTB, 1:145–48; MTL, 1:42–44). Moreover, the second fragment, in which Clemens specifies that his prosperity is a development of the past six months, can be firmly connected with events of June 1860 (see note 3). With these facts in mind, therefore, Paine’s own reasoning about the first fragment places it in 1860, not 1858. So while it remains possible that the two fragments are from separate letters which just happened to share the same theme and to have been written in 1860, it seems somewhat more likely that their common date and common theme, as well as their being fragments in the first place, mean that they belong to the same letter.

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2According to his wife’s journal, Orion again left Keokuk in May 1860, moving to Memphis, Missouri, in an effort to establish a law practice there. His distressing letter presumably described his tribulations in this latest effort to “take up a line of action, and follow it out.” Orion brought Mollie and Jennie to Memphis in August of this year (MEC, 6–9).

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3Probably since 25 March, Clemens had been one of the pilots on the City of Memphis, under Captain Joseph Edward Montgomery (usually known as J. Ed. Montgomery), a well-known pilot and commander who later became commodore of the Confederate River Fleet. Clemens’s berth on the City of Memphis, together with a contemporary report of the storm he mentions, supplies the circumstantial evidence for assigning this letter the date of 27 June 1860. According to their published memoranda, the pilots of the J. C. Swon, traveling upstream, encountered a storm at about 11:00 a.m. on 19 June, while negotiating Terrapin Bend, some twenty-eight miles above Vicksburg. “A severe storm of wind accompanied with rain and hail” was said to have “done a great deal of damage to the crops, and destroyed a great amount of timber” (“Memoranda,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 25 June 60, 3). A few hours later, the Swon met the City of Memphis, heading downstream, at Stack Island (Island No. 94), near Lake Providence, Louisiana, some thirty-five miles above Terrapin Bend. The City of Memphis is known to have reached New Orleans on 22 June, and to have departed upriver again on the twenty-fourth at 10:00 a.m. It arrived at Cairo late on 28 June, and at St. Louis on 1 or 2 July. Since Clemens says that he revisited the storm area the “day before yesterday,” he probably wrote this letter aboard ship about 27 June, soon after picking up his mail at Memphis, Tennessee, just about two days’ travel above Terrapin Bend, the site of the storm. At any rate, he clearly wrote the letter before reaching St. Louis, when his service on the City of Memphis came to an end.

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4The office and meeting room of the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association, the organization of pilots in the St. Louis–New Orleans trade.

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5The allusion is to Scott’s Lady of the Lake (1810): “And the stern joy which warriors feel” (canto 5, stanza 10). Clemens’s pride in his post was soon ended. The day he reached St. Louis, the Evening News reported that “the steamer City of Memphis has laid up for a while, and will now make some few necessary repairs. Capt. [William J.] Kountz [half-owner and regular master of the boat] has again taken charge of her” (“River News,” 2 July 60, 3; Way 1983, 94). Clemens’s 1882 notebook reveals the likely reason for the repairs: “One time I mistook Capt. Ed. Montgomery’s coat hanging on the big bell for the Capt. himself and waiting for him to tell me to back I ran into a steamboat at New Orleans” (N&J2, 536; see also chapter 49 of Life on the Mississippi, where Clemens mistakenly identified the steamboat as the Crescent City). Since the captain’s authority over a boat’s movements while entering or leaving a port was absolute, Montgomery acted correctly when he absolved his young pilot of blame and, as Clemens recalled in 1874, “shouldered the responsibility like a man” (28 Mar 74 to Meriwether Jeff Thompson, in St. Louis Missouri Republican, 28 Apr 74, 3). The City of Memphis was back at the landing by 25 July, with Captain Kountz in command and neither Montgomery nor Clemens among its officers. There is no evidence, however, that either man was dismissed punitively.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MTB, 1:146, is copy-text for the first part of the letter, ‘What . . . devil.’ (96.2–97.5); MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV) is copy-text for the remainder of the letter, ‘self . . . in it.’ (97.7–98.11). The relation of the two fragments is discussed in n. 1, p. 98.

Previous publication: L1, 96–99; MTL, 1:42–44, prints all the text of the MS except the sentence fragment with which the MS begins, but it does not include the passage for which MTB is copy-text.

Provenance:for the surviving MS, see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61. The whereabouts of the MS for the rest of the letter is unknown; when marking the MS in 1880 for insertion in his autobiography, Orion Clemens noted that “the balance is lost.”

Emendations and textual notes: Orion Clemens replaced ‘I’ with ‘me’ to tidy up the grammar at 97.11. Although his dark pencil can usually be distinguished from the lighter pencil in which the letter was written, some doubt remains about the capitalization of ‘prosperity’ (97.38) reported below.

[MTB is copy-text for ‘What. . . devil.’]

energy? • energy? [he says]. [The square brackets are in MTB.]

yourself • [previous pages missing self]

[MS is copy-text for ‘self . . . in it.’]

meddlers., • [comma over period]

and any • any d [‘y’ over ‘d’]

came., • [comma over period]

con awakened • con- | awakened

that know • [‘know’ over ‘that’]

me her • [‘her’ over ‘me’]

e take • [‘t’ over ‘e’]

to that • tohat [‘h’ over ‘o’]

somewhere. I • somewhere.—|I

w vast • [‘v’ over ‘w’]

p Prosperity • [‘P’ over ‘p’, probably by Samuel, but possibly by Orion Clemens]