Washington, Nov. 22
Dear Mr. Young—
I called at the Tribune several times but failed to find you in. I had an article partly written about the Quaker City humbug, which I thought you might possibly accept, although it was rather roughly written, & may ‸be‸ even a little coarse—but I did not like to consult with a stranger about it, & so I never told any one what I came for. When it grew late, I answered a call from the Herald, & finished & printed it there. I was at the Tribune office twice on succeeding days, but they always said you were out.1 What I wished, was to leave you some Holy Land letters to accept or refuse. I don’t know any way now but to send you two or three by mail, asking as a favor that if you do not approve them you will return them to me directed to 242 [ F F ]street Washington,2 cor. 14th. I stopped writing for the Tribune, partly because I seemed to write so awkwardly, & partly because I was apt to betray the glaring disrespect for the Holy Land & the Primes and Thompson’s who have glorified it which travel there had created in me.3 But coming home I cramped myself down to at least something like decency of expression, & wrote some twenty letters, which have survived the examinedation of a most fastidious [ censer censor ]on shipboard and are consequently not incendiary documents. There are several among these that I think you would probably accept, after reading them.4 I would so like to write some savage letters about Palestine, but it wouldn’t do. I And I would so like to modernize the biographies of some of the patriarchs—but that would not do, either.5
I have some hope that the harmless squib in the Herald will bring out bitter replies from some of the Quaker City’s strange menagerie of ignorance, imbecility, bigotry & dotage, & so give me an excuse to go into the secret history of the excursion & tell truthfully how that curious company conducted themselves in foreign lands and on board ship.
I have located here for the winter. Have called 3 times at the Tribune bureau, but always missed the staff by some five aggravating minutes. I know Mr. Foley.6
If I had [know[n] the ]letters in the Tribune [were ]being copied I would [have ]continued them [anyhow]—for to copy a letter is to invest it with importance, at any rate, whether it has any ac actual merit or not.7
I wish I could have talked with you. The letters I have sent you heretofore have been—well, they have been worse, much worse, than those I am sending you now.
I am, with great esteem,
Yrs Truly
Sam. L. Clemens
[letter docketed:] File | Y.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Our cards go in, and in ten seconds we are ushered into the presence
of the Managing Editor of The Tribune....
What! this blue-eyed boy the Managing Editor of the most influential
journal in America! You can hardly believe it. In personal
appearance Mr. Young is the most insignificant person about the
office. He is light-complexioned, has a large, sloping head,
thatched with brown hair, a clear forehead, and a prominent nose,
and is as quick of motion as a sparrowhawk. He is of medium
height—say five feet eight. His words flow from his lips
in rapid succession, as if each one was struggling to get out of his
mouth ahead of the other.... Young is a strict disciplinarian. He runs the
editorial department like a machine. Every cog strikes its groove
with punctual regularity. When he is absent his duties fall on Mr.
John R. G. Hassard. If Hassard is missing, Mr. Amos J. Cummings
takes the manager’s chair, and so perfect does
everything jibe, that if all the editors were absent the oldest
reporter, like the senior sergeant of a company destitute of
commissioned officers, would take charge. (Cummings 1868 [bib10620], 106–7)
About the winter of 1867, I think, while my family was in Paris, I
lived in a rather tumble-down building which at that time stood on
the northwest corner of Fourteenth and F Streets, N. W., opposite
the old Ebbitt House, where many of my Congressional cronies had
quarters. The house was a weather-beaten old place, a relic of early
Washington. Its proprietress was Miss Virginia Wells, an estimable lady about 70
years of age, prim, straight as a ramrod, and with smooth-plastered
white hair. She belonged to one of the first families of Virginia,
which were quite numerous in Washington, and was very aristocratic;
but having lost everything in the war, she had come to Washington,
and managed to make a precarious living as a lodging-house keeper. I had the second floor of her residence, one of the rooms, facing
upon both streets, a spacious apartment about seventy-five feet
long, which I had divided by a curtain drawn across it, making a
little chamber at the rear, in which I slept. The front part was my
sitting room. I had a desk there, and tables, with writing
materials, and my books, and a side-board upon which I kept at all
times plenty of cigars and a supply of whiskey, for I occasionally
smoked and took a drink of liquor. I was seated at my window one morning when a very
disreputable-looking person slouched into the room. He was arrayed
in a seedy suit, which hung upon his lean frame in bunches with no
style worth mentioning. A sheaf of scraggy black hair leaked out of
a battered old slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial
sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded
from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance. He
was a man I had known around the Nevada mining camps several years
before, and his name was Samuel L. Clemens. (William M. Stewart, 219–20)
One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white
paper—copy paper, I guess the newspapers call
it—on which he had written something, and throwing the
fragments into the Mediterranean. I inquired of him why he cast away
the fruits of his labors in that manner. “Well,” he drawled, “Mrs.
Fairbanks thinks it oughtn’t to be printed, and, like as
not, she is right.” (MTB, 1:328) Emma (Beach) Thayer recalled Clemens’s reading his work aloud
“for the sake of Mrs. Fairbanks’ criticism by
which I think he abided, as he would declare that she had destroyed
‘four hours of work’ or such and such an amount.
I think it was what seemed to her irreverence or too much profanity that
she objected to” (Thayer to A. B. Paine, 22 June 1907, Davis 1967, 2).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L2, 108–111; Dickinson, 117–19, with omissions.
Provenance:donated to DLC in 1924 by Mrs. John Russell Young
and Gordon R. Young. □ After inscribing only the first four lines
on the last leaf of the MS (‘[¶] If . . .
anyhow’, 108.33–109.1), Clemens trimmed the right
margin, probably to make it more nearly the same size as the two previous
leaves, which were a different kind of paper. He inadvertently trimmed off
the end of the last word in those four lines, then repaired some of the
damage by deleting the damaged words and reinscribing them at the beginning
of the line below.
Emendations and textual notes:
F F • F | F
censer censor • censer | censor
know[n] the • kno[w◊] | the [trimmed]
were • w [◊◊◊] | ‸were‸ [trimmed]
have • ha [◊◊] | ‸have‸ [trimmed]
anyhow • any- ho [◊] | ‸how‸ [trimmed]
