From Samuel L. and Olivia L. Clemens
to Jervis Langdon
2 and 3 March 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS: CtHMTH, UCCL 00437)

Polishing Irons.

March. 2.

Dear Father—

Got your dispatch, & shall talk no business with my partners1 till Mr. Slee gets back.

The “Peace” has arrived, but Livy don’t know it, for she has got some eternal company in the [drawing-room] & it is considerably after dinner-time. But I have spread the fringed red dinner-table spread over the big rocking-chair & set up the beautiful thing on it, & in a prominent place, & it will be the first thing Livy sees when she comes in.

Later—She went into convulsions of delight when she entered. And I don’t wonder, for we both so mourned the loss of the first Peace that it did not seem possible we could do without it—& for you to send another in this delightful & unexpected way was intensely gratifying. You have our most sincere [gratitude]—Livy’s for the present itself, & mine because I shall ‸‸ enj so much enjoy looking at it.2

March 3.

Your two letters came this morning, father, & your dispatch yesterday [afternoon]. {Mem.—[ En Ellen’s] in the stable & the horse in the attic looking at the scenery.}3

We think it cannot be worth while to enter into an explanation of the Express figures, for the reason that Mr. Slee must have arrived in Elmira after your letter was written, & he would explain them to you much more clearly & understandingly than I could.

I thank you ever so much for your offer to take my money & pay me interest on it until we decide whether to add it to the Kennett purchase or not. I was going to avail myself of it at once, but waited to see if Mr. Slee & MacWilliams couldn’t make Selkirk’s figures show a little more favorably. As I hoped, so it has resulted. And now, upon thorough conviction that the Express is not a swindle, I will pay some more on the Kennett indebtedness.4

I am very glad to begin to see my way through this business, for figures confuse & craze me in a little while.5 I haven’t Livy’s tranquil nerve in the presence of a financial complexity—when her cash account don’t balance (which [ do ] is about does not happen oftener than once a day) ‸ false ‸ she just increases the item of “Butter 78 cents” to “Butter 97 cents”—or reduces the item of “Gas, $6.45” to “Gas, $2.35” & makes that account [balance]. She keeps books with the most inexorable accuracy that ever mortal man beheld.

Father it is not true— Samuel slanders me—

I wrote “Polishing Irons” at the head of this letter the other night to remind either Livy or me to write about them—didn’t put it there for a tet text to preach from.6

The report of my intending to leave Buffalo [ w ] Livy & I have concluded emanates from Hartford, for the reason that it really started in the newspapers only a very little while after my last visit & your last letter to Hartford, & has been afloat ever since.7

Yr son

Samuel.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 Josephus N. Larned and George H. Selkirk (L3, 300 n. 2, 401–2 n. 2).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 In a 16 February letter to her mother, Olivia reported (CtHMTH):

UCCL00427

Click to add citation to My Citations.

After receiving the replacement she wrote (CtHMTH):

UCCL00436

Click to add citation to My Citations.

The statuette has not been identified; for the Divens, see p. 44.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 Only one of these communications is known to survive (PH in CU-MARK):

UCLC31662

Click to add citation to My Citations.

The anecdote about Jane Clemens that Langdon referred to has not been identified.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

4 Although the first payment on the $10,000 Clemens owed to Thomas A. Kennett was not due until August, he planned here to use at least part of his second quarter Innocents royalties to pay “some more on the Kennett indebtedness.” Within a few days, however, he changed his mind. Apparently he did pay Kennett $2,500 in August, with subsequent payments in 1871 and 1872. John James McWilliams, a bookkeeper in the Buffalo office of Langdon’s coal firm, was one of Clemens’s first Buffalo friends. He had assisted Slee in the “boarding house” ruse after the wedding (28 Jan 70 to Bliss, n. 5; 3 Mar 71 to Riley, n. 3; L3, 316–17, 333, 334 n. 4).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

5 The Express figures were not the only ones to agitate Clemens. On 16 February Olivia wrote her mother: “Mr Clemens says that I had presents and a good time when I was married, and when I reached here people came to see me me, but his first salutation was a paper enquiring about his income tax— That income tax has been a matter of most intense anxiety to him, he could not possibly comprehend it—” (CtHMTH). Clemens turned his anxiety into a sketch, “A Mysterious Visit,” published on 19 March in the Express. In it he told how an unfortunate boast to the tax assessor—“Two hundred and fourteen thousand, cash, is my income for this year if I know how to cipher”—threatened financial calamity until he learned to manipulate the “eleven saving clauses under the head of ‘Deductions’” (SLC 1870). The sketch was reprinted in “the Revenue Record, the official organ of the Internal Revenue Department,” at the suggestion of

an Assistant Assessor of Internal Revenue, who writes that it is the unanimous opinion of the Assistant Assessors of the Thirtieth District that it ought to be published in the Record. It is suggestive, he adds, “of some fun, and any amount of truth in reference to the assessment of incomes, and we think it would be interesting to revenue officers generally.” (“The last number . . . ,” Buffalo Express, 12 Apr 70, 2)

Click to add citation to My Citations.

6 Olivia’s 2 March letter was her second reminder about these irons—used for polishing starched shirtfronts, collars, and cuffs. She had first written to her mother about them on 20 February: “This Youth of mine does not want his shirts ironed till the polishing irons come— We ordered them from Roes Charlies store, if it will not trouble Sue [Crane] to enquire about them some time when she is down town I should like to get her to do so—” (CtHMTH). With his father’s backing, Charles Langdon became a partner in Ayrault, Rose and Company, an Elmira hardware store, in 1868 (Whitney and Smith, 4:4594; L2, 341–42 n. 3).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

7 Clemens was last in Hartford on 27 December 1869, at which time he informed Olivia that Isabella Beecher Hooker had been writing to “Mr. Langdon to make us sell out in Buffalo & come here” (L3, 440). No report of Clemens leaving Buffalo has been found in a Hartford paper. On 13 January 1870, however, the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser announced: “Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemons,) formerly of this city, lectures in Fredonia on Wednesday evening of next week” (“Brevities,” 3). On 21 January the Cleveland Herald made the point explicit: “The Buffalo Commercial intimates that Mark Twain has left that city” (“Personal Intelligence,” 4). Clemens evidently saw even more decided versions of the rumor among the Buffalo Express’s exchanges, leading him to publish a disclaimer (7 Mar 70 to the Public)

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain House, Hartford (CtHMTH).

Previous publication: L4, 81–84; LLMT, 147–48.

Provenance:donated to CtHMTH in 1963 by Ida Langdon.

Emendations and textual notes:

drawing-room • drawing-|room

gratitude • gratitutde

afternoon • after-noon

En Ellen’s • Enllen’s

do • [‘o’ partly formed]

balance. She • balance.—|She

w • [partly formed]