Elmira, 26th
Dear Mother:
My! how you startled us! And even as it is, we don’t feel altogether comfortable about you. We shall feel a good deal more comfortable when we hear that you are out again. I shall, I assure you, for I have lately had experience of sick folks who were going to come right up, & but don’t for [an ] matter of two months. However, Livy is making progress in the last two or three days. She walks three or four steps, by holding on to a chair, & every day she rides a fl few blocks. She is bright & cheerful. We look forward to our Cleveland trip, for you will have a couple of months to get well in in the meantime, & that will do, won’t it?
I am pegging [ n ] away at my book, but it will have no success. The papers have found at last the courage to pull me down off my pedestal & cast slurs at me—& that is simply a popular author’s death rattle. Though he wrote an inspired book after that, it would not save him.1
We send a world of love to you all. Tell us how your hurts are, now.2
Lovingly
Samℓ.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
The prime difficulty that meets the critic is one of
classification: he feels like a naturalist gazing upon
Barnum’s “What Is It?” Is it
“fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring”? The
evidence is purely circumstantial, extraneous, and very
unsatisfactory. The name of the author justifies the suspicion that
the work is one of humor; but the book itself affords not the
feeblest fibre of corroboration, and the suspicion is dismissed as
unwarrantable. . . . We are sincerely sorry to see Mark Twain, who
has done some admirable work, lending himself to a mere
money-catching scheme like this. (“Mark
Twain’s Autobiography,” 1:165) Also in April, in Cincinnati, The
Eclectic: A Monthly Magazine of Useful Knowledge wrote: It is well that the publishers put “Burlesque”
in brackets on the title page, else many persons would scarcely have
seen that the author intended to be peculiar. This making fun for
so-much a page, and grinding it out monthly to meet the demands of
publishers, is not usually very laughable. Indeed, on the contrary,
the material has frequently a funereal character that impresses one
unpleasantly, as he wonders if the mental decrepitude does not
presage early death. (“Book Notices,” 3
[Apr 71]: 256)
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L4, 381; MTMF, 153.
Provenance:see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
an • [‘n’ partly formed]
n • [possibly ‘u’]
