To
Olivia L. Clemens
10 and 11 January 1872 • Wheeling, W. Va., and Pittsburgh, Pa.
(MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00714)
Wheeling, 10th
Livy darling, it was perfectly splendid—no question about it—the livest, quickest audience I almost ever saw in my life.1
Pittsburgh 11th.
This was the largest audience ever assembled in Pittsburgh to hear a lecture, some say. Great numbers were turned away—couldn’t get in; stage was jam-full; three all the private boxes full—[ b◇ ] Seems to me there were three tiers of them.2
Sweetheart I sent the $300 draft purposely for Hooker—came near having it drawn in his name——however it is no matter.3
Am so glad you are having such jolly sociable times with our Elmira folks & the Clemenses & the neighbors.4 I would give the world (if I had another one like it,) to be out of this suffering lecture business & at home with [you. ]—for I love you , Livy darling.
If I had been at Mrs. Stowe’s reading5 & they wanted any help, I would have read about “Fat-Cholley Aither ns” & the rest of my little darkey’s gossip. I think I could swing my legs over the arms of a chair & that boy’s spirit would descend upon me & enter into me. I am glad Warner likes the sketch. I must keep it for my volume of “Lecturing Experiences”—but I’m afraid I’ll have to keep it a good while, for I can’t do without those unapproachable names of the Aithens family—nor “Tarry Hote,”—nor any of those things—i & if I were to print the sketch now I should have the whole “fo’-teen” after me.6
As
Well, love in abundance to you—& to the cubbie & the folks.7
Samℓ.
Mrs. Samℓ. L. Clemens | Cor Forest
& [Hawthorne ]
| Hartford |
[Conn. ]
[return address:] if not delivered within 10 days, to be returned to
[postmarked:] [pittsburgh pa. jan i
]
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
very much resembles the pictures that are meant to represent him in
his great book, “Innocents Abroad,” except
that he don’t wear the check trowsers on the lecture
stand that he wore in the holy land. He is a youngish looking man of
somewhere about thirty-five, not handsome, but having a bright and
intelligent look, and eyes with a merry twinkle that put him at once
en rapport with an audience, and that
have a fashion of snapping just as he comes to the crisis of the
joke. He was dressed very neatly in a black suit, the upper garment
being black frock coat, closely buttoned. He is clean shaven except
a heavy dark moustache; and his manner of wearing his hair, which is
abundant, shows that he is his own tonsorial artist. His style of
oratory is not unlike that of Artemus Ward. He has the same dry,
hesitating, stammering manner, and his face, aside from the merry
light in his eyes, is as grave as the visage of an undertaker when
screwing down the coffin lid. He appears to labor under some
embarrassment in not knowing just how to dispose of his arms and
hands, but this only heightens the drollery of his manner, and may
be merely a “stage trick.” (“Mark
Twain,” 11 Jan 72, 4) The reviewer for the Wheeling Register reported,
“We passed an hour or two in his company after the lecture
and after listening to his inexhaustible fund of stories, his exquisite
humor and style, cannot but feel that the world would be better if we
had more Mark Twains.” Before Clemens finally left for
Pittsburgh on the afternoon of 11 January he also received a large group
of Wheeling citizens who were “anxious to make the
acquaintance of the man whose pilgrimage had so delighted
them.” To them he mentioned his family association with
Wheeling through Sherrard Clemens (1820–80), a congressman
for the Wheeling district in the 1850s, as well as “other
distant relatives in the city” (Wheeling Register, 11 Jan 72 and 12 Jan 72, quoted in “Mark
Twain Lectured in Wheeling a Century Ago,” Richwood West Virginia Hillbilly, 21 Apr 1973, 1, 14;
L1, 346 n. 6).
Lecturing experiences, deliciously toothsome and interesting as they
are, must be recounted only in secret session, with closed doors.
Otherwise, what a telling magazine article one could make out of
them. I lectured all over the States, during the entire winter and
far into the spring, and I am sure that my salary of twenty-six
hundred dollars a month was only about half of my pay—the
rest was jolly experiences. (SLC 1869) He waited almost three years to publish his sketch; it appeared in the
New York Times on 29 November 1874 as
“Sociable Jimmy,” with the following preface:
[I sent the following home in a private letter, some time ago,
from a certain little village. It was in the days when I was a
public lecturer. I did it because I wished to preserve the
memory of the most artless, sociable, and exhaustless talker I
ever came across. He did not tell me a single remarkable thing,
or one that was worth remembering; and yet he was himself so
interested in his small marvels, and they flowed so naturally
and comfortably from his lips that his talk got the upperhand of
my interest, too, and I listened as one who receives a
revelation. I took down what he had to say, just as he said
it—without altering a word or adding one.]
(SLC 1874) The “certain little village” was Paris, Illinois,
where Clemens lectured on 30 December, and stayed over, probably until
the morning of 1 January (L4, 527–30). The extensive “Aithens
family” was undoubtedly that of Josiah F. and Catharine Athon
of Paris. Josiah Athon, listed as a fifty-three-year-old
“hotel keeper” in the 1870 county census, then had
nine children (five boys and four girls) living at home. William, the
eldest, aged thirty-one, was listed in the census as a “hotel
clerk” and further identified by an 1879 local history as the
“accommodating clerk” at the Paris House hotel,
where Clemens stayed. Charles, aged eight, was probably the
“Fat-Cholley” mentioned in Clemens’s
letter. In the published sketch, “Sociable Jimmy”
himself may have been young William Evans, whose family—one
of the few black families in Paris—lived next door to the
Athons. William was six or seven years old at the time of
Clemens’s visit (information courtesy of Nicole Remesnick;
Hammond, 239–40; History of Edgar County, 590). Clemens had
“Jimmy” explain that “Dey’s
fo’-teen in dis fam’ly ‘sides de ole
man an’ de ole ‘ooman—all brothers
an’ sisters. But some of ’em don’t live
heah.” He also conflated the landlord father and his son
William, the clerk, and disguised both family and place names:
“the landlord—a kindly man, verging toward
fifty”—was “Bill Nubbles,”
and the fictional towns of “Ragtown” and
“Dockery” were named rather than the
boy’s “Tarry Hote” (Terre Haute,
Indiana, about twenty-five miles east of Paris). Clemens also indicated
that he had written the names of the Athon family on the flyleaf of his
copy of Longfellow’s New-England
Tragedies, one of the books he said on 10 January had already been
“sent home” (SLC 1874; 10 Jan 72 to OLC, n.
4; (Redpath and Fall, 9–10; L4, 128–29 n. 3).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L5, 18–21; LLMT, 362, brief paraphrase.
Provenance:see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
M • [possibly ‘W’]
b◇ • [possibly ‘br’; ‘r’] [partly formed]
you. • [deletion implied]
Hawthorne •
Hawthorn[]
[] torn
Conn. •
Con[n]
[] torn
pittsburgh pa. jan i •
pit
[]
h pa. jan i
[]
[badly
inked]
