Hartford June 3.
Dear Mother Fairbanks:
I am very glad you liked the article.1 I observed that the N. Y. Evening Post spoke highly of it, [too.2 I] have written but little, lately, because one can not work here; but I mean to write straight along without losing a day, all the time we are at Elmira. I must do this, or my book will never be finished.3 So we are not going to have a chance to visit you or the Centennial either. I have decided to remain away from the Centennial altogether, for an interruption of my work is disastrous to it.4 I don’t know how I am going to get along without seeing you & Mollie such a long time. And I needn’t have to—for you will both go to Philadelphia & you’ll stop in Elmira, won’t you? I do wish you would—Mollie must not grow out of the glory of her young-girlhood before I see her again. My time for visiting is coming by & by. Two or three years more will see the end of my ability to do acceptable work, & then I shall have a great long compulsory holiday in which to drift around & annoy people with over-liberal visits. Then you will have more of me than you can endure.
I received the Herald, containing the news.5 What a curious thing life is. We toil ‸delve‸ away, through years of hardship, wasting toil, despondency; then comes a little butterfly season of wealth, ease, & clustering [honors. Presto]! the wife dies, a daughter marries a spendthrift villain, the heir & hope of the house commits suicide, and the son the laurels fade & fall away. Grand result of a hard-fought, successful career & a blameless life,: Piles of money, tottering age, & a broken heart.
My, how the disasters pour when they once begin! It does seem as if Mr. Benedict’s case is about the ordinary experience, & must be fairly expected by everybody. And yet there are people who would try to save a baby’s life & plenty of people who cry when a baby dies. In fact, all of us cry, but some are conscious of a deeper feeling of content, at the same time—I am, at any rate.
My mother & sister have been here some time. They go home the 10th; we go to Elmira the 15th ;——
What a booming spring-time of life it is for [ Charley! Fate] has fixed things precisely right for him, to all seeming seeming. I rejoice in his gladness & egg him on in his enthusiasms. Let him go it now when he’s young! Never mind about that grisly future season when he shall have made a dazzling success & shall sit with folded hands in well-earned ease & look around upon his corpses & mine, & contemplate his daughters & mine in the mad-house, & his sons & mine gone to the devil. That is all away yonder—we will not bother about it now.
I believe I haven’t anything further of a hilarious nature to communicate; so I will enclose abundance of love for you & Mollie & the rest, from us all—& thus close this from
Yr
Eldest born
Mrs. Mary M. Fairbanks | Care “Herald” | Cleveland | Ohio
[postmarked:]
[hartford] conn. jun 3 4pm
[and]
[cleveland o. carrier 
m]
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
For Benedict, see note 5. William Crowell, Benedict’s
son-in-law and junior partner in the Cleveland Herald, was married to Mary
Williams Benedict (b. 1845) (Pioneer Families
2007).
The Atlantic Monthly. Under the title “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of
Crime in Connecticut,” Mark Twain tells, in the first article in the Atlantic Monthly for
June, of a personal interview he had not long ago with his conscience. The article is notable chiefly because it shows a decided
advance upon Mr. Clemens’s part as a literary artist. Mark Twain has never been a mere fun maker. In the midst of his
most exaggeratedly humorous outbursts he has often grown serious for a moment, with a seriousness which indicated deep earnestness
as well as profound convictions; and even when he has “stuck to his text” and continued a consistent humorist
to the end, his humor has always carried with it at least a suggestion of a deeper purpose than its apparent one. Occasionally, too,
Mr. Clemens has written with scarcely any thought of making his readers smile, and with a distinct purpose to do a bit of genuine
literary art work, as he did, for example, in the sketch of a negro woman’s life story which he printed about a year ago.
In the present paper the purpose is both more manifest and more fully attained, and if readers will forget that its author has been
in the habit of saying and writing amusing things, they cannot well help discovering here an unexpected power upon his part to write
something better worth remembering than any of his amusingly extravagant stories ever were. The task he has set himself is not an
easy one by any means. His conscience, dwarfed and deformed by his indulgence in what he once regarded as sins, appears in bodily
shape, and in the conversation which follows it was by no means easy to preserve the verisimilitude, while regarding the conscience
as a distinct, personal existence, independent in every thing of its possessor. It is greatly to Mr. Clemens’s credit as
a literary artist that he has in the main succeeded in this singularly difficult task, and if we might have been spared the outbreak
of the old demon of wild exaggeration which marks and mars the end of the article, his triumph would have been complete. As it is,
we have a new Mark Twain who promises to be even better than the old one. The “sketch of a negro woman’s life story” was “A True Story, Repeated
Word for Word as I Heard It,” in the Atlantic Monthly for November 1874 (SLC 1874).
Copy-text:Previous publication:
MTMF, 198–200.
Provenance:See Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
too. I • too.—|I
honors. Presto • honors.—|Presto
Charley! Fate • Charley!—|Fate
hartford
•
h[a]rd
[badly inked]
cleveland o. carrier m
•
[a]n[d] o.
rrier m
[badly inked; number of characters uncertain]
