To James Redpath
28 June 1871 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: MH-H, UCCL 00627 and UCCL 00626)

Elmira, June 28.

Dear Redpath—

1. Yes, “where a literal constructions of instructions would cause you to make a longer trip by rail, we shall of course use a certain amount of discretion”—is right. I’ll allow that latitude, of course.

2. All right. Lecture me with whom you please in Washington—I like the G. A. R. there exceedingly well.1

3. No sir, no Covenanters—no speculators—nothing but regular societies.2 I hate speculators & charities. That reminds me that that Syracuse application looks dangerously like a private thing.

4. Trenton is nothing but private speculation—no association—I’d rather, infinitely, leave the night unoccupied than go there. I don’t like that to talk for speculators at all—with them it is a monkey show one night & a lecture the next.

5. All right. Call it $100 to $150 as a general thing outside of N. E., but $100 will put me in a heap of one-horse hotels I fear. But your head is doubtless level. I could draw like the devil in Chicago, any place west of New York State, & get good prices. But whether you send me west or not I guess I will leave to your discretion & take the chances. If you should conclude to send me west, don’t let it be further than St. Louis. I leave you without [ on other] limit or restriction than that, west, & Washington South.

6. Leave Buffalo out, altogether, & make some plausible excuse. I think they hate me there, for hating their town. We are offered $20,000 for our dwelling house there, & if, in 3 months no better offer comes, we shall take it & and “mosey.”3 Then it wouldn’t do to go back there & lecture.

7. Fredonia, N. Y., paid Brick Pomeroy $150, & I won’t talk there for a cent less. I mention the town because my mother & sister live there & I have often been invited there to lecture & may be again. Would like to talk there very much & see the folks, but won’t for less than [$150. One] must be allowed an hour & a half to get there in, from Dunkirk, & another hour to get back in—& after lecture you have to hustle, too, to catch the train.4

8. I Be chary of Rondout. One has to cross the river in the ice in a rubbishy ferry.

9. The N. Y. idea is good but not practicable, I guess. I wouldn’t go into the speculation with any but the very cream of the platform—no whores & scrubs.5

10. My lecture will be my new one—“Reminiscences of Some [un-Commonplace] Characters I have Met.” ‸chanced to meet.” Put it that way.‸ I shall deliver no lecture but that. By the time I have talked it in 12 towns, & got the hang of it, I’ll engage to plug the bull’s eye with it, every time. “You hear me!” {Were you serious in suggesting that rubbishy Sandwich Island hogwash for another campaign?}

11. Charge Elmira Anna Dickinson’s price, whatever it is. She will not object to revealing it.

12. Charge Rochester & Cleveland Anna’s price—& Toledo too, I should say. ‸I am a tolerably fair card in the latter.‸ ‸N.B. Sock it to Hartford!—but secure Hartford, anyway.‸ 6

I dasn’t write the way you suggest. That would put me in a scrape, which is the next baddest thing to [ leaving ‸having‸ ] you in one. Hang it, why do you sleep in the day-time? Why didn’t you know enough to speak up promptly & say, “We have engaged Mark for his first lecture, but you can have him for his second”? Talking in that church may make my Boston appearance a thing without eclat or importance & really damage me in New England. Therefore, you being the party that did it, must do what you unoffendingly & persuasively can to [ un-do] it. Show him the enclosed—let the raped Fall shed some tears & heave some sighs—move that obdurate secretary—enlarge upon ‸the‸ lucrativeness of the second delivery, & maybe you’ll fetch him.

I dasn’t throw mud at his course, belittle his concern, & go [back] on my agent. Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing? No—perish the lecturer that would dishonor his g agent! Let Lay for that secretary—& when he looms upon your vision, go for him!7

Ys Ever

Mark.

P. S. Let’s not help educate any more Jamaica Plains niggers, this year! Hey?8

[enclosure:]

[letter docketed:] Twain Mark. | June 28th.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 The Grand Army of the Republic had sponsored Clemens’s successful 8 December 1869 lecture in Washington (L3, 437, 438–39 n. 8).

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2 Presumably Redpath had been approached by a Presbyterian organization, named after the Scottish party that made several covenants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to preserve the Presbyterian faith as Scotland’s sole religion. But Clemens wished to speak exclusively for established lecture societies that sponsored a full season of lectures and could guarantee an audience and fee (8 Jan 70 to Redpath).

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3 The Clemenses originally hoped to recoup the full $25,000 purchase price of the house (3 Mar 71 to Riley; 10 Mar 71 to OC)

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4 Redpath charged $150 for Clemens’s 8 December 1871 lecture in Fredonia. Marcus M. (Brick) Pomeroy (1833–96), journalist, author, and occasional humorist, was not represented by the Boston Lyceum Bureau. During the Civil War, Pomeroy, a Democrat who initially supported the Union cause, had become notorious for front-line correspondence highly critical of the Union command. He was nearly lynched in 1865 for publishing an editorial in his own newspaper, the La Crosse (Wis.) Union and Democrat, “hoping that if President Lincoln did not keep the pledges made by him in his second inaugural some daring hand would strike a poniard into his breast” (“Won Fame and Fortune,” New York Times, 13 Apr 96, 9). The editorial was widely republished after Lincoln’s assassination, and Pomeroy earned still further notoriety with his subsequent paper, the New York Democrat, which was subsidized by and represented the interests of the Tweed ring, although he severed that association before 1871. In December 1871, the Fredonia Censor reproached its Democratic rival, the Dunkirk Advertiser and Union, by comparing Clemens’s lecture with Pomeroy’s controversial performance:

It is but fair to inform our cotemporary that Mr. Clemens never made any proposition to the Lecture Committee to lecture here in consideration of Brick Pomeroy being discarded from the course. Neither will it alleviate the disgust at Pomeroy’s effort here to compare it with Twain’s. The latter, though it disappointed the audience, contained nothing that could offend the most fastidious. Pomeroy’s talk was much of it a downright insult to the ladies and religious portion of his listeners. They ought to have risen en masse and left the hall, and many regret that they didn’t. (“The Advertiser on Twain,” 20 Dec 71, 3)

The subject and date of Pomeroy’s lecture are not known (Redpath and Fall 1871–72, 7–8; Eubank, 297–300; “The Reform Democracy,” New York Times, 6 Oct 71, 5; “ ‘Brick’ Pomeroy Dead,” New York Tribune, 31 May 96, 7; Rowell, 694–95).

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5 See 10 June 71 to Redpath and Fall.

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6 Redpath did not schedule lectures for Clemens in Elmira, Rochester, or Cleveland, but did engage him in both Hartford and Toledo for $150 on 8 November and 11 December, respectively. Anna Dickinson’s fee in Hartford during the 1871–72 season was $200, although she spoke in many other cities for $150. Clemens had lectured successfully in Toledo on 20 January 1869 (Redpath and Fall 1871–72, 3–4, 7–8; Chester, 103; L3, 51–52).

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7 Redpath had evidently informed Clemens that he had booked him to lecture twice in Boston, mistakenly scheduling the first appearance in the small lecture course in the city’s fashionable South End, rather than in the Boston Lyceum Bureau’s own course at Music Hall. South End lecturers spoke in the Congregationalist-Unitarian Church of the Disciples, an “unpretentious, roomy edifice” at the corner of West Brookline and Warren avenues. Music Hall, on the other hand, was “the largest and finest hall” in the city, with seating for twenty-six hundred (King: 1885, 191; 1883, 303–4). Redpath’s proposed solution to the problem apparently required a letter from Clemens insisting that the South End lecture be rescheduled to follow the Music Hall performance. Clemens’s enclosed letter, to be shown to the secretary of the South End course, was a stratagem to achieve the same end without giving offense or attaching serious blame to anybody. The problem was not immediately resolved. see 10 July 71 to Redpath (1st and 2nd) (Boston Directory 1871, 896; King 1883, 434–35; Boston Evening Transcript: “Boston Lyceum—Music Hall,” 1 Nov 71, 4; “South End Lectures,” 13 Nov 71, 4).

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8 Clemens had lectured on 19 November 1869 for “the benefit of a Benevolent Educational Enterprise” in Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston which, after the coming of the railroad and industrial development to adjacent areas, was in the 1870s an “upper middle class residential settlement” (“Unique Entertainment by Mark Twain,” Boston Evening Transcript, 13 Nov 69, 1; Warner, 41–42).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H).

Previous publication: L4, 419–423.

Provenance:Bequeathed to MH in 1918 by Evert J. Wendell.

Emendations and textual notes:

on other • onther

$150. One • $150.—|One

un-Commonplace • un-Common-|place

leaving ‸having‸ • leav ‸hav‸ing

un-do • [ possibly ‘undo’]

back • back back

damed darned • dame ‸rne‸d