To Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens
9 May 1872 • Cleveland, Ohio
(MS: CtHMTH, UCCL 00746)

Fair Banks,1
May 9.

My Dear Daughter:

Your [grandmother ] Fairbanks joins your mother & me in much great love to yourself & your brother Langdon.

We are enjoying our stay here to [an ]extent not expressible save in words of syllables beyond your strength. Part of our enjoyment is derived from sleeping tranquilly right along, the same & never listening to see if you are snufflin have got the snuffles afresh or the grand duke up stairs has wakened & wants a wet rag. And yet no doubt you, both of you, prospered just as well all night long as if you had had your father & mother’s usual anxious supervision. Many’s the night I’ve lain awake till 2 oclock in the morning reading Dumas & drinking beer, listening for the slightest sound you might make, my daughter, & suffering as only a father can suffer, with anxiety for his off child. ‸Some day you will thank me for this.‸

S

Well, good bye to you & to all the loving ones who are trying to supply the paternal [place. My ] child, be virtuous & you will be happy,2

Yr father

Samℓ. L. Clemens.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens and Olivia, accompanied by Jane Lampton Clemens, were visiting the Fairbanks home, built in 1870 near Lake Erie in East Cleveland. The visit had been urged on Olivia by Fairbanks in her letter of 1 April, after her own recent visit to the Clemens family in Elmira (see pp. 74–75). The Clemenses probably left Elmira on 8 May, making the trip to Cleveland by taking the New York and Erie Railway to Dunkirk, New York, and the Lake Shore Railway to Cleveland—about three hundred and thirty miles and ten hours of rail travel. Jane Clemens must have joined them at the Dunkirk junction, just three miles north of Fredonia, where she had lived with the Moffett family since April 1870. The Clemenses returned to Elmira on 14 May (L4, 118 n. 2, 301, 302 n. 5).

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2 Clemens quoted Benjamin Franklin, who wrote—in the last paragraph of a letter of 9 August 1768 to John Alleyne, in which he expressed his approval of early marriages—“Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy” (Franklin, 837). Clemens published his own twist on this maxim—“Be virtuous and you will be eccentric”—in an 1869 Buffalo Express sketch, “The Latest Novelty” (SLC 1869). By the time he had published Following the Equator, he had further transformed it: “Be good & you will be lonesome” (SLC 1897, frontispiece).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Mark Twain House, Hartford (CtHMTH).

Previous publication: L5, 85–86.

Provenance:donated to CtHMTH in 1962 or 1963 by Ida Langdon.

Emendations and textual notes:

grandmother • grand-|mother

an • an | an

place. My • place.— | My