§ 105. Answers to Correspondents
3 June 1865
Without preliminary fanfare the Californian of 3 June 1865 announced that all letters to its new department, “Answers to Correspondents,” should be “addressed to Mr. Mark Twain, who has been detailed from the editorial staff to conduct it. Courting Etiquette, Distressed Lovers, of either sex, and Struggling Young Authors, as yet ‘unbeknown’ to Fame, will receive especial attention.”1 The first of six weekly columns that Clemens contributed to the Californian followed immediately.
It is not known whether Webb, Harte, or Clemens himself initiated the idea of a Californian column for correspondents, but the editorial staff was certainly well aware of the popularity of such columns, which were a standard feature of literary papers throughout the country. Webb had quoted with approval two “Answers to Correspondents” written by Josh Billings for the New York Mercury,2 and Clemens had recently shown a disposition to burlesque the form in “Whereas” (no. 94), which concludes with Mark Twain's ostensible answer to a letter from the troubled Aurelia. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the founders of the Californian regarded such columns, at least at first, as a concession to popular taste. On May 27 the editor (probably Harte at this time) said that the Californian had survived its first year of publication “without having to abandon any of its claims to literary superiority, or without forfeiting its self-respect.” But the journal had in fact made some minor concessions: when Webb had retaken the editor's chair the previous November, he added several “new features,” including “a complete record of home news” and a “digest of the telegraphic news of each week.”3 The addition [begin page 175] of a correspondents' column was a similar move away from the purely literary plan with which Webb had begun.
In the standard correspondents' column readers were permitted to make inquiries, air their opinions, and even publish their own verse, while the editor provided answers, comments, and criticisms of his readers' contributions. Editorial response ranged from the prosaically solemn to the vivacious and witty, since few editors could wholly resist the opportunity to show their superior wit or literary expertise at the expense of the contributors. Some columns seem to have been straightforwardly serious, such as “To Correspondents” in the California Sunday Mercury: “Propriety.—We must decline the publication of your communication, still we agree with you that it is rude and in bad taste for people to laugh or talk loudly and boisterously at the theatre or in other public places.”4 But the comparable column in the San Francisco Golden Era included a wide range of contributions (from readers signing themselves as “A Poor Drayman,” “Ecce Homo,” “Osage,” “Bold Soldier Boy,” “Holy Moses,” etc.) and a mixture of serious and flippant comments from the editor. Thus “Postal” inquired seriously about how to apply for a contract to carry the mail, and “An Inquirer” wondered why the Emancipation Proclamation had not been read during the Fourth of July celebration—and both were treated straightforwardly. On the other hand, “Jessie,” seeking a cure for a broken heart, was told: “Well, let it break. We are not in the medical or surgical line. Does your heart owe anybody? If the debts exceed the assets it would be as well to put your heart through insolvency.” “Classique” asked about the word “bilque” and was told, “It is not an elegant addition to a refined lingual entertainment”; “Smarty” from Mud Springs was told that “drawers of water” made “rather inefficient raiment.” And every week “struggling” authors were mildly encouraged or verbally decapitated. Occasionally answers verged on the realm of literary burlesque, as when the editor published rules of etiquette: gentlemen were advised, for instance, that “it is quite an elegant accomplishment to sharpen your pen-knife in company on your boot, having first moistened the leather by expectorating on it.” Brief, cryptic replies of a line or two were typically added to the end of such columns. In fact, some editors, like the one who wrote “Answers to Correspondents” for the San Francisco News Letter and Pacific Mining Journal, tended to favor this form of one-liner exclusively: “Anxious [begin page 176] Inquirer” was told, for example, “Corns may be removed with a cold chisel. Afterwards bathe the part with turpentine.”5
The comic version of “Answers to Correspondents” was, therefore, no innovation, and probably did not meet Harte's and Webb's standards for the Californian. But in turning their column over to Mark Twain, the editors rightly assumed that he would take a more adventuresome tack. Mark Twain's six columns are actually burlesques of the form itself. He ridiculed silly or unnecessary questions as well as specious, overly intricate, or archly self-satisfied answers. He satirized various nuisances, show-offs, hypocrites, and superpatriots, as well as sentimentalists of all kinds. He conjured up a range of imaginary characters and attitudes, and supplied appropriately varied responses. While the comic columnists in the Era and the Mercury manifestly relied on real persons for their letters, it is clear that Clemens set out to work with his own creations—or at most, creations based remotely on the facts. Presumably he continued to do so, even after being deluged with real letters following publication of his first column: “I always had an idea that most of the letters written to editors were written by the editors themselves,” he said in his second contribution (no. 106), “but I find, now, that I was mistaken.” It was the distinctively burlesque form of Clemens' work that made it sufficiently literary for the Californian. Significantly, when he discontinued the column in July, it was carried on for only a few weeks by “Trem” in the “Mouse-Trap.”6 Without Mark Twain's imaginative skill, such a column necessarily reverted to the merely comic and descended below the Californian's announced standard of “literary superiority.”
Discarded Lover.Ⓐemendation—“I loved and still love, the beautiful Edwitha Howard, and intended to marry her. Yet during my temporary absence at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones. Is my happiness to be thus blasted for life? Have I no redress?”
Of course you have. All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side. The intention and not the act constitutes crime—in other words, constitutes the deed. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and meaning no insult, it is not an insult. If you discharge a pistol accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no murder—but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him, but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the intention constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder. Ergo, if you had married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage could not be complete without the intention. And, ergo, in the strict spirit of the law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and didn't do it, you are married to her all the same—because, as I said before, the intention constitutes the crime. It is as clear as day that Edwitha is your wife, and your redress lies in taking a club and mutilating Jones with it as much as you can. Any man has a right to protect his own wife from the advances of other men. But you have another alternative—you were married to Edwitha first, [begin page 178] because of your deliberate intention, and now you can prosecute her for bigamy, in subsequently marrying Jones. But there is another phase in this complicated case: You intended to marry Edwitha, and consequently, according to law, she is your wife—there is no getting around that—but she didn't marry you, and if she never intended to marry you you are not her husband, of course. Ergo, in marrying Jones, she was guilty of bigamy, because she was the wife of another man at the time—which is all very well as far as it goes—but then, don't you see, she had no other husband when she married Jones, and consequently she was not guilty of bigamy. Now according to this view of the case, Jones married a spinster, who was a widow at the same time and another man's wife at the same time, and yet who had no husband and never had one, and never had any intention of getting married, and therefore, of course, never had been married; and by the same reasoning you are a bachelor, because you have never been any one's husband, and a married man because you have a wife living, and to all intents and purposes a widower, because you have been deprived of that wife, and a consummate ass for going off to Benicia in the first place, while things were so mixed. And by this time I have got myself so tangled up in the intricacies of this extraordinary case that I shall have to give up any further attempt to advise you—I might get confused and fail to make myself understood. I think I could take up the argument where I left off, and by following it closely awhile, perhaps I could prove to your satisfaction, either that you never existed at all, or that you are dead, now, and consequently don't need the faithless Edwitha—I think I could do that, if it would afford you any comfort.Ⓐalteration in the MS
Mr. Mark Twain—Sir: I wish to call your attention to a matter which has come to my notice frequently, but before doing so, I may remark, en passant, that I don't see why your parents should have called you Mark Twain; had they known your ardent nature, they would doubtless have named you Water-less Twain. However, Mark what I am about to call your attention to, and IⒶemendation do so knowing you to be “capable and honest” in your inquiries after truth, and that you can fathom the mysteries of Love. Now I want to know why, (and this is the object of my enquiry,) a man should proclaim his love in large gilt letters over his door and in his [begin page 179] windows. Why does he do so? You may have noticed in the Russ House Block, one door south of the hotel entrance an inscription thus: “I Love Land.”Ⓔexplanatory note Now if this refers to real estate he should not say “love;” he should say “like.” Very true, in speaking of one's native soil, we say, “Yes, my native land I love theeⒺexplanatory note,” but I am satisfied that even if you could suppose this inscription had any remote reference to a birthplace, it does not mean a ranch or eligibly-situated town site. Why does he do it? why does he?
Yours, without prejudice,
Nomme de Plume.
Now, did it never strike this sprightly Frenchman that he could have gone in there and asked the man himself “why he does it,” as easily as he could write to me on the subject? But no matter—this is just about the weight of the important questions usually asked of editors and answered in the “Correspondents' Column;” sometimes a man asks how to spell a difficult word—when he might as well have looked in the dictionary; or he asks who discovered America—when he might have consulted history; or he asks who in the mischief Cain's wife was—when a moment's reflection would have satisfied him that nobody knows and nobody cares —at least, except himself. The Frenchman's little joke is good, though, for doubtless “Quarter-less twainⒺexplanatory note,” would sound like “Water-less twain,” if uttered between two powerful brandy punches. But as to why the man in question loves land—I cannot imagine, unless his constitution resembles mine, and he don't love water.
Arabella.—No, neither Mr. Dan Setchell nor Mr. GottschalkⒺexplanatory note are married. Perhaps it will interest you to know that they are both uncommonly anxious to marry, however. And perhaps it will interest you still more to know that in case they do marry, they will doubtless wed females; I hazard this, because, in discussing the question of marrying, they have uniformly expressed a preference for your sex. I answer your inquiries concerning Miss Adelaide PhillipsⒺexplanatory note in the order in which they occur, by number, as follows: I. No. II. Yes. III. Perhaps. IV. “Scasely.”Ⓐalteration in the MS
Persecuted Unfortunate.—You say you owe six months' board, and you have no money to pay it with, and your landlordⒶemendation keeps harassingⒶemendation you about it, and you have made all the excuses [begin page 180] and explanations possible, and now you are at a loss what to say to him in future. Well, it is a delicate matter to offer advice in a case like this, but your distress impels me to make a suggestion, at least, since I cannot venture to do more. When he next importunes you, how would it do to take him impressively by the hand and ask, with simulated emotion, “Monsieur Jean, votre chien, comme se porte-il?” Doubtless that is very bad French, but you'll find that it will answer just as well as the unadulterated article.
Arthur Augustus.—No, you are wrong; that is the proper way to throw a brickbat or a tomahawk, but it doesn't answer so well for a boquet—you will hurt somebody if you keep it up. Turn your nosegay upside down, take it by the stems, and toss it with an upward sweep—did you ever pitch quoits?—that is the idea. The practice of recklessly heaving immense solid boquets, of the general size and weight of prize cabbages, from the dizzy altitude of the galleries, is dangerous and very reprehensible. Now, night before last, at the Academy of Music, just after Signorina SconciaⒺexplanatory note had finished that exquisite melody, “The Last Rose of Summer,” one of these floral pile-drivers came cleaving down through the atmosphere of applause, and if she hadn't deployed suddenly to the right, it would have driven her into the floor like a shingle-nail. Of course that boquet was well-meant, but how would you have liked to have been the target? A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it.Ⓐalteration in the MS
The first printing in the Californian 3 (3 June 1865): 4 is copy-text. Copies: Bancroft; PH from Yale; PH of the Yale Scrapbook, pp. 18A–19.
Reprintings and Revisions. Mark Twain revised clippings of this sketch and four similar sketches from the Californian (nos. 105–109) in the Yale Scrapbook, rejecting portions of each and revising others to assemble a composite sketch for JF1. Only one section of the present sketch, from 178.30 to 179.35, survives in the scrapbook (p. 19), where Mark Twain struck through it in ink, but it is apparent that a complete clipping of the Californian was once present, that the author revised it, and that portions were then peeled away to serve as printer's copy for JF1. The missing portions appear to have been only slightly altered: Mark Twain supplied a new title, in pencil, for his intended composite version, and some undeciphered pencil marks on the section beginning at 179.36 show that he also made some unidentified revision there (see figures 105A–B below). For details of the JF1 composite text and its subsequent reprinting and revision, see the textual commentary for “Burlesque ‘Answers to Correspondents’ ” (no. 201). Only the alterations made by Mark Twain in the Yale Scrapbook are recorded here, where they can be keyed to the complete text of the original Californian sketch. There are no textual notes.