19 and 20 October 1865 • San Francisco, Calif. (MS, damage emended: CU-MARK, UCCL 00092)
P. S. You had better shove this in the stove—for if we strike a bargain I don’t want any absurd “literary remains” & “unpublished letters of Mark Twain” published after I am planted.
Orion there was genius—true, unmistakeable genius—in that sermon of yours. It was not the gilded base metal that passes for intellectual gold too generally in this world of ours. It is one of the few sermons that I have read with pleasure—I do not say profit, because I am beyond the reach of argument now. But seven or eight years ago that single sermon would have saved me. It even made me think—yea, & regret, for a while, as it was. (Don’t preach Ⓐemendationfrom this the above text, next time.) Viewed as a literary production, that sermon was first-class.
And now let me preach you a sermon. I never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, & the other a preacher of the gospel. I accomplished the one & failed in the other, because I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade—i.e. religion. I have given it up forever. I never had a “call” in that direction, anyhow, & my aspirations were the very ecstasy of presumption. An But ⒶemendationI have had a “call” to literartureⒶemendation, of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says it is m that Ⓐemendationto do right you must multiply Ⓐemendationthe one or the two or the three talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping,1explanatory note I would long ago have ceased to meddle with things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures. Poor, pitiful business! Though the Almighty did His part by me—for the talent is a mighty engine when supplied with the steam of education .—Ⓐemendationwhich I have not got, & so its pistons & cylinders & shafts move feebly & for a holiday show & are useless for any good purpose.
But as I was saying, it is human nature to yearn to be what we were never intended for. It is singular, but it is so. I wanted to be a pilot or a preacher, & I was about as well calculated for either as is poor Emperor Norton for Chief Justice of the United States.2explanatory note Now you aspire to be a lawyer, when the voice of God is thundering in your ears, & you are wilfully deaf & will not hear. You were intended for a preacher, & lo! you would be a scheming, groveling, mud-cat of a lawyer. A man never is willing to do what his Creator intended him to do. You are honest, pious, virtuous—what would you have more? Go forth & preach. When you preach from a pulpit, I will listen to you & not before. Until that time, I will read your sermons with sincere pleasure, but only as literary gems. That is my ultimatum. Ever since I got acquainted with you—which was in the autumn Ⓐemendationof 1861—I have thought many & many & many a time what how you would tower head & shoulders above any of the small-fry preachers of my experience! I know what I am talking about. It is the nature of man to see as by the light of noonday the talents of his neighbor, (& to which that neighbor is blind as night,) & at the same time to be unaware of his own talents while he is gazing afar off at those of his that neighbor., Ⓐemendationas aforesaid. You see in me a talent for humorous writing, & urge me to cultivate it. But I always regarded it as brotherly partiality, on your part, & attached no value to it. It is only now, when editors of standard literary papers in the distant east give me high praise, & who do not know me & cannot of course be blinded by partiality the glamour Ⓐemendationof partiality, that I really begin to believe there must be something in it.3explanatory note
But I’ll toss Ⓐemendationup with you. Your letter has confirmed me. I know—I don’t suppose—I know you would be great & useful as a minister of the gospel, & I am satisfied you will never be any better lawyer than a good many others. Now I don’t know how you regard the ministry, but I would rather be a shining light in that department than the greatest lawyer that ever trod the earth. What is the pride of saving the widow’s property Ⓐemendationor the homicide’s trivial life, to snatching an immortal soul in mercy from the jaws of hell? Bah! the one is the insignificant Ⓐemendation feeble glitter of the fire-flyⒶemendation, & the other the regal glory of the sun.
But as I said, I will toss up with you. I will drop all trifling, & sighing after vain impossibilities, & strive for a fame—unworthy & evanescent though it must of necessity be—if you will record your promise to go hence to the States & preach the gospel when circumstances shall enable you to do so? ⒶemendationI am in earnest. Shall it be so?
I am also in debt. But I have gone to work in dead earnest to get out. Joe Goodman pays me $100 a month for a daily letter, and the Dramatic Chronicle pays me $—Ⓐemendationor rather will begin to pay me, next week—$40 a month for dramatic criticisms. Same wages I got on the Call, & more agreeable & less laborious work.4explanatory note
Mollie, my dear, I send you slathers of love. Wrote to Ma to-night.
in pencil, on back of letter as folded:
Friday—Have just got your letter. The “prospects” are infernal, Mollie. “Confidence” is down low. I saved on the Ophir $25, but Ⓐemendation not losing the $100 assessment I would have had to pay had I held it a few days longer. All stocks have their day, & “Confidence” will, too—I did want to wait on one stock till its day arrived, but Ⓐemendationyour prospects do not look encouraging.5explanatory note Go on, I Ⓐemendation
I read all your sermons—and I shall continue to read them, but of course as unsympathetically as a man of stone. I have a religion—but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.
You are in trouble, & in debt—so am I. I am utterly miserable—so are you. K◇e Perhaps your religion will sustain you, will feed you—I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect—neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck. If I do not get out of debt in 3 months,—pistols or poison for one—exit me. {There’s a text for a sermon on Self-Murder—Proceed.}Ⓐemendation 6explanatory note
Matthew 25:14–30, the parable of the talents.
Joshua A. Norton came to San Francisco in 1849 and was soon a successful merchant and real-estate speculator. In 1853 he lost his entire fortune, reportedly in a scheme to corner the local rice market, after which he disappeared for about four years. He returned in uniform, calling himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States.” For twenty-three years he remained a San Francisco fixture, a kindly lunatic who paraded the streets, attended public functions, circulated his own currency, and issued sometimes visionary proclamations. His death in 1880 was the occasion of an elaborate public funeral (Dickson, 141–48; Cowan, Bancroft, and Ballou, 30–59, 91–103).
On 18 October the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle (“Recognized,” 3) reprinted the following remarks by the editor of the New York Round Table:
The enterprising State of California, which follows as closely as she can upon the steps of her older Eastern sisters, has produced some examples of our national humor which compare favorably with those already mentioned. They are but little known in this region, and few, if any, have yet appeared “between covers.” The foremost among the merry gentlemen of the California press, as far as we have been able to judge, is one who signs himself “Mark Twain.” Of his real name we are ignorant, but his style resembles that of “John Phoenix” more nearly than any other, and some things we have seen from his pen would do honor to the memory of even that chieftain among humorists. He is, we believe, quite a young man, and has not written a great deal. Perhaps, if he will husband his resources and not kill with overwork the mental goose that has given us these golden eggs, he may one day take rank among the brightest of our wits. (“American Humor and Humorists,” Round Table, 9 Sept 65, 2)
The demands of producing a daily Enterprise letter made it difficult for Clemens to meet other commitments. After contributing four pieces to the Californian in May 1865 and four more in June, he managed to write only seven original articles for that journal over the next six months (see ET&S2 , 144–232, 250–61, 359–66, 405–12, and Howell, 188–90). No drama reviews by him have been located in the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, although between 26 October and 19 December he did contribute several dozen unsigned brief items to that paper, which on 17 October had published his “Earthquake Almanac.” He also published three letters in the Napa County Reporter, on 11 and 25 November and 2 December (see ET&S2 , 297–99, 371–75, 380–84, 481–512).
Orion Clemens’s circumstances in Carson City were worse than his brother’s in San Francisco. No longer collecting a salary and fees as territorial secretary and having failed to secure an office under the state government elected in November 1864, Orion was forced to strike out on his own. Samuel Clemens later remembered that “he put up his sign as attorney at law, but he got no clients” (AD, 5 Apr 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:318–19). Five months after the present letter Orion left Nevada (see 22 May 66 to MEC, n. 1click to open letter).
On 21 April 1909, in a marginal note in his copy of the Letters of James Russell Lowell, Clemens recalled an “experience of 1866” when “I put the pistol to my head but wasn’t man enough to pull the trigger. Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed, but I was never ashamed of having tried. Suicide is the only really sane thing the young or the old ever do in this life” (SLC 1909, 1:375). This attempt must have come no later than the first days of 1866. Surely by 20 January, when he boasted of his literary success to his mother and sister and outlined an array of short- and long-term literary projects, Clemens was no longer disposed to consider “Self-Murder.”
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK); damage emended. The MS (reproduced in Photographs and Manuscript Facsimilesclick to open letter) consists of four sheets of thin, poor-quality white wove paper, 9 1/16 by 11 inches (22.9 by 28 cm), having the word ‘paris’ in a decorative lozenge blind embossed in the upper left corner of each leaf. The first three leaves are inscribed on one side only in a black ink, now faded to brown; the fourth leaf is inscribed on the recto in the same ink and on the verso in black pencil. The first three leaves have been mounted on supporting sheets; the fourth leaf, bearing Clemens’s inscription on the back, has not been mounted. All four leaves are creased and chipped, especially along the right edge where one crucial fragment is missing (324.34).
L1 , 322–325; SLC 1961, 6–9.
probably Moffett Collection; see p. 462.