6 and 7 September 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00347)
Monday Night.Ⓐemendation
Livy darling, I got your letter this evening, though I looked for it this morning—I had forgotten that you told me to expect the letters in the evening hereafter. Yes, dearie, I will leave this letter unsealed until I get a Salutatory to send to you in the morning.1explanatory note
I have got an answer from the Dead Canary, which he says requires no answer.2explanatory note He is torn with anger, & impugns my veracity in saying I know nothing about poetry—& to m Ⓐemendation prove the falsity of my word, does me the compliment to refer me to my remarks about Galilee, where I have written it.3explanatory note Fool, not to see that I meant I kn was not a capable judge of his kind of poetry. But wasn’t it rich & unconscious egotism in him to think I merely wished to avoid saying how beautiful his poetry was. And he says he asked me for a sarcasm & got it!—the shrewdest sarcasm I ever penned! That is the rankest egotism I ever penned heard of., & the sim most innocent. I meant it for a solemn truth when I said his poetry was bad, but he cannot believe it. I do so long to drop him a line that would give him exquisite anguish—but I can’t waste powder on such small game as that. He threatens to destroy me with a by means of a withering review of my book in his little one-horse weekly paper which a couple of hundred Mohawk Dutchmen spell their way through once a week. This fellow’s idea of his importance trenches upon the sublime. In all my life I never saw anything like it. It is the calmest, serenest, asinine iron-clad, asinine complacency the world has ever produced.4explanatory note Do you know, that creature is oz oozingⒶemendation his poetical drivel from his system all the time. No how subject, however trivial, escapes him. And he dotes upon—he worships—he passionately admires, every sick rhyme his putrid brain throws up in its convulsions of literary nausea. He cuts it out of the paper—he prints it on dainty strips of fine white paper, along with the reminder that “It will be remembered that Mr. Elliott is the author of Bonnie Eloise,” “the Dead Canary,” “The Disconsolate Sow”5explanatory note &c &c.—& he prints it again on a large sheet of white satin, & gilds it, & puts it in a gold frame & hangs it up in his parlor, with the date when the abortion was produced, attached. And behold, he invites strangers to his house under pretense of treating them to a pleasant dinner, but in reality to bore them with this awful bosh, this accumulation of inspired imbecility, this chaos of jibbering idiocy wro tortured into rhyme. He is the funniest ass that brays in metre this year of our Lord 1869.
I am rid of him now—but Livy, he did follow me up with amazing diligence. He wrote 3 times for an opinion of the Dead Canary, you remember—& several times about that whining summer-complaint of a song about some Mohawk wench’s golden hair—& some four or five times concerning that wail long-metre wail about a Blush Rose.6explanatory note I have suffered all this ◇ from that man, & yet he is going to swoop down on me with the Fort Plain Register & gobble me off the face of the earth. The unkindness of this person is more than I can bear, I am afraid. Still, I can bear his unkindness better than I can his poetry. Though sooth to say, it is equal to anything I have every seen in the death column of the Philadelphia Ledger.7explanatory note (Why didn’t I think of that sooner, & publish it in answer to his request for a sarcasm? That one would have been recognized as exquisitely felicitous.}Ⓐemendation Poor wretch, he wanted a compliment so badly—& I had the heart to refuse him. But he didn’t say he did—he only shows now that he did.
But honey, I have used up all my paper again. The Cincinnati, Toledo & other western papers speak as highly of the books as do the New York & Philadelphia papers.8explanatory note
But I must kiss my darling good night, now, & hope to touch her dear lips in reality within 4 or 5 days. The peace of God be & abide with you now & always, my angel-revelation of the b Better Land.
in ink:9explanatory note
Write Fairbanks
Pittsburgh Lec. Com.
Redpath
Medbury—(6,701.)(?)
Sp
Ⓐemendation Spiders
Erie DispatchⒶemendation
in pencil: Livy dear, I am hav exercising an influence of on Larned I think—he is writing his best, & does it better & better—his article “Found Drowned,” in yester today’sⒶemendation paper, is a rare gem—simply needs a trifline of polishing in one or two places.10explanatory note
in margin of page 1: Send this letter back to me, little sweetheart—I’ll have use for it.
in ink: Miss Olivia L. Langdon | Elmira | N. Y. postmarked: buffalo n. y. sep 7
docketed by OLL: 115½ | “Bonnie Eloise”
Almost certainly Clemens did wait until the morning of 7 September in order to enclose a clipping of his “Salutatory” from the Buffalo Express of 21 August. The original enclosure has not been found, but its text is transcribed from the Express in Enclosure with 6 and 7 September 1869 to Olivia L. Langdonclick to open letter.
Clemens must have written to George W. Elliott (author of “The Dead Canary”) sometime after 21 August, when he last complained about him in a letter to Olivia. No correspondence between the two men is known to survive.
In chapter 48 of The Innocents Abroad, Clemens devoted over six pages to Galilee in an effort to show it stripped of “the paint and the ribbons and the flowers” that other writers had deceptively added. Elisha Bliss reprinted a portion of Clemens’s account in his advertising pamphlet of late August or early September, Stray Leaves from Mark Twain’s New Book (APC 1869, 13), and it was also widely excerpted or mentioned by reviewers. Elliott printed part of its conclusion in the Fort Plain (N. Y.) Mohawk Valley Register of 10 September (2):
ELOQUENT EXTRACT.
When, during his pilgrimage through the Holy Land “Mark Twain” sat outside the tent, one night, alone under the star-lit vault of heaven and framed the beautiful metaphors in the following paragraph—extracted from his “Innocents Abroad”—he “builded better than he knew:”
“Night is the time to see Galilee. Genessaret under these lustrous stars, has nothing repulsive about it. Genessaret with the glittering reflections of the constellations flecking its surface, almost makes me regret that I ever saw the rude glare of day upon it. Its history and its associations are its chiefest charm, in any eyes, and the spells they weave are feeble in the searching light of the sun. Then, we scarcely feel the fetters. Our thoughts wander constantly to the practical concerns of life, and refuse to dwell upon things that seem vague and unreal. But when the day is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences of this tranquil starlight. The old traditions of the place steal upon his memory and haunt his reveries, and then his fancy clothes all sights and sounds with the supernatural. In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of the invisible wings. Phantom ships are on the sea, the dead of twenty centuries come forth from the tombs, and in the dirges of the night-wind the songs of old forgotten ages find utterance again.”
Elliott did not publish a “withering review” of Innocents in the Mohawk Valley Register. On the contrary, during the last five months of 1869, despite Clemens’s sarcastic letter of late August or early September, he persistently excerpted and advertised the book while reprinting articles by Mark Twain and publishing items about him. In addition to “Eloquent Extract,” the following have been identified: “Buying Gloves in Gibraltar,” “His Duty,” 27 Aug, 1,2; “Agents Can Now Get ...,” 3 Sept, 4, and 24 Sept, 3; “Eulogy on Women,” 17 Sept, 1; “Rev. H. W. Beecher—His Private Habits,” 29 Oct, 1; “Mark Twain,” 5 Nov, 1; “New Advertisements,” 5, 12, 19, and 26 Nov, 4; “A Good Letter,” 26 Nov, 1; “Editorial Brevities,” 17 Dec, 2.
“The Disconsolate Sow” was not one of Elliott’s published titles (see 21 Aug 69 to OLL, n. 5click to open letter).
Elliott’s latest lyric, which he had published on 6 August and subsequently sent to Clemens. Its first verse and chorus are:
Let wayward fortune hide her smile, Come sorrows when they will; We’ve always something left beside To make us happy still; For deep within the heart’s recess— Through all its joys and woes— There blooms, in charming loveliness, The modest hued blush rose! Chorus: The tender thoughts of one alone, That in its blossoms dwell, I could reveal; but yet, but yet, I do not care to tell! (Elliott 1869)Clemens had remarked upon this “long-metre wail” in the Buffalo Express of 26 August: “We acknowledge the receipt of a song entitled, ‘The Blush Rose,’ from the author, Mr. George W. Elliott, associate editor of the Fort Plain Register. He predicts that it will have a popularity second to none in his list of published songs. Mr. Elliott is the author of ‘Bonnie Eloise,’ and several other melodies of similar character, which have been widely known in their day” (SLC 1869).
The obituary column of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, which frequently accompanied death notices with “a little verse or two of comforting poetry,” was one of Clemens’s favorite targets (see L1 , 39 n. 4).
Clemens could have seen reviews in the Toledo Commercial, the Cincinnati Commerical, and the Cincinnati Gazette, the first two of which he later extracted for the 9 October Express. The Toledo paper observed that Mark Twain combined humor with “a deeper vein of sense and of feeling” while the Commercial of Cincinnati noted that he combined humor with “sketches of men and manners as graphic and clear as any thing one will find in works of travel or personal reminiscence” (“Literary Matters,” Toledo Commercial, 3 Sept 69, 2; Cincinnati Commercial, 4 Sept 69, 4; Cincinnati Gazette, 31 Aug 69, 1; “Advertising Supplement,” Buffalo Express, 9 Oct 69, 1, 2). There were closely held subsidiaries of the American Publishing Company in both cities, R. W. Bliss and Company in Toledo, and Nettleton and Company in Cincinnati (“Hartford Residents,” Bliss Family, 2; Hill, 16).
Clemens wrote this list for his own use, on an otherwise blank leaf, probably before he began his letter. When he used that leaf for the fifth and sixth pages of the letter, he began on the blank side and continued on the verso, so that the list appeared upside down at the bottom of the sixth (and final) page. No letters to the Fairbankses around this time have been found. Nor is any letter extant to the Pittsburgh lecture committee, for whom Clemens was to lecture on 1 November. James Redpath and James K. Medbery were competing to represent him in the lecture field (see 21 Sept 69 to Crane, n. 2click to open letter). The Erie (Pa.) Dispatch was a Republican daily and weekly paper (Rowell, 94). “Spiders” and “6,701” have not been explained.
Larned did not sign this long, mawkish obituary of Guy H. Salisbury, a Buffalo newspaperman who, in spite of “heavy troubles that crushed him down,” had been known for his “inextinguishable cheerfulness and kindly geniality” and for “the natural sweetness of his gentle and generous disposition” (Larned 1869). Clemens probably did not enclose a clipping of “Found Drowned,” since the Langdons were by this time receiving the Express daily.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), is copy-text for the letter. There is a separate commentary for the clippingclick to open letter that was originally enclosed with the letter.
L3 , 335–339; LLMT , 359–60, brief paraphrase.
see Samossoud Collection, p. 586.