15–18 March 1871 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: CU-MARK 00592)
I am sorry to ever have to read anybody’s MSS, it is such useless work—the Great Public’s is the only opinion worth having, & you can’t get that by applying a fire-assay to a random specimen of it.
My opinion of a children’s article is wholly worthless, for I never saw one that I thought was worth the ink it was written with, & yet you know & I know that such literature is marvelously popular & worth heaps of money.1explanatory note
What can my criticism be worth? I find that you are just like everybody else—can put your heart into a letter (naturalness, that pearl of price, follows by inexorable law,) when it is a private one, but the moment you set out to p write a public letter you forget that the Public is simply a multiplication of the poor, common, human Private individual—you forgoet that & look upon it as a vast, vague, unreal Shape, of some mysterious kind, & so you mount a high horse & a dismally articficial one, & go frothing in a way that nobody can poss understand or sympathizeⒶemendation with. Your Ⓐemendation. n Ⓐemendation heart & soul & are not in this article. Then Ⓐemendation you certainly can’t get anybody else’s into it. Your private letter to me stirs me—& would enlist the instant interest of the veriest stranger—consequently it is a good & valu Ⓐemendation worthy literary production—& the other isn’t.
Now that is only my opinion—Mollie’s is on the other side & is really worth more than mine, since I have no love for children’s literature. Therefore Ⓐemendation, toss my opinion to the winds & hold fast to the more worthy one.2explanatory note
But I tell you this. It is the only infallible rule in literature, too: If you are Your heart & soul must be in your work—any work—to achieve success with it.
If you were to set out to write to Mollie (at a distance & unacquainted with If you were to set out to write to Mollie (at a distance & unacquainted with the matter,) an outpouring of your heart upon the your experiences in Bliss’s office, knowing that no eye would see it but hers & hence you need not mince anything, don’t you know it would be a readable article? Of course it would.
But my opinion is worth infinitely less than Mollie’s about this article. Let that comfort & encourage you.
At any other time your experiences there would distress me greatly—but for I am & have been for weeks so buried under beetling Alps of trouble that yours look like little passing discomforts to me.—molehillsⒶemendation. {And yet I know very well that every each individual’sⒶemendation troubles are stately from his point of view.}
I am the worst man in the world to send MS to. Now don’t repeat that. It hurts me a hundred times more to give a Ⓐemendation a disparaging opinion than it can hurt the writer to receive it. Considering that you have read my article in the Galaxy on this very subject, I should have thought you would have spared me.3explanatory note
I am simply half-crazy—that is the truth.Ⓐemendation And I wish I was the other half.
If the Introductory pages are the feature, leave out the rest.
If the portraits of the grotesque monsters are the feature, leave out the rest. Ⓐemendation
If the sea-story is the feature, leave the ev out everything else.
Let there be consistency somewhere
Perhaps you will say that the object & consistency of the theseⒶemendation apparently irreconcilable unnecessities will appear in the subsequent chapters—in which case I have nothing more to say—but if it strikes me as strained & incoherent, it might strike others so.5explanatory note
But lay this away (never destroy MS.) for 3 months & then read it & see if you can’t better it. MeantimeⒶemendation write about some invention of somebody’s that you are filled with admiration of, orⒶemendation which you thoroughly despise—write about something that you feel.
Mrs. Mollie Clemens | 149 Asylum st6explanatory note | Hartford | Conn postmarked: buffalo n.y. mar 18 docketed by OC: Criticism
This letter replied to Orion’s 13 March request for an evaluation of the children’s story he was writing for the American Publisher. Orion had been wounded by Elisha Bliss’s dismissive response and resented Bliss’s insistence that he confine himself to clerical tasks (13 Mar 71 to SLC, two letters, CU-MARK).
Orion reported that
Mollie thinks it good and suitable for children. . . . But I doubt the suitableness of this story for children, and am inclined to think Bliss is right in thinking he can get plenty of people to write better for children. If you think with Mollie please send it right back for the children’s department of the Publisher. . . . If you think that with the alterations noted it will do for some paper or magazine please send it—and if you don’t like it at all throw it in the fire. (13 Mar 71 to SLCclick to open letter [2nd], CU-MARK)
In “A General Reply,” in his November 1870 Galaxy “Memoranda,” Clemens had observed:
Every man who becomes editor of a newspaper or magazine straightway begins to receive MSS. from literary aspirants, together with requests that he will deliver judgment upon the same. And after complying in eight or ten instances, he finally takes refuge in a general sermon upon the subject, which he inserts in his publication, and always afterward refers such correspondents to that sermon for answer.
The “public sermon” he then proceeded to “construct” stressed the necessity of serving an uncomplaining and unremunerated literary apprenticeship in order to achieve recognition from the public, “the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all” (SLC 1870, 732–33).
Clemens may have added the following remarks as late as 17 or 18 March, just before mailing the letter.
“The American Publisher’s Proclamation,” in the first American Publisher, promised Orion’s children’s story. In addition to a genie and a grotesque fisherman, the proclamation alluded to the other “irreconcilable unnecessities” Clemens catalogued here (OC 1871). Orion’s plans for continuing the tale included the introduction of “Mother goose and her gander and the man in the moon; and after that the return of the giant armed and dressed after waking up the other genii from their very long sleep” (13 Mar 71 to SLC [2nd], CU-MARK).
The office of the American Publishing Company. Clemens evidently sent his letter there because he did not have the exact address of Orion and Mollie’s boarding house. By directing it to Mollie, he could insure that no one at the firm but Orion would open it.
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L4 , 362–365.
see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.