25 February 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 01055)
Now you talk! We shall look for you & long for you & hunger for you till you come. We shall have the serenest & happiest time while you are here, & nobody shall know care or fatigue. As for the date of your coming, we could not have chosen it better by any possibility than you have done—unless, perhaps, we chose that you get here the middle of March instead of to Philadelphia. You Ⓐemendation see, we want you with us a good big liberal time, & we can’t have that if you fool away too much of March in transitu, because we begin to break up here the 15th or 16th of April to go to Elmira about May 1. We shall be mighty glad to see Charley, we can promise that.1explanatory note
first thirteen lines of page (about 52 words) cut away to cancel 2explanatory note
If I could get John Hay to Hartford & in our neighborhood, I would actually have nothing more to desire in the world—except your’s & David Gray’s presence here too.3explanatory note
You want to know what I am doing? I am writing two admirable books—I like a good strong adjective—& you shall claw them to pieces & burn the MS when you come.4explanatory note However, Livy is in hearty sympathy with both of these books—& you & she are my severest critics. I have written a 5-act play, with only one (visible) character in it—only one human being ever appears on the stage during the 5 acts—but the interest is not in him but in two other people who never appear at all. It may never be played—but you shall read it—it is at least novel & curious.
I have another play in my head which ought to be singularly powerful if I can get it out of my head the matrix without breaking it. I will tell you about it when you come. Maybe I’ll have written it by that time.5explanatory note
Allso, I am preparing several volumes of my sketches for publication, & am writing new sketches to add to them.6explanatory note
I am the busiest white man in America—& much the happiest.
I think you don’t like the Gilded Age,—but that’s because you’ve been reading Warner’s chapters. I wrote chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 42, 43, 45, first three or four pages of 49,—also chapters 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, & portions of 35 & 56. You read those! 7explanatory note
The Modoc has just tumbled down again & smashed some more furniture—& herself. I hear an angel sing, maybe, but there’s other tunes I prefer.
The Clemenses were planning to give up the Hooker house, which they had rented since the fall of 1871. On 7 March, the Hartford Courant reported that Clemens would
move into his new house on Farmington avenue on the 1st of May. He now occupies the dwelling house of Mr. John Hooker on Forest street, which by an advertisement in our columns to-day Mr. Hooker offers for rent for another year, as he expects to go abroad with his family in May. The house is one of the most desirable in the city both in itself and in its neighborhood. (“Local Notices,” 1)
Hooker’s advertisement mentioned that the house was “now occupied by Mr. Samuel L. Clemens” (“New Advertisements—Real Estate,” 2). In fact the Clemenses did not intend to occupy their Farmington Avenue house until after their return from Elmira, in the fall of 1874. They left for Elmira on 15 April, two weeks sooner than planned. In March and April, Mrs. Fairbanks and her son, Charles—now nearly nineteen and on an end-of-term break from his studies in Hudson, Ohio ( L5 , 52 n. 3)—traveled together in the East. Charles discussed his visits to Washington, Philadelphia, and New York in two “Here and There” columns published in the family’s Cleveland Herald on 1 May and 3 June (Charles Mason Fairbanks, 1874 [bib13487], 1874 [bib13488]). Mother, and presumably son, also visited Hartford in April, possibly just before the Clemenses left for Elmira, which they reached as usual by way of New York City. The Fairbankses and Clemenses must have left Hartford for New York almost at the same time, for they dined together there on 15 or 16 April (see 18 Apr 74 to Gray, n. 2click to open letter). While Mrs. Fairbanks was in Hartford, the Clemenses’ architect, Edward Tuckerman Potter, escorted her on a tour of the house, which she described in a long letter to the Herald written under her pen name, “Myra” ( L2 , 166 n. 4), and published on 4 May. She described the Forest Street residences of the Clemenses and the Charles Dudley Warners—“two houses that look out modestly but invitingly from the trees and hedges that seem to caress them”—and gave a detailed account of the new house Clemens was building, rebutting newspaper correspondents who assumed that “Mark Twain’s house must, of course, be ‘a joke,’ consistent with himself”:
The house stands upon Farmington avenue, and is an attractive combination of dark red brick, set off by light graceful wood work about the windows and balconies. It is planted as it were upon the bank of a dell at just the right angle to take in through its broad windows the loveliest of views of river, meadow, glen, and woodland. The visitor who accuses Mark Twain of disrespect to the avenue in putting the kitchen in front misleads you, although the humorous proprietor would justify such an arrangement on the ground that it would make his servants cheerful if they could overlook the funerals and St. Patrick’s processions, while he would choose to gaze from his library windows upon the dainty pictures which nature will paint for him in all the colors of the changing seasons. Once more I am reminded that I cannot “draw a house,” but I can give you the benefit of my tour of inspection through its numerous rooms, under the escort of the architect, Mr. Edward L. Potter, of New York. I hardly know which most impressed me, Mr. Potter’s power in his art or his love of it. He gave me no detail of height or breadth, but in the quick effects which he helped me to discover I recognized the artist capable even of enthusing me, novice as I was, with a new interest in the wonderful science of architecture. “Here,” said he, as we stood in the main hall from which opened parlors, library, and dining-rooms, “here we must produce pleasant effects, so here we put this fire-place, which shall have its antique tiles and its polished andirons. Over the mantel we have put a window opposite, and yet more, the outer landscape of Farmington Avenue and the country beyond.” Could anything be more charming? The arrangement of library and dining-rooms are simply bewitching. Indeed adjectives begin to fail me. The rooms open into each other with folding doors. At the end of the dining-room is a fire-place with a window over the mantal commanding the same avenue view. On the side a broad window looking down upon the river and its pretty bank and meadow. At the rear of the Library is a Conservatory opposite the fire-place of the dining-room. Imagine the winter attractions of these rooms, while the summer charms are not less apparent. A generous bay window in the side of the library lets in a whole sweep of rich landscape and a fire-place on the opposite side is surmounted by a quaint oaken mantel of ancient English carving. Opening from the Library is a suite of rooms whose tasteful appointments and dainty boudoir indicate their presiding genius.
Up the broad, easy stair case, which seems, somehow, not to encroach upon the spacious hall, we follow our friend Mr. Potter, who peoples and embellishes the second floor for us. Here is the nursery with its gay hangings, its bright carpet, its fantastic, story-telling tiles beside the fire place. Here are windows that take in a flood of early sunshine and perfume of the violets that grow on the bank beneath—and music of the robins—the cheeriest room in the house for a child to thrive and delight in. This door opens into the mother’s little parlor—that into the father’s study.
Here are guest rooms, opening upon balconies that command landscapes to inspire a poet or an artist—and that reminds me that on the third floor is a room so charming in its lookout as to be already devoted to the “artist friend” whoever he may chance to be. Adjoining this, is another room, in which you may look for the “author” when you find the study vacant—a billiard parlor with verandahs that look like turrets, from which to study the movements of the enemy. (Mary Mason Fairbanks)
For the sort of account Mrs. Fairbanks hoped to correct, see 4 Feb 74 to Cox, n. 3.click to open letter
When Clemens canceled part of what he had written by cutting away most of page 3, he recopied the last sentence of the first paragraph, squeezing it onto the bottom of manuscript page 2.
Hay, still on the editorial staff of the New York Tribune, had married Clara Louise Stone (1849–1914), the daughter of Cleveland millionaire Amasa Stone, on 4 February. They relocated to Cleveland, where Mrs. Fairbanks lived, in June 1875. Gray, a poet and the managing editor and co-owner of the Buffalo Courier, had been among Clemens’s closest Buffalo friends and was also a friend of Hay’s (Gale, 13, 21–22; Larned, 1:136). For details of Clemens’s friendship with the two men, see L4 and L5 .
The book on England, which Clemens soon abandoned, presumably was one of these manuscripts. He used part of it in the pamphlet he was currently preparing (see note 6 and 25 June 74 to the editor of the New York Evening Post click to open letter). The other may have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he evidently began in the summer of 1872 and returned to briefly in early 1873, completing most of the first five chapters before breaking off to work on The Gilded Age and then to travel to England. He possibly took up the manuscript between February and April 1874, and perhaps worked on it briefly in early May 1874, once he reached Quarry Farm in Elmira. He definitely worked on it steadily that summer, and probably intermittently during the rest of the year. He finally completed his draft in early July 1875 ( L5 , 114, 261, 405 n. 6; 27 Apr 74 to Brownclick to open letter; 5 May 74 to Warnerclick to open letter; 10 May 74 to OC, n. 3click to open letter; TS , 8–12, 13, 504–5; SLC 1982, 1:xi–xiii).
As Dixon Wecter noted ( MTMF , 183), the “5-act play” was the “queer play” mentioned in Clemens’s 13 February letter to Redpath. It may have been the comedy that Clemens had discussed with Edwin Booth on 3 November 1873: “to add a part to Hamlet, the part of a bystander who makes humorous modern comment on the situations in the play” ( L5 , 460). On 3 September 1881 he told Howells: “I did the thing once—nine years ago; the addition was a country cousin of Hamlet’s. But it did not suit me, & I burnt it” (MH-H, in MTHL , 2:369). And in a notebook entry of late February or early March 1897, he recalled: “25 years ago Edwin Booth told me to do this. I tried & couldn’t succeed” (Notebook 41, TS pp. 14–15, CU-MARK). Clemens at least may have begun the second play, which he had in “the matrix” (see 25 Feb 74? to unidentifiedclick to open letter).
One of these collections was Mark Twain’s Sketches. Number One, a pamphlet that finally included ten pieces previously collected in the Routledge sketchbook (SLC 1872), a few of them lightly revised, as well as three unpublished ones, written in 1872 and 1873 for the never completed book on England (see L5 , 258, 540 n. 2). Clemens apparently contemplated a series of such booklets, along the lines of the “Annual” he had considered in 1870. Three years later, while in England, he had proposed a “good fat 25 cent pamphlet” to Elisha Bliss—a collection of his New York Herald letters and several “old sketches”—but later decided against it ( L5 , 409–10, 424–25). The present pamphlet represented a revival of that concept. But Number One, ready by the spring of 1874, was withdrawn before distribution, and no others followed. The much more substantial Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, issued by the American Publishing Company in September 1875, also consisted of a mix of previously published and new (or at least unpublished) pieces, some of the former significantly revised (SLC 1875; 10 May 74 to OC, n. 5click to open letter; L4 , 209; ET&S1 , 608–53).
Mrs. Fairbanks might have written, and might have sent, a clipping of the review of The Gilded Age that appeared in the Cleveland Herald on 21 February:
“The Gilded Age,” which professes to be “a tale of to-day,” is the joint production of “Mark Twain” and Charles Dudley Warner. It is a biting satire on the men and principles—or absence of principle—of the age, and contains some highly dramatic incidents and bits of good descriptive writing, but it is not what we had reason to expect from two authors of such unquestionable talent as Mr. Clemens and Mr. Warner. The irresistible drollery of the “Innocents Abroad” finds but the faintest kind of reflection in “The Gilded Age.” The delicious mingling of genial humor and shrewd wisdom in “Back Log Studies” is nowhere perceptible in this bigger book. The hand of “Mark Twain” is visible here and there, but the most skilful literary detective would fail to place his finger on a passage which he could confidently assert to be Warner’s. It is a book from which the authors will doubtless derive present profit, but it will not add to the literary reputation of either. At the same time the book has positive merits of its own. It fearlessly lashes the frauds and humbugs who occupy prominent places in all ranks of society and in all positions of honor and profit. There is no mercy for such offenders. The mask of pretended piety and robe of assumed honesty are stripped off and the rascals exposed to the lash of the satirist and the scorn of the world. But, admitting this, it is not the work in which Messrs. Clemens and Warner feel most at home and in which their friends enjoy their company best. “The Gilded Age” is copiously illustrated. It is sold by subscription, the agents for this part of the country being Messrs. Bliss & Co., Toledo. (“Concerning Literature,” 2)
MS, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino (CSmH, call no. HM 14282).
L6 , 46–50; MTMF, 182–84.
see Huntington Library in Description of Provenance.