5 October 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (Wakeman 1878, p. 12, UCCL 01493)
. . . .
I can mention some stories, but the happy details have all faded away. * * * His best stories were so dramatic in manner, that they can only be talked, they cannot be written; they talk with fine effect, but they lose a vast amount of their force as soon as they are on paper, for there was a charm about his telling of them which pen and ink cannot convey. * * * He made you cry and laugh at the same time. It is easy to make people laugh; it is very hard to make them do both.1explanatory note
. . . .
Clemens replied to a request from Wakeman-Curtis (1858–1933) for reminiscences of her father, who had died in May 1875 (29 Aug 1877 to Howells, n. 1). She intended to include them in a book she was preparing, The Log of an Ancient Mariner. Being the Life and Adventures of Captain Edgar Wakeman, Written by Himself, and Edited by His Daughter (Wakeman 1878). Clemens’s original letter is now lost; the above text consists of excerpts that Wakeman-Curtis included in her introduction, using asterisks to signal the parts she omitted. She added this explanation: “Some effort was made to collect the ‘yarns he spun,’ but it was finally abandoned as impracticable. The gentleman who has already been mentioned, uses the following language respecting them.” Wakeman-Curtis had written (CU-MARK):
Clemens’s “kindness” was a letter he had written on 3 December 1872 to the editor of the San Francisco Alta California, alerting the public to Wakeman’s pressing need for financial help after he was stricken with paralysis (L5, 233–35). In 1874, however, when Wakeman asked him “to write my life So I Shall Die Contented,” Clemens declined, explaining that he could never put his name “to any book unless I wrote every single word” (L6: 18 Mar 1874 to OC, 82–84; 25 Apr 1874 to Wakeman, 119–21). Wakeman-Curtis, in her introduction, included—possibly as suggested by Clemens in a missing portion of his 5 October letter—the description of Wakeman and his tale of rats deserting a sinking ship which Clemens had published in his letters of 20 and 23 December 1866 to the San Francisco Alta California (Wakeman 1878, 10–12; SLC 1867b, 1867c). She thanked him for his reply on 14 October (CU-MARK):
I understand the force of what you say in regard to the stories which my father used to tell, for even those which he has written do not sound as they did when related.
I know that it would be impossible to make one who never knew him, fully understand my father’s character; but I hope that his book will find the major part of its readers among his friends.
Those stories which were really chapters from his bona fide adventures, as that of his first voyage and of his courtship, are incorporated in his “life,” but I found upon the leaf of a diary a list of some of the “yarns” which owed their origen solely to the resources of his imagination, which led me to apply to you, hoping that your memory was better than mine, and could replace the details of these aggravating references, which are in regard to the catching of an alligator whose “hide” filled a sixty gal. cask; a mountain that “blowed” 5000 ft. of itself down in one night; a robbery in Nevada where a bowie knife was taken for a sythe; the native bears of Point Reyes; an adroit and gentlemanly thief at the opera, Lima; the differences in the age of whiskey; the saving of his life by a flat-iron, on Pine st., S. F; and cetera.
Please believe me truly grateful for your good-will and for your kindness in replying at length.
Wakeman 1878, 12.