Details
CLEMENS, SAMUEL LANGHORNE ("Mark Twain") Autograph letter signed ("Samuel L. Clemens") with postscript signed ("S.L.C.") and a one-page addition by Livy Clemens on final page, to Dr. John Brown, friend and cinfidantof Queen Victoria, Quarry Farm, near Elmira [New York], 4 September 1876. 16 pages, 12mo, written on rectos only, the leaves stiched together at left-hand edge with thin thread to make a small pamphlet, first leaf with imprinted address and Clemen's monogram in red.
TWAIN IN THE MIDST OF WRITING "TOM SAWYER"
A remarkable letter and one of Clemens most explicit descriptions of the writing of Tom Sawyer; he gives a detailed description of the Elmira farm and his studio, and sends a set of photographs (no longer present) showing his family and the farm. "I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for sometime now, on a book (a story) & consequently have been so wrapped up in it & so dead to to everything else, that I have fallen mighty short in letter-writing. But night before last I discovered that that day's chapter was a failure, in conception, moral, truth to nature & execution -- enough blemished to impair the excellence of almost any chapter- and so, I must burn up the day's work & do it all over again. It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry. So I knocked off, & went to playing billiards for a change. I haven't had an idea or fancy for two days, now - an excellent time to write to friends who have plenty of ideas & fancies of their own & so will prefer an offering of the heart before those of the head. Day after tomorrow I go to a neighboring city to see a five-act drama of mine brought out [a dramatization of his and Gilder's The Gilded Age], & suggest amendments in it; & would about as soon spend a night in the Spanish Inquisition as sit there & be tortured with all the adverse criticisms I can contrive to imagine the audience is indulging in. But whether the play be successful or not, I hope I shall never fell obliged to see it performed a second time. My interest in my work dies a sudden & violent death when the work is done.
"I have invented & patented a pretty good sort of a scrap-book (I think,) but I have backed down from letting it be known as mine just at present -- for I can't stand being under discussion on a play & a scrap -- book at one & the same time! I shall be away two days, & then return & take our tribe to New York, where we shall remain 5 days buying furniture for the new house [the Hartford home, designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter, was nearly completed] & then go to Hartford & settle solidly down for the winter. After that fallow time I ought to be able to go to work again on the book. We shall reach Hartford about the middle of September, I judge.
"We have spent the past four months up here on top of a breezy hill six hundred feet high, some few miles from Elmira, N.Y., & overlooking that town,; (Elmira is my wife's birth-place, & that of Susie & the new baby [Clara]). This little summer home on the hill top (named Quarry Farm because there's a quarry on it,) belongs to my wife's sister, Mrs. Crane.
"A photographer came up the other day & wanted to make some views, & I shall send you the result per this mail. My study is a snug little octagonal den, with a coal-grate, 6 big windows, one little one, & a wide doorway (the latter opening upon the distant town.) On hot days I spreadthe study wide open, anchor my papers down with brick-bats & write in the midst of hurricanes, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirt bosoms of. The study is nearly on the peak of the hill; it is right in fron of the little perpendicular wall of rock left where they used to quarry stone. On the peak of the hill is an old arbor roofed with bark & covered with the vine you call the "American creeper" -- its green is already bloodied with red. The study...is remote from all noise.
"The group picture represents the vine-clad carriage-way in front of the farm-house...." Clemens then identifies the people depicted in the photograph, who include "Mrs Clemens & the new baby," Mr. & Mrs. Crane, the Irish wet-nurse and "'Auntie Cord' (a fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine,) -- she is the cook; was in slavery more than 40 years. And the self-satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's American nursemaid..... the picture which I have marked thus: X, shows the dwelling with the barn in the distance, & ought to show a billowy expanse of blue hills in the further distance....Now isn't the whole thing pleasantly situated? In the picture of me in the study, you glimpse...the little rock bluff that rises behind the pond, & the bases of the little of the little trees on top of it. The small square window is over the fire-place....All the study windows have Venetian blinds; they long ago went out of fashion in America, but they have not been replaced with anything half as good, yet.....Mrs. Clemens must put in a late picture of Susie -- a picture which she maintains is good, but which I think is a slander on the child.
"We revisit the Rutland Street [London] home many a time in fancy, for we hold every individual in it in happy & grateful memory...." Clemens had begun work on his masterpiece in late April; by this date, the manuscript consisted of some 400 pages. As it turned out, Clemens' vacation from his labor, described here as a brief interlude of billiards, was to last until the following summer, when he resumed work, completeing the first draft in July 1875. (See Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, pp.178-180, quoting from the present letter in three places). Clemen's reference to Auntie Cord is also of interest; he had just completed and sent to William Dean Howells "A True Story," relating the experiences of the former slave, separated from her child at a slave auction and reunited with her some twenty years later. "A moving story, one of Mark Twain's best" (Kaplan, p.180), it was published in Atlantic Monthly in November 1874. The entire letter was published in A.B. Paine, ed. Mark Twain's Letters, p.224.
Provenance:
TWAIN IN THE MIDST OF WRITING "TOM SAWYER"
A remarkable letter and one of Clemens most explicit descriptions of the writing of Tom Sawyer; he gives a detailed description of the Elmira farm and his studio, and sends a set of photographs (no longer present) showing his family and the farm. "I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for sometime now, on a book (a story) & consequently have been so wrapped up in it & so dead to to everything else, that I have fallen mighty short in letter-writing. But night before last I discovered that that day's chapter was a failure, in conception, moral, truth to nature & execution -- enough blemished to impair the excellence of almost any chapter- and so, I must burn up the day's work & do it all over again. It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry. So I knocked off, & went to playing billiards for a change. I haven't had an idea or fancy for two days, now - an excellent time to write to friends who have plenty of ideas & fancies of their own & so will prefer an offering of the heart before those of the head. Day after tomorrow I go to a neighboring city to see a five-act drama of mine brought out [a dramatization of his and Gilder's The Gilded Age], & suggest amendments in it; & would about as soon spend a night in the Spanish Inquisition as sit there & be tortured with all the adverse criticisms I can contrive to imagine the audience is indulging in. But whether the play be successful or not, I hope I shall never fell obliged to see it performed a second time. My interest in my work dies a sudden & violent death when the work is done.
"I have invented & patented a pretty good sort of a scrap-book (I think,) but I have backed down from letting it be known as mine just at present -- for I can't stand being under discussion on a play & a scrap -- book at one & the same time! I shall be away two days, & then return & take our tribe to New York, where we shall remain 5 days buying furniture for the new house [the Hartford home, designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter, was nearly completed] & then go to Hartford & settle solidly down for the winter. After that fallow time I ought to be able to go to work again on the book. We shall reach Hartford about the middle of September, I judge.
"We have spent the past four months up here on top of a breezy hill six hundred feet high, some few miles from Elmira, N.Y., & overlooking that town,; (Elmira is my wife's birth-place, & that of Susie & the new baby [Clara]). This little summer home on the hill top (named Quarry Farm because there's a quarry on it,) belongs to my wife's sister, Mrs. Crane.
"A photographer came up the other day & wanted to make some views, & I shall send you the result per this mail. My study is a snug little octagonal den, with a coal-grate, 6 big windows, one little one, & a wide doorway (the latter opening upon the distant town.) On hot days I spreadthe study wide open, anchor my papers down with brick-bats & write in the midst of hurricanes, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirt bosoms of. The study is nearly on the peak of the hill; it is right in fron of the little perpendicular wall of rock left where they used to quarry stone. On the peak of the hill is an old arbor roofed with bark & covered with the vine you call the "American creeper" -- its green is already bloodied with red. The study...is remote from all noise.
"The group picture represents the vine-clad carriage-way in front of the farm-house...." Clemens then identifies the people depicted in the photograph, who include "Mrs Clemens & the new baby," Mr. & Mrs. Crane, the Irish wet-nurse and "'Auntie Cord' (a fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine,) -- she is the cook; was in slavery more than 40 years. And the self-satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's American nursemaid..... the picture which I have marked thus: X, shows the dwelling with the barn in the distance, & ought to show a billowy expanse of blue hills in the further distance....Now isn't the whole thing pleasantly situated? In the picture of me in the study, you glimpse...the little rock bluff that rises behind the pond, & the bases of the little of the little trees on top of it. The small square window is over the fire-place....All the study windows have Venetian blinds; they long ago went out of fashion in America, but they have not been replaced with anything half as good, yet.....Mrs. Clemens must put in a late picture of Susie -- a picture which she maintains is good, but which I think is a slander on the child.
"We revisit the Rutland Street [London] home many a time in fancy, for we hold every individual in it in happy & grateful memory...." Clemens had begun work on his masterpiece in late April; by this date, the manuscript consisted of some 400 pages. As it turned out, Clemens' vacation from his labor, described here as a brief interlude of billiards, was to last until the following summer, when he resumed work, completeing the first draft in July 1875. (See Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, pp.178-180, quoting from the present letter in three places). Clemen's reference to Auntie Cord is also of interest; he had just completed and sent to William Dean Howells "A True Story," relating the experiences of the former slave, separated from her child at a slave auction and reunited with her some twenty years later. "A moving story, one of Mark Twain's best" (Kaplan, p.180), it was published in Atlantic Monthly in November 1874. The entire letter was published in A.B. Paine, ed. Mark Twain's Letters, p.224.
Provenance: