October 3 Tuesday – In Dublin, N.H. Sam finished his Oct. 1 to daughter Clara.
Clara dear, you think you have seen autumn foliage, but it is not so; you have seen only attempts, partial successes, & failures. And you have not had these attempts properly grouped, properly neared & distanced, properly leveled for vivid display in the foreground, properly retreating & softening away through a spacious gate in the gorgeous hills & dimming to smouldering embers under the hazy mountains on the verge of the world. I have to shut my eyes, to shave, this painted dream distracts my hand & threatens my throat. And I have to stop & write this postscript to quiet my mind & lower my temperature, so that I can go & stand between the windows again & without peril resume. / Father.
There is to be a reading of the horse-story in this house, Thursday, [Oct. 5] with 4 invited guests: a man, a woman, & 2 girls of 15. In the last chapter there are bugle-calls & war-music, & Miss Lyon will break in at the precise places & play this, as I read. We practiced it last night & got the cues right, & it was dramatic & stirring [MTP].
Sam also wrote to the editor of Harper’s Weekly.
John Hay & The Ballads.
Sir: In his article in the North American Review Mr. Howells expresses uncertainty in a matter concerning the Ballads in the following remark:
“It was contemporaneously supposed that the Pike County Ballads were inspired or provoked by the Pike County Balladry of Bret Harte, & they were first accepted as imitations or parodies. I believe they were actually written earlier, but if they were written later,” etc. They were not written later, they were written (& printed in newspapers) earlier. Mr. Hay told me this himself—in 1870—or ’71, I should say. I believe—indeed I am quite sure—that he added that the newspapers referred to were obscure Western backwoods journals & that the Ballads were not widely copied. Also, he said this: that by & by, when Harte’s ballads bean to sweep the country the noise woke his (Hay’s) buried waifs & they rose & walked. I think that that detail is interesting, now. It compels one to realize to oneself the difficult fact that there was a time when another person could advertise John Hay into notice better than he could do it himself. Hay made mention of the current notion that he was an imitator; he did not enlarge upon it, but he was not better pleased by it than you or I would be. He was aware that I had been a Mississippi pilot, & he asked me if he had made any technical errors in the “Prairie Bell” ballad, & said he wanted to correct them if any existed. There was one very slight one, but it could not have been corrected without dividing the heroism between two persons, & that would have spoiled the poem; so Hay left it as it was.
It is true that “in later life he wished people would forget the Ballads, for he said the equivalent of that to a friend of mine before 1880; but at the time of which I have been speaking they had not yet become an inconvenience to him by obstructing his road to a graver fame. It was another case of “Heathen Chinee.” When Harte was editing the “Overland,” & moving gradually & confidently along toward a coveted place in high-grade literature, an accident happened, one day, which blocked his progress for a time: the office-boy brought an urgent call for “copy” to fill a vacancy on the eve of going to press, & Harte, for lack of anything more to his taste, fished his H. C. Ballad out of the waste-basket where he had thrown it, & gave it to the boy. Harte’s reputation had been local, before; in a single day the Heathen Chinee made it universal. Then the eastern world called for more Chinee, & was frantic to get it. Harte tried to appease it with higher literature, & got only censure in return; & reminders that he was wasting his time upon a sort of work which was out of his line & above his ability. He told me these things long afterward, & still showed a bitter & hostile feeling against that ballad, because it had stopped his lofty march when he was making such good progress, & had remained stubbornly in his road so long that he had begun to fear that he would never get a start again. Then relief & rescue came at last, & the “Luck of Roaring Camp” blasted the Heathen Chinee out of the way & opened the road.
I always recal that talk with Hay with pleasure, not only for its own sake, but because it was incidentally the occasion of my getting acquainted with Horace Greeley, a man whom I greatly admired & longed to see, & whose memory I still revere. It was difficult to get an interview with him, for he was a busy man, he was irascible, & he had an aversion to strangers; but I not only had the good fortune to meet him, but also had the great privilege of hearing him talk. The Tribune was in its early home, at that time, & Hay was a leader-writer on its staff. I had an appointment with him, & went there to look him up. I did not know my way, & entered Mr. Greeley’s room by mistake. I recognized his back, & stood mute & rejoicing. After a little, he swung slowly around in his chair, with his head slightly tilted backward, & the great moons of his spectacles glaring with intercepted light; after about a year—though it may have been less, perhaps—he arranged his firm mouth with care & said with virile interest— “Well? What the hell do you want!”
So I think it must have been in 1870 or ’71 that I had the talk with Hay about the ballads, because both he & Mr. Greeley were doing editorial duty on the Tribune in those years. / Mark Twain [MTP].
Isabel V. Lyon wrote for Sam to E.B. Prondfit of the Aeolian Co., makers of his Orchestrelle. Sam asked for the notes to the bugle calls on Roll # 40038, so he might use them for “A Horse’s Tale,” which he hoped to have issued as a book in the early spring of 1906 [MTP]. Note: The tale as a book would not issue until Oct. 1907.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: “We’re practicing the war songs and bugle calls in with the reading of the “Horse’s Tale,” and it is good” [MTP TS 104]. Isabel Lyon’s journal # 2: “Sent to ‘The Weekly’ / ‘John Hay & the Ballads’ / wrote to Aeolion Co. for bugle call- & war song music” [MTP TS 30].
Frederick A. Duneka wrote to Sam, “eager to see ‘A Horse’s Tale’,” though it was “late for the January number—unless it comes at once.” The book could then be issued after serial publication in the magazine. He mentioned “many newspapers” were eager to print anything about Twain as his 70th approached, and that they had let “a number of important newspapers reprint parts of your ‘Editiorial Wild Oats’ thus insuring very wide publicity” [MTP].
Clara dear, you think you have seen autumn foliage, but it is not so; you have seen only attempts, partial successes, & failures. And you have not had these attempts properly grouped, properly neared & distanced, properly leveled for vivid display in the foreground, properly retreating & softening away through a spacious gate in the gorgeous hills & dimming to smouldering embers under the hazy mountains on the verge of the world. I have to shut my eyes, to shave, this painted dream distracts my hand & threatens my throat. And I have to stop & write this postscript to quiet my mind & lower my temperature, so that I can go & stand between the windows again & without peril resume. / Father.
There is to be a reading of the horse-story in this house, Thursday, [Oct. 5] with 4 invited guests: a man, a woman, & 2 girls of 15. In the last chapter there are bugle-calls & war-music, & Miss Lyon will break in at the precise places & play this, as I read. We practiced it last night & got the cues right, & it was dramatic & stirring [MTP].
Sam also wrote to the editor of Harper’s Weekly.
John Hay & The Ballads.
Sir: In his article in the North American Review Mr. Howells expresses uncertainty in a matter concerning the Ballads in the following remark:
“It was contemporaneously supposed that the Pike County Ballads were inspired or provoked by the Pike County Balladry of Bret Harte, & they were first accepted as imitations or parodies. I believe they were actually written earlier, but if they were written later,” etc. They were not written later, they were written (& printed in newspapers) earlier. Mr. Hay told me this himself—in 1870—or ’71, I should say. I believe—indeed I am quite sure—that he added that the newspapers referred to were obscure Western backwoods journals & that the Ballads were not widely copied. Also, he said this: that by & by, when Harte’s ballads bean to sweep the country the noise woke his (Hay’s) buried waifs & they rose & walked. I think that that detail is interesting, now. It compels one to realize to oneself the difficult fact that there was a time when another person could advertise John Hay into notice better than he could do it himself. Hay made mention of the current notion that he was an imitator; he did not enlarge upon it, but he was not better pleased by it than you or I would be. He was aware that I had been a Mississippi pilot, & he asked me if he had made any technical errors in the “Prairie Bell” ballad, & said he wanted to correct them if any existed. There was one very slight one, but it could not have been corrected without dividing the heroism between two persons, & that would have spoiled the poem; so Hay left it as it was.
It is true that “in later life he wished people would forget the Ballads, for he said the equivalent of that to a friend of mine before 1880; but at the time of which I have been speaking they had not yet become an inconvenience to him by obstructing his road to a graver fame. It was another case of “Heathen Chinee.” When Harte was editing the “Overland,” & moving gradually & confidently along toward a coveted place in high-grade literature, an accident happened, one day, which blocked his progress for a time: the office-boy brought an urgent call for “copy” to fill a vacancy on the eve of going to press, & Harte, for lack of anything more to his taste, fished his H. C. Ballad out of the waste-basket where he had thrown it, & gave it to the boy. Harte’s reputation had been local, before; in a single day the Heathen Chinee made it universal. Then the eastern world called for more Chinee, & was frantic to get it. Harte tried to appease it with higher literature, & got only censure in return; & reminders that he was wasting his time upon a sort of work which was out of his line & above his ability. He told me these things long afterward, & still showed a bitter & hostile feeling against that ballad, because it had stopped his lofty march when he was making such good progress, & had remained stubbornly in his road so long that he had begun to fear that he would never get a start again. Then relief & rescue came at last, & the “Luck of Roaring Camp” blasted the Heathen Chinee out of the way & opened the road.
I always recal that talk with Hay with pleasure, not only for its own sake, but because it was incidentally the occasion of my getting acquainted with Horace Greeley, a man whom I greatly admired & longed to see, & whose memory I still revere. It was difficult to get an interview with him, for he was a busy man, he was irascible, & he had an aversion to strangers; but I not only had the good fortune to meet him, but also had the great privilege of hearing him talk. The Tribune was in its early home, at that time, & Hay was a leader-writer on its staff. I had an appointment with him, & went there to look him up. I did not know my way, & entered Mr. Greeley’s room by mistake. I recognized his back, & stood mute & rejoicing. After a little, he swung slowly around in his chair, with his head slightly tilted backward, & the great moons of his spectacles glaring with intercepted light; after about a year—though it may have been less, perhaps—he arranged his firm mouth with care & said with virile interest— “Well? What the hell do you want!”
So I think it must have been in 1870 or ’71 that I had the talk with Hay about the ballads, because both he & Mr. Greeley were doing editorial duty on the Tribune in those years. / Mark Twain [MTP].
Isabel V. Lyon wrote for Sam to E.B. Prondfit of the Aeolian Co., makers of his Orchestrelle. Sam asked for the notes to the bugle calls on Roll # 40038, so he might use them for “A Horse’s Tale,” which he hoped to have issued as a book in the early spring of 1906 [MTP]. Note: The tale as a book would not issue until Oct. 1907.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: “We’re practicing the war songs and bugle calls in with the reading of the “Horse’s Tale,” and it is good” [MTP TS 104]. Isabel Lyon’s journal # 2: “Sent to ‘The Weekly’ / ‘John Hay & the Ballads’ / wrote to Aeolion Co. for bugle call- & war song music” [MTP TS 30].
Frederick A. Duneka wrote to Sam, “eager to see ‘A Horse’s Tale’,” though it was “late for the January number—unless it comes at once.” The book could then be issued after serial publication in the magazine. He mentioned “many newspapers” were eager to print anything about Twain as his 70th approached, and that they had let “a number of important newspapers reprint parts of your ‘Editiorial Wild Oats’ thus insuring very wide publicity” [MTP].
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