August 25 Wednesday – Sam wrote from Buffalo to Charles Warren Stoddard, poet and contributor to the San Francisco Overland Monthly. Stoddard became Sam’s personal secretary/companion in London in 1872.
Dear Charlie: / Thank you heartily for all your good wishes—& you must accept of mine in return. I have written Bret that we must have the “Overland”—see that he sends it, will you?
You speak of Mr. Stebbins. He came within an ace of breaking off my marriage by saying to the gentleman instructed by “her” father to call on him and inquire into my character, that “Clemens is a humbug—shallow & superficial—a man who has talent, no doubt, but will make a trivial & possibly a worse use of it—a man whose life promised little & has accomplished less—a humbug, Sir, a humbug.” That was the spirit of the remarks—I have forgotten the precise language. It was not calculated to help my case in an old, proud & honored family who are rigidly upright & without reproach themselves, & would necessarily be chary of strangers who were deliberately pronounced “humbugs” by high ecclesiastical authority. The friends I had referred to in California said with one accord that I got drunk oftener than was necessary, & that I was wild, & godless, idle, lecherous & a discontented & unsettled rover & they could not recommend any girl of high character & social position to marry me—but as I had already said all that about myself beforehand there was nothing shocking or surprising about it to the family—but I had never said I was a humbug, & I had never expected anybody who knew me to say it—& consequently there was a dark & portentous time for a while—till at last the young lady said she had thought it all over deliberately & did not believe it, & would not believe it if an archangel had spoken it—& since then there has not been flaw or ripple upon my course of true love & it does run smoothly & always will—no fear about that.
About lecturing. The only way to do it is to get into “the field”—the regular lyceum field. Individual enterprise cannot but fail—even Nasby cannot lecture on his own hook, as I do in California. James Redpath, 20 Bromfield Street, Boston, commands the New England lyceums & makes appointments for lecturers & lays out their routes for them for 10 percent on the fees. His lecturers get from $50 to $200 a night, according to their popularity. A man must be known & well known—though a decided hit made in Boston will topple all the other New England bricks to the earth. Such a hit the subscriber would have made there on the 10th of next November, but I have written to cancel all my engagements for this year. And I have done the same with the West—all the West is in the hands of the “Secretary of the A.W.L.S., Ann Arbor, Mich.” I do not talk for less than $100 a night, the N.Y. Evening Post to the contrary notwithstanding. The lecture “season” proper, begins Nov. 1 & closes Feb. 28—21 months, & is worth to me $10,000—never less, & can easily be made more—I have the run of all the fields.
You are too late for this year. What you need to do is to tackle Redpath & that other fellow (the latter charges no percentage, but is paid by the massed societies & is their servant) as early as next May & get on their lists. Popular lecturers are hard to get, in the west—& I love to lecture there. If you make a hit there you’ve a good livelihood before you always afterward. Next year I shall enter the field again east & west, & for the last time. I shall use my old first lecture on the Sandwich Islands, but that will not in the least interfere with you, for it is a topic that has seldom or never been used—in fact it will be all the better for you if I should kick up an interest in the subject (& I will.) Write the two men I have spoken of—they are the ones to make you or break you, the first time. If you make a hit, they will go for you, afterward. I am not yet formally released from my New England crusade, but they must release me—I must rush this newspaper for a while & make it whiz.
I told publishers to send books to you & Bret.
In a thundering hurry,
Yr friend always
Sam Clemens.
Du Chaillu, with all his puffing, is not required to lecture a second time in western towns—he fails with his first broadside—ditto Billings [MTPO; MTL 3: 320-21]. Note: Sam replied here to a non-extant from Stoddard. Horatio Stebbins (1821-1902), San Francisco clergyman.
Sam wrote Livy about nearly capsizing in a small boat on Lake Erie with Josephus N. Larned (1836-1913) and William H. Johnson, both of the Express [MTL 3: 322-3]. Note: “Larned was six months younger than Clemens, had a sense of humor and was a rowing and card-playing crony of Twain’s” [Reigstad 45].
“A Fine Old Man,” attributed to Sam, ran in the Buffalo Express [McCullough 21].
From the Buffalo Express “People and Things Columns” by Mark Twain:
· John Wagner, the oldest man in Buffalo—104 years—recently walked a mile and a half in two weeks. He is as cheerful and bright as any of these other old men who charge around so in the newspapers, and is in every way as remarkable. Last November he walked five blocks in a rain storm without any shelter but an umbrella, and cast his vote for Grant, remarking that he had voted for forty-seven Presidents—which was a lie. His “second crop of rich brown hair” arrived from New York yesterday, and he has a new set of teeth coming—from Philadelphia. He is to be married next week to a girl 102 years old, who still takes in washing. They have been engaged 89 years, but their parents persistently refused their consent until three days ago. John Wagner is two years older than the Rhode Island veteran, and yet has never tasted a drop of liquor in his life, unless you count whiskey [Reigstad 246].