May 19 Sunday – The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, p.20, printed an interview, “Mark Twain Chatty: He Tells of His Former Life as a Reporter.” The interview is datelined May 17, but refers to Sam’s February trip to Washington.
Washington, D.C., May 17 — I met Mark Twain the other day wandering around the Capitol and looking at pictures 50 years old as if they were new, and inspecting with the interest of a rustic stranger the vivid bronze doors whose Columbian glories had bleared his eyeballs more than two decades before. He strayed into the press gallery, threw back his gray overcoat, adjusted his gold spectacles on his nose, and looked around.
“A good deal changed, he said, glancing at the life-size photographs of Whitelaw Reid and younger editors which now decorate the walls, “and it seems a hundred years ago.”
I asked when he was here.
“I had a seat in the press gallery,” he meditated, “le’s see — in 1867 — and now I suppose all the veterans are gone — all the newspaper fellows who were here when I was, Reid and Horace White and Ramsdell and Adams and Townsend.”
“The ones you name happen to all be gone,” I admitted….
“I roomed in a house which also sheltered George Alfred Townsend, Ramsdell, George Adams and Riley of the San Francisco Alta. I represented the Virginia (Nev.) Enterprise. Also, I was private secretary to Senator Stewart, but a capabler man did the work. A little later that winter William Swinton and I housed together. Swinton invented the idea — at least it was new to me — of manifolding correspondence. I mean of sending duplicates of a letter to various widely separated newspapers. We projected an extensive business, but for some reason or other we took it out in dreaming — never really tried it.” Here Mark walked into the gallery and looked down at the vacant senatorial seats.
“I was here last,” he went on, “in 1868. I had been on that lark to the Mediterranean and had written a few letters to the San Francisco Alta that had been copied past all calculation and to my utter astonishment, a publisher wanted a book. I came back here to write it.
“Why, I was offered an office in that ancient time by the California senators — minister to China. Think of that! It wasn’t a time when they hunted around for competent people. No, only one qualification was required: You must please Andy Johnson and the Senate. Nearly anybody could please one of them, but to please both — well, it took an angel to do that. However, I declined to try for the prize. I hadn’t anything against the Chinese, and besides, we couldn’t spare any angels then.”
“A pretty good place to write,” I remarked as we took seats.
“Some things,” he said, “but an awfully bad place for a newspaper man to write a book as the publisher demanded. I tried it hard, but my chum was a storyteller, and both he and the stove smoked incessantly. And as we were located handy for the boys to run in, the room was always full of the boys who leaned back in my chairs, put their feet complacent on my manuscript, and smoked till I could not breathe.”
“Is that the way you wrote Innocents Abroad?” I asked.
“No; that is the way I didn’t write it. My publisher prodded me for copy which I couldn’t produce till at last I arose and kicked Washington behind me and ran off to San Francisco. There I got elbow room and quiet” [Scharnhorst, Interviews 96].
Notes: Horace White (1834-1916) of the Chicago Tribune; Hiram J. Ramsdell, correspondent; George W. Adams (1838-1886), Washington correspondent for the New York World; George Alfred Townsend, aka Gath (1841-1914). It is interesting to contrast Sam’s embellished recollections with the historical record — in this case why he left Washington for San Francisco, which was to obtain release of copyright claimed by the Alta. Budd gives this date for the interview with the New York Herald, p.19 [“Interviews” 7].