August 15 Thursday – What Baetzhold calls “one hot August morning” during the family’s summer stay at Quarry Farm, a relatively unknown young man tramped up the hill to visit. A year later, after a meteoric rise in literary circles, he would be widely read and discussed. Sam would later say, he knew this man’s work “better than I know anybody else’s books”: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). The exact date of Kipling’s visit, Aug. 15, is calculated from three sources: Kipling’s letters, a newspaper interview, and Kipling’s later accounts. Sam did not record the date, nor note it at the time, Kipling being relatively unknown. The case for Aug. 15:
On the evening of Aug. 11, 1889 an unknown reporter for the Buffalo Courier interviewed Kipling in Buffalo. Kipling wrote he’d had arrived in Buffalo on Aug. 9 and wrote on Aug. 11 from that city to Edmonia Hill:
This evening a reporter introduced himself to me and interviewed me on behalf of the Buffalo Courier — which see if you want news of me, my thoughts and my sentiments. I am off to Niagra tonight by the 11.50 train in order to see the moonlight on the water and shall stay there for a day or so, as you ordered me [Pinney 1:334].
The unsigned Courier interview, titled “As Others See Us,” ran on Aug. 12 [334n4]. Kipling had been staying at the Iroquois Hotel. The reporter refers to the interview being cut short, as Kipling had to catch a train. Note: As Kipling’s next letter on Aug. 13 reveals, the train wasn’t south but north, to Toronto. Kipling wrote of his time in Toronto, again to Edmonia Hill, and then revealed his travel plans, and his thoughts about where Mark Twain might be, which shows, at least, his prior intent to visit:
Tomorrow [Aug. 14] I start upon the home track and ever was a man more glad to return. I hope old Mark Twain is well out of the way in Maine where they say he rusticates and even more do I hope that you will be pleased with the little I have done [336].
Kipling’s later account of the visit was first published in Allahabad, India newspapers, The Pioneer Mar. 10, 1890 and The Pioneer Mail Mar. 19, 1890 (Kipling was on the editorial staff of The Pioneer) [Baetzhold, John Bull 358n18], then later published in the N.Y. Herald, Aug. 17, 1890 p.5 “Rudyard Kipling on Mark Twain.” In this excerpt of that account Kipling reveals he learned where (and thus when) the fact that Sam was not in Maine, Hartford, or Europe, but in Elmira. On Aug. 14 in Toronto between trains, Kipling learned this from a stranger:
They said in Toronto that he was in Hartford, Conn., and again they said perchance he is gone upon a journey to Portland, Me.; and a big fat drummer [traveling salesman] vowed that he knew the great man intimately and that Mark was spending the summer in Europe, which information so upset me that I embarked upon the wrong train at Niagara and was incontinently turned out by the conductor three quarters of a mile from the station, amid the wilderness of railway tracks. Have you ever, encumbered with great coat and valise, tried to dodge diversely minded locomotives when the sun was shining in your eyes? But I forgot that you have not seen Mark Twain, you people of no account!
Saved from the jaws of the cowcatcher I, wandering devious, a stranger met.
“Elmira is the place. Elmira in the State of New York — this State, not two hundred miles away,” and he added, perfectly unnecessarily, “Slide, Kelly, slide.” [A popular baseball poem.]
I slid on the West Shore line. I slid till midnight and they dumped me at the door of a frowzy hotel in Elmira [From Scharnhorst’s reprinting p.117].
The next day (Aug. 15) Kipling sought Mark Twain at Quarry Farm, only to be told Sam was back in town at Charles Langdon’s office. The date has been variously reported in many sources as “summer of 1889” or as “July or August” or as simply “August.” This momentous meeting was later reported by Sam and others.
First, here is Paine’s account in MTB:
THE COMING OF KIPLING
It was the summer of 1889 that Mark Twain first met Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was making his tour around the world, a young man wholly unheard of outside of India. He was writing letters home to an Indian journal, The Pioneer, and he came to Elmira especially to see Mark Twain. It was night when he arrived, and next morning some one at the hotel directed him to Quarry Farm. In a hired hack he made his way out through the suburbs, among the buzzing planing-mills and sash factories, and toiled up the long, dusty, roasting east hill, only to find that Mark Twain was at General Langdon’s, in the city he had just left behind. Mrs. Crane and Susy Clemens were the only ones left at the farm, and they gave him a seat on the veranda and brought him glasses of water or cool milk while he refreshed them with his talk-talk which Mark Twain once said might be likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression which it left behind. He gave them his card, on which the address was Allahabad, and Susy preserved it on that account, because to her India was a fairyland, made up of magic, airy architecture, and dark mysteries.
Clemens later dictated a memory of Kipling’s visit:
Kipling had written upon the card a compliment to me. This gave it an additional value in Susy’s eyes, since, as a distinction, it was the next thing to being recognized by a denizen of the moon.
Kipling came down that afternoon and spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he had surprised me — and the honors were easy. I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before — though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would. When he was gone Mrs. Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said:
”He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man — and I am the other one. Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”
He was a stranger to me and to all the world, and remained so for twelve months, then he became suddenly known, and universally known. From that day to this he has held this unique distinction — that of being the only living person, not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but always travels first-class — by cable.
About a year after Kipling’s visit in Elmira George Warner came into our library one morning in Hartford with a small book in his hand and asked me if I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling. I said, “No.”
He said I would hear of him very soon, and that the noise he was going to make would be loud and continuous. The little book was the Plain Tales, and he left it for me to read, saying it was charged with a new and inspiriting fragrance, and would blow a refreshing breath around the world that would revive the nations. A day or two later he brought a copy of the London World which had a sketch of Kipling in it, and a mention of the fact that he had traveled in the United States. According to this sketch he had passed through Elmira. This remark, with the additional fact that he hailed from India, attracted my attention — also Susy’s. She went to her room and brought his card from its place in the frame of her mirror, and the Quarry Farm visitor stood identified.
Kipling also has left an account of that visit. In his letter recording it he says:
You are a contemptible lot over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners and some are Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar — no, two cigars — with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly that I do not despise you; indeed, I don’t. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward.
A big, darkened drawing-room; a huge chair; a man with eyes, a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman’s, a strong, square hand shaking mine, and the slowest, calmest, levelest voice in all the world saying:
“Well, you think you owe me something, and you’ve come to tell me so. That’s what I call squaring a debt handsomely.”
“Piff!” from a cob-pipe (I always said that a Missouri meerschaum was the best smoking in the world), and behold! Mark Twain had curled himself up in the big arm-chair, and I was smoking reverently, as befits one in the presence of his superior.
The thing that struck me first was that he was an elderly man; yet, after a minute’s thought, I perceived that it was otherwise, and in five minutes, the eyes looking at me, I saw that the gray hair was an accident of the most trivial. He was quite young. I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk — this man I had learned to love and admire fourteen thousand miles away.
Reading his books, I had striven to get an idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the reality. Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer [880-2].
Note: See also Mark Twain: Life as I find It, Neider 310-21; Scharnhorst, Interviews 117-126. The Herald article was actually the third printing of the article.
A 1955 Kipling biography of by C.E. Carrington [p.96-100] tracks Kipling’s 1889 vacation wandering from India to Japan to San Francisco, up to Portland, Oregon and the Columbia River where he caught a 12 lb. salmon, then on to Yellowstone for a week after the 4th, Salt Lake and Chicago later in the month. Kipling then went to a “little country town on the Monongahela, Beaver, Penn. where he stayed with the parents of a friend, using the location for his base for trips to Toronto, Elmira, Washington, D.C, Boston, and New York. He sailed for London on Oct. 5. Carrington does not date the visit to Elmira nor does he cite the Buffalo Courier interview of Aug. 12. Pinney’s vol. I of Kipling’s letters gives July 24 as the date Kipling reached Beaver, Penn. via Salt Lake, Omaha, Chicago and Pittsburgh (citing Mrs. Hill’s diary). Letters from Kipling to Hill are transcribed on Aug. 9 from Lakewood, N.Y., Aug. 11 from Buffalo, Aug. 13 from Toronto, and no others until Sept. from Washington D.C [330-9].
From Katy Leary’s memoirs:
I mustn’t forget to tell you that Susy always kept that little visiting card of Kipling’s, as a kind of momento of his visit. She thought then that he must be somebody that would turn out wonderful, so she kept that card ‘cause he had written something on it — his address in India — and she liked that [LWMT 161].
Orion Clemens began a letter to Sam he finished Aug. 16, asking Sam to send a copy of a letter that Standring might publish. Sam had sent Standring’s letter to Orion, who declared that “If Hutchings [Stilson Hutchins] can get a million dollars for the Mergenthaler (as per newspaper ext I sent), yours will be likely to command more.” The doctor had recommended whiskey for Ma’s pains [MTP].
Robert Underwood Johnson wrote to Sam (Gilder to Johnson Aug. 12 encl.):
As you will see from the inclosed letter from Mr Gilder he agrees with me that it will not do to use the title you have given us for the extracts from the new book [CY]. I cant do better than to inclose his note, which touches upon other topics of your letter [MTP].