第85章

The piloting material has been uncovering itself by degrees, until it has exposed such a huge hoard to my view that a whole book will be required to contain it if I use it.So I have agreed to write the book for Bliss.

--[The book idea was later given up for the time being.]-- I won't be able to run the articles in the Atlantic later than the September number, for the reason that a subscription book issued in the fall has a much larger sale than if issued at any other season of the year.It is funny when I reflect that when I originally wrote you and proposed to do from 6to 9 articles for the magazine, the vague thought in my mind was that 6might exhaust the material and 9 would be pretty sure to do it.Or rather it seems to me that that was my thought--can't tell at this distance.But in truth 9 chapters don't now seem to more than open up the subject fairly and start the yarn to wagging.

I have been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years.

How little confirmed invalids appreciate their advantages.I was able to read the English edition of the Greville Memoirs through without interruption, take my meals in bed, neglect all business without a pang, and smoke 18 cigars a day.I try not to look back upon these 21 years with a feeling of resentment, and yet the partialities of Providence do seem to me to be slathered around (as one may say) without that gravity and attention to detail which the real importance of the matter would seem to suggest.

Yrs ever MARK.

The New Orleans idea continued to haunt the letters.The thought of drifting down the Mississippi so attracted both Clemens and Howells, that they talked of it when they met, and wrote of it when they were separated.Howells, beset by uncertainties, playfully tried to put the responsibility upon his wife.Once he wrote: "She says in the noblest way, 'Well, go to New Orleans, if you want to so much' (you know the tone).I suppose it will do if I let you know about the middle of February?"But they had to give it up in the end.Howells wrote that he had been under the weather, and on half work the whole winter.He did not feel that he had earned his salary, he said, or that he was warranted in taking a three weeks' pleasure trip.Clemens offered to pay all the expenses of the trip, but only indefinite postponement followed.It would be seven years more before Mark Twain would return to the river, and then not with Howells.

In a former chapter mention has been made of Charles Warren Stoddard, whom Mark Twain had known in his California days.He was fond of Stoddard, who was a facile and pleasing writer of poems and descriptive articles.During the period that he had been acting as Mark Twain's secretary in London, he had taken pleasure in collecting for him the news reports of the celebrated Tichborn Claimant case, then in the English courts.Clemens thought of founding a story on it, and did, in fact, use the idea, though 'The American Claimant,' which he wrote years later, had little or no connection with the Tichborn episode.

To C.W.Stoddard:

HARTFORD, Feb.1, 1875.

DEAR CHARLEY,--All right about the Tichborn scrapbooks; send them along when convenient.I mean to have the Beecher-Tilton trial scrap-book as a companion.....

I am writing a series of 7-page articles for the Atlantic at $20 a page;but as they do not pay anybody else as much as that, I do not complain (though at the same time I do swear that I am not content.) However the awful respectability of the magazine makes up.

I have cut your articles about San Marco out of a New York paper (Joe Twichell saw it and brought it home to me with loud admiration,) and sent it to Howells.It is too bad to fool away such good literature in a perishable daily journal.

Do remember us kindly to Lady Hardy and all that rare family--my wife and I so often have pleasant talks about them.

Ever your friend, SAML.L.CLEMENS.

The price received by Mark Twain for the Mississippi papers, as quoted in this letter, furnishes us with a realizing sense of the improvement in the literary market, with the advent of a flood of cheap magazines and the Sunday newspaper.The Atlantic page probably contained about a thousand words, which would make his price average, say, two cents per word.Thirty years later, when his fame was not much more extended, his pay for the same matter would have been fifteen times as great, that is to say, at the rate of thirty cents per word.But in that early time there were no Sunday magazines--no literary magazines at all except the Atlantic, and Harpers, and a few fashion periodicals.Probably there were news-stands, but it is hard to imagine what they must have looked like without the gay pictorial cover-femininity that to-day pleases and elevates the public and makes author and artist affluent.

Clemens worked steadily on the river chapters, and Howells was always praising him and urging him to go on.At the end of January he wrote: "You're doing the science of piloting splendidly.Every word's interesting.And don't you drop the series 'til you've got every bit of anecdote and reminiscence into it."To W.D.Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Feb.10, 1875.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--Your praises of my literature gave me the solidest gratification; but I never did have the fullest confidence in my critical penetration, and now your verdict on S----- has knocked what little I did have gully-west! I didn't enjoy his gush, but I thought a lot of his similes were ever so vivid and good.But it's just my luck; every time Igo into convulsions of admiration over a picture and want to buy it right away before I've lost the chance, some wretch who really understands art comes along and damns it.But I don't mind.I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have got so much more of it.

I send you No.5 today.I have written and re-written the first half of it three different times, yesterday and today, and at last Mrs.Clemens says it will do.I never saw a woman so hard to please about things she doesn't know anything about.

Yours ever, MARK.