Autobiography of Mark Twain (127 page)

67.6–13 I next saw General Grant . . . I am embarrassed—are you?”] Clemens served, briefly, as secretary for Republican Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada (1827–1909) in Washington during the winter of 1867–68, shortly after returning from the
Quaker City
expedition. His fifty letters about the trip written to the San Francisco
Alta California
, half a dozen to the New York
Tribune
, and one to the New York
Herald
, supplied more than half the content of
The Innocents Abroad
, his first major book, published in 1869 (
L2:
7 June 1867 and 9 Aug 1867 to JLC and family, 59 n. 5, 78–79; 22 Nov 1867 and 24 Nov 1867 to Young, 109 n. 2, 113–14; 2 Dec 1867 and 23 June 1868 to Bliss, 119–20, 232 n. 1). Clemens could not have met Grant in 1866, since he did not arrive in the East from San Francisco until early 1867. In a December 1867 notebook entry Clemens wrote, “Acquainted with Gen Grant—said I was glad to see him—he said I had the advantage of him” (
N&J1
, 491). The note probably alluded not to an actual meeting, but to an imaginary one, similar to the one in the manuscript
that Clemens wrote on 6 December and left unpublished entitled “Interview with Gen. Grant” (SLC 1867t). It is likely that here Clemens alludes to a reception he attended in Washington in mid-January 1868; in a letter to the San Francisco
Alta California
he mentioned shaking hands with Grant and noted that “General Sheridan was there” (SLC 1868a). He wrote his family just days later that he had “called at Gen. Grant’s house last night. He was out at a dinner party, but Mrs. Grant said she would keep him at home on Sunday evening. I
must
see him, because he is good for
one
letter for the Alta, & part of a lecture for San F” (20 Jan 1868 to SLC and PAM, Paine’s transcript in CU-MARK). That
Alta
interview probably never took place, but his calling “at Gen. Grant’s house” implies that they had been formally introduced at the reception. Their second meeting at which Clemens claimed to be “embarrassed” actually occurred in mid-1870, during a brief trip to Washington where he met up with Senator Stewart. Clemens described his encounter with Grant, then serving his first term as president, on the day it occurred, in a letter of 8 July to his wife (6 July 1870 and 8 July 1870 to OLC,
L4
, 164–67). Clemens misplaced the year of his first meeting as 1866 rather than 1868, and may therefore have misplaced the year of the second by almost the same increment, making it early 1869 rather than mid-1870. By 1870 the
Quaker City
voyage was no longer news and
The Innocents Abroad
had given Mark Twain more than “some trifle of notoriety.”

67.17–19 Then, in 1879 . . . Army of the Tennessee] In 1877–79 Grant undertook a tour through Europe and Asia, accompanied by his wife, son Jesse, Adam Badeau, and John Russell Young, during which he was graciously received by numerous foreign dignitaries and heads of state. The banquet held in Chicago on 13 November 1879 was the culmination of four days of celebration (for a full account of the tour see Jean Edward Smith 2001, 606–13).

68.1 Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago] Carter Henry Harrison, Sr. (1825–93), served as mayor of Chicago from 1879 to 1887, and again briefly in 1893, until his assassination in October. His friendship with Clemens has not been otherwise documented.

68.4–5 “I am not embarrassed—are you?”] See the Autobiographical Dictation of 27 August 1906 for another account of the meetings with Grant.

68.10 General Sherman] William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–91) entered the army after graduating from West Point in 1840 and served in the Mexican War. In 1853 he resigned his commission and took a position as a banker. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was commissioned colonel; he attained the rank of brigadier general after the capture of Vicksburg in 1863. His famous March to the Sea through Georgia divided the Confederacy and hastened the end of the war. He succeeded Grant as General of the Army in 1869, and engaged in the Indian Wars until his retirement in 1884. His
Memoirs
, published in 1875, were highly acclaimed.

68.17 Colonel Vilas was to respond to a toast] William F. Vilas (1840–1908) of Madison, Wisconsin, was admitted to the bar in 1860. He attained the rank of lieutenant colonel during the Civil War, and later became postmaster general of the United States (1885–88), secretary of the interior (1888–89), and a U.S. senator from Wisconsin (1891–97). He responded to the toast “Our First Commander, Gen. U.S. Grant” (“Banquet of the Army of the Tennessee,” New York
Times
, 15 Nov 1879, 1).

69.15–17 Ingersoll . . . was to respond to the toast of “The Volunteers,”] Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99) was trained as a lawyer. He raised and commanded the Eleventh Illinois Cavalry Regiment during the Civil War, fought at the battles of Shiloh and Corinth, and was captured by the Confederates in 1863. After the war he served as attorney general of Illinois. Known for his radical views on religion and slavery, he was a gifted and popular orator who advocated humanism and agnosticism, making him the target of frequent criticism. At the banquet he responded to the toast “The Volunteer Soldiers of the Union Army” (“Banquet of the Army of the Tennessee,” New York
Times
, 15 Nov 1879, 1). Afterwards Clemens wrote in a letter to his wife, Olivia:

I heard four speeches which I can never forget. One by Emory Storrs, one by Gen. Vilas (O, wasn’t it wonderful!) one by Gen. Logan (mighty stirring), one by somebody whose name escapes me, & one by that splendid old soul, Col. Bob Ingersoll,—oh, it was just the supremest combination of English words that was ever put together since the world began. My soul, how handsome he looked, as he stood on that table, in the midst of those 500 shouting men, & poured the molten silver from his lips! Lord, what an organ is human speech when it is played by a master! All these speeches may look dull in print, but how the lightnings glared around them when they were uttered, & how the crowd roared in response! (14 Nov 1879 to OLC,
Letters 1876–1880
)

And to William Dean Howells he wrote:

Bob Ingersoll’s speech was sadly crippled by the proof-readers, but its music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears. And I shall always see him as he stood that night on a dinner table, under the flash of lights & banners, in the midst of seven hundred frantic shouters, the most beautiful human creature that ever lived. “They fought that a mother might own her child”—the words look like any other [in] print, but Lord bless me, he borrowed the very accent of the angel of Mercy to say them in, & you should have seen that vast house rise to its feet. (17 Nov 1879 to Howells,
Letters 1876–1880)

When he returned to Hartford, Clemens wrote Ingersoll asking for a copy of his speech (9 Dec 1879 to Ingersoll,
Letters 1876–1880)
. The printed copy sent by Ingersoll is in the Mark Twain Papers, so identified by Clemens. The sentence he quoted in part to Howells reads as follows:

Grander than the Greek, nobler than the Roman, the soldiers of the Republic, with patriotism as shoreless as the air, battled for the rights of others, for the nobility of labor, fought that mothers might own their babies, that arrogant idleness should not scar the back of patient toil, and that our country should not be a many-headed monster made of warring states, but a nation, sovereign, great, and free. (“The Grand Banquet at the Palmer House, Chicago, Thursday, Nov. 13th, 1879,” CU-MARK)

69.29 “Egod! He
didn’t
get left!”] This was evidently the “slang expression” that was new to Clemens (68.13). While it originally referred to missing a boat or train connection, in the late 1870s it came to mean “lose out” in general. Clemens recorded this exact remark about
Ingersoll in his 1882 notebook (
N&J2
, 373, 507; see, for example, “How a Lawyer Got Left,”
Puck
3 [24 Apr 1878]: 4).

70.13 the child is but the father of the man] A slight misquotation from “The Rainbow,” by William Wordsworth.

70.15–16 for when they saw the General break up in good-sized pieces they followed suit with great enthusiasm] Clemens described this occasion in his letter to Howells:

Gen. Grant sat at the banquet like a statue of iron & listened without the faintest suggestion of emotion to fourteen speeches which tore other people all to shreds, but when I lit in with the fifteenth & last, his time was come! I shook him up like dynamite & he sat there fifteen minutes & laughed & cried like the mortalest of mortals. But bless you I had measured this unconquerable conqueror, & went at my work with the confidence of conviction, for I knew I could lick him. He told me he had shaken hands with 15,000 people that day & come out of it without an ache or pain, but that my truths had racked all the bones of his body apart. (17 Nov 1879 to Howells,
Letters 1876–1880)

For the full text of “The Babies,” see Budd 1992a, 727–29.

70.18 1881] The year should be 1882: see the note at 70.19–37.

70.19 Howells] William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was born at Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, into a large family with radical political and religious tendencies. He was apprenticed to his father, a printer, and became a journalist. With, as he was to say, “an almost entire want of schooling,” he read widely in his father’s library, teaching himself Spanish, German, French, and Italian (Howells to John S. Hart, 2 July 1871, in Howells 1979, 375). In recognition of his support of Lincoln’s 1860 presidential campaign, Howells was rewarded with a consulship in Venice (1861). Returning to America in 1865, he rose as a journalist, moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be assistant editor (1866–71) and then editor (1871–81) of the
Atlantic Monthly
. In 1881 he retired to concentrate on writing. Among his personal friends were Henry Adams, William and Henry James, and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (son of the poet). His friendship with Clemens dates from his review of
The Innocents Abroad
in 1869 (Howells 1869). Howells used his position at the epicenter of American letters to help assure Mark Twain’s literary success; he also served his friend as editor, proofreader, and sounding-board. In literature, Howells championed and practiced realism. His best novels, out of a vast output, are usually considered to be
The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885) and
A Hazard of New Fortunes
(1890); he memorialized Clemens in
My Mark Twain
(1910).

70.19–37 his old father . . . resigned, a couple of years later] Howells’s father, William Cooper Howells (1807–94), was appointed U.S. consul at Toronto in 1878, after serving for four years as the consul at Quebec. Howells learned in late January 1882 that his father might lose his position, and on 2 March wrote him that he planned “to spend Sunday with Mark Twain who is a great friend of Grant’s, and can possibly get me access to him” (Howells to
William C. Howells, 2 Mar 1882, in Howells 1980, 10–11). Clemens and Howells called on Grant in New York on 10 March. In
My Mark Twain
, Howells reported that Grant was “very simple and very cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years [
i.e
., ears] were earliest used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr. Arthur” (Howells 1910, 71). Grant acted so promptly that Secretary of State Frederick T. Frelinghuysen (1817–85) responded the following day, “You may inform Mr. Clemens that it is not our purpose to make a change in the Consulate at Toronto” (Frelinghuysen to Grant, 11 Mar 1882, CU-MARK). Grant forwarded the letter to Clemens, and he in turn wrote Howells, on 14 March, “This settles the matter—at least for some time to come—& permanently, I imagine. You see the General is a pretty prompt man” (MH-H, in
MTHL
, 1:394). The elder Howells resigned his post in June 1883 (21 June 1874 to Howells,
L6
, 166 n. 2; Howells 1979, 61, 196; Howells 1980, 10–11, 14, 58–59).

71.7–8 “How he sits and towers” . . . Dante] Howells quoted this phrase in a letter to Clemens from Bethlehem, New Hampshire, of 9 August 1885: “We had a funeral service for Grant, here, yesterday, and all the time while they were pumping song and praise over his great memory, I kept thinking of the day when we lunched on pork and beans with him in New York, and longing to make them feel and see how far above their hymns he was even in such an association. How he ‘sits and towers’ as Dante says” (CU-MARK, in
MTHL
, 2:536). Less than a month later, on 10 September, Clemens added this quotation to his dictated typescript, inserting in brackets the words “It was bacon and beans” and Howells’s presumed quote from Dante. The phrase is not, however, from Dante, but from a sonnet by Italian dramatist and poet Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803): “Siena, dal colle ove torreggia e siede” (“Siena, from the hill where she towers and sits”). Howells’s source was E. A. Brigidi’s
La Nuova Guida di Siena
(a work he drew on for his
Tuscan Cities)
, where it appeared without citation (Brigidi 1885, 11; Howells 1886, 126, 139). Many years later Howells recalled that the “baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other great Plutarchan captain” (Howells 1910, 72).

71.9–18 “Squibob” Derby at West Point . . . would change places with him] Howells later recalled:

Grant seemed to like finding himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when they were fellow-cadets at West Point. (Howells 1910, 72)