Autobiography of Mark Twain (142 page)

226.41–227.1 Thomas Maguire, proprietor of several theatres . . . a lecture on the Sandwich Islands] Maguire (1820–96), originally from Ireland, was San Francisco’s best-known theatrical manager for several decades. He arrived in California in 1849 and in 1850 opened his first theater. In the 1860s he owned the Opera House, on Washington Street near Montgomery,
as well as Maguire’s Academy of Music, a more splendid theater on Pine Street near Montgomery, where Clemens made his lecture debut on 2 October 1866. The lecture, which he later repeatedly revised, held a place in his platform repertoire for nearly a decade. For his own earlier account of the experience see chapter 78 of
Roughing It (RI 1993
, 532–36, 741–43; Lloyd 1876, 153–54).

227.2–3 “Admission one dollar; doors open at half past 7, the trouble begins at 8.”] The advertisement in the San Francisco
Alta California
offered “Dress Circle” seats at one dollar, and “Family Circle” seats at fifty cents: “Doors open at 7 o’clock. The trouble to begin at 8 o’clock” (“Maguire’s Academy of Music,” 2 Oct 1866, 4). The phrase soon became proverbial. Less than a year later Clemens found it scrawled on the cell wall of a New York City jail (SLC 1867i).

227.7–9 I lectured in all the principal Californian towns and in Nevada . . . retired from the field rich . . . go around the world] Clemens toured the towns of northern California and western Nevada Territory, accompanied by his friend and agent Denis E. McCarthy, from 11 October to 10 November 1866. He lectured again in San Francisco on 16 November, and then in several other Bay Area towns, before making a final appearance in San Francisco on 10 December. According to Paine, Clemens earned about four hundred dollars from his first San Francisco lecture, after paying his expenses, but his profit from the ensuing tour is not known. His intention to visit the Orient and then circumnavigate the world grew out of an invitation from Anson Burlingame, the U.S. minister to China, who befriended him in the Sandwich Islands in June 1866 and urged him to visit Peking in early 1867 (see chapter 79 of
Roughing It; RI 1993
, 537–42, 743–45;
MTB
, 1:294; 27 June 1866 to JLC and PAM,
Ll
, 347–48; see also AD, 20 Feb 1906).

227.9–12 proprietors of the
Alta
. . . twenty dollars per letter] For an analysis of how much Clemens was paid see 15 Apr 1867 to JLC and family,
L2
, 23–24 n. 1.

227.13–14 prospectus of Captain Duncan of the
Quaker City
Excursion] Charles C. Duncan (1821–98) of Bath, Maine, went to sea as a boy and took command of a ship while still a young man. In 1853 he became a New York shipping and commission merchant, but his business went bankrupt in 1865. Hoping to recover from this loss, in 1867 he arranged an excursion to Europe and the Holy Land sponsored by the parishioners of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Duncan leased the
Quaker City
and had the ship completely refitted to provide the passengers with comfortable accommodations. The prospectus described the planned itinerary for the voyage (which was to last from early June to late October), the available shipboard amenities, the guidelines for side trips ashore, the cost of passage ($1,250 in currency), and estimated personal expenses ($5 per day in gold). All passengers were required to obtain the approval of a “committee on applications” (for details of the excursion see
L2:
15 Apr 1867 to JLC and family, 23–26 nn. 1–4; “Prospectus of the
Quaker City
Excursion,” 382–84).

227.15–16 I wrote and sent the fifty letters . . . complete my contract] For Clemens’s list of the letters he thought he had written, and the number actually published, see 1–2 Sept 1867 to JLC and family,
L2
, 89–90 n. 1.

227
footnote
MacCrellish] Frederick MacCrellish (1828–82) went to California from Pennsylvania in 1852 and worked on two San Francisco newspapers, the
Herald
and the
Ledger
. In 1854 he became the commercial editor of the
Alta California
, and a part owner two years later (2? Mar 1867 to the Proprietors of the San Francisco
Alta California, L2
, 17 n. 1).

228.3–6 Noah Brooks . . . praises of the generosity of the
Alta
people] Brooks (1830–1903) began his journalism career in Boston, and during the Civil War corresponded from Washington for the Sacramento
Union
. Clemens met Brooks in 1865 or 1866, when he was the managing editor of the
Alta California
. After returning East in 1871, Brooks worked for both the New York
Tribune
and the
Times
, and throughout his life wrote books on travel and history, as well as personal memoirs (7 Mar 1873 to Reid,
L5
, 313 n. 2). He is known to have written only one biographical sketch of Clemens: “Mark Twain in California,” published in the
Century Magazine
in 1898. His account of the dispute, however, defends Clemens, not the “
Alta
people”:

During the summer of that year, while Clemens was in the Eastern States, there came to us a statement, through the medium of the Associated Press, that he was preparing for publication his letters which had been printed in the “Alta California.” The proprietors of that newspaper were wroth. They regarded the letters as their private property. Had they not bought and paid for them? Could they have been written if they had not furnished the money to pay the expenses of the writer? And although up to that moment there had been no thought of making in San Francisco a book of Mark Twain’s letters from abroad, the proprietors of the “Alta California” began at once their preparations to get out a cheap paper-covered edition of those contributions. An advance notice in the press despatches sent from California was regarded as a sort of answer to the alleged challenge of Mark Twain and his publishers. This sent the perplexed author hurrying back to San Francisco in quest of an ascertainment of his real rights in his own letters. Amicable counsels prevailed. The cheap San Francisco edition of the book was abandoned, and Mark Twain was allowed to take possession of his undoubted copyright, and his book of letters, entitled “The Innocents Abroad,” was published in the latter part of that year—1868. (Brooks 1898, 99)

228.27–29 remark attributed to Disraeli . . . statistics.”] This remark was first attributed to British statesman and author Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) in the London
Times
on 27 July 1895. Although the quip appeared in print as early as 1892, it has not been traced with certainty to Disraeli. For a full discussion, see Shapiro 2006, 208.

[Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich]

228.30 Louis Stevenson] Clemens met Stevenson (1850–94) in April 1888. Ill with lung disease, Stevenson had spent the winter with his wife and stepson at a well-known health resort at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. He wrote to Clemens on 13 April, proposing that they meet in New York City, where he planned to stay from 19 to 26 April. Clemens, an admirer of
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
, was pleased when Stevenson wrote him that he had read
Huckleberry Finn
“four times, and am quite ready to begin again tomorrow” (13? Apr 1888,
CU-MARK). Later in the year Stevenson left on a Pacific cruise, spending the rest of his life on various islands in the South Seas (15 and 17 Apr 1888 to Stevenson, CLjC; Baetzhold 1970, 203–6).

229.6 I said that I thought he was right about the others] The “others” were presumably mentioned in the portion of the text that Clemens omitted, signaled by the line of asterisks. Another omission occurs below (at 229.22). The two gaps may have been part of the original 1904 typescript (now lost), but it is more likely that they were the result of Clemens’s revisions before it was retyped in 1906.

229.7 Harte was good company and a thin but pleasant talker] See “Ralph Keeler,” note at 150.2–4. Clemens’s friendship with Harte had ended acrimoniously in 1877 with the failure of
Ah Sin
, the play on which they collaborated. In a later dictation Clemens explained that Harte’s character spoiled his “sharp wit,” which “consisted solely of sneers and sarcasms; when there was nothing to sneer at, Harte did not flash and sparkle” (AD, 4 Feb 1907;
N&J3
, 2).

229.8 Thomas Bailey Aldrich] Aldrich (1836–1907), an immensely popular poet and novelist and a pillar of the New England literary establishment, grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which served as the setting for many of his literary works. In 1852, lacking the funds to attend Harvard, he moved to New York City to work as a clerk in his uncle’s business. He soon began to publish poems, and joined the editorial staffs of several journals. During 1861–62 he was a Civil War correspondent for the New York
Tribune
. He married Lilian Woodman in 1865 and moved to Boston, where in 1866 he became editor of the literary magazine
Every Saturday
, a post he held through 1874. He succeeded William Dean Howells as editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1881, a position he retained until 1890. Clemens first met Aldrich, after some months’ correspondence, in November 1871, and the two enjoyed a lifelong friendship. Among Clemens’s tributes to Aldrich as a conversationalist is a remark recorded by Paine: “When Aldrich speaks it seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other side” (
MTB
, 2:642 n. 1; 15 Jan 1871 to the Editor of
Every Saturday, L4
, 304 n. 1).

229.28–31 “Davis’s Selected Speeches,” . . . I have forgotten] No such series of books by “Davis” has been found. Possibly Stevenson (or Clemens) misremembered the name of William Brisbane Dick (1826–1901), coproprietor of Dick and Fitzgerald, a publishing firm founded in 1858. Compilations of prose and poetry, as well as books for entertainment or self-improvement, bulked large in their catalog, which included
Dick’s Recitations and Readings, American Card Player, Dick’s Comic Dialogues, Dick’s Irish Dialect Recitations, Dick’s Art of Wrestling
, and
Dick’s Society Letter-Writer for Ladies
, all issued between 1866 and 1887. In 1867 Clemens himself had considered offering the publishers a collection of his Sacramento
Union
letters from the Sandwich Islands (Cox 2000, 85–86;
N&J1
, 176–77 n. 166).

[Villa di Quarto]

230.22 January] The first part of this dictation, through “under Providence” (237.8), survives in a typescript made by Jean Clemens in 1904 and revised by Clemens, now in the Mark Twain Papers. It is the only one of Jean’s Florentine typescripts known to survive.

230.24 Villa Reale di Quarto] Olivia’s doctors having advised a milder climate, Clemens removed his family to this Tuscan villa in the autumn of 1903. The family party consisted of Samuel, Olivia, Clara, and Jean, together with Katy Leary, their longtime servant, and Margaret Sherry, a trained nurse. They left New York in the steamer
Princess Irene
on 24 October, arriving at Genoa on 6 November. They made their way by train to Florence and were installed in the Villa di Quarto by 9 November. Later that month they were joined by Isabel V. Lyon, who had been hired in 1902 as Olivia’s secretary, but had since assumed more general duties; Lyon’s mother accompanied her (
MTB
, 3:1209; Notebook 46, TS p. 28, CU-MARK; Hartford
Courant:
“Clemens Family at Genoa,” 7 Nov 1903, 15; “Mr. Clemens in Florence,” 9 Nov 1903, 1; before 1 Nov 1903 to Unidentified, CU-MARK).

230.30 King of Würtemberg] After the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire in 1814, the Villa di Quarto was the home of Jérôme Bonaparte (1784–1860), Napoleon’s youngest brother and the former king of Westphalia. He was not the king of Württemberg, but his wife, Princess Catherine, was a daughter of Frederick I, the first king of Wiirttemberg (1754–1816).

230.31 a Russian daughter of the imperial house] The Grand Duchess Maria Nicolaievna (1819–76), a daughter of Tsar Nicholas I, purchased the villa in 1865 (“The Home of an American Countess in Italy,”
Town and Country
, Sept 1907, 10–13).

230.35 Baedeker says it was built by Cosimo I, by [ ], architect] The typescript leaves a blank space for the name, and Clemens added the brackets, fulfilling his promise, further on in the text, to “suppress” the name of the architect (231.35–36). Clemens’s likely source of information, the 1903 Baedeker guide to northern Italy, stated that the Villa di Quarto was built by Niccolò Tribolo (1500–1550) for Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–74), grand duke of Tuscany. Other sources indicate that the building dates from the preceding century (Baedeker 1903, 525; “The Home of an American Countess in Italy,”
Town and Country
, Sept 1907, 10–13).

231.13 Countess Massiglia] The Countess Massiglia (1861–1953), whom Clemens called “the American bitch who owns this Villa,” was born Frances Paxton, in Philadelphia (25–26 Feb 1904 to Rogers, Salm, in
HHR
, 557; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration 1950–54). She had been married and divorced before meeting Count Annibale Raybaudi-Massiglia, an Italian diplomat whom she married in about 1891. In addition to his remarks here, Clemens wrote about the countess in an unpublished sketch entitled “The Countess Massiglia” (SLC 1904a), and in his letters and notebooks. His only published mention of her during his lifetime was a glancing blow in a 1905 article, “Concerning Copyright” (Hartford
Courant:
“Mr. Clemens in Florence,” 9 Nov 1903, 1; “Twain and Countess at Law,” 22 Aug 1904, 7; “The Home of an American Countess in Italy,”
Town and Country
, Sept 1907, 10; SLC 1905b, 2). By a strange coincidence, Isabel Lyon had known the countess slightly

in Philadelphia about 15 years ago. I came in contact with her because M
^r
. John Lockwood boarded with her mother at 20
^th
& Cherry Streets. The mother was vicious; & the daughter who was then M
^rs
. Barney Campau, behaved abominably with M
^r
. Fred. Lockwood, ruining the happiness of that family. . . . When I saw her as I did the evening of the day that we arrived here—she of course said she had never seen me. I soon made it quite plain to her that she had— But enough— Here she remains, although she said she was going to
spend the winter in Paris. She has furnished an apartment over the stables for herself & the big Roman steward of the place—& they two live there together to the annoyance of society. . . . Here she remains, a menace to the peace of the Clemens household, with her painted hair, her great coarse voice—her slitlike vicious eyes—her dirty clothes—& her terrible manners. (Lyon 1903–6, 36–38)