Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?
That question always reminds me of an old chestnut about H. D. Thoreau, which may be apocryphal, but seems true anyway.
While walking in Walden woods one day with a companion, Thoreau was asked where Indian arrowheads were to be found. Without breaking stride, he stooped down, picked up one off the trail, and handed it to his companion, saying, “everywhere.”
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The Mark Twain Project has, of course, looked for (and found) some 10,000 letters by Mark Twain in public and private collections all around the world. But sometimes his letters (like Thoreau’s arrowheads) show up on one’s own doorstep, or in our own backyard, as it were. That is certainly the case with one highly interesting letter recently given to Bancroft by John and Mary Macmeeken of Oakland.
Mrs. Macmeeken called the Mark Twain Project last spring to say she had a Mark Twain letter she would like to show us, in the hope we might tell her something about it. She and her husband brought the letter to the Project offices. It was addressed to “Dear Nelson” (not otherwise identified) and it was tipped into the front of a 1901 copy of Huckleberry Finn, which had two bookplates: one, pasted firmly on the inside cover, for Ida Frances Nelson, and one for L. B. Wyman, not pasted down but rather tucked in, as if for safekeeping. The obvious question was, who were they, and what relationship did they have to the “Dear Nelson” Mark Twain addressed?
The Macmeekens explained that they had inherited the book and other papers from Eleanor Fiske, whose grandmother had been Ida Nelson. They also knew that L. B. Wyman was Ida’s father, Luther. That suggested that Ida had owned the book and the letter, and that she had probably placed her father’s loose bookplate inside to preserve it.
But who was Ida Frances Nelson? A quick check of the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography led us to a very brief entry on Henry Loomis Nelson, with whom Mark Twain was known to have exchanged a few letters. The last line read: “He was married, Oct. 14, 1874, to Ida Frances Wyman, of Brooklyn, N.Y.” Case closed. Ida had obviously inherited the letter from her husband Henry, to whom it had been addressed in the first place.
Before the Macmeekens left Bancroft that day, they decided to give the letter to the Mark Twain Papers, where it could keep company with so much else by Mark Twain. It was an extraordinary act of generosity, and it is an extraordinary letter — a good example of how we find out things about Mark Twain in the most unexpected places.
Henry Loomis Nelson (1846-1908) was an author, editor, and teacher. When he wrote to Clemens in 1897 and Clemens replied with this letter, he was editor of Harper’s Weekly, obviously seeking a contribution from Mark Twain.
Here is the letter in its entirety, published for the first time.
Robert Hirst is General Editor of the
Mark Twain Project.
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Hotel Metropole, Vienna, Jan. 12/97. Dear Nelson: If I had two short stories, I would send one to you & the other to a periodical where there’s an old half-way promise of mine to some-day-or-other furnish a short story — a half-promise which will probably never materialize. When a sudden impulse kicks me into attempting a short story, & the attempt succeeds to my satisfaction (which is unspeakably seldom) I’m perfectly ready & willing to part with it at customary rates. But I have to have the kick. Without it I shouldn’t ever care to make the attempt. For it usually takes 2 weeks & 3 false starts to get such a thing planned out in what you recognize to be the right way, & then half or all of another week to flutter it from the pen. Then it makes 5,000 to 10,000 words, & those are what you are paid for; $100 to $150 per 1000 words. The short story is the worst paid of all forms of literature. |
N. B. 1. A poor short story isn’t worth
printing. N. B. 2. A good short story is a novel in the cradle. Often when I take it out of the cradle to play with it, I take a liking to it & raise it. That is what happened with a number of my books. N. B. 3. In the cradle it is worth ten or fifteen worth a few hundred dollars — maybe a thousand. Raised, it can be worth (Huck Finn is a case in point) forty-eight thousand. So, you see, I never go prowling after a short story; it has to come prowling after me. For I am dam wise in my generation, & very very thoughtful. By gracious I wish you had come to Vienna. I’d give anything to see an old friendly face. This previously unpublished letter by Mark Twain is ©1999 by the Mark Twain Foundation. |
Volume 114
Spring 1999
Table of Contents
Bancroft Launches Bioscience Program with Stellar Symposium March 12–13
From the Director: Just what is it that you do, exactly?
The Business of the Humanities The “Trade”— what it is and how Bancroft uses it
The Thrill of the Chase Or, How the Biography of Poet Jack Spicer Came To Be
“The Times, They Are a’ Changin’” Bancroft Launches Free Speech Movement Archive
The Many Uses of Bancroft Collections
Joseph Esherick’s Oral History Illuminates an Architectural Icon
Where Do You “Find” Mark Twain’s Letters?
1999’s Keepsake: San Francisco in the Early 1850s
Bancroft Fellows Research Women and Space, Tobacco and Chocolate
