Bancroftiana, Number 124 Spring 2004: The Curators’ Chickens Come Home to Roost

MARK TWAIN PAPERS

The Curators’ Chickens Come Home to Roost

Mark Twain’s Satire on Charles A. Dana

A recent major gift to the Mark Twain Papers comes at a moment when there is not enough room in this issue to describe the gift as it deserves. I therefore offer the following as a foretaste of what this gift includes, and promise to describe its riches in a future issue of Bancroftiana.

The gift comes from Mrs. Anne Cushman and consists, in part, of typed copies of Mark Twain letters and manuscripts made by or for the author’s first biographer, who was also the first curator of his papers, Albert Bigelow Paine.

In looking through these documents soon after their arrival I came across a typed copy of an untitled manuscript that has been in the papers since Paine controlled them (1910)—one of several hundred such manuscripts Mark Twain wrote but never published.

I recognized this text because I had recently tried to figure out when it was written, and because I found (as previous curators had found) that it was missing page 3 in its sequence of seventeen pages. The manuscript was a satire directed at Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun. In it Mark Twain claimed that the Sun had published a bogus letter reporting an interview with him that never took place. The explanation, Mark Twain said, was that he was trying to train his good friend Dana “to write humorously,” but without success.

The best date I could come up with for the manuscript was sometime between June 1880 and May 1881. The missing page 3 was still a mystery, and that made the surviving text somewhat unintelligible.

The Paine typescript caught my eye mainly because it was clipped with the typed copy of a letter to Mark Twain, with the signature “torn off,” but with the date of writing at the top: “Dec 30, 1880.” The letter writer referred to the bogus item in the Sun, and said that he had decided it was “a hoax, a practical joke of some wit.” Paine’s typed copy of the manuscript was headed “(Answer)” even though that word did not appear in the original. Paine evidently thought the manuscript was a reply to the 30 December letter.

The letter was an easy clue to follow up on: I went to see if we had it, filed by date as it normally would be. There were only two letters to Clemens on that date, and one of them had its signature torn off. But a previous curator, or editor, had helpfully recognized the handwriting and identified Edward H. House as its author.

House’s letter of December 30, 1880, to Mark Twain, who inserted the number “3” in the upper right corner. He also slightly revised the text using the same blue ink he used elsewhere in his manuscript about Charles A. Dana.

This was relevant because the manuscript just before the missing page 3 reads as follows: “here is a note from H.; you know H. well enough to know that he has a clear judgment; listen to him.” Here follows a few blank lines on page 2, then page 4. Here also Paine’s typed copy said “(Note not found).” So even though Paine had the manuscript and the letter in one place, probably in the same folder, he concluded that the missing page 3 contained a note which was still “not found.”

But the illustration below shows that the House letter to Mark Twain was the missing page 3. Using the same blue ink he used in the Dana manuscript, Mark Twain wrote “3” in the upper right corner, and he also added several small revisions to House’s original text. Doubtless he also tore off the signature to prevent House from being identified (House became simply “H”).

I call this the “curators’ chickens coming home to roost” because it took more than one us to cause the problem, but also ultimately to solve it. Almost 100 years after Paine made his typed copy of the manuscript and the letter, those typed copies led me back to the original letter, which had been conscientiously separated from the manuscript by someone who thought, reasonably enough, that it had simply been mixed up with it. Once restored, the dated letter told us when the bogus letter in the Sun must have appeared, and it showed conclusively that composition of the manuscript must have occurred in January 1881, after Mark Twain received House’s letter. The letter itself restored the text of the missing page 3, making the whole text fully intelligible for the first time since Paine first saw it and failed to quite grasp how the pieces fit together.

—Robert H. Hirst
Curator, Mark Twain Papers, and General Editor, Mark Twain Project