If this notion is not a foolish and wicked one, won’t
you just consult with some chief Independents, and
see if they won’t call a sudden convention and
whoop the thing through? To nominate Edmunds
the 1st of November, would be soon enough, wouldn’t
it?
With kindest regards to you and the Aldriches,
Yr
Truly
S.
L. Clemens.
Clemens and Cable set out on their reading-tour in
November. They were a curiously-assorted pair:
Cable was of orthodox religion, exact as to habits,
neat, prim, all that Clemens was not. In the
beginning Cable undertook to read the Bible aloud
to Clemens each evening, but this part of the day’s
program was presently omitted by request. If
they spent Sunday in a town, Cable was up bright and
early visiting the various churches and Sunday-schools,
while Mark Twain remained at the hotel, in bed, reading
or asleep.
The great year of 1885.
Clemens and cable. Publication
of “Huck Finn.” The
grant memoirs. Mark twain
at fifty
The year 1885 was in some respects
the most important, certainly the most pleasantly
exciting, in Mark Twain’s life. It was
the year in which he entered fully into the publishing
business and launched one of the most spectacular
of all publishing adventures, The Personal Memoirs
of General U. S. Grant. Clemens had not intended
to do general publishing when he arranged with
Webster to become sales-agent for the Mississippi
book, and later general agent for Huck Finn’s
adventures; he had intended only to handle his own
books, because he was pretty thoroughly dissatisfied
with other publishing arrangements. Even
the Library of Humor, which Howells, with Clark,
of the Courant, had put together for him, he left with
Osgood until that publisher failed, during the
spring of 1885. Certainly he never dreamed
of undertaking anything of the proportions of
the Grant book.
He had always believed that Grant could
make a book. More than once, when they
had met, he had urged the General to prepare his memoirs
for publication. Howells, in his ‘My Mark
Twain’, tells of going with Clemens to
see Grant, then a member of the ill-fated firm of
Grant and Ward, and how they lunched on beans, bacon
and coffee brought in from a near-by restaurant.
It was while they were eating this soldier fare
that Clemens—very likely abetted by Howells
—especially urged the great commander
to prepare his memoirs. But Grant had become
a financier, as he believed, and the prospect of literary
earnings, however large, did not appeal to him.
Furthermore, he was convinced that he was without
literary ability and that a book by him would
prove a failure.
