15 June 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (Horner, 172–74, UCCL 00617)
1. Bully for Fall. I offer my hearty congratulations.1explanatory note
2. I use no notes in lecturing, & so I don’t dare to try to use more than one lecture during a season. I shall carry the MSS. of another lecture, along, for safety, &Ⓐemendation shall discard the new one altogether if, after a few trials, it is not a success.2explanatory note
3. The idea of a woman reading a humorous lecture is perhaps the ghastliest conception to which the human mind has yet given birth. It is the most depressing thought that has intruded itself upon me for many moons. Why, Redpath, the thing is wholly out of the question. I question if the woman ever lived who could read a densely humorous passage as it should be read. Tenderness, pathos, tragedy—the earnest, the beautiful, the majestic—all these they can & do succeed in, but they fail in humor, except in the sparkling, vivacious kind—high & brilliant comedy. They appreciate & enjoy my sort (you know I rely for my effects chiefly on a simulated unconsciousness & intense absurdities), but they cannot render them effectively on the platform. But I could take a man home with me & drill him a week (or at any rate 2 weeks), & send him out competent to deliver the lecture the way I wanted it delivered—& I wouldn’t let anybody deliver a lecture written by me unless he would deliver it in my way or else show me a better. Now if I had a he comedian (I know at least 2 on the stage who certainly don’t get $250 a month for slaving their lives away, & who could deliver a lecture of mine without any instruction at all), then we would talk. No, we couldn’t talk, either, because he would have that ten per cent idea, too, & I would have to get him to pay me forty. I could send such a man into the lecture field (he can’t get there without an excuse, & a lecture with my name to it would furnish him that,) & he would make $2000, or $3000 in five months (& have an easy, gentlemanly time), & so would I—& you’d get your ten percent.3explanatory note
4. However, as I can’t lay my hand on such a comedian nearer than Buffalo, I will e’en cease to lust after him, & continue in my plans about my own lecturing tour.4explanatory note
You’ll have to excuse my lengthiness—the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost.
Clemens had received Redpath’s 12 June reply (now lost) to his letter of 10 June. Fall, normally in charge of scheduling and business arrangements for the Boston Lyceum Bureau, would be away from the office until late July. The occasion for Clemens’s congratulations has not been identified.
Redpath was preparing his promotional matter for the 1871–72 season, and had probably asked Clemens to consider offering more than one lecture. The first advertisement of the Boston Lyceum Bureau list, without lecture titles, appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript on 19 June (“Special Notices,” 3). Redpath and Fall’s Lyceum Magazine for 1871–72, which became available about 22 or 23 June, announced for Clemens only “An appeal in behalf of extending the Suffrage to Boys” ( Lyceum 1871, 20; “To Lecture Committees in New England,” Boston Evening Transcript, 24 June 71, 2).
Possibly Redpath had received a proposal from Helen Potter for a tour with one of Clemens’s lectures. Potter, a popular elocutionist, was preparing a new type of entertainment, “lyceum personations,” which she first presented under Redpath’s auspices in May 1874. These were dramatic and humorous recreations “not only of the manner, but of the rhetoric, of distinguished lecturers and elocutionists. . . . Miss Potter’s personations of John B. Gough were so perfect, the wig, beard, and masculine garments so well chosen and so well arranged, and his peculiarities of voice and manner so faithfully represented, that the audience often forgot it was a personation and thought that they were listening to Gough himself” (Pond, 170–71). Her other male subjects included Edwin Booth, Henry Ward Beecher, and Robert Ingersoll ( Lyceum 1874, 2, 11–12; Potter, vii, 1–11, 62–68, 120–24, 158–64).
The Buffalo comedian is unidentified.
References
- Horner, Charles F. The Life of James Redpath and the Development of the Modern Lyceum. New York: Barse and Hopkins. 1926
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- Lyceum.. The Lyceum Magazine: Edited by the Boston Lyceum Bureau, and Containing Its Third Annual List. For the Season of 1871–1872. Boston: Redpath and Fall. 1871
- Pond, James B. Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage. New York: G. W. Dillingham Company. 1900
- Lyceum. Redpath’s Lyceum: Organ of Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau. Boston: [Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau]. [Season of 1874–75.]. 1874
- Potter, Helen. Helen Potter’s Impersonations. New York: Edgar S. Werner. 1891
Horner, 172–74.
L4 , 408–409; “Letters to James Redpath,” Mark Twain Quarterly 5 (Winter–Spring 1942): 21 (derives from Horner).