10? April 1869 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: Davis, UCCL 00289)
I wrote yesterday, & I surely did not expect to write again today—but Livy is taking a nap & I have an hour to myself. She Ⓐemendation is wise. We are going out to dinner, & it’s a fearful bore, & she is getting up strength for the occasion, through sleep. I have been outraging her feelings again. She is trying to cure me of making “dreadful” speeches as she calls them. In the middle of winter when I was here, we had a “run” on the hot house for a day or m Ⓐemendation two—which is to say, an unusual lot of people died & their friends came to get roses & things to decorate the coffins with, & at the end of a week there was hardly a dozen flowers of any kind left. Charley & I made a good many jokes about it, & thus horrified. But a while ago I came in with a first-rate air of dejection on, & heaved a vast sigh. It trapped Livy into a burst of anxious solicitude, & she wanted to know what the matter was. I said, “I have been in the conservatory, & there is a perfect world of flowers in bloom—& we haven’t a confounded corpse!” I guess Orion will appreciate that. I don’t like to fool Livy this way, & don’t do it often, but sometimes th Ⓐemendation her simplicity is so tempting I can’t resist the inclination. I wish you could see that girl—the first time I ever saw her I said she was the most beautiful creature in the world, & I haven’t altered my opinion yet. I take as much pride in her brains as I do in her beauty, & as much pride in her happy & equable disposition as I do in her brains.
Haven’t got anything to write about, so I will enclose one of Livy’s letters—don’t read it to anybody but the family & Margaret. 2explanatory note—but M. is one of the family, I suppose. Livy is a sensible girl, & don’t go into any hysterics in her letters—but I do when I write her. Her letter will help you to know her.
Mr. & Mrs. Langdon asks me to send her their Ⓐemendation regards.—& Livy also.
Clemens most likely wrote this letter on the same day as the previous one to Bliss, as indicated by their nearly identical datelines.
The family’s housekeeper in St. Louis. Clemens’s enclosure does not survive.
References
- Collection of Chester L. Davis, Sr.
- 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
- CC (Clara Langdon Clemens, later Gabrilowitsch and Samossoud). My Father, Mark Twain. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1931
- Wecter, Dixon. The Love Letters of Mark Twain. Edited by Dixon Wecter. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1949
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 3: 1869. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Dahlia Armon. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1992
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Christie. Printed Books and Manuscripts, Including Americana: . . . The Estates of Henry Bowen, Chester Davis, William Salloch. Sale no. 7286 (17 and 18 May). New York: Christie, Manson and Woods International. 1991
MS, collection of Chester L. Davis, Jr.
MFMT , 14, with omissions; LLMT , 85–86; L3 , 189–190.
The MS was evidently returned to Clemens by Pamela Moffett, for it survived in the Samossoud Collection at least until 1947: sometime between then and 1949 Dixon Wecter saw it and had a typescript made (now in CU-MARK). Chester L. Davis, Sr., afterwards acquired the MS directly from Clara Clemens Samossoud (see Samossoud Collection, p. 586). In 1991 it was sold to an unknown purchaser (Christie 1991, lot 87).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.