30? April 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (Paraphrase: Buffalo Express, 9 May 70, UCCL 11733)
In reply, I wrote this pleasant-spoken gentleman that I had just telegraphed to New York for the Independent article, so that I could set Dr. T. right, before as many of the public as I could reach, (for it seemed perfectly plain that I had been wronging him,) and I said I wished to make this reparation “intelligently &Ⓐemendation immediately,” without waiting a month for the Galaxy to issue again.1explanatory note
Clemens’s “About Smells” in the May “Memoranda” had attacked Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832–1902), popular pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, for bigoted remarks Talmage made in “How!” in the New York Independent on 9 December 1869 (2). Clemens had seen the offensive passage as reprinted in the 6 January 1870 Chicago Advance, a Congregational weekly ( WIM , 535; Mott 1957, 76–77), which he quoted in the Galaxy:
I have a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in church, and a working man should enter the door at the other end, would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer for being keener on the scent than a stupid watch-dog. The fact is, if you had all the churches free, by reason of the mixing up of the common people with the uncommon, you would keep one-half of Christendom sick at their stomach. If you are going to kill the church thus with bad smells, I will have nothing to do with this work of evangelization. (SLC 1870 [MT00901], 721)
Probably on 30 April, Clemens received the following letter, subsequently published in “Personal,” his long follow-up to “About Smells” in the Buffalo Express of 9 May (SLC 1870 [MT00907]):
Mark Twain, Galaxy Office, New York:
Dear Sir:
Rev. T. de Witt Talmage is a representative democratic preacher, whom to see in a “spike-tailed coat and kids” would astonish his friends quite as much as does your apparent misconception of his real character and views touching the free-church question. Will you please read his entire article in the Independent from which you quote in the Galaxy for May and favor your readers with such a memorandum as it may suggest, and greatly oblige,
Of Mr. Talmage’s Church.
The writer was Charles Crozat Converse (1832–1918), a lawyer and composer, whose father, Maxey Manning Converse, had been a prominent Elmira music teacher (Towner, 284). Clemens’s reply was probably immediate, but is known to survive only in his own paraphrase of it, also published in “Personal.” There he further explained that a second letter from Converse reached him in Elmira (about 4 May) and “the next day I dropped everything else and wrote a full explanation of how the Advance had defrauded me into wronging Dr. Talmage.” But when he “was just about to mail this for publication in the Independent, (and had even enveloped and directed it,)” an “Eastern mail brought me Dr. Talmage’s original Independent article in full, and I waited to read it.” That was probably on 6 May at the latest. On reading Talmage’s article, Clemens decided not to send his drafted “reparation” because:
I was sorrowfully disappointed—for alas! the most analytical mind in the world could not tell which was the Doctor’s sarcasm and which was his “real earnest!” It was plain that the Advance had right fair reason for regarding as a serious utterance a paragraph which Dr. T. stated to be “irony.” I am not questioning Dr. T.’s honesty, now. On the contrary I am satisfied that he really looks upon his little paragraph as irony, and very fair irony at that, but it is certainly the opaquest sarcasm that ever got into print. Any unprejudiced man who will read Dr. T.’s Independent article and then get its author or a parishioner to explain it to him, will say that the Rev. Dr. Talmage has no business meddling with a pen. Writing is not his specialty. . . .
Rev. Dr. Talmage is not a bad man. I have credible evidence that he is a very excellent man and that his heart is really in the freeing of the churches. . . . I, for one, am sorry I criticised him harshly—no, not that. But I am sincerely sorry that he ever hurled that execrable column of decomposed grammar, irreverence and incipient lunacy into print and so betrayed me into unchivalrously attacking a literary cripple. (SLC 1870 [MT00907])
Clemens instead wrote and immediately mailed “Personal” to Buffalo, where it was presumably received on Saturday, 7 May, typeset on Sunday, and published on Monday, 9 May.
References
- 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
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings. Edited by Paul Baender. The Works of Mark Twain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1973
- Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1865–1885. 2d printing [1st printing, 1938]. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1957
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “Memoranda.” Article Comprising “Introductory,” “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract,” “George Wakeman,” “About Smells,” “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” and “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper.” Galaxy 9 (May): 717–26. 1870
- Larned, Josephus Nelson. “Personal.” Buffalo Express, 20 July, 4. 1870
- Towner, Ausburn [Ishmael, pseud.]. Our County and Its People: A History of the Valley and County of Chemung from the Closing Years of the Eighteenth Century. Syracuse, N.Y.: D. Mason and Co. 1892
“Personal,” Buffalo Express, 9 May 70, 2.
L4 , 123–124.