27 January–15 April 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (Paraphrase: MTBus 16, UCCL 11899)
Once, years later, in a letter to Uncle Sam, she meant to say “Kiss Susy for me” and instead wrote “Kill Susy for me.” She told Pamela what a funny mistake she had made. “But you didn’t send it, did you?” asked Pamela, naturally shocked. “Oh, yes,” her mother answered calmly, “Sam will understand what I meant.”
Sam’s answer came promptly. He wrote, as my mother remembers it, “I said to Livy ‘It is a hard thing to ask of loving parents, but Ma is getting old and her slightest whim must be our law’; so I called in Downey and Livy and I held the child with the tears streaming down our faces while he sawed her head off.”1explanatory note
This incident, recalled by Annie Moffett Webster, was reported by her son, Samuel C. Webster, in Mark Twain, Business Man, the source of the present text. It involved Susy Clemens; Clemens’s mother, Jane; his sister, Pamela A. Moffett; and John (or Patrick) Downey, the servant who worked for the Clemenses in Hartford from mid-1872 until May 1874. Given the family’s movements during that period, it is likely that Clemens wrote the letter in 1874, between 27 January, when he arrived home from England, and 15 April, when the family went to Elmira. According to Samuel Webster’s account, Jane Clemens reacted with “outraged indignation . . . ‘Sawed her head off!’ she kept saying. ‘Sawed her head off!’” ( MTBus , 16).
References
- Webster, Samuel Charles. Mark Twain, Business Man. Edited by Samuel Charles Webster. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1946
- 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 6: 1874–1875. Edited by Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2002
Paraphrase, MTBus , 16.
L6 , 21–22.