As concerns the certainty that a writer who ventures to use the professional technicalities and freemasonriesⒶapparatus note of a trade which he has notⒶapparatus note served in his own personⒶapparatus note will never fail to makeⒶapparatus note mistakes which will “give him away” to the master of that trade—oh, well, literature is crowded withⒶapparatus note instances.
Chapter X of Alice Kegan Rice’s new book (“Mr. Orr”) opens with a scene on a Mississippi steamboat which will sound ever so sane and natural and correct to the average passenger familiar with those boats, but it will sorely befog the trained steamboatman. There’s a generous supply of steamboatⒺexplanatory note details, and they ought to enable him to locate the scene of the episode, but they won’t. He may examine them till he is tired, he will remain a defeated man: he will not be able to determine which end of the boat the thing happened on.
Thirty-seven or thirty-eight years ago, when John Hay and I were young and he was on the Tribune staff, he gathered his Pike County Ballads together for publication in book form, and he asked me for advice concerning the ballad of the “Prairie Belle.” Was there anything steamboatfully incorrect in it?
“Yes, but nothing worth the trouble of correcting, since the error is so small and so technical that the great public will never detect it. You make the engineer of the burning boat the hero. It is he who bravely resolves to hold the steamer’s ‘nozzleⒶapparatus note to the bank till the last galoot’s ashore.’Ⓐapparatus note He couldn’t do it by himself; he couldn’t see where the nozzle was, from his place on the main deck amidships; he would have to have intelligent orders from the pilot-houseⒶapparatus note, by bells or speaking tube. In that case there would be two heroes, and the pilot would be the chief one, since his post would be some thirty or forty times as perilous as the engineer’s.”
So Hay made no change, and the poem remains now as he originally wrote itⒺexplanatory note.
In the ballad of the “Heathen Chinee,” there’s a euchre-gameⒶapparatus note wherein Bret Harte’s Chinaman, the sly rascal, has fourteen cold decks up his sleeveⒺexplanatory note. Did the great public deride this extravagant departure from the likelihoods? No, the great public didn’t; it suffered no damage, for it doesn’t know the game.
Three years ago I emptied into this Autobiography a correspondence which I had been having with a bugler who had bugled in Butterfield’s brigade all through the war. I had published a short story called “A Horse’s Tale,”Ⓔexplanatory note and in it had introduced several of the regular army’sⒶapparatus note bugle calls, and had added thereto a call which wasn’t in the regulation-list. My secretaryⒶapparatus note filched it for me out of the opening bars of an operaⒺexplanatory note. That veteran bugler was distressed; he said there was never a bugle in the world that could handle that combination of notes, and he wanted me to snatch it out of the book, for my reputation’s [begin page 308] sake, before my ignorantⒶapparatus note error should be discovered, and I be laughed at. I explained to him why I believed it not worth while to squelch that call.
Last month, in New York, another bugler wokeⒶapparatus note up. He came to me withⒶapparatus note a most earnest appeal to remove that call—on the same old grounds: there never was a bugle that could deliver that combination of notes, and I would be found out, etc., etc. I couldn’t remember just what I had said to the former complainant, but I could come near enough to it to make my point; so I asked—
“When did you come across the story?”
“Yesterday. And I was going to write you, but I saw by the papers that you were here, so I thought it would be better to come in person.”
“How many people are there in the United States?”
“Eighty or ninety millions, as I understand it.”
“How many men in the army?”
“Seventy thousand.”
“How many buglers? Seventy thousand?”
“Lord, no! Only about—”
“Never mindⒶapparatus note about exactnesses. Call it seven hundred.”
“It’s too many. There’s only about—”
“Never mind, we’ll call it seven hundred. In three years I have heard from two of them. It is one bugler per year and a half. It will take me 469 years to hear from the others—I mean thoseⒶapparatus note that do not die in the meantime. I’m writing a sea-story nowⒺexplanatory note. InⒶapparatus note it the great scene, the central scene, the most thrilling episode, isⒶapparatus note where the young hero’s foot slips and he falls from the garboard strake to the futtock shrouds and fractures his skull by collision with the maintogallant stunsl boom on the way. How does it strike you? Isn’t it good?”
“Good? Well, I should say so! By gracious it sounds just splendid!”
“Does it thrill? That’s the main thing—does it thrill?”
“Oh, don’t you worry about that! it thrills you from your scalp to your heels.”
“Now that is mighty satisfactory, for allⒶapparatus note I’ve given you is only the naked plunge, nothing more—no embroideries. You wait till I’ve dressed it out with the dramatic accessories—then see! There’s a race on, you know; everybody on deck—crowds of passengers and sailors and officers—and everybody excited; captain on the capstan, thundering orders to the men; the hero’s happy mother and little sister standing in the binnacle, his proud sweetheart standing erect,Ⓐapparatus note statuesque and beautiful in the light of the cat-heads,Ⓐapparatus note her eyes and all eyes riveted upon her daring hero; and at that supreme moment he falls! falls, strikes, and the next moment there he lies gasping in death at the feet of her who lovesⒶapparatus note him, adores him, worships him more than life itself! WhatⒶapparatus note do you think of it?”
“By George, it’s great! I think it’s just splendid!”
“To be frank, so do I. Do you understand it? I mean, all of it?”
“Well, no, not the ship-talk, but that’s no matter, I get the thrill—I get the whole of it, and my, but it’s just grand!”
“All right, then, that’s all I’m after, and I shan’t alterⒶapparatus note a word. There are eighty-five [begin page 309] millions of people in America that don’t know you can’t fall from the garboard strake, because it’s under the bottom of the ship.”Ⓐapparatus note
Chapter X of Alice Kegan Rice’s new book (“Mr. Orr”) opens with a scene on a Mississippi steamboat] Clemens refers to Mr. Opp, by Alice Hegan Rice (1870–1942), mistaking both her middle name and the book’s title. Rice was best known for her popular novel Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901). She had met Clemens in July 1904, when he rented a cottage from Richard Watson Gilder next door to the Gilders’ own cottage in Tyringham, Massachusetts (13 June 1904 to Langdon, CtHMTH; Gilder to Woodberry, 4 Aug 1904, in Gilder 1916, 361–62). Rice and her husband, Cale Young Rice, called on Clemens on 26 July while visiting the Gilders. Lyon noted in her journal: “I ought not to say I was disappointed in Mrs. Rice, but I was. She seemed very unliterary and inconsequent. Mr. Clemens says that ‘Mrs. Wiggs’ is not literature so there is less need than might be for a literary flavor to Mrs. Rice” (Lyon 1903–6, entry for 26 July). According to Rice in her autobiography, Gilder warned her that Clemens was a “blasphemous and unhappy old man”; Clemens devoted much of their conversation to unflattering anecdotes about Bret Harte (Rice 1940, 76–80). Clemens probably read Mr. Opp soon after it was published in April 1909, and wrote “Note to Chapter . . . ” in May or June. The scene of the novel is the Ohio River, not the Mississippi, but the name of the river is not revealed until chapter 11. The present essay is not a dictation, but is based on an unfinished manuscript. Not only is the title incomplete, but the text ends in the middle of a sentence; the editors have altered a semicolon after “ship” to a period. Nevertheless, the mention of “this Autobiography” (at 307.32) signifies Clemens’s intention to include it.
John Hay and I were young . . . the poem remains now as he originally wrote it] Hay’s poem “Jim Bludso, of the Prairie Bell” appeared in the New York Tribune on 5 January 1871 and was collected later that year in Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces. Neither Hay’s letter asking for advice nor Clemens’s reply has been found. Hay answered Clemens’s letter on 9 January: “I owe you many thanks for your kind letter. I think the pilot is a much more appropriate and picturesque personage and should certainly have used him except for the fact that I knew Jim Bludso and he was an engineer and did just what I said” (quoted in L4, 299–300 n. 1; for Hay see AutoMT1, 534 n. 222.9). In a 1905 letter to the editor of Harper’s Weekly, Clemens explained that Hay’s technical error was a “very slight one, but it could not have been corrected without dividing the heroism between two persons, and that would have spoiled the poem; so Hay left it as it was” (SLC 1905c).
the “Heathen Chinee,” . . . has fourteen cold decks up his sleeve] Harte’s poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” better known as “The Heathen Chinee,” appeared in the Overland Monthly in September 1870 and brought him immediate fame (AutoMT2, 520 n. 120.6–17). It describes a euchre game in which two miners try to cheat the Chinese character Ah Sin, who instead wins with cards concealed up his sleeves. The poem was intended as a satire of racial prejudice, but was often misinterpreted as anti-Chinese, and was even used to support the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Penry 2010).
[begin page 610] Three years ago . . . I had published a short story called “A Horse’s Tale,”] In October 1906 Clemens received a letter from bugler Oliver W. Norton, commenting on “A Horse’s Tale,” which had appeared recently in Harper’s Monthly (SLC 1906c; see AutoMT2, 547 n. 189.43–190.4):
It is evident that you appreciate the sentiment of the bugle and you may possibly accept my criticism of your music for the bugle call by which the little girl summoned her horse, when I say that except the first strain it could not possibly be played on a bugle or trumpet. These instruments are without keys, and, whatever the size or pitch, they are alike in having only five notes. (Norton to SLC, 3 Oct 1906, CU-MARK)
Norton had fought in the Civil War under Brigadier-General Daniel Butterfield (1831–1901), and in July 1862 was the first bugler to play “Taps,” which Butterfield had adapted from a traditional bugle call. Clemens revised Norton’s typed letter as if he intended to insert it into a dictation, but never did so (Villanueva 2014).
My secretary filched it for me out of the opening bars of an opera] Soldier Boy’s bugle call is “lifted” from the introduction to the Pizzicato of the ballet Sylvia, by Léo Delibes, as Clemens acknowledged in “A Horse’s Tale” (SLC 1906c, 539; SLC 1907, viii, 81).
I’m writing a sea-story now] Unidentified.
Works cited on this page
- CtHMTH Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Conn.
- Gilder 1916 Gilder, Rosamond, ed. Letters of Richard Watson Gilder. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1916
- Lyon 1903–6 (Lyon 1903–6) Lyon, Isabel V. Journal of seventy-four pages, with entries dated 7 November 1903 to 14 January 1906, CU-MARK. 1903–6
- Rice 1940 Rice, Alice Hegan. The Inky Way. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company. 1940
- L4 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
- AutoMT1 SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, and Leslie Diane Myrick. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2010
- SLC 1905c (SLC 1905) SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “John Hay and the Ballads.” Letter to the Editor dated 3 October. Harper’s Weekly 49 (21 October): 1530. 1905
- AutoMT2 SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Edited by Benjamin Griffin, Harriet Elinor Smith, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, and Leslie Diane Myrick. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2013
- Penry 2010 Penry, Tara. “The Chinese in Bret Harte’s Overland: A Context for Truthful James.” American Literary Realism 43 (Fall): 74–82. 2010
- SLC 1906c (SLC 1906) SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “A Horse’s Tale.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 113 (August–September): 327–42, 539–49. 1906
- CU-MARK University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Villanueva 2014 Villanueva, Jari. “An Excerpt from Twenty-Four Notes That Tap Deep Emotions: The Story of America’s Most Famous Bugle Call.” 2014
- SLC 1907 SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). A Horse’s Tale. Illustrated by Lucius Hitchcock. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1907
Source document.
MS Manuscript, leaves numbered 1–8.MS, probably written in May or June 1909, is written on buff-colored wove paper measuring 5 11/16 by 8⅞ inches. It is incomplete: it ends on page 8 with ‘under the bottom of the ship;’. No typescript has been found, which calls into question whether Clemens intended this essay to be part of the Autobiography; the reference to ‘this Autobiography’ (307.32), however, justifies its inclusion. In the top margin of the first MS page Clemens wrote, ‘Hay | Harte | K. Rice | Bugler’.