Florence, Italy.Ⓐapparatus note 31st January 1904.Ⓐapparatus note
A quarter of a century ago I was visiting John Hay, now Secretary of StateⒺexplanatory note,Ⓐapparatus note at Whitelaw Reid’s house in New York, which Hay was occupying for a few months while ReidⒶapparatus note was absent on a holiday in Europe. Temporarily also, Hay was editing Reid’s paper, the New York Tribune Ⓔexplanatory note.Ⓐapparatus note I remember two incidents of that Sunday visit particularly well, and I think I shall use them presently to illustrate something which I intend to say. One of the incidents is immaterial, and I hardly know why it is that it has stayed with me so many years. I must introduce it with a word or two.Ⓐapparatus note I had known John Hay a good many years, I had known him when he was an obscure young editorial writer on the TribuneⒶapparatus note in Horace Greeley’s time, earning three or four times the salary he got,Ⓐapparatus note considering the high character of the work which came from his pen. In those earlier days he was a picture to look at, for beauty of feature, perfection of form and grace of carriage and movement. He had a charm aboutⒶapparatus note him of a sort quite unusual to my westernⒶapparatus note ignorance and inexperience—a charm of manner, intonation, apparently native and unstudied elocution, and all that—the groundworkⒶapparatus note of itⒶapparatus note native, the ease of it, the polish of it, the winning naturalness of it, acquired in Europe where he had been Chargé d’Affaires some time at the Court of Vienna. He was joyous andⒶapparatus note cordial, a most pleasant comrade.Ⓐapparatus note
Now I am coming to it. John Hay was not afraid of Horace Greeley.
I will leave that remark in a paragraph by itself; it cannot be made too conspicuous. John Hay was the only man who ever served Horace Greeley on the TribuneⒶapparatus note of whom that can be said. In the past few years,Ⓐapparatus note since Hay has been occupying the post of Secretary of State with a succession of foreign difficulties on his handsⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note such as have not fallen to the share of any previous occupant of that chair, perhaps, when we consider the magnitude of the matters involved, we have seen that that courage of his youth is his possession still,Ⓐapparatus note and that he is not any more scarable by kings and emperors and their fleets and armiesⒺexplanatory note than he was by Horace Greeley.
[begin page 223]I arrive at the application now. That Sunday morning, twenty-five years ago, Hay and I had been chatting and laughing and carrying-on almost like our earlier selves of ’67, when the door opened and Mrs. HayⒺexplanatory note, gravely clad, gloved, bonneted, and just from church, and fragrant with the odors of Presbyterian sanctity,Ⓐapparatus note stood in it. We rose to our feet at once, of course,—Ⓐapparatus noterose through a swiftly falling temperature—a temperature which at the beginning was soft and summerlike, but which was turning our breath and all other damp things to frost crystals by the time we were erect—but we got no opportunity to say the pretty and polite thing and offer the homage due:Ⓐapparatus note the comely young matron forestalled us. She came forward smileless, with disapproval written all over her face, said most coldly, “Good morning Mr. Clemens,”Ⓐapparatus note and passed on and out.
There was an embarrassed pause—I may say a very embarrassed pause. If Hay was waiting for me to speak, it was a mistake; I couldn’t think of a word. It was soon plain to me that the bottom had fallen out of his vocabulary, too. When I was able to walk I started toward the door, and Hay, grown gray in a single night, so to speak, limped feebly at my side, making no moan, saying no word. At the door his ancient courtesy rose and bravely flickered for a moment, then went out. That is to say, he tried to ask me to call again, but at that point his ancient sincerity rose against the fiction and squelched it. Then he tried another remark, and that one he got through with. He said pathetically, and apologetically,Ⓐapparatus note
“She is very strict about Sunday.”
More than once in these past few years I have heard admiring and grateful people say, and have said it myself—
“He is not afraid of this whole nation of eighty millions when his duty requires him to do an unpopular thing.”
Twenty-five years have gone by since then, and through manifold experiences I have learned that no one’sⒶapparatus note courage is absolutely perfect; that there is always some one who is able to modify his pluck.
The other incidentⒶapparatus note of that visit was this: in trading remarks concerning our ages I confessed to forty-two and Hay to fortyⒶapparatus note Ⓔexplanatory note. Then he asked if I had begun to write my autobiography, and I said I hadn’t. He said that I ought to begin at once, and that I had already lost two years. Then he said in substance this:
“At forty a man reaches the top of the hill of life and starts down on the sunset side. The ordinary man, the average man, not to particularize too closely and say the commonplace man, has at that age succeeded or failed; in either case he has lived all of his life that is likely to be worth recording; also in either case the life lived is worth setting down, and cannot fail to be interesting if he comes as near to telling the truth about himself as he can. And he will tell the truth in spite of himself, for his facts and his fictions will work loyally together for the protection of the reader; each fact and each fiction will be a dab of paint, each will fall in its right place, and together they will paint his portrait; not the portrait he thinks they are [begin page 224] painting, but his real portrait, the inside of him, the soul of him, his character. Without intending to lie he will lie all the time; not bluntly, consciously, not dully unconsciously, but half-consciously—consciousness in twilight; a soft and gentle and merciful twilight which makes his general form comely, with his virtuous prominences and projections discernible and his ungracious ones in shadow. His truths will be recognizable as truths, his modifications of facts which would tell against him will go for nothing, the reader will see the fact through the film and know his man. ThereⒶapparatus note is a subtle devilish something or other about autobiographical composition that defeats all the writer’s attempts to paint his portrait his way.”
Hay meant that he and I were ordinary average commonplace people, and I did not resent my share of the verdict,Ⓐapparatus note but nursed my wound in silence. His idea that we had finished our work in life, passed the summit and were westward bound down hill,Ⓐapparatus note with me two years ahead of him and neither of us with anything further to do as benefactors to mankind,Ⓐapparatus note was all a mistake. I had written four books then, possibly five. I have been drowning the world in literary wisdom ever since, volume after volume; since that day’s sun went down heⒶapparatus note has been the historian of Mr. LincolnⒺexplanatory note, and his book will never perish; he has been AmbassadorⒶapparatus note, brilliant orator, competent and admirable Secretary of State, and would be President next year if we were a properly honest and grateful nationⒶapparatus note instead of an ungrateful one, a nation which has usually not been willing to have a chief magistrate of gold when it could get one of tin.Ⓐapparatus note
I had lost two years, but I resolved to make up that loss. I resolved to begin my autobiography at once. I did begin it, but the resolve melted away and disappeared in a week and I threw my beginning away. Since then, about every three or four years I have made other beginnings and thrown them away. Once I tried the experiment of a diary, intending to inflate that into an autobiography when its accumulationⒶapparatus note should furnish enough material, but that experiment lasted only a week; it took me half of every night to set down the history of the day, and at the week’s end I did not like the result.
Within the last eight or ten years I have made several attempts to do the autobiography in one way or another with a pen, but the result was not satisfactory, it was too literary. With the pen in one’s hand, narrative is a difficult art; narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed by every boulder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its surface broken but its course not stayed by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before; but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important so that the trip is made.
With a pen in the hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, smoothly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is too literary, too prim, too nice; the gait and style and movement are not suited to narrative. That canal stream is always reflecting; it is its nature, it can’t help it. Its slick shiny surface is interested in everything it passes along the banks, cows, foliage, flowers, everything. And so it wastes a lot of time in reflections.
I was visiting John Hay, now Secretary of State] John Milton Hay (1838–1905) and Clemens probably first met in 1867 through a mutual friend, David Gray of the Buffalo Courier. Hay, like Clemens, grew up in a small town on the Mississippi River—Warsaw, Illinois, which is less than sixty miles from Hannibal, Missouri—and this common background fostered their friendship. Hay graduated from Brown University and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1861. But he soon gave up the law to work as assistant private secretary to Abraham Lincoln (1861–65), living in the White House and becoming his intimate companion. At the end of the war Hay was appointed secretary to the U.S. legation in Paris, then chargé d’affaires at Vienna (1867–68), and secretary of legation at Madrid (1869–70). In 1870 he accepted an editorial position on the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley, and then, after Greeley’s death in 1872, assisted the new editor, Whitelaw Reid. He gave up his Tribune position in 1875 and pursued a literary career as a poet, novelist, and biographer of Lincoln (see the note at 224.14–15). He achieved his chief fame, however, as a diplomat and statesman, serving as assistant secretary of state (1878–81), ambassador to Great Britain (1897–98), and secretary of state (1898–1905) (31 Dec 1870 to Reid, L4, 292–93, n. 3; 26 Jan 1872 to Redpath, L5, 35 n. 2; Thayer 1915, 1:83, 330–35).
Whitelaw Reid’s house in New York . . . editing Reid’s paper, the New York Tribune] Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912), a native of Ohio, joined the staff of the New York Tribune in 1868. After the death of Horace Greeley, its founder and editor, he became the owner as well as the editor-in-chief, and soon solicited contributions from Clemens. Reid was married in April 1881 and for six months, while he traveled in Europe with his bride, Hay replaced him as editor and lived in his New York house. Reid later served as minister to France (1889–92) and ambassador to Great Britain (1905–12) (link note following 20–22 Dec 1872 to Twichell, L5, 263; Thayer 1915, 1:405, 451–55).
a succession of foreign difficulties on his hands] In 1898 Hay inherited from his predecessor a dispute with Canada over Alaska’s boundaries, which was not finally resolved until 1903. He helped to negotiate the Treaty of Paris (1898), ending the Spanish-American War. During the Boxer Rebellion (1900) he took action to rescue the Peking hostages, while successfully promoting the “Open Door Policy” toward China. Most recently, he had been responsible for several treaties (1900–1903) that allowed the United States to build the Panama Canal and secure its control over the Canal Zone (Thayer 1915, 2:202–49).
not any more scarable by kings and emperors and their fleets and armies] Clemens alludes to the conflict in 1901–3 with the German kaiser and his allies, who sent a fleet of warships to blockade Venezuelan ports and threatened to invade the country, in violation of the Monroe Doctrine (Thayer 1915, 2:284–90).
Mrs. Hay] Hay was married on 4 February 1874 to Clara L. Stone (1849–1915), whose father, Amasa Stone, was a wealthy contractor, railroad magnate, and philanthropist in Cleveland, Ohio. The couple had four children, and by Hay’s own account, their marriage was a happy one. In 1905, shortly before his death, he recorded in his diary, “I have lived to be old, something I never expected in my youth. I have had many blessings, domestic happiness being the greatest of all” (Thayer 1915, 1:351, 2:408).
I confessed to forty-two and Hay to forty] At the time of his residence in Reid’s New York house, Hay was forty-two and Clemens was forty-five. It is likely that Clemens’s recollection here conflated more than one discussion with Hay, and that their conversation about autobiography took place several years earlier, in 1877 or 1878.
the historian of Mr. Lincoln] Hay and a collaborator, John G. Nicolay (1832–1901), published several works about Lincoln. Their association began in 1860, when Nicolay was appointed Lincoln’s private secretary and recruited Hay to be his assistant. During their tenure in the White House they began to select materials for a biography of Lincoln, and in 1874 began to solicit additional material from Lincoln’s son, Robert. In 1885 they signed a contract with the Century Company, receiving an unprecedented fifty thousand dollars for the serialization rights. Their biography was published in the Century Magazine from 1886 to 1890, and in the latter year was issued in ten volumes as Abraham Lincoln: A History. In a review of the work William Dean Howells wrote, “We can be glad of the greatest biography of Lincoln not only as the most important work yet accomplished in American history, but as one of the noblest achievements of literary art” (Howells 1891, 479). Four years later, in 1894, Hay and Nicolay published Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works (Thayer 1915, 2:16–18, 49).
Source documents.
TS Jean (lost) Typescript made in 1904 by Jean Clemens in Florence from Isabel Lyon’s handwritten record of Clemens’s dictation; now lost.TS2 (incomplete) Typescript, leaves numbered 59–65 (most of 65 and all of 66 are missing), made from TS Jean and revised: ‘Florence . . . of tin.’ (222.7–224.18).
TS4 Typescript, leaves numbered 53–60, made from TS Jean.
NAR 12pf Galley proofs of NAR 12, typeset from the revised TS2, ViU (the same extent as NAR 12).
NAR 12 North American Review 184 (15 February 1907), 344–46: ‘31st January 1904 . . . pleasant comrade.’ (222.7–22); ‘in trading . . . of tin.’ (223.27–224.18).
TS2 and TS4 derive independently from an earlier typescript, now lost, prepared in 1904 in Florence by Jean Clemens, who transcribed the longhand notes taken by Isabel Lyon from Clemens’s dictation. Since either typescript may incorporate authorial readings not present in the other, all of their variants have been reported. When TS2 and TS4 agree, they confirm the readings of the missing TS Jean.
Clemens revised TS2 to serve as printer’s copy for the NAR, cutting away most of page 65 and all of page 66. TS4 contains the complete text, and is therefore the unique source for the portion missing from TS2. This excerpt about Hay was first paired with an anecdote from the AD of 15 March 1906 about Twichell and the barking dog and scheduled for NAR 8 (see the Textual Commentary for that dictation). Ultimately it was combined with Clemens’s comments about his brother Orion from the ADs of 5 April and 6 April 1906 (a topic begun in NAR 11) and published in NAR 12. Someone at the NAR apparently considered shortening the installment on NAR 12pf by marking the entire text of “John Hay” for deletion, but then restored it with the instruction ‘stet’. A phrase in the TS2 text—‘instead of an ungrateful one’ (224.17)—was omitted from NAR 12pf. The same sentence was cut further before publication: the phrase ‘and would be President next year if we were a properly honest and grateful nation’ (224.16–17) was in NAR 12pf but omitted from NAR 12. The source of these revisions, which are not on any extant document, was probably someone at the NAR. Clemens himself made no revisions on this portion of NAR 12pf.
Marginal Notes on TS2 and NARpf Concerning Publication in the NAR