Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  As the months drifted by, Lester now and then volunteered to go and see Jones on his own hook. His visits produced nothing. The fact is, Lester was afraid of Jones and felt a delicacy about troubling him with my matter while he had so many burdens on his shoulders. He preferred to pretend to me that he had seen Jones and had mentioned my matter to him, whereas in truth he had never mentioned it to him at all. At the end of two or three years Mr. Slee of our Elmira coal firm proposed to speak to Jones about it and I consented. Slee visited Jones and began in his tactful and diplomatic way to lead up to my matter, but before he had got well started Jones glanced up and said,

  “Do you mean to say that that money has never been paid to Clemens?”

  He drew his check for twenty-three thousand at once; said it ought to have been paid long ago, and that it would have been paid the moment it was due if he had known the circumstances. There are not many John P. Joneses in the world.

  This was in the spring of 1877. With that check in my pocket I was prepared to seek sudden fortune again. The reader, deceived by what I have been saying about my adventures, will jump to the conclusion that I sought an opportunity at once. I did nothing of the kind. I was the burnt child. I wanted nothing further to do with speculations. General Hawley sent for me to come to the Courant office. I went there with my check in my pocket. There was a young fellow there who said that he had been a reporter on a Providence newspaper, but that he was in another business now: that he was with Graham Bell, and was agent for a new invention called the telephone. He believed there was great fortune in store for it and wanted me to take some stock. I declined. I said I didn’t want anything more to do with wildcat speculation. Then he offered the stock to me at twenty-five. I said I didn’t want it at any price. He became eager—insisted that I at least take a trifle of it—five hundred dollars’ worth. He said he would sell me as much as I wanted for five hundred dollars—offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug hat—said I could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars. But I was the burnt child, and I resisted all these temptations—resisted them easily—went off with my check intact, and next day lent five thousand of it, on an unendorsed note, to my friend who was going to go bankrupt three days later, as I have already stated.

  About the end of the year (or possibly in the beginning of 1878) I put up a telephone wire from my house down to the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town, and the first one that was ever used in a private house in the world, for practical purposes.

  That young man couldn’t sell me any stock, but he sold a few hatfuls of it to an old dry-goods clerk in Hartford for five thousand dollars. That five thousand was that clerk’s whole fortune. He had been half a lifetime saving it. It is strange how foolish people can be, and what ruinous risks they can take when they want to get rich in a hurry. I was sorry for that man when I heard about it. I thought I might have saved him if I had had an opportunity to tell him about my experiences.

  We sailed for Europe on the 10th of April, 1878. We were gone fourteen months, and when we got back one of the first things we saw was that clerk driving around in a sumptuous barouche with liveried servants all over it in piles—and his telephone stock was emptying greenbacks into his premises at such a rate that he had to handle them with a shovel. It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the deserving fail.

  To return to my adventures in the publishing business.

  Saturday, May 26, 1906

  Mr. Clemens becomes his own publisher and makes Webster general agent in firm of Webster and Company, Publishers—Webster publishes “Huckleberry Finn” successfully—Whitford of firm of Alexander and Green draws the contract—Lecture tour with George Cable—Farewell address on 19th of April.

  As I have already remarked, I had imported my nephew-in-law, Webster, from the village of Dunkirk, New York, to conduct that original first patent-right business for me, at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. That enterprise had lost forty-two thousand dollars for me, so I thought this a favorable time to close it up. I proposed to be my own publisher now, and let young Webster do the work. He thought he ought to have twenty-five hundred dollars a year while he was learning the trade. I took a day or two to consider the matter and study it out searchingly. So far as I could see, this was a new idea. I remembered that printers’ apprentices got no salary. Upon inquiry I found that this was the case with stone masons, brick masons, tinners, and the rest. I found that not even lawyers or apprenticed doctors got any salary for learning the trade. I remembered that on the river an apprentice pilot not only got nothing in the way of salary but he also had to pay some pilot a sum in cash which he didn’t have—a large sum. It was what I had done myself. I had paid Bixby a hundred dollars, and it was borrowed money. I was told by a person who said he was studying for the ministry that even Noah got no salary for the first six months—partly on account of the weather and partly because he was learning navigation.

  The upshot of these thinkings and searchings of mine was that I believed I had secured something entirely new to history in Webster. And also I believed that a young backwoodsman who was starting life in New York without any equipment of any kind, without proved value of any kind, without prospective value of any kind, yet able without blinking an eye to propose to learn a trade at another man’s expense and charge for this benefaction an annual sum greater than any President of the United States had ever been able to save out of his pay for running the most difficult country on the planet, after Ireland, must surely be worth securing—and instantly—lest he get away. I believed that if some of his gigantic interest in No. 1 could be diverted to the protection of No. 2, the result would be fortune enough for me.

  I erected Webster into a firm—a firm entitled Webster and Company, Publishers—and installed him in a couple of offices at a modest rental, on the second floor of a building somewhere below Union Square, I don’t remember where. For assistants he had a girl, and perhaps a masculine clerk of about eight-hundred-dollar size. For a while Webster had another helper. This was a man who had long been in the subscription-book business, knew all about it, and was able to teach it to Webster—which he did—I paying the cost of tuition. I am talking about the early part of 1884 now. I handed Webster a competent capital and along with it I handed him the manuscript of “Huckleberry Finn.” Webster’s function was general agent. It was his business to appoint sub-agents throughout the country. At that time there were sixteen of these sub-agencies. They had canvassers under them who did the canvassing. In New York City Webster was his own sub-agent.

  Before ever any of these minor details that I am talking about had entered into being, the careful Webster had suggested that a contract be drawn and signed and sealed before we made any real move. That seemed sane, though I should not have thought of it myself—I mean it was sane because I had not thought of it myself. So Webster got his friend Whitford to draw the contract. I was coming to admire Webster very much, and at this point in the proceedings I had one of those gushing generosities surge up in my system; and before I had thought, I had tried to confer upon Webster a tenth interest in the business in addition to his salary, free of charge. Webster declined promptly—with thanks, of course, the usual kind. That raised him another step in my admiration. I knew perfectly well that I was offering him a partnership interest which would pay him two or three times his salary within the next nine months, but he didn’t know that. He was coldly and wisely discounting all my prophecies about “Huckleberry Finn’s” high commercial value. And here was this new evidence that in Webster I had found a jewel, a man who would not get excited; a man who would not lose his head; a cautious man; a man who would not take a risk of any kind in fields unknown to him. Except at somebody else’s expense, I mean.

  The contract was drawn, as I say, by Whitford. Dunkirk, New York, produced Whitford as well as Webster, and has not yet gotten over the strain. Whitford was privileged to sign
himself “of the firm of Alexander and Green.” Alexander and Green had a great and lucrative business and not enough conscience to damage it—a fact which came out rather prominently last year when the earthquake came which shook the entrails out of the three great Life Insurance Companies. Alexander and Green had their offices in the Mutual Building. They kept a job lot of twenty-five lawyers on salary, and Whitford was one of these. He was good-natured, obliging, and immensely ignorant, and was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.

  That first contract was all right. There was nothing the matter with it. It placed all obligations, all expenses, all liability, all responsibilities upon me, where they belonged.

  It was a happy combination, Webster and Whitford. The amount that the two together didn’t know about anything was to me a much more awful and paralysing spectacle than it would be to see the Milky Way get wrecked and drift off in rags and patches through the sky. When it came to courage, moral or physical, they hadn’t any. Webster was afraid to venture anything in the way of business without first getting a lawyer’s assurance that there was nothing jailable about it. Whitford was consulted so nearly constantly that he was about as much a member of the staff as was the girl and the subscription expert. But as neither Webster nor Whitford had had any personal experience of money, Whitford was not an expensive incumbent, though he probably thought he was.

  At the break of the autumn I went off with George W. Cable on a four months’ reading-campaign in the East and West—the last platform work which I was ever to do in this life in my own country. I resolved at the time that I would never rob the public from the platform again unless driven to it by pecuniary compulsions. After eleven years the pecuniary compulsions came, and I lectured all around the globe.

  Ten years have since lapsed, during which time I have only lectured for public charities and without pay. On the 19th of last month I took a public and formal leave of the platform—a thing which I had not done before—in a lecture on Robert Fulton for the benefit of the Robert Fulton Memorial Fund.

  I seem to be getting pretty far away from Webster and Whitford, but it’s no matter. It is one of those cases where distance lends enchantment to the view. Webster was successful with “Huckleberry Finn,” and a year later handed me the firm’s check for fifty-four thousand five hundred dollars, which included the fifteen thousand dollars capital which I had originally handed to him.

  Once more I experienced a new birth. I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna, I suppose.

  Monday, May 28, 1906

  Mr. Clemens calls on General Grant just as he is about to sign contract with the Century Company for publication of his Memoirs on 10 per cent royalty—Mr. Clemens dissuades him, and finally decides to publish them himself—Terms upon which they were published.

  Webster conceived the idea that he had discovered me to the world, but he was reasonably modest about it. He did much less cackling over his egg than Webb and Bliss had done.

  It had never been my intention to publish anybody’s books but my own. An accident diverted me from this wise purpose. That was General Grant’s memorable book. One night in the first week of November 1884 I had been lecturing in Chickering Hall and was walking homeward. It was a rainy night, and but few people were about. In the midst of a black gulf between lamps, two dim figures stepped out of a doorway and moved along in front of me. I heard one of them say,

  “Do you know General Grant has actually determined to write his Memoirs and publish them? He has said so, to-day, in so many words.”

  That was all I heard—just those words—and I thought it great good luck that I was permitted to overhear them.

  In the morning I went out and called on General Grant. I found him in his library with Colonel Fred Grant, his son. The General said, in substance, this:

  “Sit down and keep quiet until I sign a contract”—and added that it was for a book which he was going to write.

  Fred Grant was apparently conducting a final reading and examination of the contract, to himself. He found it satisfactory, and said so, and his father stepped to the table and took up the pen. It might have been better for me, possibly, if I had let him alone, but I didn’t. I said,

  “Don’t sign it. Let Colonel Fred read it to me first.”

  Colonel Fred read it, and I said I was glad I had come in time to interfere. The Century Company was the party of the second part. It proposed to pay the General 10 per cent royalty. Of course this was nonsense—but the proposal had its source in ignorance, not dishonesty. The great Century Company knew all about magazine publishing; no one could teach them anything about that industry; but, at that time, they had had no experience of subscription publishing, and they probably had nothing in their minds except trade-publishing. They could not even have had any valuable experience in trade-publishing, or they would not have asked General Grant to furnish a book on the royalty commonly granted to authors of no name or repute.

  I explained that these terms would never do; that they were all wrong, unfair, unjust. I said,

  “Strike out the 10 per cent and put 20 per cent in its place. Better still, put 75 per cent of the net returns in its place.”

  The General demurred, and quite decidedly. He said they would never pay those terms.

  I said that that was a matter of no consequence, since there was not a reputable publisher in America who would not be very glad to pay them.

  The General still shook his head. He was still desirous of signing the contract as it stood.

  I pointed out that the contract as it stood had an offensive detail in it which I had never heard of in the 10 per cent contract of even the most obscure author—that this contract not only proposed a 10 per cent royalty for such a colossus as General Grant, but it also had in it a requirement that out of that 10 per cent must come some trivial tax for the book’s share of clerk hire, house rent, sweeping out the offices, or some such nonsense as that. I said he ought to have three-fourths of the profits and let the publisher pay running expenses out of his remaining fourth.

  The idea distressed General Grant. He thought it placed him in the attitude of a robber—robber of a publisher. I said that if he regarded that as a crime it was because his education had been neglected. I said it was not a crime, and was always rewarded in heaven with two halos. Would be, if it ever happened.

  The General was immovable, and challenged me to name the publisher that would be willing to have this noble deed perpetrated upon him. I named the American Publishing Company of Hartford. He asked if I could prove my position. I said I could furnish the proof, by telegraph, in six hours—three hours for my dispatch to go to Hartford, three hours for Bliss’s jubilant acceptance to return by the same electric gravel-train—that if he needed this answer quicker I would walk up to Hartford and fetch it.

  The General still stood out. But Fred Grant was beginning to be persuaded. He proposed that the Century contract be laid on the table for twenty-four hours, and that meantime the situation be examined and discussed. He said that this thing was not a matter of sentiment; it was a matter of pure business, and should be examined from that point of view alone. His remark about sentiment had a bearing. The reason was this. The broking firm of Grant and Ward—consisting of General Grant, Mr. Ward (called for a time the “Little Napoleon of Finance”) and Ward’s confederate, Fish—had swindled General Grant out of every penny he had in the world. And at a time when he did not know where to turn for bread, Roswell Smith, head of the Century Company, offered him five hundred dollars per article for four magazine articles about certain great battles of the Civil War. The offer came to the despairing old hero like the fabled straw to the drowning man. He accepted it with gratitude, and wrote the articles and delivered them. They were easily worth ten thousand dollars apiece, but he didn’t know it. Five hundred dollars apiece seemed to him fabulous pay for a trifle of pleasant and unlaborious scribbling.

  He was now
most loth to desert these benefactors of his. To his military mind and training it seemed disloyalty. If I remember rightly his first article lifted the Century’s subscription list from a hundred thousand copies to two hundred and twenty thousand. This made the Century’s advertisement pages, for that month, worth more than double the money they had ever commanded in any previous month. At a guess, I should say that this increase of patronage was worth, that month, eight thousand dollars. This is a safe estimate, a conservative estimate.