Mark Twain's Interviews: Supplement Three

This article reprints in whole or in part a total of seven newly recovered and annotated interviews with Samuel Clemens, all numbered in accordance with the sequence in my edition Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (2006).

9a. Samuel Clemens and his family sailed for Europe on 11 April 1878 aboard the same ship as the travel writer Bayard Taylor (1825–1878), who had recently been confirmed by the U.S. Senate as American minister to Germany. The New York correspondent of the Baltimore Sun was one of the many reporters at the dock when the Holsatia sailed.

"The Departure of Bayard Taylor and Mark Twain," Baltimore Sun, 13 April 1878, 3.

A large crowd of friends witnessed the departure, at New York, on Thursday, of Bayard Taylor and Mark Twain, on the Holsatia, for Bremen. At the leave taking on the steamship there were many witty and sentimental sayings. [. . .] Mark Twain observed that there was a difference between himself and Mr. Taylor: 'Mr. Taylor goes abroad with a purpose, I with none. Mr. Taylor goes to represent his country, I to represent myself. Mr. Taylor goes to do business, I to loaf. How long shall I stay? I can't tell. I left my house in hartford just as it is, so I can come back at any time. Perhaps that is the best way to do if you want to stay a good while. If you rent your house for a year or so, you know, you want to come back in three months. I am going to write something when I get settled. I can't write when I am interrupted—burn three pages out of every four, and begin over again. In Germany, where I can't understand a word they say, I can settle down and write it off."

11a. The Clemens family trip to Europe lasted a year. He was interviewed at the gangplank upon his return aboard the steamer Gallia from Liverpool on September 2.

New York Star, ca. 3 September 1879; rpt. "Mark Twain as a Journalist," Vicksburg Commercial, 6 September 1879, 3.

"Will you return to journalistic work in Hartford?" inquired the reporter, as he was about to leave.

"No, I shall not return to it. If I escape from Elmira all right there will be one more private citizen in Hartford—that is all. I didn't grace any newspaper office there, to my knowledge."

"But you were connected with the Courant, were you not?"¹

"That's a fact. So I was. A telephone wire ran from the house where I stayed to the news shop. That's how you fellows got the idea that I was an editor. It's a joke. The secret is this. My wife was afraid something might happen, so she suggested a telephone about the time they first became communicative. I contracted for the thing and had one end fastened to the house, but for a while I didn't know what to do with the other end. You see the farm lies some distance out of Hartford, and is sometimes difficult of access at night time. Well, to be on the safe side of thing[s], I asked the chief of police to hold the other end, as the doctor, or clergyman, or I might be wanted home. Police headquarters shut up too early, he said. However, I was allowed to fix the troublesome terminus at the Courant shop, which is open all night. Somebody mistook the wire for a pipe for editorial gas, and so the story got around. It didn't hurt me any, but the Courant people suffered a great deal."

14a. Clemens railed to Chicago to attend the reunion of the Army of the Tennessee, gathered to honor U. S. Grant, the commander in chief of Union armies during the Civil War and the retired eighteenth President of the United States.

[Franc B. Wilkie,]² "Twain's Best Joke," Chicago Times, 17 November 1879, 1.

The quaint and original genius, Samuel L. Clemens,—Mark Twain,—told a story at this own expense while breakfasting with a journalistic friend...