Twain in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

“Memories of Mark Twain” (1920)

[157] === “Memories of Mark Twain” (1920) Brander Matthews Brander Matthews (1852–1929), the first professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University, was caught up in a dispute over copyright with Twain in the late 1880s. Matthews argued in favor of a robust international copyright agreement, while Twain, as Martin Buinicki explains (59–60), “saw property rights as matters of individual responsibility, rather than as divine or natural rights. He felt that one had to defend these rights actively to keep them.” in 1882, Laurence Hutton and Lawrence Barrett, Frank Millet and E. A. Abbey, W. M. Laffan and I organized an intermittent and sporadic dining club, which we called The Kinsmen, because we intended to gather in the practitioners of the kindred arts, and which had no officers, no dues, and no rules, except that an invitation to one of our meetings was to be accepted as an election to membership. I gave the first dinner; and at the second, given by Hutton a full year later, I was delighted to find myself sitting by the side of Mark Twain. Then began an intimacy which lasted until his death nearly thirty years thereafter. Later, when Huckleberry Finn was issued, I had the pleasure of reviewing it for the London Saturday Review, hailing it as one of the indisputable masterpieces of American fiction. This pleased Mark; and as he had somehow discovered that I had written the criticism he took occasion to thank me.1 Mark was also one of the earliest members of the Authors’ Club, of which I had been one of the founders; and I served with him on the executive committee of the American Copyright League. It was during our eight-year campaign for international copyright that my relation with Mark was a little strained though fortunately only for a brief period. Until the passage of our bill in 1891 no foreign author had any control over the publication of his writings in the United States; an American publisher could reprint without payment anything any British man of letters wrote; and as a result every American man of letters had to see his books sold in competition with twain in his own time [158] stolen goods. We all felt this keenly; but only a few of us knew that there were certain London publishers quite as willing to reprint American books without payment as certain New York publishers were to appropriate British books on the same terms. While we wanted the rights of the authors of the United Kingdom to be protected in the United States we also wanted the rights of the authors of the United States to be protected in the United Kingdom. In 1887 I prepared a paper for the New Princeton Review, which I called “American Authors and British Pirates,” and in which I collected examples of the cruel treatment accorded to certain of our writers, forced to behold their works reprinted in England without their permission and often with an offensive mutilation of the original in the vain effort to adjust it to the supposed prejudices of British readers.2 The facts in my article surprised many who had been ignorant of them; and the editor of the New Princeton Review, Prof. William M. Sloane, suggested that I might get together material for a second paper. So I wrote to half a dozen American authors who had been maltreated by British publishers , requesting them to supply me with particulars. One of my letters went to Mark; and a few days later Professor Sloane let me see Mark’s reply, which he had sent not to me but direct to the editor for publication in the New Princeton. It was a vehement protest against my suggestion that the British law needed any alteration; and it held me up to scorn for making the needless suggestion.3 Mark let his pen run away with him and poured ridicule upon me, in a fashion which was lacking in consideration for my feelings, even if it was not actually wanting in courtesy. It was a brilliant letter , certain to evoke abundant laughter from every reader—excepting only the one to whom it was addressed. It was also an unanswerable letter, so far as its inimitable manner was concerned; and yet it had to be answered somehow. What had roused the sudden wrath which had blazed up in Mark’s epistolary excoriation was my assertion that the British law could be improved, since it was perfectly satisfactory...