Mark Twain, Collector Of Compliments

by Stephen J. Gertz

Little Montana Girl's Compliment
"She was gazing thoughtfully at a photograph of Mark Twain
on a neighbor's mantelpiece. Presently she said, reverently,
'We've got a Jesus like that at home only ours has more trimmings.'"

On January 11, 1908, The Lotos Club in New York City, one of the oldest literary associations in the United States, held a dinner in honor of one of its members, Samuel L. Clemens, aka Mark Twain.

Founded in New York City in 1870 by a group of young writers, journalists and critics, the Lotos Club initiated Twain to membership in 1873, who, waggish card that he was, immediately declared it “The Ace of Clubs.” At the dinner - attended by many luminaries - the guest of honor gave a speech announcing that he had become a collector of compliments. PBA Galleries is offering one of those compliments, in Twain's hand, in its Historic Autographs & Manuscripts with Archival Material sale May 8, 2014. It is estimated to sell for $2,500-$4,000.

As reported in the New York Times, January 12, 1908, Twain told the gathering:

"I wish to begin at the beginning, lest I forget it altogether. I wish to thank you for your welcome now and for that of seven years ago, which I forgot to thank you for at the time, also for that of fourteen years ago which I also forgot to thank you for. I know how it is; when you have been in a parlor and are going away, common decency ought to make you say the decent thing, what a good time you have had. Everybody does it except myself.

"I hope that you will continue that excellent custom of giving me dinners every seven years. I had had it on my mind to join the hosts of another world - I do not know which world - but I have enjoyed your custom so much that I am willing to postpone it for another seven years.

"The guest is in an embarrassing position, because compliments have been paid to him. I don't care whether you deserve it or not, but it is hard to talk up to it.

"The other night at the Engineers' Club dinner they were paying Mr. Carnegie here discomforting compliments. They were all compliments and they were not deserved, and I tried to help him out with criticisms and references to things nobody understood.

"They say that one cannot live on bread alone, but I could live on compliments. I can digest them. They do not trouble me. I have missed much in life that I did not make a collection of compliments, and keep them where I could take them out and look at them once in a while. I am beginning now. Other people collect autographs, dogs, and cats, and I collect compliments. I have brought them along.

"I have written them down to preserve them, and think that they're mighty good and exceedingly just."

[Twain began to read a few. The first, by essayist, critic, and editor Hamilton W. Mabie, declared that La Salle might have been the first man to make a voyage of the Mississippi, but that Mark Twain was the first man to chart light and humor for the human race].

"If that had been published at the time that I issued that book [Life on the Mississippi] it would have been money in my pocket. I tell you it is a talent by itself to pay complements gracefully and have them ring true. It's an art by itself.

"Now, here's one by my biographer. Well, he ought to know me if anybody does. He's been at my elbow for two years and a half. This is Albert Bigelow Paine:

"'Mark Twain is not merely the great writer, the great philosopher, but he is the supreme expression of the human being with its strengths and weaknesses.'

"What a talent for compression!"

[Novelist, editor, and critic William Dean Howells, Twain said, spoke of him as first of Hartford and ultimately of the solar system, not to say of the universe].

"You know how modest Howells is. If it can be proved that my fame reaches to Neptune and Saturn, that will satisfy even me. You know how modest and retiring Howells is, but deep down he is as vain as I am."

"Edison wrote: 'The average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person he generally selects Mark Twain.'

"Now here's the compliment of a little Montana girl, which came to me indirectly. She was in a room in which there was a large photograph of me. After gazing at it steadily for a time, she said:

"'We've got a John the Baptist like that.' 

"She also said: 'Only ours has more trimmings.'

"I suppose she meant the halo.

[Since the offered "compliment" is numbered “4” and the Times reported the little girl’s compliment after three prior, this sheet was most likely Twain’s reading copy; he extemporaneously changed some of the words but it was basically the same story].

"Now here is a gold miner's compliment. It is forty-two years old. It was my introduction to an audience to which I lectured in a log schoolhouse. There were no ladies there. I wasn't famous then. They didn't know me. Only the miners were there with their breeches tucked into their boot tops and with clay all over them. They wanted someone to introduce me, and then selected a miner, who protested that he didn't want to do on the ground that he had never appeared in public. This is what he said:

"'I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is he has never been in jail and the other is I don't know why...'"

The dinner was Twain-themed. As tasty as his speech was, the meal was tastier, a feast for those whose tongue for Twain went all the way. On the menu that evening:

Innocent Oysters Abroad.
Roughing It Soup.
Huckleberry Finn Fish.
Joan of Arc Filet of Beef.
Jumping Frog Terrapin.
Punch Brothers Punch.
Gilded Duck.
Hadleyburg Salad.
Life on the Mississippi Ice Cream.
Prince and the Pauper Cake.
Pudd'nhead Cheese.
White Elephant coffee.
Chateau Yquem Royals.
Pommery Brut.
Henkow Cognac.

Dishes served only in spirit included:

Double-Barrelled Detective Mystery Vegetable.

Connecticut Yankee Stew.

Mysterious Stranger Souvlaki.

Our compliments to the chef - and honoree.
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Image courtesy of PBA Galleries, with our thanks.
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Mark Twain a Bore?

by Alastair Johnston

If, like me, the steps to your bookshelf are paved with good intentions, you probably have Mark Twain's fat Autobiography volume 1 shoulder to shoulder with other "to read" titles. I delved into it, read whole chunks, but didn't start at page one and set forth, so now volume 2 is here, and time and tide waiting for no man, I jump, like Twain, in medias res.

Twain's autobiography, which he wrote by dictation, was just a rambling one-sided conversation full of random reminiscences, no holds barred, but often sweet or poignant, and not intended for publication until a century after his death. That century having elapsed in 2010 we now get one of his great works, in his own voice (The concluding third volume should be along any year now). After a lifetime as a famous raconteur polishing his delivery and perfecting his linguistic games, it's a glorious gift. He says it's like no other autobiography -- apart from perhaps Cellini's. There was a twinkle in his eye as he said that, I am sure. (Cellini however really did murder his rivals, Twain just told them, "I had in fancy taken his life several times every year, and always in new and increasingly cruel and inhuman ways, but that now I was pacified, appeased, happy, even jubilant; and that thenceforth I should hold him my true and valued friend and never kill him again.") You can open it anywhere and read any part and since short attention spans are the order of the day this kind of sporty reading is perfect.

If you are in any doubt that this is the greatest kind of American humor then sample ‪his "I've ALWAYS been into college girls" ‬routine (April 4, 1906), which is a hoot and certainly adumbrates the wit of Groucho Marx, Sid Perelman and others who followed Twain. He claims that his blushes at being asked to speak to a group of college girls were manufactured, for he is a master at appearing coy. "It makes me the most winning old thing that ever went among confiding girls. I held a reception on that stage for an hour or two, and all Vassar, ancient and modern shook hands with me. Some of the moderns were too beautiful for words and I was very friendly with those. I was so hoping somebody would want to kiss me for my mother, but I didn't dare to suggest it for myself. Presently, however, when it happened, I did what I could to make it contagious, and succeeded. This required art, but I had it in stock."

You may think of manufactured celebrity as a phenomenon of our era. Even if, like me, you cannot tell Justin Timberlake from Justin Bieber, you cannot avoid Paris Hilton or those rich Armenian women, what are they called, the Sarkastians? The Karkrashians? I try to ignore them (also), but since I do watch television and blindly follow Facebook links I am surprised how often their names turn up on the actual news, even though they are not known for being good at anything. Such celebrity bogosities are not merely of our time. Twain talks about Olive Logan. She married a penny-a-line copywriter and got him to put notices in the paper, "Olive Logan has taken a summer place at Cohasset," "Olive Logan thinks Transcendentalism is passing away," etc, until people in small towns began to wonder who she was. She then went on a lecture tour and made $100 a night for showing up and mouthing rubbish, but everyone went to see her. "I didn't think the day would ever come when my heart would soften towards Olive Logan," writes Twain, "and I would put my hands before my eyes if she were drowning, so as not to see it."

What's not to like about someone who said, "I speak French but I cannot understand it"? As a writer, Twain is second only to Melville and frankly who would you rather have dinner with? Whose reminiscences would you rather read? Melville put his early memories into two of the greatest novels ever written, Typee and Omoo. No amount of after-dinner talk could come close. When a certain twisted peripheral member of the book world died this year I recalled Twain's “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

The Man in White by Spy

Twain's thinking was ahead of his time. He decried slavery, opposed American intervention in the Philippines, wanted the US to denounce King Leopold of Belgium for his atrocities in the Congo (they didn't) -- generally his political views were out of step with the bozos who charged, bayonets fixed, along behind the government. He dressed in white because it suited him, saying he would really rather dress in a Coat of Many Colors if he could: "I would like to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets, resplendent with all the stunning dyes of the rainbow, and so would every sane man I have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." He was somewhere between a dandy and a hippie. A Philadelphia journalist write: "Mark is a bachelor, faultless in taste, whose snowy vest is suggestive of endless quarrels with Washington washerwomen; but the heroism of Mark is settled for all time, for such purity and smoothness was never seen before. His lavender gloves might have been stolen from some Turkish harem, so delicate were they in size; but more likely -- anything else were more likely than that." (Even anonymous journalists caught the spirit of his style.)

The New Yorker recently ran a good piece by Ben Tarnoff that pointed out Twain's currency: "Ironic narcissism is more or less our national default mode now, but Twain was ahead of his time." But Tarnoff cites reviews of volume one that condemned Twain as a boring old fart. Those pointing the finger were Adam Gopnik and Garrison Keillor. Really? Come on! Garrison Keillor, that smarmy git, called volume one "a ragbag of scraps." I am glad of Keillor's distinctive voice because it alerts me in time to turn off the radio before I have to listen to his pretentious twaddle. (People never paid him any mind when he was just Gary Keillor.) Talk about a "ragbag of scraps," his donkey dung may be sugar-coated but it is donkey dung nonetheless! I propose we drain Lake Woebegone, and, as Emperor Claudius said, "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out!"

"Gopnik" (a cross between a beatnik and a gobstopper or a tiny version of one of Gellett Burgess's Goops), wrote this piece dismissing Twain's first volume as a shaggy dog story without a punchline. Has he never read Tristram Shandy? That's an epic shaggy dog story without a punchline (unless the "site" of Uncle Toby's wound is considered a payoff) and something Gopnik might aspire to emulate if he doesn't want to end up lost in the footnotes to People Once Thought Smart Who Wrote in the New Yorker. The ages old juxtaposition of expert opinion versus the popular taste goes back to Pilgrim's Progress, the first example of a book where popular acclaim overrode the expert minority, according to Macauley. We don't need these critics to tell us why we shouldn't read Twain. Sure, he's rambling, that's the charm of it. You should be so lucky to have time to dictate your memoirs from your deathbed for two years!

Sam Clemens, apprentice printer in Missouri, proudly holds a typestick

Twain has given us so much, a lot of it not in the novels, but in conversations, letters, asides and these here dictations. Many years ago I wrote to the Mark Twain archive at UC Berkeley and asked if they could verify that Twain had coined the expression "Jesus H. Christ." They were generous with their time, and sent me a chunk of information from his autobiographical dictation which I used in my book on nineteenth-century typefounders' specimens (Alphabets to Order, British Library, 2000). The relevant parts in full occupy three pages of volume one, and concern Clemens' fellow apprentice printer on the Hannibal Courier, Wales McCormick. These three pages comprise a brilliant short story (with a brief digression on eating potatoes with Kaiser Wilhelm II). Roughly the tale is this: Sam and Wales are apprenticed to Mr Ament, publisher of the Hannibal Courier, who gives them board and clothes, but no pay. The clothes were the master's cast-offs: "I was only about half as big as Ament, consequently his shirts gave me the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus-tent, and I had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them short enough." Wales had the opposite problem, being a large lad, and was suffocated by the hand-me-downs. Mrs Ament played her part in the "Amentian idea" for she sweetened the apprentices' coffee herself with a deft trick. She dipped the teaspoon in the coffee first to make it wet then into the sugar bowl, but she turned the spoon over so what looked like a heaping spoon of sugar was in reality the bottom of the teaspoon with a thin layer of sugar on it which she then put into the lads' brew and stirred. 

The preacher Alexander Campbell came to town and gave a rousing sermon. The Campbellites so loved his words they subscribed $16 to have his sermon printed. The apprentices set up the work and made a proof but hit a snag. McCormick had left out two words in a thinly spaced line and there was not a break for another three pages which meant he would have to reset a hundred or more lines of solid matter, and furthermore, it was Saturday morning, coming up on their only afternoon off. Wales had the idea to abbreviate Jesus Christ to "J.C." "It made room for the missing words, but it took 99 percent of the solemnity out of a particularly solemn sentence. We sent off the revise and waited. We were not intending to wait long. In the circumstances we meant to get out and go fishing before that revise should get back, but we were not speedy enough." Sure enough Campbell appears and reads them a lecture on diminishing the savior's name. Wales decided since he would miss his afternoon's fishing he would at least have some sport, so enlarged the offending J.C. into Jesus H. Christ. "Wales knew that would make prodigious trouble, and it did. But it was not in him to resist it. He had to succumb to the law of his make. I don't remember what his punishment was, but he was not the person to care for that. He had already collected his dividend."

Like good ancient tomes these autobiographical volumes have chapter heads with synopses of the upcoming section so you can coast through to the bits you may want to read about General Grant, Ellen Terry, Petroleum V. Nasby or others of his contemporaries. But they are only fleeting personae: "This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back -- I get glimpses of them in the mirror -- and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography." How's that for honesty? His sly, self-deprecatory wit shines out of every page. There's a rich secret conspiratorial correspondence with a Brooklyn librarian over the banning of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn from the children's section of the public library that shows what a caring person he was. He immediately takes the librarian into his bosom and writes him long confidential letters, because he has found an ally. Some critics lament that so much attention is showered on one writer when there are other deserving writers who are neglected, but Twain is an archetype of a great writer and deserves our attention until he has had his say.
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Of Related Interest:

Mark Twain On How To Announce Your Marriage Engagement  
Fictional Newspapers of Mark Twain (And Then Some) 
Mark Twain Hapless Collector

Mark Twain On How To Announce Your Marriage Engagement

by Stephen J. Gertz

On October 16, 2013, Bonham's-Los Angeles is offering a three-page, recto and verso Autograph Letter Signed, dated Elmira, NY, February 5, 1869 by Mark Twain regarding his engagement to be married, in its Fine Books and Manuscripts including Historical Photographs sale. It is estimated to sell for $15,000-$25,000.

Samuel L. Clemens and Olivia Langdon, the woman who would become his wife, initially met at the end of 1867; together they attended a reading by Charles Dickens. Throughout 1868 Twain conducted his courtship of her primarily through letters. Olivia rejected his first proposal but accepted his second in 1869. Upon her acceptance, Clemens composed a clarion call to his family, less an engagement announcement than a gushing, self-deprecating declaration of intent that dares his family not to love his future wife, the sort of sentiment deeply appreciated by a prospective spouse.

The letter reads in full:

Olivia Clemens, neé Langdon.

My dear Mother & Brother & Sisters & Nephew & Niece, & Margaret: 

This is to inform you that on yesterday, the 4th of February, I was duly & solemnly & irrevocably engaged to be married to Miss Olivia L. Langdon, of Elmira, New York. Amen. She is the best girl in all the world, & the most sensible, & I am just as proud of her as I can be.

It may be a good while before we are married, for I am not rich enough to give her a comfortable home right away, & I don't want anybody's help. I can get an eighth of the Cleveland Herald for $25,000, & have it so arranged that I can pay for it as I earn the money with my unaided hands. I shall look around a little more, & if I can do no better elsewhere, I shall take it.
 

I am not worrying about whether you will love my future wife or not—if you know her twenty-four hours & then don't love her, you will accomplish what nobody else has ever succeeded in doing since she was born. She just naturally drops into everybody's affections that comes across her. My prophecy was correct. She said she never could or would love me—but she set herself the task of making a Christian of me. I said she would succeed, but that in the meantime she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit & end up tumbling into it—& lo! the prophecy is fulfilled. She was in New York a day or two ago, & George Wiley & his wife Clara know her now. Pump them, if you want to. You shall see her before very long. 

Love to all. Affect'ly 

Sam. 

P.S. Shall be here a week.

Twain, c. 1869.

They were married a year later. Their marriage a happy one, it lasted thirty-four years, enduring the death of two children and periodic financial troubles secondary to Clemens' weakness for get rich quick schemes. Aside from pen & paper, the only investment that ever paid off for him was his effort to win the heart of Olivia Langdon.

This letter is found in The Love Letters of Mark Twain, p. 64. Its provenance is solid: that of the prominent Twain scholar and collector Chester L. Davis, (1903-1987). It was last seen at Christie's New York, June 9, 1992, lot 35, when it sold for $9,500. 

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Letter image courtesy of Bonham's, with our thanks.
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Bad Afternoon of a Fawn: Bambi's Dark Secret Revealed

by Stephen J. Gertz

Thumper: Psst!  Hey, you! Who's your daddy?

Bambi: The Great Prince stag.

Thumper: No, I mean the guy who wrote you.

Bambi: Walt Disney?

Thumper: No, he adapted you. I mean the guy who brought you into the world.

Bambi: I don't know.

Thumper: Your author was Felix Salten, an Austrian Jew born in Hungary in 1869. He wrote you in German in 1923 and you were translated into English in 1928.

First edition (1923)

First edition in English (1928).

Thumper: His real name was Siegmund Saltzmann and his family moved to Vienna when he was an infant because the city granted Jews full citizenship in 1867; life was much easier there. When his father went broke he quit school and became an insurance salesman but, with an inch to write, began submitting poems and reviews to local journals. Soon, he was part of the Jung Wien (Young Vienna) movement and writing assignments came his way. In 1901 he published his first collection of short stories and afterward produced an average of a book a year - novels, short stories, essays, plays, you name it - under the pseudonym Felix Salten.

In 1906 he anonymously wrote a scandalous book.

Bambi: Scandalous? 

Thumper: Oh, yes. The book was Josefine Mutzenbacher, oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne, von ihr selbst erzählt.

Bambi: What's that mean?

Thumper: Josephine Mutzenbacher, or The Story of a Viennese Whore, as told by Herself. It's written in a very realistic and explicit manner.

Bambi: No! I'm shocked. Say it isn't so.

First edition.

Thumper: It is! It's a wild thing, privately published in an edition of 1000 copies for subscribers only and an instant hit. It's the most popular German erotic novel of all time. 

Thumper: It was first translated into English c. 1920s in a clandestine edition - a horrible job, all sex no style, Salten's humor lost as well as his voice, the rich flavor of the prose, and spirit of contemporary Vienna. This translation has been reprinted countless times; avoid it like a forest fire.

Thumper: The only translation into English that's worth reading is that done by Rudolf Schleifer in 1967 for Brandon House Library Editions out of North Hollywood, California. It was commissioned by Brian Kirby, the imprint's editor, who is considered to be the American Maurice Girodias due to his taste in fine erotica and boldness in publishing the finest erotic literature and translating for the first time into English many European erotic novels.

This edition bears an introduction by Hilary E. Holt, Ph.D., who did the translation under the pseudonym Rudolf Schleifer. Holt, an Austrian emigré to Los  Angeles, was a "sad, old man" according to Kirby, and a former professor living in a small, dumpy apartment in Hollywood  who translated for Kirby under the pseudonyms Rudolf Schleifer, Andre Gilbert, and Franz Mecklenberg. He  provided Kirby with many German erotic works from his personal collection, including Josefine Mutzenbacher. Holt also wrote introductions for the imprint, sometimes under his own name (when he'd done the book's translation under one of his pseudonyms), sometimes under the pseudonyms John S. Murphy, James E. White, Albert W. Lowy, or Allan D. Warner.

In his introduction Holt recalled a conversation he had with Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), the Vienesse novelist, about Mutzenbacher.

"Stefan Zweig was the only mortal who worked-up enough courage to ask the alleged ghost-writer of the Mutzenbacher Memoirs, Felix Salten, whether he had actually authored the book. The famous author of Bambi, et al, Zweig's senior by twelve years, was a very serious gentleman of dignified bearing which definitely did not encourage any indiscreet questions. Zweig mentinoed this episode to me, 37 years ago, in the following words:

"'Salten and I were discussing the literary phenomenon of famous authors writing bawdy stories containing four letter words and describing sexual bouts with Rabelaisian frankness. Salten reminded me of the poem Der Herr von Iste by Goethe ["Mr. Iste" is Goethe's penis, who refused to cooperate when Goethe, age 78, met a willing wench]. I, in turn, mentioned Mark Twain's bawdy story dealing with the court of Elizabeth I, 1601.

"'I thought this a good occasion to question Salten about his alleged authorship of the Mutzenbacher story. He smiled mysteriously and said, 'If I deny it, you won't believe me, and if I admit it, you'll think I am teasing you. So...' and he shrugged. To me this was a badly disguised admission. Knowing Salten well, I realized he'd have become very angry at being asked such a question unless he was the author.'"

Bambi: I'm plotzing; I need to lie down. It's like discovering daddy was an axe-murderer.

Thumper: More like a pimp. 

Bambi: I feel corrupted.

Thumper: You are. Blame it on Walt Disney. You were born a roe-deer. Disney played Frankenstein and turned you into a white-tailed deer.

Bambi: I feel tainted.

Thumper: You feel tainted? In the book I'm Friend Hare. Disney turned me into Thumper, a rabbit with paw pads. Rabbits don't have paw pads. I'm a freak.

Felix Salten reading to his children.

"The saying is, that young whores become old, religious crones, but that was not my case. I became a whore at an early age and experienced everything a woman can ... in bed, on chairs, tables, standing against walls, benches, lying on the grass, in dark hall-ways, in private bedchambers, on railroad trains, in lodging houses, in jail; in fact in every conceivable place where it was possible...but I have no regrets. I am along in years now...the enjoyment which my sex afforded me is fast disappearing. I am rich but faded, and often being very lonesome, but it never entered my mind, although in the past years I was religious... to now do penance."

That's the opening to the lousy first edition in English.

"When I remember the old popular saying that young whores turn into religious bigots when they become old, I must claim to be one of the few exceptions. Yes, I am old now, and have lost my good looks, and though I am wealthy, I often suffer from loneliness; but I don't regret my past one little bit and don't feel I have to do penance. I believe in God, but I dislike making a show of religion which is a private concern.

"My sex education started very early in life, and theory and practice were never separated. I have experienced everything that a woman can in male company, be it in bed, on the floor, on tables or chairs, leaning against the walls of old houses, in the open field, in carriages and on trains, in military barracks, in prisons and bordellos."

That's the opening as translated by Holt. Quite a difference!

As "translated" by Paul J. Gillette in 1970 for Holloway House in Los Angeles it isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Gillette was notorious for using existing translations of erotic novels, paraphrasing them, and adding graphic scenes not present in the original.

By the way, the memoir is fiction but Josefine Mutzenbacher was real. Born in 1859 in Ottakring, Vienna's 17th district, by the 1890s she had amassed enough wealth to buy a huge, ranch-like estate in the Austrian province of Carinthia. 

Bambi: How do you know so much about books? You must read a lot.

Thumper: Constantly. You know what they say - rabbits do it like bunnies.

Bambi: Thumper the book humper?

Thumper: You're not as innocent as you look, boy. I presume you've experienced sex.

Bambi: I'm only in it for the doe.

Thumper: Ultimately, so was Josephine Mutzenbacher.

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[SALTEN, Felix]. Josefine Mutzenbacher oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt. [N.p., n.p.] Privatdruck, 1906. First edition, limited to 1000 copies for subscribers only. Octavo. 332 pp.  In the original silk envelope.

Hayn-Gotendorf VIII, 477: "An extremely naturalistic portrayal of the life of a prostitute seeking Sotadicum."

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Image of title page to first edition of Josefine Mutzenbacher courtesy of  Buchauktionen Hauff & Auvermann of Berlin, offering a copy in its Sale 71, Moderne Literatur und Kunst, October 24, 2013 (featuring an excellent selection of fine erotica), with our thanks. The lower margin of the title page has been Photoshopped to remove an inventory ticket.

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Mr. Bigamy's Confessions: An Old Seven Wives Tale

by Stephen J. Gertz

Some one has said that if any man would faithfully write his autobiography, giving truly his own history and experiences, the ills and joys, the haps and mishaps that had fallen to his lot, he could not fail to make an interesting story; and Disraeli makes Sidonia say that there is romance in every life. How much romance, as well as sad reality, there is in the life of a man who, among other experiences, has married seven wives, and has been seven times in prison - solely on account of the seven wives, may be learned from the pages that follow.

He's just a guy who can't say no. The guy in question is L.A. Abbott (b. 1813), who, in 1870, published an anonymous memoir of marriage craps, lucky seven not so lucky for our "matrimonial monomaniac," who, evidently, found the process of divorce distasteful so why bother? The trials and tribulations of a bigamist ensue.

It was all a series of misunderstandings, claims Abbott, a homeopathic doctor. When he took a young lass with him on his professional rounds out of town, for instance, she was the one who claimed they were married, not him, who was, after all, still married to another. When his brother-in-law found out about this incident, the gods of matrimony rained hell and Abbott wound up in the hoosegow.

Spoiler Alert: the farmer's daughter makes an appearance:

“From the day, almost, when I began to board with this farmer there sprung up a strong attachment between myself and his youngest daughter which soon ripened into mutual love.”  

Mutual love often ripens in Abbott's life, alas, too often at the same time. First comes love, then comes marriage, then come cops in the jailhouse carriage. It's one misadventure after another as our hero takes it on the lam throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New England, Canada, and California, one step ahead of the authorities - and in-laws with pitchforks and torches. But never for long. You can run but you can't hide: Abbott becomes acquainted with the penal system x seven, prison scrapes and daring escapes. Oh, and he forges bank notes, steals, and kidnaps his own son - who later tries to murder him. Citizens of the Bay State will be fascinated by Abbott's discussion of "Love-Making in Massachusetts," whence the farmer's daughter worsts Abbott in Worcester.

Save for "flogging the devil" out of one wife, it's one serio-comic connubial calamity after another, escapades aplenty, the entire book neatly summarized in its Table of Contents, which reads like a film treatment for a whacked-out farce, Mel Brooks & Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage Monomaniac. Caveat: beware of milliners on the make.

Frontispiece.

CHAPTER I. THE FIRST AND WORST WIFE. My Early History. The First Marriage. Leaving Home to Prospect. Sending for My Wife. Her Mysterious Journey. Where I Found Her. Ten Dollars for Nothing. A Fascinating Hotel Clerk. My Wife's Confession. From Bad to Worse. Final Separation. Trial for Forgery. A Private Marriage. Summary Separation.

CHAPTER II. MISERIES FROM MY SECOND MARRIAGE. Love-Making in Massachusetts. Arrest for Bigamy. Trial at Northampton. A Stunning Sentence. Sent to State Prison. Learning the Brush Business. Sharpening Picks. Prison Fare. In the Hospital. Kind Treatment. Successful Horse-Shoeing. The Warden my Friend. Efforts for my Release, A Full Pardon.

CHAPTER III. THE SCHEIMER SENSATION. The Scheimer Family. In Love with Sarah. Attempt to Elope. How it was Prevented. Second Attempt. A Midnight Expedition. The Alarm. A Frightful Beating, Escape. Floggiing the Devil Out of Sarah. Return to New Jersey. " Boston Yankee." Plans to Secure Sarah.

CHAPTER IV. SUCCESS WITH SARAH. Mary Smith as a Confederate. The Plot. Waiting in the Woods. The Spy Outwitted. Sarah Secured. The Pursuers Baffled. Night on the Road. Efforts to Get Married. " The Old Offender." Married at Last. A Constable After Sarah. He Gives it Up. An Ale Orgie. Return to " Boston Yankee's." A Home in Goshen.

CHAPTER V. HOW THE SCHEIMERS MADE ME SUFFER. Return to Scheimer's. Peace, and then Pandemonium. Frightful Family Row. Running for Refuge. The Gang Again. Arrest at Midnight. Struggle with my Captors. In Jail Once More. Put in Irons. A Horrible Prison. Breaking Out. The Dungeon. Sarah's Baby. Curious Compromises. Old Scheimer my Jailer. Signing a Bond. Free Again. Last Words from Sarah,.

CHAPTER VI. FREE LIFE AND FISHING. Taking Care of Crazy Men. Carrying off a Boy. Arrested for Stealing my Own Horse and Buggy. Fishing in Lake Winnepisiogee. An Odd Landlord. A Woman as Big as a Hogshead. Reducing the Hogshead to a Barrel. Wonderful Verification of a Dream. Successful Medical Practice. A Busy Winter in New Hampshire. Blandishments of Captain Brown. I go to Newark, New Jersey.

CHAPTER VII. WEDDING A WIDOW AND THE CONSEQUENCES. I Marry a Widow. Six Weeks of Happiness. Confiding a Secret, and the Consequences. The Widow's Brother. Sudden Flight from Newark. In Hartford, Conn. My Wife's Sister Betrays Me. Trial for Bigamy. Sentenced to Ten Years' Imprisonment. I Become a " Bobbin Boy." A Good Friend. Governor Price Visits Me in Prison. He Pardons Me. Ten Years' Sentence Fulfilled in Seven Months.

Attempt To Elope With Sarah Scheimer.
An exciting bridal shower and bachelor party rolled into one.

CHAPTER VIII. ON THE KEEN SCENT. Good Resolutions. Enjoying Freedom. Going After a Crazy Man. The Old Tempter in a New Form. Mary Gordon. My New " Cousin." Engaged Again. Visit to the Old Folks at Home. Another Marriage. Starting for Ohio. Change of Plans. Domestic Quarrels. Unpleasant Stories about Mary. Bound Over to Keep the Peace. Another Arrest for Bigamy. A Sudden Flight Secreted Three Weeks in a Farm House. Recaptured at Concord. Escaped Once More. Traveling on the Underground Railroad. In Canada.

CHAPTER IX. MARRYING TWO MILLINERS. Back in Vermont. Fresh Temptations. Margaret Bradley. Wine and Women. A Mock Marriage in Troy. The False Certificate. Medicine and Millinery. Eliza at Saratoga. Marrying Another Milliner. Again Arrested for Bigamy. In Jail Eleven Months. A Tedious Trial. Found Guilty. Appeal to Supreme Court. Trying to Break Out of Jail. A Governor's Promise. Second Trial. Sentenced to Three Years' Imprisonment.

CHAPTER X. PRISON LIFE IN VERMONT. Entering Prison. The Scythe Snath Business. Blistered Hands. I Learn Nothing. Threaten to Kill the Shop Keeper. Locksmithing. Open Rebellion. Six Weeks in the Dungeon. Escape of a Prisoner. In the Dungeon Again. The Mad Man Hall. He Attempts to Murder the Deputy. I Save Morey's Life. Howling in the Black Hole. Taking Off Hall's Irons. A Ghastly Spectacle. A Prison Funeral. I am Let Alone. The Full Term of my Imprisonment.

CHAPTER XI. ON THE TRAMP. The Day of my Deliverance. Out of Clothes. Sharing with a Beggar. A Good Friend. Tramping Through the Snow. Weary Walks. Trusting to Luck. Com fort at Concord. At Meredith Bridge. The Blaisdells. Last of the "Blossom" Business. Making Money at Portsmouth. Revisiting Windsor. An Astonished War Den. Making Friends of Enemies. Inspecting the Prison. Going to Port Jervis,

CHAPTER XII. ATTEMPT TO KIDNAP SARAH SCHEIMER'S BOY. Starting to See Sarah. The Long Separation. What I Learned About Her. Her Drunken Husband. Change of Plan. A Suddenly-Formed Scheme. I Find Sarah's Son. The First Interview. Resolve to Kidnap the Boy. Remonstrance of my Son Henry. The Attempt. A Desperate Struggle. The Rescue. Arrest of Henry. My Flight into Pennsylvania. Sending Assistance to my Son. Return to Port Jervis. Bailing Henry. His Return to Belvidere. He is Bound Over to be Tried for Kidnapping. My folly.

CHAPTER XIII. ANOTHER WIDOW. Waiting for the Verdict. My Son Sent to State Prison. What Sarah Would Have Done. Interview with my First Wife. Help for Henry. The Biddeford Widow. Her Effort to Marry Me. Our Visit to Boston. A Warning A Generous Gift. Henry Pardoned. Close of the Scheimer Account. Visit to Ontario County. My Rich Cousins. What Might Have Been. My Birthplace Revisited.

CHAPTER XIV. MY SON TRIES TO MURDER ME. Settling Down in Maine. Henry's Health. Tour Through the South. Secession Times. December in New Orleans. Up the Mississippi. Leaving Henry in Massachusetts. Back in Maine Again. Return to Boston. Profitable Horse-Trading. Plenty of Money. My First Wife's Children. How They Have Been Brought Up. A Barefaced Robbery. Attempt to Blackmail Me. My Son Tries to Rob and Kill Me. My Rescue. Last of the Young Man.

CHAPTER XV. A TRUE WIFE AND HOME AT LAST. Where Were All My Wives? Sense of Security. An Imprudent Acquaintance. Moving from Maine. My Property in Rensselaer County. How I Lived. Selling a Recipe. About Buying a Carpet. Nineteen Lawsuits. Sudden Departure for the West. A Vagabond Life for Two Years. Life in California. Return to the East. Divorce from my First Wife. A Genuine Marriage. My Farm. Home at Last.

Wright, in American Fiction 1774-1900, wrongly includes the book as a novel. Kaplan, in contrast,  rightly includes it in American Autobiographies. It's too fantastic to be phoney. “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't” (Mark Twain).

Twain would have loved this book. Groucho Marx would have had a field day with it.

Capt. Spaulding: [to Mrs. Rittenhouse and Mrs. Whitehead] Let's get married.
Mrs. Whitehead: All of us?
Capt. Spaulding: All of us.
Mrs. Whitehead: Why, that's bigamy.
Capt. Spaulding: Yes, and it's big of me too.
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N.B.: A word to the wise (and wives): If you write and publish a book anonymously keep your name off the copyright page.
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[ABBOTT, L. A.]. Seven Wives and Seven Prisons: or, Experiences In the Life of a Matrimonial Monomaniac. A True Story, Written By Himself. New York: Published for the Author, 1870. First edition. Twelvemo. 205 pp. Original green cloth, gilt lettering. Frontispiece, three plates.

Kaplan, American Autobiographies 10. Wright II, 3. 
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Images courtesy of Garrett Scott, Bookseller, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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Fictional Newspapers of Mark Twain (And Then Some)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Objective journalism is a modern concept.  Through the end of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, subjective newspapers were the norm, typically assuming the attitude of the publisher, editor, or printer, roles that often met in the same person.

Samuel L. Clemens (early writing as W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab before adopting the pseudonym Mark Twain), began as a tramp printer, soon reporter for a handful of newspapers, and knew the species well. In Journalism in Tennessee, a story he wrote (as Mark Twain) while editor for the Buffalo Express, September 4, 1869, he satirically relates an apocryphal sojourn with the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop, a paper run by a Chief Editor who knew a thing or two about the realities of journalism. 

In the story, Twain reports that he wrote the following on assignment:

"The editors of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake evidently labor under a misapprehension with regard to the Dallyhack railroad…"

To which the editor responded, "Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such gruel as that? Give me the pen!"

The editor's rewrite:

"The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad…"

In addition to the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop, and Semi-Weekly Earthquake, Twain, in this story, also cites the apocryphal Moral Volcano, Mud Springs Morning Howl, Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, and the Daily Hurrah.

There were, surely, other dubious American newspapers of the nineteenth century that proudly declared their character but Twain, alas, does not mention them. We at Booktryst are not so shy. Would that modern papers cut through the claptrap to get to the heart of their product, and conscious or unconsciously assert, in their names, the subjective reality behind the objective fantasy with nineteenth century gloss and piquant result:

The Daily Noose

The Conniption Fit and Farm News

The Pottsville Primal Scream

The Daily Fracas and Sunday Fuss

The  Clamorer

The Afternoon Lather

The Town Crier & Weekly Weeper

The Herald-Prevaricator

The Mendacity Times

The Morning Bracer

The Daily Oy

The Paroxysm & Apoplexy Ledger

The Morning Drizzle and Evening Deluge

The Sunday Moral Hazard

The Daily Mudslide

The Tuscaloosa Seer and Tea Leaf

The Newel Post & Sub-Intelligencer

The Washington Blind Observer

The Richmond Detached Retina

The Louisville Corrective Lens

The Country Crock & Crackpot

The Denver Dismal-Register

The Amityville Horror-Express

The Basal Cell Carcinoma-Standard

Journalism in Tennessee was recently reprinted in a new book I cannot say enough good things about, Typographical Tourists, which we recently reviewed.

The typographical device is courtesy of Poltroon Press, with our thanks.

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Readers are invited to submit their own apocryphal newspaper names in the Comments section.
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The Wanderlust And Wastrel Lives Of Vagabond Printers

by Stephen J. Gertz

In spite of the fact that I received a law degree, 
I have never been in court except to plead guilty.
                    - Col. Will K. Visscher, tramp printer

Between the American Civil War and the introduction of the Linotype machine in the 1890s, a curious sub-species of Homo Sapien roamed the mountains and prairies,  dusty trails and roads to nowhere and everywhere throughout the United States.

Escaping heartbreak, following the next drink, deserting the Army, coping with war trauma, fleeing debts, the wages of vice, the humiliation of typographical errors, or simply heeding  the call of the  wild, tramp printers populated the landscape. Most were well-educated, many came from respectable families. What they all had in common was that when urge struck or circumstance befell they resigned their position, collected their pay and hit the road.

What Alastair M. Johnston, editor of Typographical Tourists: Tales of the Tramping Printer, a new book from Johnston's Berkeley-based Poltroon Press, has done is a fascinating joy, pulling out of the oven a fine loaf of printing history, rich and nourishing, previously sliced but never so generously nor spread with such tasty condiments and wry wit. The condiments have tang. Employing “artistic printing” ornaments from the 1880s,  Johnston used all the Victorian typefaces in his shop for headpieces and a fair amount of “clip art” - small news cuts from the specimen books of the late nineteenth century to evoke the period.

In thirty-five chapters based upon contemporary newspaper stories or wholly reprinting articles from 19th century trade periodicals, you'll meet, amongst many characters:

Morningstar, a serial prankster who, left alone to compose, would write and print announcements and advertisements of unusual candor: "Now is the time to die. Perkins is giving cut price funerals and will bury people at bargain prices..."; Beanbody, a gifted forger of letters of recommendation from former employers he'd burned; Rocky Mountain Smith (or was it Jones?);  Texas Jack, who "wore a sombrero, top boots, and a long linen duster" and was the fastest setter in the West; "Shortalize" Murray, who employed abbreviations uniquely his own; Alexander Cameron, a Scotsman who, after incurring the wrath of his boss and being fired continued to show up for work anyway, his employer ultimately capitulating to his charm; Old Barney, who  thus explained his chronic homelessness: "my blood is too quick...It would be impossible for me to settle down...prosperity would wear me out...Three meals a day and a place to sleep [would] eventually kill me;" and Thomas McKenna, "reputed to be one of the oldest printers in the country. He was old when the oldest printers on the Eagle were kids, and there is a legend about him to the effect that he was seen around the office when Gutenberg and Faust were making their first experiments with movable types."

"The old-time tramp printer was generally 'an amoosing cuss,' as Artemus Ward would say." Many tramp printers, as Ward, became writers, and we learn that some "set their matter 'right outer their heads,'" avoiding pen and paper altogether, a mind-boggling process to contemplate. Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Horace Greeley were tramp printers in their youth, as was Lincoln's favorite author, political humorist Rev. Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby.

You'll also get to know Mark Twain (“as a typesetter he was slower than the wrath of God”) and Bret Harte, who, it was reported in 1876, "admits that he learned the printer's trade. He says he could work six quarts of type per day on a hand-press, and could correct a roller as good as anybody."

And what of the female compositor? "They never 'sojer,' they never bother the editors for chewing tobacco; they never prowl around among the exchanges for The Police Gazette; they never get themselves full of budge...they never swear about the business manager, they do not smoke nasty old clay pipes..." That's why the lady is not a tramp.

Only problem? Entering the trade by necessity, single women tended to depress wages. The solution? "Select a pretty, modest and amiable compositress, and take her out of the printing office by marrying her. If you cannot do this, because you already have a wife, encourage others to do it."

What inspired Johnston, a master printer who has managed to stay in one place, to take up the hobo's bindle and stick and bum the scholar's road?

"While working in the Kemble Collection of the California Historical Society I began to find stories and memoirs in trade periodicals (such as the Inland Printer, The Pacific Union Printer, The Printer & Bookmaker) about tramp printers. Some were better written than others, and I began collecting them. I used the material for performances in which I would dress up in a top hat and frock coat and relate the tales of the tramping printer. One memorable event was held at the historic Historical Society premises, when I teamed up with my friend Steve Lavoie to perform - however they wouldn’t let us light the hurricane lamp or smoke our cigar stubs, so we were limited to nipping on a bottle of Jack for punctuation...

"...Soon I had two folders of raw material and decided it was time to put the material in order before it got too unwieldy. But then I discovered the Library of Congress Historic American Newspaper archive which yielded many more wonderful tales tucked between ads for shoe polish and draught horses. I was overwhelmed with great source material and could cherry-pick it for this anthology, tailoring it so the stories lead into one another."

Typographical Tourists is an extremely colorful, often wildly amusing, ink-stained On the Road, with Johnston steering us through the world of printers with type in their blood but ants in their pants, compelled by personal demons or nomadic spirits to a precarious existence leavened by an adventurous, if impecunious, black-ink life rich in colorful anecdotes and stories. Johnston has performed a fine service by collecting them here in one place from diverse sources, known, obscure, or merely forgotten. It's a movable type feast, accent on the movable, a travelogue through the peripatetic world of the tramp printer.

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JOHNSTON, Alastair M. (editor). Typographical Tourists. Tales of Tramping Printers. Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 2012. Octavo. 178 pp, including bibliography. Illustrated wrappers. $20.
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The Apocryphal Cookbooks of Famous Novelists

LAWRENCE, Cynthia [pseud. of Lillian Hellman?]. Barbie's Easy-As-Pie Cookbook.
New York: Random House, 1964.
Though she preferred anonymity, we're pleased that the Unfinished Woman
had time to finish this book, attributed to her based upon its Stalinist sympathies.

Recently, Kelvin Johnson, an adult-bookstore clerk in Baltimore, MD, bought the contents of a self-storage unit at auction. Within was box of books that upon close examination inspired Johnson to contact lawyers, accountants, and rare book dealers.

“I’m not much of a vanilla-book person,” Johnson said, “but I do know that none of these authors were known for their work in the kitchen. They’re all cookbooks.”

The news has rocked the literary establishment.

“We all feel like we’ve been kneaded, and flattened with a rolling pin,” Marilyn Bagley, Professor of English Literature at West Covina Community College in Southern California and author of Heavy Metal and Hip-Hop Motifs in Victorian Novels 1840-1860: The Foreshadow of Ozzie Osborne, Original 50 Cent, and the Quest For Bling Within the Works of William Thackeray and George Eliot, reported. “All our bubbles have been squooshed.”

Basil Pine-Coffin, a literary forensics specialist and rare book dealer that Johnson has hired to appraise the books, said, “stylistically, they’re spot on; there’s no question in my mind that they are genuine. They appear to be vanity editions, and one-offs – unique. They have certainly never been heard of or seen before. This is an amazing discovery that will provide scholars with plenty to chew on for many years to come. The books are priceless - but we’re working on it.”

A few highlights from the trove:

Mark Twain married his interest in gastronomy with his affection for the vernacular and erotic, and thus brought A Tramp, A Broad, and Huckleberry Pie out of the oven and onto the dessert tray.

Who knew that Charles Dickens was a closet chocolatier? Barnaby Fudge melts in your mouth.

Was Edgar Allen Poe a secret Jew? No one has ever imagined it. But The Tell-Tale Calves Liver, a tract on trayfe (non-kosher), strongly suggests that the idea ain’t just chopped liver.

William Styron suffered from depression for much of his adult life yet he, apparently, found joy in the simple pleasures and so bequeathed Sophie’s Choice Brisket to us.

Portrait of a Lady Finger is surely Henry James’ lightest confection.

We now know what drove F. Scott Fitzgerald to drink. The Beautiful and the Damned Angel Cake is a bittersweet tragedy.

True, she didn’t write fiction. Yet environmentalists and litterateurs will be seared when they learn that when not spraying the truth on pesticides Rachel Carson tacitly wrote The Silent Spring Chicken. No comment on this understated gustatory salute to Cornish game hens and the many ways to prepare them, sotto voce, and hormone-free.

It is likely that no one will ever tackle James Joyce’s contribution to the dinner table. No kitchen consultants have been able to make head or tail out of Finnegan’s Cake, much less bake it. But that shouldn’t stop it from winning the Pillsbury Bake-Off; it’s a modern classic that will be much admired though rarely eaten.

William Faulkner, it turns out, spent as much time with a baking sheet as a sheet of paper. One afternoon, he asked his Hollywood employer, studio-chief Jack Warner, if he could finish writing at home. Warner looked at his watch and said, sure, go ahead. A week later, Warner was pissed-off. “Where the fuck is Faulkner?” Turns out, Faulkner had something in the oven – at home in Oxford, Mississippi, where he apparently fled to compose the following soufflés: The Sound and the Fricassee; As I Lay Frying; Intruder in the Crust; Requiem For a Bun; and Albacore, Albacore!

Johnson is very excited. And the stakes are high. At a press conference this morning his team announced their appraisal of the collection, a staggering $200,000,000.

Yet all is not well in the world of literary dishes - instant riches.

James Salt, the respected rare book dealer that Johnson originally brought in to help with the project, excused himself early on. He believes the collection may only be worth $200, at best.

“I smell fish,” Salt sniffed, “and I’m not talking about Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea Bass: 20 Lite N’ Easy Meals.

“While it’s true that Tolstoy hated Italian food I seriously doubt that he would devote his time and labor to a 1,000 page book about his struggle with it. I don’t care how many so-called experts assert otherwise, I will never be convinced that he wrote War On Pizza.”

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