Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America by Mark Perry

Author:Mark Perry [Perry, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588363886
Amazon: B000FC1MF0
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2004-05-03T21:00:00+00:00

MARK TWAIN MISSED all of this. Through most of November and December and all of January, he was on a reading tour with George Washington Cable—marketed by the two of them as the “Twins of Genius” tour. It was an exacting and exasperating time: During the tour Twain worried about the subscription sales of Huckleberry Finn, threatened to sue a company for printing pirated copies of his book (they are “thieves and swindlers,” he wrote to Charley), debated with Richard Watson Gilder about edits to the chapters that would appear in the Century, and argued incessantly with Cable, whom he described to Livy as “the pitifulest human louse I have ever known.” Twain complained about the long train rides, the weather, the people, the hotels, and Cable’s piety. During the first night of their tour, as Twain was relaxing in his hotel room with a book, Cable came to see him, Bible in hand, and read a chapter from the Old Testament. Twain listened politely, puffed on his cigar, and nodded seriously. Guileless, Cable waited for a note of thanks, but Twain was having none of it. “See here, Cable,” he said, “we’ll have to cut this part of the program out. You can read the Bible as much as you please so long as you don’t read it to me.” With that, Twain went back to his reading. The problem may well have been that during the tour Cable was greeted as warmly as Twain, and often had more success. The New York Times thought so, eviscerating Twain’s performance with words that Twain would not soon forget:

The management, in its newspaper advertisements, spoke of the entertainment as a “combination of genius and versatility,” but neglected to say which of the gentlemen had the genius and which the versatility. Some of those who were present last evening may have felt justified in coming to the conclusion that Mr. Cable represented both these elements, while Mr. Clemens was simply [a] man, after the fashion of that famous hunting animal one-half of which was pure Irish setter and the other half “just plain dog.” Mr. Cable was humorous, pathetic, weird, grotesque, tender, and melodramatic by turns, while Mr. Clemens confined his efforts to the ridicule of such ridiculous matters as aged colored gentlemen, the German language, and himself.

This rankled. “With his platform talent he was able to fatigue a corpse,” Twain wrote of Cable. By the end of December Twain, like Huck, was in a “sweat”—which was one of the words that Gilder wanted to excise from the chapters that Twain had given him. Just after the New Year, after a much needed break with Livy and the children in Hartford, Twain was on the road again. The first part of the tour had taken him and Cable to New England, New York, and as far west as Cleveland, but the last part of the tour would take the two into the Midwest and back to Twain’s Hannibal, before finishing in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.