"I suppose it is because you are Mark Twain's daughter"
Autograph Letter Signed "Father", to his daughter Clara Clemens, about the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Fair.
New York: May 2, 1907.
Price: $6,000.00
About the item
Three pages, in ink, on folded small octavo sheet of letterhead. Usual folds, otherwise very good.
Item #376589
Clemens writes to his middle daughter ("O dear Ashcat"), giving an account of his visit, by Henry H. Roger's yacht Kanawha, to the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Fair: "...we did have a Foggy & gashly time! - after the first day of the fair, which was sunny & bright. The others deserted & fled home by rail; but Broughton & I stuck it out - resolved that we would never trust ourselves to the hated rail. We lay at anchor day after day smothered in white fog, & read, talked, smoked, yawned, gaped & cussed. (This was at Old Point Comfort). Once we went ashore & spent a couple of hours with the officers in Fortress Monroe ...."
He gives an account of trips ashore, shopping and being smitten and dumb-struck by "the most beautiful girl you could imagine; but I was so stupefied by the fog that I couldn't think of anything to say to her, so I didn't speak to her at all. I am still regretting it." He summarizes the first day of the Fair, including his attendance at the Virginia Governor's reception, where "I took it off his hands. It gave him a rest & he was thankful. I knew him & his wife before." He informs her he has heard of her success with singing recitals at Elmira and Utica, where she took the "house by storm..." suggesting somewhat off-handedly that "I suppose it is because you are Mark Twain's daughter. But anyway, it is splendid and I am glad." He closes with travel plans, that Miss Lyon is ill "& there is no one to fight the reporters" and signs "With lots of love, Father."
The Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition, marking the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown and the Virginia colony by settlers from England, was held in Norfolk, Virginia, from April 26 to November 30, 1907. A day after it closed, the New York Times called the exposition "the most colossal failure in the history of exhibitions", with the fair organizers on the hook to the federal government for a million-dollar loan.
Amusingly, Twain's and Rogers's departure from the fair aboard the yacht was unnoticed by the press, who declared the pair lost at sea (New York Times, May 4, 1907). Twain, for the second time in his life would have the reports of his demise greatly exaggerated, vowing in the press to conduct an "exhaustive investigation of this report that I have been lost at sea. If there is any foundation for the report, I will at once apprise the anxious public" (New York Times, May 5, 1907).
