The message below is in response to an article in the Mark Twain Annual. I felt it needed a timely response but did not warrant more of a response than what I've said below. I hope the plain-text appears readable in the Forum! I hope Twainians take particular note of the two new discoveries in my on-going research into the origins of Sam Clemens' nom de plume. The fact that Vanity Fair was being sold from a news-stand in Virginia City and being reprinted in a local newspaper in 1861 --a paper quite familiar to Clemens-- is very strong evidence. Sadly, only a handful of Virginia City newspapers before February, 1863 are known to survive, so this is the best evidence we have from Virginia City. I have gathered up quite a bit of other evidence as well, but will save it for another article when I've finished my research. *************** Two New Discoveries and a Rehash Refuted The latest _Mark Twain Annual_ (volume 12, 2014) contains an article that will be of interest to those who have read about the three conflicting accounts of how Sam Clemens took hold of his famous _nom de plume_. In Carolyn Grattan Eichin's "From Sam Clemens to Mark Twain: Sanitizing the Western Experience," the bar tab story is presented once more as a viable account of how he took on his pen-name. The reason given for resurrecting this previously debunked story is that the motivations and veracity of the three people who provided similar versions of the bar tab story at different times in western newspapers (an anonymous writer using the name "Washoe Genius" in 1866, George W. Cassidy in 1877, and later on a fireman named Thomas Sawyer) had not been fully and fairly investigated. It's always useful to re-examine these stories, and this case sounded promising, and she provides some interesting biographical background on these people and their accounts, but in the end the bar tab legend arrives back where it started: a story told (or merely retold) by three people, none of whom can be demonstrated to have known or even to have ever met Mark Twain. The reasons she gives for finding Cassidy a credible witness are twofold: because he was in Nevada at the same time as Sam Clemens and because he was an educated and successful citizen (Eichin 117). This seems too thin an explanation. He was a local politician and later a member of Congress, the sort of credentials that did not impress Mark Twain during his Nevada days or later in life, and it adds no credibility to his story. The account credited to the "Washoe Genius" is anonymous, so his identity and veracity cannot be proven, and the veracity of the account by Thomas Sawyer, who also claimed to be the original source for Mark Twain's famous character, has been debunked by R. Kent Rasmussen and Barbara Schmidt in a "Briefly Noted" Mark Twain Forum review of a book about Sawyer, Rpbert Graysmith's _Black Fire_. Grattan Eichin embraces that book and says that Twain only "mildly rebuked Sawyer's claim" to be the original Tom Sawyer, but in fact Twain candidly denied ever knowing anyone by that name and said "that story lacks a good deal in the way of facts" (Scharnhorst, _Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews_ 174). There are other problems with those accounts. The Cassidy account lists several people who were supposedly witnesses to the bar tab story, among them Dan de Quille (William Wright), but none of those named ever confirmed Cassidy's story and Mark Twain emphatically denied it. The Sawyer account puts Bret Harte and Sam Davis in Virginia City with Mark Twain, in flagrant defiance of historical fact. In fact, both the Cassidy and the Sawyer accounts have the tone of embellishment, with their possible origins in the anonymous 1866 account. Guy Cardwell commented on their folklorish nature when he debunked the bar tab story, and I recommend his 1975 article as worthwhile reading. This rereading of the bar tab stories does not note that in startling contrast to these three hearsay accounts by unsubstantiated witnesses, we have no mention of the bar tab story in any of the books, memoirs, articles, interviews, or correspondence that survive by those who _did_ know Mark Twain in Virginia City: Dan de Quille, Joe Goodman, Orion and Mollie Clemens, William H. Clagett, Clement T. Rice, William M. Stewart, James W. Nye, and many others less known like Rollin M. Daggett, Robert M. Howland, J. B. Graham, Augustus W. Oliver, John C. Lewis, G. T. Sewall, et al. The author says the men who provided the bar tab stories "believed themselves to be truthful" and that "it is the realm of the academic historian to value those memories within a context that makes the past useful to the present." (Grattan Eichin 118). Frankly, I don't know what this means, but I'd caution against trusting bar-room recollections in general, and believing what you read in newspapers, even old ones. Grattan Echin proposes that Mark Twain made up the Capt. Sellers story to hide his embarrassing drinking and sexual exploits during his Nevada years. But she does not account for why Mark Twain would have famously asked his western friends to write letters of reference on his behalf to his future father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, or why he would have invited former Nevada friends like Joe Goodman and Dan de Quille to Hartford where they met his wife Olivia and stayed several months (Goodman in 1871; de Quille in 1875). That's not exactly the behavior of a newly married man with deep dark secrets to keep from his family and Nook Farm friends. The 1975 debunking by Guy Cardwell is attacked, as is Horst Kruse, and the author seems particularly upset with my article about the probable origins of Mark Twain's _nom de plume_ that appeared in the _Mark Twain Journal_ last year, calling it "specious" and based on "intuition." Oh well, I tried not to be. She is selective and inaccurate in her presentation of my theory. Frequently demanding documentary proof--a "smoking gun" she calls it--that does not survive in the historical record. She berates me for "extrapolating" a 20th century term ("brand") to Mark Twain's _nom de plume_, but Mark Twain himself said "If a man puts a certain trademark upon a certain _brand_ of cloth he has no rights to sell the public another sort of cloth under that same trademark. But authors as a rule do not look upon a _nom de plume_ as a trademark, do they? Perhaps not, but I do. Mark Twain is my trademark." (Scharnhorst 229). Clearly, I did not have to extrapolate very far. She also misreads my suggestion that _The Silver Age_ was a possible source where Mark Twain might have seen an exchange file of _Vanity Fair_, and says flatly that he never wrote for that paper. I never said he did, but the editors at MTP say he may have helped write a piece for that paper (_Letters I_:212,n.11) and I do cite them. She implies that _Vanity Fair_ was a newspaper that would have been too bulky to store in the "cramped quarters" of a Virginia City newspaper office, that newspapers were of "limited usefulness" and that they would have ended up "in the wood stove in all likelihood." (Grattan Eichin 122). But _Vanity Fair_ was not a multi-column folio daily newspaper; it was a royal octavo weekly magazine and my article carefully explained both the exchange system and the difference between the timely content of a newspaper and the comic "filler" provided by journals like _Vanity Fair_. A complete run of _Vanity Fair_ (1859-63), bound in six slender volumes occupies barely 6 1/2 inches of shelf space. Newspapers did indeed retain magazines as future sources of filler material; I have a volume of _Vanity Fair_ that was retained in the exchange file of the _Boston Daily Advertiser_ whose editor thought paying 87 1/2 cents to have those 52 issues bound was a good idea. Exchange files were not fuel for fires; they were valuable resources, and when _The Silver Age reincarnated as _The Daily Union_, their exchange files would have been considered a valuable asset and retained. What would those files have contained? I could give more examples to refute her other criticisms point by point, but most of her questions and problems with my theory can be answered by a careful rereading of the factual evidence I presented, my endnotes, and my references. I could also refute some of her claims using further evidence I've uncovered, including a news vendor named J. G. Foxe who advertised issues of _Vanity Fair_ for sale in the October 2, 1861 issue of _The Silver Age_, and a comic piece reprinted from _Vanity Fair_ (May 25, 1861) in _The Silver Age_ on July 20, 1861. My conclusion that _Vanity Fair_ was readily available in Virginia City was based on statistical facts and my knowledge of the exchange system that placed it there--not intuition or specious reasoning. I strongly suggest that she read up on the exchange system; at one point in her piece she actually mistakes an exchange system reprint as a newspaper article from a newspaper called the _Exchange_ (Grattan Eichin 115). There are no "smoking guns" for _any_ of the three accounts of how Twain laid hands on his _nom de plume_, only circumstantial evidence. The smoking guns for the bar tab story would be documentary evidence proving personal relationships between Mark Twain and those who told their bar tab stories in the newspapers, _plus_ a convincing assessment of their veracity, and a clear demonstration that it wasn't something that began _after_ he adopted his _nom de plume_, but that Clemens was using the name for his bar tabs _before_ he adopted the _nom de plume_ in 1863--or for a convincing account by one of Mark Twain's many Virginia City friends to suddenly come to light. The smoking gun for the Capt. Sellers story would be to find a river report by Sellers signed "Mark Twain" and somehow advance the date of his death by sixteen months, but those newspaper files (online and off) have been repeatedly searched and the only Sellers river report found was signed "I. Sellers." The smoking gun for the _Vanity Fair_ account would be the discovery of a copy of that very issue of _Vanity Fair_ annotated by Twain himself, or a reprint of that _Vanity Fair_ story with the "Mark Twain" character in a Virginia City newspaper before February, 1863. It's unlikely that any of these accounts will ever be proven with a smoking gun, and Grattan Eichin should not be demanding such evidence when she has no such evidence herself. Often the historical records yields less than what we all might wish, so we must apply logic and draw reasonable conclusions using the best evidence. It is understandable that some Twainians would be reluctant to give up mythologies more or less accepted as fact for 150 years in the face of newly discovered printed evidence like _Vanity Fair_, or that a Nevada writer might wish to see Nevada lay claim to the origins of Mark Twain's wonderful _nom de plume_. It's fun to let facts and logic take a holiday and depend instead on supposition based on unsubstantiated hearsay evidence, but doing so is engaging in folklore, not recording history. It's the stuff of spirited collegial banter at conferences but this re-examination does not advance Twain scholarship. Kevin @ Mac Donnell Rare Books 9307 Glenlake Drive Austin TX 78730 512-345-4139 Member: ABAA, ILAB ************************* You may browse our books at: www.macdonnellrarebooks.com