Dead Letters: The Forty-Four

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

There were forty-four speeches in that room on the Fourth of July, 1873, and a man killed every one of them with a single sentence, and I was there to watch it done. I was also, I should say at the front, carrying the forty-fourth.

The occasion was the Independence Day dinner of the Americans in London, held that year with the full pomp the exiled patriot brings to the business of missing home. I had come to cover it for a paper in New York, which is to say I had come for one man. But the secretary of the society, learning there was a correspondent at the table, had leaned to my ear during the soup and said that a few of the press might be called to say a word, and would I be ready, and I had said I would, and I had spent the fish course arranging in my head the three sentences about home that a man can say on that night without shame. So I sat there with a small speech of my own folded up in me, which is the only time in this long career I have gone to a room as one of the principals instead of the vulture at the window, and I want that on the record because of how the evening turned out.

The one man I had truly come for was Mark Twain. He was in London that summer, at the Langham Hotel, the most famous humorist alive and getting more so by the week, and it was known up and down Fleet Street that he had been invited and would be called on to speak. A Twain speech was money. I had orders to get it down entire and wire it home, and I had taken a seat where I could see his mouth move.

He was in dark evening dress like every other man in the hall, which somehow made him harder to miss, the mustache and the slow eye that went around the room pricing everything in it. He had a speech. You could see he had a speech the way you can see a man is carrying a full glass across a crowded floor, the particular care of it. He had written it and set it in his memory and he was waiting, with the patience of a professional, for the chairman to hand him the floor.

The chairman was the United States Minister, General Robert Schenck. He presided. After the blessing he rose, and he made what I can only describe, and what Twain would later describe in nearly these words in print, as a great long inconceivably dull harangue, and having emptied the room of its last drop of life he arrived at his point. Speech-making, the General observed, did not seem to be exhilarating the guests. He proposed therefore to dispense with all further oratory, so that the company might sit and talk quietly to its elbow-neighbors and pass a sociable evening.

I have been in rooms when the verdict came in wrong. It was like that. Forty-four men had come to that dinner with a speech folded in a pocket and in the chest, each one polished for the one night of the year an American abroad is permitted to say aloud how he feels about the country he left, and the General had disposed of all of it to spare himself the trouble of listening. At a table near mine an old man took his pages half out of his coat, looked at them, and put them back, and smoothed the coat down over them with the flat of his hand, and did not do anything else for a long time. The floor was never given to any man. My three sentences about home sat in me and went sour. The dinner guttered out into private murmuring and died.

I went to Twain afterward in the crush by the doors. I introduced myself and my paper and I asked him, straight, whether he would give me the speech anyway, off the floor, for the wire, so the thing he had made would not be wasted on a coat closet in London. It was, I thought, a kindness to us both.

He looked at me with that slow pricing eye and he was not unfriendly about it. He said that a speech a man has written and not been allowed to give is the only kind that keeps, and that he had every intention of letting this one age. The General had done him a favor, he said, though the General did not know it, because a speech delivered is gone by morning into the yawns of the men who heard it, whereas a speech murdered in front of forty-four witnesses was a property, and he meant to hold the deed. He thanked me for my interest in his work. He advised me to take some in my own. Then he put on his hat and went out into the London night with the best copy of my career buttoned up inside his coat, and I filed, from that glittering assembly of the American genius, precisely nothing. My own three sentences I never wrote down. I could not now tell you what they were.

Two years later I saw Schenck's name in the papers, going down over a silver mine that had turned out to hold a great deal more of other men's money than of silver, and a week after that I was in a bookshop and opened Twain's new collection of sketches, and there it was. The whole speech, the one I had reached for in the doorway, printed out entire under a plain title, every joke he would have spent on that ungrateful room now spent instead on the whole of the reading world at a dollar and seventy-five cents the volume. And beneath it, in brackets, he had appended the murder. He described the harangue. He described the killing of the oratory. He wrote that in consequence of that one remark forty-four perfected speeches died in the womb, and that by it the General had lost forty-four of the best friends he had in England, and that more than one man said that night, this is the sort of person that is sent to represent us in a great sister empire. Which, with Schenck's name fresh in the papers, was no longer quite a joke.

Twain got the last word. He got it by post, two years late, in an edition that outsold every speech ever delivered at that dinner or any other, and the man who had tried to bury his voice in a dull evening was preserved forever in a bracket as the fool who did it.

But I have thought since, more than once, about the other forty-three. The men who were not Mark Twain, who had also written their speeches and learned them by heart and carried them into that room on the one night a year it was allowed, and had them killed in the chair by a bored general, and had no collection coming out, and no bookshop that would ever hold their Fourth of July. Their speeches died where they sat. Nobody appended them to anything. The world keeps the words of the man it has already decided to keep and lets the rest go down with the table talk and the cleared plates and the guttering of a bad evening in a foreign city a long way from home.

I know, because I was the forty-fourth, and mine is gone with theirs, and I have been filing other men's words ever since.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.