25 August 1869 • Buffalo, N.Y. (Transcript and paraphrase: Freeman 1936, lot 68, UCCL 00340)
(SUPERSEDED)
I have written Bret that we must have the “Overland,” see that he sends it, will you?1explanatory note You speak of Mr. Stebbins. He came within an ace of breaking off my marriage by saying to the gentleman instructed by “her” father to call on him &Ⓐemendation inquire into my character, that “Clemens is a humbug—shallow & superficial—a man who has talent, no doubt, but will make a trivial & possibly a worse use of it—a man whose life promised little & has accomplished less—a humbug, Sir, a humbug”2explanatory note ... The friends that I had referred to in California said with one accord that I got drunk oftener than was necessary & that I was wild & Godless, idle, lecherous & a discontented & unsettled rover & they could not recommend any girl of high character & social position to marry me—but as I had already said all that about myself beforehand there was nothing shocking or surprising about it to the family.3explanatory note paraphrase: He continues regarding a lecture program and mentions his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, etc.4explanatory note
Stoddard, who had known Clemens since 1864 or 1865, was a frequent contributor of poetry and prose to the San Francisco Overland Monthly, edited since its inception in the summer of 1868 by Bret Harte ( L2 , 30–31, 232–33, nn. 1). Clemens’s letter to Harte has not been recovered, but his high regard for the Overland Monthly is clear from a report he sent to the San Francisco Alta California in July 1869:
The Eastern press are unanimous in their commendation of your new magazine. Every paper and every periodical has something to say about it, and they lavish compliments upon it with a heartiness that is proof that they mean what they say. Even the Nation, that is seldom satisfied with anything, takes frequent occasion to demonstrate that it is satisfied with the Overland. And every now and then, it and the other critical reviews of acknowledged authority, take occasion to say that Bret Harte’s sketch of the “Luck of Roaring Camp” is the best prose magazine article that has seen the light for many months on either side of the ocean. They never mention who wrote the sketch, of course (and I only guess at it), for they do not know. The Overland keeps its contributors’ names in the dark. Harte’s name would be very familiar in the land but for this. However, the magazine itself is well known in high literary circles. I have heard it handsomely praised by some of the most ponderous of America’s literary chiefs; and they displayed a complimentary and appreciative familiarity with Harte’s articles, and those of Noah Brooks, Sam. Williams, William Chauncey Bartlett, etc. (SLC 1869 [MT00767])
Harte evidently did arrange for the magazine to be sent to the Buffalo Express: on 13 September the paper reprinted most of his incisive comments on Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868) from the current issue (Harte 1869, 293–94). It was likely Clemens himself who observed that the “book notices of the Overland Monthly, of San Francisco, have achieved a celebrity which is great in America and still greater in England, as models of piquancy, critical analysis and felicitous English” (SLC 1869 [MT00822]).
For other accounts of the remarks by San Francisco clergyman Horatio Stebbins, see 20 and 21 Jan 69 to OLL, n. 6click to open link.
Clemens exaggerates his candor. In his letter of 24 January 1869 to Olivia Langdon he conceded that he had not revealed his past “in full & relentless detail” to her or her parents.
Probably Clemens here recalled one or both of his 1866 Sandwich Islands lectures in San Francisco: his 2 October debut performance or his equally successful farewell appearance on 10 December (see L1 , 361, 372–73). The dealer’s catalog that supplies the text for this letter describes it as an “A.L.S., 5 pp., folio.” Clemens’s words-per-page rate on apparently similar stationery—for example, his 1 September 1869 letter to Olivia Langdon—suggests that the present text is about one-fourth of the complete letter to Stoddard.
Transcript and paraphrase, Freeman 1936, lot 68, courtesy of William P. Barlow, Jr. A later, partial publication in LLMT , while possibly an independent transcription from the MS, shows no variants other than those of omission.
L3 , 320–321; see copy-text; and LLMT , 58, excerpt.
The present location of the MS, part of the Charles T. Jeffery Collection before its sale in 1936, is not known.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.
The Freeman catalog describes the MS as an “A. L. S., 5 pp., folio, Buffalo, August 25th, N. Y.” Single quotation marks in the copy-text are silently emended to double quotation marks.