21 September 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01367)
(SUPERSEDED)
Look here, Howells, it is going to be time, now, pretty soon, for some of Grant’s blacklegs to retire from the consulships & render them into the handsⒶemendation of stainless literary incapables—of whom Stoddard is one of which.
Now I’ll be fair with you. I’ll tell you what I will do. If you will sit down & be the first office-seeker in the field, & write a letter & ask Gov. Hayes to replace, with Stoddard, the first blackguard he catches in a consulship after the firs fourth of next March, I will agree to support my brother myself, all through the administration; otherwise I will throw him upon the government—as he did with himself in Mr. Lincoln’s time.1explanatory note My brother has the strongest possible claims upon Gov. Hayes, too; because it was my brother’s sagacious desertion of the republican party three months ago (he is simply hell on political sagacity, as St Chrysostom would say) that made Mr. Tilden’s coming defeat so inflexibly & implacably & absolutely certain. I can always tell which party’s funeral is appointed if I can find out how my brother has made up his mind to vote. For some inscrutable reason God never allows him to vote right. 〚I believe I told you once about my brother’s religious gymnastics? Well, I have some late news under that head: he is getting stuck after the Mohammedan plan of salvation, now.)〛
Poor, Sto sweet, pure-hearted, good-intentioned, impotent Stoddard, I have known him 12 years, now, & in all that time he has never been fit for anything but a consul. When I was at the Langham Hotel in London I hired him for 3 months, at $15 a week & board & lodging, to sit up nights with me & dissipate.2explanatory note At the end of the time he wouldn’t take a cent. I had to finally smuggle it to him through Dolby after leaving England.3explanatory note Stoddard’s got no worldly sense. He is just the stuff for a consul. Don’t you think so? Now you ought to know, you know.4explanatory note You ought to know about these things. Now you pitch in & leg for him. Get a quiet consulship created, at Terre del Fuego, if there shouldn’t be a vacancy.
You are to answer my interminable letters only with postal cards, you understand. I write long, because I’m idle.5explanatory note
Edward Bates, Lincoln’s first attorney general, was a St. Louis acquaintance of Orion Clemens’s. In 1861 he arranged for Lincoln to appoint Orion secretary of Nevada Territory ( L1 , 114 n. 9; SLC 1906, SLC 1906, in MTA , 2: 269–70, 290–91).
In 1873 and 1874 ( L5 , 456–57, 476–78, 493; L6 , 4).
George Dolby was Clemens’s English lecture agent in 1873 and 1874 (L5, 446–48; L6 , 2).
Howells had served as United States consul in Venice from early 1862 until mid-1865 (Howells 1979, 83 n. 3, 93–94).
Howells replied, on a postcard sent on 22 September from Pepperell, Massachusetts, near Townsend Harbor, where he and his family were concluding their summer (CU-MARK):
Stoddard had fractured his left arm “just below the elbow and the joint suffered a double dislocation,” in May of 1874, while “riding a blind horse across the Campagna at midnight” ( L6 , 417 n. 1; Howells 1979, 133, 139–40). He never received a consular appointment.
MTHL , 1:153–54.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.