14 August 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01116)
I will hope that in the course of time I may be so situated that I can make the attempt, but I am debarred now by a book contbract which I keep shirking & dodging, but which I can’t venture to shirk any longer.2explanatory note There is more money in books than in plays, but still when I get the chance I shall be cheerfully willing to intrude further upon the dramatic field.
letter docketed in pencil, possibly by Daly: S L. Clemens and in ink, in an unidentified hand Saml. L. Clemens
John Augustin Daly (1838–99), a dramatic critic, playwright, and producer, staged the classics as well as new plays on American themes. Since 1869 he had managed his own company at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, housed at three different locations in New York. His present establishment, built for him at Twenty-eighth Street near Broadway, opened on 3 December 1873 (see also 24 Oct 74 to Howells [1st], n. 3click to open link). Having learned of the impending production of Clemens’s Gilded Age, and with his new season scheduled to begin on 25 August, he wrote (CU-MARK):
Daly had already used “something” of Clemens’s. On 18 February 1873, “Roughing It” had opened at the Grand Opera House, another New York theater Daly was then managing. This was
a kaleidoscopic drama in four acts, eleven tableaux and a transformation, put together by the resourceful Daly. The scenery covered much territory from a villa on the Grand Drive or Boulevard, New York, to scenes in the Metropolitan Hotel, to Castle Garden, to the Grand Union Depot, thence to Simpson’s Bar (with a leaf from Mark Twain), to the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The grand “transformation” included an Opium Smoker’s Dream.... This fourth production of Daly at the Grand Opera House ran but four weeks. Daly had not quite hit it off, as we say. (Odell, 9:285–86)
The New York Tribune reported that the play borrowed little from the book:
In its third act it reproduced a few traits and incidents from the source of its title—Mark Twain’s characteristic and clever “Roughing It.” ... Its story related the elopement of a rich man’s daughter with a poor noodle, and the father’s pursuit of these fugitives from the metropolis to Simpson’s Bar. A few of its situations were seen to be ingeniously constructed, and parts of its texts were heard to be smartly written. Its intention appeared to be, in the most extravagant sense, farcical. Its attainment was utter puerility. (“The Drama,” 22 Feb 73, 4)
The Hartford Times was more specific about Daly’s borrowings and more enthusiastic about the play:
It is not, as might be supposed from the title, a spectacular condensation of Mark Twain’s last book. Indeed there is very little of Mark about it, except his famous description of the Chinese quarters in San Francisco, which is admirably represented toward the close.... “Roughing It” is altogether a clever piece of spectacular dramatization and is destined to have a long run. (“Music and the Drama,” 1 Mar 73, 2)
For Clemens’s two unfulfilled contracts with the American Publishing Company, see 10 May 74 to OC, n. 5click to open link. Neither contract expressly prohibited him from undertaking a dramatic project.
MS, Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H).
L6 , 206–207; Joseph Francis Daly, 146–47; Brownell 1946, 2–3.