14 December 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (TS: MH-H, UCCL 01165)
mrs. clemensⒶemendation received the mail this morningⒶemendation, & the next minute she lit into the study with danger in her eye & this demand on her tongue: where is the profanity mr. howells speaks of?1explanatory note then i had to miserably confess that i had left it out when reading the mss. to her. nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my scalp. does your wife give you rats, like this, when you go a little one-sided?
i guess i shall have to afflict you with the machine before long; it is most too tearingⒶemendation on the mind for
where is the profanity mr. howells speaks of?] Olivia read Howells’s letter of 11 December (see 9 Dec 74 to Howells, n. 2click to open link). Although one overtly profane expression—“‘Well, if this don’t beat hell!’”—and some closely simulated profanity appeared in the first installment of “Old Times” (SLC 1875 [MT02540], 72–73), the present allusion more likely is to the second installment. The profanity there did not survive Elinor Howells’s and Olivia Clemens’s objections—except descriptively, in a passage about Clemens’s first piloting instructor, Horace E. Bixby ( L1 , 70–71):
“What do you know?”
“I—I—nothing, for certain.”
“By the great Caesar’s ghost I believe you! You’re the stupidest dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea of you being a pilot—you! Why, you don’t know enough to pilot a cow down a lane.”
Oh, but his wrath was up! He was a nervous man, and he shuffled from one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. He would boil a while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again. . . . He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. B—— was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen’s curses drifted, the higher Mr. B—— lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with. (SLC 1875 [MT02539], 219)
TS, made by Clemens, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).
L6 , 316–317; Paine 1912, 253, excerpt; MTB , 1:549, excerpt; MTHL , 54.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.