20 October 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MiD, UCCL 01274)
Welcome back!1explanatory note I saw by the police report, some days ago, that you were home again, & I hoped & believed you would write when you got out. What a lack of recharchiveness2explanatory note there is about our jails & calabooses as compared with that to of the older & more cultured civilizations. But you have noticed that, of course.
My friend, the flower which you took such honest pains to pluck & lug some thousand of miles is not a flower at all but a mere onion—a fruit a berry so common in this country that it may be gathered from well-nigh any treeⒶemendation in the forest. Pray keep as still as you can about your travels,—especially among unfeeling strangers—for whereas you were straigtened for information before, you are now become, by diligent research in foreign lands, a glittering Golconda, a majestic Bonanza of ignorance.
But God He knows we are glad to get you back again if only you will not talk. ObserveⒶemendation, I never “fraternized” with those St. Sebastians. I only enjoyed their condition——& with sincerity regretted that the ancients therir foes had not lived to make similar pin-cusihionsⒶemendation of the degraded artists that upholstered Italy with their portraits.
I am waiting for Osgood to invite us all to dinner; at which time I shall be glad to advance to Boston & renew, etc. I would suggest, through you, that he invite Howells, too. It would not be wise to leave Howells out, for he occupies a very influential position & is a man who would not hesitate to destroy a book of yours or mine if we seemed to connive at any prandial slights in his case. Gill the publisher is a nice person, too; but Howells has privately tried, without success, to pu get him to put his “Private Theatricals” into the “Treasure Found & Gobbled” Series”—& so there may be bad blood between them.3explanatory note
I perceive that this “Private Theatricals” is going to lift Howells a trifle too high in the public estimation. Could you give it a black eye in an article? I could get it inserted in the Hartford papers.
We send our love to you both, & our hearty welcome home—& presently when I meet you at dinner I shall deliver more of the same commodity.
Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK):
Evidently a play on “recherché,” meaning “refinement” or “lavish elegance.”
Gill had announced that Essay, in his Treasure-Trove series, would include a piece by Howells (“Mrs. Johnson”). Since no copy of that volume has been located, it is not known whether he did in fact reprint it (see BAL , 8:19132). It was for just such unauthorized appropriation that Clemens considered Gill an “infernal thief” (16 Aug 75 to Osgoodclick to open link). Howells’s “Private Theatricals” ran in the Atlantic from November 1875 through May 1876.
MS, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, Michigan (MiD).
L6 , 561–63; Carnegie Book Shop, lot 159, excerpt; AAA/Anderson 1937, lot 84, excerpt; Parke-Bernet 1968, lot 90, excerpts and facsimile of MS page 1.
When offered for sale in 1968 the MS was part of the collection of Charles E. Feinberg.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.