4 August 1876 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: CSmH, UCCL 01355)
Did you say you were coming here about this time, Mother Fairbanks?1explanatory note Then why don’t you do it? We want to come & see you, but it can’t be compassed for the reason that I am tearing along on a new book & can’t interlard a vacation, being warned against it by the fate of my pet book, which lies at home one-third done & never more to be touched, I judge. Destroyed by a vacation. The mill got cold & could not be warmed up any more.2explanatory note
Livy makes a trip down the hill once a week & is laid up for two days afterward. But you come along here—do—you haven’t anything to do, & if you had you wouldn’t do it. I can’t go to Buffalo, so I am trying to drag David Gray down here for a Sunday but I can’t manage it.3explanatory note Everybody’s on a tread-millⒶemendation, I with the rest—& you idling around. I wonder how your conscience feels. I don’t know whether it is right to lavish love upon such a character, but we do, nevertheless, & include the household.
Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks | Care “Herald” | Cleveland | Ohio return address: if not delivered within 10 days, to be returned to postmarked: elmira n.y. augⒶemendation 5 6pm and cleveland o. carrier aug 7 2pmⒶemendation
Mrs. Fairbanks may have proposed such a visit when she was in Hartford in March 1876 (24 Mar 1876 to Fairbanksclick to open link). Her surviving 1876 letters to Clemens do not mention an Elmira visit.
The new work was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The “pet book” may have been his unidentified “double-barreled novel” that Clemens had apparently begun in November 1875, was evidently working on again in June of 1876, and finally abandoned in early July (9 Aug 1876 to Howellsclick to open link, n. 5). Or it may have been “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” which he had been working on intermittently since 1868—most recently, possibly, in May of 1874. He eventually published a version of it in Harper’s Monthly in December 1907 and January 1908 and as a book in 1909 (SLC 1907–8, SLC 1909; 3 June 1876 to Fairbanksclick to open link, n. 3; 9 Aug 1876 to Howellsclick to open link; L6 : 8 May 1874 to Perkins, 139 n. 3; 4 Nov 1875 to Howells, 582, 585 n. 9).
Gray, a poet and managing editor and co-owner of the Buffalo Courier, soon wrote (CU-MARK):
Gray was in Elmira with Clemens for the weekend of 19–20 August (23 Aug 1876 to Howellsclick to open link; 1 Sept 1876 to Websterclick to open link). Gray’s family consisted of his wife, the former Martha Guthrie, and two sons, David (1870–1968), later a playwright and novelist and ambassador to Ireland from 1940 to 1947, and Guthrie (1874–1905), later an electrical engineer ( L6 : 25 Feb 1874 to Fairbanks, 49 n. 3; 18 Apr 1874 to Gray, 108–10).
MS, CSmH, call no. HM 14291.
MTMF , 201.
See Huntington Library in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.