12 October 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: MH-H, UCCL 01375)
I see where the trouble lies. The various author’s dislike trotting in procession behind me. I vaguely thought of that in the beginning, but did not give it its just importance. We must have a new deal.1explanatory note The Blindfold Novelettes must be suggested anonymously. Warner says, let this anonymous person say his uncle has died & left him all his property—this property consisting of nothing in the world but the skeleton of a novel; he does not like to waste it, yet cannot utilize it himself because he can’t write novels; he therefore begs writers to fill up the skeleton for him—in which way he hopes to get 6 or 6 8 novels in place of one, & thus become wealthy.
Now I would suggest that Aldrich devise the skeleton-plan, for it needs an ingenious head to contrive a plot which shall be prettily complicated & yet well fitted for lucid & interesting development in the brief compass of 10 Atlantic pages. My plot was awkward & overloaded with tough requirements.
Warner will fill up the skeleton—for one. No doubt Harte will; will ask him. Won’t Mr. Holmes? Won’t Henry James? Won’t Mr. Lowell, & some more of the big literary fish? If we could ring in one or two towering names beside your own, we wouldn’t have to beg the lesser fry very hard. Holmes, Howells, Harte, James, Aldrich, Warner, Twain TrobridgeⒶemendation, Twain—now there’s a good & godly gang—team, I mean—everything’s a team, now.2explanatory note
IfⒶemendation we fail to connect, here, I’ll start it anonymously in Temple Bar & see if I can’t get the English Authors to do it up handsomely.3explanatory note It would make a stunning book to sell on railway trains. But I believe we can make it go, here, with the proposition to come ano[n]ymously & Aldrich to construct the plot.
This letter apparently gives Clemens primacy in use of this phrase. He used it again in 1889 in chapter 13 of A Connecticut Yankee, where Hank Morgan complains of being
in a country where the right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it . . . would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. . . . It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal. (CY, 160)
Henry James used the phrase in The Princess Casamassima, in a passage in which the princess, like Hank Morgan, speaks of the necessity for social revolution. Contrary to the claim in Mark Twain–Howells Letters (MTHL, 1:161 n. 1), however, James did not use it in the passage as it initially appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for June 1886 and in the first book publication later that year: “Possibly you don’t know that I am one of those who believe that a great social cataclysm is destined to take place, and that it can’t make things worse than they are already” (James 1886a, 420; 1886b, 798). By 1908, when The Princess Casamassima was included in the New York edition of his work, James had revised the passage: “Possibly you don’t know that I’m one of those who believe that a great new deal is destined to take place and that it can’t make things worse than they are already” (James 1908, 2:199). It is not known if James borrowed the phrase from Yankee. In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt used it in his acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination and it famously became the rubric for his Depression recovery program. Although Roosevelt reportedly intimated that Yankee provided the phrase (see Schmidt 2017), it has not been confirmed that either he or his speech writer knowingly borrowed it from the book.
No evidence has been found that Clemens pursued his “Blindfold Novelettes” scheme in England through Temple Bar magazine.
MS, MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 (98).
MTHL , 1:160.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.