14 June 1877 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS, in pencil: MH-H, UCCL 01441)
Good for you. There are no better terms than those you got, except an equal division of profits—& the latter method costs a body $2000 a year for an agent’s salary & expenses & is more wear & tear & trouble than keeping hotel.1explanatory note
Yes, autumn October suits me for these sketches. Shall send you the first two numbers tomorrow. I revised them to-day, & began No. 3. Isn’t there some Montreal magazine I can sell or give them to, & thus beat Belford Bros., thieves, of Toronto?2explanatory note
Sell the type-writer for $20? Yes. Do not lose this opportunity of swindling that reptile. I didn’t lend you that thing; I gave it to you because you had been doing me some offense or other, & there seemed no other way to avenge myself; but I am placable now & am willing to take $10, you to take the other ten for commission, bother, express-expenses &c. Let us compromise on that.3explanatory note
We had to remain at Mother’s in Elmira until yesterday, to let our youngest have a run of fever & get back her strength.4explanatory note But we are housed here on top of the hill, now, where it is always cool, & still, & reposeful & bewitching.
The love of we’uns unto you’unsⒶemendation.
Clemens answered Howells’s letter of 9 June, written from Conanicut, Rhode Island, albeit on Atlantic Monthly letterhead (CU-MARK):
editorial office of the atlantic monthly, the riverside press, cambridge, mass.
June 9, 1877.
My dear Clemens:
Send on I and III as soon as they are ready, and I will have them put in type at once. If it is quite the same to you I would rather begin printing them in the October number. This, considering that the printers now have the August copy, is not so late as it seems. But let me know if you have any prejudices or preferences in the matter.
The wretch who sold you the type-writer has not yet come to a cruel death. In the meantime he offers me $20.00 for it. I never could regard it as more than a loan, so I ask you whether I shall sell it at that price, or pass it along to you at Elmira.
Barrett offered me $25 a night for the play anywhere outside of New York, and $50 a night there, and I agreed. Perhaps I could have made better terms, but to tell you the truth I was so knocked down by his taking the play that I couldn’t summon all my rapacity to my aid on the instant. Of course I have been suffering for it ever since.
We have come down (by a sympathetic simultaneity with you, on the 6th) to this island of Conanicut, near Newport, and are in a white fog that carries desolation to the soul. Our address is P.O. Box 160, Newport. I know now why you wished to kill your landlord and fellow boarders when in this region. If Providence ever lets me get back to live in my own house, I don’t think I’ll leave it for a while.— I don’t dare to tell Mrs. Howells how low I feel. She chipperly joins me in love to you all.
Yours ever
W. D. Howells
By “III” in his first sentence Howells evidently meant to write “II,” referring to the first two installments of “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion.” The “sympathetic simultaneity” in his final paragraph was the coinciding of his family’s summer move to Conanicut with the Clemens family’s move to Elmira. For the “landlord” see 17 Apr 1876 to RoBards, n. 2.
The typewriter was the machine that Clemens had purchased in Boston in November 1874 and given to Howells a year later (L6: 9 Dec 1874 to OC, 308–10; 21 June 1875 and 25 June 1875 to Howells, 497–500; link note following 29? July 1875 to Redpath, 521–23; 1 Sept 1875 to Milnes, 531; 4 Nov 1875 to Howells, 584 n. 7; 5 Nov 1875 to Bliss, 586–87). In his autobiography Clemens included an extended, semi-accurate recollection of his first typewriter, dictated in 1904. He recalled, in part:
That early Boston machine was full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to-day has virtues. After a month or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. He was reluctant, for he was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly towards them, and he remains so to this day. But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me, and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not believe myself. He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.
He kept it three months, and then returned it to me. I gave it away twice after that, but it wouldn’t stay; it came back. Then I gave it to our coachman, Patrick McAleer, who was very grateful, because he did not know the animal, and thought I was trying to make him wiser and better. As soon as he got wiser and better he traded it to a heretic for a side-saddle which he could not use, and there my knowledge of its history ends. (AutoMT2, 446)
MS, in pencil, MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 (98).
MTHL , 1:182–83.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.