4 November 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (NN-B, UCCL 02494)
We had a royal good time at your house, & have had a royal good time ever since, talking about it, both privately & with the neighbors. Mrs. Clemens’s bodily strength came up handsomely under that cheery respite from household & nursery cares. I don’t doubt that Mrs. How I do hope that Mrs. Howells’s didn’t go correspondingly down, under the added burden to her cares & responsibilities. Of course I didn’t expect to get through without committing some crimes & hearing of them afterwards, so I have taken the inevitable lashings & been able to hum a tune while the punishment went on. I “caught it” for letting Mrs Howells bother & bother about her coffee when it was “a good deal better than we get at home.” I “caught it” for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment & mak Ⓐemendationlosing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS when the printers are done with it.2explanatory note I Ⓐemendationcaught it once more for personating that drunken Col. James.3explanatory note I caught it like everything for confessing, with contrition, for mentioning that Mr. Longfellow’s picture was slightly damaged;4explanatory note & when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shame-facedly, that I had privately suggested to you that we hadn’t any frames, & that if you wouldn’t mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, &c., &c., &c., the madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said:
“How could you, youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive nature, upon such a repulsive er—”
“Oh, Howells won’t mind it! You don’t know Howells. Howells is a man who—”
She was gone. But George was the first person she stumbled on in the hall, so she took it out of George. I was glad of that, because it saved the babies.5explanatory note
You will judge, by the enclosed (as I do,) that Miss Kellogg Ⓐemendationnever got that song of Mr. Boott’s which I mailed to her. {Mr. Bull was the very party who urged me to send it to her; he saw her a week after I mailed it, & she never mentioned the fact to him.} When she comes here I will drink four bottles of lager & then sing it for her—for I never can get any ease or expression into music without a good backing of inspiration. She will admire that song, then.6explanatory note
What do you mean? Relieve a screed that is too light & rollicking, by adding some more of the same sort to its company? If you had a patient who was already suffering with the colic, would it help matters any to drive a nail in his foot & give him the lockjaw? NoⒶemendation, no, that wouldn’t mend matters. the thing. I will wager that the editor-instinct in you is the right one. So don’t you have any false delicacy about obeying its suggestion. I will put the article in the New York Times—Sunday edition—& let it boom along & on its grievous mission & carry sleepless nights & suffering to a thousand households. Don’t you allow yourself to have one bit of discomfort about this.7explanatory note
Booah’s idea of the wasteful magnificence of the Greeks is delicious! Pity but you could ingeniously draw him out, on the whole subject, & thus build an article upon “A Boy’s Comments u Upon Homer.” 8explanatory note
I’ve got another rattling good character for my novel! That great work is mulling itself into shape gradually. It Ⓐemendation begins to suggest to me the graded foetuses one sees in bottles of alcohol in anatomical museums. I can look back over my row of bottles, now, & discover that it has already developed from a rather inferior frog into a perceptible though libelous suggestion of a child. I hope to add a bottle a day, now, right along. 9explanatory note {All of the above ruthlessly condemned by the Head Chief of the Clemens tribe.}
Mrs. Clemens sends love to Mrs. Howells—meantime she is diligently laying up material for a letter to her. {More bottles.}
Although Clemens’s date was previously accepted as accurate ( MTHL , 1:103), he actually wrote this letter on 4 November, for he referred to his and Olivia’s 29 October–1 November visit (her first) with the Howellses in Cambridge. Clemens also mistook the month in his date for the next letter.
The manuscript of Howells’s review of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, which had so gratified Olivia. On 21 November Howells promised to send it to her (19 Oct 75 to Howellsclick to open link; 23 Nov 75 to Howells, n. 1click to open link).
Unidentified.
See 28 Oct 75 to Houghton and Companyclick to open link. The Clemenses called on Longfellow at his Cambridge home, Craigie House, on 31 October 1875. Clemens had met the poet at least once previously, on 16 February 1874, at a dinner in Boston for Wilkie Collins (13 Feb 74 to Kingsley, n. 3click to open link; “Tributes to Poet by Men of Letters,” New York Times, 24 Feb 1907, sec. 1:4; Wagenknecht, 215).
The Clemenses’ butler, George Griffin (1849?–97), had been with them at least since the spring of 1875 (Thomas K. Beecher to Langdon, 27 and 29 May 75, and 1880 United States census information, courtesy of the Mark Twain House, Hartford). In 1906, in “A Family Sketch,” Clemens recalled:
George was an accident. He came to wash some windows, & remained half a generation. He was a Maryland slave by birth; the Proclamation set him free, & as a young fellow he saw his fair share of the Civil War as body servant to General Devens. He was handsome, well built, shrewd, wise, polite, always good-natured, cheerful to gaiety, honest, religious, a cautious truth-speaker, devoted friend to the family, champion of its interests, a sort of idol to the children & a trial to Mrs. Clemens—not in all ways, but in several. For he was as serenely & dispassionately slow about his work as he was thorough in parts of it; he was phenomenally forgetful; he would postpone work any time to join the children in their play if invited, & he was always being invited, for he was very strong, & always ready for service as horse, camel, elephant or any other kind of transportation required; he was fond of talking, & always willing to do it in the intervals of work—also willing to create the intervals; and finally, if a lie could be useful to Mrs. Clemens he would tell it. That was his worst fault, & of it he could not be cured. He placidly & courteously disposed of objections with the remark—
“Why, Mrs. Clemens, if I was to stop lying you couldn’t keep house a week.”
He was invaluable; for his large wisdoms & his good nature made up for his defects. He was the peace-maker in the kitchen—in fact the peace-keeper, for by his good sense & right spirit & mollifying tongue he adjusted disputes in that quarter before they reached the quarrel-point. . . . There was nothing commonplace about George. (SLC 1906, 9–11, 31)
The enclosed letter, from either Mr. Bull or soprano Clara Louise Kellogg, has not been found. Since July Clemens had been trying to alert Kellogg to music by Howells’s friend, Francis Boott (see 5 July 75 to Howells, nn. 1click to open link, 8click to open link). She and her opera company were to be in Hartford for performances on the evenings of 10 and 11 November. Kellogg sang the second night, but had a cold and was not in good voice. Mr. Bull has not been further identified, but he was not the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, as previously thought ( MTHL , 1:105 n. 5). Ole Bull had toured the United States in 1872–73, but was in Europe throughout 1875. Clemens and Howells first met him in April 1880, in Cambridge, where he had lived since the preceding autumn (Hartford Courant: “Amusements,” 10 Nov 75, 1; “‘Fra Diavolo,’ Last Evening” and “The Opera—Card from Manager Hess,” 12 Nov 75, 2; Haugen and Cai, 173–83; Mortimer Smith, 176–90, 199–204; Bull, 261–65; 19 and 20 Apr 80 to Howells, MH-H, in MTHL , 1:299–301; Howells 1979, 247–48).
The “screed” was “A Literary Nightmare,” the manuscript that Clemens sent to Howells on 27 October. They had discussed it while the Clemenses were in Cambridge, with Howells reserving judgment. Then, presumably in a letter of 2 or 3 November (now lost), Howells pronounced it too slight for the Atlantic Monthly, but offered Clemens the option of supplementing it. In his next letter, possibly written before he received this one, Howells changed his mind (CU-MARK):
The clipping, simulated here in a line-by-line resetting, was not from the New York Sun of 1 November, as previously reported (although the Sun did print the same verses that day), nor has it been found in any Boston newspaper ( MTHL , 1:110; “Sunbeams,” 2). A bobtail car was a small tram pulled by a single horse, with a driver but no conductor. Howells wrote his letter by hand, but addressed the envelope on the typewriter, which had arrived on 3 November, via Elisha and Frank Bliss (see the next letter). The story he intended to “get at” on Sunday, 7 November, was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Clemens presumably left in Cambridge the secretarial copy of the manuscript which he had arranged to have prepared in July, and on which he had already made some revisions (Mathews, 1:152; 13 July 75 to Howellsclick to open link; SLC 1982, 1:xiii).
“Booah” was seven-year-old John Mead Howells. Howells must have included some of his recent remarks in the missing 2 or 3 November letter to Clemens.
This work may have been the “long, solid literary job” Clemens had in mind when he explained to Redpath, on 22 September, why he could not lecture in November. It may also have been the “new book” that Olivia alluded to in late October (25–28? Oct 75 to Brownclick to open link). And it may likewise have been the “bigger book” Clemens promised Bliss in the next letter. By 9 November, Clemens had stopped “mulling” and begun writing this unidentified novel, only to abandon the manuscript and make a new start two weeks later (23 Nov 75 to Howellsclick to open link). It is possible that what he then produced was the “double-barreled novel” he later put aside, in early July 1876, to begin writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (HF, xxiv). And it may have been the “double-barreled novel” that he recalled for Howells in a 16 August 1898 letter:
In 1876 or ’75, I wrote 40,000 words of a story called “Simon Wheeler” wherein the nub was the preventing an execution through testimony furnished by mental telegraphy from the other side of the globe. I had a lot of people scattered about the globe who carried in their pockets something like the old mesmerizer-button, made of different metals, & when they wanted to call up each other & have a talk, they “pressed the button” or did something, I don’t remember what, & communication was at once, opened. I didn’t finish the story, though I re-began it in several new ways, & spent altogether 70,000 words on it, then gave it up & threw it aside. (NN-B, in MTHL , 2:674–75)
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L6 , 581–85; MTB , 1:558, excerpt; MTL , 1:265–66, with omission; MTHL , 1:103–6.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.