14 September 1876 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-BGC, UCCL 02505)
Yes, the collection of caves was the origin of it. I changed it to echoes because these being invisible & intangible, constituted a still more absurd species of property, & yet a man could really own an echo, & sell it, too, for a high figure—such an echo as that at the villa Simonetti, two miles from Milan, for instance.2explanatory note My first purpose was to have the man make a collection of caves & afterwards of echoes, but perceived that the element of absurdity & impracticability was so nearly identical as to amount to a repetition of an idea.
I am reading & enjoying the biography. It is a marvelous thing that you read for it & wrote it in such a little bit of a time, let alone conduct a dysentery at the same time—when I have that disease, even mildly, I can write absolutely nothing. Warner had a good & appreciative review of the book in yesterday’s paper.3explanatory note He put down everything else to attend to that. I like W. better & better, every day. I have had prejudices & dislikes, there, but I think they have worn themselves out, now. I believe Mrs. Clemens is as blindly fond of him as she is of you—which is a great argument with me, because her instincts in the perception of worth are always truer than mine.
I will not & do not believe that there is a possibility of Hayes’s defeat, & yet but I want the victory to be sweeping. Every little helps. Now haven’t you somebody handy who can make a ten-cent book, to be given away, of this nature, to-wit: A miniature volume, with a page the size of a postage stamp, with this title-page: “What Mr. Tilden has done for His Country.” And put in it paragraphs like this:
“In October, 1862 I contributed $7,000 toward the public revenues for the patriotic purpose of prosecuting the war against rebellion.”
Put into the litle little volume all the services which Tilden has unselfishly rendered his country—you see the book should be sized according to the materials his career is able to furnish.
Then make this pygmy book fast, with a string—or tack it inside the cover, of a 12 or 24 or 8vo (according to materials,) to bear this title-page: “What Mr. Tilden has done for h Himself.” This book should be paragraphed thus:
“In October, 1862, I raised my right hand, & kissed a book, & for this service allowed myself $20,000 or $30,000 of government money, my time being valuable & this compensation not seeming to me exorbitant.”4explanatory note
And so forth & so on. Read the enclosed slip from the Courant. Such a book, issued 2 or 3 weeks before election, might help, some. It is a book that anybody can write, with a campaign file of the N. Y. Times to get his material from. I would write it myself if I had the time & the materials, . I seem to have said though I would of course question the wisdom or and also the propriety of putting my name to such a piece of work.
It seems odd to find myself interested in an election. I never was before. And I can’tn seem to get over my repugnance to reading or thinking about politics, yet. But in truth I care little about any party’s politics—but the man that behind it is the important thing.
You may well know that Mrs. Clemens liked the Parlor Car—enjoyed it ever so much, & was indignant at you all through, & kept exploding into rages at you for drawing such a pretending that such a woman ever existed—closing each & every explosion with “But it is just what such a woman would do”—“It is just what such a woman would say.” They all voted the Parlor Car perfection—except me. I said they wouldn’t have been allowed to court & quarrel there so long, uninterruptedⒶemendation; but at each critical moment the odious train-boy would come in & pile foul literature all over them four or five inches deep, & the lover would turn his head aside & curse—& presently that train-boy would be back again (as on all those western roads) to take up the literature & leave prize candy.
Of course the thing is perfect, in the magazine, without the train-boy; but I was thinking of the stage & the groundlings. If the dainty touches went over their heads, the train-boy & other possible interruptions would fetch them every time. Would it mar the flow of the thing too much to insert that devil? I thought it over a couple of hours & concluded it wouldn’t, & that he ought to be in for the sake of the groundlings (& to get new copyright on the piece.)
AndⒶemendation it seemed to me that now that the fourth act is so successfully written, why not go ahead & write the 3 preceding acts? And then after it is finished, let me put in into it a low-comedy character (the girl’s or the lover’s father or uncle) & gobble a big pecuniary interest in your work for myself. Do not let this generous proposition disturb your rest—but do write the other 3 acts, & then it will be valuable to managers. And don’t go & sell it to anybody, like Harte, but keep it for yourself.
Harte’s play can be doctored till it will be entirely acceptable & then it will clear a great sum every year. I am out of all patience with Harte for selling it. The play entertained me hugely, even in its present crude state.5explanatory note
That is a good story of your sister’s, but I don’t think I could make it go except in one fashion—by taking the idea & applying it in some other way, as I did with the caves, & do with pretty much everything. There are few stories that have anything superlatively good in them except the idea, &—& that is always bettered by transplanting.
But Aldrich has genius enough to get over that difficulty. The man that wrote Margjorie Daw would make an admirable thing of the perplexities of these people, I should think.6explanatory note
I was going to enclose it, for Aldrich, but I think I won’t, yet. I’ll wait. By & by the story will grab hold of me, maybe.
Pardon the length of this. Love to you all.
enclosure simulated, line by line: 7explanatory note
The more Tilden’s character is revealed to
the people of the United States the less fit
he
seems to be President, the more we see reason
to believe the representations of the leading
democratic
papers—the New York World and
the Express, and the Cincinnati Enquirer—be-
fore his nomination, and made in the hope of
preventing it. They spoke the
truth then,
which cannot be removed by their reluctant
support now. Tilden is an old man, and he
has lived a
thoroughly self-seeking life; all
his shrewdness and ability have been devoted to
amassing money for Tilden; and at the
close
of his life he has come actively forward into
politics for Tilden’s benefit exclusively; and
he
uses the same means to secure his political
ends that procured him his vast fortune. We
commend the comparison of
his life with
that of Hayes, as revealed in the biography of
the latter. What sacrifice has Tilden ever made
for his
country, what service has he rendered
it? While Hayes was in the field Tilden could
not even sustain his government by
an honest
income return; for years he let the govern-
ment guess at his income, certain that he
would save money by
making no return.
When he set his eye on the presidency, he laid
his plans for it in his usual long-headed man-
ner.
He saw that the popular thing was a war
upon the rings, and it is entirely in accord with
his thoroughly scheming and
self-seeking char-
acter that he should turn “reformer” in or-
der to reach the presidency. We
perfectly
well remember that when Fernando Wood was
first elected mayor of New York he astonished
his enemies and
disgusted his friends
by his vigor against the thieves.
But we cannot judge Wood by that one city
campaign, any more
than we can Tilden by his
raid on the New York corruptions. We find
his character from his whole record.
Clemens answered two letters from Howells (CU-MARK). The first was:
Neither the “story of the cave-collector,” suspected source of Clemens’s “Canvasser’s Tale,” (SLC 1876k), nor any appeal from the Republican national committee has been identified. In his letter of 23 Augustclick to open link to Howells, Clemens made no report of that committee having contacted him, nor of reading Howells’s “Parlor Car” in the September Atlantic Monthly. He must have mentioned both in a subsequent letter to Howells that has not been found. The second letter from Howells (CU-MARK) that he now answered was:
It probably was Anne Thomas Howells (1844–1938), the youngest of Howells’s three sisters and herself a writer, who sent this story (Howells 1979b, 462–63, 465). Clemens noted what appears to be his evaluation of it on Howells’s envelope: “An egg that was an antique.”
Clemens described this “most remarkable echo in the world” in chapter 19 of The Innocents Abroad (SLC 1869, 195–97).
Warner’s review of Howells’s Sketch of the Life and Character of Rutherford B. Hayes appeared on the front page of the Hartford Courant on 12 (not 13) September. Warner noted that although the biography was “necessarily hasty,” and had been “undertaken as a public duty, . . . the author had not proceeded far in it before it became a labor of love, and the true nature and greatness of the man revealed itself more and more to the writer in the mass of private letters, diaries and note books that were placed at his disposal” (Warner 1876e).
In this suggested paragraph and in the previous one for the “pygmy book,” Clemens alluded to a charge, being debated in the press, that Tilden had “committed perjury in 1862, by swearing to a taxable income of $7,118,” when, in fact, according to “his statement under oath in 1876,” he had “received in 1862, for services rendered to the St. Louis, Alton and Terre Haute Railroad the sum of $20,000” (“Gov. Tilden’s Income Again,” New York Times, 15 Sept 1876, 4).
Clemens was decidedly in the minority in his generous appraisal of Harte’s Two Men of Sandy Bar, which he had seen recently in New York: the critics panned it mercilessly. After five weeks on the New York stage, Robson took the play on the road, appearing last in San Francisco in 1878. He reportedly lost ten thousand dollars on the venture (AutoMT2, 631–32; Scharnhorst 1992, 52–59).
Aldrich’s story collection, Marjorie Daw and Other People, was published in 1873. The title piece was an epistolary tale about an ill man who falls in love with the fictitious Marjorie Daw, invented by a friend to ease the tedium of the illness.
The enclosure, a clipping of a Hartford Courant editorial, does not survive with the letter. It is transcribed here from the Courant for 14 September 1876 (2). The editorial alludes to Tilden’s labors in the early 1870s, as chairman of the New York state Democratic committee, to bring down William M. Tweed and the corrupt Tammany Hall “ring,” which controlled New York city politics, and to reform the state judiciary. Fernando Wood (1812–81), a controversial three-time Democratic mayor of New York (1855–58, 1860–62), compromised an ambitious program of reforms with political chicanery and questionable ethics (Mushkat 1990, 38, 41–81).
MS, NN-BGC.
MTL , 1:285–87; MTHL , 1:150–53.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.