Explanatory Notes        Apparatus Notes (Ⓐ)

Source: New York Public Library, Albert A. and Henry W. Berg Collection, New York ([NN-BGC])

Cue: "My sense of"

Source format: "MS"

Letter type: "[standard letter]"

Notes:

Last modified:

Revision History: AB

Published on MTPO: 2022

Print Publication:

This edited text supersedes the previously published text
MTPDocEd
To William Dean Howells
23 December 1877 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-BGC, UCCL 02520)
Sunday Night.
My Dear Howells:

My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permannenciesⒶemendation—a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, & which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repenteancies.1explanatory note

I feel that my misfortune has gone injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at present. It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages, now. So it is my opinion & my wife’s, that the telephone story had better be suppressed. If Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion?2explanatory note


It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech & saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much. And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me! It burns me like fire to think of it.3explanatory note

The whole matter is a dreadful subject—let me drop it here—at least on paper.4explanatory note

Penitently yrs
Mark.
Textual Commentary
Source text(s):

MS, NN-BGC.

Previous Publication:

MTL , 1:316; MTB , 2:606; MTHL , 1:212.

Provenance:

See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.

Explanatory Notes
1 Clemens was distraught over his 17 December speech at the Atlantic Monthly birthday dinner to John Greenleaf Whittier, in which he had depicted three tramps who impersonated Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes and quoted comically from their works. On 27 December he wrote a letter of apology to the three authors. For their reaction to the speech, and Clemens’s later opinion of it, see the notes for that letter. The “humiliation” at age seven has not been identified.
2 For Howells’s decision about the “telephone story,” see note 4.
3 Howells had introduced Clemens as the humorist whose name is known wherever our tongue is spoken, and who has, perhaps, done more kindness to our race, lifted from it more crushing care, rescued it from more gloom and banished from it more wretchedness than all the professional philanthropists that have lived; a humorist who never makes you blush to have enjoyed his joke, whose generous wit has no meanness in it, whose fun is never at the cost of anything honestly high or good, but comes from the soundest of hearts and the clearest of heads. (“The Atlantic Dinner,” Boston Evening Transcript, 18 Dec 1877, 1, 3)
4 

On 25 December, before replying to Clemens, Howells wrote to Charles Dudley Warner: “This morning I got a letter from poor Clemens that almost breaks my heart. I hope I shall be able to answer it in just the right way” (TS in CtHT-W). Howells then wrote (CU-MARK):

UCLC32617
editorial office of the atlantic monthly. the riverside press, cambridge, mass.
Dec. 25, 1877.
My dear Clemens:

I was just about to ask you to let me postpone your story a month, because I found the Feb’y number overfull, and your paper had come last to hand. But I have no idea of dropping you out of the Atlantic, and Mr. Houghton has still less, if possible. You are going to help and not hurt us many a year yet, if you will. Every one with whom I have talked about your speech regards it as a fatality—one of those sorrows into which a man walks with his eyes wide open, no one knows why. I believe that Emerson, Longfellow and Holmes themselves can easily conceive of it in that light, and while I think your regret does you honor and does you good, I don=t want you to dwell too morbidly on the matter. Mr. Norton left a note on my table the other day, expressing just the right feeling towards you about it. One of the most fastidious men here, who read the speech, saw no offense in it. But I don’t pretend not to agree with you about it. All I want you to do is not to exaggerate the damage. You are not going to be floored by it; there is more justice than that even in this world. And especially as regards me, just call the sore spot well. I could say more and with better heart in praise of your good-feeling (which was what I always liked in you) since this thing happened than I could before.

—A man isn’t hurt by any honest effort at reparation. Why should n’t you write to each of those men and say frankly that at such and such an hour on the 17th of December you did so and so? They would take it in the right spirit, I’m sure. If they didn’t the right would be yours.

Mrs. Howells joins me in cordial regards to Mrs Clemens and yourself.

Ever yours
W. D. Howells.

The note from Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), an eminent author, editor, and Harvard professor of art history who also spoke at the Whittier dinner, was presumably a reply to a letter from Howells of 19 December:

And what a sweet and graceful and gracious speech you made the other night!—All sense of that and of other things was long blotted out for me by that hideous mistake of poor Clemens’s. As you have more than once expressed a kindness for him, you will like to know that before he had fairly touched his point, he felt the awfulness of what he was doing, but was fatally helpless to stop. He was completely crushed by it, and though it killed the joy of the time for me, I pitied him; for he has a good and reverent nature for good things, and his performance was like an effect of demonical possession. The worst of it was, I couldn’t see any retrieval for him. (Howells 1979, 182)

The “fastidious” reader of Clemens’s speech was Harvard English Professor Francis J. Child (1825–96). In 1910, in “My Mark Twain,” Howells recalled receiving

a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper report of it, praising Clemens’s burlesque as the richest piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence of its victims. I think it must always have ground in Clemens’s soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it, by giving the thing the right setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in Washington. I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child’s note on the other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. (Howells 1968, 296–97)

Emendations and Textual Notes
Ⓐ  permannencies ●  perman- | nencies
Top