[in ink:]
Boston, Nov. 16, 1935.
1
Dear Livy:
You observe I still call this beloved old place by the name it had when I was young. Limerick! It is enough to make a body sick.
The gentlemen-in-waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this letter to you, & no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves. But let them! The slow old fashions are good enough for me, thank God, & I will none other. When I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed, holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand, & reflect that a thousand miles away there is another fool [hithched] to the other end of it, it makes me frantic with rage; & then am I more than implacably fixed & resolved than ever, to continue taking twenty minutes to telegraph you what I might communicate in thre ten seconds by the new way if I would so debase myself. And when I see a whole silent, solemn [drawing-room] full of idiots sitting with their hands on each other’s foreheads “communing,” I tug the white hairs from my head & curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation. In our old days such a gathering talked ‸pure‸ drivel & [“rot,”] mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad generation.
It is sixty years since I was here before. I walked hither, then, with my precious old friend. It seems incredible, now, that we did it in two days, but such is my recollection. I no longer mention that we walked back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer. Men were men in those old times. Think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat.
My air-ship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from China loaded with the usual cargo of jabbering, copper-colored missionaries, & so I was nearly an hour on my journey. But by the goodness of God thirteen of the missionaries were crippled & several killed, so I was content to lose the time. I love to lose time, anyway, because it brings soothing reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old, now lost to us forever.
Our game was neatly played, & [successfully. None] expected us, of course. You should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when I said, “Announce [ th ] his grace the Archbishop of Dublin & the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Hartford.” Arrived within, we were all eyes to see the Duke of Cambridge & his Duchess, wondering if we might remember their faces., & they ours. In a moment, in they came tottering in; he, stooped & bent & withered & bald; she blooming with wholesome old age. He peered through his glasses a moment, then screeched in a reedy voice: “Come to my arms! Away with titles—I’ll know ye by no names but Twain & Twichell!” Then fell he on our necks & jammed his trumpet in his ear, the which we filled with shoutings to this effect: “God bless you, old Howells, what is left of yeou!”
We talked late that night—none of your silent idiot “communings” for [ we ‸us‸ ] of the olden time. We rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our tongues & drank till the lord Archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him & resumed its sweeter forgotten name of New York. In truth he almost got back into his ancient religion, too, good Jesuit as he has always been since O’Mulligan the First established that faith in the Empire.
And we canvassed everybody. Bailey Aldrich, Marquis of Ponkapog,2 came in, got ‸nobly‸ drunk, & told us all about how poor Osgood lost his earldom & was hanged for conspiring against the Second Emperor—but he didn’t mention how near he ‸himself‸ came to being hanged, too, for engaging in the same enterprise. He was as chaffy as he was sixty years ago, too, & swore the Archbishop & I never walked to Boston—but there was never was a day that Ponkapog wouldn’t lie, so be it by the grace of God he got the [opportunity.
The] Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy & bronzed by the suns & storms of many climes & scarred with the wounds got in many battles, & I told him how I had seen him sit in a high chair & eat fruit & cakes & answer to the name of Johnny.3 His granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately married to the youngest of the Grand Dukes, & so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the Howells’s may reign in the land? I must not forget to say, while I think of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, & your wig. H Keep your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, & so cheat your persecuting neuralgias & rheumatisms. Would you believe it?—the Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you—deafer than her husband. They call her to breakfast with a park of artillery; & usually when it thunders she looks up expectantly & says “Come in.” But she has become gentle subdued & gentle with age & never destroys the furniture, now, except when uncommonly vexed. God knows, my dear, it would be a happy thing if you & old I Lady Harmony4 would imitate thsis spirit. But indeed the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture. When I throw chairs through the window I have a sufficient reason to back it. But you—you are but a creature of passion.
The monument to the author of ‸“Gloverson & His Silent Partners”‸ is finished. It is the stateliest & the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man. This noble classic has now been translated into all the languages of the earth & is adored by all nations & known to all creatures. Yet I have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I do with my own great-grandchildren.5
I wish you could see old [Cambridge] & Ponkapog. I love them as dearly as ever, [but] privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on idiots. It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes three & four times of an evening, forgetting that they had jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. Ponkapog still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of [it. Perhaps] his best effort of late years is this:
“O soul, soul, soul of mine!
Soul, soul, soul of thine!
Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine,
And sing thy lauds in crystal wine!”
This he goes about repeating to everybody, daily & nightly, insomuch that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him.
But I must desist. There are drafts here, everywhere & my gout is something frightful. My left foot hath resemblance to a snif snuff-bladder.6 God be with you.
Hartford.
These to Lady Hartford, in the earldom of Hartford, in the upper portion of the city of Dublin.7
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
was upon me when, thirty-five years ago, I wrote
the letter to Mr. Howells, while ostensibly writing it to my
wife. Its date—1935—projects me into a
still distant day, and makes some of the persons mentioned in it
pretty old: for instance, The Earl of Hartford (myself,) 100;
his grace the Duke of Cambridge, (Howells) 98; The Lord
Archbishop of Dublin (Rev. Joseph H. Twichell)
96; John Howells (the Lord High Admiral) 65; Lady Hartford,
(Mrs. Clemens—on whom be peace!) 90; and the Rt. Hon.
The Marquis of Ponkapog (Thomas Bailey Aldrich—on
whom be peace!) 98. He provided the following commentary on the letter: That first paragraph is bad
prophecy—very bad indeed. But it is full of interest,
for it calls sharp attention to an astonishing political
change—astonishing when we reflect that it has taken
only the brief space of thirty-five years to bring it about.
Thirty-five or forty years ago the Irishman had been with us
only about thirty years, yet had already become a formidable
power, and was increasing his power by such leaps and bounds
that a person prophetically inclined might with some sort of
show of reason predict political supremacy for him after a
further interval of a couple of generations, allowing him to
remove the Papacy to New York and distribute Irish names about
the country—Dublin, Limerick, etc. It has not happened. No, the probabilities
of thirty-five years ago have failed—and signally. In
that day the Irishman was at the top of our foreign element, and
the German came next. The other foreigners were few and
unimportant. There were lots and lots of Americans in the city
of New York then—a thing unthinkable to-day! To-day
we have to go around with an interpreter. To-day eighty-five per
cent of Greater New York’s four-and-odd millions are
foreign, half-foreign, and foreign by one remove. The citizen
with American great-grandparents—when
found—is stuffed and put in the great museum in the
park, along with the Brontosaur and the other impressive
fossils. The Irishman still rules the city—like hell,
so to speak!—but it is by grace of native genius, not
by authority of numbers. 2. My second paragraph foresees a day when
the telegraph is to be too slow, and we shall correspond by
thought-transference—straight from brain to brain.
That forecast has still 27 years in which to make good. I repeat
that forecast, and stand by it. Before 1935 it will cease to be
a dream and become a fact. Wireless telegraphy has arrived; from
sending thought on the wings of the air out of a battery made of
metal to sending it out of a battery made of brain-cells is but
a trifling step, and the Marconi is already born who will show
us how to do it. The temper exhibited in paragraph No. 2 is
another bad prophecy. I shall let fly no such outbursts when I
am a hundred years old. I shall be a very quiet prophet then,
and an example to the whole cemetery. 3. Paragraph No. 3 is good enough prophecy.
If I live to be a hundred I know very well I shall verify it;
for by that time I shall be sure to think I did walk from Hartford to Boston with Twichell, and
that we did walk back in a single
day—a hundred miles and more! Even now, when I tell
about that walk I find it difficult to keep its marvels within
bounds. That was a memorable excursion. It was a wretched idea.
Twichell proposed it, and I thoughtlessly said yes to it, which
shows that there was more than one ass in Hartford in those
days. We walked twenty miles the first day, and I went to bed
that night a physical wreck, though Twichell was as fresh as a
new-blown flower, for he had been chaplain of a marching
regiment all through the war and by practice had acquired the
endurance of a steel machine. The next morning we resumed the
pedestrian exploit—on the train, not on foot. The
Associated press had informed the country about our start.
Aldrich and Howells and Osgood and the others were full of
enthusiastic interest in the matter and were on the look-out.
When next day’s telegrams informed the world that we
should reach Boston by nightfall, those boys were proud of us
and astonished, for they had not supposed we could walk the
whole distance in two days, but would require three. So they got
up a banquet for us at Young’s Hotel, and when we
entered the place on foot (from the station) they were insane
with admiration of us and pride in us. I suppose we would have
told them about the train if we had thought of it. 4. Paragraph No. 4 is good prophecy. Day
before yesterday the air-ship of the brothers Wright broke the
world’s record. It did another thing too: it
demonstrated—for the first time in
history—that a competent air-ship can be devised. For several years now, the newspapers
of the whole civilised world have daily been filled with the
encouraging doings of the air-ship inventors, and now at last we
perceive that the long hoped-for day has come, and that we shall
presently be flying about the skies with ease and confidence and
comfort. No. 4 has another prophecy: that by 1935 we shall have
Chinamen coming to us as missionaries. But I think that that was
not really intended as a prediction, I think it merely embodied
a hope; a hope that some day those
excellent people would come here and teach us how to be at peace
and bloodless for thousands of years without the brutal help of
armies and navies. But that gentle dream is dead: we have taught
them to adopt our sham civilisation and add armies and navies to
such other rotten assets as they may possess. Paragraph No. 8 refers to poor Ralph
Keeler—on whom be peace! He was a dear good young
fellow, and we all loved him. He sailed for Cuba as
correspondent for the New York Tribune, and never reached there.
There was some evidence that he talked too freely in the hearing
of some royalist Spaniards and was assassinated and his body
flung into the sea. His novel “Gloverson and His
Silent Partners” is probably long ago forgotten, for
Keeler’s removal left only one person to remember it.
I judge so, for he told me himself that only one copy was sold.
(CU-MARK) From 1861 to 1864 Twichell had served as
“regimental chaplain with the 71st New York State
Infantry, Second Regiment, Excelsior Brigade,” regularly
accompanying the troops into battle (Strong, 20–37). On 9 September 1908
Orville Wright successfully demonstrated an airplane he and his
brother had built to fulfill a War Department contract, remaining
airborne for over an hour.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L6, 289–294; MTL, 1:231–34, with omission; MTB, 3:1633–36.
Provenance:see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
{An • [written and canceled in pencil]
hithched • [‘h’ partly formed]
drawing-room • drawing-|room
“rot,” • [quotation marks possibly inserted]
successfully. None • successfully.—|None
th • [‘h’ partly formed]
we ‸us‸ • [cancellation and insertion in pencil]
opportunity. [¶] The • opportunity.—| [¶]The
Cambridge • [‘br’ conflated]
but • [‘bu’ conflated by miscorrection]
it. Perhaps • it.—|Perhaps
