Oct. 4/75.1
My Dear Howells:
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 ]losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS when the printers are done with [it.2 I ]caught it once more for personating that drunken Col. James.3 I caught it like everything for confessing, with contrition, for mentioning that Mr. Longfellow’s picture was slightly damaged;4 & 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.5
You will judge, by the enclosed (as I do,) that Miss [Kellogg ]never 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.6
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], 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.7
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.” 8
I’ve got another rattling good character for my novel! That great work is mulling itself into shape [gradually. It ] 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. 9 ‸{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.}
Yrs Ever
Mark
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
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 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 Howells; SLC 1982, 1:xiii).
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)
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L6, 581–85; MTB, 1:558, excerpt; MTL, 1:265–66, with omission; MTHL, 1:103–6.
Provenance:see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
mak • [‘k’ partly formed]
it. I • it.—|I
Kellogg • [possibly ‘H Kellogg’]
lockjaw? No • lockjaw?—|No
gradually. It • gradually.—| It
