To William Dean Howells
7 June 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: MH-H, UCCL 01239)

Hartford, June 7.

My Dear Howells:

By all means come! Be sure to come! You speak in the s first person singular number; do double it, if within the possibilities, & bring Mrs. Howells with you.1 Take the fast train which leaves Boston about ten o’clock & here you are at luncheon almost before you think you’ve started! Mrs. Howells will feel hardly any fatigue.2

I’ll have the letter shipped to Warner.3

Bless me, I understood you to say you had announced me for August—& so I have carried the nightmare of having to re-chew that odious chapter, ever since! If you haven’t announced it much, couldn’t you just let on that you didn’t mean it? I am proposing to take hold of the thing [today] or tomorrow—but it is so hard to pump up a new interest in what one has written once & dismissed from his mind.4

I think that that music is lovely. Mr. Potter was here when it came, & he sat down at the piano & played & sang it—& his is a noble voice. Next I want to get Rev. Mr. Parker here & have him sing it for me.5

I am a splendid ass! Upon referring to your former letter I peceive that you ask me to telegraph, [ y ] so that you can stop the announcement of the August number. I am unutterably stupid. Now I will go ahead & finish the article without another wriggle.6

I am ever so grateful to you & to Mr. Booth for that music. Mr. Potter liked it exceedingly, & sang it several times. He spoke as if he knew Mr. Booth—which is very likely, for Potter is a composer of music, himself.7

For two days the weather has been swelling around, threatening [ to ] big things, but I could put the result in a tin dipper & not crou wd it.

Ys Ever

Clemens

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 In a now lost letter written on 4 or 5 June, Howells had accepted Clemens’s invitation to visit—most recently repeated on 22 May—setting the date at 12 June. See notes 3 and 6 for more of the letter’s contents.

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2 Howells replied with a postcard on 10 June (CU-MARK):

UCLC32186

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3 Howells had asked Clemens to forward a letter of 4 June 1875 to Charles Dudley Warner, who was on tour in Europe and the Near East. In it, amoung other matters, Howells discussed “Passing the Cataract of the Nile,” Warner’s article in the July Atlantic Monthly, the first of a series, and also reported “Mark Twain’s Mississippi papers have been a great success as they richly deserved to be” (Howells 1979, 97; Warner 1875).

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4 After writing the fifth paragraph, Clemens went back and canceled this with a wavy vertical line, leaving it still very legible.

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5 Edward T. Potter, the Clemenses’ architect, had visited Hartford in may, apparently to confer about improvements to the house, including the purchase of furniture for the upper and lower verandas (which he called “ombras”) the installation of a marble floor. The Reverend Edwin Pond Parker (1836–1920) was a prominent Hartford Congregational clergyman, pastor of the Second Church of Christ since 1860. He had an extensive knowledge of music, had in part supported himself in college by teaching it, and composed a number of hymns (Potter to SLC, 30 May 75, CU-MARK; Trumbull, 1:291). See note 7.

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6 In his lost letter, Howells doubtless rejected the revisions in the final installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi” that Clemens had submitted on the proofsheets on or soon after 22 May (see 22 May 75 to Howells, n. 2). Possibly he even re-enclosed those proofsheets, with further suggestions, while notifying Clemens that since it was now too late to get the article into the July Atlantic he would announce it for August, unless Clemens telegraphed to stop him.

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7 Howells sent the sheet music for “No More,” a song by Francis Boott (1813–1904). Boott, a graduate of Harvard University, lived in Italy for many years before settling in Cambridge in the early 1870s; it was there that he and Howells became friends. His compositions, primarily vocal, included both secular and sacred songs; among them were settings of six poems by Bret Harte. Boott and his family associated with leading literary figures both in the United States and Italy. Howells later used Boott’s son-in-law, Frank Duveneck, as basis for the artist in Indian Summer (Howells 1886), and Henry James drew on Boott and his daughter for the Osmonds in Portrait of a Lady (1881). William James, also an intimate friend, wrote Boott’s obituary and delivered a eulogy at his memorial service. Little has been discovered about Potter’s music, but one of his compositions, “Room for a Soldier,” was later transcribed for band by John Philip Sousa (William James, 97–101; MTHL, 1:87 n. 4; Sousa, 3).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]).

Previous publication: L6, 492–94; MTHL, 1:85–87.

Provenance:see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

today • to-|day [within canceled paragraph]

y • [partly formed]

to • [‘o’ doubtful]