Look here, Howells, it is going to be time, now, pretty soon, for some of Grant’s blacklegs to retire from the consulships & render them into the [hands] of stainless literary incapables—of whom Stoddard is one of which.
Now I’ll be fair with you. I’ll tell you what I will do. If you will sit down & be the first office-seeker in the field, & write a letter & ask Gov. Hayes to replace, with Stoddard, the first blackguard he catches in a consulship after the firs fourth of next March, I will agree to support my brother myself, all through the administration; otherwise I will throw him upon the government—as he did with himself in Mr. Lincoln’s time.1 My brother has the strongest possible claims upon Gov. Hayes, too; because it was my brother’s sagacious desertion of the republican party three months ago (he is simply hell on political sagacity, as St Chrysostom2 would say) that made Mr. Tilden’s coming defeat so inflexibly & implacably & absolutely certain. I can always tell which party’s funeral is appointed if I can find out how my brother has made up his mind to vote. For some inscrutable reason God never allows him to vote right. ⟦I believe I told you once about my brother’s religious gymnastics? Well, I have some late news under that head: he is getting stuck after the Mohammedan plan of salvation, now.)⟧
Poor, Sto sweet, pure-hearted, good-intentioned, impotent Stoddard, I have known him 12 years, now, & in all that time he has never been fit for anything but a consul. When I was at the Langham Hotel in London I hired him for 3 months, at $15 a week & board & lodging, to sit up nights with me & dissipate.3 At the end of the time he wouldn’t take a cent. I had to finally smuggle it to him through Dolby after leaving England.4 Stoddard’s got no worldly sense. He is just the stuff for a consul. Don’t you think so? Now you ought to know, you know.5 You ought to know about these things. Now you pitch in & leg for him. Get a quiet consulship created, at Terre del Fuego, if there shouldn’t be a vacancy.
You are to answer my interminable letters only with postal cards, you understand. I write long, because I’m idle.6
Yrs Ever
Mark.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Edward Bates, Lincoln’s first attorney general, was a St. Louis acquaintance
of Orion Clemens’s. In 1861 he arranged for Lincoln to appoint Orion secretary of Nevada Territory (RI 1993, 574; AutoMT1, 452, 461).
In 1873 and 1874 (L5: 19 Oct 1873 to Stoddard, 456–57; link note following 14 Nov 1873 to OLC, 476–78; link note following 28 Nov 1873 to Fitzgibbon, 493; 3 Jan 1874 to OLC, L6, 4).
George Dolby was Clemens’s English lecture agent in 1873 and 1874 (link note following 29 Sept 1873 to MacDonald [2nd of 2], L5, 446–48; 1 Jan 1874 to Ftizgibbon, L6, 2).
Howells had served as U.S. consul in Venice from early 1862 until mid-1865
(Howells 1979a, 83 n. 3, 93–94).
Howells replied, on a postcard sent on 22 September from Pepperell, Massachusetts, near
Townsend Harbor, where he and his family were concluding their
summer (CU-MARK): Stoddard had fractured his left arm “just below the elbow and the joint suffered a double
dislocation,” in May of 1874, while “riding a blind horse across the Campagna at midnight” (17 Mar 1875 to Stoddard, L6, 416–18; Howells 1979b, 133, 139–40). He never received a
consular appointment.
Source text(s):Previous publication:
MTHL, 1:153–54.
Provenance:
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
hands • han hands [corrected miswriting]
