To William Dean Howells
6 June 1877 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: MH-H, UCCL 01439)

June 6/77.

My Dear Howells:

No sir, I wasn’t blackguarding you for delaying to answer. Exactly the res verse. My letter was hardly out of my hand till I was saying, “There, it is gone, & I have forgotten to say, ‘This needs no answer’—so [I] have gone & laid one more burden upon a man whose guards were in the water already—will never t neglect that P.S. again!.” The debt was discharged when you sent the Hammond pamphlet—& I so considered it. I took that to be your answer.1

Autobiog’s? I didn’t know there were any but old Franklin’s & Benvenuto Che Cellini’s. But if I should think of any I will mention them with pleasure.2

I am more delighted about [Barret] & the play than I can express. I hope you get good terms out of him, & have drawn your contract from the standpoint that he is the blackest-livered scoundrel on earth.3 That is the standpoint of our contract with Parsloe, who is a mighty good fellow & as gentle as a lamb.

Blast a man who lets on that he is going to buy a man’s house, & then doesn’t do [it. However], there is a hell. That thought calms me even in my bitterest moments.4

I have written two Numbers of my “Random Notes of an Idle Excursion” (you see that does not indicate whither the ship is bound & therefore the reader can’t be saying “Why all this introduction—are we never coming to Bermuda?”) The reader never discovers whither the ship is bound, until the last paragraph of the second number informs him. It begins to look as if this Excursion may string out to 4 or 6 Numbers. Will re-read & correct & forward 1 & 2 when I get to Elmira. (We leave for there to-day.)

Now if you should print these things, couldn’t you set them up 2 or 3 months before you are going to use them, so that I can have duplicate proofs & simultane with Temple Bar?5 The love of our crowd to yours.

Yrs Ever

Mark.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1Neither Clemens’s letter, written sometime after 29 May, nor Howells’s delayed answer has been found. The “pamphlet” has not been identified, but must have been one of the dozens of small books and tracts written by popular evangelist Edward Payson Hammond (1831–1910). “An Overrated Book,” Clemens’s humorously dismissive review of Hammond’s 1868 Sketches of Palestine, appeared anonymously in the “Contributors’ Club” in the Atlantic Monthly for June 1877. He confessed to the authorship in a letter of 27 October 1879 to Albert J. Scott (Letters 1876–1880; Eppard 1977; Gribben 1980, 1:288; Hammond 1868; SLC 1877e).

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22Howells, in his now lost letter, had asked Clemens for suggestions for writers he might include in the series of “Choice Autobiographies” for which he was going to provide introductory essays. He published eight volumes of these in 1877–78 (through James R. Osgood or Houghton, Osgood and Company), for Frederica Sophia Wilhelmina (volumes 1–2), Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Thomas Ellwood (volume 3), Vittorio Alfieri, Carlo Goldoni, and Edward Gibbon (volumes 4–6), and Jean François Marmontel (volumes 7–8), but none for Benjamin Franklin or Benvenuto Cellini. Clemens had ridiculed Franklin’s autobiography, notably in his “Memoranda” department in the Galaxy magazine for July 1870, but was admiring of Cellini’s: in an 1878 notebook entry, he called the latter “the most entertaining of books” (N&J2, 229), and referred to it elsewhere in his notebooks, in chapter 35 of Huckleberry Finn, and in chapter 17 of A Connecticut Yankee (AutoMT1, 5–6; Howells 1979b, 151, 164–65, 169–70, 177, 186–87; SLC 1870; Gibson and Arms 1948, 11, 27; N&J2, 227–28, 234; N&J3, 239).

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3Howells’s play, A Counterfeit Presentment, was serialized in the Atlantic from August through October 1877, and published in book form by Osgood and Company in late September (Howells 1877a, 1877e; “New Publications,” Boston Globe, 29 Sept 1877, 5). It is a comedy about an artist who courts a woman in love with another man, winning her affection after her father exposes her first love as a villain. Howells had thought about writing a play for Lawrence Barrett (1838–91), an actor, producer, and manager, as early as July 1875 (5 July 1875 to Howells, L6, 504–5 n. 1). For the terms of the agreement Howells reached with Barrett for the dramatic rights to A Counterfeit Presentment see 14 June 1877 to Howells, n. 1.

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4John Fiske (1842–1901), a philosopher and historian and at this time assistant librarian at Harvard, was, like Howells, a resident of Cambridge. He had considered buying Howells’s house, but instead decided to build one of his own (Howells 1979b, 166–67).

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5Howells did send Clemens duplicate proofsheets of “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion”: see 3 Aug 1877 to Bentley.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 (98).

Previous publication:

MTHL, 1:180–81.

Provenance:

See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes:

I • I | I [corrected miswriting]

Barret • [sic]

it. However • ~.— | ~