Sept. 14.
My Dear Howells:1
Yes, the collection of caves was the origin of it. I changed it to echoes because these being invisible & intangible, constituted a still more absurd species of property, & yet a man could really own an echo, & sell it, too, for a high figure—such an echo as that at the villa Simonetti, two miles from Milan, for instance.2 My first purpose was to have the man make a collection of caves & afterwards of echoes, but perceived that the element of absurdity & impracticability was so nearly identical as to amount to a repetition of an idea.
I am reading & enjoying the biography. It is a marvelous thing that you read for it & wrote it in such a little bit of a time, let alone conduct a dysentery at the same time—when I have that disease, even mildly, I can write absolutely nothing. Warner had a good & appreciative review of the book in yesterday’s paper.3 He put down everything else to attend to that. I like W. better & better, every day. I have had prejudices & dislikes, there, but I think they have worn themselves out, now. I believe Mrs. Clemens is as blindly fond of him as she is of you—which is a great argument with me, because her instincts in the perception of worth are always truer than mine.
I will not & do not believe that there is a possibility of Hayes’s defeat, & yet ‸but‸ I want the victory to be sweeping. Every little helps. Now haven’t you somebody handy who can make a [ten-cent] book, to be given away, of this nature, [to-wit]: A miniature volume, with a page the size of a postage stamp, with this title-page: “What Mr. Tilden has done for His Country.” And put in it paragraphs like this:
“In October, 1862 I contributed $7,000 toward the public revenues for the patriotic purpose of prosecuting the war against rebellion.”
Put into the litle little volume all the services which Tilden has unselfishly rendered his country—you see the book should be sized according to the materials his career is able to furnish.
Then make this pygmy book fast, with a string—or tack it inside the cover, of a 12 or 24 or 8vo (according to materials,) to bear this title-page: “What Mr. Tilden has done for h Himself.” This book should be paragraphed thus:
“In October, 1862, I raised my right hand, & kissed a book, & for this service allowed myself $20,000 or $30,000 of government money, my time being valuable & this compensation not seeming to me exorbitant.”4
And so forth & so on. Read the enclosed slip from the Courant. Such a book, issued 2 or 3 weeks before election, might help, some. It is a book that anybody can write, with a campaign file of the N. Y. Times to get his material from. I would write it myself if I had the time & the materials, . I seem to have said though I would of course question the wisdom or and also the propriety of putting my name to such a piece of work.
It seems odd to find myself interested in an election. I never was before. And I can’tn seem to get over my repugnance to reading or thinking about politics, yet. But in truth I care little about any party’s politics—but the man that behind it is the important thing.
You may well know that Mrs. Clemens liked the Parlor Car—enjoyed it ever so much, & was indignant at you all through, & kept exploding into rages at you for drawing such a pretending that such a woman ever existed—closing each & every explosion with “But it is just what such a woman would do”—“It is just what such a woman would say.” They all voted the Parlor Car perfection—except me. I said they wouldn’t have been allowed to court & quarrel there so long, [uninterrupted]; but at each critical moment the odious train-boy would come in & pile foul literature all over them four or five inches deep, & the lover would turn his head aside & curse—& presently that [train-boy] would be back again (as on all those western roads) to take up the literature & leave prize candy.
Of course the thing is perfect, ‸in the magazine,‸ without the [train-boy]; but I was thinking of the stage & the groundlings. If the dainty touches went over their heads, the train-boy & other possible interruptions would fetch them every time. Would it mar the flow of the thing too much to insert that devil? I thought it over a couple of hours & concluded it wouldn’t, & that he ought to be in for the sake of the groundlings (& to get new [copyright] on the [piece.)
And] it seemed to me that now that the fourth act is so successfully written, why not go ahead & write the 3 preceding acts? And then after it is finished, let me put in into it a low-comedy character (the girl’s or the lover’s father or uncle) & gobble a big pecuniary interest in your work for myself. Do not let this generous proposition disturb your rest—but do write the other 3 acts, & then it will be valuable to managers. And don’t go & sell it to anybody, like Harte, but keep it for yourself.
Harte’s play can be doctored till it will be entirely acceptable & then it will clear a great sum every year. I am out of all patience with Harte for selling it. The play entertained me hugely, ‸even‸ in its present crude state.5
That is a good story of your sister’s, but I don’t think I could make it go except in one fashion—by taking the idea & applying it in some other way, as I did with the caves, & do with pretty much everything. There are few stories that have anything superlatively good in them except the idea, &—& that is always bettered by transplanting.
But Aldrich has genius enough to get over that difficulty. The man that wrote Margjorie Daw would make an admirable thing of the perplexities of these people, I should think.6
I was going to enclose it, for Aldrich, but I think I won’t, yet. I’ll wait. By & by the story will grab hold of me, maybe.
Pardon the length of this. Love to you all.
Ys Ever
Mark.
[enclosure:] 7
The more Tilden’s character is revealed to |
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Neither the “story of the cave-collector,” suspected source of Clemens’s “Canvasser’s Tale,”nor any appeal from the Republican national committee has been identified. Since in his letter of 23 August Clemens made no report of that committee having contacted him, nor of reading Howells’s “Parlor Car” in the September Atlantic Monthly, he must have mentioned both in a subsequent letter to Howells that is not known to survive. The second letter from Howells that he now answered was:
It probably was Anne Thomas Howells (1844–1938), the youngest of Howells’s three sisters and herself a writer, who sent this story (Howells 1979, 462–63, 465). Clemens noted what appears to be his evaluation of it on Howells’s envelope: “An egg that was an antique.”
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Previous publication:
MTL, 1:285–87; MTHL, 1:150–53.
Provenance:
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
ten-cent • ten-|cent
to-wit • to-|wit
uninterrupted • uninterrupupted
train-boy • train-|boy
train-boy • train-|boy
copyright • copy-|right
piece.) [¶] And • piece.)—|[¶] And