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‸’t‸n 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 simulated, line by line:] 7
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The more Tilden’s character is revealed to |
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Clemens answered two letters from Howells (CU-MARK). The first was: Neither the “story of the cave-collector,” suspected source of Clemens’s
“Canvasser’s Tale,” (SLC 1876k), nor any appeal from the
Republican national committee has been identified. In his letter of 23 August to Howells, 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 has not been found. The second letter from
Howells (CU-MARK) 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 1979b, 462–63, 465). Clemens noted what
appears to be his evaluation of it on Howells’s envelope: “An egg that was an antique.”
Clemens described this “most remarkable echo in the world” in chapter 19 of The
Innocents Abroad (SLC 1869, 195–97).
Warner’s review of Howells’s Sketch of the Life and Character of Rutherford B. Hayes appeared on the front page of the Hartford Courant on 12 (not 13) September. Warner noted that although the biography was “necessarily hasty,” and had been “undertaken as a public duty, . . . the author had not proceeded far in it before it became a labor of love, and the true nature and greatness of the man revealed itself more and more to the writer in the mass of private letters, diaries and note books that were placed at his disposal” (Warner
1876e).
In this suggested paragraph and in the previous one for the “pygmy book,” Clemens alluded to a charge,
being debated in the press, that Tilden had “committed perjury in 1862,
by swearing to a taxable income of $7,118,” when, in fact, according to “his statement under
oath in 1876,” he had “received in 1862, for services rendered to the St. Louis, Alton and Terre Haute
Railroad the sum of $20,000” (“Gov. Tilden’s Income Again,” New York
Times, 15 Sept 1876, 4).
Clemens was decidedly in the minority in his generous appraisal of Harte’s
Two Men of Sandy Bar,
which he had seen recently in New York: the critics panned it mercilessly. After five weeks on the New York stage, Robson took the play on the road, appearing last in San Francisco in 1878. He reportedly lost ten thousand dollars on the venture (AutoMT2, 631–32; Scharnhorst 1992, 52–59).
Aldrich’s story collection, Marjorie Daw and Other
People, was published in 1873. The title piece was an epistolary
tale about an ill man who falls in love with the fictitious Marjorie Daw, invented by a friend to ease the tedium of the
illness.
The enclosure, a clipping of a Hartford Courant editorial, does not survive with the
letter. It is transcribed here from the Courant for 14 September 1876 (2). The editorial alludes to Tilden’s labors in the early 1870s, as chairman of the New York state Democratic committee, to bring down
William M. Tweed and the corrupt Tammany Hall “ring,” which
controlled New York city politics, and to reform the state judiciary. Fernando Wood
(1812–81), a controversial three-time Democratic mayor of New York (1855–58, 1860–62),
compromised an ambitious program of reforms with political chicanery and questionable ethics (Mushkat 1990, 38, 41–81).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
MTL, 1:285–87; MTHL, 1:150–53.
Provenance:
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
uninterrupted • uninterrupupted [corrected miswriting]
piece.) [¶] And • ~.)— | [¶] ~
