To William Dean Howells
29 August 1877 • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: NN-BGC, UCCL 02516)

Elmira, Aug. 29.

My Dear Howells:

Just got your letter last night. No, dern that article, it made me cry when I read it in proof, it was so oppressively & ostentatiously poor. Skim your eye over it again & you will think as I do. If Isaac & the prophets of Baal can be doctored gently & made permissible, it will redeem the thing; but if it can’t, let’s burn all of the article except the tail-end of it & use that as an instroduction to the next article—as I suggested in my letter to you of day before yesterday. (I had this proof from Cambridge before yours came.)1

Boucicault says my new play is ever so much better than Ah Sin; says the Amateur detective is a bully character, too.2 An actor is chawing over the play in New York, to see if the old Detective is suited to his abilities. Haven’t heard from him yet.3

If you’ve got that paragraph by you yet, & if in your judgment it would be good to publish it, & if you absolutely would not mind doing it, then I think I’d like to have you do it—or else put some other words in my mouth that will be properer, & publish them.4 But mind, don’t think of it for a moment if it is distasteful—& doubtless it is. I value your judgment more than my own, to as to the wisdom of saying anything at all in this matter. To say nothing leaves me in an injurious position—& yet maybe I might do better to speak to the men themselves when I go to New York. This was my latest idea, & it looked wise.

We expect to leave here for home Sept. 4, reaching there the 8th—but we may be delayed a week.

I wish I knew whether the “house” will send the “advance” sheets to the “Canadian Monthly” or whether I am to do it. Do you know? It is perfectly easy for me to do it, but no need of both of us doing it.5

Curious thing. I read passages from my play, & a full synopsis, to Boucicault, who was re-writing a play which he wrote & laid aside 3 or 4 years ago. (My detective is about that age, you know). Then he read a passage from his play, where a real detective does some things that are as idiotic as some of my old Wheeler’s performances. Showed me the passages, & behold, his man’s name is Wheeler! However, his Wheeler is not a prominent character, so we’ll not alter the names. My Wheeler’s name is taken from the old Jumping Frog sketch.6

I am re-reading Ticknor’s diary, & am charmed with it; though I still say he refers to too many good things when he could g just as well have told them. Think of the man traveling 8 days in convoy & familiar intercourse with a band of outlaws through the mountain fastnesses of Spain—he the fourth stranger they had encountered in 3 thirty years—& compressing this priceless experience into a single colorless paragraph of his diary! They spun yarns to him this unworthy devil, too.7

I wrote you a very long letter a day or two ago, but Susie Crane wanted to make a copy of it to keep, so it has not gone yet. It may go to-day, possibly.

We unite in warm regards to you & yourn.

Yrs Ever

Mark

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1Neither the letter from Howells to which Clemens replied nor Clemens’s of “day before yesterday” is known to survive. Clemens received proofsheets of the second installment of “Some Rambling Notes” from the Riverside Press, in Cambridge, where the Atlantic Monthly was printed. “Isaac & the prophets of Baal,” possibly “doctored gently,” remained in the sketch, in the November 1877 issue (SLC 1877–78, 590–91). Its originator was Clemens’s friend of the late 1860s, Captain Edgar Wakeman (N&J1, 241–43). Clemens’s immediate source for the story, however, was Twichell, his Bermuda travel companion. Twichell had heard it from Wakeman, whom he had met in 1874 while en route to Peru to investigate the treatment of Chinese laborers (Courtney 2008, 151–57; Twichell to SLC, 13 Aug 1874 and 22 Aug 1874, CU-MARK). On 13 October 1877, Twichell remarked in his journal: “M.T. His articles on our Bermuda trip have begun to appear in the Atlantic Monthly. My story of Capt Wakeman’s exposition of ‘Isaac and the prophets of Baal,’ which I have told so long, ever since I returned from South America is incorporate[d] in the 2nd article, and so lost to me forever” (Twichell 1874–1916).

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2Clemens had known Dion Boucicault, an actor and prolific playwright, since the early 1870s, and in 1873 had consulted with him about dramatizing The Gilded Age (17 May 1873 to Warner, L5, 368–70). No letter from him to Clemens about the Simon Wheeler play has been found. Despite his praise, the play was ultimately a decided failure (a fact Clemens himself later recognized), and it was never produced. For a transcription of the manuscript see “The Simon Wheeler Sequence” in Satires and Burlesques (S&B, 216–306).

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3The actor “chawing over the play in New York” has not been firmly identified. It is likely, however, that it was Sol Smith Russell, a member of Augustin Daly’s theater company and a client of theatrical agent Horace Wall. Russell wrote to Clemens on 25 August that both men had told him about the play (calling it “Clues”) and that Daly thought the “star” role would suit him well (6 Aug 1877 to Conway, n. 2; Russell to SLC, 25 Aug 1877, CU-MARK). Clemens was no doubt pleased—Russell was the actor he had originally wanted for the part—and answered immediately, suggesting a meeting. He had probably not yet received Russell’s reply, written on 28 August. Russell tried twice to arrange a meeting, but was evidently not successful. (Clemens’s side of the correspondence has not been found.) His letters do not mention whether he had read the play. The manuscript that Clemens left in New York was returned to him at the end of August by Maze Edwards, acting on behalf of Wall (4 and 6 July 1877 to Howells; Russell to SLC, 28 Aug 1877 and 30 Sept 1877, CU-MARK; Edwards to SLC, 31 Aug 1877, CU-MARK).

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4That is, the paragraph about New York critics that Clemens proposed in his letter of 3 August to Howells. For Howells’s answer see 19 Sept 1877 to Howells, n. 1.

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5

Clemens wanted to forestall the unauthorized Canadian publication of his Bermuda sketches, scheduled to begin in the October issue of the Atlantic Monthly (14 June 1877 to Howells, n. 3). H. O. Houghton, publisher of the Atlantic (the “house”), wrote to Hart and Rawlinson, publishers of the Canadian Monthly and National Review, on 23 August (the letter has not been found). Hart and Rawlinson replied on 27 August (CU-MARK):

Yours of 23 inst is received and contents fully noted. We will be much pleased to enter into the arrangement you propose relative to the publication of Mr Clemens papers in the “Canadian Monthly” and as our publication day is about the same as yours they will appear almost simultaneously we will however advertise a short time before that we have arranged with Mr Clemens for their publication and Mssrs Belford would hardly dare to publish them, though we could not restrain them legally we have other influences that will protect us.

Send on the advance sheets for the Oct. No as soon as convenient.

Although Houghton complied, the strategy was not successful. The Rose-Belford Company (successors of the Belfords) included the Bermuda sketches, together with several other short works, in their Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion, issued in 1878 (Houghton to SLC, 9 Aug 1877, and Houghton and Company to SLC, 30 Aug 1877, CU-MARK; Roper 1966, 53).

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6Although named for the narrator of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Clemens’s detective—like Captain “Hurricane” Jones in “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion”—was actually based on Edgar Wakeman (15 Sept 1879 to Howells, NN-BGC). Boucicault’s play has not been identified.

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7Clemens was rereading Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, which includes a description of the author’s trip from Seville to Lisbon in 1818 with a band of Spanish “contrabandists” (Ticknor 1876, 1:241–42; Gribben 1980, 2:704). Ticknor (1791–1871), an eminent scholar of Spanish literature, was the brother of William D. Ticknor, a founder of the Boston publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, NN-BGC.

Previous publication:

MTL, 1:302–3; MTHL, 1:199–201.

Provenance:

See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.

Emendations and textual notes: