To
Jane Lampton Clemens
12 July 1877 • Elmira, N.Y.
(Transcript by Albert Bigelow Paine: CU-MARK, UCCL 12739)
(SUPERSEDED)
‸Keep the details private.
S L C.‸
Elmira, Thursday.
My Dear Mother:
I hope you & Sam arrived safely & had a pleasant journey.
I have written a play. (Keep this to yourself for the present—at least all details except that bare fact.) It is in four acts. I conceived the idea, plotted it out in skeleton, & wrote the closing scene of the last act, all in one day. I wrote the close of the third act & the middle of the second on the second day. I completed the play entirely in 4 more days & a half. Three hundred pages of manuscript in less than 7 ‸consecutive‸ working days of 6½ hours each. I usually write only 25 pages a day, but this time I made things fly—never had to stop to think of a word. When the play was done, I put in five days trimming, polishing & cutting it down—for of course you couldn’t play all that manuscript in one night.
It took Bret Harte & me 14 working days (long ones, too) to plot out that play of ours ‸(“Ah Sin”,)‸ in skeleton; it took the two of us 8 days to write it after it was plotted out. We didn’t trim & polish it ‸at‸ all—& we shall live to repent it, too. It was not my fault; it was wholly that of that natural liar, swindler, bilk, & literary thief, Bret Harte, son of an Albany Jew-[pedlar. I] shall shed no tears if that play should fail, in October. It ought to—I know that pretty well.
I go to New York to-morrow, to go to theatres a week or two, privately, & see if I can put ‸my‸ hand on a comedian who can do the boss character in my new comedy. If I can’t find a considerably better one than Raymond is or ever was, I shall come back home & weep.
Please keep these private details among yourselves. We are all well & send love. I don’t know whether you are there or not. Shall direct this to Orion.
Affly
Sam.
Textual Commentary
Copy-text:Provenance:See Paine Transcripts in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
Paine or his typist apparently transcribed Clemens’s MS interlineations as interlineations in the
typescript, and they have been therefore rendered as such in the text.
pedlar. I • pedlar.—I [the dash probably an end-line dash in MS]
