To Frank Fuller
7 August 1867 • Naples, Italy
(Transcript facsimile: CtY-BR, UCCL 00142)

Naples, Italy, Aug 7/67

Friend Fuller

Don’t make any arrangements about lecturing for me. I have got a better [thing,] in Washington.

[Shall ]spend the winter there.1

[It ]will be well for both of [us, ]I think—[& ]surely must be for me—better than lecturing at $50. a night for a Literary Society in Chicago & paying my own expenses. I have calculated all that & there isn’t any money in it. If I lectured 50 times during the season it would only pay each of us $750. Deduct traveling expenses & would there be “monthly wages” left? Hardly. Going about on our own hook would be worse if it snowed any. Winter after next will be early enough to dare [that,]—& I may be better known, then, after a winter spent in [Washington.]

[I ]must not commit myself on paper, but will explain fully when I see you in October.2

[I ]have had a good deal of fun on this trip, but it is costing like Sin. [I will ]be a busted community some time before I see America again. The worst of it is, that a ship is a bad writing desk & I can’t write on shore because I have too much to see there. So I neglect my correspondence half the time & botch it the balance.3 Tell Webb I saw Lily Hitchcock in Paris & she was chief among the ten thousand American roses there & altogether lovely.4 I did so yearn to kiss her for her mother but it was just my luck—her mother was there herself. But she is a splendid girl—both of them I mean. I long to have a talk with you, my old compound of miraculous suavity & gorgeous address,—& a smoke—& shall I hope before a great many [weeks.]

[Good-bye ]& give my love to your brother5

Yours ever

Mark

[in margin: ([over] )]

Aug 7/67

PS Italy is a beautiful land, & its daughters are as fair as the moon6 that holds her silvery course above their heads & its traditions are rich with the poetry & romance of the old crusading days,—happy days! glorious days but destined never to return! I like Italy.

Yrs

Mark

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens was about to accept Senator William M. Stewart’s offer of a private secretaryship (see 9 Aug 67 to JLC and family).

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2 Fuller seems to have relayed a lecture offer from Edwin Lee Brown of the Young Men’s Library Association of Chicago, who in early June had expressed an interest in arranging a three-month tour, probably about fifty lectures. The $50 fee Clemens mentioned here, however, does not accord with the $100 fee previously offered (8 June 67 to McComb). And Clemens’s calculation that the tour would pay them only $750 is correct only if we assume he was deducting $1,000 in travel expenses. Since this letter is preserved only in a modern transcript, these anomalies suggest that one or more of the figures in the text may misrepresent the manuscript. Despite his refusal, Clemens’s name appeared in December on a list of “celebrities” scheduled to lecture for Brown’s organization, indicating that it still hoped to book him. Clemens did not lecture in Chicago until 7 January 1869, during his 1868–69 midwestern lecture tour, which was sponsored by the Associated Western Literary Societies, to which the Young Men’s Library Association belonged (“Chicago,” New York Evening Post, 11 Dec 67, 1; “The American Vandal Abroad,” Chicago Times, 8 Jan 69, 3).

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3 In the three weeks since 15 July, Clemens had probably written six Alta letters (SLC 1867 [MT00562], 1867 [MT00563], 1867 [MT00566], 1867 [MT00567], 1867 [MT00568], 1867 [MT00572]), one Tribune letter (SLC 1867 [MT00561]), and two Herald letters (SLC 1867 [MT00553], 1867 [MT00554]), bringing his total to fifteen in the eight and a half weeks since the start of the trip. Over the next four days he apparently wrote three more to the Alta (SLC 1867 [MT00569], 1867 [MT00570], 1867 [MT00571]), although some of these may have been back dated.

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4 Song of Solomon 5:10, 16: “My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.... yea, he is altogether lovely.”

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5 Fuller had one younger and two older brothers as well as a sister, but the brother mentioned here has not been identified (Fuller to Mr. Brown, 27 June 1912, CLjC).

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6 Song of Solomon 6:10, one of Clemens’s favorite verses: “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” Compare L1, 96 n. 8, and 169 n. 16.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

Photocopy of a transcript (handwritten, in pencil) made by Dana S. Ayer of Clemens’s now-lost MS. The editors have not seen the transcript itself, which is in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (CtY-BR). Emendation to restore the likely reading of the lost original has been carried out only where Ayer’s habitual errors can be confidently identified: Ayer’s invariant ‘and’ for Clemens’s invariant ‘&’; Ayer’s flush-left paragraphs for Clemens’s normal indented paragraphs; and Ayer’s omission of terminal punctuation where Clemens habitually supplied it.

Previous publication: L2, 75–77.

Provenance:see Brownell Collection, pp. 509–11.

Emendations and textual notes:

thing, • [comma possibly a stray mark]

[¶] Shall • [flush ¶] Shall

[¶] It • [flush ¶] It

us, • [possibly no comma]

& • and [also at 75.7, 8, 10, 12, 76.5, 7, 8 (twice), 12 (three times), 14, 19, 20, 21]

that, • [possibly ‘that.’]

Washington. • Washington‸

[¶] I • [flush ¶] I

[¶] I • [flush ¶] I

[no ¶] I will • [possible flush ¶] I will

weeks. • weeks‸

[¶] Good-bye • [flush ¶] Good-bye

(over) • [Since the versos of all three pages of Ayer’s transcription are blank, there can be no doubt that Ayer copied this instruction from the MS, and that Clemens wrote the postscript on the verso of the last page of the body of the letter.]