To James Redpath
10 July 1871 • (2nd of 3) • Elmira, N.Y.
(MS: DLC, UCCL 00635)

Elmira, July 10.

Dear Redpath:

A more careful reading of your late letter has set me thinking, & I do plainly see in that [Southend] business calamity for my lecture season. I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can’t be made to do it, in any possible way. And Lord knows it wasn’t “business” to [ pav ] start me in my most important city in an obscure course, & that, too, in a church. What could you have been thinking about? Seems to me that an agent would feel the importance of a first-rate start for his [ clin ] client—is that correct?

Hang it, if the Southend business looks more & more fatal, the more I think of it. We must get rid of it, even if I have to write the proposed letter—which is a heavy pill to take, there is no question about that. Can’t you fix it some way, so as to get me liberated without prejudice? I certainly haven nothing against that society, but to talk elsewhere than in Music Hall & in a big course may ruin me. But if n everything else fails, present the letter & let the heavens fall.

Read over the enclosed, & if you want it altered, return it & state the alterations.1

Yrs

Mark.

[letter docketed:] boston lyceum bureau, redpath & fall. jul 15 1871 [and] Twain Mark | Elmira 7/10 ’71

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens’s enclosure, a draft of a letter of withdrawal from the South End appearance to be used in case the rescheduling could not be negotiated, is not known to survive and proved unnecessary (see the previous letter, n. 2).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned in 1981 by Mr. and Mrs. Roy J. Friedman, who provided a photocopy. The MS is now at the Library of Congress (DLC).

Previous publication: L4, 434–434; excerpts in Will M. Clemens 1900, 28; MTL, 1:189; Horner, 167; “Letters to James Redpath,” Mark Twain Quarterly 5 (Winter–Spring 1942): 20; Chester L. Davis 1978, 3. All excerpts include a last line which does not appear in the MS and which is evidently taken from a letter of 13 February 1872 to Redpath: “Success to Fall’s carbuncle and many happy returns.”

Provenance:deposited in DLC by Roy J. Friedman in 1993.

Emendations and textual notes:

Southend • South-|end

pav • [possibly ‘pay’; ‘y’ partly formed]

clin client • clinent