Hartford, Oct. 26/81.
My Dear Charley—
A Parthian arrow? Now what have I ever done to you, that you should not only slide off to heaven, before you have earned a right to go, but must add the gratuitous villainy of informing me of it? thus with but thinly-disguised malice reminding me that I am detained in purgatory, as yet.
The house is full of carpenters & decorators; whereas, what we really need, here, is an incendiary. If the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs, & fly to the isles of the blest, & shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of the crater of Haleakala & get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone & the telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain, a piece, & board with a godly, breech-clouted native, & eat poi & dirt, & give thanks to God for to Whom all thanks belong, for these privileges; & never house-keep any more.
I think my wife would be twice as strong as she is, but for this wearing & wearying slavery of housekeeping. However, she thinks she must submit to it, for the sake of the children; whereas, I have always had a tenderness for parents, too; so, for her sake & mine, I sigh for the incendiary. When the evening comes & the gas is lit & the wear-&-tear of life ceases, we want to keep house always; but next morning, we wish, once more, that we were free & irresponsible boarders.
Work?—one can’t, you know, to any purpose. I don’t really get anything done, worth speaking of, except during the 3 or 4 months that we are away in the summer. I wish the summers were seven years long. I keep three or four books on the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one of them at [home. Yes,] & it is all because my time is all taken up with answering the letters of strangers. It can’t be done through a short-hand amanuensis—I’ve tried that, & it wouldn’t work; I couldn’t learn to dictate. What does possess strangers to write so many letters? I never could find that out. However, I suppose I did it myself when I was a [stranger.s.] But I will never do it again.
Maybe you think I am not happy? The very thing that gravels me is, that I am. I don’t want to be happy when I can’t work; & I am resolved that hereafter I won’t be.
What I have always [longer] for, was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands, overlooking the sea; but with Providence’s usual irony, this boon is conferred upon you, who have no right to it & ought to have been damned instead.
Write—& aggravate me again.
Your[s] ever
Mark.
That magazine article of yours was mighty good; up to your very best, I think.
I enclose a ‸book-‸review, written by Howells.
Textual Commentary
Source text(s):Previous publication:
MTL, 404–5, partial publication.
Provenance:
Sometime before 1939 the MS was purchased by businessman William T. H. Howe (1874–1939); in 1940 Dr. Albert A. Berg bought and donated the Howe Collection to NN.
Emendations and textual notes:
home. Yes, • ~.— | ~
stranger.s. • [deletion of period implied]
longer • [sic]
