June 22/82.
My Dear Howells—
I am in a state of willd enthusiasm over this July instalment of your story. It’s perfectly dazzling—it’s masterly—incomparable. Yet I heard you read it—without losing my balance. Well, the difference between your reading & your writing is—remarkable—I mean, in the effects produced & the impressions left behind. Why, the first ‸one‸ is to the second ‸other‸ [as is as] a one of Joe Twichell’s electric booming yarns repeated by a somnambulist. Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter, & it is a gentle, pe‸arly‸rl dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it; & by ‸& by‸ I strike it in print, & shout to myself, “God bless us, how has that pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous [sunset] splendors!”
Well, I don’t care how much you read your truck to me, ◊ you can’t permanently damage it for me that way. It is always perfectly fresh & dazzling when I come on it in the magazine. Of course I recognize the form of it as being familiar—but that is all. That is, I remember it as pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead & cold, but ready for the match—& now I see them touched off & all ablaze with blinding fires. You can read, if you want to, but you don’t read worth a damn. I know you can read, because your readings of Cable & your repeatings of the German doctor’s remarks prove that.
That’s the best drunk scene—because the truest—that I ever read. There are touches in it which I never saw any writer take note of before. And they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy. How very drunk, & how recently drunk, & how altogether admirably drunk you must have been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece! Didn't think
Why I notice that that religious interview between Marcia & Mrs. Halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me—but dear me, it’s just too lovely for anything. (Wrote Clark to collar it for the “Library.”)
Hang it, I know where the mystery is, now: When you are reading, you glide right along, & I don’t get a chance to let the things soak home; but when I catch it in the magazine, I give a page 20 or 30 minutes in w which to gently & thoroughly filter into [me. Your] humor is so very subtle, & elusive—(well, often it’s just a vanishing breath of perfume, which a body isn’t certain he smelt, till he stops & takes another smell.)—whereas you can smell other people’s all the time. And your sarcasms on women & people—dern it I always take them for compliments, on the first reading.
[SLC cut the page here to cancel an unknown amount of text, which probably included his complimentary close and signature; he wrote the paragraph below on a partial piece of paper, which appears to be the bottom portion of the cut page]Evening.—Everything was going so well—so jubilantly. And now evidently Susie is stricken—& savagely—with this dire scarlet fever.
Textual Commentary
Source text(s):Previous publication:
MTL, 1:421–22 (incomplete); MTHL, 1:407–8.
Provenance:
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
Emendations and textual notes:
as is as • [sic]
sunset • suns sunset [corrected miswriting]
me. Your • ~.— | ~
