2 September 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 02473)
Your telegram just rec’d. Shall await your letter.1explanatory note
But I made a mistake in writing you. It would take too long to explain. Suffice it that I was charging about 33 per cent more than I meant to.
This disgusts me. But I send the “Fable for Old Boys & Girls” anyway. Since its price is lowered I don’t know but what you might really come to like it. But hurl it back with obloquy if you don’t. I can dodge.
I enclose also a “True Story” which has no humor in it. You can pay as lightly as you choose for that, if you want it, for it is rather out of my line. I have not altered the old colored woman’s story except to begin it at the beginning, instead of the middle, as she did—& worked traveled both ways.2explanatory note
I told this yarn to Hay & some company & they liked it. So I thought I’d write it.3explanatory note
enclosure:
Do you mind that attitude? It took me hours to perfect that.4explanatory note
Howells’s telegram does not survive, but his follow-up letter does (CU-MARK):
Howells answered Clemens’s letter of 22 August and a letter written about a week later, now lost but alluded to in Clemens’s second paragraph. When he received it, Howells was packing for his family’s Saturday, 29 August, return to Cambridge from their summer quarters in Jaffrey, New Hampshire (Howells 1979, 66). For Charles Pope’s response to the translation Howells finished sending him that same day, see note 4. Howells’s letter did not reach Clemens for four months: the postmarks on its envelope indicate that it arrived in Elmira on 3 January 1875, whereupon Theodore Crane readdressed and remailed it to Hartford. Howells’s joke about Sir Walter Scott (“the Waverley man”) has not been explained.
Mary Ann (“Auntie”) Cord (1798–1888), a former slave, was the Cranes’ cook at Quarry Farm. She had lost her husband and seven children when the family was broken up and sold around 1852, only to be miraculously reunited, thirteen years later, with her youngest son, Henry, then a soldier in the Union army. Henry, who had escaped to Elmira before the Civil War and become a barber, brought his mother back with him when he resumed his career there. Mary Cord told the Clemenses the story of the separation and reunion on or shortly before 28 June 1874 (see 3 July 74 to OLC, n. 1click to open letter). Clemens’s moving version, “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” in which he called Mary Cord “Aunt Rachel,” was his debut in the Atlantic Monthly, appearing in November 1874. The following year he reprinted the story in Sketches, New and Old (Wisbey 1981, 1, 3; SLC: 1874; 1875, 202–7). In 1907 Howells remembered that he did not pay “lightly” for it:
He came first with “A True Story,” one of those noble pieces of humanity with which the South has atoned chiefly if not solely through him for all its despite to the negro. . . . “A True Story” was but three pages long, and I remember the anxiety with which the business side of the magazine tried to compute its pecuniary value. It was finally decided to give the author twenty dollars a page, a rate unexampled in our modest history. I believe Mr. Clemens has since been offered a thousand dollars a thousand words, but I have never regretted that we paid him so handsomely for his first contribution. I myself felt that we were throwing in the highest recognition of his writing as literature, along with a sum we could ill afford; but the late Mr. Houghton, who had then become owner and paymaster, had no such reflection to please him in the headlong outlay. He had always believed that Mark Twain was literature, and it was his zeal and courage which justified me in asking for more and more contributions from him, though at a lower rate. (Howells 1907, 601)
For Howells’s 1875 assessment of “A True Story” and the “confusion” it caused in the “average critical mind,” see pp. 657–58. For Houghton, see 11 Dec 74 to Houghton and Company, n. 1click to open letter.
It was almost certainly during one of his most recent visits to New York— in late June and early July, on his way to and from Hartford—that Clemens told the “yarn” to John Hay and William Seaver, and possibly other “company” as well (see p. 171 and 25 Sept 74 to Seaverclick to open letter).
This photograph, taken by Elisha Van Aken of Elmira (see the next letter, n. 6), survives without a cover letter of its own and was probably enclosed here. Howells alluded to it—and to two other photographs, now lost—in his reply to this letter (CU-MARK):
Clemens had praised A Foregone Conclusion in his letter of 21 June to Howells. The fable evidently was not his first failure with the Atlantic. Around mid-December 1874 he told Joseph H. Twichell that “the first two pieces he sent to the Atlantic were rejected” (Twichell, 1:38). The earlier unsuccessful piece has not been identified. Howells was doubtless correct in thinking the fable too indelicate for the magazine’s readers. Published as the three-part “Some Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls” in Sketches, New and Old in 1875, it depicts a scientific expedition in which the ludicrous researchers are an assortment of animals and insects who misinterpret their findings, get drunk, and are repeatedly irreverent. This printed version, typeset from a manuscript now at the New York Public Library (NN-B), does not explicitly mention Sisyphus and Atlas, but does have its Tumble-Bug observe that he comes “of a race that rolled their fragrant spheres down the solemn aisles of antiquity” (SLC 1875, 139). Clemens did not add any “circumstantiation” to “A True Story” (see 20 Sept 74 to Howells, n. 1click to open letter). The missing photograph of the “whole landscape” may have been an exterior view of Clemens’s study identical to the one enclosed in the next letter. The “asthma” photograph has not been identified. Howells’s “dispoged” echoes Sairey Gamp in Dickens’s Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, a book Clemens knew well. Charles Pope had written to Howells on 4 September, expressing his satisfaction with Howells’s work: “I could wish for nothing better, and I believe no one could have done it better” (Howells 1979, 64 n. 3; MTHL , 2:863; L1 , 104–5, 112, 190, 193; L5 , 490).
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B). MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784 [98]), is copy-text for the enclosed inscribed photograph.
L6 , 217–20; MTB , 1:514, and MTL , 1:223, excerpts from letter; MTHL , 1:22-23, 25 n. 3, without photograph.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenance for the letter. The photograph was donated in 1945 by Mildred Howells and John Mead Howells.