24 October 1874 • (1st of 2) • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-B, UCCL 02475)
I have delayed thus long, hoping I might do something for the January number, & Mrs. Clemens has diligently persecuted me day by day with urgings to go to work & do that something, but it’s no use—I find I can’t. We are in such a state of weary & endless confusion that my head won’t “go.” So I give it up.
Say I sent you the St. Louis Republican’s enthusiastic review of Samson forwarded to me by Pope. Of course Pope sent one to you, but perhaps he didn’t italicise the most significantⒶemendation feature, & so I did it myself (the repeated calls before the curtain)—though now it occurs to me that you would naturally notice that very pearticularly without any of my assistance.1explanatory note
But now why don’t you invent a play yourself? It would pay you, say $30 a night in New York & $20 everywhere else. That, I remember, is what Daly was to pay Bret Harte (this was 3 years ago)—& he was to advance pay him one or two thousand dollars, besides, on the delivery of the MS.2explanatory note Daly has the most superb company of actors in America—they would almost do justice to even a play written by you. Shan’t I drop Daly a line & hint to him that it isn’t likely you would want to bother with a play but that possibly you might if prsersuasively tackled? Shan’t I?3explanatory note
With Mrs. Clemens & Twichells’ affectionate Ⓐemendation warm regards.
The clipping that Clemens had sent, and the letter presumably enclosing it, are not known to survive. The enthusiastic review appeared in the St. Louis Republican for 6 October 1874; it is transcribed in full in Enclosure with 8? October 1874 (unrecovered) to William Dean Howellsclick to open letter. Clemens probably forwarded it to Howells as soon as he received it, on about 8 October. In 1874 and 1875, Pope toured the United States with Howells’s Samson, playing primarily in the South, Midwest, and West, and later revived the play briefly, in 1877. Howells’s translation was first published in 1889 (Howells: 1889; 1960, 2).
In early 1871 and again in mid-1872, Harte planned to write a play for Augustin Daly, but had not done so. By September 1874 he was working on Kentuck, a play about a character from his 1868 story “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” For that he was to receive from Daly “One hundred dollars per night or six hundred dollars per week. Matinées free unless they reach $600, in which case $50 is to be paid.” When Dion Boucicault became Harte’s collaborator in September 1874, the terms became “12 per cent of the gross receipts nightly,” to be divided equally. The collaboration was unsuccessful, however, and Kentuck was not completed (Joseph Francis Daly, 171, 173; Harte 1868; Scharnhorst 1992, 53).
Daly was known for the strength of his companies, achieved through his ability
to restore forgotten and discarded personalities as well as to bring forward unfriended youth. . . . His purpose was to break away from tradition; to free actors from the trammels of “lines” into which they had settled as in a groove. It was with a great wrench that the old favorites were pried out of the rut, but the result was soon a mobile force, adaptable and creative. He astonished his players by throwing them into parts for which they thought they had no fitness. They were one day dejected over their tasks, and the next elated with the success they had achieved. . . . Then the dignity of the profession was secured by impartial rules. The humblest personage had rights equal to the favorites of the public. All could come to the manager with a grievance. From the beginning he got the reputation of an unyielding disciplinarian, but if he was rigid with others, he also sacrificed himself. It was soon seen that no one else could do so much with men and women of the stage as he. (Joseph Francis Daly, 89–90)
Howells’s response does not survive, but evidently was affirmative: see 29 Oct 74 to Daly.click to open letter
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B).
L6 , 261–262; MTL , 1:229, excerpt; MTHL , 1:33–34.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.