Farmington Avenue,
Hartford, Sept. 20, 1876. My dear
Howells,—All right, my boy, send proof
sheets here. I amend dialect stuff by talking
and talking and talking it till it sounds right —and
I had difficulty with this negro talk because a negro
sometimes (rarely) says “goin” and sometimes
“gwyne,” and they make just such discrepancies
in other words—and when you come to reproduce
them on paper they look as if the variation resulted
from the writer’s carelessness. But I
want to work at the proofs and get the dialect as
nearly right as possible.
We are in part of the new house. Goodness knows
when we’ll get in the rest of it—full
of workmen yet.
I worked a month at my play, and launched it in New
York last Wednesday. I believe it will go.
The newspapers have been complimentary. It is
simply a setting for the one character, Col. Sellers—as
a play I guess it will not bear a critical assault
in force.
The Warners are as charming as ever. They go
shortly to the devil for a year—(which
is but a poetical way of saying they are going to afflict
themselves with the unsurpassable—(bad word)
of travel for a spell.) I believe they mean to go
and see you, first-so they mean to start from heaven
to the other place; not from earth. How is that?
I think that is no slouch of a compliment—kind
of a dim religious light
about it. I enjoy that sort of thing.
Yrs
ever
Mark.
Raymond, in a letter to the Sun, stated
that not “one line” of the California
dramatization had been used by Mark Twain, “except
that which was taken bodily from The Gilded Age.”
Clemens himself, in a statement that he wrote
for the Hartford Post, but suppressed, probably
at the request of his wife, gave a full history of
the play’s origin, a matter of slight interest
to-day.
Sellers on the stage proved a great
success. The play had no special merit
as a literary composition, but the character of Sellers
delighted the public, and both author and actor were
richly repaid for their entertainment.
Letters 1874. Mississippi chapters.
Visits to Boston. A joke
on Aldrich
“Couldn’t you send me some such story
as that colored one for our January number—that
is, within a month?” wrote Howells, at the end
of September, and during the week following Mark Twain
struggled hard to comply, but without result.
When the month was nearly up he wrote:
To W. D. Howells,
in Boston:
Hartford,
Oct. 23, 1874.
My dear Howells,—I have
delayed thus long, hoping I might do something for
the January number and Mrs. Clemens has diligently
persecuted me day by day with urgings to go to work
and do that something, but it’s no use —I
find I can’t. We are in such a state of
weary and endless confusion that my head won’t
go. So I give it up.....
Yrs ever,
Mark.
