10 July 1871 • (2nd of 3) • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00635)
A more careful reading of your late letter has set me thinking, & I do plainly see in that SouthendⒶemendation business calamity for my lecture season. I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can’t be made to do it, in any possible way. And Lord knows it wasn’t “business” to pav Ⓐemendation start me in my most important city in an obscure course, & that, too, in a church. What could you have been thinking about? Seems to me that an agent would feel the importance of a first-rate start for his clin Ⓐemendation client—is that correct?
Hang it, if the Southend business looks more & more fatal, the more I think of it. We must get rid of it, even if I have to write the proposed letter—which is a heavy pill to take, there is no question about that. Can’t you fix it some way, so as to get me liberated without prejudice? I certainly haven nothing against that society, but to talk elsewhere than in Music Hall & in a big course may ruin me. But if n everything else fails, present the letter & let the heavens fall.
Read over the enclosed, & if you want it altered, return it & state the alterations.1explanatory note
letter docketed: boston lyceum bureau, redpath & fall. jul 15 1871 and Twain Mark | Elmira 7/10 ’71
Clemens’s enclosure, a draft of a letter of withdrawal from the South End appearance to be used in case the rescheduling could not be negotiated, is not known to survive and proved unnecessary (see the previous letter, n. 2).
References
- United States Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- Horner, Charles F. The Life of James Redpath and the Development of the Modern Lyceum. New York: Barse and Hopkins. 1926
- Davis, Chester L., Sr. “Mark’s Playful Letters (Mixed Scraps).” Twainian 37 (November-December): 1–3. 1978
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned in 1981 by Mr. and Mrs. Roy J. Friedman, who provided a photocopy. The MS is now at the Library of Congress (DLC).
L4 , 434–434; excerpts in Will M. Clemens 1900, 28; MTL , 1:189; Horner, 167; “Letters to James Redpath,” Mark Twain Quarterly 5 (Winter–Spring 1942): 20; Chester L. Davis 1978, 3. All excerpts include a last line which does not appear in the MS and which is evidently taken from a letter of 13 February 1872 to Redpath: “Success to Fall’s carbuncle and many happy returns.”
deposited in DLC by Roy J. Friedman in 1993.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.