20 May 1874 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: WU, UCCL 01090)
(That is the first time I have started to write a letter to myself for some time—I find simple soliloquizing easier, cheaper, quicker, & more uniformly satisfactory.)
Yes, but I do love you, still, but every time I am in New York it is only for a day & then I am encumbered with my tribe & can’t get a chance to visit. I ran down d alone, day before yesterday, on business, & expected to stay over & have a time with you & John Hay, but I got to the h Ⓐemendation Astor at 9. PM, & at midnight my business was completed—so I rushed for home long before you were up, in the morning.
I’m ever so much obliged to you for fixing up that thing for me—& if it don’t get into print I will curse other people, not you.1explanatory note
Do you a “jokelet?” (Plainly this man is mad.) Can a person do jokelets when he is in labor with a book which it will take him 18 months to deliver himself of? However, if a jokelet should occur to me, & you would be willing to father it & hold me freee Ⓐemendation from guilt, it is yours.
I hope to run through New York by & by, on my way to Hartford, leaving my tribe behind, & then I propose to assemble where there be refreshments, & tackle you.
Seaver had agreed to Clemens’s request of 1 May, possibly sending a draft of the remarks he planned to insert in Harper’s Monthly for July (1 May 74 to Seaver, n. 2click to open link).
References
- Madison Memorial Union Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- 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 6: 1874–1875. Edited by Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2002
MS, Rare Book Department, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison (WU).
L6 , 149–150.
Norman D. Bassett, a Madison alumnus, owned the MS by October 1942. He donated his Mark Twain collection to WU on 9 July 1955.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.