3 August 1877 • 2nd of 2 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS, correspondence card, in pencil: CtHMTH, UCCL 01464)
slcMine & Bret Harte’s shares from the new play “Ah Sin” will come to you from Parsloe. Please place both shares to my credit at Bissell’s & tell me the amount. Harte shan’t have a cent till his entire indebtedness to me is paid.1explanatory note
If Harte inquires, tell him that is my verdict.2explanatory note
Harte, who stayed in Washington instead of attending the New York debut of Ah Sin, sent the following appeal to Augustin Daly at about this time (Daly 1917, 236–37):
There is, I believe, somewhere up in Hartford an agent and lawyer of Mr. Clemens, who is at some time to furnish accounts &c.—to me possibly—but he doesn’t, he says, know anything about the play since it was played in Washington. I don’t want any accounts from you or Parsloe, only a single expression of your opinion as to whether the play was or was not successful, and as one of its authors, this does not seem to me to be an inconsistent request or calculated to wound anybody’s—say Parsloe’s—sensitive nature. It is the mere courtesy of business.
Send me a line.
Yours truly,
Bret Harte.
A. Daly Esq.
5th Ave. Theatre
Daly may have transmitted this request to Clemens, advising him to give Harte a full accounting. On 20 August Parsloe told Clemens that Edwards would send Harte a record of “Receipts etc to date, and this will be continued until further notice” (CU-MARK). The following day, Perkins forwarded a letter from Parsloe to Harte, and wrote to Harte himself, presumably apprising him of Clemens’s instructions (neither letter has been found; Perkins to SLC, 21 Aug 1877, CU-MARK). At the end of August, Harte went in person to see Edwards to get “figures.” Edwards let Clemens know, and confided, “I’m glad he’s arrived at the opinion that in the arrangement he is, nobody” (Edwards to SLC, 31 Aug 1877, CU-MARK).
References
- Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Conn.
- 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
- Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Previously Unpublished Letters. Prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Robert H. Hirst, Lin Salamo, and Harriet Elinor Smith. 8 vols. Berkeley: The Bancroft Library. 2001
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Ah Sin. Bret Harte, coauthor. Play written between October 1876 and February 1877. The only complete text is a prompt copy of 217 pages, in an unknown hand, at ViU[bib10492]. Published in SLC 1961[bib10456]. Twenty-seven MS pages of discarded dialogue, written by both Clemens and Harte, are also at ViU[bib10492]. 1876–77
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Daly, Joseph Francis. The Life of Augustin Daly. New York: Macmillan Company. 1917
MS, correspondence card, in pencil, CtHMTH.
MicroPUL, reel 1.
See Perkins Collection in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.