February 4 Thursday – Clara Clemens wrote to her friend Dorothea Gilder (daughter of Richard Watson Gilder), about a screaming confrontation with her father (the letter was postmarked Feb. 5 and refers to the episode as “yesterday.”
I have reached the very lowest stage a human being can drop. I have had an attack of what everyone in the house calls hysteria the one thing of all others I have always despised most.
I should not believe it had happened if I were not so lame & sore all over, today and seem curiously weak.
For Heaven’s sake I hope you never will be seized as I was yesterday for the shame on me today is indescribable, when one of the servants came in to my room this A.M. & said that all the servants wished to express their sympathy I felt as if I should never stop flushing.
I don’t know why I was so suddenly seized, but at any rate I was seized by something & began to scream curse & knocked down the furniture Etc. Etc. ‘till everyone of course came running & in my father’s presence I said I hated him hated my mother hoped they would all die & if they didn’t succeed soon I would kill them, well on & on for more than an hour, I don’t know all I said but mother hearing the noise & being told that I was overwrought got a heart attack and as you can imagine today I can hardly meet anyone’s eyes. Of course I am as hoarse as a crow & am terribly bruised from knocking myself against things. Doesn’t it sound like the commonest vulgarest actress? It all comes of controlling controlling controlling one’s self ‘till one just bursts at last in despair. The whole winter has been & still is ghastly, my mother has been growing steadily worse, the doctor’s tone is always discouraging, there is constant war with that Countess & my father is trying to sue her (with right of course) we expect to leave to move out of the house any minute & there it is, my mother couldn’t be moved if the house were burning….
I should think everyone would consider it dangerous to come near our family….
I never had such a strange feeling before in my life as I have today, I keep blushing at intervals & then feeling resentful—do tell me have you ever acted so that people were frightened away from you & admitted to you afterwards they thought you were insane? If you haven’t I pray you never will. I am in bed half the time nowadays anyway but this minute it seems to me I should like never [to] leave it.
This is not exactly a letter it’s sort of a “please do tell me that you have or that you know someone that had a similar attack,” it seems to me I don’t belong in good society anymore. Very affectionately yrs. C.C. [NY Times, Apr. 22, 2000 “Putting a Happy Face on an Often Unhappy Twain”;Trombley, MTOW 35-6].
Note: Sam was surrounded by incapacited females: Clara was nearing a nervous breakdown, which would fully erupt after her mother’s death; Isabel Lyon was in bed from Feb. 2 to 7 with nervous prostration from the donkey attack; and Livy was still an invalid whose condition was worsening.
Frederick A. Duneka wrote to Sam, hoping to:
“count on two short stories a year” from him. He had arranged in “accordance with your letter to let the Anti-vivisection Society in England have 3000 pamphlets of ‘The Dog’s Tale.’ This will not interfere with making a fine little book of it also, and we hope to sell that in England as well as here.” He noted that Howells was going to England in March, followed soon by Col. Harvey, and hoped they might all get together [MTP]. Sam wrote “Answered” on the env. Followed by “Wants the 2 stories—also 2 stories a year.”
Paola de Plaisant wrote an account to Sam of the donkey-bite to the peasant, Paggiciali Gerdincinco, on Jan 15, losing his thumb and part of his hand. Since the peasant claimed to own the donkey, and knew of its tendency to bite, an inquiry by a judge concluded nothing more could be done, and the Countess Massiglia was not liable [MTP].