March 14 Monday – At the Villa Reale di Quarto, Isabel Lyon wrote for Sam to Frederick A. Duneka:
“Mr. Clemens wishes me to add a postscript to his letter saying that if there would better be a change in the title of ‘You’re a damfool Mary’—and he gathers that you desire one—the change which he would prefer is this; use the word Jackass instead of Damfool in both title & closing remark” [MTP].
Sam also wrote to William Dean Howells.
Yes, I set up the safeguards, in the first day’s dictating—taking this position: that an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth; partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell (though I didn’t use that figure)—the results being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.
The summer in England! you can’t ask better luck than that. Then you will run over to Florence; we shall all be hungry to see you-all. We are hunting for another villa, (this one is plenty large enough but has no room in it) but even if we find it I am afraid it will be months before we can move Mrs. Clemens. Of course it will. But it comforts us to let on that we think otherwise, & these pretenses help to keep hope alive in her. Good-bye, with love. [sentence canceled; see Note]. AMEN [MTHL 2: 782]. Note: the source suggests the canceled sentence was lined out by Howells, not by Twain, and reads: “God damn the human race, & God damn the crimes of this old collective world.”