November 26 Wednesday – In Riverdale, N.Y. Sam wrote to Carl Thalbitzer, a Danish writer, who, after reading “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” wrote to Sam on Nov. 13 asking if Sam put his personal views into such stories.
You have read me between the lines. What I have tried to do and what I still try to do, is to allow only a little to leak out between the lines. This has been a strain upon me for thirty years. I have put this restraint upon myself and kept it there all these years to keep from breaking my wife’s heart, whose contentment I value above the salvation of the human race. This is a confession that in building a wall across my Nile and damming my feelings and opinions behind it, and trying to caulk the leaks, I am not actuated by principle, but by something much stronger—sentiment.
I shall continue to leak, but shall not write the book unless I survive my wife—which I hope will not happen.
I believe that many a person has examined man with a microscope in every age of the world; has found that he did not even resemble the creature he was pretending to be; has perceived that a civilization not proper matter for derision has always been and must always remain impossible to him—and has put away his microscope and kept his mouth shut. Perhaps because the microscopist (besides having an influential wife) was built like the rest of the human race—99 parts of him being moral cowardice. I am such a person myself. I used my microscope during fifteen years, and then put the result on paper five years ago. When ever I wish to account for any new outbreak of hypocrisy, stupidity or crime on the part of the race I get out that manuscript and read it, and am consoled, perceiving that the outbreak was in obedience to the law of man’s make, and was not preventable. My wife does not allow this manuscript to be published, and as 99 parts of me forbid me to make myself comprehensively and uncompromisingly odious, it has not been difficult to persuade me to restrict the reading of it to myself. But you shall read it when you come to see me; then perhaps you will believe with me that civilizations are not realities, but only dreams; dreams of the mind, not of the heart, and therefore fictitious, and perishable; that they have never affected the heart and therefore have made no valuable progress; that the heart remains today what it always was, as intimacy with any existing savage tribe will show. Indeed the average of the human brain is not a shade higher today than it was in Egyptian times ten thousand years ago.
All this elaborate explanation of why I am not likely to write that book which you speak of amounts to this, when boiled down: 99 parts of me are afraid, and my wife, who is the bulk of the remaining fraction, forbids it [MTP].
In N.Y.C. William Dean Howells replied to Sam’s draft to Frederick C. Harriott.
“I am afraid ‘robbing’ is rather too bumpsome, and I have suggested another version of our demand, less accusing and less threatening, but not less mandatory. I don’t think it well to talk of proceeding, but we can proceed at once, apparently through Harvey and his lawyer if we get no answer” [MTHL 2: 752].
Ell E. Sea wrote to Sam offering an “obituary” for his Harper’s Weekly contest [MTP].
A.H. Tyson wrote from Glenridge, N.J. to Sam to call his attention to a case of coincidence to his story, “Was it Heaven? or Hell?” [MTP]. Note: Tyson wrote on letterhead of Charles T. Wills, builder, NYC.