September 30 Thursday — In Redding, Conn. Sam wrote to Melville E. Stone, manager of the Associated Press. “Dear Stone: / This is a personal matter of great importance to me, & as I am not well enough to travel, these days, I am sending Albert Bigelow Paine, my secretary, to you with it. / With my love /...” [MTP].
Lotos Club wrote from NYC to invite Clemens to a farewell dinner for Melville E. Stone on Oct. 5 [MTP].
Autumn, 1909 — Sam wrote to the “Unborn Reader” as to William Dean Howells.
To the Unborn Reader,
In your day, a hundred years hence, this manuscript will have a distinct value; & not a small value but a large one. If it can be preserved ten centuries it will have a still larger value— a value augmented tenfold, in fact. For it will furnish an intimate inside view of our domestic life of to-day not to be found in naked & comprehensive detail outside of its pages. Its episodes have occurred in all lands & in all ages, but they have never near linked together in progressive order & sequence & set down as plain narrative of fact before; heretofore certain of them have been used in romances, but not otherwise. That employment of them has weakened them, not strengthened them, because, so used, they fail of the priceless quality of authenticity.
There are these conspicuous characters in this true tale of mine, this queer & shabby & pitiful tale—to— wit, I, a pair of degraded & sufficiently clumsy sharpers, & I the born ass, their easy victim. These those characters have figured as clever inventions in many romances, but in this manuscript we are not inventions, we are flesh & blood realities, & the silly & sordid things we have done & said are facts, not fancies,
I have set this history down in the form of a letter—a letter to an old & sympathetic friend, a friend of thirty-five years’ standing, the novelist William Dean Howells. This was to give me freedom, after freedom, limitless freedom, liberty to talk right out of my heart, without reserve. I could not talk like that to the general public, I could not strip myself naked before company.
Howells is all refinement, by nature & training. Now & then, when I have been obliged to be robust & indelicate in my speech, Howells was an embarrassment to me; I found I could not say things to him which I could not say to a lady. In these cases I have gotten over the difficulty by imagining I was talking to Colonel George Harvey. He is as robust as I am myself.
This original manuscript will be locked up & put away, & no copy of it made. Your eye, after mine, will he the first to see it.
If the Paston Letters had been a free-spoken private communication to a Howells of four & a quarter centuries ago, imagine the light it would throw upon domestic life in England in that old day! a life which is hidden in deep night, a life which is a sealed book to the world forever; & imagine the value of it!
Mark Twain [MTP: L-A MS]