December 30 Friday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria Sam began a letter to William Dean Howells that he added a PS to on Jan. 3, 1899.
I begin with a date—including all the details—though I shall be interrupted presently by a South-African acquaintance who is passing through, & it may be many days before I catch another leisure moment. Not how suddenly a thing can become habit, & how indestructible the habit is, afterward! In your house in Cambridge a hundred years ago, Mrs. Howells said to me, “Here is a bunch of your letters, & the dates are of no value, because you don’t put any in—the years, anyway.” That remark diseased me with a habit which has cost me worlds of time & torture & ink, & millions of vain efforts & buckets of tears to break it, & here it is yet—I could easier get rid of a virtue.
Sam expressed disappointment that Bliss had not met Howells’ price for writing the critical Introduction to his Uniform Edition. He also related Livy’s financial calculations (see Dec. 29):
“I have been out & bought a box of 6-cent cigars; I was smoking 4½ before.”
Sam also confessed he didn’t read Howells’ works as much as he should and not “anywhere near half as much” as he wanted to; still he read whenever he got the chance and was saving up his last serialized story segments ( Ragged Lady was serialized in Harper’s Bazaar, July-Nov. 1898). He confessed the last time he’d read a book by Howells was two years before in London (Impressions and Experiences 1896); he’d read it twice and some chapters “several times,” and then lent it to “another admirer.” He asked about John Howells’ twenty -five million dollar competition, as well as the “new thing of the Harpers which is to relieve you from creative work.” He passed on family plans to return and live in N.Y. in the fall of 1899, then closed with these somber lines:
Susy hovers about us this holiday week, & the shadows fall all about us of
“The days when we went gipsying
A long time ago.”
Death is so kind, so benignant, to whom he loves; but he goes by us others & will not look our way
[MTHL 2: 674-8]. Note: the lines are from Edwin Ransford’s 1863? song