To W. D. Howells, in Boston:
Sunday Night. 1877.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,—My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies—a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentancies.
I feel that my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that I retire from before the public at present. It will hurt the Atlantic for me to appear in its pages, now. So it is my opinion and my wife's that the telephone story had better be suppressed. Will you return those proofs or revises to me, so that I can use the same on some future occasion?
It seems as if I must have been insane when I wrote that speech and saw no harm in it, no disrespect toward those men whom I reverenced so much. And what shame I brought upon you, after what you said in introducing me! It burns me like fire to think of it.
The whole matter is a dreadful subject—let me drop it here—at least on paper.
Penitently yrs,
MARK.
Howells sent back a comforting letter. “I have no idea of dropping
you out of the Atlantic,” he wrote; “and Mr. Houghton has still
less, if possible. You are going to help and not hurt us many a
year yet, if you will.... You are not going to be floored by it;
there is more justice than that, even in this world.”
Howells added that Charles Elliot Norton had expressed just the
right feeling concerning the whole affair, and that many who had not
heard the speech, but read the newspaper reports of it, had found it
without offense.
Clemens wrote contrite letters to Holmes, Emerson, and Longfellow,
and received most gracious acknowledgments. Emerson, indeed, had
not heard the speech: His faculties were already blurred by the
mental mists that would eventually shut him in. Clemens wrote again
to Howells, this time with less anguish.
To W. D. Howells, in Boston: