MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I have just received this letter from Orion--take care
of it, for it is worth preserving. I got as far as 9 pages in my answer
to it, when Mrs. Clemens shut down on it, and said it was cruel, and
made me send the money and simply wish his lecture success. I said
I couldn't lose my 9 pages--so she said send them to you. But I will
acknowledge that I thought I was writing a very kind letter.
Now just look at this letter of Orion's. Did you ever see the
grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined
together? Mrs. Clemens said “Raise his monthly pension.” So I wrote to
Perkins to raise it a trifle.
Now only think of it! He still has 100 pages to write on his lecture,
yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United
States and invested the result!
You must put him in a book or a play right away. You are the only man
capable of doing it. You might die at any moment, and your very greatest
work would be lost to the world. I could write Orion's simple biography,
and make it effective, too, by merely stating the bald facts--and this I
will do if he dies before I do; but you must put him into romance. This
was the understanding you and I had the day I sailed.
Observe Orion's career--that is, a little of it: (1) He has belonged
to as many as five different religious denominations; last March
he withdrew from the deaconship in a Congregational Church and the
Superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that
for many months (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been
a confirmed infidel, and so felt it to be his duty to retire from the
flock.
2. After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a
democratic newspaper. A few days before the Presidential election,
he came out in a speech and publicly went over to the democrats; he
prudently “hedged” by voting for 6 state republicans, also.
The new convert was made one of the secretaries of the democratic
meeting, and placed in the list of speakers. He wrote me jubilantly of
what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech. All right--but
think of his innocent and pathetic candor in writing me something like
this, a week later:
“I was more diffident than I had expected to be, and this was increased
by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I
seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated
upon, and presently they began to get up and go out; and in a few
minutes they all rose up and went away.”
How could a man uncover such a sore as that and show it to another? Not
a word of complaint, you see--only a patient, sad surprise.