But what I started to say, was, that I have just read
Part II of Indian Summer, and to my mind there isn’t
a waste line in it, or one that could be improved.
I read it yesterday, ending with that opinion; and
read it again to-day, ending with the same opinion
emphasized. I haven’t read Part I yet,
because that number must have reached Hartford after
we left; but we are going to send down town for a
copy, and when it comes I am to read both parts aloud
to the family. It is a beautiful story, and makes
a body laugh all the time, and cry inside, and feel
so old and so forlorn; and gives him gracious glimpses
of his lost youth that fill him with a measureless
regret, and build up in him a cloudy sense of his
having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off
land, and of being an exile now, and desolate—and
Lord, no chance ever to get back there again!
That is the thing that hurts. Well, you have
done it with marvelous facility and you make all the
motives and feelings perfectly clear without analyzing
the guts out of them, the way George Eliot does.
I can’t stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and
those people; I see what they are at a hundred years
before they get to it and they just tire me to death.
And as for “The Bostonians,” I would rather
be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read
that.
Yrs
Ever
Mark
It is as easy to understand Mark Twain’s enjoyment of Indian Summer as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians. He cared little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest and most direct terms. It is interesting to note that in thanking Clemens for his compliment Howells wrote: “What people cannot see is that I analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the analytical school, which I am supposed to belong to, and I want to thank you for using your eyes..... Did you ever read De Foe’s ‘Roxana’? If not, then read it, not merely for some of the deepest insights into the lying, suffering, sinning, well-meaning human soul, but for the best and most natural English that a book was ever written in.”
General Grant worked steadily on his book, dictating when he could, making brief notes on slips of paper when he could no longer speak. Clemens visited him at Mt. McGregor and brought the dying soldier the comforting news that enough of his books were already sold to provide generously for his family, and that the sales would aggregate at least twice as much by the end of the year.
This was some time in July. On the 23d of that month General Grant died. Immediately there was a newspaper discussion as to the most suitable place for the great chieftain to lie. Mark Twain’s contribution to this debate, though in the form of an open letter, seems worthy of preservation here.
To the New York “Sun,” on the proper place for Grant’s Tomb: