A Bibliography of William Dean Howells contains the
following item. 74-17. "Atlantic dinner," Boston
Transcript, Dec. 17, 1874, xlvii, 1. Speech (quoted and
paraphrased).[1]
The determination that Howells made such a speech is based
apparently on the following paragraph in the Transcript
account
of the Atlantic's dinner for contributors held at Boston's
Parker
House on December 15, 1874.
During the evening Mr. Howells was toasted as "The Editor of the
Atlantic: Such is his impartiality that he has been known to reject his own
contributions." It gave him the opportunity for a most characteristic little
speech, in the course of which he retorted on those critics who sometimes
find the magazine dull. He said they little know how dull he might have
made it if he had chosen. "They have no idea of the master-pieces of
inanity and absurdity which are each month withheld from them. They
cannot understand what strong restraint the editor places upon his own gifts
for their sake, and how continually he rejects his own contributions." At a
later stage Mr. Howells referred to his first contributions to the Atlantic,
in 1860, which were accepted by Mr. Lowell, and stated that Mr. Fields
uniformly rejected everything he sent.
There is no further indication of either the contents of Howells' speech or
its length.
There is, however, another contemporary newspaper article that
provides considerably more information on the dinner in general and on
Howells' performance in particular. In fact, "A Dinner on Parnassus,"
which appeared in the New York Tribune (18 Dec. 1874), p.
3, actually prints in full the text of Howells' "characteristic little speech"
of approximately seven hundred words. This account, unsigned, was filed
by Arthur Gilman,[2] then
in the employ of H. O. Houghton and Company, purchaser of the
Atlantic late in 1873 from James R. Osgood.
To the information that this speech was printed in a contemporary
account of the dinner can be added the further information that a manuscript
of the speech in Howells' hand has recently come to light.[3] Made available by Houghton
Mifflin
Company, it is at present on deposit in Harvard's Houghton Library.
Written in ink, with additional cancellations and inter-linear corrections in
pencil, and spread over nine consecutively numbered half-sheets, the
manuscript carries no explicit indication of the occasion for which the text
was prepared. An enclosing sheet to which the pages are loosely sewn bears
the penciled inscription in an unidentified hand: "Mr. H. O. Houghton
—
6 Phillips Pl." This fact suggests the possibility that Gilman, after having
been allowed to use the manuscript, returned it, not to Howells, but to
Houghton. This may also explain its presence in the Houghton Mifflin files.
The manuscript version differs slightly from that printed
in the Tribune, but neither contains the reference to Lowell
and
to Fields which is quoted indirectly in the Transcript account.
It is less likely that these were ad libitum extensions of his
speech than that they were remarks offered by Howells, as master of
ceremonies, at some later moment.