1889-11-a to Clara Lanza

Printed letter, The Bookman (New York, July 1918, page 4823), 186 words

[Edited for paragraph breaks, capitalization, spelling and punctuation.]

[November 1889]

I thought it far and away my best work. I forged every chapter like a sword, every sentence like a knife. My friends assured me that it was head and shoulders above A Mummer*s Wife or the Confessions. But I do not believe it is as bad as they say. It cannot be. It is impossible that a man who writes so perfectly as myself should be the author of three hundred pages of twaddle. Agreed that Mike Fletcher is inferior to A Mummer's Wife, it does not thereby follow that it is a bad book. You have seen my article on Buchanan. Who else could have written it? Frank Harris said it ran Swift pretty close. Well, is it possible that a man who writes as I have done, and am still writing, could turn out a book that is bad from end to end? No, it is not possible. All the same, I am in dreadful distress.