January 14 Monday – At 21 Fifth Ave, N.Y. Isabel Lyon wrote a letter of introduction from Sam for Finley Peter Dunne to Lyman Beecher Stowe [MTP].
Sam also wrote a letter to daughter Jean. After relating the dinner company for the previous night (see Jan. 13 entry) he wrote:
Miss Lyon has gone to Redding with John Howells.
That lady did find me in the train, after my pleasant visit to you, but not until we were within 30 minutes of New York.
The stenographer has arrived (10.30 a.m.), & I must go to work.
Goodbye, dear heart—with lots of love & kisses— / Father [MTP]. Note: Sam visited Jean in Katonah shortly after returning from Bermuda.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: I think the King grows lovelier every day of his life. This morning he was so interested in a sermon, no, a lecture by Dr. Crapsey appearing in today’s “Sun.” A letter courageously setting forth Dr. C.’s opinions of the God depicted in the Bible, & it’s a great & wretched pity that I cannot remember to write down every word that falls from the King’s lips.
He said that Dr. Crapsey has expressed well, what he expresses brutally. (He doesn’t ever do anything brutally—but he does express himself with strength.) All the afternoon he played billiards until Mr. Larkin came to make a change in Mr. Clemens’s will—i.e. giving C.C. full authority over all literary remains. The King talks so much about his death in these days. About seven o’clock he called for the organist—I am that—& I played to him Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Schuberts Unfinished Symphony until dinner time. Then after dinner when I had played the Lohengrin Wedding March 3 times while he lay curled up in a corner of the couch with his black cape wrapped about him, we talked a little about music, then he talked about what he wants done with the parts of Susy’s biography of him as it appears in his Autobiography. When he is gone he would like to have it published in book form, Susy’s biography of him & his comment upon it, for that will stand as a memorial of her. The King was never able to write a memorial of her. It was never anything but a Lament & couldn’t ever be anything but that. But this is different—it is her word of him, which reveals herself, & he comment of her which reveals the King [in] him [MTP TS 10-11; also Gribben 505]. Note: NY Sun, a paper Clemens usually read. Algernon Sidney Crapsey (1847–1927) was an Episcopal priest, who was found guilty of heresy in 1906 and stripped of his office. Like Twain, Crapsey did not believe in the divinity of Christ.
Thomas Fitch wrote from Law Offices of Thomas Fitch, Tucson, Ariz. to Sam. In part from a wonderful letter that appears to be a reply:
You did not know that while negotiations were pending for your duel with Laird, that gentleman cane to me, and said that he was weary of journalism and its acerbities, and wanted to return to the bloodless east. He offered to sell me one third interest in the Union at the low figure of $6000 and sell it entirely on credit, taking his pay from one half of the salary of $50 per week that the other partners would allow me for editing the paper, and I to pay interest on the purchase money out of the other half, at the rate of 2% per month. As a condition of the purchase I was to buy his duel, and take his place on the field of honor.
Financially the proposition did not appeal to me. The Union was just about paying expenses and salaries. [He then showed he would receive nothing the first year and increasing amounts each year to the sixth year and beyond.]
As for the accompanying proposition to buy the duel, I rejected it with scorn. The mines of the Comstock would not have tempted me to shorten your young and beautiful life, to say nothing of the chance of shortening my own. I was then still limping from the effects of my collision with Joe Goodman. As a duelist I had had pie enough. I had given up Journalism for law, and the Cacoethes Scribena no longer titillated the hemispheres of my brain, and so your life was saved to the world, which for that act of thoughtful mercy owes me many delights.
Joe Goodman and I afterwards became warm friends, Is he there? I last saw him 20 years and mor ago, he was then raisin-ranching at Fresno. Later I heard of him deciphering hieroglyphics, and searching for prehistoric bugs in Central America. Daggett, Myers, Wright, Mrs. Cory, and Mrs. Fitch, who formed with you and me the occupants of the club on the third story of that brick building, forty four years ago are gone. I shall soon be 69, and while I am not weary of life and am hale and sound in body and mind, I would yet stretch out welcoming arms to the messenger who would summon me to my waiting palace among the stars. There I shall see you again old boy, even if to do so I have to put on asbestos garments, and come down stairswith a fan in one hand and an iced julep in the other [MTP].
Francis Wayland Glen wrote from Brooklyn, NY to thank Sam for his “timely warning to the citizens of this Republic in the January number of the North American Review.” Glen wanted to meet him. “We are entering upon a revolution throughout the world in finance, commerce, industry, politics, religion and the arts and sciences, and when peace is finally restored there will not be a throne left in Europe which has not been cast into Irish, Atlantic, Baltic or Meditteraen [sic] Sea [MTP]. Note: Lyon wrote on the letter: “The thrones come back again. There’s only the human race left—& its such a dam fool”
William Rutherford Mead wrote to invite Sam to the Sixth Annual Dinner of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Jan. 18 at 7:30 p.m., the guest of honor Sir Ashton Webb [MTP]. Note: Lyon wrote on the letter: “Ansd”; Webb (1849-1930), English architect, was the first recipient of the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1907.
Joe Twichell wrote to Sam with thanks and praise for the Bermuda trip and also for Miss Lyon, whom he called, “A daisy—a bouquet of daisies—a bushel of ‘em, is she!” He noted a former college acquaintance begged him to “dissuade” Twain from writing against Christian Science [MTP].