August 5 Thursday — In Redding, Conn. Sam wrote to John Brown, Jr. (“Jock”) in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Dear Mr. “Jock:” / Don’t you think you can find for me, among your father’s papers, a fugitive scrap of that dear little Marjorie’s penmanship? If you can, I will take good care of it & return it to you as soon as the engraver is done with it.
I suppose I am asking the impossible; still, I will hope, anyway. Thirty-six years ago your father gave Mrs. Clemens a copy of his Marjorie, in the parlor of Veitch’s hotel in George street, & read passages to us—about the multiplication, & the terrific name Marjorie called “John,” &c., &c. I remember it so clearly, so vividly! /
Sincerely Yours / ... [MTP].
Paine writes of an exchange with Clemens on this day:
August 5, 1909. This morning I noticed on a chair a copy of Flaubert’s Salammbo which I recently lent him. I asked if he liked it.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t like any of it.”
“But you read it?”
“Yes, I read every line of it.”
“You admitted its literary art?” :
“Well, it’s like this: If I should go to the Chicago stockyards and they should kill a beef and cut it up and the blood should splash all over everything, and then they should take me to another pen and kill another beef and the blood should splash over everything again, and so on to pen after pen, I should care for it about as much as I do for that book.”
“But those were bloody days, and you care very much for that period in history.”
“Yes, that is so. But when I read Tacitus and know that I am reading history I can accept it as such and supply the imaginary details and enjoy it, but this thing is such a continuous procession of blood and slaughter and stench it worries me. It has great art—I can see that. That scene of the crucified lions and the death canon and the tent scene are marvelous, but I wouldn’t read that book again without a salary” [MTB 1516].
Royal P. Jarvis wrote from NYC to “express my keen enjoyment from reading over a number of times your latest “Is Shakespeare Dead?” As a teenager he’d read an article in the NAR by Ignatius Donnelly and had ever since been a doubter [MTP].