October 27 Saturday – Sam’s notebook: “Carnegie Hall Livy to go. 57th & 7th ave.” [NB 43 TS 27]. Note: see further down in entry for the Woman’s Press Club Tea.

At the Hotel Earlington in N.Y.C., Sam wrote to Vernon L. Bean in Chicago.

“And so that pet scheme of mine has succeeded again. It has never once failed—& for a very good reason: no lazy, dull, commonplace, characterless youth is man enough to try it.

Your letter [not extant] has given me vast pleasure. …” [MTP].

Note: Bean was later involved as Asst. Sec’y to Chicago Mayor, but his position at this time was not determined, nor is the “scheme” Sam referred to, though possibly it was his idea of working for free as an apprentice to begin a career, then at some point presenting one’s employer with offers by competitors as a way to secure paid employment. In other words, to become indispensable.

Sam also wrote to Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “We are here in New York looking for a house” [MTHHR 453n1].

Sam also wrote to John Y. MacAlister, referring to the letter he wrote on the ship (which is put to Oct. 12). Sam’s idea was to allow the American Plasmon Co. to “go right along & make its fortune” without establishing a “big company.”

“Can it be done? Could the Exploration veto it? Wouldn’t they like it? Wouldn’t they prefer it? …

This American Plasmon is in first-rate hands. Give yourself no uneasiness about Dr. Cook. He is quite sane, & awfully capable & wide awake. …”

Sam asked for reports on the London and Berlin Plasmon companies, and said he was “laying wires” daily with “prominent & useful people.” He then claimed to have rescued H.H. Rogers from a sickbed with Plasmon and that he now was “a convert.” He added “The first time I see Mr. Rockefeller, I will tell him how to beat his indigestion.”

Sam announced they thought they had found a furnished house at $2,500 a year; as soon as the papers were signed he would send the address [MTP].

Note: Of the house, 14 W. 10th Street, N.Y.C., which the Clemenses evidently took possession of Nov. 1, Dias writes:

Clemens, who had resolved never to return to his Hartford home because of its acutely painful memories of the beloved Susy, requested that his friends find for him a house in New York. Obligingly, Frank N. Doubleday began a search and discovered a lavishly furnished residence at 14 West 10th Street, a house of which Clemens at once approved.

In fact, much to Doubleday’s surprise and discomfort, Clemens moved into the house before he had actually signed a lease, and, in typical Clemens fashion, at once began to find defects in his newly-acquired residence. He seemed to hold Doubleday responsible for these domestic flaws, bombarding him on a daily basis with postcards filled with complaints about the furnace, the water, the windows, the oven—“whatever,” Albert Bigelow Paine tells us “he thought might lend interest to Doubleday’s life” [MT & HHR, Odd Couple 89-90; MTB 1112-13]. (Editorial emphasis.) Note: the change on the status of looking for a house between Sam’s letter to Aldrich and the one to MacAlister, suggests either a period of hours between the two letters or a decision made before the latter.

Sam spoke on “perfect grammar” at the Women’s Press Club Tea in Carnegie Hall. The hostess was Mrs. Ernest Seton-Thompson; Rev. Phebe Hanaford presided. Some of his remarks as in Fatout:

I was recently asked what I had found striking in this country since my return. I didn’t like to say, but what I have really observed is that this is the ungrammatical nation. I am speaking of educated persons. There is no such thing as perfect grammar and I don’t always speak good grammar myself. But I have been foregathering for the past few days with professors of American universities and I’ve heard them all say things like this: “He don’t like to do it.” Oh, you’ll hear that tonight if you listen, or “He would have liked to have done it.” You’ll catch some educated Americans saying that. When these men take pen in hand they write with as good grammar as any. But the moment they throw the pen aside they throw grammatical morals aside with it.

…[He said that various pictures had arisen in his mind, suggested by Mrs. Gaffney and several musical numbers.]

I don’t know why, I don’t see the connection, but there the pictures are. The first of them is at home in the nursery, when my children were little. The second is of a jail where I once was—by request—not for any crime that I had committed—that they had found out, at least—but to see other people who had committed crimes, and the third picture is the one that I saw years ago in a house in New York.

Perhaps I am recalled to the first picture by the precosity of your sex in entering the field of literature— you will see it in the family—even in the cradle. On the occasion of which I speak, my daughter, just then out of the cradle, displayed this precosity. Her governess had given her a lesson on the reindeer, which took perhaps an hour. My daughter repeated it to us in a few sentences, possessing decided literary value. This may have come from me. I don’t know, but the inaccuracy of the sentences did not come from me. That was original with her.

She said: “The reindeer is a very swift animal. A reindeer once drew a sled 400 miles in two hours.” Then, commenting on it, “This was regarded as remarkable. When the reindeer was done drawing that sled 400 miles in two hours it died.”

Now, there is the whole process of thought, the putting two and two together and drawing a conclusion. My next picture is of the prisoners in the Pretoria jail at the time of the Jameson raid. I soothed the feelings of those prisoners. I told them if they were not in that jail they would probably be in another. I pointed out their great opportunity for concentrating their minds. Sir Walter Raleigh would never have written his great history if he had not been imprisoned in the Tower. Another book written in jail was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a book I could have written myself if I had been in jail. I told those prisoners that instead of trying to get out they should have been paying board in that jail, so great were their opportunities of concentration.

As a final instance of the force of limitations in the development of concentration, I must mention that beautiful creature, Helen Keller, whom I have known for these many years. I am filled with the wonder of her knowledge, acquired because shut out from all distraction. If I could have been deaf, dumb, and blind I also might have arrived at something. I am only sentimentally blind, morally deaf and sometimes, not always, dumb. No, her grammar isn’t “perfect.” There’s no such thing as “perfect grammar,” but she is as near to it as anyone can be [MT Speaking 346-8]. Note: as per NB entry this day, Livy was in the audience.

George Iles (1852-1942), Canadian author, actor inscribed a copy of Flame, Electricity and the Camera (1900) to Sam: “Samuel L. Clemens with the author’s high regard. New York, October 27, 1900” [MTP]. Note: Iles once played Rip Van Winkle in the play, American Cousin. See entries for Iles in Vol. II.

An anonymous review of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories, ran in Speaker, p.103. Tenney: “Brief review, praising the title story; ‘the rest of the book is of the nature of pleasant gossip, essays on the Jews, on Christian Science, &c’” [Tenney: “A Reference Guide Third Annual Supplement,” American Literary Realism, Autumn 1979 p. 186].