August 6 Monday – Sam wrote from Elmira to Elisha Bliss about copyright law, Canadian piracy, Andrew Chatto visiting Canada, and the requirement for a work to be registered in Canada 60 days before publication, something Moncure Conway did not do with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and likely was unaware of [MTLE 2: 123].
Sam then wrote to Conway, asking a favor to find a certain kind of watch. Sam told of his feud with Harte and his meeting with Andrew Chatto at the Lotos Club on Aug. 2, the day after the Ah Sin opening. Sam enclosed a New York Evening Post article that was a “fair sample” of the Bermuda articles Sam was offering to “simultane” to Temple Bar.
“I have left precious little of Harte in ‘Ah Sin,’ & what there is he stole from other people. He is an incorrigible literary thief—& always was [MTLE 2: 124].
Sam then wrote a fairly long letter to Mary (Mollie) Fairbanks (now Gaylord). Sam perhaps tried to make up for being unable to attend Mollie’s wedding. Sam wrote that the family would “run over to Ithaca tomorrow for a 2-day visit.” (Ithaca, N.Y. was the home of Hjalmar H. Boyesen, who had visited the Clemens family over the last holiday season.) He told of his three weeks in New York working on the Ah Sin play. He hadn’t been able to find a producer for his Simon Wheeler play, but wrote:
“I have a vast opinion of the chief character in it. I want to play it myself, in New York or London, but the madam won’t allow it. She puts her 2 ½ down with considerable weight on a good many of my projects” [MTLE 2: 125]
Besides the startling revelation of Livy’s Lilliputian shoe size (another exaggeration?), Sam asked what Mollie was reading, and launched into a long philosophical discussion of how a person shouldn’t have a “single interest in the world outside of his work,” should “work for 3 months on a stretch, dead to everything but his work; then loaf diligently 3 months & go at it again.”
Sam wrote he had read half of Les Miserables, “two or three minor works of” Victor Hugo, and also “that marvelous being’s biography by his wife”; Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, and Yonge’s Life of Marie Antoinette, which Sam was highly critical of; In Exitu Isreal, by Baring-Gould (loaned by Twichell); The Taking of the Bastille, by Dumas; “a small history of France” by Madame de Genlis, in French; and some chapters in Taine’s, Ancient Regime; John Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856) (Sam read it on the voyage to Bermuda and said he “would have thrown the book into the sea if I had owned it.” ); Charles Reade’s, Woman Hater—Sam had just finished reading it (“a handful of diamonds scattered over every page”) and had just begun Picciola in French, by Xavier Boniface Saintine (1798–1865).
Sam threw in a few lines about his hatred for Republican forms of government and universal suffrage [MTLE 2: 126-7].
Sam also wrote to Henry O. Houghton, inquiring about the Canadian Monthly; letter not extant but referred to in Houghton’s Aug. 9 reply.
Sam also wrote to Charles T. Parsloe, letter not extant but referred to in Parsloe’s reply of Aug. 10.
Charles E. Perkins wrote financial information to Sam, including his $150 bill for the past 6 months [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the env “Perkins salary & insurance paid. Aug 77”