January 12 Sunday – The New York World on page 14 ran a long interview and feature article, “‘Mark Twain’ at Home.” A brief excerpt about Sam’s writing habits:
“I don’t know how much copy I write each day in those three summer months. The amount varies. ‘Do a little every day’ is my rule. Stick to it and you find the pile of manuscript growing rapidly. If on reading it over I find things I don’t like I simply tear up twenty or thirty pages and there is no harm done. Don’t be in a hurry to do too much, but work regularly.”
“Then you don’t wait for inspiration?”
“I don’t think the prose writer needs to. If he were to depend upon the support he’d have an inspiration — say once in three months; it would last forty-eight hours, and what would it have accomplished?…I wrote Innocents Abroad in sixty days, working from noon until midnight every day. I wouldn’t dare do it now. I’m an old man. It would break me down.”
“Didn’t it hurt you then?”
“No; I had just left a newspaper desk and I was used to that sort of thing. But now I go slower. There is a book” — pointing to a bundle of manuscript in a pigeonhole — “that I began in 1867 [Shem’s diary]. I’m not sure about the exact date, but I think that was it.”
To charges of plagiarism in CY by Charles Heber Clark (Max Adeler), a man Sam said “had for some years placed himself in such a position that the imputation of being concerned with humor could be cast at him,” but now was “a respectable member of society,” he answered:
“This aroused a great curiosity in me. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘if I had done all Adeler claims, I am the old original boss plagiarist, and hereafter I shall claim pay accordingly.’ How the chapter might have lingered in my mind I could faintly conceive, but how he knew that I had stolen from him hundreds of incidents which he couldn’t possibly have read because my book was not yet published, was too much for my weak imagination. And where do ideas come from? … ‘Well,’ thought I, ‘if I can have stolen unconsciously all of these thousands of ideas from Max Adeler I must have become a worker of miracles.’ … I laugh every time I hear the idiots jackassing in a charge of plagiarism against somebody or other.
“Why, to repeat another man’s thoughts is to pay him the highest compliment you can. It shows what a grip his mind has taken on yours. I never charge any one with plagiarism, for to do so would prove me incapable of gratitude for the highest compliment a man can pay me.”
[The entire article is republished in Scharnhorst, Interviews.105-13].
John Richards wrote from Saucelito, Calif. with feedback for Sam on CY about protectionism. Sam wrote on the envelope, “Protection. Will answer” [MTP].