April 11 Wednesday – Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote from the Hotel de France & Choiseul, Paris:
Dear Mark: / I’ve a bit of news which I am sure will interest you, since it is the only happy thing that has befallen this stricken family during the past three years—the engagement of Talbot to a sweet young New England girl, a Miss Eleanor Little. ….
We start for home on April 27—the fiancée remains on this side for a while—and I shall be glad to get back. We made a long sojourn in Egypt, and I have had all the potted mummy I want at present. We all are well and send love and remembrances to you and your little flock, God keep them! / Yours affectionately …[MTP].
Clemens’ A.D. for the day: Frank Fuller and his enthusiastic launching of Clemens’ first New York lecture— Results not in fortune but in fame—Leads to a lecture tour under direction of James Redpath—Clipping in regard to Frank Fuller, & Clemens’ comments—Olive Logan clipping & Clemens’ comments—Clemens’ feeling toward suicides [MTP Autodict2].
Isabel Lyon’s journal:
Santa C. arrived yesterday [Apr. 10] & last evening I took mother to see Mrs. Fisk in Leah Kleshua [sic Kleschna]. It is such a good & well acted & well staged play…After the play we went around to the Green room & saw Mrs. Fisk…She was delighted with the message which Mr. Clemens sent her about the Horse’s Tale (it is to appear in Harper’s in August) but she said its main work would be done in Mexico & not yet in Spain—for Spain isn’t ripe for it[.] She sent Mr. Clemens her dear love & other charming messages which he was waiting for on my return.
Last night Mr. Clemens dined with Mrs. Johnson and her revolutionary tribe—Narodny and others. No—Narodny wasn’t there either—but he’s to be there tonight, & Gorky too. A buck dinner.
They sat down 13—such a hellish superstition it is [MTP TS 65]. Note: Minnie Maddern Fiske played the lead role in Leah Kleschna at the Academy of Music. Born Marie Augusta Davey, she was often billed simply as Mrs. Fiske.
Charles Butler Fenton (1862-1962), former New Zealand captain, wrote from Brooklyn, NY to Sam. “May I request you to kindly place forward your proposed lecture to be delivered on 19 inst. at Carnegie Music Hall to an earlier date. / As I am a seafaring man, Master of a merchant steamship, trading to China ports, in the employ of your friend Mr Rogers, and as I purpose getting married on the 19 inst; hence the reason of my request” [MTP]. See Apr. 16 for Sam’s matchless reply.
The New York Times, p. 11, “Ellen Terry’s Jubilee” announced a movement to celebrate the 50 anniversary of Miss Ellen Terry’s stage career. Mark Twain and Joseph H. Choate were th “in full sympathy” and Daniel Frohman of the Lyceum Theatre was taking subscriptions. A big benefit started ty the London Tribune was also being held in London for Ellen Terry, the aim being to fund her retirement.
The New York Times, p. 6, “Riot of Enthusiasm Greets Maxim Gorky” also announced the dinner for this evening to which Ivan Narodny invited Twain to meet Maxim Gorky (Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov) (1868-1936), Russian author and activist; the paper then reported the substance on Apr. 12, p.4:
Gorky and his wife will be guests at many receptions here. This evening he will be a guest of honor at a dinner at A Club, 3 Fifth Avenue. Mark Twain, W.D. Howells, Peter Finley Dunne,
Robert F. Collier, Robert Hunter, Gaylord Wilshire, M[r]. Narodny, and M[r]. Tchaykoffsky will be among the other guests [Note: See picture insert below, which also gives among the group, Maxim Gorky, and his son Zinovii Peshkov].
McFarland writes of The A Club at 3 Fifth Ave. (where Charlotte Teller Johnson lived with her grandmother) a few doors down from Sam’s 21 Fifth Ave.:
In February 1906, a group of eighteen or twenty young writers and social workers bought a mansion at 3 Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square, with the intention of entering into a cooperative housing arrangement. The news caused a small stir in the newspapers. The proposed housing collective was so at odds with the individual or familial ways that New Yorkers usually lived that reporters were dispatched to investigate this novel group. When a reporter asked its president, Howard Brubaker, what the collective’s name was, Brubaker casually replied, “Oh, just call it a club.” Thereafter it became known as “A Club” both in the newspaper accounts and in the popular lore of the group itself. Although the A Club cooperative housing experiment lasted only a few years, it nevertheless brought together and helped solidify a network of individuals whose contribution to Village history far outweighed their relatively small numbers.
Newspaper reporters who interviewed A Club’s founders received somewhat contradictory descriptions of the group’s purpose and membership. The earliest version came from Helen Todd, a wealthy Chicago settlement worker who had bankrolled the purchase of the mansion. She described A Clubbers as “people who like the bohemian life and are interested in the East Side of New York,” and who took the Fifth Avenue house “because it is only a short distance from the ‘ghetto.’” The part about wanting to be close to East Side slums was true enough, but the New Yorkers in the group objected to Todd’s use of the word “bohemian” in connection with themselves. Charlotte Teller [Johnson], an editorial assistant at Everybody’s magazine and a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, emphasized that “Life [at A Club] will not be bohemian, as has been stated, for most of us are old enough not to be childish in that way….We shall lead a perfectly conventional, normal family life.” She, for one, hoped to organize women who were employed in the factories of the Washington Square district. “We are here for work,” she stated emphatically [120-21]. Note: editorial emphasis on names.
Isabel Lyon’s journal for Apr. 12: Last night [Apr. 11] Mr. Clemens dined with Narodny & Maxim Gorky and others down at #3 Fifth Avenue. It must have been a delight even if Gorky cannot speak a word of English. He sat on Mr. Clemens’s right & his adopted son acted as interpreter. Mr. Clemens said when the signal for serving dinner was given 3 Japs in white uniforms moved off for the soup & as one of them served Maxim Gorky, he reached out his hand & took the little Jap’s in friendly greeting “A better thing than the Portsmouth Peace,” for while neither could speak a word of the other’s language, their hearts did the spontaneous talking that tells [MTP TS 65-66]. See the rest of the Apr. 12 entry. Hirst notes that the language barrier “… explains, perhaps, why there are not extensive records of what the two talked about.”
GORKY AND TWAIN PLEAD FOR REVOLUTION
Committee Formed to Raise Funds for Russian Freedom.
——— ——— ———
TO ARM REVOLUTIONISTS
”I Come to You a Beggar That Russia May Be Free,” Says Gorky at A Club Dinner.
The American auxiliary movement to aid the cause of freedom in Russia was launched last night at a dinner given at the Club A House, 3 Fifth Avenue, with Mark Twain and Maxim Gorky as the principal spokesmen.
“If we can build a Russian republic to give to the persecuted people of the Czar’s domain the same measure of freedom that we enjoy, let us go ahead and do it,” said Mark Twain. “We need not discuss the method by which that purpose is to be attained. Let us hope that fighting will be postponed or averted for a while, but if it must come— ” Mr. Clemens’s hiatus was significant.
“I am most emphatically in sympathy with the movement now on foot in Russia to make that country free,” he went on. “I am certain that it will be successful, as it deserves to be. Anybody whose ancestors were in this country when we were trying to free ourselves from oppression must sympathize with those who now are trying to do the same thing in Russia.
“The parallel I have just drawn only goes to show that it makes no difference whether the oppression is bitter or not; men with red, warm blood in their veins will not endure it, but will seek to cast it off. If we keep our hearts in this matter Russia will be free.”
The dinner was given by Ivan Narodny, the representative in this country of the Russian military revolutionists, in honor of Maxim Gorky. The list of guests included Dr. Nicholas Tchaykoffsk, Robert Collier, Kikolay Zavolsky Pieshkoff, the adopted son of Gorky; Nikolas Burenin, his friend and private secretary; Arthur Brisbane, David Graham Phillips, Robert Hunter, Ernest Poole, Dr. Walter Weyl, Leroy M. Scott, and Howard Bruebaker. W. D. Howells and Peter Finley Dunne had been invited but were unable to attend.
Mark Twain’s speech followed the reading by Robert Hunter of a manifesto formally inaugurating the American movement to help make Russia free. This movement will involve the appointment of a large committee of men of National reputation to aid in the collection of funds throughout the United States for the purchase of arms for the Russian revolutionists.
Mr. Clemens, Mr. Collier, Mr. Howells, Mr. Dunne, Mr. Hunter, Mr. Phillips, Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago, and others have already accepted places on the committee, and it was said by Mr. Hunter that invitations have been sent to a great number of others who are expected to join the movement.
[information about funds cut out here]
Mark Twain sat on the right of M. Narodny. Maxim Gorky sat on the right of Mr. Clemens. On the other side of the Russian writer sat his adopted son, who acted as interpreter during the animated conversation which was carried on between the American author and the writer who has depicted so vividly the tragic depths of the life of the lower classes in Russia.
Mr. Clemens, in beginning his speech, paid a warm tribute to Gorky, and this was returned by the Russian when his turn came to speak.
Gorky Praises Mark Twain.
“I am very glad to meet Mark Twain,” he said. “I knew him through his writings almost before I knew any other writer. I was little more than a boy when I began to wait and hope for the meeting which has been realized tonight. It is a happy day – a day happy beyond all expectation to me.
“Mark Twain’s fame is so well established all the world over that I could not add anything to it by any words of mine. He is a man of force. He has always impressed me as a blacksmith who stands at his anvil with the fire burning and strikes hard and hits the mark every time. He has done much to beat away the dross and bring out the true steel of character in his writings.
“I come to America expecting to find true and warm sympathizers among the American people for my suffering countrymen, who are fighting so hard and bearing so bravely their martyrdom for freedom. Now is the time for the revolution. Now is the time for the overthrow of Czardom.
Now! Now! Now! But we need the sinews of war, the blood we will give ourselves. We need money, money, money. I come to you as a beggar that Russia may be free.”
…[ Seated left to right: Zinovii Peshkov (Gorky’s adopted son), Gorky, Twain, Ivan Narodny ]
“What have you read in American literature?” Gorky was asked.
“I have read Mark Twain. The reading proved an inspiration to me. It is part of the liberal education of Russia to read Mark Twain’s works. They have all been translated and sold in hundreds of editions [The article continued on. The New York Sun, Apr. 12 p. 2, and the New York Tribune, p4 also gave accounts.]
Dear Mark: / I’ve a bit of news which I am sure will interest you, since it is the only happy thing that has befallen this stricken family during the past three years—the engagement of Talbot to a sweet young New England girl, a Miss Eleanor Little. ….
We start for home on April 27—the fiancée remains on this side for a while—and I shall be glad to get back. We made a long sojourn in Egypt, and I have had all the potted mummy I want at present. We all are well and send love and remembrances to you and your little flock, God keep them! / Yours affectionately …[MTP].
Clemens’ A.D. for the day: Frank Fuller and his enthusiastic launching of Clemens’ first New York lecture— Results not in fortune but in fame—Leads to a lecture tour under direction of James Redpath—Clipping in regard to Frank Fuller, & Clemens’ comments—Olive Logan clipping & Clemens’ comments—Clemens’ feeling toward suicides [MTP Autodict2].
Isabel Lyon’s journal:
Santa C. arrived yesterday [Apr. 10] & last evening I took mother to see Mrs. Fisk in Leah Kleshua [sic Kleschna]. It is such a good & well acted & well staged play…After the play we went around to the Green room & saw Mrs. Fisk…She was delighted with the message which Mr. Clemens sent her about the Horse’s Tale (it is to appear in Harper’s in August) but she said its main work would be done in Mexico & not yet in Spain—for Spain isn’t ripe for it[.] She sent Mr. Clemens her dear love & other charming messages which he was waiting for on my return.
Last night Mr. Clemens dined with Mrs. Johnson and her revolutionary tribe—Narodny and others. No—Narodny wasn’t there either—but he’s to be there tonight, & Gorky too. A buck dinner.
They sat down 13—such a hellish superstition it is [MTP TS 65]. Note: Minnie Maddern Fiske played the lead role in Leah Kleschna at the Academy of Music. Born Marie Augusta Davey, she was often billed simply as Mrs. Fiske.
Charles Butler Fenton (1862-1962), former New Zealand captain, wrote from Brooklyn, NY to Sam. “May I request you to kindly place forward your proposed lecture to be delivered on 19 inst. at Carnegie Music Hall to an earlier date. / As I am a seafaring man, Master of a merchant steamship, trading to China ports, in the employ of your friend Mr Rogers, and as I purpose getting married on the 19 inst; hence the reason of my request” [MTP]. See Apr. 16 for Sam’s matchless reply.
The New York Times, p. 11, “Ellen Terry’s Jubilee” announced a movement to celebrate the 50 anniversary of Miss Ellen Terry’s stage career. Mark Twain and Joseph H. Choate were th “in full sympathy” and Daniel Frohman of the Lyceum Theatre was taking subscriptions. A big benefit started ty the London Tribune was also being held in London for Ellen Terry, the aim being to fund her retirement.
The New York Times, p. 6, “Riot of Enthusiasm Greets Maxim Gorky” also announced the dinner for this evening to which Ivan Narodny invited Twain to meet Maxim Gorky (Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov) (1868-1936), Russian author and activist; the paper then reported the substance on Apr. 12, p.4:
Gorky and his wife will be guests at many receptions here. This evening he will be a guest of honor at a dinner at A Club, 3 Fifth Avenue. Mark Twain, W.D. Howells, Peter Finley Dunne,
Robert F. Collier, Robert Hunter, Gaylord Wilshire, M[r]. Narodny, and M[r]. Tchaykoffsky will be among the other guests [Note: See picture insert below, which also gives among the group, Maxim Gorky, and his son Zinovii Peshkov].
McFarland writes of The A Club at 3 Fifth Ave. (where Charlotte Teller Johnson lived with her grandmother) a few doors down from Sam’s 21 Fifth Ave.:
In February 1906, a group of eighteen or twenty young writers and social workers bought a mansion at 3 Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square, with the intention of entering into a cooperative housing arrangement. The news caused a small stir in the newspapers. The proposed housing collective was so at odds with the individual or familial ways that New Yorkers usually lived that reporters were dispatched to investigate this novel group. When a reporter asked its president, Howard Brubaker, what the collective’s name was, Brubaker casually replied, “Oh, just call it a club.” Thereafter it became known as “A Club” both in the newspaper accounts and in the popular lore of the group itself. Although the A Club cooperative housing experiment lasted only a few years, it nevertheless brought together and helped solidify a network of individuals whose contribution to Village history far outweighed their relatively small numbers.
Newspaper reporters who interviewed A Club’s founders received somewhat contradictory descriptions of the group’s purpose and membership. The earliest version came from Helen Todd, a wealthy Chicago settlement worker who had bankrolled the purchase of the mansion. She described A Clubbers as “people who like the bohemian life and are interested in the East Side of New York,” and who took the Fifth Avenue house “because it is only a short distance from the ‘ghetto.’” The part about wanting to be close to East Side slums was true enough, but the New Yorkers in the group objected to Todd’s use of the word “bohemian” in connection with themselves. Charlotte Teller [Johnson], an editorial assistant at Everybody’s magazine and a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, emphasized that “Life [at A Club] will not be bohemian, as has been stated, for most of us are old enough not to be childish in that way….We shall lead a perfectly conventional, normal family life.” She, for one, hoped to organize women who were employed in the factories of the Washington Square district. “We are here for work,” she stated emphatically [120-21]. Note: editorial emphasis on names.
Isabel Lyon’s journal for Apr. 12: Last night [Apr. 11] Mr. Clemens dined with Narodny & Maxim Gorky and others down at #3 Fifth Avenue. It must have been a delight even if Gorky cannot speak a word of English. He sat on Mr. Clemens’s right & his adopted son acted as interpreter. Mr. Clemens said when the signal for serving dinner was given 3 Japs in white uniforms moved off for the soup & as one of them served Maxim Gorky, he reached out his hand & took the little Jap’s in friendly greeting “A better thing than the Portsmouth Peace,” for while neither could speak a word of the other’s language, their hearts did the spontaneous talking that tells [MTP TS 65-66]. See the rest of the Apr. 12 entry. Hirst notes that the language barrier “… explains, perhaps, why there are not extensive records of what the two talked about.”
GORKY AND TWAIN PLEAD FOR REVOLUTION
Committee Formed to Raise Funds for Russian Freedom.
——— ——— ———
TO ARM REVOLUTIONISTS
”I Come to You a Beggar That Russia May Be Free,” Says Gorky at A Club Dinner.
The American auxiliary movement to aid the cause of freedom in Russia was launched last night at a dinner given at the Club A House, 3 Fifth Avenue, with Mark Twain and Maxim Gorky as the principal spokesmen.
“If we can build a Russian republic to give to the persecuted people of the Czar’s domain the same measure of freedom that we enjoy, let us go ahead and do it,” said Mark Twain. “We need not discuss the method by which that purpose is to be attained. Let us hope that fighting will be postponed or averted for a while, but if it must come— ” Mr. Clemens’s hiatus was significant.
“I am most emphatically in sympathy with the movement now on foot in Russia to make that country free,” he went on. “I am certain that it will be successful, as it deserves to be. Anybody whose ancestors were in this country when we were trying to free ourselves from oppression must sympathize with those who now are trying to do the same thing in Russia.
“The parallel I have just drawn only goes to show that it makes no difference whether the oppression is bitter or not; men with red, warm blood in their veins will not endure it, but will seek to cast it off. If we keep our hearts in this matter Russia will be free.”
The dinner was given by Ivan Narodny, the representative in this country of the Russian military revolutionists, in honor of Maxim Gorky. The list of guests included Dr. Nicholas Tchaykoffsk, Robert Collier, Kikolay Zavolsky Pieshkoff, the adopted son of Gorky; Nikolas Burenin, his friend and private secretary; Arthur Brisbane, David Graham Phillips, Robert Hunter, Ernest Poole, Dr. Walter Weyl, Leroy M. Scott, and Howard Bruebaker. W. D. Howells and Peter Finley Dunne had been invited but were unable to attend.
Mark Twain’s speech followed the reading by Robert Hunter of a manifesto formally inaugurating the American movement to help make Russia free. This movement will involve the appointment of a large committee of men of National reputation to aid in the collection of funds throughout the United States for the purchase of arms for the Russian revolutionists.
Mr. Clemens, Mr. Collier, Mr. Howells, Mr. Dunne, Mr. Hunter, Mr. Phillips, Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago, and others have already accepted places on the committee, and it was said by Mr. Hunter that invitations have been sent to a great number of others who are expected to join the movement.
[information about funds cut out here]
Mark Twain sat on the right of M. Narodny. Maxim Gorky sat on the right of Mr. Clemens. On the other side of the Russian writer sat his adopted son, who acted as interpreter during the animated conversation which was carried on between the American author and the writer who has depicted so vividly the tragic depths of the life of the lower classes in Russia.
Mr. Clemens, in beginning his speech, paid a warm tribute to Gorky, and this was returned by the Russian when his turn came to speak.
Gorky Praises Mark Twain.
“I am very glad to meet Mark Twain,” he said. “I knew him through his writings almost before I knew any other writer. I was little more than a boy when I began to wait and hope for the meeting which has been realized tonight. It is a happy day – a day happy beyond all expectation to me.
“Mark Twain’s fame is so well established all the world over that I could not add anything to it by any words of mine. He is a man of force. He has always impressed me as a blacksmith who stands at his anvil with the fire burning and strikes hard and hits the mark every time. He has done much to beat away the dross and bring out the true steel of character in his writings.
“I come to America expecting to find true and warm sympathizers among the American people for my suffering countrymen, who are fighting so hard and bearing so bravely their martyrdom for freedom. Now is the time for the revolution. Now is the time for the overthrow of Czardom.
Now! Now! Now! But we need the sinews of war, the blood we will give ourselves. We need money, money, money. I come to you as a beggar that Russia may be free.”
…[ Seated left to right: Zinovii Peshkov (Gorky’s adopted son), Gorky, Twain, Ivan Narodny ]
“What have you read in American literature?” Gorky was asked.
“I have read Mark Twain. The reading proved an inspiration to me. It is part of the liberal education of Russia to read Mark Twain’s works. They have all been translated and sold in hundreds of editions [The article continued on. The New York Sun, Apr. 12 p. 2, and the New York Tribune, p4 also gave accounts.]
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