June 8 Friday – Clara Clemens’ 32 birthday. She called her father on the telephone, that device he used to swear and rail at in Hartford in the late 1870s [June 9 to Clara]. nd
Isabel Lyon’s journal:Santa telephoned for it is her birthday & her voice made us lonelier than ever. When she asked me how things were here I blurted out that it was lonely & Mr. Clemens felt it too, & from his last letter to her she said she could know it. Then later we held a “Lodge of Sorrow”—Mr. Clemens & I—& have pronounced this Upton House as failure. It is remote from all human beings—& wonderful as the view may be, the “human jewel” is more of a necessity than is the view.
Mother arrived in F. from Washington today.
Today Mr. Paine went down to New York [MTP TS 79-80].
William Dean Howells wrote from Kittery Point, Maine to Isabel Lyon that he’d received a telegram from Furness (not extant): “Please tell Clemens…I remember no more of the Furness story now than he does,” but a friend of Pilla Howells was “acquainted with the precise circumstances” and he would write him again once he saw her in a few days [MTHL 2: 809]. Note: the Furness story was a parallel one to Sam’s “Was it Heaven? or Hell?” Howells wrote again on June 11.
Samuel S. McClure wrote to Sam. “I arranged with Peter Finley Dunne to syndicate his articles. On the average I got about $1,250. an article, of which he got $1,000. and I got $250. I think that a series of short articles, made up of parts of your autobiography, each more or less completely a story, could be syndicated for at least as much as Mr. Dunne’s.” McClure offered to take up the syndication and pay Sam an 80% royalty of the gross receipts [MTP]. Note: Sam replied ca. June 11. He was contemplating dumping Harper’s and letting McClure syndicate 50,000 words at $50,000. See IVL entry for May 27. His unhappiness with Harper’s stemmed from their reluctance to publish Christian Science; he also perceived they were not advertising his books properly.
Roi Cooper Megrue for Elisabeth Marbury wrote to Sam enclosing papers for him to sign for him to be come “a member of the Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques of France. It is necessary that these papers be signed in order that you may receive your royalties” [MTP].
Barbara Mullen wrote from Moberly, Mo. to bring before Sam what she considered to be “a slander that is being perpetrated upon you almost every day in the town where you passed your boyhood…” It seems that the recent new hotel, named after Twain, was so full up daily that the hotel agents were going to the train depot and calling out repeatedly, “Mark Twain’s full!” [MTP]. Note: Sam answered on June 14.
Isabel Lyon’s journal:Santa telephoned for it is her birthday & her voice made us lonelier than ever. When she asked me how things were here I blurted out that it was lonely & Mr. Clemens felt it too, & from his last letter to her she said she could know it. Then later we held a “Lodge of Sorrow”—Mr. Clemens & I—& have pronounced this Upton House as failure. It is remote from all human beings—& wonderful as the view may be, the “human jewel” is more of a necessity than is the view.
Mother arrived in F. from Washington today.
Today Mr. Paine went down to New York [MTP TS 79-80].
William Dean Howells wrote from Kittery Point, Maine to Isabel Lyon that he’d received a telegram from Furness (not extant): “Please tell Clemens…I remember no more of the Furness story now than he does,” but a friend of Pilla Howells was “acquainted with the precise circumstances” and he would write him again once he saw her in a few days [MTHL 2: 809]. Note: the Furness story was a parallel one to Sam’s “Was it Heaven? or Hell?” Howells wrote again on June 11.
Samuel S. McClure wrote to Sam. “I arranged with Peter Finley Dunne to syndicate his articles. On the average I got about $1,250. an article, of which he got $1,000. and I got $250. I think that a series of short articles, made up of parts of your autobiography, each more or less completely a story, could be syndicated for at least as much as Mr. Dunne’s.” McClure offered to take up the syndication and pay Sam an 80% royalty of the gross receipts [MTP]. Note: Sam replied ca. June 11. He was contemplating dumping Harper’s and letting McClure syndicate 50,000 words at $50,000. See IVL entry for May 27. His unhappiness with Harper’s stemmed from their reluctance to publish Christian Science; he also perceived they were not advertising his books properly.
Roi Cooper Megrue for Elisabeth Marbury wrote to Sam enclosing papers for him to sign for him to be come “a member of the Societe des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques of France. It is necessary that these papers be signed in order that you may receive your royalties” [MTP].
Barbara Mullen wrote from Moberly, Mo. to bring before Sam what she considered to be “a slander that is being perpetrated upon you almost every day in the town where you passed your boyhood…” It seems that the recent new hotel, named after Twain, was so full up daily that the hotel agents were going to the train depot and calling out repeatedly, “Mark Twain’s full!” [MTP]. Note: Sam answered on June 14.
Entry Date
Links to Twain's Geography Entries