January 15 Tuesday – At 21 Fifth Ave, N.Y. Sam began a letter to Edith Draper in Lancashire, England that he enclosed a photo he signed on Jan. 17: “I will comply with pleasure, dear Mrs Edith. My secretary will choose a photo which will go handily in the mail & I will autograph it. / Indeed I shouldn’t regret it if I were an Englishman—& particularly a Lancashire man / Sincerely…” [MTP]. Note: Lyon remarked about this note on a sheet inserted into her journal: “Here is a proof of the sweet & courteous answer Mr. Clemens writes personally to one who calls herself ‘only an English cottager.’ He is beyond words, gentle & darling to the simple ones of the earth who write from their hearts; whose letters are ‘literature’—because they come from the heart. He always appreciates them, & says so with his pen & to the writer.”
Isabel Lyon’s journal: This morning the King went down stairs with his white necktie on wrong side out, & he wouldn’t let me change it, because he preferred it that way. He preferred the shining cheap satin surface & is going to instruct Robert the Butler to arrange them that way. Again he was upset at the Hobby “because she did not arrive on time”, so he fumed himself into a splendid mood & was so full of dictating that he burned away from 11:30 until 2:30.
Tomorrow evening Helen Keller is to dine here, & some people are coming in afterward.
Today Mr. Paine brought me a little meerschaum pipe—from the King. The King has been having a touch of gout on his left foot—so I’ve been painting it with iodine. When he walked down the stairs he limped & I remarked that he seemed lame, when he said yes, he was a little lame, he couldn’t step on the fo’castle of his foot. Bless him!
Of the selections from Twain’s A.D.’s, DeVoto selected about half of the materials not chosen before by Paine to be included in Mark Twain in Eruption (1940); among DeVoto’s choices, was “Purchasing Civic Virtue,” dictated this day, which compared America to Rome. Sam railed against Roosevelt’s Executive Order 78, which gave veterans, disabled or not, between 62 and 70, a pension; Sam saw this as a naked grab for votes.