May 30 Thursday – Sam replied to Harper’s of May 29: Note: Lyon wrote on the letter: “If the London people will just ask C&W [Chatto & Windus] they will find that they can let Harpers know. They transferred” [MTP].
Isabel Lyon’s journal: Days and weeks are passing and I am not writing a word about the most wonderful creature in the world, but I’ll try to hark back. He is in love with Tuxedo.
Today, as well as yesterday, when we were driving around making calls, he was like a young creature who had been caged for years. At Mrs. Alfred Seton’s today the talk plunged at once into the fact that there is no such thing as “will power” and the King waxed fine and strong, but they were bent on convincing him that he had not convinced them and couldn’t convince them in 25 years. They cared so much for their own point of view that they couldn’t comprehend his. Then we went to the Rogerses. H.H. has had a postprandial operation for some private thing that the King as forgotten the name of, but we found him well enough to be down stairs and so we went in and chatted, until a crowd of young creatures came in. Then home we came very tired and both of us in bed by 8:30 [MTP TS 61].
In his A.D. for this day, Sam referred to several notable naturalists: the extraordinary mind of Aristotle [Gribben 27]. Sam Also commented on John Burroughs, ed. Songs of Nature. “Burroughs…backs up his assertions merely by his ‘say-so’” [117]. Note: See May 29 on Burroughs. Sam mentioned Also the 14 Century naturalist, Sir John Mandeville (pseud. of an unknown compiler); Sam’s copy of Early Travels in Palestine (1848) includes Mandeville’s account of his journey to the Holy Land [448]. Sam also asserted that “Natural history is … not an exact science,” and no naturalist can post as an “unassailable authority”—not even Aristotle, Pliny, or Sir John Mandeville [550].
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 more on the Roosevelt/Long controversy, continued from his dictation of the previous this day [22-4].