August 27 Tuesday – In Saranac Lake, N.Y. Sam replied to John Y. MacAlister’s Aug. 2 letter.
Drop the mental telegraphy!—your machine isn’t synchronous with mine (which is out of repair) & won’t work.
Mr. Rogers is so headstrong I can’t do anything with him. He will stick to his own schemes & won’t look at mine. Still, he has good ones, & I go into them whenever I get a chance. For 6 months he has had one preparing, & I am raking & scraping to be ready. If he gets it prepared to suit him I mean to put all the money into it he will allow me to risk.
Sam wrote a couple of paragraphs about the Plasmon report and the failure to combine it with the beef extract. He wrote he was “Writing, like the nation! but rather for pleasure than for publication.” He had declined Samuel McClure’s offer for him to be editor of a new magazine (to be called Universal Magazine), writing, “I have been out of slavery for 30 years; I know I couldn’t be comfortable with even a cobweb chain on. I’ve lost the habit.”
Insert: Clemens home in Riverdale (“Wave Hill House”).
Sam also wrote about the house on eighteen acres overlooking the Hudson they’d secured for a year, and mentioned it was about the same distance from Grand Central Station as the Dollis Hill house was from Baker Street in London. He had an option, which cost him nothing, of buying the place for $150,000. He related the fun he’d had on the yacht cruise and now was answering a “whole bushel of letters!” with his pen as Jean’s typewriter was in for repairs. He wrote of a new contract:
Private. By a new contract I have $16,000 a year for 4 years (on the “Popular Edition” of my books) with indefinite continuance of the same. We’ll bank that, & not spend any of it. The new contractor has also bought the remains of the de luxe edition & paid Bliss & me $13,000 each for the same. So that is off our hands—thoughy it was far from being a burden [MTP].
Note: known later as the Wave Hill House (Sam never referred to it as such), the Riverdale on the Hudson house was built in Greek Revival style as a country home in 1843 by N.Y.C. attorney William Lewis Morris. It was purchased in 1866 and enlarged in 1866- 69 and again in 1890 by William Henry Appleton, a publishing magnate. Theodore Roosevelt’s family rented the house in the summers of 1870-1 when Teddy was 12-13; his stay there added to his love (some would say obsession) of nature.
Sam also wrote to an unidentified man, commenting on a list of books sent: “In the list are two books…which I do not call to mind; I suppose they are piracies.” He added three to the list published since 1895: FE, JA, and the Hadleyburg volume. He suggested sending the list to American Publishing in Hartford; that Bliss could “probably answer the other questions, too; & name the sales of the books—things which I am not able to do” [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Miss O’Reilly:
My dear Miss O’Reilly—
I am far up in the Adirondack woods & have no books with me, but I am sending a couple of autographs to Harpers, with instructions to paste them in & forward the books to you.
I am not meaning to be tardy, & I ask pardon, but I have been away a fortnight & have been ill since my return until now [MTP]. Note: had been to unidentified person.
Sam also wrote two notes to Franklin G. Whitmore. The first (postmarked Aug. 27) is one line: “You can do the rest of the filling out and attend to the collecting.” This may relate to renting the Farmington Ave. house, while the second letter (postmarked Aug 28) relates to the sale of the house:
Dear Brer: / Whenever you have an offer for the house let us know the amount. I doubt if Mrs. Clemens can ever bring herself to sell, but it might happen—one never knows. I wish we had sold it ten years ago for what it would fetch, little or big. One ought not to retain idle property in our country, the only one in the world that taxes such just the same when it is idle as when it is earning money. Just on account of the taxes there has never been a time when I wouldn’t have sold the house for anything it would fetch if the family had been willing [MTP].