December 20 Tuesday – Sam went to Boston, Mass. And gave the speech, “Patent Adjustable Speech” in reaction to a toast on “Post-Prandial Oratory” at the Congregational Club, Music Hall [Fatout MT Speaking 230-4]. The Twainian Jan-Feb 1946 p.1 reports from a Boston Globe article (Dec. 21, p.1, “Pilgrims”), that Charles W. Hill, Globe producer, presided and that the guests included Governor Oliver Ames, Lt. Gov. J.Q.A. Brackett, Leverett Saltonstall, Chauncey M. Depew, and Rev. Dr. W.L. Gage of Hartford. (See also The Twainian Nov.-Dec. 1951, p.1). Fatout’s introduction to a text of the speech:

“For the amusement of 1,200 club members and guests, attending a Boston Forefathers Day dinner, Mark Twain delivered what he called his “Patent Adjustable Speech,” good for all occasions. He illustrated its possibilities by a manner that varied from gay to lugubrious, even to the stimulation of copious tears” [MT Speaking 230].

And from Sam:

Now at a public dinner when a man knows he is going to be called upon to speak, and is thoroughly well prepared — got it all by heart, and the pauses all marked in his head where the applause is going to come in — a public dinner is just heaven to that man. He won’t care to be anywhere else than just where he is. But when at a public dinner it is getting way along toward the end of things, and a man is sitting over his glass of wine, or his glass of milk, according to the kind of banquet it is, in ever-augmenting danger of being called up, and isn’t prepared, and knows he can never prepare with the thoughtless gander at his elbow bothering him all the time with exasperating talky-talk about nothing, that a man is just as nearly in the other place as ever he wants to be. Why, it is a cruel situation. That man is to be pitied; and the very worst of it is that the minute he gets on his feet he is pitied.

Now he could stand the pity of ten people or a dozen, but there is no misery in the world that is comparable to the massed and solidified compassion of five hundred. Why, that wide Sahara of sympathizing faces completely takes the tuck out of him, makes a coward of him….

My scheme is this, that he shall carry in his head a cut-and-dried and thoroughly and glibly memorized speech that will fit every conceivable public occasion in this life, fit it to a dot, and win success and applause every time…all he has got to do is change three or four words in that speech, and make his delivery anguishing and tearful, or chippy and facetious, or luridly and thunderously eloquent just as the occasional happens to call for…[230-1]

Webster & Co. Wrote a note to Sam advising they’d sent “to-day a complete set of your books in half-morocco, with the exception of the ‘Innocents,’ which is in cloth” [MTP].

Susan L. Crane wrote to Sam that tomorrow she would send Livy the crayon picture of “beau as she was at that time.” Auntie Cord was “just about through with this life.” Blatherskite (the cat) was “well, and very fine…with his big body, deep fur, and lovely spirit” [MTP].