November 17 Thursday – In Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Frank Bliss.
I put in 5 days on 50 pages of Introduction, & then put it in the fire. A thousand dollars’ worth of work for nothing. An author cannot successfully write about his own books nor a mother about her own children—nothing but a poorly-concealed parade of silly vanities results. No one can do the job creditably but an outsider. No one can do it best for me but Howells or Brander Matthews.
Sam sent three pages of Introduction which were satisfactory but which he said did “not exhibit me turning handsprings in my shirt-tail.” He also told of Ignace Spiridon’s portrait of him, which he felt was “a long way the best” he had ever had, and suggested “it will be better to confine it to the Uniform, or make a canvassing ad. or specialty” [MTP]. Note: the portrait was used as a frontispiece to Vol. 20 of the 1899 Edition de Luxe of The Writings of Mark Twain. A large copy of it used to hang in the MTP’s main study room at their temporary quarters on Hearst Street, where it kept an eye on visiting Twainiacs.
Sam also wrote to H.H. Rogers.
Oh, dear me, you don’t have to excuse yourself for neglecting me, you are entitled to the highest praise for being so limitlessly patient & good in bothering with my confused affairs, & pulling me out of a hole every little while. …
A MS (about “Hadleyburg”) went to you a day or two ago from London. It is more than 20,000 words. I haven’t any purpose in view about it as yet. The [NY] “World” took a look at it. I think it is just possible that it didn’t like my price—$200 per 1000 words. (I didn’t expect it to!)
It makes me lazy, the way that Steel stock is rising. If I were lazier—like [Clarence] Rice—nothing could keep me from retiring. But I work right along, like a poor person. I shall figure up the rise, as the figures come in, & push up my literary prices accordingly, till I get any literature up to where nobody can afford it but the family. (N.B. Look here, are you charging storage? I am not going to stand that, you know.) Meantime I note these encouraging illogical words of yours about my not worrying because I am to be rich when I am 68; why didn’t you have Cheiro make it 90, so that I could have plenty of room?
Sam thought it would be “jolly good” if someone could make a successful play out of “Is He Dead?” He asked for a copy of Frank Mayo’s play, Pudd’nhead Wilson, as a “capable young Austrian” wanted to translate it and investigate staging it in Vienna. Some London dramatists were interested in bargaining for the dramatization rights to his “£1,000,000 Bank Note.” He mentioned one Borkis was willing. Also, he speculated it was James B. Pond “who emptied that sewage down the back of the Chambermaid’s House Journal,” and noted that it was in Pond’s taste and that “Some of it has dribbled into these Vienna papers.”
He closed by noting that “Young Dr. Freeland” would visit in December and thought he could find the Clemenses a reasonably-priced flat in the Washington Square region of N.Y.C. for when they went home next October. He doubted it could be done because he read that New York was “growing more & more expensive every day.” He closed by asking about the $1,000 that Bliss should have sent for the McClure’s excerpt of FE [MTHHR 377].
Notes: Pond’s “sewage” was his reaction to an anonymous article in the Ladies’ Home Journal for Oct. 1898: “The Anecdotal Side of Mark Twain, etc.,” stories contributed by friends about Mark Twain’s lecture circuit days [Tenney 27 cites The Twainian, II (November, 1940) p.4]. Cheiro (Louis Hamon) palm-reader, had prophesied in 1895 and 1897 that Sam would become wealthy at age 68. See Vol. 2 entries.
Sam also wrote to Nikola Tesla, after reading of a possible invention that might “introduce into the earth permanent peace & disarmament in a practical & mandatory way”—a “destructive terror” which anticipated the “mutually destructive” weapon, the nuclear bomb. Did Tesla have Austrian and English patents on the device? Since Sam knew cabinet ministers of several European countries and would be in Europe a year more, he was in a position to sell the patents to them. “won’t you set a price upon them [patents] & commission me to sell them?” [MTP].
Note: Tesla was perhaps the best known scientist of his time; the inventor of the radio and other devices; brilliant but the epitome of the mad scientist, often given to wild and exaggerated claims about possible inventions, Tesla had disclosed he was working on a death ray, against which no defense was possible. Sam had known Tesla for some years, perhaps meeting him for the first time on Feb. 6 1894. See entry.