January 1 Monday – At 30 Wellington Court in London, England Sam replied to Will M. Clemens (incoming not extant).
No-no, don’t print a line from those letters, nor from any other letters of mine. I am very glad you asked me, instead of printing them first & asking afterward, as some people have a way of doing. I hope you will destroy the letters—it is what Redpath ought to have done. They are strictly private—he knew that—& they should have been burned at once. Such letters should not even be published after a man is dead, let alone while he is alive….when Redpath allowed these to survive, he did an inexcusable thing [MTP: Sotheby’s auction June 19, 2003, Item 99].
Sam also replied to Laurence Hutton, whose incoming letter is not extant, but as with other lost letters we can see what at least some of the subject matter was by virtue of Clemens’ reply.
To encourage you I will remark that your troubles with the new house have only begun. We have been there. Tinkering on our Hartford home still cost $500 a year, & would cost four times that if we did all of the necessary ones.
…
I am getting heart-breakingly anxious to get home—to get home and never budge again. I am due to die this year, according to a trustworthy prophecy of thirty-five years’ standing, & I must not get caught out, on the wrong side of the water.
Clara is pretty fairly well; Jean is improving satisfactorily: both danced till 1 o’clock this morning, seeing the Old Year out & the New one in. Mrs. Clemens has been in bed a fortnight with a combination of influenza & bronchitis, but is now up & stirring about her room. Moi? I am as always—healthy as a rock.
As to the when of our coming home, we can’t tell, yet—we can only guess, and hope. We guessed spring, for a while; now we have to guess summer.
I have never minded the fogs before; but now, with everybody in mourning around us, I find them unendurably depressing [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Joe Twichell.
—sh! Private.
Dear Joe: Who is Miss Elizabeth Alden Curtis? I am afraid it is a relative of Mrs. Ned Bunce. Is it so? Have you read her Omar Khayam—with introduction by Dick Burton? I have not seen such another curiosity since I was born. It is the most detailed & minutely circumstantial plagiarism that has yet been perpetrated in any century. And the author is quite innocent of crime, for it is manifest that she is not aware that she is committing one. And that is strange, for she is not a fool, but intelligent & has poetry in her somewhere. Isn’t it an odd idea?—to sit down with a noble poem in front of her & proceed to recast it & degrade it line by line, stanza by stanza, straight through, & guilelessly taking credit to herself all the time for the sacrilege she is committing. … It took Dick [Burton] two hours to write that Introduction, & he was in a clean man’s hell all the while [MTP]. Note: Elizabeth Alden Curtis: One Hundred Quatrains from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: a Rendering in English Verse by Omar Khayyam (1899); 600 copies on Dutch hand-made paper, available in late Nov., 1898. See also Gribben 516-18.
Sam also wrote to Chatto & Windus. Text not available from [MTP].
Sam’s notebook: “The 20th C is a stranger to me—I wish it well, but my heart is all for my own century. I took 65 yrs of it just on a risk, but if I had known as much about it as I know now, I would have taken the whole of it” [NB 43 TS 4].