June 26 Saturday – At 23 Tedworth Square in London, Sam wrote a postcard to Chatto & Windus: “Please send for some more MS.—say 10 or 11 Monday.” Sam wanted them to send the entire typewritten lot of pages to H.H. Rogers [MTP].
Sam also wrote a note to Helen Lucy Stewart Skrine (Mrs. Francis H. Skrine) confirming his attendance at her dinner for Thursday at 8 p.m. The dinner date was changed to Wednesday, June 30, as shown in the to-do list below (#14) [Alexander Autographs, Sale 38, Lot 1349, Oct. 9-10, 2008].
Sam’s notebook: “Saturday, June 26, mailed Goerz cheque No. 58919 for £65.5 & a New Orleans cheque No. 20496 for £10.4.1 to City Bank for deposit to Livy’s credit”
Right below this entry Sam wrote a to-do list, striking out items he completed:
See bank about letter of credit.
Cable Sue stop at Grosvenor
Ship Chatto contract home.
Take books to Chelsea library
Write London Library
Take Joan to Goertz.
Order some shirts
A suit of clothes.
Write & thank Garth for house.
Take home Macalister’s book.
Call & thank Bram for Dracula [see June 1]
Get smoking tobacco & pipes.
Visit Chapins.
Dine Skrine Wednesday [June 30]
Sup Gillette Thursday [July 1]
Ask Chatto for July settlement.
Get passes from Austrian Emb. [NB 41 TS 32].
First appearing in the London literary journal Academy p. 653-5 as “Mark Twain, Benefactor” on June 26 [Tenney 26], this unsigned article on Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling ran later in several US newspapers, including the Salt Lake City Tribune on July 11 and the NY Times on July 17 with various headlines:
Mark Twain as Kipling’s Progenitor
A few years ago Mr. Kipling called on Mark Twain in Hartford. Afterward, in an account of his visit, he described the temptation which had beset him to steal the great man’s corncob pipe as a relic. It was a nice touch of homage, coming from the man who has done more than any other to carry on the traditions established by the American writers, and in so doing in a large measure to supersede him. These traditions may be briefly described as the wish to set down as bluntly and forcibly as possible whatever one has to say, and the refusal to allow any intermediary between one’s self and one’s subject.
Before Mr. Kipling rose glowing in the East, Mark Twain held the field. He was the ideal of masculine writers. There were no half ways with his readers—either they swore by him through thick and thin or unconditionally they cast him aside. Probably no author has been so little read by women, although, on the other hand, there was hardly a boy in the English-speaking world who would not have bartered his soul for Mark Twain’s corncob pipe as a relic. He did just what boys and elemental men like: he came straight to the point; he feared no one, and he esteemed laughter above all the gifts of God.
Thus it was from twenty-five to a dozen years ago. But then, in the early eighties, Mark Twain’s old manner became changed. He abandoned his zest in lawless life and the records of his personal impressions in the serious places of the earth, and he turned to satire and romance. His sorrowing readers had only just perceived the melancholy truth when “Soldiers Three” appeared, in its quiet blue-gray covers, to mark the beginnings of a new sledge-hammer pen and divert their grief. British India won, and to-day Mr. Rudyard Kipling is the ideal masculine writer, and his is the pipe that is coveted by boys and elemental men. He is a finer artist than Mark Twain, his sympathies are wider, his genius is more comprehensive, and yet, when all be said, the fact remains that Mark Twain is his literary progenitor. [Note: on p. 652 the publication also ran an editorial commenting on the mistaken rumor that Sam was ill in London, and on the subscription effort by the NY Herald: Tenney: 26]
Major and Mrs. James B. Pond visited Sam. A photograph of Mark Twain on Univ. of California’s new thisismarktwain.com site is an inscribed photo of Mark Twain which reads: “Mark Twain at his Chelsea home where Maj. & Mrs. Pond visited June 26, 97.—Here is where ‘Mark” is reported to be dying in poverty. He never looked better.” If the date of the visit is correct, then Sam’s note previously dated only “July 1897” preceeded June 26 (see June, before June 26 entry). Note: at least three photos are given this date by the MTP in their photograph binders: one of Mark Twain seated by the fireplace with daughter Clara standing behind him, one with Twain and his beloved cigar, and one without cigar.