October 2 Saturday– In Vienna, Austria, Clara Clemens wrote to Chatto & Windus asking them to forward all letters to the Hotel Metropole [MTP].

Sam also replied to Andrew E. Murphy, whose “letter caught us on the rail & got mislaid.” Murphy’s letter is not extant. Only the American Publishing Co. would know about literary rights and be able to “answer propositions” that Murphy had inquired about [MTP].

Sam also wrote to Eduard Pötzl (1851-1915), Viennese dialect humorist and journalist, thanking him for books sent and wishing “there were more of them.”

I have just been reading “Darf ich Raūchen” [May I smoke?]. How sharply it reminds me of an experience of my own; & by this sign I recognize that back of it lies truth, actuality, fact. I did not publish mine, but I have never forgotten it nor ceased to value it. It was three years ago, in Paris, when I had my first attack of gout. The first physician forbade red wine but allowed whisky; the second forbade whisky but allowed red wine; the third—but by your own experience you see how it ended: by consulting six doctors I achieved permission to drink anything I wanted to—except water. The trouble with less thoughtful people is, that they stop with one doctor.

I am down with the gout again; but this time I haven’t any doctor at all. This is the very Past-Mastership of wisdom. / Sincerely Yours…[MTP]. Note: Dolmetsch gives Pötzl as Sam’s closest Viennese friend [37].

From Bancroftania, Vol. 121 Fall 2002:

Among the first to publish an interview with him was Siegmund Schlesinger of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt , on October 2. By then Pötzl must already have introduced himself and given Clemens some of his books, for in the Schlesinger interview Clemens “mentioned his admiration for Pötzl’s ‘gallery of pure Viennese types’ from which he hoped to learn much” (Dolmetsch, 35). That same day, Clemens wrote to Pötzl, thanking him for his books, which may have included Bummelei and Launen, published in 1896 and 1897 [See also Gribben 557.]

The NY Times, p.7, and the Hartford Courant, p.1, ran essentially the same squib, “Mark Twain Has the Gout”:

London, Oct. 2—A dispatch to the Daily Chronicle from Vienna says that Mr. Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) is confined to his bed with the gout. But he is in excellent spirits, and calls his ailment “toothache in the toe.”

This day’s issue of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt ran the first detailed interview with Mark Twain.

This one was a full-blown feuillton, a particularly Viennese genre—forerunner, perhaps, of the modern feature story—which occupied the lower half of a front page and, in this instance, was continued inside the paper. Entitled “A Quarter-hour with Mark Twain” (Eine Viertelstunde bei Mark Twain), it was written by the paper’s feature editor (Feuilleton-redakteur), Sigmund Schlesinger, a writer with whom Twain was to have a close if unproductive working relationship during his stay in Vienna. This interview was very chatty and intimate, and it was clear that Twain was quite at ease with Schlesinger. At its conclusion, he accepted Schlesinger’s invitation to write something at a later date for Neues Wiener Tagblatt, a commitment never fulfilled [Dolmetsch 34-5].