Vol 3 Section 0066

April 4 Sunday – William Dean Howells wrote to Sam.

“I am very sorry that I cannot read at the Authors’ Guild Entertainment. I long ago decided not to take part in Author’s readings, and there is nothing but your kindly wish, to make me revise this decision in the present case. Yours…” [MTP; not in MTHL].

April 5 Monday

April 6 Tuesday – At 4 a.m., 23 Tedworth Square in London Sam replied to a not-extant note from John Y. MacAlister.

Ah, but I mustn’t stir from my desk before night, now when the publisher is hurrying me & I am almost through [with FE]. I am up & at work now—4 o’clock in the morning—& a few more spurts will pull me through. You come down here & smoke; that is better than tempting working men to strike & go to tea.

And it would move me too deeply to see Miss Corelli. When I saw her last it was on the street in Hamburg, & Susy was walking with me [MTP].

Note: the Clemens family was in Hamburg, Germany from Apr. 25, to May 1, 1878, five days, but Sam’s Aug. 1907 A.D. reference to first meeting her “in Germany fifteen years ago,” suggests 1891 or 1892. Marie Corelli (born Mary Mackay; 1855-1924), British novelist, would manipulate Sam into a Stratford luncheon on June 29, 1907. She would become the best-selling UK female novelist of the early 20th century, though critics ripped her books.

Emily S. Patton wrote to Sam from Yokohama, Japan enclosing a book she’d wanted to send earlier but had not due to Susy’s death. Patton had hoped to meet Mark Twain when and if he ever came to Japan. She had lost her husband and all but one of her children while living in Australia, then lost her daughter to cholera after moving to Japan seven years before. She mentioned that her daughter had been at school with a teacher who had been at a mission school in Syria when the Sam and the Quaker City excursion visited; her description of Sam then was that he was “very grave and silent” [MTP].

Note: This from http://www.phoenixbonsai.com/1800Refs/Patton.html :

Emily S. Patton (? – ?) and her daughter were originally from England but had lived in Australia prior to taking up residency in Japan in 1889. She lived at The Bluff in Yokohama while working in Tokyo as an instructor at the School of Music in Ueno. By 1900, she had become the proprietor of the Yokohama School of Music and Academy of Dancing, located at her home address in The Bluff. She started writing Japanese Topsyturvydom in 1895 [published 1896]. The book ridicules Western misconceptions about Japan.…. Clues to

her personal life appear in a book she wrote in 1905 entitled Japanese Types Sketched with a Brush and Pen, which was produced by Kelly and Walsh, the leading bookseller dealing in Western books in Yokohama.

April 7 Wednesday

April 8 Thursday – At 23 Tedworth Square in London, Sam wrote to James R. Clemens [MTP]. Note: No text is available.

Sam also wrote to H.H. Rogers, giving a status on the new book—though he could finish in another week he was “going carefully” and the type-writer lady was “fearfully slow.” He hoped to have the book in Rogers’ hands by the time the Rogers family “get back from junketing.” Wayne MacVeagh was sailing Saturday Apr. 10, and planned to call on Rogers “to tell you that I am healthy.” The day’s work was done and dinner was ready [MTHHR 269-70].

SLC used mourning border for most letters from Susy’s death on, then from Livy’s death on.