Vol 3 Section 0142

Note: Dolmetsch (45) writes Sam’s speech was given by most papers as “Die Schwierigkeiten der deutschen Sprache” (The Difficulties of the German Language) “certainly a less offensive, perhaps more accurate labeling of its contents.”

In his speech to Concordia, Sam corrected his friend Eduard Pötzl’s Oct. 3 article “Silent Observer,” which had humorously stated his purpose in coming to Vienna was to stop traffic on the bridges. “My presence on the bridges has a quite innocent purpose,” Sam said. It was the only place he might stretch out a German sentence, with the verb on one end of the bridge and its prefix on the other, thereby making sense of it by walking the bridge. Sam’s speech was less than ten minutes long; the newspapers reported the reactions were tumultuous with applause and cheers.

After the cheering faded, Jakob von Winternitz, past president of the press club, rose to offer a toast “to the Clemens ladies” in the gallery with Bettina Wirth [Dolmetsch 45]. Note: Sam’s speech is not to be confused with the segment from TA, “The Awful German Language.”

November – “In Memoriam” for Susy Clemens was first published in Harper’s Monthly for Nov. 1897. It was collected in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (Hartford, 1900) and The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906) [Budd Collected 2: 1003].

Sam’s tribute to the late James Hammond Trumbull written in Weggis, Switzerland, ran in the Nov.

issue of Century Magazine.

Sam began the unfinished “Chronicle of Young Satan” in Nov. 1897 [Camfield, bibliog.].

McClure’s Magazine p. 3-18, ran an illustrated excerpt from FE called “From India to South Africa: The Diary of a

Voyage,” with a full page photograph of Mark Twain by Alfred Ellis on p. 2, with a facsimile of Mark Twain’s hand: “Be

good & you will be lonesome. / Mark Twain.”

Note: McClure’s segment was not authorized by Sam, but was contributed by the American Publishing Co. through an oversight in their contract with Clemens. Sam apologized to Richard Watson Gilder of the Century Co., when Gilder was refused a like segment—see Jan. 13, 1898 to Gilder.

Review of Reviews (London), p. 468 , ran “Mark Twain on Empire-Building. A Philosophy of Clothes-Lines,” with some excerpts of FE from the Nov. McClure’s [Tenney 26].

The Book Buyer included an anonymous article, p. 302-3 which reproduced a page from Sam’s notebook on making a maxim, and a photograph of him just before the family left Chelsea for Vienna [MTJ Bibliographic Issue Number Four 42:1 (Spring 2004) p.7].

F. Kaplan writes,

In November, in a revised and expanded “St. Petersburg Fragment,” Huck and Tom become Austrian boys in a semi-medieval eighteenth-century Catholic world who are befriended by “Philip Traum,” the pseudonym of the protagonist of “The Chronicle of Young Satan.” …. The humorist, who had discerned

so much worth laughing at, now finds that human misery makes laughter too painful to bear. Twain’s reworking between 1898 and 1908 of Young Satan’s visits to earth, “Schoolhouse Hill” and “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” have, like most of what Twain had written since A Connecticut Yankee, little about them that is funny” [554-5].

November 1 Monday – Sam’s tribute to the late James Hammond Trumbull written in Weggis, Switzerland, ran in the Hartford Courant, p.3.

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