1601: Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors

by Mark Twain

  Thus was this Elizabethan dialogue poured into the moulds of cold type.According to Merle Johnson, Mark Twain's bibliographer, it was issuedin pamphlet form, without wrappers or covers; there were 8 pages oftext and the pamphlet measured 7 by 8 1/2 inches. Only four copies arebelieved to have been printed, one for Hay, one for Gunn, and two forTwain.

  "In the matter of humor," wrote Clemens, referring to Hay's deliciousnotes, "what an unsurpassable touch John Hay had!"

  HUMOR AT WEST POINT

  The first printing of 1601 in actual book form was "Donne at ye AcademiePress," in 1882, West Point, New York, under the supervision of Lieut.C. E. S. Wood, then adjutant of the U. S. Military Academy.

  In 1882 Mark Twain and Joe Twichell visited their friend Lieut. Woodat West Point, where they learned that Wood, as Adjutant, had under hiscontrol a small printing establishment. On Mark's return to Hartford,Wood received a letter asking if he would do Mark a great favor byprinting something he had written, which he did not care to entrust tothe ordinary printer. Wood replied that he would be glad to oblige. OnApril 3, 1882, Mark sent the manuscript:

  "I enclose the original of 1603 [sic] as you suggest. I am afraid thereare errors in it, also, heedlessness in antiquated spelling--e's stuckon often at end of words where they are not strictly necessary, etc.....I would go through the manuscript but I am too much driven just now, andit is not important anyway. I wish you would do me the kindness to makeany and all corrections that suggest themselves to you.

  "Sincerely yours,

  "S. L. Clemens."

  Charles Erskine Scott Wood recalled in a foreword, which he wrote forthe limited edition of 1601 issued by the Grabhorn Press, how he feltwhen he first saw the original manuscript. "When I read it," writesWood, "I felt that the character of it would be carried a little betterby a printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneouswith the pretended 'conversation.'

  "I wrote Mark that for literary effect I thought there should be aspecies of forgery, though of course there was no effort to actuallydeceive a scholar. Mark answered that I might do as I liked;--that hisonly object was to secure a number of copies, as the demand for it wasbecoming burdensome, but he would be very grateful for any interest Ibrought to the doing.

  "Well, Tucker [foreman of the printing shop] and I soaked some handmadelinen paper in weak coffee, put it as a wet bundle into a warm room tomildew, dried it to a dampness approved by Tucker and he printed the'copy' on a hand press. I had special punches cut for such Elizabethanabbreviations as the a, e, o and u, when followed by m or n--and for the(commonly and stupidly pronounced ye).

  "The only editing I did was as to the spelling and a few old Englishwords introduced. The spelling, if I remember correctly, is mine, butthe text is exactly as written by Mark. I wrote asking his view ofmaking the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic--telling me todo whatever I thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result."

  Thus was printed in a de luxe edition of fifty copies the most curiousmasterpiece of American humor, at one of America's most dignifiedinstitutions, the United States Military Academy at West Point.

  "1601 was so be-praised by the archaeological scholars of a quarter ofa century ago," wrote Clemens in his letter to Charles Orr, "that Iwas rather inordinately vain of it. At that time it had been privatelyprinted in several countries, among them Japan. A sumptuous edition onlarge paper, rough-edged, was made by Lieut. C. E. S. Wood at West Point--an edition of 50 copies--and distributed among popes and kings andsuch people. In England copies of that issue were worth twenty guineaswhen I was there six years ago, and none to be had."

  FROM THE DEPTHS

  Mark Twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was anirreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into thewell-springs of human nature. In 1601, as in 'The Man That CorruptedHadleyburg,' and in 'The Mysterious Stranger,' he tore the masks offhuman beings and left them cringing before the public view. With thedeftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions anddelighted in exposing human nature in the raw.

  The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooteddeep in Mark Twain's nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, whoprinted 1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,

  "If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 roseI would say that Mark's intellectual structure and subconscious grainingwas from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudorperiod. He came from the banks of the Mississippi--from the flatboatmen,pilots, roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitivepeople--as Lincoln did.

  "He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers,gamblers and the men of '49. The simple roughness of a frontier peoplewas in his blood and brain.

  "Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language tohim. Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly,picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation. Such language isforcible as all primitive words are. Refinement seems to make forweakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabicwords bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that. ThenI think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred ofpuritanism. But there is more than this; with all its humor there is asense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no moreobscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. Everyword used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of theirvocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent,but only as language to express his meaning. No act of nature is obscenein itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulteriorpurpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on whatChaucer would quite simply call 'the bare erse.'"

  Quite aside from this Chaucerian "erse" slapping, Clemens had also asemi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it inShakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keensense of character. It was made especially effective by the artisticarrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture ofa phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women "in thespacious times of great Elizabeth."

  Mark Twain made of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance,carried over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done formere delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which itdeals. That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness isapparent from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' wherehe refers to the conversation at the famous Round Table thus:

  "Many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this greatassemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen of the land would havemade a Comanche blush. Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.However, I had read Tom Jones and Roderick Random and other books ofthat kind and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen inEngland had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in themorals and conduct which such talk implies, clear up to one hundredyears ago; in fact clear into our own nineteenth century--in whichcentury, broadly speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and thereal gentleman discoverable in English history,--or in European history,for that matter--may be said to have made their appearance. Suppose SirWalter [Scott] instead of putting the conversation into the mouths ofhis characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves? Weshould have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowenawhich would embarrass a tramp in our day. However, to the unconsciouslyindelicate all things are delicate."

  Mark Twain's interest in history and in the depiction of historicalperiods and characters is revealed through his fondness for historicalreading in preference to fiction, and through his other historicalwritings. Even in the hilarious, youthful days in San Francisco, Painereports that "Clemens, howeve
r, was never quite ready for sleep. Then,as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and losehimself in English or French history until his sleep conquered." Painetells us, too, that Lecky's 'European Morals' was an old favorite.

  The notes to 'The Prince and the Pauper' show again how carefullyClemens examined his historical background, and his interest in thesematerials. Some of the more important sources are noted: Hume's 'Historyof England', Timbs' 'Curiosities of London', J. Hammond Trumbull's 'BlueLaws, True and False'. Apparently Mark Twain relished it, for as BernardDeVoto points out, "The book is always Mark Twain. Its parodies of Tudorspeech lapse sometimes into a callow satisfaction in that idiom--Markhugely enjoys his nathlesses and beshrews and marrys." The writing of1601 foreshadows his fondness for this treatment.

  "Do you suppose the liberties and the Brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman words" Walt Whitman, 'An American Primer'.

  Although 1601 was not matched by any similar sketch in his publishedworks, it was representative of Mark Twain the man. He was no emaciatedliterary tea-tosser. Bronzed and weatherbeaten son of the West, Markwas a man's man, and that significant fact is emphasized by the severalphases of Mark's rich life as steamboat pilot, printer, miner, andfrontier journalist.

  On the Virginia City Enterprise Mark learned from editor R. M.Daggett that "when it was necessary to call a man names, there were noexpletives too long or too expressive to be hurled in rapid successionto emphasize the utter want of character of the man assailed.... Therewere typesetters there who could hurl anathemas at bad copy which wouldhave frightened a Bengal tiger. The news editor could damn a mutilateddispatch in twenty-four languages."

  In San Francisco in the sizzling sixties we catch a glimpse of MarkTwain and his buddy, Steve Gillis, pausing in doorways to sing "TheDoleful Ballad of the Neglected Lover," an old piece of uncollectederotica. One morning, when a dog began to howl, Steve awoke "to findhis room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden,holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement,"relates Paine in his Biography.

  "'Come here, Steve,' he said. 'I'm so chilled through I can't get a beadon him.'

  "'Sam,' said Steve, 'don't shoot him. Just swear at him. You can easilykill him at any range with your profanity.'

  "Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain let go such a scorching, singeingblast that the brute's owner sold him the next day for a Mexicanhairless dog."

  Nor did Mark's "geysers of profanity" cease spouting after these gay andyouthful days in San Francisco. With Clemens it may truly be said thatprofanity was an art--a pyrotechnic art that entertained nations.

  "It was my duty to keep buttons on his shirts," recalled Katy Leary,life-long housekeeper and friend in the Clemens menage, "and he'dswear something terrible if I didn't. If he found a shirt in his drawerwithout a button on, he'd take every single shirt out of that drawer andthrow them right out of the window, rain or shine--out of thebathroom window they'd go. I used to look out every morning to seethe snowflakes--anything white. Out they'd fly.... Oh! he'd swear atanything when he was on a rampage. He'd swear at his razor if it didn'tcut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom doorsometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter. Well, I'd go andknock; I'd say, 'Mrs. Clemens wants to know what's the matter.' And thenhe'd say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, 'Did she hear me Katy?''Yes,' I'd say, 'every word.' Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he wasafraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs. Clemenshated swearing." But his swearing never seemed really bad to Katy Leary,"It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow," she said. "Sort ofamusing it was--and gay--not like real swearing, 'cause he swore like anangel."

  In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favoritebilliards. "It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.Clemens play billiards," relates Elizabeth Wallace. "He loved the game,and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, andthen the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in hismore youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort. Gently,slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as thoughthey had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came thisstream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives."

  Mark's vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself. In Paris, in hisappearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,Mark's address, reports Paine, "obtained a wide celebrity among theclubs of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has everfound its way into published literature." It is rumored to have beencalled "Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism."

  In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W. Fisher to accompany him on an explorationof the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learnedthat Clemens had been the Kaiser's guest at dinner, opened the secrettreasure chests for the famous visitor. One of these guarded treasureswas a volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed toFrederick the Great. "Too much is enough," Mark is reported to havesaid, when Fisher translated some of the verses, "I would blush toremember any of these stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about themwhen I get to Vienna." When Fisher had finished copying a verse for himMark put it into his pocket, saying, "Livy [Mark's wife, Olivia] is sobusy mispronouncing German these days she can't even attempt to get atthis."

  In his letters, too, Howells observed, "He had the Southwestern, theLincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose oneought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I wasoften hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which hehad loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bearto burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear tolook at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying thatin it he was Shakespearean."

  "With a nigger squat on her safety-valve" John Hay, Pike County Ballads.

  "Is there any other explanation," asks Van Wyck Brooks, "'of hisElizabethan breadth of parlance?' Mr. Howells confesses that hesometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which,to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he couldnot bear to reread. Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years,while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon 'having that swearing outin an instant,' he would never had had cause to suffer from his having'loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.' Mark Twain's verbalRabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which,not having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inwardand left there to ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgiesof forbidden words. Consider the famous book, 1601, that firesideconversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth: is there any obsoleteverbal indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has notpainstakingly resurrected and assembled there? He, whose blood was inconstant ferment and who could not contain within the narrow bonds thathad been set for him the riotous exuberance of his nature, had to havean escape-valve, and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaninglessobscenity--the waste of a priceless psychic material!" Thus, Brookslumps 1601 with Mark Twain's "bawdry," and interprets it simply asanother indication of frustration.

  FIGS FOR FIG LEAVES!

  Of course, the writing of such a piece as 1601 raised the question offreedom of expression for the creative artist.

  Although little discussed at that time, it was a question whichintensely interested Mark, and for a fuller appreciation of Mark'sposition one must keep in mind the year in which 1601 was written, 1876.There had been nothing like it before in American literature; there hadappeared no Caldwells, no Faulkners, no Hemingways. Victorian Englandwas gushing Tennyson. In the United States polite letters was a cultof the Brahmins of Boston, with William Dean Howells at the helm ofthe Atlantic. Louisa May Alcott published Little Women in 1868-69, andLittle Men in 1871. In 1873 Mark Twain led the van of the debunkers,scraping the gilt off the lily in the Gilded Age.
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  In 1880 Mark took a few pot shots at license in Art and Literature inhis Tramp Abroad, "I wonder why some things are? For instance, Art isallowed as much indecent license to-day as in earlier times--but theprivileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailedwithin the past eighty or ninety years. Fielding and Smollet couldportray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we haveplenty of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowedto approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.But not so with Art. The brush may still deal freely with any subject;however revolting or indelicate. It makes a body ooze sarcasm at everypore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generationhas been doing with the statues. These works, which had stood ininnocent nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one ofthem. Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can helpnoticing it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous. But the comicalthing about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallidmarble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this sham andostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blooded paintings which doreally need it have in no case been furnished with it.

  "At the door of the Ufizzi, in Florence, one is confronted by statuesof a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulatedgrime--they hardly suggest human beings--yet these ridiculous creatureshave been thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidiousgeneration. You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallerythat exists in the world.... and there, against the wall, withoutobstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, thevilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's Venus.It isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no, it is theattitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe theattitude, there would be a fine howl--but there the Venus lies, foranybody to gloat over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw younggirls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long andabsorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with apathetic interest. How I should like to describe her--just to see whata holy indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear theunreflecting average man deliver himself about my grossness andcoarseness, and all that.

  "In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood,carnage, oozing brains, putrefaction--pictures portraying intolerablesuffering--pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out indreadful detail--and similar pictures are being put on the canvas everyday and publicly exhibited--without a growl from anybody--for theyare innocent, they are inoffensive, being works of art. But supposea literary artist ventured to go into a painstaking and elaboratedescription of one of these grisly things--the critics would skin himalive. Well, let it go, it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges,Literature has lost hers. Somebody else may cipher out the whys and thewherefores and the consistencies of it--I haven't got time."

  PROFESSOR SCENTS PORNOGRAPHY

  Unfortunately, 1601 has recently been tagged by Professor EdwardWagenknecht as "the most famous piece of pornography in Americanliterature." Like many another uninformed, Prof. W. is like the littleboy who is shocked to see "naughty" words chalked on the back fence,and thinks they are pornography. The initiated, after years of wadingthrough the mire, will recognize instantly the significant differencebetween filthy filth and funny "filth." Dirt for dirt's sake issomething else again. Pornography, an eminent American jurist haspointed out, is distinguished by the "leer of the sensualist."

  "The words which are criticised as dirty," observed justice John M.Woolsey in the United States District Court of New York, lifting the banon Ulysses by James Joyce, "are old Saxon words known to almost all menand, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturallyand habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life,physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe." Neither was there"pornographic intent," according to justice Woolsey, nor was Ulyssesobscene within the legal definition of that word.

  "The meaning of the word 'obscene,'" the Justice indicated, "as legallydefined by the courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead tosexually impure and lustful thoughts.

  "Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses andthoughts must be tested by the court's opinion as to its effect on aperson with average sex instincts--what the French would call 'l'hommemoyen sensuel'--who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the samerole of hypothetical reagent as does the 'reasonable man' in the lawof torts and 'the learned man in the art' on questions of invention inpatent law."

  Obviously, it is ridiculous to say that the "leer of the sensualist"lurks in the pages of Mark Twain's 1601.

  DROLL STORY

  "In a way," observed William Marion Reedy, "1601 is to Twain's wholeworks what the 'Droll Stories' are to Balzac's. It is better than theprivately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of Eugene Field; is, indeed,an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in Rabelais,or in the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light fromShakespeare's urn. It is humor or fun such as one expects, let us say,from the peasants of Thomas Hardy, outside of Hardy's books. And,though it be filthy, it yet hath a splendor of mere animalism of goodspirits... I would say it is scatalogical rather than erotic, save forone touch toward the end. Indeed, it seems more of Rabelais than ofBoccaccio or Masuccio or Aretino--is brutally British rather thanlasciviously latinate, as to the subjects, but sumptuous as regards thelanguage."

  Immediately upon first reading, John Hay, later Secretary of State,had proclaimed 1601 a masterpiece. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain'sbiographer, likewise acknowledged its greatness, when he said, "1601 isa genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. It is better than thegross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps in some day to come, thetaste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literaryrefugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writing of MarkTwain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter ofenvironment and point of view."

  "It depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not," wroteClemens in his notebook in 1879. "I built a conversation which couldhave happened--I used words such as were used at that time--1601. Isent it anonymously to a magazine, and how the editor abused it and thesender!"

  "But that man was a praiser of Rabelais and had been saying, 'O that wehad a Rabelais!' I judged that I could furnish him one."

  "Then I took it to one of the greatest, best and most learned of Divines[Rev. Joseph H. Twichell] and read it to him. He came within an aceof killing himself with laughter (for between you and me the thing wasdreadfully funny. I don't often write anything that I laugh at myself,but I can hardly think of that thing without laughing). That old Divinesaid it was a piece of the finest kind of literary art--and David Grayof the Buffalo Courier said it ought to be printed privately and leftbehind me when I died, and then my fame as a literary artist wouldlast."

  FRANKLIN J. MEINE