by Mark Twain
It’s a rotten alphabet. I appoint Mr. Carnegie to get after it, and leave simplified spelling alone. Simplified spelling brought about sunspots, the San Francisco earthquake, and the recent business depression, which we would never have had if spelling had been left all alone. . . . Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.
Who, in the history of humankind, ever tried to do a St. Vitus’s dance? And did the person who put the “h” in “gherkin” do it as a prank, or was it an act of malice prepense, purposely designed to bring about sunspots? And now that the problem has at last been properly diagnosed, who else but Mark Twain would have the nerve to sic the great Andrew Carnegie on it?
II
Early and late, Twain was capable of such antic comedy. As often as not, it supports rather than contests prevailing moral opinion. In a speech called “Advice to Youth” (1882) Twain advises young boys and girls not to “meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created.” He continues: “You don’t have to take aim even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time, at a hundred.” Here, Twain is having it both ways. He is outrageous in expression. How did the youth come by a Gatling gun and why on earth does he want to fire on a cathedral? But he is very conventional in his outlook. After all, what could be more agreeable and proper to his Victorian audience than to warn children away from guns? Twain has at once satisfied his audience that he is the master humorist of the age and bolstered his image as a moral sage, but one free of any familiar finger-wagging or fustian rhetoric.
The material for humor seemed to be constantly available to him. There is of course the comedy of situation. His notebook germ for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) is an inventory of comic possibilities:
Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the Middle Ages. Have the notions and habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can’t scratch. Cold in the head—can’t blow—can’t get at handkerchief, can’t use iron sleeve. Iron gets red hot in the sun—leaks in the rain, gets white with frost & freezes me solid in winter. Suffer from lice & fleas. Make disagreeable clatter when I enter a church. Can’t dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down and can’t get up.
The humorous situation was only one of many weapons in his comic arsenal.
There was also the comedy of animals—of moulting cows, asthmatic horses, insomniac clams, and swearing blue jays. There was the comedy of customs—of burials (of the stalwart Buck Fanshaw or the unlucky William Wheeler, who got nipped by the machinery of a carpet factory and had to be buried “just so”); and of sentimental grief (expressed in the morbidly bad poetry of Emmeline Grangerford, alas). There was the comedy of vegetables (of Simon Erickson’s fanatic desire to grow turnips as a vine or Pudd’nhead Wilson’s acute adage: “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”). There was comedy in holidays and hospitality, in sacred places and in slang; there was comedy in apprenticeship and penmanship, in clothes, furniture, and scripture, in undertakers and editors. Amazingly, with such imaginative power at his disposal, Twain never really pressed his advantage. He did not condescend to his created characters, no matter how mean their condition or amusing their idiom. Nearly always, Twain refused to play the humorist as bully; he preferred to pick on someone or something his own size or at times much bigger. Two notable exceptions are to be found in his treatment of the particularly vulnerable states of Arkansas and New Jersey, however.
As a purely chronological matter, this collection includes diverse specimens of his writing, beginning in 1865 with the publication of the famous jumping frog story and continuing throughout his writing career to his last years. And if The Portable Mark Twain does not exhaustively survey the author’s professional life, it at least touches upon nearly every important phase of it. In a letter to an unidentified correspondent, Twain confessed that he confined himself in his writings to “familiar” experience. That experience was diverse, he reported, and included stints as jour printer, pilot, soldier, prospector, journalist, publisher, lecturer, and the like. The inventory ends with this revealing disclosure: “I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.” Ass or no, Clemens nevertheless dramatized his recollected experience with an exquisite attention to detail and mood. There are in “Early Days” (1907) delicious memories of the time spent on his uncle John Quarles’s farm close to his birthplace in Florida, Missouri. In “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875) Clemens vividly recalls his childhood ambitions in Hannibal and his awkward apprenticeship under the seasoned riverboat pilot, Horace Bixby. There are comic pictures of “the boys” in Nevada Territory, of Twain himself tearfully grieving at the tomb of Adam or puzzling over the vast canvasses of the Old Masters. There are the biting satires of colonial endeavor and the decimation of native populations, and the almost but not quite reverential description of the Sea of Galilee seen by starlight.
In matters of geography, too, this volume is reasonably comprehensive. The great Mississippi River valley receives the greatest space, and this is as it should be, if for no other reason than it is the setting of his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There are also specimens from his actual travels in the Holy Land and in Germany and Italy and his round-the-world tour made in 1895-96, as well as the wholly fantastic journeys to Camelot and the Garden of Eden (magically transported to Niagara Falls). Twain had Pudd’nhead Wilson say in one of his maxims, I have “traveled more than any one else and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.” This is arrant nonsense, of course. If David Wilson, attorney at law, a.k.a. the “pudd’nhead,” had had a lick of sense or an ounce of self-respect, he would have left Dawson’s Landing instantly. Instead, he perversely lingered most of his life fashioning maxims for his “Calendar,” collecting fingerprints, and living among people who had decided from the moment he stepped off the boat that he was a “lummox,” a “labrick” and many other unflattering things.
Twain, on the other hand, had indeed traveled more than most people, enough to know that, the effects of British colonialism notwithstanding, the English language and the Anglo-Saxon point of view were not the only games being played in the world. In fact, by the end, Clemens had circumnavigated the globe and gone nearly everywhere except the place he set out for in 1857, the Amazon. But he got diverted into river-boating and did not look back. Twain later transferred the childhood ambition to get to South America to Huckleberry Finn, but Huck never made it either.
Twain (and Clemens, too, for that matter) had also traveled up and down the social ladder in remarkable ways. In his San Francisco days, it was oysters and champagne one day, unemployment and despair the next. In the mid-1880s he owned his own publishing house that had just published the monumentally successful memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and he had high hopes for his investments; ten years later he was trying to find his way out of debt. These swings in personal fortune probably made him that much more alert to thwarted ambition and to matters of class distinction and the spurious lines that divide human creatures from one another. Clemens knew firsthand the profligacy of ambition and the meagerness of destiny, but in this, as in most matters, he was on both sides of the question. He could have Pudd’nhead Wilson sardonically remark, “There isn’t a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights.” Yet in “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1909) he could picture true “heavenly justice”; the hereafter was a place where one was judged and rewarded according to an inward greatness that, on earth, often never had the opportunity to develop.
As a rule, Twain recog
nized the markers of supposed merit for what they are, patent absurdities. In his day they might be pretentious titles, epaulets, or bad French; in our own they might be stretch limos, buns of steel, or bad French. He typically satirized such inequity and pretense with an eager glee. In The Innocents Abroad (1869), for example, Twain meets the Czar of Russia and marvels at the terrible yet whimsical authority he wields: “If I could have, I would have stolen his coat. When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by.” However, the author himself was not exempt from like affectation. Clemens had a love/hate relation with the English and more than once satirized their aristocratic ways. Nevertheless, he sometimes strutted around in the scarlet robes he had worn when he received an honorary degree from Oxford—there was no other red that could compare with it, he thought, “outside the arteries of an archangel.” He once bragged, “An Oxford decoration is a loftier distinction than is conferrable by any other university on either side of the ocean.” And, in the persona of Mark Twain, Clemens could become the ultimate name-dropper. He recounts in Following the Equator (1897) a visit by a Mohammedan “god.” A direct descendant of the Prophet and worshipped accordingly, this walking deity wants to discuss the “philosophy of Huck Finn.” Twain’s reaction is predictable: “It would be false modesty to pretend that I was not inordinately pleased. I was. I was much more pleased than I should have been with a compliment from a man.”
These sorts of encounters between social unequals can make for great comedy, and Twain applied the attendant mechanisms of social adjustment (envy and flattery, obsequiousness and exasperation, indifference and condescension) in a variety of ways and to diverse effects. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) begins with a letter addressed to Artemus Ward. Twain, in this instance cast in the role of a dandified gentleman, expresses his “lurking suspicion” that he has been set up. In urging him to search for the edifying company of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, Ward has deliberately thrown Twain in the way of Simon Wheeler and a reminiscence of the notorious Jim Smiley. What follows, of course, is a rambling and hilarious narrative about a “fifteen minute nag,” a bull pup named “Andrew Jackson,” and the precocious jumping frog “Dan’l Webster.” If Twain had been less impatient with Wheeler, we might have heard the tale of a “yaller one-eyed cow” as well, but he storms off in a huff and his readers necessarily must follow. In “An Encounter with an Interviewer” (1874), a “peart” young reporter from the Daily Thunder-storm seeks an interview with the estimable Mr. Twain. The persona here is simpleminded and afflicted with an “irregular” memory, and Twain leads the interviewer on a wild goose chase for even the most basic information. The young man—having learned that Twain is 180 years old, attended Aaron Burr’s funeral, and many other curious things—leaves exasperated and befuddled. Twain regrets the departure: “He was pleasant company, and I was sorry to see him go.”
In “The Story of the Old Ram” (1872) Twain the tenderfoot is tricked by “the boys” into mouth-watering anticipation to hear Jim Blaine’s inebriated tale. The storyteller meanders about, getting further and further from the announced subject, and it is not until the raconteur falls asleep mid-sentence that Twain perceives that he has been “sold.” There are many other instances of unlikely pairings of character—those emissaries from the “grand divisions of society” in Virginia City, Nevada, Scotty Briggs and the Parson; or Twain the self-satisfied and ignorant substitute editor for an agricultural journal (who advises among other things that “clams will lie quiet if music be played to them”) and the outraged editor who rebukes him; or Hank Morgan, the practical, hardheaded, nineteenth-century Yankee, and Sandy, the good-hearted, innocent, sixth-century jabberer.
Some of Twain’s encounters were not humorous, however, nor were they intended to be. In “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1874) the former slave and now a servant, Aunt Rachel, literally and figuratively towers above the author, clearly his moral superior. For once, Clemens did not hide behind the camouflage of an adopted persona but is known simply as “Misto C—” and as such bears the full weight of an unwanted recognition: namely, that his judgment of Aunt Rachel’s character borders on criminal stupidity and callousness. Similarly, in one of the most affecting episodes in Huckleberry Finn, after playing yet another joke on Jim, Huck receives such a tongue lashing from the fugitive slave that he mulls over his deserved upbraiding and finally “humbles” himself to a black man. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885) was published in the company of other Civil War memoirs in the Century magazine. Clemens had spent a very brief time in the pro-Confederate Marion Rangers before removing to the Nevada Territory, and he freely admits that perhaps he “ought not be allowed much space among better people.” For the most part his description of the campaign is pure burlesque at the author’s expense, but a sudden revulsion of moral feelings brought about by the shooting of an innocent man decides him on quitting the business of war “while I could save some remnant of my self-respect.” It is almost a certainty that this killing was pure fabrication, introduced to provide the author with a moral dilemma he might respond to with the sort of sensitivity he had attributed to Huckleberry Finn, whose narrative he had completed only a few months before writing this memoir. Clemens is extenuating his conduct during the war, but he is also expressing a value. The ultimate worth and dignity of a man or woman cut across class lines and unmistakably declare themselves, if only by appealing to one’s moral sympathies and wounded sense of justice.
III
Despite the orthodox language of Clemens’s confession to his brother that he was answering to the inner promptings of the Lord’s will in becoming a humorist, it is more likely that he was following the path of least resistance. Comedy came naturally to him. It was apparently irresistible and, for the most part, something more than mere “fragrance” or “decoration.” Far from doing God’s work, at least as early as 1865 and probably before, he seemed motivated to offer up the comforts of laughter as relief from a world that, depending on his mood, he had decided was an annoyance, a trial, an affliction, or a tragedy; a world that, if it could not be redeemed, might at least be made more tolerable. At any rate, in the same letter to Orion he confided a less than reverential regard for the workings of providence: “I have a religion—but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.”
The poor was not his cause, but it was, from time to time, his affiliation. There was not much young Clemens inherited from his father that he could not disavow or outgrow, but he did seem to be permanently affected by the idea that prosperity was just around the corner. In the 1820s, John Marshall Clemens had purchased at least 70,000 acres in Tennessee, and he held fast to the conviction that it would one day make the family rich. It didn’t. To the contrary, it engendered in the children false hopes. As Clemens recalled late in life, “It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers and indolent. . . . It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.”
It was a curse that Sam Clemens could never quite shake. No doubt that prospective fortune grew in proportion to the degree the family felt the pinch of necessity. John Clemens died in 1847, but even before that his debts had mounted; the family auctioned off property, sold their furniture, and took in boarders. Young Sam Clemens never experienced the penury of Tom Blankenship (the impoverished and neglected Hannibal boy who apparently served as the model for Huck Finn), but at times he must have felt something of a child of misfortune himself. Still, the visionary in him persisted throughout his life, as even only a few items from the large inventory of his enthusiasms will attest. In the Nevada Territory in the 1860s, Clemens thought he would strike it rich by trading in mining stocks. He didn’t. As the owner of his own publishing house, he enthusiastically believed every Catholic family in the world would purc
hase the authorized biography Life of Pope Leo XIII (1887). They didn’t. He was right to believe that an automatic typesetter would make a fortune; he was wrong to believe the inventor James W. Paige, an inveterate tinkerer and perfectionist, would ever produce a commercially viable product. He was wrong, too, in investing around a quarter of a million dollars in the project and as a consequence leaving his own publishing concern undercapitalized. In 1894, Clemens entered into voluntary bankruptcy; by 1898, largely through the success of his around-the-world lecture tour, he was able to repay his debts in full. One would think Clemens might have learned the wisdom of Pudd’nhead Wilson’s maxim published in Following the Equator: “There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can.” However, in 1900 Clemens began investing in a food supplement called Plasmon and eventually lost around $50,000.
These are merely instances, but they indicate, in Clemens, a tendency that was abroad in the land. Get-rich-quick schemes, grand aspirations, exploitation, and corporate and government corruption abounded after the Civil War. Twain dramatized the passion for instant wealth in such tales as “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract” (1870), “The £1,000,000 Bank Note” (1893), “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), and “The $30,000 Bequest” (1904). Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote a novel naming the era The Gilded Age (1873), but the literary historian Vernon Parrington might have come closer to the spirit of the times when he called it “The Great Barbecue”: “A huge barbecue was spread to which all presumably were invited. Not quite all, to be sure; inconspicuous persons, those who were at home on the farm or at work in the mills and offices, were overlooked; a good many indeed out of the total number of the American people. But all the important persons, leading bankers and promoters and business men, received invitations. There wasn’t room for everybody and these were presumed to represent the whole. It was a splendid feast.”