Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  “I have never seen you before, but I knew you by your pictures.”

  Then she nestled her head back, tilted up her face, and looked sweetly up and added,

  “But they are not half so beautiful as you are.”

  I was aware of it before, but to please her I pretended that it was a discovery, and that this was the first time any one had exhibited so delicate and so just a penetration.

  Those three men are extravagantly and satisfyingly handsome, but I doubt if Henry Rogers is second in the competition. It is an old saying that whatever is unpleasant in a person’s character and disposition will come out at sea, and that if he has any disagreeable infirmities of temper he will not be able to conceal them on shipboard. I have made a great many voyages with Mr. Rogers and his friends in his yacht, and his character and disposition always stood the test. He was always genial, always courteous, always diligently thoughtful of others. On land it is the same. Consider that most temper-trying game—billiards. When Mr. Rogers painstakingly tries for an easy shot and misses it a couple of yards and I burst into an unfeeling laugh, he does not resent it, he only leans on his cue and looks wounded, and says “I should be sorry to have a disposition like yours.”

  One would think I am painting an angel; but it is only a future one. If there is a better man among us, a cleaner man, a kindlier man, a man with fewer faults, I have not met him.

  In mid-July, 1895, Mrs. Clemens and Clara and I started on our lecturing and bookmaking money-grubbing raid around the globe, and every day we melted a layer off the Webster debt. At the end of two and a half years we had earned the necessary money, then Mr. Rogers paid off all of the ninety-six creditors at one sitting. We still had ten thousand dollars in bank in London, and eighteen thousand five hundred dollars left over in his hands in New York. We were living in Vienna. I sent over and asked him to bet on Federal Steel with the eighteen thousand five hundred dollars. He bought the stock, and after two or three months he sold it for considerably more than twice the figure he had paid for it. The wolf has not molested our door since. Whenever I have trusted Mr. Rogers to invest my savings for me I have prospered; but nearly every time that I have stealthily and clandestinely crept into the market and invested them on my own judgment I have got struck by lightning.

  Now let us go back to the beginning and see if we can adequately do up that man—No. 14 in the blatherskite gallery. No, gentle stenographer, put up your pencil—this is not the time. I don’t seem to be loaded—and when I take hold of him I want to warm him up so competently that when he lands at his final home Satan will be obliged to say “You can come in if you like, but after what you have been through with my nephew we’ve nothing fresh to offer you here.”

  The man has done me no harm, but I have never liked his complexion.

  Wednesday, August 8, 1906

  The effrontery of amateur literary efforts—The playing of charades to-night—From Susy’s Biography: the presentation of “The Prince and Pauper” at Mr. Warner’s house.

  There is one great trouble about dictating an autobiography, and that is the multiplicity of texts that offer themselves when you sit down and let your mouth fall open and are ready to begin. Sometimes the texts come flooding from twenty directions at once, and for a time you are overwhelmed with this Niagara and submerged and suffocated under it. You can use only one text at a time, and you don’t know which one to choose out of the twenty—still you must choose; there is no help for it, and you choose with the understanding that the nineteen left over are probably left over for good, and lost, since they may never suggest themselves again. But this time a text is forced upon me. This is mainly because it is the latest one that has suggested itself in the last quarter of an hour, and therefore the warmest one, because it has not had a chance to cool off yet. It is a couple of amateur literary offerings. From old experience I know that amateur productions, offered ostensibly for one’s honest cold judgment, to be followed by an uncompromisingly sincere verdict, are not really offered in that spirit at all. The thing really wanted and expected is compliment and encouragement. Also, my experience has taught me that in almost all amateur cases compliment and encouragement are impossible—if they are to be backed by sincerity.

  I have this moment finished reading this morning’s pair of offerings, and am a little troubled. If they had come from strangers I should not have given myself the pain of reading them, but should have returned them unread, according to my custom, upon the plea that I lack an editor’s training and therefore am not qualified to sit in judgment upon any one’s literature but my own. But this morning’s harvest came from friends, and that alters the case. I have read them, and the result is as usual: they are not literature. They do contain meat, but the meat is only half cooked. The meat is certainly there, and if it could pass through the hands of an expert cook the result would be a very satisfactory dish indeed. One of this morning’s samples does really come near to being literature, but the amateur hand is exposed with a fatal frequency, and the exposure spoils it. The author’s idea is, in case I shall render a favorable verdict, to offer the manuscript to a magazine.

  There is something about this naïve intrepidity that compels admiration. It is a lofty and reckless daring which I suppose is exhibited in no field but one—the field of literature. We see something approaching it in war, but approaching it only distantly. The untrained common soldier has often offered himself as one of a forlorn hope and stood cheerfully ready to encounter all its perils—but we draw the line there. Not even the most confident untrained soldier offers himself as a candidate for a brigadier-generalship, yet this is what the amateur author does. With his untrained pen he puts together his crudities and offers them to all the magazines, one after the other—that is to say, he proposes them for posts restricted to literary generals who have earned their rank and place by years and even decades of hard and honest training in the lower grades of the service.

  I am sure that this affront is offered to no trade but ours. A person untrained to shoemaking does not offer his services as a shoemaker to the foreman of a shop—not even the crudest literary aspirant would be so unintelligent as to do that. He would see the humor of it; he would see the impertinence of it; he would recognize as the most commonplace of facts that an apprenticeship is necessary in order to qualify a person to be tinner, bricklayer, stone mason, printer, horse-doctor, butcher, brakeman, car conductor, midwife—and any and every other occupation whereby a human being acquires bread and fame. But when it comes to doing literature, his wisdoms vanish all of a sudden and he thinks he finds himself now in the presence of a profession which requires no apprenticeship, no experience, no training—nothing whatever but conscious talent and a lion’s courage.

  We do not realize how strange and curious a thing this is until we look around for an object lesson whereby to realize it to us. We must imagine a kindred case—the aspirant to operatic distinction and cash, for instance. The aspirant applies to the management for a billet as second tenor. The management accepts him, arranges the terms, and puts him on the pay-roll. Understand, this is an imaginary case; I am not pretending that it has happened. Let us proceed.

  After the first act the manager calls the second tenor to account, and wants to know. He says:

  “Have you ever studied music?”

  “A little—yes, by myself, at odd times, for amusement.”

  “You have never gone into regular and laborious training, then, for the opera, under the masters of the art?”

  “No.”

  “Then what made you think you could do second-tenor stunts in ‘Lohengrin’?”

  “I thought I could. I wanted to try. I seemed to have a voice.”

  “Yes, you have a voice, and with five years of diligent training under competent masters you could be successful, perhaps, but I assure you you are not ready for second tenor yet. You have a voice; you have presence; you have a noble and childlike confidence; you have a courage that is stupendous, and even superhum
an. These are all essentials, and they are in your favor, but there are other essentials in this great trade, which you still lack. If you can’t afford the time and labor necessary to acquire them, leave opera alone and try something which does not require training and experience. Go away, now, and try for a job in surgery.”

  Surgery. What does that remind me of? All our thoughts come from the outside. They come always by suggestion. We never originate one ourselves. It ought not to take me five minutes to trace out the origin of this one—surgery. . . . I see now where it originated, I see it without spending even so much as two minutes upon it. It comes from the charades. There is to be a surgeon in the charades to-night. I am to be that surgeon; I had forgotten it. But it will be an easy part, although I don’t know anything about surgery; as easy as authorship to an amateur. We have taken with energy to charading, of late. About once a week we get together the youths and maidens of the region, to the number of fifteen or twenty, and after supper we play impromptu charades until bedtime. We are busy choosing the words for to-night, and the household are busy contriving the costumes. A quite variegated talent is required in these performances. You have to act several parts in the course of an evening. The charaders are divided into two squads; the leaders are chosen beforehand; then, when we are ready to begin, the leaders choose a subordinate, turn about, until the panel is exhausted. Meantime, the leaders have selected the words that are to be played. While one squad is playing, the other squad acts as audience. I am to lead one side this evening, and have chosen four words, to wit: cocktail, champagne, catastrophe—and another, I can’t recall it now, but I’ve got it on a piece of paper up stairs. If my side plays two charades and the other side two, that is all that we shall have time for; but we generally select more words than we are going to need, in order that we may have a choice. On our side, to-night, we shall get no further than those two drinks—cocktail and champagne—because it will take all the time at our side’s disposal, these being long-winded charades, the kind that string out pretty liberally in performance. There is going to be opportunity for a wide spread of histrionic talent. I am to be a rooster, a surgeon, a teacher of reading, spelling, arithmetic, geography, singing, and the art of story-telling (with an illustration). I am to be several other things, also. I am to be a teething child, nine months old, in long clothes; also an Indian chief; also an emperor in a party of emperors; also some other things too tedious to describe. Necessarily there is going to be a good deal of noise and fun—there always is.

  It brings back the lost and lamented days of a quarter of a century ago—days which I have already described in earlier chapters of this autobiography—when the children were little creatures and we and the children of the neighbors used so often to play impromptu charades. Naturally this reminds me of Susy’s Biography, and that it is months since we have taken a text from it, because such a multitude of things have forced themselves into these talks through the compulsion of passing and flying interests, and have crowded the Biography out of our minds. But we will look at it now and draw a remark or two from it.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  Papa went to Europe to lecture and after staying in Scotland and England and making a flying tripp through Ireland he returned home with mamma.

  Last winter papa was away for many months reading with Mr. G. W. Cable, and while he was gone we composed a plan of surprising him when he came home by acting scenes from “The Prince and Pauper.”* It took us a great while to commit all that was necesary but at last we were almost ready and we expected him to come home the next day on which evening we had planned to surprise him. But we received a telegram from him stating that he would reach Hartford “to-day at two o’clock.” We were all dismayed for we were by no means prepared to receive him and the library was strune with costumes which were to be tried on for the last time and we had planned a dress rehearsal over at Mr. Warners for that afternoon.

  But mamma gathered the things up as quickly as possible and hustled them into the mahogany-room. Soon we heard the carriage roll over the pavement in front of the house and we all rushed to the doore. After we had partially gotten over our surprise and delight at seeing papa we all went into the library. We all sat with papa a little while and then mamma dissapeared into the mahogany-room. Clara and I sat with papa a while so as to prevent his being surprised of our seemingly uncalled for disertion of him. But soon we too had to withdraw to the mahogany-room so as to help mamma sew on bucles onto slippers and pack costumes into a clothesbasket. Papa was left all alone; exept that one of us every once in a while would slipp in and stay with him a little while. Any one but papa would have wondered at mamma’s unwonted absence but papa is so absence minded, he very seldom notices things as accurately as other people do; although I do not believe in this instance he could have been wholly without suspicion.† At last he went up to the billiardroom and Jean went with him. Mamma as a special favor let Jean into this secret on condition that she would not breathe a whisper to any one on the subject, especially to papa, and Jean had promised but when alone up in papa’s room, it was very hard for her not to tell papa the whole thing. As it was she was undecided whether to tell him or not. She did go so far as to begin with “It’s a secret, papa,” and then dropping varius other hints about the secret and she went so far that papa said afterwards that if he had been any one else he should have guessed it in a minute. At ½ past three o’clock we all started for Mr. Warners house, there to have our rehearsal. Jean and the nurse went with us, so papa was left absolutely alone.

  The next day the first information that papa got was that he was invited for the evening and he did not know that anything unusual was going to happen until he sat before the curtain.

  We got through the scenes quite successfully and had some delightful dancing afterwards. After we had danced for about ½ an hour mamma seemed in quite a hurry to get home, so we put on our things and started for home. When we entered the library a lady was sitting in one of the arm-chairs. I did not recognize her and wondered why mamma did not introduce me to her, but on drawing nearer to her chair I saw it was Aunt Clara Spaulding!

  Mamma told Aunt Clara that we would have the “Prince and Pauper” again in a few weeks so she could see it. So it was decided that we should have it again in a few weeks.

  At length the time was sett and we were nearly prepared, when Frank Warner who took the “Miles Hendon” part got a severe cold and could not play it, so papa said that he would take the part. Papa had only three days to learn the part in, but still we were all sure that he could do it. The scene that he acted in was the scene between Miles Hendon and the Prince, “The Prithee pour the water!” scene. I was the Prince and papa and I rehearsed together two or three times a day for the three days before the appointed evening. Papa acted his part beautifully and he added to the scene, making it a good deal longer. He was inexpressibly funny, with his great slouch hat and gait! Oh such a gait! Papa made the Miles Hendon scene a splendid success and every one was delighted with the scene, and papa too. We had great great funn with our “Prince and Pauper” and I think we none of us shall forget how imensely funny papa was in it. He certainly could have been an actor as well as an author.*

  I have already described that monumental night in an earlier chapter of this autobiography. In the quoted passages you have an exhibition of that thing which I was talking about a while ago—untrained, inexperienced amateur authorship. It has merits, and very noticeable ones. This time the result is literature. The writer is a child, and we do not want a child to write as a grown person writes. The proprieties, the accuracies, and the reserves which we require of the grown person we will not endure in the child. Susy is all alive with her subject. Her heart is in it, and her interest is so intense that she makes us see the episodes as she saw them, and also makes us see her very self in the flesh, her glad self, her eager self, her excited self, with the flush in her cheeks and the glow in her eyes. If it were a grown person writing, we would not have it; i
t would not be literature. But as it stands, it is literature, and no grown person, trained or untrained, can successfully imitate it: the innocent simplicities and childish eagernesses and exaltations which give it its charm and make literature of it, would elude him.

  If we only had Susy here to-night!

  * Dramatized from the book by her mother. S.L.C.

  † But I was. S.L.C.

  * Susy’s opinion stands now justified, and mightily reinforced, after sixteen or seventeen years, for at dinner the other night, after I had told about—I forget what—Sir Henry Irving let fall the same remark. Riverdale, November 1901. S.L.C.

  Friday, August 10, 1906

  Clipping from Westminster Gazette, criticising statement in “Diary of Eve” and calling it irreverent—Mr. Clemens replies to this—Mr. Higbie’s manuscript—Mr. Clemens’s reply to him—Extract from Mr. Higbie’s essay.

  This morning’s mail brings me this clipping from the Westminster Gazette, which is one of the brightest and ablest of the London journals.

  MARK TWAIN TRIPPING.

  Even a professional humorist may be called upon to suffer a laugh at his own expense. “Mark Twain,” in his somewhat irreverent “Diary of Eve” (Harper’s), is guilty of an amusing error. Alluding to the naming by Adam of the brute creation, the “mother of all living” is made to suggest that but for her tactful prompting and assistance the feat would never have been accomplished. As a matter of fact, the naming of the “fowl of the air” and the “beast of the field” was performed prior to the forming of woman, which was indeed, as the famous humorist would have known had he taken the trouble to read carefully the second chapter of Genesis, a consequence of the former transaction, for we are told (Gen. ii., 20): “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.” It is always well to be sure of one’s ground—even before attempting a joke.