Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  I remained awake as long as I could, and did what I could to keep my laughter from shaking the bed and provoking suspicion, but even my fears could not keep me awake forever, and I finally fell asleep and presently woke again—under persuasion of circumstances. Jim was kneeling on my breast and pounding me in the face with both fists. It hurt—but he was knocking all the restraints of my laughter loose; I could not contain it any longer, and I laughed until all my body was exhausted, and my face, as I believed, battered to a pulp.

  Jim never afterward referred to that episode, and I had better judgment than to do it myself, for he was a third longer than I was, although not any wider.

  I played many practical jokes upon him, but they were all cruel and all barren of wit. Any brainless swindler could have invented them. When a person of mature age perpetrates a practical joke it is fair evidence, I think, that he is weak in the head and hasn’t enough heart to signify.

  I have wandered far from my semi-centennial. Susy inserts a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes and a greeting from Uncle Remus (Joel Chandler Harris).

  From Susy’s Biography.

  To Mark Twain

  (ON HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY).

  AH Clemens, when I saw thee last,— We both of us were younger,— How fondly mumbling o’er the past Is Memory’s toothless hunger!

  So fifty years have fled, they say, Since first you took to drinking,— I mean in Nature’s milky way,— Of course no ill I’m thinking.

  But while on life’s uneven road Your track you’ve been pursuing, What fountains from your wit have flowed— What drinks you have been brewing!

  I know whence all your magic came,— Your secret I’ve discovered,— The source that fed your inward flame— The dreams that round you hovered:

  Before you learned to bite or munch Still kicking in your cradle, The Muses mixed a bowl of punch And Hebe seized the ladle.

  Dear babe, whose fiftieth year to-day Your ripe half-century rounded, Your books the precious draught betray The laughing Nine compounded.

  So mixed the sweet, the sharp, the strong, Each finds its faults amended, The virtues that to each belong In happier union blended.

  And what the flavor can surpass Of sugar, spirit, lemons? So while one health fills every glass Mark Twain for Baby Clemens!

  Nov. 23d, 1885. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

  TO THE EDITORS OF THE CRITIC:

  There must be some joke about this matter, or else fifty years are not as burdensome as they were in the days when men were narrow-minded and lacked humor—that is to say, when there was no Mark Twain to add salt to youth and to season old age. In those days a man at fifty was conceded to be old. If he had as many enemies as he had grandchildren it was thought that he had lived a successful life. Now Mark Twain has no grandchildren, and his enemies are only among those who do not know how to enjoy the humor that is inseparable from genuine human nature.

  I saw Mr. Twain not so very long ago piloting a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River in front of New Orleans, and his hand was strong and his eye keen. Somewhat later I heard him discussing a tough German sentence with little Jean—a discussion in which the toddling child probably had the best of it,—but his mind was clear, and he was bubbling over with good humor. I have seen him elsewhere and under other circumstances, but the fact that he was bordering on fifty years never occurred to me.

  And yet I am glad that he is fifty years old. He has earned the right to grow old and mellow. He has put his youth in his books, and there it is perennial. His last book is better than his first, and there his youth is renewed and revived. I know that some of the professional critics will not agree with me, but there is not in our fictive literature a more wholesome book than ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ It is history, it is romance, it is life. Here we behold human character stripped of all tiresome details; we see people growing and living; we laugh at their humor, share their griefs; and, in the midst of it all, behold we are taught the lesson of honesty, justice and mercy.

  But this is somewhat apart from my purpose; it was my desire simply to join THE CRITIC in honoring the fiftieth anniversary of an author who has had the genius to be original, and the courage to give a distinctively American flavor to everything he has ever written.

  JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.

  Twenty-one years have gone by since then, but they have had absolutely no effect upon my spiritual constitution; they have left not a single trace upon it; on the contrary, I seem to feel several years younger than I felt then. When a man reaches fifty, age seems to suddenly descend upon him like a black cloud. He feels immeasurably old—very much older than he is ever to feel again, I am sure. I doubt if any person ever crosses his fiftieth parallel without experiencing what I have just described. Once when I was visiting Howells in Cambridge, a long time ago, he glanced through the window and said,

  “Be careful now; don’t mention age; keep clear away from subjects that can suggest it. Here comes James Russell Lowell. He has just arrived at his half-century and thinks he is a thousand years old. He is under a depression which he cannot shake off. He is miserable with the realization that he is at last old—old beyond escape, old beyond cure; but he keeps his black secret shut up within, and perhaps is not aware that it is exposing itself on the outside, in his carriage and expression, as effectively as he could expose it by speech. Just at present his age is the only thing he thinks about and the only thing he won’t talk about.”

  It was true. Mr. Lowell talked to us about many things during the next hour, but age was not one of them.

  Several years later another instance came under my notice. Major General Franklin, who had been one of McClellan’s favorite generals in the Civil War, arrived at his fiftieth year, and his life-long cheerfulness suddenly deserted him as completely as if it had been a garment which he had discarded. He sat an evening through at the Monday Evening Club and when it came his turn to speak he excused himself, and during the evening no utterance escaped him but now and then a profound sigh. But within a couple of months he had resumed his youth again and had forgotten that he was old. There was evidence of this at the club. He illustrated his part of the discussion with war reminiscences of a cheerful sort, just as had been his common habit before the fifty-year bolt struck him down. One of his illustrations was the following incident. I have forgotten what he employed it to illustrate, but I remember the incident very well. He was telling about the rout at the first Bull Run, and was describing the wild flight of the soldiery and how they flung knapsacks, muskets, and everything away as they fled, and how they sought protection from the bullets wherever they could find it. He found one of his soldiers lying at full length in a gully, and said to him,

  “Come out of that, you rabbit! Come out of it and try to be a man!”

  But the soldier said tranquilly “Yes, you want the place yourself, you son of a bitch!”

  Lowell regained his cheerfulness and went to his death a cheerful soul at seventy-two. Franklin reached a greater age, I think, but the depressions which his fiftieth year brought him passed quickly and did not return.

  I do not perceive that my fifty-seven added years have brought serious depressions to me, if any at all, but if they have, they have failed to last. I am aware that I am very old now, but I am also aware that I have never been so young as I am now, in spirit, since I was fourteen and entertained Jim Wolf with the wasps. I am only able to perceive that I am old by a mental process; I am altogether unable to feel old in spirit. It is a pity, too, for my lapses from gravity must surely often be a reproach to me. When I am in the company of very young people I always feel that I am one of them, and they probably privately resent it.

  Wednesday, November 7, 1906

  Simplified Spelling.

  The first time I was in Egypt a Simplified Spelling epidemic had broken out, and the atmosphere was electrical with feeling engendered by the subject. This was four or five thousand years ago—I do not remember just how many thousand it was, for my memory for minor detai
ls has suffered some decay in the lapse of years. I am speaking of a former state of existence of mine, perhaps my earliest reincarnation; indeed I think it was the earliest. I had been an angel previously, and I am expecting to be one again—but at the time I speak of I was different.

  The Simplifiers had risen in revolt against the hieroglyphics. An uncle of Cadmus who was out of a job had come to Egypt and was trying to introduce the Phenician alphabet and get it adopted in place of the hieroglyphics. He was challenged to show cause, and he did it to the best of his ability. The exhibition and discussion took place in the Temple of Astarte, and I was present. So also was the Simplified Committee, with Croesus as foreman of the Revolt—not a large man physically, but a simplified speller of acknowledged ability. The Simplifiers were few; the Opposition were multitudinous. The Khedive was the main backer of the Revolt, and this magnified its strength and saved it from being insignificant. Among the Simplifiers were many men of learning and distinction, mainly literary men and members of college faculties; but all ranks and conditions of men and all grades of intellect, erudition, and ignorance, were represented in the Opposition.

  As a rule, the speeches on both sides were temperate and courteous, but now and then a speaker weakened his argument with personalities, the Revolters referring to the Opposition as fossils, and the Opposition referring to the Revolters as “those cads,” a smart epithet coined out of the name of Uncle Cadmus.

  Uncle Cadmus began with an object lesson, with chalk, on a couple of blackboards. On one of them he drew in outline a slender Egyptian in a short skirt, with slim legs and an eagle’s head in place of a proper head, and he was carrying a couple of dinner pails, one in each hand. In front of this figure he drew a toothed line like an excerpt from a saw; in front of this he drew three skeleton birds of doubtful ornithological origin; in front of these he drew a partly constructed house, with lean Egyptians fetching materials in wheelbarrows to finish it with; next he put in some more unclassified birds; then a large king, with carpenter’s shavings for whiskers and hair; next he put in another king jabbing a mongrel lion with a javelin; he followed this with a picture of a tower, with armed Egyptians projecting out of the top of it and as crowded for room as the cork in a bottle; he drew the opposing army below, fierce of aspect but much out of drawing, as regards perspective: they were shooting arrows at the men in the tower, which was poor military judgment, because they could have reached up and pulled them out by the scruff of the neck. He followed these pictures with line after line of birds and beasts and scraps of saw-teeth and bunches of men in the customary short frock, some of them doing things, the others waiting for the umpire to call game; and finally his great blackboard was full from top to bottom. Everybody recognized the invocation set forth by the symbols: it was the Lord’s Prayer.

  It had taken him forty-five minutes to set it down. Then he stepped to the other blackboard and dashed off “Our Father which art in heaven,” and the rest of it, in graceful Italian script, spelling the words the best he knew how in those days, and finished it up in four minutes and a half.

  It was rather impressive.

  He made no comment at the time, but went to a fresh blackboard and wrote upon it in hieroglyphics:

  “At this time the King possessed of cavalry 214,580 men and 222,631 horses for their use; of infantry 16,341 squadrons together with an emergency-reserve of all arms, consisting of 84,946 men, 321 elephants, 37,264 transportation carts, and 28,954 camels and dromedaries.”

  It filled the board, and cost him twenty-six minutes of time and labor. Then he repeated it on another blackboard in Italian script and Arabic numerals, and did it in two minutes and a quarter. Then he said,

  “My argument is before you. One of the objections to the hieroglyphics is that it takes the brightest pupil nine years to get the forms and their meanings by heart; it takes the average pupil sixteen years; it takes the rest of the nation all their days to accomplish it—it is a life sentence. This cost of time is much too expensive. It could be employed more usefully in other industries, and with better results.

  “If you will renounce the hieroglyphics and adopt written words instead, an advantage will be gained. By you? No, not by you. You have spent your lives in mastering the hieroglyphics, and to you they are simple, and the effect pleasant to the eye, and even beautiful. You are well along in life; it would not be worth your while to acquire the new learning; the aspect of it would be unpleasant to you; you will naturally cling with affection to the pictured records which have become beautiful to you through habit and use, and which are associated in your mind with the moving legends and tales of our venerable past and the great deeds of our fathers, which they have placed before you indestructibly engraved upon stone. But I appeal to you in behalf of the generations which are to follow you, century after century, age after age, cycle after cycle. I pray you consider them and be generous. Lift this heavy burden from their backs. Do not send them toiling and moiling down to the twentieth century still bearing it, still oppressed by it. Let your sons and daughters adopt the words and the alphabet, and go free. To the youngest of them the hieroglyphics have no hallowed associations; the words and the alphabet will not offend their eyes; custom will quickly reconcile them to it, and then they will prefer it—if for no other reason, for the simple reason that they will have had no experience of any method of communication considered by others comelier or better. I pray you let the hieroglyphics go, and thus save millions of years of useless time and labor to a hundred and fifty generations of posterity that are to follow you.

  “Do I claim that the substitute which I am proposing is without defect? No. It has a serious defect. My fellow Revolters are struggling for one thing, and for one thing only—the shortening and simplifying of the spelling. That is to say, they have not gone to the root of the matter—and in my opinion the reform which they are urging is hardly worth while. The trouble is not with the spelling; it goes deeper than that; it is with the alphabet. There is but one way to scientifically and adequately reform the orthography, and that is by reforming the alphabet; then the orthography will reform itself. What is needed is that each letter of the alphabet shall have a perfectly definite sound, and that this sound shall never be changed or modified without the addition of an accent, or other visible sign, to indicate precisely and exactly the nature of the modification. The Germans have this kind of an alphabet. Every letter of it has a perfectly definite sound, and when that sound is modified an umlaut or other sign is added to indicate the precise shade of the modification. The several values of the German letters can be learned by the ordinary child in a few days, and after that, for ninety years, that child can always correctly spell any German word it hears, without ever having been taught to do it by another person, or being obliged to apply to a spelling book for help.

  “But the English alphabet is a pure insanity. It can hardly spell any word in the language with any large degree of certainty. When you see the word chaldron in an English book, no foreigner can guess how to pronounce it; neither can any native. The reader knows that it is pronounced chaldron—or kaldron, or kawldron—but neither he nor his grandmother can tell which is the right way without looking in the dictionary; and when he looks in the dictionary the chances are a hundred to one that the dictionary itself doesn’t know which is the right way, but will furnish him all three and let him take his choice. When you find the word bow in an English book, standing by itself and without any informing text built around it, there is no American nor Englishman alive, nor any dictionary, that can tell you how to pronounce that word. It may mean a gesture of salutation, and rhyme with cow; and it may also mean an obsolete military weapon, and rhyme with blow. But let us not enlarge upon this. The sillinesses of the English alphabet are quite beyond enumeration. That alphabet consists of nothing whatever except sillinesses. I venture to repeat that whereas the English orthography needs reforming and simplifying, the English alphabet needs it two or three million times more.”

&nbs
p; Uncle Cadmus sat down, and the Opposition rose and combated his reasonings in the usual way. Those people said that they had always been used to the hieroglyphics; that the hieroglyphics had dear and sacred associations for them; that they loved to sit on a barrel under an umbrella in the brilliant sun of Egypt and spell out the owls and eagles and alligators and saw-teeth, and take an hour and a half to the Lord’s Prayer, and weep with romantic emotion at the thought that they had, at most, but eight or ten years between themselves and the grave for the enjoyment of this ecstasy; and that then possibly these Revolters would shove the ancient signs and symbols from the main track and equip the people with a lightning-express reformed alphabet that would leave the hieroglyphic wheelbarrow a hundred thousand miles behind and have not a damned association which could compel a tear, even if tears and diamonds stood at the same price in the market.

  Thursday, November 8, 1906

  From Susy’s Biography: Mr. Clemens thinks he will write no more books—Mr. Clemens’s inability to remember faces of friends—The exquisite faces and landscapes which his mind draws and paints when he is half asleep—He has not yet written himself out; prefers dictating—Mrs. Riggs recalls the episode of F. Hopkinson Smith selling the original manuscripts at auction—The artists’ dinner for Hopkinson Smith.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  Feb. 12, ’86.

  Mamma and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa since he has been publishing Gen. Grant’s book has seemed to forget his own books and work entirely, and the other evening as papa and I were promonading up and down the library he told me that he didn’t expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do anything, he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been pertickularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe down stairs, not yet published.*