Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  But this intended future of course will never do, and although papa usually holds to his own opinions and intents with outsiders, when mamma realy desires anything and says that it must be, papa allways gives up his plans (at least so far) and does as she says is right (and she is usually right, if she dissagrees with him at all). It was because he knew his great tendency to being convinced by her, that he published without her knowledge that article in the “Christian Union” concerning the government of children. So judging by the proofs of past years, I think that we will be able to persuade papa to go back to work as before, and not leave off writing with the end of his next story. Mamma says that she sometimes feels, and I do too, that she would rather have papa depend on his writing for a living than to have him think of giving it up.

  I have a defect of a sort which I think is not common; certainly I hope it isn’t: it is rare that I can call before my mind’s eye the form and face of either friend or enemy. If I should make a list, now, of persons whom I know in America and abroad—say to the number of even an entire thousand—it is quite unlikely that I could reproduce five of them in my mind’s eye. Of my dearest and most intimate friends, I could name eight whom I have seen and talked with four days ago, but when I try to call them before me they are formless shadows. Jean has been absent, this past eight or ten days, at a Sanatorium in the country, and I wish I could reproduce her in the mirror of my mind, but I can’t do it. There was a dinner party here last night, all old friends of ours. I recall how Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin Riggs looked; also how Dorothea Gilder looked; but I can get only blurred and scarcely recognizable glimpses of Norman Hapgood and Mrs. Hapgood, Mr. Riggs, and Clara Clemens.

  It may be that this defect is not constitutional, but a result of life-long absence of mind and indolent and inadequate observation. Once or twice in my life it has been an embarrassment to me. Twenty years ago, in the days of Susy’s Biography, there was a dispute one morning at the breakfast table about the color of a neighbor’s eyes. I was asked for a verdict, but had to confess that if that valued neighbor and old friend had eyes I was not sure that I had ever seen them. It was then mockingly suggested that perhaps I didn’t even know the color of the eyes of my own family, and I was required to shut my own at once and testify. I was able to name the color of Mrs. Clemens’s eyes, but was not able to even suggest a color for Jean’s, or Clara’s, or Susy’s.

  This defect seems to be out of place with me. It would seem to indicate that I have no sense of form and proportion or I would have memory of them, since each faculty has a memory of its own. I think I ought to be able to recall forms and faces, because, although I can neither draw nor paint, my mind often draws and paints the most exquisite and the most faultless faces—faces of strangers always—when I am almost asleep but yet dimly conscious of my surroundings. These faces are very small. In size and quality they are like the old-fashioned ivory miniatures; like, but not just like, for they are much more dainty and charming and beautiful than any ivory miniatures that I have ever seen; by contrast with them the ivory miniature is coarse and unspiritual.

  I may not have a monopoly in this kind of art, but I have an idea that more people lack it than possess it. My half-asleep mind has drawn and painted for me thousands upon thousands of these lovely faces, but I think I can say with certainty that not once has the face of a friend or an acquaintance appeared among them. It is a pity, for if my dead could come back in that gracious form, that weird art would have a priceless value for me.

  There is another form of picture-making which my mind, when I am but half conscious, shares with the rest of the world, I suppose; that is the production of faces of about half normal size in black and white, never in color; faces that laugh, faces that grin, faces that swiftly undergo all sorts of pleasant and unpleasant contortions; faces that continuously dissolve away and vanish, but instantly reappear with new features and with new “stunts” to exhibit, to use the slang phrase. With me, these faces, like the miniature faces, are always new to me; they never favor me with a countenance which I have ever seen before.

  The landscapes which rise upon my drowsing mind properly belong with the miniatures, for they are projected on a very small scale. They seem close by, but they look as they would look to a Gulliver in Lilliput. There will be a lake; there will be a rim of delicate mountains steeped in soft sunlight; there will be little bays with miniature white sand beaches; there will be capes and headlands projecting into the dimpling blue water; and the whole landscape—lake, mountains and all—will be so little that it will look as if it might be framed and hung upon the wall.

  All this talk is suggested by Susy’s remark: “The other evening as papa and I were promonading up and down the library”—— Thank God I can see that picture! and it is not dim, but stands out clear in the unfaded light of twenty-one years ago. In those days Susy and I used to “promonade” daily up and down the library, with our arms about each other’s waists, and deal in intimate communion concerning affairs of State, or the deep questions of human life, or our small personal affairs.

  It was quite natural that I should think I had written myself out when I was only fifty years old, for everybody who has ever written has been smitten with that superstition at about that age. Not even yet have I really written myself out. I have merely stopped writing because dictating is pleasanter work, and because dictating has given me a strong aversion to the pen, and because two hours of talking per day is enough, and because— But I am only damaging my mind with this digging around in it for pretexts where no pretext is needed, and where the simple truth is for this one time better than any invention, in this small emergency. I shall never finish my five or six unfinished books, for the reason that by forty years of slavery to the pen I have earned my freedom. I detest the pen, and I wouldn’t use it again to sign the death-warrant of my dearest enemy.

  Fifteen years ago. . . . However I am reminded of something that occurred here at dinner last night; in fact I am reminded of several things that occurred here at dinner last night. Mrs. Riggs seemed to me to be almost as young and beautiful as she was a quarter of a century ago, and certainly she was as bright and charming as ever she was in her life. I couldn’t look at her without thinking of F. Hopkinson Smith, successful novelist, acceptable public reader, acceptable after-dinner talker, acceptable water-color artist, acceptable architect, and of high repute as a builder of lighthouses and great iron bridges. I couldn’t possibly ever look at Mrs. Riggs and not instantly think of F. Hopkinson Smith. About a dozen years ago there was a great gathering one night at Sherry’s, in aid of one of those charities where a crowd gets together at an expensive place like that and spends four thousand dollars for things to eat and collects thirty-seven dollars and a half for the charity—usually by an auction sale of things which nobody values and nobody wants. The auction this time was of original manuscripts, presumably in autograph form. F. Hopkinson Smith was the auctioneer. In those days his reputation as a writer was just barely budding; he was hardly known, but he probably didn’t know it. He certainly is a man of many talents, and good ones, too, but several of them are not as good as he thinks they are. He began the auction with a literary production of his own, a short story. It was a typewritten manuscript; it was merely autographed at the end. He made proclamation, and, to encourage the house, he started the bidding himself—at fifty dollars for the property. He auctioned away very energetically, and with good staying power, and finally succeeded in selling the asset at an advance upon his own bid. Then he put up an original manuscript of Mrs. Riggs’s, all in her own handwriting; but as he didn’t start the bidding this time there was an embarrassed pause, he barking away vigorously all through it but not raising a bid, for the people had been discouraged by the pace he had set. By and by somebody had the courage to start a bid—two dollars and a half—and Smith worked and sweated over it most manfully, because he had by this time realized what a mistake he had made in the beginning and what a particularly unpleasant mistake i
t was for all concerned—and everybody in the house was concerned.

  Well, never mind what the final result was—it is gone from my memory, and was never important anyway. At the end of the evening Mrs. Riggs and Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge met in the dressing-room, and Mrs. Dodge said with immense enthusiasm,

  “Kate Douglas Wiggin, there aren’t any words that can express the admiration I feel for you. It was wonderful that you could hold your temper, in the circumstances; it was marvelous that you didn’t break out and tell that man what you thought of him.”

  Mrs. Riggs said,

  “Oh yes, yes, I wanted to, but you know I am a lady, and I have to be so damned particular!”

  And I can’t ever think of Smith without thinking of a luncheon party of artists which gathered itself together in Chase’s spacious and sumptuous studio years and years ago when Hopkinson Smith’s large fame as an artist had just begun to flicker and spit and make itself vaguely visible in the twilight of public observation. He was at the luncheon, and, being new, the artists were very kind to him, very complimentary, and did everything they could to make him feel at home. It may be that in trying so hard to be sufficiently kind they overdid it. At any rate, when the speeches had been going on for a good while, an artist who had been unconsciously and unintentionally qualifying himself to take a chance in the debate, rose up and stood with roving and genial eye, and supporting his general unsteadiness by leaning his forefinger on the table; he licked his lips several times, and then said,

  “I’ve (hic) been hearing a tiresome complimentary lot about this Mr. Hop-skip-and-jumpkinson Smith; and if he ain’t too tired I (hic) want to see him get up and do it!”

  * It isn’t yet. Title of it, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” S.L.C.

  Monday, November 19, 1906

  Susy’s spelling—More remarks about Simplified Spelling.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  Ever since papa and mamma were married, papa has written his books and then taken them to mamma in manuscript and she has expergated them. Papa read “Huckleberry Finn” to us in manuscript just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mamma to expergate, while he went off up to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mamma while she was looking the manuscript over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully dreadful part must be scratched out. And I remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was dreadful, that Clara and I used to delight in, and oh with what dispair we saw mamma turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would be almost ruined without it. But we gradually came to feel as mamma did.

  It would be a pity to replace the vivacity and quaintness and felicity of Susy’s innocent free spelling with the dull and petrified uniformities of the spelling book. Nearly all the grimness is taken out of the “expergating” of my books by the subtle mollification accidentally infused into the word by Susy’s modification of the spelling of it.

  I remember the special case mentioned by Susy, and can see the group yet—two-thirds of it pleading for the life of the culprit sentence that was so fascinatingly dreadful and the other third of it patiently explaining why the court could not grant the prayer of the pleaders; but I do not remember what the condemned phrase was. It had much company, and they all went to the gallows; but it is possible that that specially dreadful one which gave those little people so much delight was cunningly devised and put into the book for just that function, and not with any hope or expectation that it would get by the expergator alive. It is possible, for I had that custom.

  Susy’s quaint and effective spelling falls quite opportunely into to-day’s atmosphere, which is heavy with the rumblings and grumblings and mutterings of the Simplified Spelling Reform. Andrew Carnegie started this storm, a couple of years ago, by moving a simplifying of English orthography, and establishing a fund for the prosecution and maintenance of the crusade. He began gently. He addressed a circular to some hundreds of his friends, asking them to simplify the spelling of a dozen of our badly spelt words—I think they were only words which end with the superfluous ugh. He asked that these friends use the suggested spellings in their private correspondence.

  By this, one perceives that the beginning was sufficiently quiet and unaggressive; but of course the newspapers got hold of it; and they got as much fun out of it as they could have gotten out of a funeral, or any of the other things which to the average newspaper mind are particularly ludicrous.

  Next stage: a small committee was appointed, with Brander Matthews for managing director and spokesman. It issued a list of three hundred words, of average silliness as to spelling, and proposed new and sane spellings for these words. The President of the United States, unsolicited, adopted these simplified three hundred officially, and ordered that they be used in the official documents of the Government. It was now remarked, by all the educated and the thoughtful except the clergy, that Sheol was to pay. This was most justly and comprehensively descriptive. The indignant British lion rose, with a roar that was heard across the Atlantic, and stood there on his little isle, gazing, red-eyed, out over the glooming seas, snow-flecked with driving spindrift, and lashing his tail—a most scary spectacle to see.

  The lion was outraged because we, a nation of children, without any grown-up people among us, and with no property in the language, but using it merely by courtesy of its owner the English nation, were trying to defile the sacredness of it by removing from it peculiarities which had been its ornament and which had made it holy and beautiful for ages.

  In truth there is a certain sardonic propriety in preserving our orthography, since ours is a mongrel language which started with a child’s vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime.

  Why is it that I have intruded into this turmoil and manifested a desire to get our orthography purged of its asininities? Indeed I do not know why I should manifest any interest in the matter, for at bottom I disrespect our orthography most heartily, and as heartily disrespect everything that has been said by anybody in defence of it. Nothing professing to be a defence of our ludicrous spellings has had any basis, so far as my observation goes, except sentimentality. In these “arguments” the term venerable is used instead of mouldy, and hallowed instead of devilish; whereas there is nothing properly venerable or antique about a language which is not yet four hundred years old, and about a jumble of insane spellings which were grotesque in the beginning, and which grow more and more grotesque with the flight of the years.

  However, I like to have a hand in whatever is going on, and so I took a hand in the Spelling Reform and made a speech upon the subject before the Associated Press delegates, last September, in these words:

  I am here to make an appeal to the nations in behalf of the Simplified Spelling. I have come here because they cannot all be reached except thru you. There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe—only two—the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here. I may seem to be flattering the sun, but I do not mean it so; I am meaning only to be just and fair all around. You speak with a million voices; no one can reach so many races, so many hearts and intellects, as you—except Rudyard Kipling, and he cannot do it without your help. If the Associated Press will adopt and use our simplified forms, and thus spread them to the ends of the earth, covering the whole spacious planet with them as with a garden of flowers, our difficulties are at an end.

  Every day of the 365 the only pages of the world’s countless newspapers that are read by all the human beings and angels and devils that can read, are those pages that are built out of Associ
ated Press dispatches. And so I beg you, I beseech you—oh, I implore you to spell them in our simplified forms. Do this daily, constantly, persistently, for three months—only three months—it is all I ask. The infallible result?—victory, victory all down the line. For by that time all eyes here and above and below will have become adjusted to the change and in love with it, and the present clumsy and ragged forms will be grotesque to the eye and revolting to the soul. And we shall be rid of phthisis and phthisic and pneumonia and pneumatics, and diphtheria and pterodactyl, and all those other insane words which no man addicted to the simple Christian life can try to spell and not lose some of the bloom of his piety in the demoralizing attempt. Do not doubt it.

  Do I seem to be seeking the good of the world? That is the idea. It is my public attitude; privately I am merely seeking my own profit. We all do it, but it is sound and it is virtuous, for no public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests. In 1883, when the Simplified Spelling movement, first tried to make a noise, I was indifferent to it; more—I even irreverently scoffed at it. What I needed was an object lesson, you see. It is the only way to teach some people. Very well, I got it. At that time I was scrambling along, earning the family’s bread on magazine work at seven cents a word, compound words at single rates, just as it is in the dark present. I was the property of a magazine, a seven-cent slave under a boiler-iron contract. One day there came a note from the editor requiring me to write ten pages on this revolting text: “Considerations concerning the alleged subterranean holophotal extemporaneousness of the conchyliaceous superimbrication of the ornithorhyncus, as foreshadowed by the unintelligibility of its plesiosaurian anisodactylous aspects.”