Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  The vacancies between the pegs furnished an object-lesson; their position in the procession another. To read that James I reigned from 1603 until 1625, and William II from 1087 till 1100, and George III from 1760 till 1820 gives no definite impression of the length of the periods mentioned, but the long and short spaces between the pegs of these kings conveyed a quite definite one through the eye to the mind. The eye has a good memory. Many years have gone by, and the pegs have disappeared, but I still see them, and each in its place; and no king’s name falls upon my ear without my seeing his pegs at once and noticing just how many feet of space he takes up along the road.

  The other day, mamma went into the library and found papa sitting there reading a book, and roaring with laughter over it. She asked him what he was reading, he answered that he hadn’t stopped to look at the title of the book, and went on reading; she glanced over his shoulder at the cover, and found it was one of his own books.

  That is another of Susy’s unveilings of me. Still, she did not garble history but stated a fact.

  I do not remember what book of mine I was reading that day, but I remember the circumstance very well, although it was so many years ago. It was a quiet and peaceful Sunday afternoon, and Mrs. Clemens sat by the wood fire in the library, deeply interested in a book. I sat in the bay window on the opposite side of the room, and I took a book at random from the shelves there and began to read it, with the scandalous result recorded by Susy. I suppose I ought to have been ashamed when I found that the book which had been so delighting me was my own, and it is just possible that I tried to soften my case by saying I was ashamed; but at bottom I wasn’t, I was gratified. I judged that in feeling and manifesting high and cordial approval and admiration of the book, I had paid it a higher compliment than could have been paid it by any other critic. It was an old book; I do not know which one, but I know that it was one of the first two written by me; therefore it was twelve or fifteen years old. Necessarily, I had changed a good deal in that stretch of time; necessarily my manner of phrasing had considerably changed, and so it was rather a marvelous thing that I should still be able to like the book, or, indeed, any considerable part of it. Of course there was many and many a passage in it that would have affronted and offended me, but by luck I didn’t happen upon those, and I am sure I paid myself a very high compliment when I found any at all that did not arouse my hostility.

  I soon forget my books after I have finished writing them. As a rule, years elapse before I glance at them again; then they are quite new to me. I can read them as a stranger would, and when I come upon a good thing in them I am as quick and competent to recognize it as any other stranger would be.

  Style is a mysterious thing. It seems to be a part of the man, and a thing which he cannot get wholly away from by any art. It seems to leak from his pen in spite of him. Unquestionably, by watchfulness he can disguise his style, apparently—successfully and effectively, throughout a book—but only apparently; the success will not be complete; it will not be perfect; somewhere in the book his watchfulness will relax, and his pen will deliver itself of a phrase that will betray him to any one who is well acquainted with his style. I know this by experience. Ten or twelve years ago, when I sold to the Harpers the serial rights in the book called “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,” I did not want the authorship to be known, because I did not wish to swindle the public. At that time, my nom de guerre placed upon a book meant to everybody that the book was of a humorous nature; to put it upon a serious book, like the “Joan,” would beguile many persons into buying it who would not have been willing to spend their money upon serious books from my pen. The story reached to the third month in the magazine with the anonymity still safe, but the next instalment contained indiscretions of phrasing which were promptly recognized as coming from my shop. Many letters came to the Harpers charging me with the authorship of the book, and after that they put my name to it, with my consent. As a protection to the public, I was going to publish “The Prince and the Pauper” anonymously, but the children, and their mother, persuaded me out of it. Perhaps it was just as well, for there are things in it which would have been recognized by many persons as bearing my trade-mark. Style is apparently, then, as natural and as unconscious, and as difficult to successfully get rid of for any considerable time, as a person’s gait and carriage. Two years ago, I wrote in a carefully disguised fashion an article whose authorship I wished should not be discovered. I submitted it to Clara, and in the middle of it she found a phrase which she said anybody would know me by. She was right, and it had to come out—a pity, too, for the careless and unpremeditated phrasings which are so sure to be stamped with the trade-mark of character are usually the ones which are best worth preserving.

  A quarter of a century ago, when Thomas Bailey Aldrich succeeded Mr. Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, he found in the safe an unsigned contribution by me which had been lying there a couple of years; but he recognized it as mine by the handwriting. He published it, unsigned, and sent me a check. I read two-thirds of the article and regretfully made preparation to return the check with the information that I was not the author of it; then I proceeded to finish the reading, for I found it interesting. Almost immediately my eye fell upon a sentence which brought out of me the remark “There isn’t any one alive that would have said it in just that way but myself. I did write the article, and I’ll cash the check.”

  These reminiscences bring to my mind some others which in a way are akin to them. Many years ago, when Jean was perhaps eight years old, Mrs. Clemens and I made a flying visit to Quarry Farm, three or four hundred miles away, leaving the rest of the family and the servants at home. Katy reported conditions to us by telegraph, every day, using a formula which she never changed, and which she had reported by telegraph scores of times when she had been left in charge of the children:

  “Children all well and happy. KATY.”

  Long ago as that was, we had a telephone in our house. Katy telephoned her daily message to the telegraph office, but after a while the operators saved her breath for her. They came to know her voice, and when she would call the office the operator would speak up and say, with the rising inflection proper to an interrogation,

  “Children all well and happy, Katy?”

  “Yes.”

  That ended it, and the transmitter went to the hook.

  There is something strange and wonderful about a woman’s intuitions. The telegram continued to arrive in exactly the same words, daily, for a week; then Mrs. Clemens became uneasy, and she said,

  “You must take the next train for Hartford; something is wrong there.”

  I am merely a man, and of course I wanted a reason for her opinion. She said she hadn’t any, except that the telegrams had latterly not affected her as they had been accustomed to do. I remarked that there had been no change in the wording, but she said—— No matter, the fact remained that they were now filling her with vague apprehensions that all was not right, and I must go, and go at once.

  I did it. When I arrived at home, twenty-four hours later, it was afternoon. In the hall I found the evening paper, and I stood there a moment to read a short paragraph which had attracted my attention. It announced the death, in Boston, of a relative of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a man whose name escapes me—but it went on to say that Dr. Holmes had learned of the death from the Evening Transcript, and that thereupon he said to a friend,

  “This relative had just turned his fiftieth year; here is his name, a name part of which was not really his, but he had to carry it fifty years because he was baptized under it. My father baptized him, and when he was ready to confer the name he found that he had mislaid the slip of paper upon which it was written, so he had to trust to memory, with the result that he got the middle name wrong; it should have been Wendell.”

  Then Dr. Holmes went to his brother’s house to confer about the funeral. This was the house which their father had lived in fifty years before. Dr. Holmes had been in
the library a thousand times since, but this time when he entered it he walked to one of the shelves, took out a book at random, blew the dust from it, and gave it a shake, and out dropped the slip of paper that his father had mislaid when he misnamed that child fifty years before. It was remarked that Dr. Holmes was not surprised that he had been moved to take out that particular book and not another, because many times, before, he had been moved to obey seeming commands delivered to him by inanimate objects.

  That interested me, for many a time inanimate objects had required service of me and gotten it—at least the requirement had quite plainly seemed to come from those unsentient objects, and from no other accountable source.

  While I stood in the hall with the newspaper in my hand, the postman arrived, and when I went up to call on Jean I carried the letters with me. I found Jean sitting up in her crib, in the middle of the nursery, and Katy at her side, reading aloud to her. Mrs. Clemens’s instinct had been correct; Jean had been dangerously ill, and the physician had persuaded Katy to continue the usual telegram, he believing that the child would recover, and that it would be wise, and well for Mrs. Clemens’s health’s sake, to keep the bad news from her. Jean was safe now, and getting along very well. After my conversation with Katy she quitted the room and left me in charge. The book that she had been reading was lying open, face down, on Jean’s feet. I took it up and began to read where I judged Katy had left off; then I began to laugh. I read on, and continued to break into explosions of admiring and grateful laughter, until I was interrupted by an ejaculation from Jean. She had an outraged look in her face, and she said in a tone of sharp reproach,

  “Papa!”

  “Why Jean,” I said, “what are your objections? I think it’s the brightest book I ever saw. Why it’s just charming.”

  Jean did not melt. She said austerely, indignantly, uncompromisingly,

  “Papa, you ought to be ashamed to talk like that about your own book.”

  But I was innocent. The book was “Huckleberry Finn,” but I had not recognized it. I had been paying myself another fine and great and unbought compliment. I read fifteen or twenty minutes, then gave Jean a rest, and took up the letters. They were from strangers, as usual, but the superscription upon one of them had a vaguely and far distant familiar look to it. I opened it and turned to the signature. It was “Bessie Stone.”

  It carried me back eighteen years in a flash. Away back there in the first months of our marriage, a couple of little Massachusetts schoolgirls wrote a joint letter to me which was full of innocent sweet pieties, and of gentle solicitude for me; and the burden of its message was an appeal to me to amend my ways, now, and lead a better life. I was amused at having the character of my life thus candidly exposed to me by these dear little schoolgirls of fourteen and fifteen years, but I was touched by it, too, for its intent was kindly; its solicitude was sincere and honest, and I did not fail to return the best answer I could, and put into it my quite genuine thanks. I was cautious, though; I was careful; I did not commit myself; I did not promise to lead a better life, for I could not have promised it honestly. I didn’t want to lead a better life, and I knew I wasn’t going to try; but I couldn’t wound and distress and disappoint those sweet little creatures, so I vaguely intimated that I was busy now, that I had a good deal on my hands, and that I should be obliged to postpone this reform for a time, but that I was not going to forget it; no, I should keep it in mind, and——so on, and so on. I wrote the best letter I could, without pledging myself to an upright way of life, which I knew very well I couldn’t stand.

  The little schoolgirls wrote again; I answered; they wrote again; I answered; they wrote a third time; I answered. The intervals between letters were growing a little wider, and a little wider, all the time. They kept pleading with me to pray—that was one of the main things; they dwelt upon that patiently and persistently, and I did the best I could, in the circumstances, without definitely compromising myself. So at last the correspondence came to an end, I still postponing, and the children finally disheartened, I suppose.

  Now then, after a lapse of eighteen years since the day of that correspondence, I opened this letter—still in that original round schoolgirl hand, with not a noticeable change in it in any particular—and in it I found a jubilant note of gladness. Bessie Stone said something like this—I don’t remember her words:

  “Our pleadings with you about prayer, so long ago, have borne fruit at last. I know it must be on account of those pleadings that Mary came to be a child of prayer, and the thought made me oh, so happy, oh, so grateful!”

  I couldn’t make anything out of that. I was acquainted with a good many Marys, but I couldn’t call to mind one that was specially distinguished in the way indicated, and so I was not able to guess who this Mary could be that Bessie Stone was talking about, or in what way her and her friend’s spiritual wrestlings with me had brought this unknown Mary to this pass.

  Jean required me to read again, so I put Bessie out of my mind and picked up “Huckleberry Finn” again, and before I had read ten sentences I came upon that very Mary, and her prayer.

  This incident would have startled me at any time, but the force of the surprise was doubled and quadrupled through following so swiftly upon the Dr. Holmes incident of a similar character. I have not seen “Huckleberry Finn” since, so far as I remember, and so I do not know whereabouts in the book Mary’s prayer is mentioned, and, in fact, I don’t remember Mary at all.

  * Cleveland, not Chicago. S.L.C.

  Saturday, December 29, 1906

  The end of Susy’s Biography: the trip to Keokuk—Mr. Clemens speaks of the journey—Mentions hearing the leadsmen’s calls on the Mississippi steamboat—He sees his mother, then, for the last time in life—Gives the details of the romance of her life.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  June 26, ‘86.

  We are all of us on our way to Keokuk to see Grandma Clemens, who is very feeble and wants to see us, and pertickularly Jean who is her name sake. We are going by way of the lakes, as papa thought that would be the most comfortable way.

  We went by way of the lakes, and it was a very pleasant and satisfactory excursion. We spent a day or two in Duluth, and a day or two in St. Paul and Minneapolis; then we boarded a Mississippi steamboat and went down the river to Keokuk. In my book called “Old Times on the Mississippi” I have explained that “mark twain” is the leadsman’s cry for two fathoms—twelve feet—and have also explained how I came to adopt that phrase as a nom de guerre. If the children had ever been acquainted with these not very important facts, they had forgotten them by the time that they arrived on board that Mississippi steamboat. A little after nightfall we entered a shoal crossing. I was standing alone on the hurricane-deck, astern, and I heard the big bell forward boom out the call for the leads. A moment later the night wind was bringing to me out of the distance, and faintly and musically, the leadsmen’s long-drawn chant—sounds which had once been so familiar to me, and which had in them now the charm and witchery and pathos which belong with memories of a life that has been lived, and will come back no more:

  “By the d-e-e-p four!”

  “Quarter less four!”

  “H-a-l-f three!”

  “M-a-r-k three!”

  “H-a-l-f twain!”

  “Quarter-r-r twain!”

  “Mark under water twain!”

  “M-a-r-k twain!”

  “M-a-r-k t-w-a-i-n!”

  “M-a-r-k t-w-a-i-n!”

  And so it went on, and on, the quaint and welcome old music beating softly upon my ear, and working its enchantments upon my spirit. Then suddenly Clara’s little figure burst upon me out of the darkness, and she assailed me in a voice that was intense with rebuke and reproach,

  “Papa!”

  “Well, dear?”

  “I have hunted all over the whole boat for you. Don’t you know they are calling you?”

  We remained in Keokuk a week, and this was the last time that I sa
w my aged mother in life. Her memory was decaying; indeed, for matters of the moment it was about gone; but her memories of the distant past remained, and she was living mainly in that far away bygone time; and so the secret of her life—the great secret, the romance of her life—was presently revealed by her lips, unconsciously and unknowingly. Orion’s wife had been the recipient of this confidence, and she had kept it strictly to herself, but she felt it right and fair that I should share it with her, and so she told me about it; no, I am wrong in my dates; she did not tell me about it at that time, but at a later time, when I went West to attend my mother’s funeral.

  It can do no harm to set it down here, for it will not see print until years after all of us who have a personal interest in it shall have passed from this life. All through my boyhood I had noticed that the attitude of my father and mother toward each other was that of courteous, considerate, and always respectful, and even deferential, friends; that they were always kind toward each other, thoughtful of each other, but that there was nothing warmer; there were no outward and visible demonstrations of affection. This did not surprise me, for my father was exceedingly dignified in his carriage and speech, and in a manner he was austere. He was pleasant with his friends, but never familiar; and so, as I say, the absence of exterior demonstration of affection for my mother had no surprise for me. By nature she was warm-hearted, but it seemed to me quite natural that her warm-heartedness should be held in reserve in an atmosphere like my father’s.