Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  As I have said, my mother’s memory for immediate events failed in the closing years of her life. When she was eighty-five or eighty-six years old a Medical Convention took place in a river town some distance north of Keokuk—Burlington, Iowa. Doctors came to the Convention from many parts of the United States, among them a physician verging toward ninety years of age—Dr. Gwynn, I have forgotten his first name. It was in midsummer. My mother, for her safety’s sake, was kept under watch in those days, but one day when the watch was for the moment relaxed she disappeared. She was gone two days, and during this time no trace of her could be found; then she reappeared looking tired and worn, and sad. What had been happening was this: she had found Dr. Gwynn’s name in the list of delegates to the Burlington Convention; she had slipped away and wandered to the river and taken passage for Burlington in the steamboat. The Convention’s labors were nearly finished. She went to the principal hotel and asked eagerly for Dr. Gwynn. She was informed that he had taken his departure for Kentucky the day before. She made no comment except with her face and eyes, which revealed that she had suffered a deep disappointment. She returned to Keokuk, and then her injured mind betrayed her, and in the privacy of the home she told Orion’s wife a secret which she had carried in her heart for more than sixty years. It was this:

  When she was a girl of twenty, in Lexington, Kentucky, she became engaged to a fine young fellow who was making his sure and steady way toward prosperity and acceptance as a physician. They were passionately fond of each other. Young John M. Clemens had been a suitor for her hand, but had been rejected. There was to be a ball in a town five or ten miles away. In that day that young girl had a passion for dancing, and, indeed, for everything else that had charm and pleasure and vigorous life in it. She wanted Gwynn to take her to the ball; he was not able to do it; he said his duties required him to remain at his post, and he must not desert it. The young girl was grievously disappointed, and she upbraided him for his lack of devotion. He defended himself, and the incident ended in a lovers’ quarrel. He had hardly turned his back when my appointed father appeared on the scene. He once more begged her to marry him, and in her anger she said she would, but it must be instantly, lest her mind undergo a change, since she was not marrying him for love, but to spite Gwynn.

  For more than sixty years she had grieved in secret for the crime committed against herself and another in a moment of unreflecting passion. It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my personal experience in my long lifetime.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  July 4,

  We have arived in Keokuk after a very pleasant

  So ends the loving task of that innocent sweet spirit—like her own life, unfinished, broken off in the midst. Interruptions came, her days became increasingly busy with studies and work, and she never resumed the Biography, though from time to time she gathered materials for it. When I look at the arrested sentence that ends the little book, it seems as if the hand that traced it cannot be far—is gone for a moment only, and will come again and finish it. But that is a dream; a creature of the heart, not of the mind—a feeling, a longing, not a mental product: the same that lured Aaron Burr, old, gray, forlorn, forsaken, to the pier, day after day, week after week, there to stand in the gloom and the chill of the dawn gazing seaward through veiling mists and sleet and snow for the ship which he knew was gone down—the ship that bore all his treasure, his daughter.

  Hamilton, Bermuda, January 6, 1907

  The power of association to bring back a lost word or name, as shown on the Bermuda trip when Mr. Clemens and Mr. Twichell recall Miss Kirkham’s name—Mr. Clemens’s dream, born of the association of Mr. Twichell’s remarks about aerial navigation and the reading of the statistics of the railway accidents compiled by the United States Government.

  “That reminds me.” In conversation we are always using that phrase, and seldom or never noticing how large a significance it bears. It stands for a curious and interesting fact, to wit: that sleeping or waking, dreaming or talking, the thoughts which swarm through our heads are almost constantly, almost continuously, accompanied by a like swarm of reminders of incidents and episodes of our past. A man can never know what a large traffic this commerce of association carries on in his mind until he sets out to write his autobiography; he then finds that a thought is seldom born to him that does not immediately remind him of some event, large or small, in his past experience. Quite naturally these present remarks remind me of various things, among others this: that sometimes a thought, by the power of association, will bring back to your mind a lost word or a lost name which you have not been able to recover by any other process known to your mental equipment. Yesterday we had an instance of this.

  Reverend Joseph H. Twichell is with me on this flying trip to Bermuda. He was with me on my last visit to Bermuda, and to-day we were trying to remember when it was; we thought it was somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years ago, but that was as near as we could get at the date. Twichell said that the landlady in whose boarding-house we sojourned in that ancient time could doubtless furnish us the date, and we must look her up. We wanted to see her, anyway, because she and her blooming daughter of eighteen were the only persons whose acquaintance we had made at that time, for we were traveling under fictitious names, and people who wear aliases are not given to seeking society and bringing themselves under suspicion. But at this point in our talk we encountered an obstruction: we could not recall the landlady’s name. We hunted all around through our minds for that name, using all the customary methods of research, but without success; the name was gone from us, apparently permanently. We finally gave the matter up, and fell to talking about something else. The talk wandered from one subject to another, and finally arrived at Twichell’s school days in Hartford—the Hartford of something more than half a century ago—and he mentioned several of his schoolmasters, dwelling with special interest upon the peculiarities of an aged one named Olney. He remarked that Olney, humble village schoolmaster as he was, was yet a man of superior parts, and had published text-books which had enjoyed a wide currency in America in their day. I said I remembered those books, and had studied “Olney’s Geography” in school when I was a boy. Then Twichell said,

  “That reminds me—our landlady’s name was a name that was associated with schoolbooks of some kind or other fifty or sixty years ago. I wonder what it was. I believe it began with K.”

  Association did the rest, and did it instantly. I said,

  “Kirkham’s Grammar!”

  That settled it. Kirkham was the name; and we went out to seek for the owner of it. There was no trouble about that, for Bermuda is not large, and is like the earlier Garden of Eden, in that everybody in it knows everybody else, just as it was in the serpent’s headquarters in Adam’s time. We easily found Miss Kirkham—she that had been the blooming girl of a generation before—and she was still keeping boarders; but her mother had passed from this life. She settled the date for us, and did it with certainty, by help of a couple of uncommon circumstances, events of that ancient time. She said we had sailed from Bermuda on the 24th of May 1877, which was the day on which her only nephew was born—and he is now thirty years of age. The other unusual circumstance—she called it an unusual circumstance, and I didn’t say anything—was that on that day the Rev. Mr. Twichell (bearing the assumed name of Peters) had made a statement to her which she regarded as a fiction. I remembered the circumstance very well. We had bidden the young girl good-bye and had gone fifty yards, perhaps, when Twichell said he had forgotten something (I doubted it,) and must go back. When he rejoined me he was silent, and this alarmed me, because I had not seen an example of it before. He seemed quite uncomfortable, and I asked him what the trouble was. He said he had been inspired to give the girl a pleasant surprise, and so had gone back and said to her—

  “That young fellow’s name is not Wilkinson—that’s Mark Twain.”

  She did not lose her mind; she did not exhibit
any excitement at all, but said quite simply, quite tranquilly,

  “Tell it to the marines, Mr. Peters—if that should happen to be your name.”

  It was very pleasant to meet her again. We were white-headed, but she was not; in the sweet and unvexed spiritual atmosphere of the Bermudas one does not achieve gray hairs at forty-eight.

  I had a dream last night, and of course it was born of association, like nearly everything else that drifts into a person’s head, asleep or awake. On board ship, on the passage down, Twichell was talking about the swiftly developing possibilities of aerial navigation, and he quoted those striking verses of Tennyson’s which forecast a future when air-borne vessels of war shall meet and fight above the clouds and redden the earth below with a rain of blood. This picture of carnage and blood and death reminded me of something which I had read a fortnight ago—statistics of railway accidents compiled by the United States Government, wherein the appalling fact was set forth that on our 200,000 miles of railway we annually kill 10,000 persons outright and injure 80,000. The war-ships in the air suggested the railway horrors, and three nights afterward the railway horrors suggested my dream. The work of association was going on in my head, unconsciously, all that time. It was an admirable dream, what there was of it.

  In it I saw a funeral procession; I saw it from a mountain peak; I saw it crawling along and curving here and there, serpent-like, through a level vast plain. I seemed to see a hundred miles of the procession, but neither the beginning of it nor the end of it was within the limits of my vision. The procession was in ten divisions, each division marked by a sombre flag, and the whole represented ten years of our railway activities in the accident line; each division was composed of 80,000 cripples, and was bearing its own year’s 10,000 mutilated corpses to the grave: in the aggregate 800,000 cripples and 100,000 dead, drenched in blood!

  On board ship. January 9, 1907

  Mr. Clemens’s four maxims apropos of an incident which has just occurred—Description of Bermuda.

  There has been an incident—an incident of a common sort—an incident of an exceedingly common sort—an incident of a sort which always troubles me, grieves me, and makes me weary of life and long to lie down in the peaceful grave and be at rest. Such incidents usually move me to try to find relief in the building of a maxim. It is a good way, because if you have luck you can get the venom out of yourself and into the maxim; then comfort and a healed spirit follow. Maxims are not easy to make; they do not come in right shape at the first call; they are creatures of evolution, of development; you have to try several plans before you get one that suits you, or even comes fairly near to suiting you. I have made four attempts at this maxim, to wit:

  1. If it is so funny you can’t tell it without laughing, don’t tell it: spare your listener.

  2. If you can laugh at it yourself while you are telling it, you may know by that sign that it is not funny—to others.

  3. When you laugh at your own funny things you are asking alms for their poverty.

  4. When the hen has laid a joke she does the laughing herself. There be human beings that are as vulgar.

  The relief is not perfect, but it will have to do. I do not feel as axiomatic as usual to-day.

  That is a pleasant country—Bermuda—and close by and easy to get to. There is a fine modern steamer admirably officered; there is a table which even the hypercritical could hardly find fault with—not even the hypercritical could find fault with the service. On board there is constant communication with the several populations of the planet—if you want it—through the wireless telegraph, and the trip to Bermuda is made in two days. Many people flit to that garden in winter and spring, and heal their worn minds and bodies in its peaceful serenities and its incomparable climate, and it is strange that the people of our Northern coasts go there in mere battalions, instead of in armies. The place is beautiful to the eye; it is clothed in flowers; the roads and the boating are all that can be desired; the hotels are good; the waters and the land are brilliant with spirit-reviving sunshine; the people, whether white, black, or brown, are courteous and kindly beyond the utmost stretch of a New York imagination. If poverty and wretchedness exist, there is no visible evidence of it. There is no rush, no hurry, no money-getting frenzy, no fretting, no complaining, no fussing and quarreling; no telegrams, no daily newspapers, no railroads, no tramways, no subways, no trolleys, no L’s, no Tammany, no Republican party, no Democratic party, no graft, no office-seeking, no elections, no legislatures for sale; hardly a dog, seldom a cat, only one steam-whistle; not a saloon, nobody drunk; no W.C.T.U.; and there is a church and a school on every corner. The spirit of the place is serenity, repose, contentment, tranquillity—a marked contrast to the spirit of America, which is embodied in the urgent and mannerless phrase “Come step lively,” a phrase which ought to be stamped on our coinage in place of “In God We Trust.” The former expression is full of character, whereas the latter has nothing to recommend it but its bland and self-complacent hypocrisy.

  I think it must be the fret and fever of our American life that is responsible for our atrocious manners. No other civilized nation is so uncourteous, so hard, so ungentle, so ill-bred, as ours. We wear several impressive titles—conferred by ourselves, of course—whereby we publish to the world that we are the only free and independent nation; that our land is the special and particular land of the free and home of the brave, and so forth, and so on; but we cannot seem to get anybody outside of our frontiers to recognize these titles, except in a doubting and half-hearted way; whereas what we want, and urgently need, is a title which shall be accepted and ratified with enthusiasm by the rest of the Christian world—a title not claimable by any other nation, a title able to hold its own unchallenged in all weathers. I believe I could think up the right title if I had time. Naturally it would be a title claiming for us the distinction of being the Unpolite Nation, but in fairness I should be obliged to make one reserve, one exception—the cabmen of Boston. Boston is the most courteous of American cities, perhaps, and I think it quite likely, at least possible, that of all Boston guilds the guild of cabmen stands about at the head in this regard. Anyway, with thirty-seven years’ experience to draw upon, I have never yet encountered an uncourteous Boston cabman. Of such is the kingdom of heaven, as I look at it. I am not claiming to be courteous myself, for in truth I am not. I am an American. I am as national as the eagle itself.

  What Bermuda can do for a person in three short days, in the way of soothing his spirit and setting him up physically, and in giving his life a new value by temporarily banishing the weariness and the sordidness out of it, is wonderful—if that is not too strong a word, and I think it isn’t. Bronchitis disappears there in twenty-four hours; and it is the same with sore throats, and kindred ailments, and they do not return until the patient gets back home; yet Bermuda is neglected; not many Americans visit it. I suppose it is too near-by. It costs too little trouble and exertion to get to it. It ought to be as far away as Italy; then we would seek it, no doubt, and be properly thankful for its existence. However, there is this much to be said for Americans: that when they go to Bermuda once, they are quite sure to go again; and some among the especially wise acquire the habit of it. I know one American who has spent nine seasons there. Consider this—if you are tired, and depressed, and half sick: you can reach that refuge inside of two days, and a week or two there will bring back your youth and the lost sunshine of your life, and stop your doctor’s bills for a year.

  Dublin, New Hampshire, Summer-end, 1905.

  As concerns interpreting the Deity. This line of hieroglyphs was for fourteen years the despair of all the scholars who labored over the mysteries of the Rosetta stone:

  After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:

  Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all the temples; this upon pain of death.

  That was the twenty-fourth translation that had been furnished by scholars. For a time it stood. But only for a
time. Then doubts began to assail it and undermine it, and the scholars resumed their labors. Three years of patient work produced eleven new translations; among them, this, by Grünfeldt, was received with considerable favor:

  The horse of Epiphanes shall be maintained at the public expense; this upon pain of death.

  But the following rendering, by Gospodin, was received by the learned world with yet greater favor:

  The priest shall explain the wisdom of Epiphanes to all the people, and these shall listen with reverence, upon pain of death.

  Seven years followed, in which twenty-one fresh and widely varying renderings were scored—none of them quite convincing. But now, at last, came Rawlinson, the youngest of all the scholars, with a translation which was immediately and universally recognized as being the correct version, and his name became famous in a day. So famous, indeed, that even the children were familiar with it; and such a noise did the achievement itself make that not even the noise of the monumental political event of that same year—the Flight from Elba—was able to smother it to silence. Rawlinson’s version reads as follows: