Mark Twain : The Gift of Humor 9780761864219, 9780761864202

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Mark Twain The Gift of Humor Harold H. Kolb Jr.

University Press of America,® Inc. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Copyright © 2015 by University Press of America,® Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 UPA Aquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannery Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014942088 ISBN: 978-0-7618-6420-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN: 978-0-7618-6421-9 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Humor is often the force that holds families in orbit, and I dedicate this work to the memory of my parents, Harold and Ottille Kolb, whose team of story teller and straight woman played the family boards for half a century; to my children, Kathryn and Lee, whose sense of fun instructed their elders; and to my wife, Jean Burgin Kolb, whose laughter is only one of the great gifts she brought into our lives.

“[Mark Twain] was a thinker of courageous originality and penetrating sagacity [but] all his wisdom . . . begins and ends in his humor.” W. D. Howells My Mark Twain 1910 “Though I consider sociopolitical ideas . . . supremely important, we care about [Twain’s] particular questions and answers primarily because of his gift for humor.” Louis J. Budd Mark Twain, Social Philosopher 2001 Edition

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

I: Introduction 1 The Shape of a Humorist’s Career A Peculiar Genius Forty-Five Years as a Serio-Humorist A Century of Criticism A Humorist’s Self-Definition

1 3 3 7 12 16

II: Toward a Discussion of Humor 2 The Physics of Humor I II III IV 3 The Psychology of Humor Relaxation Coping Aggression 4 The Sociology of Humor: National Character and Morality American Humor The Morality of Humor Mark Twain and the Natives, at Home and Abroad

19 21 21 27 30 34 37 40 42 46 51 53 58 62

III: Early Years: Comic Creations (1851–1872) 5 The Strategy of Counterpoint

69 71

v

vi

Contents

The Apprenticeship of a Humorist The Clash of Contrast and the Stretch of Exaggeration Jump-Starting a Career A Humorist Afloat The Innocents Abroad Samson Trimmed, Lightly Roughing It 6 Throw in Another Grizzly: The Tall Tale in America I II III

71 79 90 96 101 113 117 133 133 138 141

IV: Middle Years: The Triumph of Satire (1873–1889) 7 Old Times and New Narrators “Old Times on the Mississippi” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer A Joke for John: The Whittier Birthday Speech Tramping with Twichell A Turn to History: The Prince and the Pauper 8 The Non-Example of Bret Harte I II III 9 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Joke on Jim Beyond Jim: The Humor of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 10 Comic Contrast and Violent Humor: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Comic and Satiric Contrasts The Humor of Violence Satire and Poignancy 11 The Advocacy of W. D. Howells I II III IV

147 149 150 155 162 169 181 187 188 190 197 199 201 209

V: Later Years: The Humorist as Ironist (1890–1910) 12 The Not-So-Gay Nineties Busted A Bankrupt Abroad

243 245 245 248

217 218 222 228 231 231 234 237 239

Contents

vii

Raffish Reviewer Twain’s Twins: Pudd’nhead Wilson Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Gains and Losses 13 A Subtle Humorist Recovery Following the Equator Vienna and London Homecoming Satirist vs. Imperialists Adam and Eve The Higher Animals The Christian Science Autocracy Shakespeare and the Law God and Man Pessimist?

254 269 277 284 287 287 289 296 305 308 319 326 334 344 347 359

VI: Remnants 14 Mysterious Strangers The Texts Editorial Pain Symbols, and a Theory, of Despair 15 An Uncharted Sea of Recollection: Mark Twain’s Autobiography Four Twentieth-Century Editions The Twenty-First Century Definitive Autobiography “The Right Way to Do an Autobiography”

367 369 370 376 385 391 397 406 410

Appendix Books by Mark Twain: A Selected List of American Editions Published in His Lifetime Tales and Sketches Posthumously Published Works

427

Sources Key to Abbreviations Other Works Cited

435 435 446

Notes

455

Index

497

427 431 432

Acknowledgments

Several of the ideas in this work floated into print in earlier forms, and I wish to thank Staige Blackford and the Virginia Quarterly Review, American Literary Realism, The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, and the University of Alabama Press (publisher of The Mythologizing of Mark Twain) for trying them out. Other opportunities for discussion were made available by Lothar Hönnighausen and the Englishes Seminar at the University of Bonn, meetings of the International Society for Humor Studies at Phoenix and Cork, Philip Beidler and the Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature, the Mark Twain Memorial in Hartford, and Herbert Wisbey and the Center for Mark Twain Studies in Elmira, which provided a site—the Langdon/Clemens library at Quarry Farm—that gives a lecturer the exhilarating sense of having dived through time, like Hank Morgan in Dan Beard’s illustration at the end of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I wish also to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, whose faith in long-term investments was put to the test. And I am grateful to the University of Virginia, to its Center for Advanced Studies, and to my colleagues and students in Charlottesville who assisted in many ways, most importantly by being committed to what Jefferson called “the illimitable freedom of the human mind to explore and to expose every subject susceptible of its contemplation.” The following short list represents only the tip of the large iceberg of those from whom I learned in person and/or in print: Wilbury A. Crockett, Walker Gibson, Joe Lee Davis, Walter J. Friedrich, Edwin H. Cady, Terence Martin, Frederick Anderson, Henry Nash Smith, Louis J. Budd, Fredson Bowers, and J. C. Levenson. My thanks for specific answers to specific questions go to Piper Owens, Stella Donovan, and Beverly Shellem of Uniix

x

Acknowledgments

versity Press of America, Harriet Smith at the Mark Twain Project, Hugh Van Dusen, Steve Courtney, Roger Mulier, Vikki Drewel of the Coyote Cowboy Company, Steve Rohr of Lexicon Public Relations, Michele Cobb at AudioGO, Lori Styler and Barbara Hogenson of The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Yessenia Santos of Simon & Schuster, Joan Ashe of Henry Holt and Company, Jenna Meade at National Public Radio, Stephanie Vyce of Harvard University Press, Rodney Sheley of University of Missouri Press, UVa colleagues and friends Stephen Railton, David Vander Meulen, Jon Mikalson, John Miller, William McDonald, Roland Simon, Hal Waller, and Jeff Kirsch, as well as the staffs at the Mark Twain Memorial, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. Kathryn Kolb provided the line drawing and took the photographs. Jean Kolb was involved in the work at every stage, providing a sympathetic ear at the beginning, an encouraging heart along the way, and a sharp editorial eye at the end. Every student of Mark Twain has benefited from the remarkable river of Twain scholarship that widens every year; and all of us are deeply indebted to the University of California Press and the staff of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, directed by Robert H. Hirst, whose meticulous scholarship and authoritative editions—of Twain’s published works, previously unpublished manuscripts, letters, and now autobiography—have transformed the study of Mark Twain’s writings and his life. (See the Appendix for a description of these volumes.) In addition, I wish to thank the Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia Library and photographer Kathryn Kolb for permission to photograph and print the following items from the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature: Mark Twain’s penciled note of 1 June 1897, page 260 of the 1889 edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and the cover of the Paine-Duneka 1916 edition of The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance by Mark Twain. I am also grateful to the following individuals, journals, publishers, institutions, and authors’ representatives for permission to quote from the items listed below. To the University of Missouri Press, for permission to reprint as an epigraph the statement by Louis J. Budd in his Mark Twain: Social Philosopher. Copyright © 2001 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. To the University of Alabama Press, for permission to use, in a partial and revised form, some of the text from my article entitled “Mark Twain and the Myth of the West,” printed in the University of Alabama Press book The Mythologizing of Mark Twain, 1981, edited by Sara deSaussure Davis and Philip D. Beidler. To the University of Illinois Press and A.L.R. editor Gary Scharnhorst for permission to use part of my article entitled “The Outcast of Literary Flat: Bret Harte as Humorist,” printed in American Literary Realism 1870-1910, Vol. 23, Number 2, for Winter 1991. To Hal Holbrook, for allowing me to reproduce an excerpt from his Mark Twain Tonight! Columbia Record OS 2019,

Acknowledgments

xi

1959. To Baxter Black, for reprinting the poem “Why Do the Trees All Lean in Wyoming?” from his book Coyote Cowboy Poetry ©1986. To Rosemary A. Thurber and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc. for permission to quote from “The Bear Who Let It Alone” and “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight” by Rose Hartwick Thorpe from Fables For Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated by James Thurber © 1940 by Rosemary A. Thurber. To Harvard University and the Trustees of Amherst College for permission to reprint Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Riddle We Can Guess” from The Poems Of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. To the Scribner Publishing Group, a part of Simon & Schuster, Inc., for permission to quote from CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller. Copyright © 1955, 1961 by Joseph Heller. Copyright renewed 1989 by Joseph Heller; from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright © 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons; copyright renewed 1954 by Ernest Hemingway; and from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright © 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons; copyright renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway. To Henry Holt and Company for permission to reprint Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice" from the book The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 1951 by Robert Frost. To National Public Radio for permission to reprint an excerpt from NPR news report titled “Stand-Up Comic & TV Dad Bernie Mac” originally broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered on 11 December 2002. Copyright © 2002 National Public Radio, Inc.; any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited. Quotations on page iv are from Howells, MMT, 183, and Budd, Social Philosopher, xvii.

I

Introduction

Chapter One

The Shape of a Humorist’s Career

“Why may one not be telling truth while one laughs?” Horace, Satires 1

A PECULIAR GENIUS With his customary blend of truth and exaggeration, Mark Twain claimed, in an autobiographical piece written in 1900, that when he sailed from California to New York over three decades earlier he “had failed in all my other undertakings and had stumbled into literature without intending it.” 2 It is certainly true that none of the half dozen vocations he tried during his early years worked out. Twain escaped the drudgery of typesetting at age 21 with a cockamamie plan to travel to South America and trade in coca. When that plan evaporated, he became a steamboat pilot, but his career on the river was cut short by the Civil War. He next tried to make a fortune by digging for silver and gold in Nevada, and then by the less laborious but just as fruitless scheme of investing in mining stocks. Turning to journalism, he was a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and then the San Francisco Morning Call, until he was invited to resign from the latter for lackluster performance in what he found to be a boring job. Pedestrian newspaper reporting was not the answer for the ambitious young man of 28, who, the previous year, had adopted the pseudonym “Mark Twain” for magazine and newspaper articles which allowed for more authorial color than the drab, anonymous columns of the Call. In hindsight, Twain could see that he had possessed a literary bent from the beginning. As a teenage typesetter he composed dozens of squibs, poems, and brief sketches for his brother’s county newspapers and mailed off pieces to faraway Boston and Philadelphia. During his travels as a teenager, Twain sent letters back home which 3

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were published in local papers, and he composed several sketches during his steamboating career. Following those four years, he spent another four writing for newspapers and magazines. By the time he was thirty, he began to realize that writing humorous sketches and travel accounts and eventually books would turn out to be the best means of earning the substantial income he desired. Twain ultimately produced three dozen books of wildly varying quality, often designed with an eye to maximizing sales. He thought of himself not as an artiste, but as a public entertainer and censor—a combination wit, storyteller, reporter, historian, gadfly, and moralist, who wrote for the masses rather than for reviewers and critics. Mark Twain happened to be an entertainer remarkably endowed with a soaring imagination, a musician’s ear for spoken and written language, a lively interest in all things sublunary, and the ability to create character, tell a tale, and point a moral. Beyond these talents, he had a unique gift, which everyone seemed to recognize, though no one could quite describe. Newspaper editors called it “his peculiar genius” and “his peculiar manner of looking at things,” 3 one which, according to Albert Paine, “saw facts at curious angles and phrased them accordingly.” 4 Who but Mark Twain would define Judas Iscariot as a “premature Congressman,” depict his newly born daughter as arriving “perfectly sound but with no . . . baggage,” and predict that Dickens’ sudden death in 1870 would result in a parade to the lecture platform of various persons who could claim some contact with the great man, however trifling, including one who “possesses a hole which once belonged in a handkerchief owned by Charles Dickens.” 5 This unique gift, which defines Mark Twain better than anything else, was his extraordinary capacity to recognize disparity—from the unexpected surprises and odd quirks of everyday life, to the shams and hypocrisies of the unwise and unscrupulous, to the often grim clash between human ideals and realities. Much of Twain’s achievement stems from his ability to identify incongruities in the world around him, to yoke together improbable combinations, to create contrasts of character and situation, and to present them in strikingly novel ways with fresh and innovative language and surprising turns of phrase. From the beginning, Mark Twain was described as a humorist, but he quickly outgrew frontier pranks and the beer-hall definition of humor he inherited, and stretched it to include all three of the disparity cousins— comedy, satire, and irony—for disparity fueled his ire as well as his amusement. Twain’s career is often seen as a movement from the comic to the tragic, from fun to raillery, from optimism to pessimism. There is broadbrush accuracy in this notion, but it masks a key point: the disparity cousins are related in that all three are based on the literary strategy that runs throughout his career—upsetting the apple carts of expectations, assumptions, authorities, conventions, proprieties, pretensions, affectations, idealizations. They differ in that comedy is often an innocently surprising disparity, a

The Shape of a Humorist’s Career

5

juxtaposition of strange bedfellows. (“When crushed, sage-brush emits an odor which isn’t exactly magnolia, and equally isn’t exactly polecat, but a sort of compromise between the two.” 6) Satire is disparity with an edge, comedy with a purpose, which is frequently the exposure of hypocrisy and cant, whether of politicians, presidents, police, or the author himself. (“The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.” 7) Irony is satire generalized, disparity you can see coming, wry rather than hilarious. (“When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.” 8) The disparity of comedy posits the unexpected against the normal. The disparity of both satire and irony posits what is against what ought to be, but satire suggests the possibility of correction while irony tends to present disparity as an immutable condition of life and the nature of man. Twain’s personal trajectory across the literary landscape was, in the main, a movement from comedy to satire to irony, but it wasn’t simply that, for bits and pieces of the satiric and ironic show up in his earliest writings and lectures, and the comic keeps surfacing, even in his bleakest moods. The three genres—all rooted in disparity, but branching out in different directions with different effects—overlap across Twain’s career as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Mark Twain is our leading disparitist, working across the full range of incongruities. He thrived on contrast and opposition, often taking the other side, sometimes the far side. It is characteristic that Twain would extol the virtues of bowling on a dilapidated alley, of playing billiards on “a scarred and battered and ancient billiard table [with] a peck of checked and chipped balls, and a rackful of crooked and headless cues.” 9 In his experience, he said, “games played with a fiendish outfit furnish ecstasies of delight which games played with the other kind cannot match.” 10 At the comic end of the disparity range, Twain produced unusual comparisons and extravagant exaggerations. As a satirist he speared pomposity and hypocrisy. As an ironist he put pressure on the too easily swallowed assumptions and pieties of his day: a benign God and a providential universe, the inevitability of progress and

Figure 1.1. Mark Twain’s career as a humorist.

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Chapter 1

the perfectibility of man, the superiority of the human species and the socalled civilized nations, and flag-waving patriotism. Mark Twain was so organized for disparity that when he was introduced as an after-dinner speaker in London in 1899 by British comedian George Grossmith, he remarked that in order to create the contrast needed for humor he would have to be serious: I am curiously situated tonight. It so rarely happens that I am introduced by a humorist; I am generally introduced by a person of grave walk and carriage. That makes the proper background of gravity for brightness. I am going to alter to suit. . . . When you start with a blaze of sunshine and upburst of humor, when you begin with that, the proper office of humor is to reflect, to put you into that pensive mood of deep thought, to make you think of your sins. . . . A sermon comes to my lips always when I listen to a humorous speech. 11

Mark Twain’s early writings are largely comic, but reviewers and commentators noted a strain of something else, even in the 1860s. Early Twain was, of course, “a phunny fellow and no mistake,” but he was also “a keen observer of men and their surroundings” whose “wit serves to drive the truths deeper into the mind.” 12 Recognizing that Twain was different from the conventional humorists of his day, the Boston Evening Transcript, in an 1867 review of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, observed that Mark Twain had “acquired a wide newspaper reputation, not only for his drollery, but for his sagacity of observation, his keen perception of character, and the individuality of his style and tone of thinking.” 13 In the middle period, around the time of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, comedy, satire and irony are evenly balanced, which helps explain the power of that remarkable work. Later writings fall off to irony, yet there is still much satire and many gleams of comedy in the darkness. Twain’s gift for disparity in its various forms, and his blending of those forms throughout his career, enabled him to tell jokes with buried truths, and to express ironic, even tragic statements in a witty, extravagant fashion. He could be simultaneously comic and serious, to the delight and instruction and sometimes confusion of his readers and lecture audiences. In October 1865, when Twain decided to turn his full attention to “seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures,” he called it a “poor, pitiful business.” 14 By 1873, after writing four books and having been enthusiastically received by cultivated English readers and audiences, he had new respect for his chosen profession, writing to the editor in chief of the New York Tribune that “I am not a man of trifling literary consequence.” 15 Toward the end of his career, in July 1906, he reviewed with satisfaction “these forty years wherein I have been playing professional humorist before

The Shape of a Humorist’s Career

7

the public.” 16 In those four decades, Mark Twain had changed the landscape of humor. By humorist, Twain meant a person with a keen eye for disparities in human behavior and the incongruities of life, since humor is always a matter of pairings. Twain’s writing is often based on a factual situation, from his experience or historical reading, which he then exaggerates, or challenges, in order to apply pressure, and to provide an alternative understanding. This alternative understanding may be amusing or not, or both, but it is essential to his best works, early and late. Twain instinctively searches for a contrast to a statement, idea, or event, especially one that others may not have noticed. If there is no contrast inherent in his material, he will invent one, as in his 1867 letters to the Missouri Democrat, in which “Mark Twain” denounces female suffrage (“I want to protest against the whole business”) and a fictional “Mrs. Mark Twain” responds in kind, attacking “the vile, witless drivelings of that poor creature who degrades me with his name.” 17 Sometimes he provides contrast by using a fanciful conceit, such as his description of the angels who appear in paintings by the old masters. (“They are always on deck when there is a miracle to the fore—so as to get put in the picture, perhaps. Angels are as fond of that as a fire company.” 18) At other times disparity is created by language that is deliberately out of step with the topic. (After reading Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of the Will, Twain wrote to the Reverend Joseph Twichell that he had “a strange and haunting sense of having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic.” 19) It may seem gratuitous at this late date to insist that Twain is a humorist, but obvious truths are sometimes the most overlooked. Mark Twain is America’s—perhaps the world’s—best known humorous writer. Yet many commentators in his time and our own have thought of humor as merely an attractive surface feature, a sugar coating on a social or philosophical pill, rather than a crucial part of both the meaning and the structure of Twain’s writings. He is a writer whose lifelong mode of perception is essentially humorous, a writer who sees the world in the sharp clash of contrast, whose native language is exaggeration, whose vision unravels and reorganizes our perceptions, for humor celebrates oddity, opposition, dislocation, rethinking. Humor, in all its mercurial complexity, is at the center of Mark Twain’s talent, his successes, and his limitations. It is as a humorist—amiably comic, sharply satiric, and grimly ironic—that he is best understood. FORTY-FIVE YEARS AS A SERIO-HUMORIST Mark Twain’s first published piece, written when he was fifteen, was a joke on the laziness and pretensions of a fellow printer’s apprentice, Jim Wolf, who boarded with the Clemens family. It was followed by hundreds of bur-

8

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lesques, parodies, caricatures, hoaxes, and satires, produced at first in the margins of Twain’s careers as typesetter, steamboat pilot, miner, and reporter; and then as his main line of work as feature writer and comic lecturer in California and Nevada. By the time he achieved national acclaim with “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” published twelve days before his 30th birthday, Twain had served a decade-and-a-half apprenticeship in humorous writing. As he graduated from sketches to books—The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873)—Twain maintained the comedy while honing the satire and the considerable body of literary skills he had been fitfully developing in his juvenilia: narrative immediacy, persuasive characterization, pungent dialect, and a limber style closer to speech than that of earlier American writers. By the time he arrived at the major phase of his career in the middle 1870s, Mark Twain was capable of writing factual reportage, broad burlesque, parody, straightforward narrative, satire, eloquent description, and serio-humorous prose—sometimes, to the confusion of genre purists, all in the same work. By then he was reaching beyond the contemporary humorists with whom he continued to be grouped by reviewers, and he tried increasingly to distance himself from these embarrassing country cousins, self-declared “phunny phellows” such as Artemus Ward, Bill Nye, and Josh Billings. Twain was relentless in his attacks on stale jokes and insufferable jokers. Sir Dinadan, the official court humorist in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is an “armor-plated ass” whose jokes had “reached that state of wear where the teller has to do the laughing himself while the other person looks sick.” 20 On the other hand, Twain also distanced himself from what he called the “big literary fish,” 21 writing to his friend W. D. Howells that I bored through Middlemarch during the past week, with its labored & tedious analyses of feelings & motives, its paltry & tiresome people, its unexciting & uninteresting story, & its frequent blinding flashes of single-sentence poetry, philosophy, wit, & what-not, & nearly died from the over-work. I wouldn’t read another of those books for a farm. . . . I can’t stand George Eliot, & Hawthorne and those people . . . and as for the Bostonians, I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that. 22

A later letter roasted Howells’ much-revered Jane Austen: “It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.” 23 While he continued to write comic sketches, Mark Twain’s main energies after 1870 were absorbed by longer, more ambitious, more thoughtful narratives, located somewhere between Josh Billings and Jane Austen. He is conventionally seen as a jokester who grew up to become a novelist, although neither classification is entirely adequate. Even his early joking was often pointed and meaningful. And his novels are sui generis. A self-described “jack-leg” novelist who was “not born with the novel-writing gift,” 24 Twain

The Shape of a Humorist’s Career

9

created his own hit-and-run improvisational genres: picaresque adventures, travel accounts, medieval romances, detective stories, science fiction, philosophical speculation. An author who claimed to prefer the literature of fact— biography and history—to fiction, 25 Twain produced books that combine fact and fiction based on his own life (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson), his travels (The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator), and his historical reading (The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Joan of Arc). Sometimes—especially in the travel books—autobiography, journalism, and history are merged, for Mark Twain made up structure as he went along. The extended narratives are more complex than his earlier humorous skits, but Twain had not abandoned his career as a humorist for the deeper waters of Literature. Rather, his combination of humor and quasi-factual literature transformed both. His humor gave his literature brightness, and his subject matter gave his humor carrying power that transcended the ephemeral careers of nineteenth-century comedians. Across the years his topics and tone changed. Twain’s early works sometimes create comedy for its own sake; the major works of the middle period—from “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875) through Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885) to Connecticut Yankee (1889)— brilliantly combine comedy and satire; the later works drift to irony. Over the course of his lifetime, the targets of his censure expanded from commonplace foibles (patent medicines and relentless salesmen and noisy children) to Sunday school pieties to romantic literature to Mississippi Valley society to human history and finally to the nature of man. But Mark Twain’s awareness of incongruity, and the strategies he employed for articulating that awareness, such as contrast and exaggeration, are the foundation stones for his entire 45-year career, as he evolved from comedian to satirist to sage. Throughout this career he was, as he first called himself in 1867, a “serio-humorous” author and lecturer. 26 As a young reporter, Twain used to mix comic squibs in with his facts. As he advanced to travel writing and lecturing, he would alternate comedy and descriptive eloquence, according to the following plan: Any lecture of mine ought to be a running narrative-plank, with square holes in it, six inches apart, all the length of it; & then in my mental shop I ought to have plugs (half marked “serious” & the others marked “humorous”) to select from & jam into these holes according to the temper of the audience. 27

This procedure led many reviewers to comment on both “flashes of humor which convulsed his hearers with laughter, and gleams of sentiment which almost induced the wish that he might not resume the humorist’s vein.” 28 As his ideas deepened and his talent matured, Twain moved beyond

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alternation by integrating humorous and serious elements, for he came to believe that comedy frequently had a grim side and, conversely, that the comic was forever peeking out from behind the black skirts of tragedy. The essence of Twain’s achievement as a humorist, like that of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molière, comes not simply from his gift for the comic, but from his keen sense of the ludicrous in the “cheap shams and windy pretence” of human beings and in the often wayward aim of fate. 29 Throughout his career, Twain built his plots on the dichotomies essential for humor: pilgrims and sinners, experienced hand and tenderfoot, children and adults, sound heart and deformed conscience, prince and pauper, Bridgeport and Camelot, man and angel. The contrasts between Bemis’s buffalo and ordinary quadrupeds, Horace Bixby and the cub pilot, Miss Watson’s heaven and the Widow Douglas’s, Merlin’s magic and Hank Morgan’s technological miracles not only reinforce but embody the meaning of the texts in which they occur: the wonder of the West, the rocky road to maturation, the anthropomorphic nature of religion, the quarrel between superstition and science. Understanding Mark Twain as a humorist also helps us to understand his spasmodic habits of composition and his episodic plots, which produced both brilliant successes and embarrassing duds. It illuminates interpretive problems old and new—haphazard narrative organization, the endlessly debated ending of Huckleberry Finn, the sometimes bizarre juxtapositions in Connecticut Yankee, Twain’s supposed racism, his putative pessimism, apparent inconsistencies in plot and idea, and the hit-or-miss productions of the final fifteen years of his life. In the mid-eighteen nineties, Mark Twain suffered the collapse and bankruptcy of his publishing firm, the failure of the Paige typesetter in which he had invested deeply, and the death of his 24-year-old daughter Susy—events that are commonly evoked to explain the bleakness of many later writings. Yet Twain had recovered his financial footing by 1898, and would leave his sole surviving daughter a considerable fortune at his death in 1910. Susy’s death, however painful, was not unique, for Mark Twain had the misfortune throughout his life to experience the premature deaths of fourteen of his closest family members. Four of his siblings, three of his children, and a niece died as children or young adults; his father, two brothers-in-law, two nephews, and his wife all died between the ages of 39 and 58. Twain came to believe that the greatest disparity was life itself, proceeding inexorably from birth to oblivion. Much of the late humor can indeed be characterized as grim and sardonic, but the bitterness and asperity of Twain’s late works have been oversold. What hasn’t been recognized is how much fun there is in his negatives. In a letter in 1899 he described to Howells the bleak project that would become The Mysterious Stranger: “I believe I can make it tell what I think of Man, & how he is constructed, & what a shabby poor ridiculous thing he is, & how mistaken he is in his estimate of his character & powers &

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qualities & his place among the animals.” 30 Yet the grim cast of these remarks is qualified by the author’s gleeful enthusiasm in the project: “It is a luxury! an intellectual drunk.” And the rest of the letter crackles with Twainian joie de vivre. It contains a spirited attack on publisher Frank Bliss (“Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag”), a complaint about children’s lack of practical value (“If I could beget a typewriter—but no, our fertile days are over”), a comment on Livy Clemens’ haphazard spelling (“a person who is not born to spell cannot learn—& in time, association with that kind of people rots one’s own spelling”), a sketch of tea-party conversationalists (“one should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God”), and a vignette about a sweet young lady and her prodigious dog who blocked traffic on a Viennese sidewalk while the dog raised his leg and washed down a palace (“That dog was loaded for bear . . . they ought to water [him] at home”). Part of Twain’s unique talent is his ability to carry the strategies and the ebullience of comedy into serious topics. The three unfinished manuscript versions of The Mysterious Stranger contain—along with their satiric comments on human nature—puns, jokes, boyhood adventures, a comic love story, and numerous gibes aimed at corrupt priests, Catholicism, and the Pope. Much of the levity was edited out of the text issued posthumously in 1916 by Twain’s literary executor A. B. Paine and Harper’s editor Frederick Duneka, a Roman Catholic whom Twain described in his autobiography as having “a good literary instinct and judgement as long as his religion does not get into his way.” 31 Duneka and Paine reformed the bad priest in Twain’s manuscript into an astrologer, one of hundreds of major alterations in the book published six years after Twain’s death without any indication of the heavy-handed posthumous editing and revision. Harper’s commissioned N. C. Wyeth to create a full-page color illustration of the doubly fictitious astrologer, which appeared on the cover of this doubly fictitious volume. It was partly this corrupt edition, and the commentary on it, that set in motion the still-current idea that Mark Twain ended his life as a bitter pessimist. The late autobiographical dictations, made by Twain in his seventies, were also subject to selective and unfortunate editing in the four fragmentary versions in which they saw print in the twentieth century. When the ongoing comprehensive California edition of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (volume one appeared in 2010) is completed in its entirety of perhaps two thousand pages, it will demonstrate that Mark Twain’s last major literary project contains a remarkable amount of sustained and effective, and often amiable, humorous writing. Twain did indeed fulminate in his later years against what he called “the damned human race,” but at the same time he designated his companionship with three old friends as The Damned Human Race Luncheon Club. There is much humor in the late works, and even when they are not

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amusing they demonstrate the strategies of a humorist, for irony is disparity in chains. A CENTURY OF CRITICISM As Mark Twain’s fame grew, reviewers and critics struggled to find an explanation. They faced a difficulty, since their culture believed that laughter gratified man’s animal nature and that humor was—however momentarily pleasurable—inferior. Abraham Lincoln’s penchant for droll stories and epigrams, for quoting Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Kerr, and Petroleum V. Nasby, was criticized even by his cabinet: Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase told a friend that “I can’t treat this war as a joke.” 32 Ward, Kerr, and Nasby were fit companions for a roistering prince or a local politician, but not for a king or president. Brander Matthews analyzed these nineteenth-century attitudes, and their implications for Mark Twain, in a perceptive 1896 essay entitled “The Penalty of Humor,” which claimed that “we are ashamed of our laughter”: often we think it is a thing to be apologized for [and that] blinds us to the other merits of a writer who may amuse us. . . . Because [Twain] is primarily a humorist, because he is free from cant and sham pathos, because he does not take himself too seriously, because his humor is free, flowing, unfailing, because his laughter is robust and contagious and irresistible, [he] is set down in most accounts of American literature as a funny man only, . . . dismissed with a line or two of patronizing comment. . . . Mr. Clemens, having more humor than any one else of his generation, has had to pay a higher price. 33

Comic lecturers and writers were, in the phrase of the time, “mere humorists.” Professor Charles F. Richardson shook a warning finger at such jokers and jesters, including Mark Twain, in his stolid 1016-page tome on American Literature published in 1886: Clever as they are, [they] must make hay while the sun shines. Twenty years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in some higher literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the privileged comedians of the republic. Humor alone never gives its masters a place in literature; it must coexist with literary qualities, and must usually be joined with such pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or Holmes. 34

Today, when Lamb and company are relegated to anthologies, Charles F. Richardson is unknown, and Mark Twain is riding high, this judgment seems silly. To understand it fully, we need to untangle its two premises. The first— that humor is second-rate—has eroded over time, thanks in part to Twain himself. The second premise, that humor must co-exist with something else,

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is more useful. A humorous statement can be judged by both the cleverness of its style and the significance of its thought. Knock-knock jokes and other puns, to take an extreme example, can be momentarily amusing, but they have virtually no content. They are like a flashy dresser who we might say is “all style,” implying he or she lacks substance. Mark Twain, who called the pun the “last and saddest evidence of intellectual poverty,” 35 would agree, and dictated his thoughts about nineteenth-century humorists in a passage in his Autobiography that surprisingly echoes Richardson’s admonition: “Why have [earlier humorists] perished? Because they were merely humorists. Humorists of the ‘mere’ sort cannot survive. . . . Humor must not professedly teach, it must not professedly preach; but it must do both if it would live forever.” Then, perhaps sensing a little Richardsonian pomposity in his own declaration, Twain demonstrates his remarkable combination of intellectual substance and humorous style by undercutting his overstatement: “By forever, I mean thirty years.” 36 Not willing to be trapped by a one-dimensional view of his career, Twain also argued for the comic side of the serio-humorous, writing to Andrew Lang that I have been misjudged, from the very first. I have never tried in even one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but have done my best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would have satisfied my dearest ambition at any time; for they could get instruction elsewhere, and I had two chances to help to the teacher’s one: for amusement is a good preparation for study and a good healer of fatigue after it. 37

Humor is a way of looking at the world aslant and a gift for presenting that vision in a striking manner. A humorist, as Twain came to embody the term, is not someone who is always amusing, or who always writes about funny topics. Rather, a Twainian serio-humorist is someone who brings to the subject, regardless of its content, an eye for disparity and the possibilities of irony, skepticism about human motives, and a penchant for overturning expectation. These attributes are expressed in compelling narratives and with fresh and surprisingly apt phrasing and the italicizing force of over- and understatement. Mark Twain’s genius lies in joining perceptive commentary about the human condition with an arresting style, a powerful blend which is further enhanced by his abilities to capture character, produce the sounds and rhythms of speech, spin out a narrative, and vividly evoke both place and time. Thus he is a humorist whose talents overflowed the usual boundaries of the category, flooding the adjacent territories of journalism, travel writing,

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the novel, biography, children’s books, science fiction, the mystery story, religious commentary, and the philosophic essay. In the nineteenth century, Mark Twain’s champions as well as his critics tended to accept the inferiority of humor because they associated it with the broad burlesque of literary jokesters, misspellers, punsters, and slapstick lecturers. His critics complained that he had done “perhaps more than any other living writer to lower the literary tone of English speaking people.” 38 His champions defended Twain from the charge of being merely a humorist by insisting on the seriousness, the morality of his writing, arguing that, as W. D. Howells put it, “his humor is at its best the foamy break of the strong tide of earnestness.” 39 The twentieth century witnessed a new appreciation of humor impelled by the publication in 1905 of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious, 40 and furthered by the commercialization of comedy, the exploitation of humor in advertising and entertainment, and a general decline in public piety. The sort of remark that Twain made about Theodore Roosevelt (“the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War” 41), which he embargoed from print until after Roosevelt’s death and his own, is now a staple of public commentary. Sitting presidents are sitting ducks. Publishers’ blurbs conventionally insist that almost every contemporary novelist, no matter how bleak his or her vision, is a comic genius. Yet lurking behind these apparent affirmations is a lingering Victorian suspicion, as I discovered when, newly appointed as an assistant professor, I saddened my chairman, a scholar of Renaissance literature, by designing a course on American humor. Several years later I was invited to talk on the topic in Bonn—an occasion that was announced with printed invitations. The title I proposed, “The Importance of Not Being Earnest,” was rejected by the speakers’ committee as “not serious enough” for formal invitations to a lecture on humor. Twentieth-century criticism of Mark Twain perpetuated both the denigration of the mere humorist and the promotion of the moralist, ignoring Howells’ shrewd afterthought to his central argument that Twain was “the most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men”: But it would be rather awful if the general recognition of his prophetic function should . . . [renounce] the humor that has endeared him to mankind. It would be well for his younger following to beware of reversing the error of the elder, and taking everything in earnest, as these once took nothing in earnest from him. 42

That is what often happened after 1900: younger generations of critics tended to concentrate on Twain’s prophetic function and slight the comedy commingled so adroitly with his earnestness. William Lyon Phelps—“a college professor in good standing” as Mencken called him—was one of the first aca-

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demics to claim, in 1907, that Mark Twain was “our foremost living American writer,” a claim that leapfrogged over Twain's comedy. Phelps insisted that “he is much more than a humorist” for “I have never known a frivolous person who really enjoyed or appreciated Mark Twain.” 43 The procession that followed Phelps, steering well clear of frivolity and largely ignoring the common reader, established Twain as our foremost social critic—a bold iconoclast and bitter satirist who exploded pretension and hypocrisy and laid the genteel tradition in its grave. Twain’s works attacking politicians, colonialism, imperialism, and war were much praised and often reprinted. By the middle of the twentieth century, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had become a standard, virtually inevitable school text and its “themes” of compassion and brotherhood were dutifully taught by white teachers as a powerful depiction of the evils of slavery. Now, two generations after the integration of American schools and the rise of an African-American perspective in literary studies, Twain's portrayal of Jim’s ignorance and gullibility has come increasingly under attack. In recent years, still neglecting Mark Twain’s humor, some critics have disparaged rather than praised his prophetic function, indicting him as a preacher of the gospel of wealth, an ambitious if unsuccessful businessman, a friend of plutocrats, a racist, a materialist—like Hank Morgan—who believes that the world can be saved with tooth-wash, telephones, and blasting powder. A biography in the 1990s, yet another ship venturing on the perilous seas of lay psychoanalysis, claims Twain was “pathogenic,” “narcissistic,” “infantile,” “masochistic,” “pedophilic,” and suffered from, among other things, “psychic arrestment,” “megalomania,” “paranoia,” and “hypochondria”: “He was childish, malicious, excessively ambitious, self-indulgent, destructive, vulgar, sentimental, exploitative, rationalist, skeptical, atheistic, mechanistic, antiaristocratic, and elitist. He fantasized the possession of enormous power and of wealth beyond measure. He suffered from bitterness, terror, guilt, and despair.” 44 This view of Mark Twain tells us a good deal about ourselves and our postmodern world, for literary criticism, like all forms of perception, is a matter of reading in as well as reading out. Much recent Twain scholarship focuses on identity politics. These discussions are important, and useful in connecting Twain’s work to current academic concerns and in teasing out the full ramifications of his writings. They are also inevitable, since he has become an American cultural touchstone, and is routinely invoked on all sides of the ongoing debates that characterize a nation engaged in self-definition since its beginning. Sometimes Mark Twain—as iconoclast, democrat, anti-imperialist, humanitarian, cultural critic—is the hero of these discussions; sometimes—as proper Victorian, aristocrat, chauvinist, racist, prisoner of culture—he is the villain. Ultimately, however, these many flourishing branches of inquiry need to be connected to the main trunk, which is Twain’s

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career as a humorist—a career which has weathered all the critical and theoretical storms, since readers around the world continue to recognize that Mark Twain “is funny and talks about real things at the same time,” as my nine-year-old daughter put it, when I read to her the chapter in Connecticut Yankee in which Launcelot and his knights ride to the rescue on bicycles. At the other end of the reader spectrum, Louis J. Budd, in the preface to the reissue of his Mark Twain, Social Philosopher, thirty-nine years after its initial publication, confesses to “the wish that my book had made more vivid the pleasures of encountering Mark Twain’s mind and personality. Though I consider sociopolitical ideas . . . supremely important, we care about his particular questions and answers primarily because of his gift for humor.” 45 Some of the questions that are currently being asked about Twain—what is wrong with his writings and what was wrong with him?—are based on the premises that he is somehow a failure and that the task of criticism is to dismantle. That strategy is effective in tempering simplistic notions of a presumably serene, heroic author and his unblemished masterpieces, though it tips the balance too far in the other direction. As James Thurber put it, “you might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.” 46 A HUMORIST’S SELF-DEFINITION This study begins with an overview of humor that reverses the usual tendency to assume we all know instinctively what humor is, a tendency that has led some critics to treat the topic superficially or dodge it altogether. After having established a specific basis for discussion, we can then proceed to a consideration of Mark Twain’s writings and career, seen from a perspective that claims his literary genius stems from his vision, his strategies, and his achievements in creating humorous prose—sometimes amiable, sometimes caustic—that sent his books around the world in eighty languages and has kept them exuberantly in print for more than a century. As early as the mid1860s, Twain was praising examples of excellent comedy: What with a long season of sensational, snuffling dramatic bosh, and tragedy bosh, and electioneering bosh, and a painful depression in stocks that was anything but bosh, the people were settling down into a fatal melancholy . . . when [comedian Dan] Setchell appeared in the midst of the gloom. . . . And since that night all the powers of dreariness combined have not been able to expel the spirit of cheerfulness he invoked. 47

At the same time, Twain was beginning to define how comic excellence could be achieved: “Does [Fred Franks] not possess the first virtue of a comedian, which is to do humorous things with grave decorum and without seeming to know that they are funny?” 48 He invariably refers to himself as a

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humorist when he discusses his authorial career, a career that first became clear to him in the fall of 1865, in San Francisco, just as he was turning thirty. On the 19th of October, a day after finishing “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” Mark Twain wrote to his brother that he had had a “call” to humorous literature. 49 When later he appeared in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, he rejoiced in having an audience that “I sit down before in perfect serenity (for the simple reason that it don’t require a ‘humorist’ to paint himself stripèd & stand on his head every fifteen minutes).” 50 When he was asked to make a public statement about the Tilden/Hayes election of 1876, he considered the matter carefully: “When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.” 51 Writing the next year in the Traveller’s Record concerning his new house in Hartford, Twain described himself as “author, architect, humorist.” 52 In June 1888, Twain received the first of his four honorary degrees, a Master of Arts from Yale. It came at a good time, for he had been stung by Matthew Arnold’s essays denigrating the American “addiction to ‘the funny man,’” and characterizing Twain’s humor as “attractive to the Philistine of the more gay and light type.” 53 Twain used his thank-you note to Yale president Timothy Dwight, published in the Hartford Courant, to reply to the remarks of the recently deceased Arnold by making an eloquent defense of his profession as a humorist. The late Matthew Arnold rather sharply rebuked the guild of American "funny men" in his latest literary delivery, and therefore your honorable recognition of us is peculiarly forcible and timely . . . [reminding] the world that ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it—the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties. 54

To his Hartford friend and Courant editor Charles Clarke, Mark Twain wrote that he was “mighty proud” of his Yale degree, for “I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any College in any age of the world, as far as I know.” 55 The species in this self-identifying taxonomy is Author, the sub-species, Humorist, a term whose meaning Twain both broadened and deepened. In calling himself a humorist, Twain meant that sometimes he was an exaggerating entertainer, pointing out the strange conjunctions and curious mishaps of everyday life. Sometimes he was a slashing satirist, taking down fools and knaves, questioning authority, spearing hypocrisy, exposing the emperors who have no clothes. Sometimes he took on the whole shebang, confronting the contradictions of benign providence and malign fate, of human love and human ha-

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tred, of happiness and suffering. Often these genres merged, for Twain’s uniqueness lay in his ability to be wickedly funny and deeply serious at the same time, questioning the existence of God (who knows?), the nature of man (not as great as we had thought), and our relation to other species (who are superior to humans in some respects). Mark Twain’s originality lay not in the content of his opinions, but in his courage to tread where others walked lightly or not at all, in his ability to state what many thought but few could articulate, and in his gift for expressing common wisdom with uncommon perspective, surprising twists, and a unique pungency which made old adages freshly memorable. In May 1907, when Mark Twain received a cable inviting him to come to Oxford to receive an honorary degree, he confessed frankly that he thought it was about time. Never falsely modest, he stated that “in my own peculiar line I have stood at the head of my guild” for a generation. He went on to both celebrate the academic degrees he had been awarded, and to keep them in perspective: It pleased me beyond measure when Yale made me a Master of Arts, because I didn't know anything about art; I had another convulsion of pleasure when Yale made me a Doctor of Literature, because I was not competent to doctor anybody's literature but my own, and couldn't even keep my own in a healthy condition without my wife's help. I rejoiced again when Missouri University made me a Doctor of Laws, . . . not knowing anything about laws except how to evade them and not get caught. And now at Oxford I am to be made a Doctor of Letters; . . . what I don't know about letters would make me a multimillionaire if I could turn it into cash. 56

Mark Twain thought of himself as a humorist, albeit a new kind—multifaceted, wide ranging, probing, complex, serious as well as amusing, satiric and ironic as well as comic, built for the ages as well as for the moment. We need to understand him the way he understood himself.

II

Toward a Discussion of Humor

Chapter Two

The Physics of Humor

“It is a law that humor is created by contrasts.” Mark Twain, in an 1891 interview 1

I To understand a writer whose vision of life is essentially humorous, we need first to consider the nature of humor. It is a slippery topic, one that tends to scoot away when you try to pick it up or pin it down, for humor is a complex and multifarious phenomenon that invades every aspect of human behavior and is articulated in a variety of expressions—enough to stock a small encyclopedia: absurdity amusement burlesque buffoonery caricature clowning comic comic relief comedy drollery ethnic humor farce fool funny gag graveyard (gallows, black, sick) humor 21

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hoax irony irreverence jest joke (and jocular) jollity lampoon laughter ludicrous malapropism merriment mirth mockery numbskull (moron) joke parody pasquinade practical joke pun raillery ribaldry ridicule sarcasm sardonic (grim, wry, sarcastic, cynical) humor satire sexual (indecent, risqué, blue, or dirty) jokes slapstick tall tale tragicomedy travesty whimsy wit Perhaps because of this complexity and variety, many insights into humor tend to be snapshot affairs that capture single moments, aspects, corners of humor, but fail to illuminate the whole. Sigmund Freud’s Der Witz is a monumental exception, but even that remarkable work needs to be tightened and made accessible in a contemporary context. By synthesizing perceptions from ancients and moderns, and with the assistance of recent research in the social sciences, it is possible to construct a general foundation on which most theories of humor can rest, one which both suggests its essence and allows for its infinite variety. 2 That foundation has two parts. The first could be called the physics of humor—its structure, mechanics, technique. The physics of humor is what makes something potentially funny. The second part,

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the psychology of humor, describes the relation of a potentially humorous situation to the individual participant or observer or reader or audience. Whether a potentially humorous situation is actually funny depends on what function it serves, what needs it satisfies for the individual. These aspects will be discussed in the next chapter. But first, we need to focus on physics. Discussions of laughter, humor, and comedy can seem bewilderingly diverse. Aristotle traces humor to “some defect or ugliness”; Sir Philip Sidney notes that “laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature.” Bergson calls it “something mechanical encrusted on the living”; Schopenhauer states that “the cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of [an] incongruity”; Bellezza refers to “some unexpected observation that scatters or . . . disorients the ideas and sensations of the reader.” 3 But if we concentrate on what Freud calls the “construction” of humor, what Jean Paul calls “the object,” what Lauter calls “what we laugh at [rather than] why we laugh,” a shape begins to emerge. 4 We can see that shape looming in the many terms conventionally used in descriptions of humor: abnormality, contrast, deviation, dichotomy, discrepancy, disorientation, disparity, displacement, disruption, distortion, exaggeration, inappropriateness, incongruity, inconsistency, irreverence, inversion, juxtaposition, perspective, shock, reversal, surprise, unpredictable. That most of these terms are less various than they first appear can be seen from their Latin roots: ab: away from contra: against de: from, off, apart, away, down, out dis: apart, asunder, not ex: outside, out of, away from, not in, ir: not juxta: close by re + vers: turn back un: opposite of, contrary to, not These roots and terms demonstrate that there are always two parts to the physics of the humor equation: something is different from (away, against, off, not) something else, a ≠ b. There is no humorous statement or situation that cannot be factored down to a duality, whether it is the two meanings of the crux word of the humble pun that the 16-year-old Sam Clemens couldn’t resist, adding italics so readers of the Hannibal Journal wouldn’t miss the point (“We are all subject to change—except printers; they never have any spare change” 5), or the two views of humankind that energize the adult Mark Twain’s rambunctious excursions into theology:

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Chapter 2 Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the “noblest work of God.” 6

Not all dichotomies, of course, are comic. Some may be simply baffling, and initiate a puzzle-solving response. Others may be frightening. But humor always begins with a disparity, and occasionally that disparity is humorous by itself. In the word that is sometimes cited as the only one-word joke in the English language, “Kalamazoo,” the explosive last syllable is amusingly out of whack with the preceding syllables, like a splash following three running steps on a diving board. Partially similar four-syllable place names, like Honolulu or Kalamata, contain no such phonetical fun. Usually, however, disparity is only the first step in what makes a statement or a situation humorous. A person driving across a railroad intersection who glances down the track and discovers a locomotive a hundred feet away will probably not find the moment amusing. Yet it might be, when told the next day. Or when made into a film, with Buster Keaton at the controls. Or when converted into a parlor joke, in which the victim opens what appears to be a box of candy only to have a paper locomotive spring out. One has to have the right relation to a situation to find it funny, but regardless of that relation some kind of disparity or contrast, with an accompanying upset of expectations, must be present in the first place for a situation to have the potential for humor. There are many kinds of humorous dichotomies, ranging from simple to complex. The simplest kinds, the raw materials for banana peel humor, are accidents or mistakes, such as a slip or pratfall (in earlier centuries, “prat” was slang for buttocks), a mispronunciation (a student whose native language was French once told me that my lecture had “converted all the septics”), a malapropism (a country woman reported to us that her neighbor, a notorious drinker, had died of “galoshes of the liver”), a metaphor run amok (“The local bank bit off more than it could chew by engaging in cutthroat competition with the giants of finance.”), or an incongruous name (in this category we might put the original names of many film stars: Archibald Leach, Marion Morrison, Issur Danielovitch, Thomas Mapother; birth names, respectively, of Cary Grant, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Tom Cruise). 7 Misunderstandings can function the same way. I once asked a clerk in a sporting goods store if they carried squash balls. “No sir,” he replied, “all our equipment is first quality.” Juxtaposition is the key to these accidents of daily life, just as it is in reported incidents that we find amusing, such as the squibs that gleefully fill idle spaces in newspapers and magazines: Atlanta (UPI)—A man in a gorilla mask, accused of trying to rob a McDonald’s restaurant at bananapoint . . . was charged with aggravated assault and

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attempted robbery. Witnesses told detectives a man wearing a gorilla mask leaped over the counter of the hamburger stand, pulled a banana from his pocket and demanded that the startled clerk open the cash register.

All of these accidents and incidents have the same common denominator: what has happened differs from what usually happens. The normal course of events is disrupted, our expectations are not fulfilled, we are surprised. Some humor attempts to take advantage of the duality built into accidents by creating them, thus producing “slapstick humor,” a term that derives from early stage comedies in which characters whacked one another, often on the prat, with noise-making paddles constructed of two flat pieces of wood fastened at one end to a handle. The wooden nutmeg, the exploding cigar, the thrown pie are created accidents, as are the baggy pants and antics of a clown. Comic lecturers and journalists in the mid-nineteenth-century America of Mark Twain’s youth were addicted to linguistic slapstick, as Josh Billings’ “Essa on the Muel” demonstrates: The mule is haf hoss, and haf Jackass, and then kums to a full stop, natur diskovering her mistake. Tha weigh more, akordin tu their heft, then enny other kreetur, except a crowbar. Tha cant hear enny quicker, nor further than the hoss, yet their ears are big enuff for snow shoes. You kan trust them with enny one whose life aint worth enny more than the mules. 8

Perhaps this acrobatic orthography struck our great-great-grandparents as humorous because many of them, in an age of increasing literacy, expanded educational opportunities, and newly established newspapers and magazines, had just learned how to spell. The visual distinction between enuff and enough represents a facile kind of disparity, as do pseudonyms used by young Sam Clemens— “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab” and “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.” These language games are based on pure juxtaposition, without much significance, though perhaps a hint of anti-aristocratic pleasure is generated from seeing the shirtsleeve casualness of enuff, enny, kreetur, and Snodgrass rub against the formality of correct prose and distinguished presidents. A contemporary combination of linguistic slapstick and political innuendo can be seen in the “Bushisms” compiled by Jacob Weisberg for Slate on the World Wide Web, which reprints verbal faux pas of former president George W. Bush: “I firmly believe the death tax is good for people from all walks of life all throughout our society.” “Our nation must come together to unite.” “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” 9 Beyond these simple juxtapositions lie more complex disparities with greater significance. A business sign on Interstate 85 north of Atlanta provides not only a shock of difference, but an insight into the American character as well: “VIP Massage Parlor: Truckers Welcome.” A sign in Old Fort, NC announces that “Dr. Holler” practices “Family Dentistry.” After the pub-

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lication of G. & C. Merriam’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961, the New Yorker published a cartoon that, through the disparity of ungenteel language in a dignified environment, neatly summarized the outpouring of reviews that attacked the Third’s abandonment of prescriptive lexicography. In an elegant Merriam office suite, a prim secretary informs a visitor, who has asked to see the editor in chief, that “Dr. Gove ain’t in.” When one reads that Mark Twain established a Damned Human Race Luncheon Club, the phrase is amusing because the bleak expectation established by “Damned Human Race” is set on its ear by the geniality of “Luncheon Club.” As the phrase sinks in, the pleasure in its disparity is increased by the gradual perception of its accuracy—a pithy rendering of the mixed view of human beings that Twain and his contemporaries struggled with in their later years, as do many of us today. This disparity-with-significance is illustrated by the so-called “Freudian slip,” as in a note a careless student might write to his professor: “I’ve been working all weak on my paper, but I can’t seem to finish it.” The slip part of the term refers to the difference, in this instance a spelling error; the Freudian part describes the significance which, according to popular understanding of Freudian theory, is an unconscious intention that underlies and creates what appears on the surface to be an accident. The combination of accident (unexpected error) and meaning (unexpected significance of the error) provides an appropriate inappropriateness, a “concordia discors,” as Horace put it, that highlights the disparity and intensifies the possibility for humor. 10 Whether accidental or intentional, simple or complex, disparity provides the fundamental building block for the physics of humor. The design of this disparity is a many-splendored thing. Sometimes part b of the a ≠ b contrast lies outside the situation or the text. In his “Famous Poems Illustrated,” James Thurber creates humor by reprinting, word for word, nineteenth-century poems that are now out of fashion, and emphasizing their unfashionableness with illustrations, such as the earnest maiden clinging desperately to the clapper of the church bell in “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight”: “Sexton,” Bessie’s white lips faltered, pointing to the prison old, With its turrets tall and gloomy, with its walls dark, damp, and cold, “I’ve a lover in that prison, doomed this very night to die, At the ringing of the Curfew, and no earthly help is nigh; Cromwell will not come till sunset,” and her lips grew strangely white As she breathed the husky whisper:— “Curfew must not ring to-night.” 11

The disparity and the joke are not in the poem, but between the poem and the reader who does not admire the sentimentality of the melodramatic octameters by sixteen-year-old Rose Hartwick, who sent them to a Detroit newspaper in 1870. A similar gulf of sensibility is created for many readers and viewers by advertisements. A seller of Christmas trees, for example,

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attempting to cash in on environmental concerns, describes his harvest as follows: “For many years these trees have beautified the land, cleansed the air, provided you with oxygen, and protected your water supply. Their removal has freed other trees to make a similar contribution.” In the political arena, satirical humor can be created by simply presenting the views and statements to which antagonists are strongly opposed, as in Milhouse—a film made in the late 1960s by stitching together speeches by Richard Nixon. In 2003, opponents of the war in Iraq—presumably waged because of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”—were quick to note the difference between that phrase and President Bush’s later revision to “weapons of mass destruction program related activities.” II Disparity is a relative term and some similarity, some linkage, some cohabitation of the same world by the two things being contrasted, must be present for a difference to be perceived. a ≠ b is perhaps better rendered as a ≠ a.′ “Galoshes of the liver” is humorous because galoshes sounds something like cirrhosis. “Overshoes of the liver” would not be funny, unless the auditor’s train of thought could be routed from overshoes to cirrhosis via galoshes junction. It is difficult to make much out of the difference between, say, a post office and an armadillo; they inhabit distinct spheres. But if we switch the armadillo to a tortoise or a snail, possibilities emerge. Linked by the concept of slowness and yoked by rhyme, an unexpected similarity-within-adifference arises, and “snail mail” is born. Even a failed disparity can be grist for the endlessly commodious mill of humor, as in a statement that might be made by a Texan who didn’t get it quite right: “That reminds me of the old story about the armadillo and the hare.” Familiar with Aesop’s fables, we would laugh at the mistake of armadillo for tortoise, yet that laugh is possible only because there is a general similarity between armadillos and tortoises. If our hypothetical Texan had got it totally wrong— “That reminds me of the old story about the bronco and the hare”—his listeners would have no way to recognize the mistake and would have to wait, humorlessly, for the story to continue. Thus the disparity necessary for humor is difference-with-similarity, since two things have to be associated in some way for a difference between them to be grasped. We use the phrase “comparing apples to oranges” (or in some European languages, apples to pears) to dismiss a presumably false analogy; the phrase works because they are both fruits and can be differentiated as well as compared. Apples can be related to, and distinguished from, dozens of things that are round, or ripe, or red; things that bud and grow and fall. But the statement that an apple is different from a factory or a pencil or a

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DC-10, while true enough, would lead most persons to shrug their shoulders. There is not enough similarity for the mind to get a grip on the difference. This similarity within disparity explains why metaphor is so often pleasurable, and why humorists deal in it so often. The wit at the heart of metaphysical poetry derives from incongruous—but still possible—comparisons that then slide into congruity. “Let man’s soul be a sphere,” says John Donne, who also lets lovers be explorers and tapers and fleas and fish and beaten gold and compass feet. The impact of these remarkable conceits is twofold. We are surprised to see unlike things, such as souls and drawing instruments, yoked together: “If [our souls] be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are two.” And we are surprised again to discover that the comparison works, that the unlikely pairing yields new meaning, that disjunction has become conjunction: Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do; And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. 12

At the extreme edge of disjunction-conjunction humor lies the joke of apparent incoherence. It involves a statement that first appears to be nonsensical, but then turns out to have a certain fractured logic. In 1896, as he sailed from India to South Africa on a lecture tour, Mark Twain commented on the omissions in the ship’s library: “Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.” 13 Garrison Keillor likes this sort of joke also. During the Monica Lewinsky fracas, actor Tim Russell, impersonating Bill Clinton on The Prairie Home Companion, noted that his dog Buddy wasn’t there. When an interviewer asked for clarification of the meaning of there, Clinton/Russell explained that there was where the thing that was supposed to have happened didn’t happen. Theorists of humor sometimes distinguish the humor of surprise from the humor of recognition. Recognition, however, what Melville called the “shock of recognition,” is also a category of surprise. In a complex joke, such as the metaphysical conceit, both the original disparity and the subsequent similarity are unexpected. Not all metaphysical poetry and not all metaphor is humorous, but all metaphor is twin-footed; the Greek root, meta + pherein, means “to carry beside.” In an essay on polysemy (the ability of words to mean more than one thing), Paul Ricoeur notes that “to grasp the same in the difference . . . is the work of the metaphoric process.” 14 Thus metaphor has the potential for humor and almost every humorist is a metaphorist. Josh Billings’ audiences, once they tired of tormented spelling, probably continued to listen and read because of the unexpected comparisons of mules to

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crowbars and snowshoes and Mexican canons. One of the best American humorists prior to Mark Twain, George Washington Harris, enlivens his tales with his boy narrator’s stream of inventive similes (“ugly es a skin’d hoss”; “thin es a stepchile’s bread an’ butter”; “a-cuttin up more shines nor a cockroach in a hot skillet”) and physical—rather than metaphysical—conceits: “But then, George, gals an’ ole maids haint the things tu fool time away on. Hits widders, by golly, what am the rale sensibil, steady-goin, never-skeerin, never-kickin, willin, sperrited, smoof pacers. They cum clost up tu the hossblock, standin still wif thar purty silky years playin, an’ the naik-veins athrobbin, an’ waits fur the word, which ove course yu gives, arter yu finds yer feet well in the stirrup, an’ away they moves like a cradil on cushioned rockers, ur a spring buggy runnin in damp san.’ A tetch ove the bridil, an’ they knows yu wants em tu turn, an’ they dus hit es willin es ef the idear wer thar own. I be dod rabbited ef a man can’t ‘propriate happiness by the skinful ef he is in contack wif sumbody’s widder, an’ is smart. Gin me a willin widder, the yeath over: what they don’t know, haint worth larnin. They hes all been tu Jamakey an’ larnt how sugar’s made, an’ knows how tu sweeten wif hit; an’ by golly, they is always ready tu use hit. All yu hes tu du is tu find the spoon, an’ then drink cumfort till yer blind.” 15

Harris’ example was not lost on Mark Twain, who praised Sut Lovingood’s Yarns in 1867 as a book that “abounds in humor,” even as he noted that “Eastern people will call it coarse and possibly taboo it.” 16 Twain would go on to create dialect more readable than Harris.’ Aiming at a wide audience, he would tame the frontier sensuality that abounds in Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, but his most famous boy narrator, much like Sut, is a metaphorical virtuoso. In Huck’s richly imagistic view of the world, lies are facts “painted up considerable,” sunlight sifting through leaves makes “freckled places on the ground,” a stranger in Pikesville “lays over the yeller fever, for interest.” The undertaker at the funeral of Peter Wilks slid around in his black gloves with his softy soothering ways, putting on the last touches, and getting people and things all ship-shape and comfortable, and making no more sound than a cat. He never spoke; he moved people around, he squeezed in late ones, he opened up passage-ways, and done it all with nods, and signs with his hands. Then he took his place over against the wall. He was the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever see; and there warn’t no more smile to him than there is to a ham. 17

Thus metaphor demonstrates the humorist’s knack for putting unlike things together, especially when the unlikely conjunction produces a shock of recognition, a new insight. Whiskey and rattlesnakes are dissimilar enough for a linkage to be amusing, and for the similarity-beyond-the-difference to be surprisingly satisfying when Huck tells us that “I’d druther been bit with a

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snake than pap’s whiskey.” 18 Often Mark Twain will put together an entertainingly discordant list, which on reflection turns out to be not so discordant: “It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.” 19 Just before leaving San Francisco in 1866, Twain wrote to his mother that he had enjoyed meeting several eminent clergymen and he planned to “make Rev. Dr Bellows trot out the fast nags of the cloth for me when I get to New York.” 20 “Nags of the cloth” is amusing because of its sharp deviation from the expected phrase, men of the cloth. Amusement trickles into wisdom as the reader begins to sense the suggestions about the ministerial profession unleashed by the horse racing metaphor: competitiveness, business enterprise, public spectacle. A good deal of humor is based on an unusual relationship that turns out to be unusually pertinent— “the sudden marriage,” as Twain put it in his notebook, “of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.” 21 III Two principles need to be kept in mind by the humorist who wishes to maximize the possibilities of disparity. The first is to keep the edge of difference sharp. “I’d druther been bit by a copperhead than a rattlesnake,” or “I’d druther been drunk on store-bought gin than pap’s whiskey” are statements that make good sense, but as the difference diminishes, the potential for humor is reduced. The humorist not only keeps the two sides of disparity distinct, but often increases the separation between them through elaboration and exaggeration. In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Twain claims that “Cooper hadn’t any more invention than a horse; and I don’t mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse.” 22 When the narrator of Roughing It is marooned by a flood at an isolated inn on the Carson River, he describes a confrontation between the landlord and one of the guests. In order to make the situation humorous, Twain makes the landlord a “meek, wellmeaning fellow” and the guest “a stalwart ruffian called ‘Arkansas,’ who carried two revolvers in his belt and a bowie knife projecting from his boot, and who was always drunk and always suffering for a fight.” 23 When Arkansas “began to shoot, and the landlord to clamber over benches,” Twain resolves the confrontation with another exaggerated contrast. The landlord’s wife appears, armed with a pair of scissors, and reduces Arkansas to “a state of permanent humiliation.” Less obvious ways of sharpening difference can involve details of style, often using repetition, that are part of the poetry of humor. Mark Twain will use alliteration to connect the first part of a phrase in order to set it against the snapper:

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the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces. 24

just as he will reverse field and use the same device to emphasize not the difference but the similarity-within-the-difference: I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey. 25

Sometimes he will repeat a word or phrase, with a spin: the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter— ‘tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning. 26

Twain will arrange the items in a list for maximum surprise by burying the wild card: then the white people came, and brought trade, and commerce, and education, and complicated diseases, and civilization. 27

Here, rather than calling attention to the contrast immediately, the humorist holds the difference back, lulling readers or auditors by leading them down the primrose path of expectation. Vaudeville routines work in a similar fashion, opening with bland and familiar exchanges: “Say, I think I’ve seen you before. Didn’t I meet you in Buffalo?” “No, you couldn’t have. I’ve never been to Buffalo.”

that set up the snap of difference in the rejoinder: “Well, neither have I. It must have been two other fellows.”

Vaudeville routines tend to be rapid-fire exchanges, a characteristic that illustrates the second principle of manipulating disparity, a principle captured by traffic signs on uphill slopes in tunnels: Keep Up Speed. Quickness is crucial to humor, for the juxtaposition that is always involved needs to come on with a rush for maximum surprise and shock. We describe a joke as having been “sprung” or “cracked,” a humorous climax as a “punch line,” a person as having “exploded” or “burst out” with laughter. We say “it struck me funny,” and the it is more likely to be amusing if it strikes fast and hard. “Brevity is the soul of wit” because surprise decays rapidly, a point that Shakespeare turns into a joke by giving the statement to long-winded, unwitty Polonius. Mark Twain, in recalling his “first literary venture” in a sketch for the Galaxy, states that, as a seventeen-year-old printer, he was setting a line of

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type which read “To Mary in H--l,” referring to Hannibal, when “I was suddenly riven from head to heel by what I regarded as a perfect thunder-bolt of humor.” 28 This realization—that “H--l” could refer to hell as well as Hannibal—is harmless enough, but the vigor of Twain’s description aptly captures the humorous process in operation. Humor is a thunderbolt affair, which thrives on the clap of juxtapositions and lightning-fast comebacks. And it has a short life span: once you get the joke, or the riddle, as Emily Dickinson states, it is over: The Riddle we can guess We speedily despise— Not anything is stale so long As Yesterday’s surprise— 29

Part of Dickinson’s wit stems from her terse dramatic situations and quick closures; about 75% of her poems have fewer than ten lines. A juxtaposition that allows one to get used to it gradually, like a ship slowly appearing on the horizon, loses the sharpness of contrast and thus its potential for humor. Standup comedians fire rapidly, so as not to give the audience a chance to get bored with what has happened or to predict what is coming. A string of Bob Hope or Johnny Carson or Jay Lenno jokes, told at a slow pace, would drift along like half-deflated balloons after the party is over. But speed is not everything in the convoluted labyrinths of humor. Rather than simply speed, the velocity principle might better be called timing. The trick is to adjust the pace so that the listener or reader is surprised but not dazed, since he or she needs to get the significance of the juxtaposition as well as the shock. We need to “catch the joke,” not have it thrown by us, as political comedian Mark Russell demonstrates when he performs in front of a live audience. Russell takes his clues from his auditors, starting a new routine after the laughter and applause from the previous one have peaked, but before they have subsided. Mark Twain’s mastery of the pause illustrates how precisely timing can be tuned. A lifelong storyteller, Twain sharpened his skill in pacing a story from observing Dan Setchell, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye, James Whitcomb Riley, and others, and from his own experience as a lecturer. His manipulation of the pause on stage is suggested by the following passage taken from a presentation by Hal Holbrook in his Mark Twain Tonight! Each plus sign (+) represents a one-second interval. Well about noon, I spurred my + animated trance + + alongside a stretch of sandy beach where I’d noticed a bevy of nude young native ladies bathing in the sea. + This was the sort of local color I was after + + + + + + for my newspaper + + + so I went down and sat on their clothes + + + + + + +

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to keep them from being stolen + + and begged them to come out for it seemed to me the sea was rising. + I was satisfied they were running some risk + + + + But they went right on with their sports, swimming races and splashing about—it was a heart-warming spectacle + + when I finally turned round to leave I was surprised to find the horse asleep again + which goes to show that there is some difference between the man and the horse + + + + + you cannot rely on a horse to gather news. + + + + + + + + + + 30

In converting the oral pause to print, the intervals necessary to give the reader time to follow humorous turns presented as afterthoughts have to be created by punctuation and short sentences: “Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.” 31 Twain’s technique, a written version of his slow stage drawl, demonstrates the difference between speed and timing. The standup comic keeps up a rapid delivery because his jokes are often similar, linear, superficial—pieces of popcorn swallowed one after the other. Mark Twain uses a slower routine to give the auditor or reader enough time to chew on his more complex material, to follow twists and turns that, for example, extend the disparity between Miss Watson’s stern piety and Huck’s gritty, common-sense pragmatism. Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. 32

Timing is also the secret of the shaggy-dog story, which Twain used on stage and in print, and which he called the epitome of the “fine and beautiful” American art of story telling: The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter. . . . The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it. 33

In Roughing It, Jim Blaine— “tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk”—unleashes a meandering monologue that begins with a ram: (“There never was a more bullier old ram than what he was”), switches to its acquisition (“Grandfather fetched him from Illinois—got him of a man by the name of Yates—Bill Yates—maybe you might have heard of him”), and drifts from Bill Yates to his father to Seth Green to Sarah Wilkerson to Sile Haw-

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kins and then out onto the broad stream of Blaine’s undifferentiated reminiscences. 34 This slowly unraveled yarn might appear to violate the principles of sharpened difference and timing established above, but in fact it affirms them. Blaine’s hapless mental navigation constantly upsets the expectation of a coherent story and the longer it continues the more the disparity builds. Blaine’s tranquil, deadpan manner also contrasts with the hilarity of his descriptions of old Miss Wagner’s glass eye (“it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t’other one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass”) and Parson Hagar’s demise (“he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute. . . . There was fourteen yards in the piece”). The joke is doubled by the innocence of the narrator—the local boys have heard Blaine before—who waits expectantly for the tale to conclude. It never does, of course, and after two thousand words, in which the old ram is never mentioned again, Jim Blaine talks himself to sleep and, along with the boys, the reader collapses in laughter. IV Why is disparity—enhanced by sharpness and intensified by precise timing—amusing? Much of the reason lies in the ways we put disparity and contrast to work, to serve our purposes and justify our view of the world. Yet disparity by itself, innocent and unfiltered by the ego, seems also to provide pleasure for its own sake. We are instantly amused by Charlie Chaplin’s stifflegged gait, a Gary Larson snake wearing rhinestone glasses, a cat walking on two legs or a human on four. So much of human life is wrapped in predictable patterns—necessarily so, since prediction is the basis of comprehension—that we are tickled by the unexpected. Patterns of language, for example, have to be predictable to be understood, but relentless repetition is boring. Thus we enjoy small twists of the patterns, such as the use of lost positives (couth behavior, defatigable effort, clement weather), retooled clichés (Thoreau’s “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity,” and “I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick”), 35 and the kaleidoscopic turns of the pun (time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana). Ford Madox Ford maintains that such variety helps produce an attractive literary style, which he defines as a succession of small surprises. Canadian psycholinguist Frank Smith provides a framework for understanding the expectation-surprise polarity in his description of the importance of prediction in cognition: What we have in our heads is a theory of what the world is like, a theory that is the basis of all our perceptions and understanding of the world, the root of all learning, the source of hopes and fears, motives and expectancies, reasoning

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and creativity. . . . We drive through a town we have never visited before, and nothing we see surprises us. There is nothing surprising about the buses and cars and pedestrians in the main street; they are predictable. But we do not predict that we might see anything—we would be surprised to see camels or submarines in the main street. Not that there is anything very surprising or unpredictable about camels or submarines in themselves—we would not be surprised to see camels if we were visiting a zoo or to see submarines at a naval base. . . . Our predictions are very specific to situations. 36

Smith’s purpose is to explain how humans are able to read, and by extension, how they understand all experience. He never mentions humor, but his description of prediction illustrates the standard against which humor—the camel on main street—operates. This contemporary insight enables us to update earlier theories of humor. Pascal, for instance, states that “Two faces that are alike, although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh when together, on account of their likeness.” Henri Bergson glosses Pascal’s example by claiming that “a really living life should never repeat itself.” 37 Given what we now know about prediction and cognition, we can better understand both the example and the explanation. Two faces that are alike seen in a heterogeneous crowd would be amusing, though the similar faces of two persons introduced to us as twins would not, just as two dogs walking perfectly in step might be funny, whereas two soldiers in step probably would not be. (In fact, amusement is more likely to derive from soldiers who, like Beetle Bailey, are out of step with the group.) Two blimps in formation might cause us to laugh, but not two F-18s. Thus twinning contains the potential for humor, which is fulfilled only if the doubling is unexpected. The key lies in the lack of expectation. And this key provides a way to understand some of the pleasure produced by excellence. Spectators who watch a splashless entry into the water climaxing a championship dive, a basketball sunk from mid-court, or a perfect carrier landing, will often catch themselves smiling; as will those who listen to a performance by Cecelia Bartholdi or Wynton Marsalis or James Galway; or those who read a passage from Shakespeare or Dante or Cervantes that expresses a thought with superlative precision. Naturalist Joe Hutto notes that blooming swamp sunflowers assault the eye as profoundly as thunder assaults the ear. It is a well-known biological phenomenon: The human mind will not function while staring at a patch of sunlit swamp sunflowers, and facial muscles are gradually subverted into the display of an involuntary smile. Human consciousness is quickly and mercifully undone by the overwhelming vision of so much perfection. 38

A really living life is so rarely perfect that perfection provides pleasure by upsetting our normal expectations.

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Innocent disparity provides a holiday, a vacation from the daily round of the ordinary. It pumps fresh air into our lungs and sends us back to work and normality with greater alertness and sharpened perspective. Variety may not be the meat and potatoes of life, but it is the spice. A mild shock is good for the system, assuming it doesn’t hurt, and it is even more pleasurable if it aligns with our needs. Issues of hurt and need, however, take us beyond the mechanics of difference, beyond physics. They lead us to psychology.

Chapter Three

The Psychology of Humor

“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it.” —Love’s Labor’s Lost 1

The most successful joke in which I have participated occurred years ago when, shortly after a reading of “Little Red Riding-Hood,” our two young children wandered into the bedroom where my wife and I had prepared a surprise. Lying on his back between the sheets, wearing a bonnet tied under his chin, was our eighty-pound shepherd-setter. The children exploded with delight at the sharp incongruities in this tableau: a dog in a human bed, black paws against the white sheets, heavy muzzle projecting from a girl’s bonnet. But as the laughter stretched on, died down and was reignited again and again, we began to fear that the children might indeed laugh themselves sick. Apparently we had set in motion a more complicated game than we had supposed. The laughter went on long after the surprise had worn off, and it became obvious that the children’s pleasure was being fueled from a new source. We recalled the intense quiet with which they had listened to the first of the tale’s two climaxes: “Oh! but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!” “The better to eat you with.” And scarcely had the wolf said this, than with one bound he was out of bed and had swallowed up Red Riding-Hood. 2

Gradually we realized that the humor they were enjoying stemmed from relief piled on top of disparity. The children’s fear of large animals, of being small and vulnerable in a huge and sometimes fierce world—fears far strong37

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er than parents often recognize—had dissolved in the discovery that the wolf in sheet clothing was only their old friend Rah-Rah, whose whiskers they pulled, on whose back they rode, and into whose friendly mouth they stuffed arrowroot cookies. Some moments of humor are created simply by disparity (a dog in a human bed), but for the most part humor has to do with the uses to which disparity is put (in the reenactment of “Little Red Riding-Hood,” taming fear). Human beings, not very good at conserving the world around them, are wonderfully adept at conserving their own experiences and turning everything they encounter to their own ends, their own needs. Juxtaposition establishes the potential for humor. Whether a juxtaposition is funny to a given person in a given place at a particular time depends on the psychology, on the relationship of the potentially humorous situation to the individual. Several years ago, during a conference that seemed to be going nowhere with a nervous graduate student, I tried to put her at ease by dropping academic topics for a moment and describing an amusing bumper sticker I had seen while driving to the office—“Just Divorced.” To my astonishment, the student burst into tears; after a few minutes she told me that her husband had walked out on her the previous evening. “Did you hear the one,” a friend says, a preface that usually begins what might be called modern vaudeville jokes, “about the two drunks who were walking along a railroad track”: ‘This is the longest set of stairs I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Oh, I don’t mind the stairs. It’s the damn low railing that’s killing me.’” That joke might not be amusing to a railroad repairman, or the occupants of a 70-story building with inoperative elevators. It might not be amusing if told in church, or at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. It might not tickle someone who is tired or sick or angry, or someone who has been awakened to hear it at two a.m. After Huck Finn escapes from Pap’s cabin and pushes off down river in a canoe in the middle of the night, he overhears two men at a ferry landing laughing about a joke one of them has just told: “then they waked up another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn’t laugh; he ripped out something brisk and said let him alone.” 3 In November 1866, Mark Twain was waylaid by highwaymen on a “lonesome, windswept road” between Gold Hill and Virginia City, and relieved of $125 in cash and a gold watch. 4 An instigator of pranks himself in his Nevada and California days, Twain was not amused to discover later that the fake holdup had been engineered by friends, even though they returned his valuables. A partisan of obscene stories, Twain failed to see the joke when someone added genitalia to the illustration of Uncle Silas in chapter 32 of an early printing of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In chapter 21 of Roughing It, the narrator describes a hilariously raucous scene in his boarding house when a middle-of-the-night accident overturns a shelf containing jars of tarantulas captured by the fourteen men who bunk together in a second-floor

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room. One of them cries, “Turn out, boys—the tarantulas is loose,” and the men scramble and leap in the dark until the landlady appears with a lantern. That chapter was written a decade after the event took place. But at the time, Twain notes, The landscape presented when the lantern flashed into the room was picturesque, and might have been funny to some people, but was not to us. Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks and beds, and so strangely attired, too, we were too earnestly distressed and too genuinely miserable to see any fun about it, and there was not the semblance of a smile anywhere visible. 5

Human perceptions are influenced by the perceiver’s age, gender, race, religion, social class, nationality, ethnicity, health, occupation, environment, and all the other things that are rolled into the contemporary slang phrase “where someone is coming from.” William James, the grandfather of modern theories of cognition and interpretation, first articulated the rationale for this concept in 1890 in his Principles of Psychology: “Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes . . . out of our own head.” 6 In the case of humor, the object before us is a disparity. What we bring to it out of our own head is the totality of our experiences and ideas—what Frank Smith calls “the theory of the world in our heads” 7 —as focused by the social and physical environment in which the meeting with the disparity takes place. Whether a given disparity is funny for a specific individual depends on what happens at the meeting, on whether the disparity serves a purpose or fulfills a need. The purposes and needs that humor can serve are innumerable, for there is virtually no corner of human experience or emotion that has not been invaded by the comic. Don Nilsen summarizes much humor research by listing four groups of functions that scholars have discerned: such psychological functions as arousal, ego defense, coping, and gaining status; such sociological functions as involvement, stroking, alienating, promoting social stability, promoting social change, superiority, and testing limits; such physiological and medical functions as increased alertness (because of adrenaline, norepinephrine, and dopamine secretions), increased respiration, increased muscle activity and heart rate (internal jogging), increased oxygenation, decreased pain and increased pleasure (because of endorphin secretion), and clearing of the lungs and tear ducts; and such educational functions as making a point memorable, keeping students awake and alert, effectively arguing and persuading, and allowing students to see things from a different perspective. 8

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These functions may overlap, or conflict, or simply wither away in the face of other perceptions with which the comic has to compete. People who are angry or suffering from hunger or occupied in sexual intercourse may find disparities irrelevant. Or just the reverse can happen, since humor, like tennis played with the net down, operates by subtle and ambiguous rules. Hunger can block a joke but a joke can also block hunger, as we sometimes try to do with the “I’m so hungry I could eat a ——” formula. And some wonderful jokes, forever lost to the world, are created by amorous couples who might be embarrassed to hear them at a nightclub or read them in a novel. In spite of the variety of applications to which people put humor, several essential needs can be identified for which the comic has a special relevance, a most-favored-nation relationship. These needs conflate many of the individual functions on Nilsen’s list, and they explain a large percentage of the psychological humorousness of humor. They are the need to relax, the need to cope, and the need to dominate. RELAXATION Life is rhythmic, and the recurring cycles in nature are echoed not only in human physical existence, but in social and institutional organizations as well. Our lives are bifurcated into units of school and play, workday and holiday, occupation and vacation, discipline and freedom, tension and release. My military service, as I recall it now, seemed to be divided between the cockpit and the barroom, the office and the ocean, the tarmac and the tennis court. The business side of these divisions promotes stability, structure, predictability. The off-duty side, although shorter in time and less important in our official values, seems as necessary to life as sleep is to wakefulness. And it is this off-duty side that is associated with humor. For a moment, laughter releases the pressures created by schedules, responsibilities, commitments, authorities, bosses, heads of businesses and heads of state, which explains the appeal of jokes aimed up the chain of command. This release of tension is pleasurable and relaxing (the word derives from the Latin verb laxare, to loosen), both physiologically and psychologically. William F. Fry Jr., of the Stanford School of Medicine, has demonstrated that laughter increases respiration, heart rate, and muscle tension, which subsequently drop to below-normal levels and a condition of physical relaxation; just as sleep research has proved that aerobic exercise in the afternoon raises the temperature, which then drops in the evening to the lower level associated with sleep. The structure of humor plays against what is expected, and the meaning of humor often plays against what is established. There is an unbuttoned pleasure in contrariness, in rebellion, in going against the grain. One might

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conjecture that unmarried couples who bought dime-store wedding rings and tiptoed their way into motels in the 1950s had more fun than those in later decades when assignations were more easily achieved. As Jonathan Swift put it, “humour is odd, grotesque, and wild.” 9 It represents the unconventional, the disruptive, the subversive, and it allows us to unwind by suspending the structure and restrictions of the work-a-day world. Relaxing, loosening the collar and the mind, is as important for groups as it is for individuals. For the individual, relaxation often has to do with releasing the grip of seriousness and responsibility. For the group, it is a matter of decreasing strangeness, breaking the ice, creating community, defusing differences and possible problems. Humor is often the catalyst of gregariousness, the lubrication for social interaction. At an uneasy moment in The Odyssey, Odysseus’ son confronts the suitors who have occupied his house: Telémakhos’ frenzy struck someone as funny, and soon the whole room roared with laughter at him, so that all tension passed. 10

Frank Capra noted that when difficulties developed on a movie set, the slightest humorous remark made everyone laugh and feel that things were going to be all right. A company commander in Vietnam reported that one of his squads, on reconnaissance patrol in the jungle, was brought to an abrupt halt when a stray bullet clipped off a sergeant’s finger. The group stood frozen, transfixed, but the sergeant managed to respond with a joke—perhaps something about which finger he had lost—and the squad was able to resume its patrol. Less dramatic but still important moments of potential tension often occur at introductions, beginnings of relationships, first meetings of committees or sports teams, opening lectures. Even the Talmud, not noted for its comedy, advises that one should begin a lecture with “something humorous.” 11 Since the need for amiable interaction is so strong, much of the conviviality at beginnings can derive a lot of laughter mileage from a minimum of humorous octane. Some individuals at a cocktail party are so motivated to connect that they laugh before the joke, between jokes, and after even the most pitiful jokes. And groups gathered around the punch bowl who attribute the general hilarity to alcohol are sometimes chagrined to discover that the punch was unspiked, that their good humor arose from elevation of the spirit, rather than inebriation from the spirits. At the extreme, laugh recordings and the canned mirth used on television programs demonstrate the extraordinarily contagious quality of laughter. We laugh simply because we hear others laugh, a phenomenon that appears to factor out the first part, the disparity, of the humor equation. It seems to be all psychology, without any physics. Yet laughing at nothing is itself a kind of disparity, an upset of conventional

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behavior, just as children’s seemingly mindless silliness in a room full of adults provides them with the pleasures of a subversive contrast to the grown-up world. Thus humor is precisely the opposite of poetry as defined by Robert Frost: “a momentary stay against confusion.” 12 Frost’s striking phrase applies not only to poetry and art, but to other anchor points of existence as well—family, occupation, religion, government, law, science, interpretations, conclusions. Stay is appealing in a universe of flux, spun out of an inconceivable big bang and racing toward an unimaginable finale, but we need to be reminded, as Frost well knew, that all our stays are momentary. Permanence is a wistful illusion; it is, as Derrida put it, “the dream at the heart of philosophy.” 13 Humor provides balance by throwing open the window to anarchy. If art is a momentary stay against confusion, humor is a momentary confusion which provides a release, a “comic relief,” from human notions of stay. COPING Relaxing is a means of breaking the repressions that threaten individuals and the tensions that threaten groups. Coping can be seen as an extension of relaxing, a more active method of facing problems and dangers that cannot be put aside. If relaxing is a form of loosening, coping—from Old French couper, to strike—is a way of hitting back. With relaxation, humor provides a truce zone; with coping, humor provides weapons. We like to assume—the triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson said of second marriages—that things should go right. If we are in a hurry, we want to believe that the baby sitter will be on time, the dog will be found, the car will start, the signal lights will be green. Thus, as we pull up to the fifth consecutive red light, we laugh at a bumper sticker stating “Shit Happens,” the phenomenon of everyday life known to an earlier, less pungent generation as Murphy’s Law: if something can go wrong, it will. One of the important functions of humor is helping us contend with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—accidents, pain, disease, war, aging, death, and perhaps the ultimate outrage, the demise of planet earth. Our cosmic fate is not yet completely understood, but until it is humans have plenty of local negatives to contend with, along with the internal anxieties that these negatives arouse: disappointment, inadequacy, guilt, fear, loneliness, depression. There are negative ways of coping, through withdrawal, alcohol, and narcotics. And positive ways, often through commitment to personal goals, public causes, other human beings, religion. The genre of tragedy wrings a kind of victory out of despair through heroic resistance or stoic endurance, grace under pressure, going down with dignity. Comedy,

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like tragedy, recognizes the negatives, but makes them, however briefly, irrelevant. In an interview in 1905, Mark Twain described what he called the “value” of humor: The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant. 14

Humor can’t change the cards, but it can change our attitude toward the deal, allowing us momentarily to ignore, accept, or even triumph over the uncertainties of life. James Thurber’s “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” provides a double pleasure for the reader. Initially there is the disparity between Mitty’s timid life and his heroic imaginings, as well as the distance we perceive between his puppy-biscuit-and-overshoes existence and our own. Yet beyond that, at some level, we sense that he speaks for us as well. We all suffer what Thurber, in a note at the end of “My Life and Hard Times,” describes as “confusions . . . blunderings and gropings . . . the little perils of routine living.” 15 Mitty’s attempt to cope is fun because it is exaggerated, and it is also satisfying because we too, in our own ways, have had to face down the firing squads of fate. Even mortality seems not so grim if it is wittily phrased: “We are all on a treadmill to oblivion.” Fred Allen liked that sentence so much he called his autobiography Treadmill to Oblivion, which has now, in spite of its titular melancholy, stepped back into print. The Darwinian struggle seems less threatening if we tame it with a Vahan Shirvanian cartoon showing a row of fish of increasing sizes, each about to be swallowed by the next larger fish; or with a Soviet Russian analogy: “Under capitalism it’s dog eat dog; under communism it’s the other way around.” Metaphysical questionings seem not so troublesome in the hands of Woody Allen: “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.” The humorist puts events into perspective, even an event as calamitous as the expansion of the sun into a red giant that will eventually devour the inner planets: “You say the sun will explode in five billion years? Thank goodness! I thought it was five million.” The humorist brings galactic calamity back to the human scale, where we can deal with it, as in Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice.” Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice

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Frost’s poem also serves as a reminder of the importance of the expression of humor. According to Cicero, “whatever is expressed wittily consists sometimes in a thought, sometimes in the mere language, but men are most delighted with a joke when the laugh is raised by the thought and the language in conjunction.” 17 In “Fire and Ice,” the poet conjoins two sets of apparently disparate elements and emotions (fire vs. ice, desire vs. hate), playing against expectation by demonstrating their similarities. In formal terms, he establishes a pattern of terminal sounds (fire, ice, hate), but rather than plodding down a familiar road of rhyme (ab ab bc bc), he creates one less traveled by (abaabcbcb). At the same time, he varies line length by establishing a tetrameter pattern (Some say the world will end in fire) and then breaking it with abrupt dimeters (Some say in ice; And would suffice) at key semantic moments. The resolved disparities of rhyme, meter, and meaning are brought together at the end with the pleasing, slightly unexpected harmony of the concluding notes of a chamber ensemble performance. The importance of humor in coping with the fire and ice of external nature and internal human nature has long been recognized. A minister friend of Twain’s, the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows, wrote The Relation of Public Amusements to Public Morality in 1857, which held that the lack of humor is a calamity, and an injury to the sober and solid interests of society . . . to scholarship, economy, virtue, and reverence. . . . The intellect that plays a part of every day, works more powerfully and to better results, for the rest of the time; the heart that is gay for an hour, is more serious for the other hours of the day. 18

In recent decades, a number of hypotheses about humor have been subjected to scientific scrutiny. We might guess, for example, that the need to find a situation humorous increases with an individual’s fear or anxiety, as seemed to be happening with our children’s response to the staging of “Little Red Riding-Hood.” That is precisely what Arthur Shurcliff found in an experiment in which three groups of students were assigned different laboratory tasks, ranging across increasing levels of apprehension. The first group was told to pick up and hold a “docile” white rat for five seconds; the students in the second group were to draw a small blood sample from a rat; those in the third group were tasked with drawing 2 cc. of blood from a rat that “might bite through the glove or escape.” At the start of the task [for each group] the rat was discovered to be a toy. Questionnaires were then administered, asking [the students] to rate humor, anxiety, and surprisingness. Humor ratings showed a significant positive trend

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with both anxiety and surprisingness [i.e., the more anxiety the students had to begin with, the more humorous and the more surprising was the discovery that the rat was a toy]. The results support the relief theory of humor, and suggest surprisingness as a strongly correlated variable. 19

Although it is difficult to obtain funding for humor research—foundations seem to think that amusement cannot be important—there is an increasing interest in humor as a coping mechanism in the health and social science professions. This interest was perhaps legitimized and certainly popularized in 1979 with the publication of Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins’ best-selling Anatomy of an Illness, which described his use of humor therapy to induce sleep and reduce paralysis in his recovery in 1964 from ankylosing spondylitis—inflammatory arthritis that produces deterioration and fusing of the spinal column. This book encouraged a flourishing subgenre, of which a recent product is Mike Nichols’ film Wit, with Emma Thompson. Cousins later authored The Healing Heart and Head First: The Biology of Hope, and there is a growing body of professional literature on the clinical uses of humor, including the Handbook of Humor and Psychotherapy and Humor and Wellness in Clinical Intervention (ed. William F. Fry Jr. and Waleed Salameh), Humor and Aging (ed. Lucille Nahemow, Kathryn McCluskeyFawcett, and Paul McGhee), and Humor and the Health Professions (Vera Robinson). Science has invented a name—gelotology, from Greek gelōs, laughter—for the study of humor, and we now have applications such as therapeutic humor, clown therapy, and laughter meditation. Not everyone is persuaded about the contribution of humor to healing. In a meta-analysis published in the July 2001 Psychological Bulletin, Rod A. Martin of the University of Western Ontario reviewed 41 scientific articles published since 1960, and found that “Despite the popularity of the idea that humor and laughter have significant health benefits, the current empirical evidence is generally weak and inconclusive.” Nevertheless, many medical professionals seem to accept the idea that humor is salubrious, as indicated in a 2004 summary from the University of California: Laughter is universal and . . . babies gurgle with laughter by about four months of age . . . Laughter reduces tension, clears the mind, and lifts the spirits. . . . A decade ago researchers found that besides increasing heart rate and hormone production, laughter also improves muscle tone and circulation. . . . Now neurologists at Stanford University have discovered another reason why laughter makes us feel good. They monitored the brain activity of people reading funny cartoons and found that humor and laughter triggered the brain’s “reward centers,” . . . the same areas activated by cocaine and amphetamines. 20

A 2010 update adds that

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Chapter 3 Japanese researchers at the Foundation for the Advancement of International Science recently found that laughter can actually reduce glucose levels in people with diabetes. In addition, they reported, certain genes that control immune system activity were stimulated by laughter. And scientists from the University of Maryland Medical Center and Stanford University found that mirthful laughter has good effects on the arteries, blood pressure, and cardiovascular system in general.

Along with this scientific and professional interest has come a troupe of popular writers, lecturers, consultants, entrepreneurs, and entertainers, who offer a variety of institutes, workshops, conferences, and websites on humor, as well as dozens of videotapes and books with titles, sometimes a little depressing, such as The Laughter Prescription, Fuzzify, and Mirth in Management. These activities and writings stress the positive contributions humor can make to health and life, and they connect with centuries of folk wisdom stretching back to the Old Testament (“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones” 21), though it’s worth noting that the New Testament seems to take a different view that may have armed some of Twain’s nineteenth-century critics: “Resist the devil, and . . . let your laughter be turned to mourning. . . . Is any merry? let him sing psalms.” 22 AGGRESSION It took about a generation for the ideas unleashed in Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 to seep into the consciousness of ordinary Americans. By the end of the nineteenth century, two schools of thought had arisen concerning social Darwinism, as the implications of evolution for human society were called at the time. On one hand were the soft Darwinists, who believed that humans, at the top of the ladder, were continuing to evolve into better, purer, more spiritual beings. On the other hand, the hard social Darwinists believed science had proved nature to be a world of tooth and claw, that the race was to the swift and to the strong, for humans as well as animals and plants. In a similar manner, discussions of humor often fall into soft or hard schools of interpretation. The soft interpreters believe that humor is one of our best traits, that it cushions blows, creates bonds, and makes life palatable. The hard types see humor as based on distortion, stupidity, and violence; and point out that it is often used to gain superiority or revenge. The difference between the Darwinian debate and the humor debate is instructive. Both schools of social Darwinists were wrong. Evolution is a scientific description of past events, not a prediction of the future or a justification of present action. Both schools of humor, however, are right, for humans need to dominate as well as to bond, to put down as well as to pick up, and humor,

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ubiquitous, is only too ready to oblige. Having considered the positive benefits of relaxing and coping, we need also to look at the dark side. Some of the earliest discussions of humor noted it was often reductive, based on a fall, a slip, or human pretentiousness, stupidity, and villainy. The deviation from the norm or from expectation, necessary for the physics of humor, was seen as a deviation downward. Comedy for the Greeks was lesser than tragedy. It was associated with a low, vernacular style, as opposed to the high poetic style of tragedy. It was played in light sandals—“socks”— which allowed the actors to skip about, in contrast to the thick-soled buskins that gave tragedians dignified height and stately gravity. The subject matter of comedy tended to be human foolishness and imperfection, while tragedy showed us our greatness. (The fact that the climax of foolishness was usually marriage and the finale of greatness was often death is itself a piece of ironic humor.) Aristotle said that “the ludicrous consists in some defect or ugliness” 23; Cicero maintained that what is laughed at is “a certain baseness and deformity.” 24 Both thought of the ugly and the base in terms of disparity, in that a fall or a broken limb or a false statement is ugly since it deviates from the normal or ideal form. But both were quick to qualify their statements. The ludicrous was a defect or ugliness, according to Aristotle, “which is not painful or destructive.” And baseness and deformity, in Cicero’s view, “are laughed at solely or chiefly [when they] point out and designate something offensive in an inoffensive manner.” Later commentators raised the ante by identifying a kind of humor that is ugly in intent and offensive in action: Thomas Hobbes: “The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly.” 25 Stephen Leacock: The origin of laughter “was in a sort of shout of exultation or triumph, the cry of the savage over his fallen enemy.” 26 Martin Grotjahn: “The wit . . . is sharp, quick, alert, cold, aggressive, and hostile. He is inclined to murder his victims in thought.” 27 Called tendency humor by Freud, and hierarchy humor or superiority humor by others, the purpose of this kind of humor is to release aggression, castigate outsiders, slam our enemies, and demonstrate our superiority. If the humor of relaxation produces a zone of truce and the humor of coping creates weapons of response, the humor of hierarchy seeks out targets. These targets are most often people who are different from the creator of the humor and his or her audience of insiders—in skin color, nationality, language, social class, age, occupation, sex, religion, political and other beliefs. These differences

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provide an initial disparity. It is the insider’s attitude of superiority that makes the disparity pleasing and humorous, for insiders. The us-them contrast works in our favor, for it demonstrates that we, from our point of view, are smarter, better looking, better dressed, better bred, more knowledgeable, more competent, more sophisticated, more au courant. No wonder this use of disparity is pleasing, for it works like a seesaw: putting them down puts us up. With hierarchy humor, we make jokes about others. Bosses joke about employees, and employees return the insult, a phenomenon endlessly repeated in pairings: Easterners and Westerners, Republicans and Democrats, bluecollar workers and white-collar administrators, officers and enlisted personnel, parents and teenagers, men and women. Students joke about professors; professors joke about students. Students and professors together joke about maintenance crews. Maintenance crews joke about the ignorance of the overeducated. A nation of immigrants provides rich materials for putdowns based on race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality—precisely those characteristics we officially abjure in statements of equal opportunity employment. A nation of many regions sees jokes slide from one group to another. In Boston they ask how many Irish it takes to change a light bulb; that light bulb is screwed in by Poles in Chicago, Norwegians in Minnesota, Blacks in Mississippi, Chicanos in California. Minorities are targets for majorities, just as recent hires are targets for old timers, and the last group over is a target for everyone already here. Since group status is constantly in flux, patterns of humor change over time. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the standard butts of jokes were often farmers, bucolics, hicks; and every traveling salesman had his supply of stories about farmers’ daughters, in which the hero, usually a salesman, triumphed over the sexual naiveté of the young lady or the bungled vigilance of her clodhopping father. (The word butt comes from Middle English butte, meaning goal or target, perhaps influenced by the other meaning of butte, which refers to the thicker end of something, whether rifles or humans.) As the nation became urbanized and industrialized in the later nineteenth century and immigration patterns changed, we began to create jokes about the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles. Women driver jokes came in with Henry Ford and went out with Adolph Hitler, as women learned how to fly airplanes and build submarines during World War II. Anti-Nazi humor diminished rapidly as democracy took hold in postwar West Germany and Volkswagens began to invade America. Polack jokes seemed to decline when striking workers faced down the government in the Gdansk shipyards in 1980 and Lech Walesa and his Solidarity Party opened the first cracks in the Soviet bloc. Hierarchy humor provides an index of an individual’s enemies, and of a nation’s out-groups at any given time. Some jokes are more negative than others, and while the humor of hierarchy is always at the expense of an other, it runs a range from the vicious to

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the merely condescending. Mark Twain does his share of fulminating: “Bret Harte is the most contemptible, poor little soulless blatherskite that exists on the planet today.” 28 But much of the time he works at the more amiable end of hierarchy humor, where the sting is softened by his ability—like that of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Charlie Chaplin, James Thurber, Charles Schultz— to realize his own limitations and failings, his comradeship with the targets of his humor, his kinship with common humanity: “bunched together [E. C. Stedman and T. B. Aldrich] were as vain as I am myself, which is saying all that can be said under that head without being extravagant.” 29 Walt Kelly made that kind of self-deprecating humor famous in our time with his twist on Oliver Hazard Perry: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Humor begins with a surprising disparity. Whether that disparity is amusing depends on how it is perceived by the individuals involved. It can be innocent or sinister, iconoclastic or idolatrous, uplifting or depressing, ennobling or degrading. It can bind and heal, or it can slash and cut. Humor can provide new insights or reinforce old prejudices. It can serve causes good or evil, for its protean capaciousness ranges across the entire spectrum of human purpose and desire. “People can laugh,” said James Thurber, “out of a kind of mellowed self-pity as well as out of superiority.” 30 The three uses of humor considered above—relaxing, coping, dominating—are meant to be suggestive rather than definitive, for there are other uses, and in any case these are merely labels. As Valéry observed, “One cannot get drunk or quench one’s thirst with labels on a bottle.” 31 Humor cannot be pigeonholed, for that is precisely what humor is about—defying pigeonholes, reversing labels, mixing categories, upsetting the neat classifications our rage for order constructs. Whatever the labels, it is clear that humor can serve many masters, some kind, some cruel, and these apparently contradictory uses can take place simultaneously. Consider a prison joke: How many officials does it take to switch on a light bulb in a state penitentiary? Eight. One to turn on the juice, and a chaplain, a doctor, a reporter, three witnesses, and an undertaker. Immediately we recognize a superiority component—prison inmates putting down what they see as the bureaucratic tendencies of the keepers of the keys. At the same time, such a joke may help inmates get along with one another, trapped as they are on the same side of the wall. And the macabre analogy may help inmates to cope by trivializing execution, even if only for a moment. One function of humor can be mixed with others, and humor itself can be, and often is, mixed with nonhumorous aspects of life. Some of the effect of Alfred Hitchcock’s relentlessly tightening nooses of terror derives from his skill in inserting moments of laughter, such as those the Teresa Wright character shares with the detective in Shadow of a Doubt, even while she is being stalked by a psychopathic murderer. 32 Joke books quickly become boring

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precisely because they are unmixed, like a meal composed only of sauces. Part of Mark Twain’s brilliance is that he matured from his early career as a “wild humorist” 33 not by renouncing humor, but by embedding it in his tales the way it is complexly embedded in human existence. In his Autobiography, Twain stated that “the real Colonel Sellers, as I knew him in James Lampton, was a pathetic and beautiful spirit . . . with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom.” Twain complained that the actor who portrayed Sellers on stage, John T. Raymond, could capture only the comic part of the famous turnipeating scene in the play Colonel Sellers: “In the hands of a great actor that piteous scene would have dimmed any manly spectator’s eyes with tears, and racked his ribs apart with laughter at the same time.” 34 Mark Twain’s ability to do as a writer what Raymond was unable to do as an actor is a feature of his work that W. D. Howells particularly admired. When Twain published his account of his two weeks as a Confederate irregular in the Civil War, Howells wrote that “I read your piece about the unsuccessful campaign with the greatest delight. It was immensely amusing, with such a bloody bit of heartache in it, too.” 35 Humor’s complexity demonstrates its kinship with other key aspects of human life. Like truth, it lies at the bottom of a well; like love, we recognize it better than we can define it. And like both truth and love, humor is complexly rooted not only in our individual selves, but in the social fabric into which our separate lives are woven. Up to this point our discussion has focused largely on how individuals perceive humor. Now we need to consider the ramifications of humor for groups, what might called the sociology of humor.

Chapter Four

The Sociology of Humor National Character and Morality

“So much depends upon the environment of a joke. To be good it must absorb its setting.” 1 Mark Twain

Some years ago, during a trip to Arizona, I sent a postcard to a friend back in Charlottesville, a foreign scholar who was spending the year at the University of Virginia studying American literature and culture. The postcard pictured a coiled diamondback rattlesnake, and I wrote the following message: “This is the kind of snake that frightened the horses pulling the stagecoach Jean and I were riding in, causing the coach to overturn. As a result my leg was broken, so I could not escape from the Indians who robbed us. Other than that, it has been a good trip.” On my first day back at the university, the friend appeared at my office. “How is your leg?” he asked. “Fine,” I replied, as I got up to greet him. He stared at my legs, and then slowly raised his head and looked me in the eye. “No broken leg?” “No.” “No snake?” “No.” “No stagecoach?” “No.” “No Indians?” “No.” 51

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“Ah ha,” he said finally, with a forced smile, “I see. American humor. Very funny.” When I recounted that incident later to a group of American Studies students, they tried to define American humor for a while, and then turned the discussion to two topics currently on their minds: the ongoing campus debate about political correctness and the current national discussion about political mudslinging—this was in October of an election year. I asked the students if they had heard any racist or political jokes they would be willing to tell to the group. All of the hands seemed to go up, almost too enthusiastically. I began to have second thoughts, but I was stuck with my question and I called on a particularly eager student. He said: “How do you get a nigger out of a tree in Alabama?” My heart sank and I tried to intervene, but a punch line is as hard to stop as a punch: “Cut the rope.” To my astonishment, the group, including African-American students, one of whom was senior class president, seemed amused. With one exception. That exception was a young white woman from Montgomery who went off like a rocket, attacking the joke teller, the class, bad jokes, me, racial humor, Southern stereotypes, and Northern bigots. She protested again and again, and the more she fumed the more the class seemed to find the situation—the joke plus her response— humorous. The key word turned out not to be the n-word but the A-word, and the joke was received by the students more as regional satire than racial humor, and not funny to an Alabamian. Chastened by this experience, I decided to try something more objective, more scientific, less edgy. I sent the students down to a local shopping center armed with political cartoons and questionnaires. There were ten satirical cartoons, five attacking Democrats and five attacking Republicans, arranged in mixed order. The questionnaire contained several innocuous questions interspersed with others designed to elicit liberal or conservative opinions. Interviewing shoppers at random, the students asked them which cartoons they found funny, and then gave them the questionnaire. The results were exactly as we had predicted: those respondents who favored one side of the political spectrum found the jokes aimed at their opponents humorous and were puzzled or insulted by the others. “That’s not funny” was a frequent comment about the satire aimed at the candidates in the same camp as the respondent. Only those who indicated no clear political preference were amused by the full slate of cartoons. These three incidents raise a number of questions about the role of humor for the overlapping groups that constitute the social fabric of human existence. 2 Does humor help us connect with others, or does it separate us? Does humor vary from nation to nation, from culture to culture, from topic to topic? Is it possible to define Irish humor or Jewish humor or Lithuanian humor or military humor? What makes a joke “bad” or “not funny”? Is black humor or blue humor or numbskull humor funny? Are ethnic jokes offen-

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sive? Are some topics out of bounds for humor, and if so, who gets to say where the boundaries lie? These and related questions can be factored down to two that are useful in a study of America’s leading humorist. Is there any such thing as American humor? Can humor be judged moral or immoral? AMERICAN HUMOR “Literature in democratic ages . . . will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, almost always vehement and bold. . . . There will be more wit than erudition, more imagination than profundity; and literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigor of thought, frequently of great variety and singular fecundity.” 3 Alexis de Tocqueville

The phrase “American humor” has been in use for almost two hundred years. People who have used it have assumed it refers to works composed by Americans, and that these works constitute a definable tradition—one which could be described historically or chronologically, one which could be packed into an anthology or a college course. Behind these assumptions is the notion that not only do Americans, like all humans, create humor, but that their particular version is unique, differing say, from French or Chinese humor. Of course Americans make jokes about American topics—Arkansas mosquitoes, California smog, Florida elections, Congressional gridlock, presidential faux pas—but are there differences greater than simply local subject matter? Theo Sommer, former editor in chief of Die Zeit, once reported that he heard the following joke making the rounds at a cocktail party in Georgetown: Q. What would happen if a neutron bomb went off in the kitchen? A. It would leave the dishes intact, but it would certainly stop the grumbling about the food. Sommer commented that such a joke could not be told in his country. Having tried telling it later at the University of Bonn, I can state that Sommer was entirely correct. Why? Is it because Americans have different historical and geographical circumstances? If a neutron bomb were to go off—at least prior to 9/11/2001—it seemed more likely to explode in Europe than in North America. Or is it that Americans have a different habit of mind—more fantastic, vehement, irreverent? Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill try to answer this question in America’s Humor, where they make the following assertion at the beginning of the first chapter: “Since peculiar things were always happening in America and uninformed newcomers always lusted for strange news, over the years merry fellows could unwind incredible yarns about the flora, fauna, natives, and geography and then give true or untrue but more or less plausible explana-

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tions.” 4 Yet only twelve pages later, the authors contend that “both the American and his humor had their origin in England.” The difficulty in defining American humor is a subset of the larger problem of defining national character. Canadians joke that they hoped they would have the best of all worlds—French cuisine, American enterprise, and British culture; but they wound up instead with British cuisine, French enterprise, and American culture. This joke would not work if we didn’t believe in distinctive national characteristics. Ray Billington summarizes the views of foreign travelers to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as follows: Americans . . . refuse to pay proper respect to those of superior lineage, insist on calling each other “Gentlemen” or “Ladies” whatever our origins, and pridefully bestow the reigns of government on the humble and undeserving. We are blatantly nationalistic, boasting endlessly of our democratic institutions, and sometimes flexing our military muscles uselessly when another nation indulges in a bit of diplomatic game-playing. We are always experimenting with new ideas and gadgets, even though the old are still useful. We are forever moving about, shifting from house to house and state to state, and squandering so much vacation time on travel that we have no time for enjoyment when we arrive. We work endlessly, and seem unable to enjoy true leisure. We are so shamefully wasteful that our machines are cunningly contrived for premature obsolescence; one traveler compared the American home to a reverse assembly line, deliberately reducing to rubble the gadgets with which it is plentifully stocked. We worship the Almighty Dollar beyond all reason, treat our wives with a respect no European woman could expect, and are so optimistic that we would refuse to recognize the Day of Doom were its shadow already upon us. 5

Are these statements true? Can they be verified? Is it possible to make generalizations about the more than 300 million Americans who populate the most diverse country in the world? Billington also talks about the Age of Jackson, inaugurated in 1828 by Andrew Jackson’s landslide victory over John Quincy Adams. What if one asks who did not vote for Jackson. Answer: women, African-Americans, Native Americans, people under the age of 21, non-owners of property in some states, those who didn’t go to the polls, and the 509,097 white men who did go to the polls and voted for Adams. These groups made up 95% of the nation’s population at the time. That means the 647,231 Americans who voted for Jackson, 5% of the total population, are the basis for what we call “the Age of Jackson.” As America grows increasingly diverse and our attitudes swing increasingly toward valuing diversity, we have become suspicious of cultural generalizations, even as we continue to use them. We talk about the beliefs of Americans, of Virginians, of Charlottesvilleans, even though the parents of students in a relatively small grammar school in Charlottesville speak 35 different native languages in their homes. Is it possible to construct a model

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of national character that is true to both the centripetal and centrifugal forces in our society? That was precisely the question David Potter discovered he had to answer before he could write a book on economic abundance and the American character. The strategy he worked out, in a 72-page introduction to the study that ultimately became People of Plenty, provides a useful answer. According to Potter, we need both history and the social sciences to explain how national culture is created and how it is passed on. The process begins with specific historical facts of geography, climate, population, economic activities, political organization, religious beliefs. People are “influenced by the circumstances and conditions in which they live and [their] collective responses to distinctive conditions will in time take the form of collective traits that are themselves distinctive.” 6 It is not the historical conditions themselves but the collective responses to those conditions that constitute the culture that is passed on to individuals. Thus history changes, but its effects can linger on. Free land in America was gone in 1890, but 70 years later a perceptive politician was able to put his finger on the nerve of the culture and ride into the presidency on a campaign based on a “new frontier.” No two individuals inherit the culture in quite the same way, yet many or most members of a society share attitudes, goals, values, ideas, ideals, and habits of mind that set them apart from other societies. This concept, Potter concludes, means that national character does exist, although it is a changing and not a fixed quality, for the culture itself changes; it means also that national character varies from one individual to another; partly because no two personalities are enough alike to receive the impact of the culture in precisely the same way, but even more because the culture assigns diverse roles to various classes of individuals in the society, and it imposes different cultural experiences and makes different cultural demands upon each of these classes or status groups. Further, it means that no mystic link exists to unite race and character and that no direct relationship exists between environment and character, for, as Linton expressed it [in The Cultural Background of Personality], “between the natural environment and the individual there is always interposed a human environment which is vastly more significant.”

Accordingly, we need first to establish the historical conditions which gave rise to cultural responses and ultimately a distinctive American humor. We can debate whether the European migration to America was a heroic enterprise to break free of the shackles of the Old World, or a gargantuan land grab at the expense of natives, Mexicans, and shackled Africans. (“There goes the neighborhood,” says one native to another in a Gary Larson cartoon, as they watch the first Europeans pulling their boats up on the shore.) Truth loves the middle way and both of these versions can be supported, but in either case the continental immensity of North America was the first great historical fact that confronted the European mind. In 1670

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Governor Berkeley of Virginia sent an exploring party westward to find the “East India sea,” which, by one estimate, was about a ten-day trip. The expedition turned back after reaching the Blue Ridge Mountains. Americans didn’t know what they had until November 1805, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, after an 18-month overland trek starting from St. Louis, steered their canoes into the estuary where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific. And what they had was a land measured in millions of square miles, largely without geographical barriers, linked by navigable rivers, seasoned by a temperate climate, mostly arable, and rich in forests, game, waterpower, metals, and minerals. Jefferson attributed the mediocre state of agriculture in America to “our having such quantities of land to waste as we please,” 7 so much land that we could give it away free to settlers under the Homestead Act passed during Lincoln’s presidency. The United States turned out to be much larger than all of western Europe, and there were ranches in Texas as big as small nations. The 3000 miles from New York to Los Angeles would take a European traveler from London to Siberia. If freedom in space was the first historical condition of European settlement in America, the second was freedom in time, freedom from the past. The people who settled America picked up and left behind relatives, furniture, occupations, languages, traditions, the accumulation of centuries. Those who came from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries left behind kings, bishops, and a hierarchical society in which one’s life tended to be fixed, a society in which a small number of people controlled the rest. For many it was a chance for a new start in the unspoiled vastness of the new world. “He is an American,” said Crèvecœur, “who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” 8 The most evocative word for Americans seems to be new: New England, New Orleans, New York, New Mexico. There are 42 cities and towns in Pennsylvania alone whose names begin with new. And then there is Roosevelt’s New Deal, Reagan’s New Federalism, George H. W. Bush’s New World Order (which lasted about six months), Clinton’s New Covenant; along with New Age, New Woman, New Left, New Right, New Math, New South, New Era, and New Era Potato Chips. “Novus ordo seclorum” is our official motto, printed on every dollar bill: “a new order of the ages.” A third historical condition from which American culture takes root is yet another freedom—freedom of the individual from political and religious tyranny. 9 The immigrants didn’t bring princes and bishops with them; they had to govern themselves. They organized townships and colonies and elected their leaders and followed them, and got rid of them when they felt like it. Government of, by, and for the people became an essential part of the American experience. A century and a half after the first colonization, the original fact of separation and freedom was institutionalized by the Declara-

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tion of Independence and by a Constitution that established a democratic republic and put some men, at least, on an equal footing in law. Our symbols became the goddess of liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the free flying eagle. Abraham Lincoln summarized the American experience in one succinct sentence at Gettysburg: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” What sort of culture, what sort of character, emerged from these three bedrock freedoms, along with subsequent historical conditions, such as diverse and enriching waves of immigration, unprecedented technology, accelerating industrialization and urbanization, evolving democratization, and the process of westward exploration, pioneering, and settlement that transformed the country from a small group of Atlantic-hugging colonies to a vast continental nation in only four generations? The collective responses to these historical conditions, that is, the culture, which is then passed on to individuals in individual ways, led many—not all—Americans to believe they could improve their lot in life and educate their children, own homes and property, find employment and start businesses, participate in local decision making and elect national leaders. These possibilities were denied to some, but they were open to a larger percentage than had been usual in the world’s history. And that percentage tended to be independent, pragmatic, and optimistic; confident that hard work and opportunity could lead to individual prosperity, that free enterprise and democratic government could lead to national advancement. These notions are not necessarily a list of virtues, though many Americans might think they were, for the other sides of these coins demonstrate excessive materialism, reckless exploitation of resources, moral smugness, naïve belief in progress, heedless disregard of the claims of natives and Mexicans, and enslavement of African-Americans. But they do describe a constellation of beliefs which, if not unique to America, was and is characteristic of many Americans. And it is this constellation of beliefs that informs the American part of “American humor.” Humor seems to be universal in human societies, though the subjects for humor, the ways in which it is expressed, and the uses to which it is put are shaped by culture. We would not expect Japanese humor to be manifested in loud exclamations and guffaws. We would be puzzled to find Muslims joking during daily prayers. And thus it is not surprising to discover that a country with 14,000-foot mountains, painted deserts, tornadoes, grizzly bears, and fifteen species of rattlesnakes has a predilection for tall tales; that a nation conceived in defiance of kings and bishops relishes irreverent humor; that people who define an intercity baseball contest as the “World Series” lean toward exaggeration; that citizens who call their presidents Harry, Ike, Jack, Dick, Jerry, and Bill have a fondness for horse-sense

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and leveling jokes. James E. Carter Jr., reading the American wind, went before a judge to have his name officially changed to Jimmy. But we need to keep the categories suggestive and not coercive. Americans tell all kinds of jokes, and other cultures tell tall tales. More than a century before Columbus, Chaucer was creating horse-sense jokes in “The Miller’s Tale” (a student of astronomy falls into a marl-pit while gazing at the heavens) and “The Reeve’s Tale” (“The gretteste clerkes been noght wisest men”). 10 Irreverence has come bouncing down through the ages and spread around the globe. Young people everywhere are irreverent by definition, almost by vocation, and many nations have witnessed a decline in piety toward their leaders and institutions encouraged by newspapers, education, television, the Internet, and the spread of democratic government. Truth is often a matter of percentages. Americans do tell more tall tales than other people, and these tales tend to be taller and more outlandish than their cousins elsewhere. Irreverence is not uniquely American in quality, but its quantity and its brashness seem peculiarly American. Being “reverential,” Mark Twain wrote to Mary Fairbanks, “don’t jibe with my principles.” 11 Irreverence was, in fact, the chief charge made against Twain in his lifetime, especially by British commentators. A reviewer for the New Quarterly Review in 1876 provided a typical explanation: “There is one sort of fun much employed by Mark Twain, against which I strongly protest. It is where he turns solemn or sacred subjects into ridicule. . . . The excuse is sometimes made that Americans have not our insular regard for the proprieties.” 12 Reviewers, foreign visitors, historians, humorists, and all of us will continue to generalize about national traits and attitudes. The notion of a distinctive American humor is a useful half-truth. THE MORALITY OF HUMOR “My belief is that all humor is in bad taste. Every joke will offend somebody.” 13 Lawrence Peter

There is no more morality in the physics of humor than there is in physics itself. Splitting an atom is one thing; dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima is another. Similarly, there is no moral issue at stake in the difference between the pronunciations nuclear and nucular. But when a comedian, imitating a president, says that “As Commander in Chief, my hands is on the nucular trigger,” the difference has been turned into a satiric weapon. The morality of humor is thus a matter of psychology and sociology rather than physics; it lies not in the humor-initiating disparity, but in the application of a disparity to human purposes. Think of humor as a message sent encoded in a binary pattern. The recipient decodes its meaning through filters. The first

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set—psychological—consists of factors that make up personality, such as age, sex, race, religion, nationality, ethnic background, education, occupation, and marital status. These filters are wrapped in yet another set—sociological—that involves relationships to other persons, group identities, locale, and time. These sets of filters create, enhance, color, diminish, or destroy the humor in a potentially humorous binary message. Who tells a joke? To whom? In front of whom? It makes a difference. One of the pleasures of family life is a rich aggregation of humorous incidents, stories, and word play which is largely opaque to outsiders. An Italian mother joke may play very differently if told to, or especially by, people not of Italian descent. Teenage humor works better with friends in the cafeteria than with parents at the dinner table. When is a joke told? “Mrs. Custer, would you care to contribute to Indian relief?” would not have been a winner in the summer of 1876, except perhaps at Sitting Bull’s encampment along the Yellowstone River. Today, when many people find Sitting Bull more of a hero of the American West than George Armstrong Custer, that sort of joke is acceptable, even fashionable. Where is a joke told? At a stag dinner in 1879 in Paris, to a group of artists and writers who called themselves the “Stomach Club,” Mark Twain delivered a speech entitled “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism.” “Of all the various kinds of intercourse,” he maintained, masturbation “has the least to recommend it. As an amusement it is too fleeting; as an occupation it is too wearing; as a public exhibition there is no money in it.” 14 Even Mark Twain would not have considered delivering that speech to the Monday Evening Club of Hartford, to which he had been elected six years earlier. During the Holocaust, Nazis ridiculed Jewish people as part of the campaign of denigration and elimination. Jews ridiculed camp guards in an attempt to survive. We like to think of the first as an abasement, a perversion of humor; the second as good and appropriate, a heroic use of humor. But disparities are impartial; morality is provided by what humans make of them. Cultural differences between groups contain the potential for humor, as do stereotypes of others, since a stereotype is an exaggeration and exaggeration provides duality. There will always be cultural and ethnic humor, since cultures will always differ and the concept of “ethnic” itself assumes the existence of distinctive and distinguishable groups. Thus there will always be jokes about people who are seen as different in color or other physical characteristics, those who eat different foods, have different languages or accents, live in different places, believe in different gods. Michele Norris, host of an NPR series on “Comedy and Race in America” featuring Bernie Mac, Paul Rodriquez, and Margaret Cho, noted that “in the world of standup comedy, the subject of race is not so much a minefield, but rather a goldmine, an endless source of great material.” 15 Whether this on-the-edge material is received as

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comic or “not funny,” friendly or insulting, positive or negative, depends on the attitudes of the comedians and the perceptions of the audiences. Is nothing sacred? That’s the way the question might have been phrased in the nineteenth century. Today we might ask if there are any taboos left, though restraints is perhaps a better term, since taboo suggests an absolute prohibition that humor sometimes observes. Senior citizens are fond of pointing out that restraints have been thrown to the winds and life is going to hell in a handbag, but they have been doing that for a long time—at least since the time of Juvenal, who complained about young people racing their chariots along the roads outside Rome. 16 The parents of the Gilded Age generation, and that of the gay nineties, and the roaring twenties, and the do-yourown-thing sixties, all seemed to think that propriety had been murdered in their lifetimes. But here we are and decorum, of a sort, is still with us. There continue to be more or less widely held opinions that certain topics are inappropriate for humorous treatment, usually those that are considered sacred or unusually sensitive (religion, death, the initial moments of war or catastrophe), though these are highly variable in individuals, groups, and cultures, and across time. It became more possible to tell God and Bible jokes in the later twentieth century, which is one of the reasons Clara Clemens finally gave permission for her father’s Letters from the Earth to be published in 1962. A dead baby joke (Q. How do you make a dead baby float? A. Take a glass of root beer and add two scoops of dead baby.) doesn’t seem as shocking as it would have in the mid-nineteenth century, partly because then almost every family lost infants and young children. Among Sam Clemens’ siblings, Pleasant died at three months, Margaret and Benjamin at nine years, Henry at 19. Twain’s first child, Langdon, lived only 19 months. On the other hand, jokes at the expense of minorities, common earlier, are seen as less appropriate now. A racist joke can cost you your job, as was discovered by the well-named Earl Butz, a former Secretary of Agriculture, and Trent Lott, former Senate Majority Leader. 17 Sexual jokes seem to flourish in all times and cultures, though cultures that are not as hung up on sexuality as ours, such as those of Native Americans, joke more openly about sex. Even Mark Twain concealed offcolor words and jokes in his private notebooks (“Horse begin to ---- like a thunder storm.” “That --cking Harris”). 18 Mark Twain’s longest known foray into bawdy humor came in 1876, when, researching for the story that would become The Prince and the Pauper, he came across a conversation demonstrating “the frank indelicacies of speech permissible among ladies and gentlemen” in earlier times. 19 Composed as a letter to his friend the Reverend Joseph Twichell, Twain’s 2300-word manuscript entitled “1601. Conversation, as it Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors” was Twain’s attempt to put into archaic English an unbuttoned discussion among Queen Elizabeth, her retainers, and literary men of the time. Using some but

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not all of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” Twain relates sexual adventures and comments of the conversationalists (“Before I had gained my fourteenth year,” recounts Lady Margery, putting an end to a controversy about how to spell bollocks, “I had learnt that them that would explore a cunt stop’d not to consider the spelling o’t”). He repeats jokes (the salacious old archbishop unable to rape a wily young maiden), and parodies Shakespeare. When Sir Walter Raleigh cuts a mighty fart, the Bard responds with a towering description: Though ye sinless hosts of heaven had foretold ye coming of this most desolating breath, proclaiming it a work of uninspired man, its quaking thunders, its firmament-clogging rottenness his own achievement in due course of nature, yet had not I believed it; but had said the pit itself hath furnished forth the stink, and heaven's artillery hath shook the globe in admiration of it. 20

“1601” was surreptitiously printed in 1880, apparently at the instigation of John Hay, in an edition of six copies, and reprinted two years later at West Point, presumably during an off-duty moment, in a typographically elaborate issue of 50 copies. It enjoyed underground circulation by print, mimeograph, and Xerox throughout much of the twentieth century. Now it is included in standard printings of Twain’s works, along with the Stomach Club speech on masturbation, without a blush or a murmur. These days Americans pride themselves on sexual liberation, though we still categorize sexual humor as off-color or indecent or risqué or blue. “Dirty jokes” are still dirty, which is partly why they are still funny. Sensitivities and restraints can decay over time. It is now possible for rambunctious American fifth graders to nudge one another during history class and whisper, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” And new sensitivities can arise. An aging society and perhaps fear (as they go, so may I) have made jokes about people with Alzheimer’s disease relatively rare. Except for an occasional I-told-you-so arched eyebrow from an arch Democrat, President Reagan’s Alzheimer’s remained largely beyond the pale for political humor. Another contemporary example demonstrates both the creation and the decay of restraints on humor. In the week after the 9/11/2001 attack on the New York World Trade Center, the New Yorker magazine ran no cartoons. For a month afterward they abjured cartoons about President Bush. Then magazines, newspapers, talk show hosts, and comedians gradually slipped back to business as usual, though it wasn’t until March 2002, that Jacob Weisberg’s irreverent “Bushism of the Day” feature of Slate Magazine was back at its electronic stand. By then terror talk had been domesticated. The Washington Post reported that, six months after 9/ 11, enough time had elapsed “for the vocabulary of one of the country’s most frightening days to become slang for teenagers of all backgrounds, comic

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relief in school hallways and hangouts.” Students in area schools were quoted as saying “He’s as hard to find as bin Laden,” and “If you’re weird, people might call you ‘Taliban’ or ask if you have anthrax.” A tough teacher was called “such a terrorist”; strict discipline of students was “total jihad”; a messy bedroom was “ground zero”; out-of-style clothes prompted the question “Is that a burqa?” And petty concerns were dismissed contemptuously: “That’s so Sept. 10th.” 21 In 2005, the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, a foursome of hyphenated Americans (American-Iranian, -Palestinian, -Egyptian) began performing standup cross-cultural comedy in the U.S. and abroad. Restraints on humor not only change and decay over time, they are themselves targets. Humor is subversive, literally a “turning under” and thus jokes concerning subjects one is not supposed to joke about keep springing up and are often wickedly funny because they are doubly funny—the original disparity reinforced by the deviation from decorum. “No laughing matter” means it might be a far-out laughing matter. “No trespassing” signs posted on certain conversational topics are to humor what such signs on property are to 14-year-old boys: invitations. Part of the fun of dirty jokes is like the fun of playing in mud puddles—getting dirty. “There is a fascination,” Mark Twain stated, “about meddling with forbidden things.” 22 Thus political correctness is an obvious target for humor, but not necessarily for its politics. Most Americans welcome increasing respect for the dignity of all peoples as part of the continuing expansion of democracy that has characterized American society for three centuries. Rather, humor works against the “correctness.” It is one of the ways we have of being reminded that the circumstances of human life are rarely 100%; that there are dangers in fanaticism, authoritarian dogma, narrowly conceived ideology, extremism, superpatriotism, even super virtue. The sappy heroine in a collective novel Twain was involved with was, he wrote, “virtuous to the verge of eccentricity.” 23 Zealotry is almost always a mistake, even when it is the zealotry of truth. Truth changes, and then where are you? Even the Pope, the least sheepish of mortals, must have felt chagrined when finally, at the end of the twentieth century, 359 years too late, he made the church’s apologies to Galileo, who was sentenced to house arrest for claiming that the sun was at the center of the solar system. MARK TWAIN AND THE NATIVES, AT HOME AND ABROAD In recent decades, Mark Twain has been accused of racial insensitivity in his depiction of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and this topic is discussed specifically in chapter 9. For now, we should note that a twenty-firstcentury reader of Twain’s early works, including Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, may be unhappily surprised to find a good deal of humor at the expense of other peoples and cultures. Abroad, Twain castigates the Portu-

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guese (“slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy”), Italians (“a happy, cheerful, contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and everlasting unaspiring worthlessness”), Greeks (“they lie and cheat”), Mohammedans (“their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral”), Syrians (“the ugliest, wickedest looking villains we have seen”), Palestinians (“rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt”). 24 At home he pitches into Mormons, Irish, American Indians, Blacks, Chinese, Mexicans, and Hawaiian natives (“Kanakas”), who often come dismissively at the end of lists: The witnesses were called—legislators, high government officers, ranchmen, miners, Indians, Chinamen, negroes. The whole population—men, women and children, Chinamen and Indians, were massed in the main street. the Genuine Mexican Plug came tearing into town . . . with one final skip over a wheelbarrow and a Chinaman. a murder which the very cattle in the corrals, the Indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the streets were cognizant of! “Jimmy, it’s the sociablest place I ever saw. The Chinaman waltzed in as comfortable as anybody. If we’d staid a while, I reckon we’d had some niggers.” There is no such thing as keeping a vessel in elegant condition, when she carries molasses and Kanakas. 25

A weak defense, from our contemporary point of view, could be made of these and scores of other racial slurs. Some of them, such as the one beginning with “Jimmy” above, are the narrator’s report of statements presumably made by someone else. And everyone, not just minorities, comes into Twain’s satiric crosshairs. White American tourists, politicians, miners, missionaries, newspapermen, lawyers, washerwomen, policemen, railroad employees, alcoholic ship captains, and the narrator himself, are the butts of many comic situations. For the most part, his joking is amiable rather than vicious, and the author takes pains to side with Hawaiians against Captain Cook (“Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook”) 26 and the Chinese (“a kindly disposed, well-meaning race”) 27 against the white policemen and politicians of Virginia City, Nevada (“the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum”). 28 Still, it is clear that Mark Twain in his twenties and thirties had not separated himself very far from the California state law of 1850 which held that “No Black, or Mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a White man”; a prohibition

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that was extended in 1854 to include “Chinese and all other people not white.” 29 Worse yet, some of the joking and most of the nonhumorous commentary about Native Americans in Roughing It is not only insensitive but abusive. 30 Early chapters of the book contain a scattering of denigrating comments (“[The coyote] will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desertfrequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat anything they can bite”). 31 Then the attack escalates in the chapter devoted to the Nevada Goshutes, who are described as a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, . . . indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless, like all other Indians; prideless beggars—for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian he would not “go,” any more than a clock without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jackass rabbits, crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a Great Spirit show a something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whisky is referred to. . . . One would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the Goshoots and yet they used to live off the offal and refuse of the [stagecoach] stations a few months and then come some dark night when no mischief was expected, and burn down the buildings and kill the men from ambush as they rushed out. 32

Native Americans appear in both minor and leading roles in dozens of Mark Twain’s works throughout his career. Sometimes it is simply a matter of innocent funning, as with the Irish brogue speaking “Indians” from Limerick who peddle beads and moccasins at Niagara Falls. 33 Sometimes jokes at the expense of the natives are meant to be genial, even if we find them condescending and derogatory today. (“Mph! Dam stove heap gone!” is a native’s laconic comment when he fires up and explodes a cooking stove used to store rifle powder.) 34 Often the Indians are stalking horses for an attack on “the mellow moonshine of romance” in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. 35 Sometimes American Indians are used as a yardstick of comparison to satirize medieval knights or the French. At times Mark Twain’s penchant for sharpening contrasts makes his references more negative than they might be in less loaded contexts. He delights in taking a position from “the authorities,” exaggerating it, and then countering the original position with an equally exaggerated rebuttal: In books [the Indian] is tall and tawny, muscular, straight, and of kingly presence; he has a beaked nose and an eagle eye. . . . But out on the plains . . . he is little, and scrawny, and black, and dirty; and . . . thoroughly pitiful and contemptible. There is nothing in his eye or nose that is attractive. 36

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Occasionally Mark Twain makes neutral and even positive references to Indians. Two pages after he excoriates the Goshutes in Roughing It as “a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race,” Twain reverses course in order to satirize railway officials and employees: There is an impression abroad that the Baltimore and Washington Railroad Company and many of its employés are Goshoots; but it is an error. There is only a plausible resemblance, which, while it is apt enough to mislead the ignorant, cannot deceive parties who have contemplated both tribes. But seriously, it was not only poor wit, but very wrong to start the report referred to above; for however innocent the motive may have been, the necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class who have a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the Rocky Mountains, Heaven knows! If we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion, in God’s name let us at least not throw mud at them. 37

But there are also a number of writings in which Native Americans are portrayed as brutal, vicious, and evil. There is nothing amusing about the character of Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as I discovered one afternoon when I took some neighborhood children to see a film version of the novel, and wound up holding the hands of frightened youngsters, one of whom crawled into my lap. An even more vicious portrayal is at the center of a long unfinished manuscript that Mark Twain worked on just after completing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Described by the author, in a letter to W. D. Howells, as a new story of “Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer among the Indians 40 or 50 years ago,” 38 the narrative picks up the thread of lighting out for the [Indian] Territory with which Huckleberry Finn ends. Tom Sawyer persuades Huck and Jim to “run off, some night, and cut for the Injun country and go for adventures,” 39 and the trio eventually joins up with a pioneer family bound for Oregon. After traveling some distance, the party reaches the Platte River, where they camp near five Oglala Sioux. For several days the Indians seem friendly, and the two groups eat together and play games. Then the Indians devise a buffalo hunt to divide the pioneers; they shoot and scalp the father and sons, tomahawk the mother, and kidnap Jim and the two girls, aged seven and seventeen. Tom and Huck, joined by the elder girl’s fiancé, set off to follow the Indians. The manuscript breaks off just after Huck discovers a bloody piece of the elder girl’s dress near four stakes driven into the ground. “Tom [said Huck], where did you learn about Injuns—how noble they was, and all that?” . . . He turned away his head, and after about a minute he said “Cooper’s novels.” 40

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These varied and contradictory references make it difficult to summarize Mark Twain’s attitude toward Native Americans. Something of a pattern can be discerned, for the early references, especially when Twain was living in the West, tend to be more negative than the later. When he moved to New York and Connecticut, he seemed to adopt the more sympathetic Eastern view of the natives: “They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine—at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s.” 41 Mark Twain’s final comment on Indians comes in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1909), where the Captain discovers that Indians in heaven greatly outnumber whites and that St. Peter’s assistant is “a Pi Ute Injun I used to know in Tulare County; mighty good fellow.” 42 But this evolving pattern is not uniform. There are sympathetic remarks in an early (1877) letter to Howells: “I hope [President Hayes, Elinor Howells’ cousin] will put Lt. Col. Richard Irving Dodge . . . at the head of the Indian Department. There’s a man who knows all about Indians, & yet has some humanity in him— (knowledge of Indians, & humanity, are seldom found in the same individual).” 43 And there are negative references in later works, such as “A Californian’s Tale” (1893), in which a miner has been driven to delusions by the capture of his young wife by Indians many years before the tale opens. “Dead?” the narrator asks. “That or worse,” replies one of the miner’s friends. It seems clear that Mark Twain, in addition to using Indians as opportunities for jokes and attacks on Cooper and others, was indeed prejudiced against the natives. That prejudice lessened, though it did not entirely disappear, over time. In this spasmodic evolution, Mark Twain was a child of his age. When he was born in 1835, Native Americans ranged freely across much of the West. When he was a boy, some remnant natives, cut off from their cultures, were living on the edge of Midwestern towns, sometimes on handouts or thievery. There was an Injun Joe in Hannibal in the 1830s, a drunkard whom John Marshall Clemens, young Sam’s father, tried unsuccessfully to reform. 44 When Sam and his brother Orion took the Overland Trail to Nevada Territory in 1861, Indian raids were still a threat to travelers and settlers. The period of Mark Twain’s most productive writing, from “Old Times on the Mississippi” in 1875 to Connecticut Yankee in 1889, coincided exactly with the major Indian wars in the West. In the same month, June 1876, that Twain began to write Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer rode into the valley of the Little Bighorn River in Montana, with eleven companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. By the time Mark Twain departed for a nine-year residence in Europe in 1891, the Sioux had been massacred by Gatling guns at Wounded Knee and the Indian problem began to turn from warfare to welfare. Once “the vanishing American” really began to disappear and was no longer a military threat or a commercial impediment, many whites began to mollify their hostility. In 1924, fourteen

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years after Mark Twain’s death, when the treaties had all been broken and the natives had lost all but a fraction of their lands, they were officially made American citizens—a final irony matching the initial irony more than four centuries earlier when Columbus stepped ashore, and making what Samuel Eliot Morison calls “one of the worst guesses in history,” named the natives of the new world “Indios.” 45 An international context also sheds light on Twain’s evolving attitudes. In 1895-96, as part of his effort to recover from bankruptcy and pay off his debts, Mark Twain made a twelve-month lecturing trip that took him across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand, India, and South Africa. By then, the high tide of colonialism had swept around the world, subordinating, exploiting, and extinguishing native peoples on every continent but Antarctica. In the book that resulted from this trip, Following the Equator, Mark Twain was forced to confront the situation of natives and “savages” in a comprehensive way. The experience led him to express concern for the natives everywhere he traveled, as well as to rethink the plight of the North American Indians and renew his antipathy to American slavery, to which he explicitly connected end-of-the-century conditions overseas. Although Twain lectured to and was a guest of mostly British imperialists, much of the satire of the book is directed at the Europeans who had so mercilessly and so completely slaughtered native populations, stolen their lands, extinguished their cultures, and dragged their remnants into modern white history. In 1872 in Roughing It, the young narrator states that he had “been obliged to look the bulky volumes of Wood’s ‘Uncivilized Races of Men’ clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the Goshoots. . . . It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa.” 46 A quarter of a century later, when Mark Twain actually got to South Africa, he denounced the treatment of black natives by white Rhodesians as a twenty-year death sentence: “[It] is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude ‘civilization’ . . . with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor.” 47 In his travels, the author, then 60, came to a realization that escaped most of his white contemporaries, convinced as they were of a stair-step notion of the technical, cultural, and moral advance of civilization: native peoples were just as smart, just as human, as the most advanced citizens of the leading European and North American countries. That is, the difference between aboriginals and whites was a matter of eyeglasses, written language, railway trains, dentists, and dynamite; not intelligence, art, skill, emotional understanding, or physical prowess and endurance. Seen by Twain in this new light, Fiji Islanders were handsome and intelligent. The Australian aborigines possessed “a craft, a penetration, a luminous sagacity, and a minuteness and accuracy of observation. . . . It must have been race-aversion that put upon them a good deal of the low-rate intellectual reputation which they bear and

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have borne this long time in the world’s estimate of them.” 48 This new appreciation of aboriginal peoples led Twain to excoriate their treatment by the civilized world: In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to death . . . we have burned the savage at the stake . . . we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mother with dogs and guns through the woods and swamps for an afternoon’s sport . . . we have taken the savage’s land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed him every day, and broken his pride, and made death his only friend, and overworked him till he dropped in his tracks. 49

The vehemence of this attack suggests an apology for earlier, less sympathetic views from an author who now understands that “the hearts of men are about alike, all over the world, no matter what their skin-complexions may be.” 50 In the remaining decade and a half of his life, Mark Twain would become a highly visible leader of the emerging U.S. anti-imperialism movement, and he would write powerful indictments of world-wide colonialism (“To the Person Sitting in Darkness”), Czarist Russia (“The Czar’s Soliloquy”), atrocities in the Belgium Congo (“King Leopold’s Soliloquy”), war in the Philippines (“A Defense of General Funston”), mindless patriotism (“The WarPrayer”), mob violence (“The United States of Lyncherdom”), and anti-Semitism (“Concerning the Jews”), among others. 51 The author moved with his time, and we need to remind ourselves that it is not possible for a person who has been dead for a century to somehow have our contemporary attitudes, shaped as those attitudes are by the intervening years. Everyone is a person of his or her generation and culture. Many are locked in their times; some, especially those who continue to speak to us, have more perspective, are more critical, and push on the boundaries of their eras. Here Mark Twain gets high marks. He was seduced by the get-rich fever of his age, but he also gave it a name (the Gilded Age) and helped to unmask it. Both a believer and a critic of many nineteenth-century notions, Mark Twain shared the race prejudice of his moment in history, but he at least partially transcended it. Satirists always have one foot in their era; that’s how they understand it. And one foot out; that’s how they put on the pressure.

III

Early Years: Comic Creations (1851–1872)

Chapter Five

The Strategy of Counterpoint

“Human nature delights in contrasts, and I have considerable human nature in me.” 1 Mark Twain, in an 1867 letter to the San Francisco Alta California

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF A HUMORIST Mark Twain, who knew one when he saw one, described his Western comrade Jim Gillis as “a born humorist”: He had a bright and smart imagination and it was of the kind that turns out impromptu work and does it well, does it with easy facility and without previous preparation, just builds a story as it goes along, careless of whither it is proceeding, enjoying each fresh fancy as it flashes from the brain and caring not at all whether the story shall ever end brilliantly and satisfactorily or shan’t end at all. 2

Twain himself was a born humorist. From his earliest years he reveled in novelty and variety and had a sharp eye for contrast and contradiction. If he at least partially inherited this instinct, it surely came not from his father, a “silent, austere” man, 3 but from his mother. A redhead like her son Sam, who called her my “first and closest friend,” Jane Clemens had a “sunshiny disposition,” “felt a strong interest in the whole world and everything and everybody in it,” 4 and enjoyed dancing to the age of 87. She was a defender of underdogs and underpersons and once argued, in response to her family’s teasing abuse of Satan, that since he was the supreme sinner, Satan deserved the daily prayers of every Christian. Writing after her death in 1890, Twain noted that 71

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Chapter 5 She was very bright, and was fond of banter and playful duels of wit; and she had a sort of ability which is rare in men and hardly existent in women—the ability to say a humorous thing with the perfect air of not knowing it to be humorous. Whenever I was in her presence, after I was grown, a battle of chaff was going on all the time. . . . Once, under pretence of fishing for tender and sentimental reminiscences of my [sickly] childhood . . . I asked her how she used to feel about me in those days. With an almost pathetic earnestness she said, “All along at first I was afraid you would die”—a slight, reflective pause, then this addition, spoken as if talking to herself— “and after that I was afraid you wouldn’t.” 5

In 1867, when Twain sent his mother a copy of his first book, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, And Other Sketches, he inscribed it “To|My Mother—|The dearest Friend I ever|had, & the truest.” 6 Two years later he dedicated his second book, The Innocents Abroad, to his mother, describing her as “My Most Patient Reader and Most Charitable Critic.” After leaving home at the age of 17, Twain corresponded frequently and voluminously with Jane Clemens for many years, sending her letters that are witty, affectionate, teasing, confiding, and rich with his experiences and opinions, successes and mishaps. A key insight into this relationship, and into young Sam Clemens’ precocious proclivities, can be seen in a letter by Orion Clemens written to a Miss Wood on 3 October 1858, long before Sam, then a cub pilot, became known as a humorist. Orion had written to thank Miss Wood for her assistance to his two younger brothers when the steamboat Pennsylvania exploded in the summer of 1858. Reminiscing about their younger days, before “this time of great trouble,” Orion recalled that often Sam would mislead Henry, causing their mother to begin a stern lecture. “But the lectures were never concluded, for Sam would reply with a witticism, or dry, unexpected humor, that would drive the lecture clean out of my mother’s mind, and change it to a laugh.” 7 In addition to inheritance, a family tradition of bantering, and a Missouri town and farm environment of story telling, Mark Twain was a humorist by vocation and training. He went to work in Hannibal at a young age, for his father died from pneumonia in 1847 when Sam was eleven, and the family had to bestir themselves. Jane served meals to paying guests, older brother Orion (pronounced Or´ion by the family) worked as a printer in St. Louis, sister Pamela (Pa mee´la) gave music lessons, and Sam, while attending local schools for the next two years, did odd jobs and then became an apprentice for a local newspaper. When Orion returned to Hannibal in 1850 and established his own weekly newspaper, the Western Union, Sam and their younger brother Henry went to work for him. Alert to the anecdotes and tales that floated through the little newspaper office in Hannibal where he set type, Sam Clemens began his 60-year career as an author with a joke. His first known publication, “A Gallant Fireman,” a 155-word newspaper squib, ap-

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peared on page 3 of the Western Union for 16 January 1851. 8 The fifteenyear-old apprentice described an incident occasioned by a fire that had broken out in a grocery store next to Orion Clemens’ print shop. The fireman of the ironic title is Jim Wolf, a fellow apprentice, who responded to the emergency by carrying some implements out of the shop. As Clemens described it, Wolf lugged the equipment “some ten squares off,” returning “in the course of an hour,” long after the fire had been put out. Thus Mark Twain’s career as a humorist began with comic exaggeration, satire, and a tendency to focus a story on character and language, not merely on the facts of an incident. He is much less interested in the fire in Parker’s grocery than in lampooning Jim Wolf’s quixotic heroics (he “gathered the broom, an old mallet, the wash-pan and a dirty towel, and in a fit of patriotic excitement, rushed out of the office”), his casual pace (“being of a snailish disposition, even in his quickest moments, the fire had been extinguished during his absence”), and his hyperbolic posturing and ignorance (“‘if that thar fire hadn’t bin put out, thar’d a’ bin the greatest confirmation of the age!’”). Undoubtedly encouraged by seeing his work in print in this instance, and perhaps in others that have not been preserved, Sam sent a more elaborate comic satire— “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter”—to the Boston Carpet-Bag the following year. Though clumsy in spots, this work of a sixteen-year-old printer’s devil demonstrates in embryo the satire of pretentiousness, the use of the vernacular, and the ironic reversal that would eventually make its author famous: “Ladies [boasts the dandy], if you wish to enjoy a good laugh, step out on the guards. I intend to frighten that gentleman into fits who stands on the bank.” The ladies complied with the request, and our dandy drew from his bosom a formidable looking bowie-knife, and thrust it into his belt; then, taking a large horse-pistol in each hand, he seemed satisfied that all was right. . . . Marching up to the woodsman, he exclaimed: “Found you at last, have I? You are the very man I’ve been looking for these three weeks! Say your prayers!” he continued, presenting his pistols, “you’ll make a capital barn door and I shall drill the key-hole myself!” The squatter calmly surveyed him a moment, and then, drawing back a step, he planted his huge fist directly between the eyes of his astonished antagonist, who, in a moment, was floundering in the turbid waters of the Mississippi. . . . “I say, yeou [declared the squatter], next time yeou come around drillin’ key-holes, don’t forget yer old acquaintances!” 9

Almost all of the more than two dozen pieces that have survived from Sam Clemens’ print shop days are humorous—a parody of “Tintern Abbey,” satires on local citizens (some accompanied by cartoon woodcuts, carved by Sam with a jack-knife), mock-heroic verses aimed at a rival newspaper editor (“The Burial of Sir Abner Gilstrap, Editor of the Bloomington ‘Republi-

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can’”), ethnic jokes and comic dialect at the expense of the Irish (“‘Oh, me, I’se scairt to death, I is, an’ I’ll niver git over it in the worl.’”), humorous anecdotes apparently retold (“A young friend gives me the following yarn as fact”), and puns. 10 Often these works of Clemens’ middle and late teens are signed with the kind of comic pseudonyms that had become commonplace in the age of Major Jack Downing, John Phoenix, Squibob, Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Orpheus C. Kerr (i.e., “office seeker”). Long before he settled on “Mark Twain” in 1863, Clemens experimented with “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins,” “A Dog-be-Deviled Citizen,” “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Esq.,” “Rambler,” “Grumbler,” “Peter Pencilcase’s Son, John Snooks,” and “A Son of Adam.” Orion Clemens tried to keep his younger brother in Hannibal, and at work, by giving him his own column in the Hannibal Journal, but at 17, Sam was ready for a larger world. In June of 1853 he traveled to St. Louis and then to the East—New York, Philadelphia, and Washington— supporting himself by typesetting and sending back letters that were published in Orion’s short-lived newspapers in Missouri and Iowa. Returning to the Midwest nine months later, Sam worked off and on for his brother and as a free-lance journeyman printer in St. Louis and Cincinnati. He continued to write travel letters for Orion’s Muscatine Journal, and experimented with comic vernacular and deadpan humor in three pieces published in the Keokuk Post describing the misadventures of a country bumpkin, “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass,” in the big city: “Chicago’s a great place, but I ain’t going to say nothin about it, only jest this, that when you feel like tellin a feller to go to the devil, tell him to go to Chicago—it’ll anser every purpose, and is perhaps, a leetle more expensive.” 11 When, at the age of 21, Sam abandoned typesetting to go on the river— two years as a cub and two more as a licensed Mississippi River steamboat pilot—he did not totally abandon his incipient career as a humorist. He published two parodies and wrote two unpublished melodramas that we know of between 1859 and 1861, and apparently established himself as a raconteur in the pilothouse. According to a former associate interviewed by biographer Albert Paine, Clemens “was much given to spinning yarns so funny that his hearers were convulsed, and yet all the time his own face was perfectly sober. If he laughed at all, it must have been inside. It would have killed his hearers to do that. Occasionally some of his droll yarns would get into the papers.” 12 Horace Bixby, the pilot who taught Clemens the river and was immortalized in “Old Times on the Mississippi,” remembered that “Sam was always scribbling when not at the wheel.” 13 Sam’s scribbling stopped for about a year when the outbreak of the Civil War closed down commercial traffic on the river. Out of work at age 25, he returned to Hannibal and spent two weeks camping out with childhood friends in a volunteer unit of Confederate irregulars, resigning, he later said, because he was “incapacitated by

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fatigue” from retreating. 14 At this point Orion Clemens’ career took its only successful turn. He had studied law briefly in the St. Louis office of attorney Edward Bates, and he was active in politics, serving as a Republican campaign worker in the election of 1860. When Lincoln became president, he selected Bates as Attorney General, and Bates got Orion appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, newly created in March 1861 as miners poured in following the discovery of silver in the Comstock Lode two years earlier. 15 Orion headed west to assume his duties in July 1861, and Sam, who paid for their Overland Stage tickets, went along for the month-long ride as secretary to the Secretary. It was, he recounts in Roughing It, a “unique sinecure. I had nothing to do and no salary.” 16 Sam Clemens’ attempts to establish an income after they arrived in Carson City led to speculation in mining stocks, and then, during the months of October and November, a clerkship with the first Nevada Territorial Legislature. When the legislative session ended, Clemens devoted his considerable energies to attempting to strike it rich. He spent the first six months of 1862 prospecting for gold and silver, reducing and assaying ore specimens, sinking shafts, digging tunnels with pick and shovel, defending property from claim jumpers, investigating milling techniques used to process ore, and investing all the cash he could find in paying assessments to develop claims and in buying, selling, and trading shares in dozens of mining stocks. Stimulated by the flush times he would describe so wryly a decade later, Clemens wrote to his brother in May that his latest mining claim “will make us capitalists,” “there is no shadow of a doubt,” “I know it to contain our fortune,” we have “secured a sure thing now.” The same letter, however, confessed that he and his partner were “‘strapped’ and we haven’t three days’ rations in the house.” A month later his appraisal was more sober: “Well, it does seem like a dead sure thing,—but then it’s the d—dest country for disappointments the world ever saw.” 17 Nothing panned out, and by the summer he was disappointed and broke—one more illustration that once surface outcrops had been scooped up, the business of mining quickly became controlled by corporations and financiers. As historian Richard White puts it, “Miners quoted the Mexican proverb that it took a gold mine to develop a silver mine, and added that it took a bank to develop the gold mine.” 18 Thus Sam reverted to his earlier skills, writing occasional letters to newspapers back in Iowa as well as in Nevada, including the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Recognizing an unusual spark in some letters that Clemens had submitted under the pseudonym of “Josh,” 19 Enterprise editor Joseph Goodman and business manager William Barstow offered Sam a position as a local reporter in July 1862, and in the fall he began a career in writing that would last the rest of his life. In some ways Sam Clemens was ideally suited to be a reporter. Like his mother he was smart and interested in all manner of things. His years as a

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typesetter and journeyman printer had made him literate at an early age, and given him an indoctrination into newspaper work and writing for deadlines. His time on the river had trained his memory and initiated a lifetime habit of keeping notebooks. His first year in Nevada and his reporting for the legislature had made him familiar with the people and issues in the raucous, mostly male, boom-and-bust mining towns in the new territory. And he had another set of talents as well—imaginative, humorous, and satirical—that immediately gave a special flavor to his reportorial work. Most of the hundreds of pieces that he composed for the Enterprise are no longer extant; those that do survive can be divided into groups. There are some routine news reports, occasionally signed by Sam. L. Clemens, which apparently bored their author: The Territorial Legislature will meet here next Tuesday at noon. The rooms used last year in the county buildings, have been let by the County Commissioners for the use of the two Houses, at $500 for the session of forty days, payable in greenbacks. The halls are now being fitted up, and will be ready at the proper time. 20

Other straightforward reports, even on such intractably factual topics as assaying silver bars, are enlivened, and often made more intelligible, by colorful similes: After the amalgam has been retorted at the mill, it is brought here and broken up and put into a crucible (along with a little borax,) of the capacity of an ordinary plug hat; this vessel is composed of some kind of pottery which stands heat like a salamander; the crucible is placed in a brick furnace; in the midst of a charcoal fire as hot as the one which the three Scriptural Hebrew children were assayed in. 21

Then there are many news reports richly embellished with wit and wisecracks, often, after February 1863, signed “Mark Twain”—a pseudonym that signified the personal stamp which distinguished Clemens’ work from the anonymous columns of daily newspapers. 22 There was, it announced, a narrator behind the prose, a personality who interpreted events for the reader, a character whose shape shifted to suit the task at hand. At times that narrator is a sharp-eyed wag, alert to the humorous possibilities of everyday life. When Mark Twain attended a service of the Presbyterian Church in its temporary quarters on the second floor of the Carson City courthouse, and afterwards interviewed the sheriff, he noted that “by an easy and pleasant transition, I went from church to jail. It was only just down stairs—for they save men eternally in the second story of the new court house, and damn them for life in the first.” 23 At other times the narrator plays the naïve innocent who doesn’t get the joke, a written version of the deadpan speaker that Twain

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admired in his mother’s expression and in the stage performances of Fred Franks, Dan Setchell, and Artemus Ward; and one that he would himself perfect as a lecturer. The [Nevada] Supreme Court will meet in Carson City on the 13th of the present month; and in connection with this intelligence I present the following item . . . thus: “Wm. Alford vs. Nathaniel Dewing et als.—Ordered filed, denying rehearing.” There it is, and I wash my hands of the matter. I don’t know Alford, and I don’t know Dewing, and I don’t know Et Als—and I never heard of either, or any of these gentlemen until this very day, when the Clerk of the Supreme Court brought me this written nightmare, which has been distressing me up to the present moment. If it is a charge, I do not make it; if it is an insinuation, I do not endorse it; if its expression-less exterior conceals a slur, I do not father it. I simply publish the document as I received it, and take no responsibility upon myself for the consequences. 24

And finally, there are whole-cloth tales, satires, and hoaxes that allowed Mark Twain’s late-twenties exuberance to soar in the windy altitudes of Western journalism: A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner—which lifetime, by the way, came to a close about a century ago, in the opinion of a savan who has examined the defunct. The body was in a sitting posture, and leaning against a huge mass of croppings; the attitude was pensive, the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the fore-finger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart. 25

This “unmitigated lie,” as Twain called it, 26 was meant to be a satire on the contemporary newspaper mania about “extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels” and an attack on an unfriendly judge, but it was accepted as fact by many of the dozen or more papers that reprinted it. 27 Mark Twain would gradually grow beyond the hoaxes, practical jokes, lies, puns, broad burlesques, and farces that Satan in The Mysterious Stranger would call “a thousand low-grade and trivial” comicalities, but in the early 1860s Twain experimented with comicalities of all grades. Another celebrated hoax that helped establish him as the “Washoe Giant” was a news item entitled “A Bloody Massacre near Carson.” 28 It describes a man named P. Hopkins, impoverished by the common (and still surviving) practice of cooking dividends to bolster stock prices, who becomes insane, and murders his wife and nine children: “About ten o’clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and

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bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon.” 29 Once again Mark Twain thought he had given a wink to the reader—it is difficult to ride four miles on horseback with your throat cut from ear to ear—and once again many of his readers missed it, just as they had missed the fact that the petrified man was thumbing his petrified nose at them in the earlier sketch (“the right thumb resting against the side of the nose . . . and the fingers of the right hand spread apart”). Twain’s satire, this time against stock manipulators as well as sensationalism in the press, misfired yet again, and his critics were not mollified by his apology, itself undercut by a jocular jab at the press, printed on the following day. By 1864 Mark Twain had risen to the top of mining-town journalism, such as it was. He was well known throughout the Territory of Nevada, celebrated by some, and considered notorious by others, including rival journalists, though some allowance might be made here for the customary vehemence and inflation of Western journalism: The editor of the Enterprise [i.e., Mark Twain, as local reporter or local editor] has proved himself an unmitigated liar, a poltroon and a puppy. 30 Giving way to the idiosyncratic eccentricities of an erratic mind, Mark has indulged in the game infernal—in short, “played hell.” . . . The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man, though sheathed with the brass and triple cheek of Mark Twain. 31

On the other hand, in December 1863, Twain’s many friends elected him president of the so-called “Third House” of the Territorial Legislature, a highly informal group described by a modern historian as a strange institution of Carson City [which] appeared in 1862 and lasted at least seven years. It is, apparently, without a parallel in American history. Intended by its prankster founders to burlesque the processes and results of popular legislation, it met informally, in rear rooms, saloons, the schoolhouse, the Presbyterian Church, the Assembly itself. Legislators, lawyers, hangers-on, and townsmen made up the membership. . . . It made fun of governors’ messages, proposed absurd bills, told lies, punned, played tricks, baited prominent politicians, and “elected” state officials. 32

The following month, now as “Governor” of the Third House of the Constitutional Convention, Twain delivered a burlesque “Governor’s Message,” perhaps his first public speech to a large group. He wrote to his sister that he had the satisfaction of having had a larger audience than the visiting comic celebrity Artemus Ward had attracted the previous month in Virginia City, and the “gratification of hearing good judges say it was the best thing of the kind they had ever listened to,” as well as the present of a $225 gold

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watch. 33 Perhaps the most prescient comment about Twain’s Nevada years was made in retrospect by Joe Goodman, in describing a midnight oyster supper that Artemus Ward had thrown for the staff of the Territorial Enterprise, when “course succeeded course and wine followed wine”: “Then begun a flow and reflow of humor it would be presumptuous in me to attempt to even outline. It was on that occasion that Mark Twain fully demonstrated his right to rank above the world’s acknowledged foremost humorist.” 34 Successful, ambitious, restless in what he called “sage-brush obscurity,” 35 the 28-year-old author was ready to try his fortune in the big time. Once again he went west, this time to California, which had boomed into statehood in 1850 and produced a cultural flourish in San Francisco with twelve daily newspapers, literary journals, professional writers, theaters, opera, ballet, and 231 barrooms. 36 Mark Twain signed on as a reporter for the San Francisco Morning Call, while also contributing articles to the weekly Golden Era and sending items back to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Routine newspaper work (“soulless drudgery—and almost destitute of interest” 37) continued to bore him, and when he could he poured his energies into the kind of writing that had made his reputation in Nevada— ingenious, exuberant, flamboyant, outrageous; and characterized, as the San Francisco Examiner later put it, by a “shrewd, graceless, good-humored, cynical way of looking at things as they in fact are—unbullied by authority and indifferent to tradition.” 38 THE CLASH OF CONTRAST AND THE STRETCH OF EXAGGERATION I The California writings, and those in Nevada which preceded them, are a motley group of squibs, reports, descriptions, sketches, parodies, satires, and burlesques both high (elevating a trivial subject) and low (trivializing an elevated subject), which illustrate a wide range of strategies and varying kinds of success. These Western works demonstrate two crucial techniques that show Mark Twain honing his skills as a humorist. With the exception of a few straightforward news reports, each piece is constructed with a contrast that provides the duality which is the foundation stone for humor. Sometimes the contrasted parts are simply linked with dashes and commas, as in “Advice for Good Little Boys”: You ought never to take anything that don’t belong to you—if you can not carry it off. If you unthinkingly set up a tack in another boy’s seat, you ought never to laugh when he sits down on it. You should never do anything wicked

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Similarly heavy-handed, an article about a Sunday morning in San Francisco sets up a framework of pious rhetoric and then punctures it with bracketed interjections of cacophonous sounds: This is the Sabbath to-day. This is the day set apart by a benignant Creator for rest—for repose from the wearying toils of the week, and for calm and serious [Brown’s dog has commenced to howl again—I wonder why Brown persists in keeping that dog chained up?] meditation upon those tremendous subjects pertaining to our future existence. How thankful we ought to be [There goes that rooster, now.] for this sweet respite; how fervently we ought to lift up our voice and [Confound that old hen—lays an egg every forty minutes, and then cackles until she lays the next one.] testify our gratitude. How sadly, how soothingly the music of that deep-toned bell floats up from the distant church! How gratefully we murmur [Scat!—that old gray tom-cat is always bully-ragging that other one—got him down, now, and digging the hair out of him by the handfull.] thanksgiving for these Sabbath blessings. How lovely the day is! [“Buy a broom! buy a broom!”] How mild and beautiful the [“Golden Era ‘n’ Sund’ Mercry, two for a bit apiece!”] sun smites upon the tranquil [“Alta, Mon’ Call, an’ Merican Flag!”] city! [“Po-ta-to-o-o-es, ten pounds for two bits–po-ta-to-o-o-es, ten pounds for quart-va-dollar!”] 40

In another piece contrasting two kinds of language, Mark Twain describes the report of a journalist who gets inebriated at a wedding on his way back from the stock market: “Stocks brisk, and Ophir [a mining company] has taken this woman for your wedded wife.” 41 A valentine written by a law student begins “To the loveliness to whom these presents shall come, greeting,” and the narrator comments, in case the reader missed the point, that “a man must be [a villain] to blend together the beautiful language of love and the infernal phraseology of the law in one and the same sentence!” 42 Parodies work in a similarly contrastive fashion, since the reader has one text in mind that grates against another supplied by the author: “Once upon a morning dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious shirt that me and Steve has wore.” 43 In a more radical experiment in poetic contrast, undertaken to console his seasick friend “Brown” in Hawaii, Twain alternates lines from “The Burial of Sir John Moore” and “The Destruction of Sennacherib”: The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, The turf with our bayonets turning, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold, And our lanterns dimly burning. 44

Brown immediately “threw up everything he had eaten for three days.”

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Other polarities are established by setting up a yin-yang dialogue between two persons: correspondent (usually invented) and editor, or the narrator and a foil, often “Mr. Brown,” who interrupts the narrator with blunt, realistic, anti-sentimental comments. A number of the Nevada sketches involve an exchange of ripostes between Mark Twain of the Enterprise and his good friend Clement Rice, dubbed “The Unreliable” by Twain, of the Virginia City Union. On 28 February 1863, the Marysville, California Appeal noted that “the reporters for the Virginia [City] Union and the Virginia Enterprise, over the mountains, have a lovely time ‘sparring’ at each other.” The specific piece to which the Appeal referred was a mock obituary of “the Unreliable” Rice by “Reliable” Mark Twain, filled with characteristic comic insults. The Unreliable, according to Twain, stole from his friends, never paid his board, and crashed parties uninvited: “He is dead and buried now, though: let him rest, let him rot. Let his vices be forgotten, but let his virtues be remembered: it will not infringe much on any man’s time.” Then there is a P.S.: Twain has just learned that Rice has come to life again, climbed out of his coffin, carried it to town, sold it for $2.50, and gotten drunk. Twain concludes: “He was always unreliable in life—he could not even be depended upon in death.” 45 In another sketch that creates contrast by violating genre expectations, Twain writes a “biography” of City Marshall Jack Perry: John Van Buren Perry, recently re-elected City Marshall of Virginia City, was born a long time ago, in County Kerry, Ireland, of poor but honest parents, who were descendants, beyond question, of a house of high antiquity. The founder of it was distinguished for his eloquence; he was the property of one Balaam, and received honorable mention in the Bible. 46

The reference, of course, is to Balaam’s ass in Numbers 22. Occasionally Twain creates a contrast by beginning a sketch with a proposition, letter, newspaper article, or advertisement, which he then counters or debates. One tale begins with opposed epigraphs: Early to bed, and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. —Benjamin Franklin. I don’t see it. —George Washington. 47

Sometimes he will present an incongruous list: “[The dog] died full of years, and honor, and disease, and fleas.” 48 Twain wrote home that Nevada Territory is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, slate, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, gamblers, In-

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Mark Twain’s Nevada and California notebooks also demonstrate his focus on the strategy of counterpoint, for they contain hundreds of contrasts, observed or created: No care-worn or eager, anxious faces in the land of happy contentment [Hawaii]–God! what a contrast with California & Washoe. Water taken in moderation cannot hurt anybody. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Don’t be fooled by this absurd saw. I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise & a horse bit him. 50

One notebook entry— “Barbarism & high civilization so close together— religion refinement superstition bestiality”—outlines the bipolar structure Twain uses in his letters from the Sandwich Islands and later in The Innocents Abroad. 51 In his early works, Mark Twain will often blurt out the point, perhaps as a guide for himself and the reader: “a vivid contrast,” “quite a contrast,” “a startling contrast,” “a striking contrast,” “a glaring and hilarious contrast.” A chapter subtitle in a Sandwich Islands letter to the Sacramento Union could be used in any of scores of Twain’s works— “New Scenes and Strong Contrasts”—and the opening sentences of that chapter capture the way the author revels in the concept: “The further I traveled through [Honolulu] the better I liked it. Every step revealed a new contrast—disclosed something I was unaccustomed to.” In his first four major books, Twain uses the word contrast 56 times: “the most extravagant contrast to be found in history,” “a thousand odd comparisons and contrasts” “strong contrasts to heighten the effects.” 52 “Contrast,” Mark Twain told a welcome-home reception given him by the New York Press Club in the fall of 1900, “is what brings out humor.” 53 II Another noun Mark Twain often uses is lie, which has two meanings in his works. There is, of course, the plain lie, an untruth meant to deceive. And then there is the playful lie, which comes with a wink to the reader or listener. In this sense lie is often a synonym for exaggeration, and it points to the second basic technique in Twain’s humor toolbox. Exaggeration works hand in glove with contrast, for exaggerating the two poles of a contrast, such as barbarism and refinement, sharpens and italicizes the differences between native and advanced civilizations by pushing the poles farther apart, enabling the author to satirize both sides. And an exaggeration, from Latin agger, “to

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pile up,” is itself a duality, consisting of the original fact or situation and the piled-up version. In 1902, W. D. Howells sent Mark Twain a copy of his most recent book, a boy’s town story called The Flight of Pony Baker. Twain, who was at the time writing a narrative entitled “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” replied that “It is a charming book, & perfectly true. It ought to reproach me, for I am making Huck Finn tell things that are imperfectly true, this last week or two. They are true, but with that qualification; he exaggerates; you don’t. Still, I have to keep him as he was, & he was an exaggerator from the beginning.” 54 Like Huck, Mark Twain was an exaggerator from the beginning. At the age of 15, in his first published piece, young Sam Clemens described how Jim Wolf carried the broom and dustpan out of the print shop and away from the fire next door, depositing them “some ten squares off.” A half century later, when Mark Twain recounted the incident to A. B. Paine, the distance had lengthened to “half a mile.” In between those times, Twain continually manipulated stretchers, embroidery, tall tales, and what he himself called “wild extravaganzas.” 55 In the early works his exaggerations, like his contrasts, are sometimes overdone in a rush of energy and exuberance. In writing up a riding accident suffered by his Enterprise confrere Dan De Quille, Twain states that Dan was wrenched from his saddle and thrown some three hundred yards . . . alighting upon solid ground, and bursting himself open from the chin to the pit of the stomach. His head was also caved in out of sight, and his hat was afterwards extracted in a bloody and damaged condition from between his lungs; he must have bounced end-for-end after he struck first, because it is evident he received a concussion from the rear that broke his heart; one of his legs was jammed up in his body nearly to his throat, and the other so torn and mutilated that it pulled out when they attempted to lift him into the hearse which we had sent to the scene of the disaster, under the general impression that he might need it; both arms were indiscriminately broken up until they were jointed like a bamboo; the back was considerably fractured and bent into the shape of a rail fence. Aside from these injuries, however, he sustained no other damage. 56

The last sentence, of course, is the best. Mark Twain may have written that sentence because he had recently been stung by the reactions of readers who were taken in by the “Petrified Man” and “Bloody Massacre” hoaxes, and he was learning how to make the reader an insider to the joke, not its butt. An exaggeration that tricks the reader is simply an untruth, a plain lie; the charm lies in letting readers in on the piled-up fun, so they can enjoy it. In addition, his skill was developing to the point where he may have realized that too many exaggerations, each piled too high, can become predictable, unsurprising, dull. Thus he created a new joke with the last sentence. The

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understatement about “no other damage,” hard on the heels of the preceding overstatements, provides both a contrast and a surprise—exactly what is required for humor. Thus understatement, though headed in the opposite direction, is structured like overstatement, since its effect is based on a departure from normal statement. Twain would become a master of both these deviations from expectation, and he sometimes played one against the other. Mark Twain’s most famous bon mot is an understatement about overstatement. In May 1897, Dr. James Ross Clemens, one of Twain’s cousins, fell ill, and garbled accounts that Mark Twain was dying led American newspapers to cable their representatives in London, where Twain was living at the time, to ascertain the facts. Responding to inquiries on 1 June, Twain composed a 39-word note stating that “the report of my death was an exaggeration,” and sent or gave it to Frank Marshall White, a representative of the New York Journal. This statement, expanded by White to 127 words, appeared on the front page of the Journal on 2 June 1897, and has been circulating in various versions ever since. 57 Also on 2 June, Twain recorded the contents of his statement, almost exactly, in his notebook. Nine years later, on 3 April 1906, he dictated an embellished version, in which the statement was spoken rather than written. This version appeared in “Chapters from My Autobiography,” published in the North American Review in 1906 as “Say the report is greatly exaggerated,” and in Bernard DeVoto’s 1940 edition of Twain’s autobiographical dictations as “Say the report is exaggerated,” which omitted the “greatly” added by Twain when he revised his dictation for publication in 1906. There is yet another version of the famous remark in Albert Paine’s Mark Twain, A Biography, where Paine quotes the contents of a newspaper cable brought by a reporter who came to interview Mark Twain about his reputed illness: “If Mark Twain very ill, five hundred words. If dead, send one thousand.” Clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable. “You don’t need as much as that,” he said. “Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.” 58

The grim smile and the “grossly” need not be taken literally, since Paine’s free-ranging biographical method allows him to invent dialogue, manipulate quotations, and convert Twain’s wry pleasure with the newspaper inquiries to grimness. Paine had the autobiographical dictations on his desk. He seems to have lifted out the “exaggerated” passage, remolded it to fit his biography, added the “grossly,” which he may have taken from White’s 1910 article in Outlook, and omitted the passage in his later two-volume edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography. All six of these versions—three by Twain himself—and yet another by Margaret White Raoul in 1931, differ in various ways, but fortunately we can

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prove what Mark Twain originally said, or more precisely wrote, for the penciled note that Twain transmitted to journalist White on 1 June 1897 still exists—passed on from White to his daughter and ultimately to book collector Waller Barrett. It reads as follows, with the brackets indicating words that Mark Twain wrote and then struck out: James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine was seriously ill two or three weeks ago, in London, but [is well now.] [did not die in poverty and] is well now. [I have not] [been ill] The report of my illness grew out of his illness, the report of my death was an exaggeration. Mark Twain

The strikeovers suggest the note was written in haste, which would explain the missing comma in the first sentence, and the comma splice in the second. The manuscript also shows that Twain began the second sentence with “I have not been ill.” Apparently at that point inspiration struck; he crossed out the bland factual statement, and substituted the remark about the report of his death. When Mark Twain jotted down the incident in his notebook the next day, he misremembered slightly, and put the “I have not been ill” part at the end. To his credit, Paine published this version in his edition of Mark Twain’s Notebook in 1935, even though it contradicted his biography of 1912. By 1897 Twain had been practicing the art of understatement for over three decades, and an ancestor of the exaggerated death remark can be seen in the first of his letters from Nevada to the San Francisco Morning Call: “There was a report about town, last night, that Charles Strong, Esq., Superintendent of the Gould & Curry, had been shot and very effectually killed. I asked him about it at church this morning. He said there was no truth in the rumor.” 59 Throughout his career, Twain insisted understatements and overstatements were meaningful as well as playful. An autobiographical entry, dictated after his 70th birthday dinner, spells out his theory of exaggeration: In the [birthday] speech which I made were concealed many facts. I expected everybody to discount those facts 95 per cent and that is probably what happened. That does not trouble me, I am used to having my statements discounted. My mother had begun it before I was seven years old. But all through my life my facts have had a substratum of truth, and therefore they were not without preciousness. Any person who is familiar with me knows how to strike

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Figure 5.1. Mark Twain’s penciled note of 1 June 1897; courtesy of the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

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my average, and therefore knows how to get at the jewel of any fact of mine and dig it out of its blue-clay matrix. My mother knew that art. When I was seven or eight, or ten, or twelve years old—along there—a neighbor said to her, “Do you ever believe anything that that boy says?” My mother said, “He is the wellspring of truth, but you can’t bring up the whole well with one bucket”—and she added, “I know his average, therefore he never deceives me. I discount him 30 per cent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it anywhere.” 60

Mark Twain had what might be called a multiplying imagination. When he is in his reportorial mode, Twain tends to be factually accurate. (“At five o’clock on the morning after the disaster, in latitude 2 degrees 20 minutes north, longitude 112 degrees 8 minutes west, the ship went down.” 61) But when he begins to create a story—whether it’s fiction, autobiography, or a letter to his mother—the impulse to add and improve takes over. The sack of flour auctioned off in Nevada for $5300 to benefit the Sanitary fund brings “eight thousand dollars in gold” in Mark Twain’s account. Brigham Young’s 17 wives and 41 children in Salt Lake City are multiplied to “twenty or thirty” wives and “fifty” children. The depth of Kilauea’s crater is increased from 400 feet to “nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others.” 62 A newspaper clipping in Twain’s scrapbook states that his brother Henry, after a steamboat explosion, escaped on a mattress to a raft or open wood boat, “where he lay exposed [to wind and sun] for eight hours.” Twenty-five years later, the author claimed that Henry swam back to the burning steamboat to “help save the wounded.” 63 Consistency was never Twain’s strong suit, and many of his works, especially his travel accounts, are complicated by narration that is alternately reportorial and fictional, sometimes on the same page. What is consistent is Mark Twain’s lifelong habit of exaggeration, in virtually all contexts. He was partially serious when he looked back on his youth in a letter written in 1876: I can picture myself as I was, 22 years ago. . . . You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a selfsufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung & imagining he is re-modeling the world & is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense & pitiful chuckle-headedness—& an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19-20. 64

And he is completely serious when castigates King Leopold in an autobiographical dictation thirty years later, but even here the piled-on vehemence gives his statement an almost ecstatic exuberance: The royal palace of Belgium is still what it has been for fourteen years—the den of a wild beast—King Leopold II—who for money’s sake mutilates, mur-

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Chapter 5 ders, and starves, half a million of friendless and helpless poor natives in the Congo State every year, and does it by the silent consent of all the Christian powers except England; none of them lifting a hand or a voice to stop these atrocities, although thirteen of them are by solemn treaty pledged to the protection and uplifting of those wretched natives. In fourteen years, Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years. 65

Like Huck Finn, Mark Twain stretched the truth without destroying its substratum of reality. The truth lies in the substratum; the fun lies in the exaggeration. Stretching serves to underscore the reality and make it memorable. “Mr. Mark Twain,” says Huck in the first paragraph of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” 66 In Twain’s way of thinking, stretched truth was still truth. Exaggeration is a strategy of expression for a humorist, but it was more than that for Mark Twain, since it came to him naturally. Twain was an enthusiast, who tended to go to extremes in matters great and small. He wrote of his mother that “in all her life she never knew such a thing as a halfhearted interest,” 67 and that was true of her son as well. Twain pitched himself avidly into whatever held his attention for the moment, whether it was writing a manuscript, courting his fiancée, giving a speech, or making an investment. Both his praise and his condemnation were often hyperbolic. To Howells he wrote, “You are really my only author; I am restricted to you; I wouldn’t give a damn for the rest.” 68 The pious pilgrims on the Quaker City he described as the “rustiest, ignorant, vulgar, slimy, psalm-singing cattle that could be scraped up in seventeen States.” 69 The ship’s captain was “a canting hypocrite, filled to the chin with sham godliness, and forever oozing and dripping false piety and pharisaical prayers.” 70 This tendency toward overstatement and overreaction produced some brilliant moments for Twain, and also some grief. He was highly sensitive as well as impetuous, quick to perceive an insult—real or imaginary—he might have given, or received. Thus he found himself writing hot letters and editorials on one hand, and apologizing on the other. Twain never tamed his explosive temperament, though he did learn, at least on some occasions, to let his correspondence cool before he mailed or printed it. There is a caution for biographers and critics here. Any single statement by Mark Twain, however dramatic or memorable, may capture a moment or a mood, but may not represent his full range of opinions on a particular subject or issue. III Exaggeration and contrast, of course, are tools of the trade for anyone who works the comic side of the street. What is unusual about Mark Twain, who

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worked both sides, is that he uses these tools to further other narrative purposes—factual reporting, description, characterization, plot development, satire, even philosophy. Twain’s lack of decorum, essential to his humor, extends also to not having the politesse to keep humor and seriousness separate. It is this quality that made Mark Twain, even in the early days, something more than a mere jokester. The merger of humor and traditional narrative can be seen in the fledgling writer’s flights of eloquence, a skill appreciated in an age that valued rhetorical flourish in oratory, prose, and poetry, such as H. W. Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life”: Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time. 71

In our own age, of course, which is better defined by Hemingway than Longfellow, eloquent generalizations tend to be suspect: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” 72 Mark Twain would quote from “the Psalm of Life” on at least five occasions 73 —sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes satirically—and as early as his mid-teens, young Sam Clemens was practicing the art of magniloquence, though even then with a sly twist. His second sketch published in an Eastern newspaper, this time the Philadelphia American Courier, was entitled “Hannibal, Missouri,” and consists of a double contrast: early and present-day Hannibal, then Western and Eastern life. The sixteen-year-old apprentice typesetter and neophyte writer begins with Missouri’s frontier past: Then the wild war-whoop of the Indian resounded where now rise our stately buildings, and their bark canoes were moored where now land our noble steamers; here they traded their skins for guns, powder, &c. But where now are the children of the forest? Hushed is the war-cry—no more does the light canoe cut the crystal waters of the proud Mississippi; but the remnant of those once powerful tribes are torn asunder and scattered abroad, and they now wander far, far from the homes of their childhood and the graves of their fathers. 74

Chronologically, Twain could have been Longfellow’s son, or Hemingway’s grandfather, and sometimes his lofty rhetoric is straight; sometimes, as in the San Francisco Sunday morning piece, it is wholly satirical. Yet often, as in the Hannibal passage, it exists in a delectable middle ground of slightly overdone self-satire—a technique that confused Mark Twain’s lecture audiences, who at times were uncertain whether to applaud or to laugh. Often they were invited to do both, for Twain discovered he could get credit for a

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“fine specimen of word painting,” as one reviewer put it, while using that specimen to contrast what followed: “Each of these telling passages would be followed by some humorous comment that would convulse the house with laughter.” 75 The same strategy in print can be seen in the over-cooked description of the sun-gilded “clustering spires and ramparts” of Marseilles at sunset in The Innocents Abroad, which ends with “leagues of environing verdure” and “a mellow radiance that touched with an added charm the white villas that flecked the landscape far and near,” and then with an author’s note: “[Copyright secured according to law.]” 76 In a sketch written shortly after his move to California in 1864, Mark Twain contrasts the deserts of Nevada with the delights of San Francisco: To a Christian who has toiled months and months in Washoe; whose hair bristles from a bed of sand, and whose soul is caked with a cement of alkali dust; whose nostrils know no perfume but the rank odor of sage-brush—and whose eyes know no landscape but barren mountains and desolate plains; where the winds blow, and the sun blisters, and the broken spirit of the contrite heart finds joy and peace only in Limburger cheese and lager beer—unto such a Christian, verily the Occidental Hotel is Heaven on the half shell. 77

This description rides on its own exuberant excess, toys with biblical language (“unto” and “verily”), embeds small contrasts (lofty “joy and peace” versus lowly “Limburger cheese and lager beer”) inside of the major contrast (Nevada and California), and culminates in a jocular anticlimactic climax (“Heaven on the half shell”). And that joke is turned into another in the next sentence: “He may even secretly consider it to be Heaven on the entire shell.” Yet at the same time, Twain is serious about the contrast: there is a difference between Nevada and California. It is this complex mixture of humorous and serious purposes that led his contemporaries to identify Mark Twain, even in his twenties, as somehow different from other comedians of the time. Here was a new breed of comic cat, a humorist who had perceptive and significant things to say, and was able to phrase them both eloquently and amusingly. In later years, Twain’s eloquence would mature along with his humor, and he would no longer have to undercut expressive passages, such as his description of Hawaii as “the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean,” 78 or his depiction of the vigor of General Grant’s prose, which will “bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.” 79 JUMP-STARTING A CAREER As a reporter, Mark Twain had a special fondness for odd and unusual incidents—murders, duels, fires, mining accidents, shipwrecks, earthquakes,

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avalanches—incidents that came with exaggeration already built in. When he found examples of human and natural extremes, he wrote them up. When he couldn’t find them, he sometimes made them up. 80 And when he couldn’t make them up, he quit. Which is precisely what he did, apparently at the suggestion of his supervisor at the San Francisco Morning Call, in the fall of 1864. Here is how that supervisor, co-proprietor and editor George Barnes, described Twain’s attitude toward his newspaper duties. “Mark,” said the managing editor to him, one day [in September], “there is a riot going on among the stevedores along the city front. Get the facts and make a column.” “Ya-a-s,” he responded, with his inimitable drawl; “but how can I get them. There’s no street railroad down that way. You wouldn’t want a fellow to walk a mile to see a couple of ‘longshoremen in a fight, would you?” 81

Twain had previously asked for a reduction in his duties to daylight hours only, with a decrease in pay from $40 a week to $25, and the end of his employment was in sight. In the following month, the managing editor made this observation, while he and Clemens were sitting in the editorial room: “Mark, do you know what I think about you as a local reporter?” “Well, what’s your thought?” “That you are out of your element in the routine of the position, that you are capable of better things in literature.” Mark looked up with a queer twinkle in his eye. “Oh, ya-a-s, I see. You mean to say I don’t suit you.” “Well, to be candid, that’s about the size of it.” 82

Resigning from the Call, Twain made a marginal living by sending occasional letters to the Enterprise and contributing articles to the Californian, a new literary journal edited by Bret Harte, which offered more room for his imagination than the daily grind of daily newspapers. 83 Then, in the winter of 1864-65, he took a three-month vacation in the mining regions of Tuolumne and Calaveras counties in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, staying with friends at Jackass Hill and then Angel’s Camp. Shut in on a February day by the bleak winter rains, gathered about the tavern stove at the Camp, Twain and his companions listened to a tale about a loaded frog that the author-to-be summarized briefly in his little 4 x 6½ inch reporter’s pocket notebook: “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot & he couldn’t jump—the stranger’s frog won.” 84 Returning to San Francisco on 26 February 1865, Mark Twain continued to write for the Californian, sent letters to the Territorial Enterprise, published articles in the Golden Era and Youth’s Companion, and joined the staff

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of the Dramatic Chronicle. Several pieces made use of the stories he had heard at Jackass Hill and Angel’s Camp, and he worked intermittently at converting his note about the frog story into a fully developed sketch. Fired by the possibilities apparently unrecognized by the original teller, who “was dealing with what to him were austere facts, and they interested him solely because they were facts,” 85 Mark Twain, after several months and several false starts, 86 eventually refitted the story with two narrators and elaborated the frog-stuffing denouement by creating a character whose passion for betting is developed in a crescendo of gambling. Jim Smiley “was the curiosest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side, and if he couldn’t he’d change sides.” Smiley will bet on a horserace or a dogfight or a chicken fight or flying birds or crawling straddle-bugs or the health of Parson Walker’s wife. He owns a menagerie of competitors— “rat-terriers, and chicken cocks, and tom-cats and all them kind of things”—and the adventures of two of his animals are narrated at length: the fifteen-minute nag whose desperation plunge at the end of a race always carried her across the finish line “just about a neck ahead”; and a small bullpup, Andrew Jackson, whose ploy was to grab his opponent by a hind leg. Andrew Jackson dies of a broken heart when he is matched against a dog that had lost its rear legs in an accident: [When] he came to make a snatch for his pet holt, he saw in a minute how he’d been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he ‘peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged like, and didn’t try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad.

The development of Jim Smiley’s character and the adventures of his extended family of animals, all invented by Mark Twain, take up half of the story and lead adroitly to the concluding frog contest that Twain inherited from the original tale. Smiley, an overreacher in speculation, finally gets what he deserves, losing his bet to a stranger who grounds Smiley’s frog, “Daniel Webster,” by filling him with buckshot while Jim is out slopping around in a swamp, searching for an opposition frog for the stranger to bet on. Then [Smiley] says “one—two—three—jump!” and him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind, and the new frog hopped off lively, but Dan’l give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders—so—like a Frenchman, but it wasn’t no use—he couldn’t budge; he was planted as solid as a anvil, and he couldn’t no more stir than if he was anchored out.

Jim is too curious, and his obstinate and perverse betting curiosity— remarkable even in a society presumably inured to extravagant gambling— brings him down. Like, one might say, a character in a Greek tragedy, and

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this thoughtful aspect clothed in a wildly funny tale points the direction Mark Twain’s mature talent will take. In other ways as well, the jumping frog story gives a sign of things to come, an indication that after a miscellaneous fifteen-year apprenticeship, the author was beginning to get it together. Instead of a rambling sketch, we have a focused and developed tale. Instead of witty comments by “Mark Twain” that jump and spin in many directions, we have a character narrator, Jim Smiley, who stabilizes the story with a consistent point of view and a voice appropriate to that point of view. Instead of having contrasts pointed out by an omniscient narrator, we have contrast built into the narrative. An athletic competition among amphibians is amusing to begin with, and that disparity is increased by a contest between mismatched frogs that turns out to be no contest. The title is ironic: the “Jumping Frog” can’t jump. And instead of exaggerations stacked up miscellaneously, we have exaggeration embedded in characterization. The extravagance of the yarn is not “Mark Twain’s,” but Jim’s, and it is an essential part of his personality on which the story turns. Demonstrating what he had learned from Artemus Ward and others, as well as his mother, Twain employs naïve narration—deadpan, as the stage term puts it for an expressionless face—that appears not to recognize the eccentricities and the ironies of the story, and thus creates continuous humorous disparity. 87 In the jumping frog story, we have two deadpan narrators. The outside narrator, formal and stuffy (“I hereunto append the result”), appears only in the opening and closing paragraphs. He simply doesn’t get it. The inside narrator, Simon Wheeler, has an easy oral style (“There was a feller here once”) that contrasts both with the outside narrator and with conventional book talk, especially book talk in 1865. Wheeler, like the storytelling miner in Angel’s Camp, may not get it either. Or, like Mark Twain in his deadpan stage performances, he may be putting us on. In either case, his vernacular monologue is earthy and unschooled and loquacious. At the same time—yet another contrast—it is surprisingly imaginative and precise. Part of the fun of many of Twain’s gritty, ungrammatical vernacular characters is their sure-shot verbal accuracy. Why, I’ve seen him set Dan’l Webster down here on this floor—Dan’l Webster was the name of the frog—and sing out, “Flies! Dan’l, flies,” and quicker’n you could wink, he’d spring straight up, and snake a fly off’n the counter there, and flop down on the floor again as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn’t no idea he’d done any more’n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightfor’ard as he was, for all he was so gifted.

Mark Twain finished “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” around the 16th or 17th of October 1865, and mailed it to Artemus Ward in New York, probably via the steamship Golden City, which departed San Francisco on

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the morning of the 18th. 88 That same day, the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, where Twain worked, reprinted, under the heading of “Recognized,” an excerpt from the New York Round Table. In an article entitled “American Humor and Humorists,” the Round Table editor decided to recognize some of the new Western writers and to hazard what would turn out to be a very shrewd guess: The enterprising State of California, which follows as closely as she can upon the steps of her older Eastern sisters, has produced some examples of our national humor which compare favorably with those already mentioned. They are but little known in this region, and few, if any, have yet appeared “between covers.” The foremost among the merry gentlemen of the California press, as far as we have been able to judge, is one who signs himself “Mark Twain.” Of his real name we are ignorant, but his style resembles that of “John Phoenix” more nearly than any other, and some things we have seen from his pen would do honor to the memory of even that chieftain among humorists. He is, we believe, quite a young man, and has not written a great deal. Perhaps . . . he may one day take rank among the brightest of our wits. 89

We can conjecture that the foremost merry gentleman treated his compatriots on the Chronicle to a round of drinks that evening at the Occidental Hotel. The next day, still feeling exuberant from the praise of the Eastern literary establishment and the confidence of having at last completed to his satisfaction an ambitious, complex tale he had struggled with, Mark Twain sat down and wrote a long and revealing letter to his brother. Orion Clemens was back in Carson City, where his venture into politics had not survived Nevada’s leap from territory to statehood in 1864. In debt and out of work, Orion was a man whose career was an erratic search for a career, and he tried, without success, printing, editing, practicing law, writing articles for newspapers, proofreading, raising chickens, taking in boarders, inventing a flying machine, and writing novels. At the moment, in the fall of 1865, he had decided to become a preacher, and was preparing by writing sermons and sending them to his brother. As Sam approached 30—Orion was already 40—the brothers’ relationship subtly reversed, and the younger, in his letter of 19 October, lectured the elder while defining himself: Orion there was genius—true, unmistakeable genius—in that sermon of yours. It was not the gilded base metal that passes for intellectual gold too generally in this world of ours. It is one of the few sermons that I have read with pleasure—I do not say profit, because I am beyond the reach of argument now. But seven or eight years ago that single sermon would have saved me. . . . And now let me preach you a sermon. I never had but two powerful ambitions in my life. One was to be a pilot, & the other a preacher of the gospel. I accomplished the one & failed in the other, because I could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade—i.e. religion. I have given it

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up forever. I never had a “call” in that direction, anyhow, & my aspirations were the very ecstasy of presumption. But I have had a “call” to literature, of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit, & if I were to listen to that maxim of stern duty which says that to do right you must multiply the one or the two or the three talents which the Almighty entrusts to your keeping, I would long ago have ceased to meddle with things for which I was by nature unfitted & turned my attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures. Poor, pitiful business! . . . You see in me a talent for humorous writing, & urge me to cultivate it. But I always regarded it as brotherly partiality on your part, & attached no value to it. It is only now, when editors of standard literary papers in the distant east give me high praise, & who do not know me & cannot of course be blinded by the glamour of partiality, that I really begin to believe there must be something in it. . . But as I said, I will toss up with you. I will drop all trifling, & sighing after vain impossibilities, & strive for a fame—unworthy & evanescent though it must of necessity be—if you will record your promise to go hence to the States & preach the gospel when circumstances shall enable you to do so? I am in earnest. 90

Mark Twain may have lost his religion, but he had—apparently at this moment—discovered his profession, though it comes as a surprise to the modern reader to find Twain denigrating that profession as low, poor, pitiful, unworthy, evanescent, and nothing to be proud of. Our greatest humorist seems to have shared the low opinion of humor in his day. What the letter suggests is that, having struggled with the nineteenth-century’s condescending attitude toward humor, Twain can now articulate that attitude, face it, take a stand against it even while partially embracing it, and get on with his career, a career that would itself give humor a better name. Twain claimed all his life that he was a popular writer, and jotted in his notebook in 1887 that “My books are water; those of the great geniuses [are] wine. Everybody drinks water.” 91 By then he had succeeded in creating a position between conventional humorists and “serious” authors, keeping something of the comedy of the former and the seriousness of the latter. He often defended humor, but he was also quick to point out the deficiencies of what he thought of as bad or trivial humor—lies, hoaxes, puns, stale jokes, practical jokes, and acerbically condescending humor like that of Bret Harte. His own theory of humor eventually came close to that defined by Henry Fielding in his preface to Joseph Andrews, a book which Twain owned. Fielding, using an analogy to art, likens burlesque to caricature, which is useful in purging away “spleen, melancholy, and ill affections,” 92 but is essentially a lower form, since it relies on distortion. The truly comic is, like painting, based on a “just imitation” of nature, in which the writer points out human affectations caused by vanity or hypocrisy. “The Jumping Frog” was stronger than Twain’s

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previous work precisely because it made the leap from burlesque to the truly comic. The confidence that produced Mark Twain’s letter to his brother on 19 October was justified the following month. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” arrived in New York too late to be included in Artemus Ward’s forthcoming book of humorous sketches, as the two writers had intended, and Ward’s publisher passed it on to Henry Clapp, editor of the New York Saturday Press, where it was published on 18 November 1865. An immediate success, the frog story exploded a mine of delight and applause in the East, with reverberations, intensified by numerous reprintings, rolling back across to California to the considerable gratification of the typesetter-pilotminer-reporter turned humorist. The story was so widely praised that its author, perhaps somewhat miffed to have his other work ignored, could complain to his mother that “those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!” 93 This complaint should be understood as an overdramatic bit of false modesty, for Twain then pasted into his letter a clipping from the New York correspondent of the Alta California: “Mark Twain’s story in the Saturday Press of November 18, called ‘Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog,’ has set all New York in a roar, and he may be said to have made his mark. I have been asked fifty times about it and its author, and the papers are copying it far and near. It is voted the best thing of the day.” 94 Mark Twain published a revised version in the Californian (16 Dec. 1865), reprinted it in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867), reprinted it again in Sketches, New and Old (1875) as “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and yet again in “The Private History of the Jumping Frog Story” in the North American Review (April 1894). 95 In April 1867, Twain wrote to his mother that “James Russell Lowell . . . says the Jumping Frog is the finest piece of humorous writing ever produced in America.” 96 In December 1869, he wrote to Olivia Langdon, whom he was then courting, that “it is the best humorous sketch that America has produced, yet.” 97 That may be an overstatement, but the frog story was clearly the best sketch Twain had produced up to that time. It marks the point in his life where talent, confidence, and fame first came together, and he began his career as a humorist in earnest. A HUMORIST AFLOAT “By his story of the Frog,” wrote Charles Henry Webb, founder of the Californian, “[Mark Twain] scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump, and won for himself the sobriquet of The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope.” 98 And then Webb added, “He is also known to fame as the Moralist of the Main.” Popularity and fame were a pleasant change for the humorist/moral-

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ist, who had just turned 30, and only a few months earlier had considered a return to piloting steamboats. Now his career as a writer, after a leisurely and variegated start, began to progress. Suddenly Mark Twain was a man on the move, and his ambition, literary talent, skill as a humorist, fame, and financial success all rapidly accelerated. His first move, in the early spring of 1866, was again westward. No longer a local reporter, he was appointed a special correspondent by the Sacramento Union and sent on a five-month trip to the Sandwich Islands (officially known as Hawaii after 1893). Twain’s job, just the kind of assignment he liked and the beginning of his career as a travel writer, was to produce an article a week on topics of his own choice, at a salary of $20 for each piece. He would ultimately produce 25 articles, including his dramatic report on the survivors of the Hornet, a clipper sailing ship which caught fire and sank on May 4th in the Pacific, 100 miles north of the equator. After 43 days and a 4000-mile journey, with only 10 days supply of food and little water, 15 survivors in a lifeboat washed ashore on the island of Hawaii. Most were taken directly to the hospital in Honolulu. Mark Twain, incapacitated by saddle boils, was carried on a stretcher to the hospital and took notes while a friend interviewed the survivors. Staying up all night to write his report, Twain finished it in time to have it tossed aboard a schooner bound for San Francisco, which “was just casting off her sternline.” 99 The three-column front-page story, the first detailed report to reach the States, was a major scoop for the Sacramento Union and its special correspondent. Arriving back in San Francisco in August—after the Hornet piece, like the jumping frog story, had been widely copied in newspapers and journals— Mark Twain was, in his own words, “about the best-known honest man on the Pacific Coast.” 100 Never one to undervalue his productions, Twain raised his fee for the Hornet letter from $20 to $300. That fall, capitalizing on his growing fame as a writer and his private success as a raconteur, he decided to try out a new dimension in his career as a humorist. He scheduled a lecture about his recent trip, titled in later versions “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The advertisement, after listing the particulars, contained a cascading series of dualities foreshadowing the double-edged satire of both islanders and missionaries contained in the lecture: A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA Is in town, but has not been engaged. Also, A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS Will be on exhibition in the next block. MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS were in contemplation for this occasion, but the

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idea has been abandoned. A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION May be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please. 101 The advertisement concluded with the inspired line: DOORS OPEN AT 7 O’CLOCK THE TROUBLE BEGINS AT 8 O’CLOCK The packed house was not disappointed, and reviewers had high praise for “one of the most interesting and amusing lectures ever given in this city,” with its “shrewd observation,” “valuable information and eloquent description,” “side-splitting similes, grotesque imagery, and fearfully ludicrous stories.” Bret Harte called the lecture “a brilliant success,” and noted that Twain’s humor is “of the western character of ludicrous exaggeration and audacious statement [with] more motive than that of Artemus Ward.” 102 Thus encouraged, Mark Twain engaged a manager and launched into a triumphal lecture tour in seventeen mining towns in California and Nevada that lasted into December. Old friends and acquaintances in these towns guaranteed a warm reception, but his success went beyond friendship for it was based on a new genre—a lecture/performance which merged humor with information, especially about exotic topics, and with oratorical eloquence, and thus took Twain beyond even the best comic lecturers of the day. He told his audience that he would endeavor to tell the truth, “as nearly as a newspaper man can.” 103 And he added that “If I embellish it with a little nonsense, that makes no difference; it won’t mar the truth.” He enjoyed “dry statistics . . . ingeniously used” 104 as well as flexing his developing literary muscles. On his steamship trip to the Sandwich Islands, Twain had promised a young lady passenger that he would send her some knife-like leaves from the rare Hawaiian high-altitude silver sword plant. He eventually found the leaves in the crater of the dormant volcano Haleakala, and when he later mailed them he wrote that “I had to send them—I wouldn’t consider the Island trip complete with so chivalrous a promise, so knightly a deed as the disarming of a crater many times larger than myself & the laying of his weapons at the feet of a lady, unaccomplished.” 105 “How’s that?” he concluded. “I think I’ll put that in my lecture.” Having conquered the West, in print and on stage, Mark Twain was ready once more to move on. He had graduated from routine newspaper work to special assignments and weekly literary journals, and he now began to think of appearing “between covers,” projecting books on the Sandwich Islands, the Mississippi River, and his Western experiences, as well as a collection of sketches. 106 Signing up again as a “special traveling correspondent,” this

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time for the San Francisco Alta California, Twain headed for the larger literary world of New York. “I sail tomorrow,” he wrote to his mother on 14 December 1866, “leaving more friends behind me than any newspaper man that ever sailed out of the Golden Gate.” 107 In a column the next day entitled “‘Mark Twain’s’ Farewell,” the Alta succinctly summarized the author’s 5½ years in the West, and shrewdly predicted his future. “Mark Twain” goes off on his journey over the world as the Traveling Correspondent of the ALTA CALIFORNIA, not stinted as to time, place or direction—writing his weekly letters on such subjects and from such places as will best suit him. . . . That his letters will be read with interest needs no assurance from us—his reputation has been made here in California, and his great ability is well known; but he has been known principally as a humorist, while he really has no superior as a descriptive writer—a keen observer of men and their surroundings—and we feel confident his letters to the ALTA, from his new field of observation, will give him a world-wide reputation. 108

In New York during the first five months of 1866, Twain sent travel letters to the Alta and published articles in New York and Missouri papers, but was unable to interest a publisher in his Sandwich Islands letters. He did, however, arrange for the publication of a book of sketches. While that was in press, he returned home to St. Louis, where his mother and sister were then living, and during this five-week trip he lectured in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois. According to the St. Louis Missouri Republican for 26 March, Mark Twain “succeeded in doing what we have seen Emerson and other literary magnates fail in attempting. He interested and amused a large and promiscuous audience.” 109 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches appeared on 30 April, and with that as collateral, Twain undertook, with some trepidation, to lecture on the Sandwich Islands at the Cooper Union in New York City on 6 May. He advertised the event as “Serio-Humorous,” 110 apparently to separate himself from the lesser fry of mere humorists in the critical eyes of strangers in this formidable literary and cultural capitol. While the New York correspondent for the Sacramento Union seemed to worry that some members of the large audience of two to three thousand “were amazed and confounded at the impudence and freedom of this wild Californian,” 111 the New York papers were uniformly positive. The Herald stated that the lecture was “embellished with sparkling wit, happy hits and a genial humor wholly peculiar and unexcelled.” 112 Having broken the Eastern barrier, Twain lectured in Brooklyn on the 10th and again back in New York the following week. Another lecture planned for Brooklyn had to be cancelled, for Twain was fully occupied with finishing promised articles and preparing for the overseas trip that would make him famous.

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Early in 1867, members of Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church congregation had organized a “great Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land.” 113 This grandmother of all travel cruises was to last five months, to be made in a luxurious paddle-wheel steamboat, to enroll a distinguished list of passengers, including Beecher and General Sherman, and to cost $1250. Mark Twain, struck by “the bold originality, the extraordinary character, the seductive nature, and the vastness of the enterprise,” 114 persuaded the Alta California to pay for his passage in exchange for doubling his travel letters from one to two per week, and he arranged to correspond as well with the New York Tribune and the Herald. The 75 excursionists and their traveling correspondent boarded the Quaker City for departure on 8 June. Twain was surprised “to see so many elderly people,” 115 and disappointed that “urgent duties” and “the Indian war” prevented Beecher and Sherman from joining the party, but he delighted, as he wrote his mother, in his “splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless room-mate who is as good & true and right-minded a man as ever lived.” 116 Always aware of his audience, Twain softened this description of Dan Slote in a letter to the Alta (“a nice moral room-mate [with] many shirts, and a History of the Holy Land, a cribbage-board and three thousand cigars. I will not have to carry any baggage at all”) 117 and softened it even more in The Innocents Abroad (“I . . . found him to be intelligent, cheerful of spirit, unselfish, full of generous impulses, patient, considerate, and wonderfully good-natured”). 118 As the journey progressed, Twain established close friendships with “eight or nine of the excursionists,” 119 was a leader of the “sinners” faction on board ship, and became increasingly unhappy with the much larger group of pious “pilgrims.” In his summary of the excursion, published in the New York Herald the day after the Quaker City docked back in New York, Twain concluded that no “party more ill-fitted, by age and awful solemnity, for skurrying around the world on a giddy picnic, ever went to sea in a ship since the world began.” 120 If the trip was a mixed success as a picnic, it proved to be a ten-strike both personally and professionally. Shortly after their return, in late December 1868, Mark Twain was introduced to Olivia Langdon, the elder sister of fellow passenger Charles Langdon. By then he had already received offers from several publishers for a book based on the Quaker City trip. These offers fell on open ears, for Twain was unhappy with the editing, printing, and marketing of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. 121 Only 4,067 copies were printed, and apparently no author royalties were ever paid. Thus Twain was pleased to sign a contract with Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Co., located in Hartford, which offered a 5% royalty and the aggressive marketing tactics and door-to-door salesmen of subscription publishing. In March 1868, Twain sailed for California, where he negotiated republication rights with the Alta California and

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set about, with the help of Bret Harte, revising his 58 published Quaker City letters into a 651-page book. THE INNOCENTS ABROAD “It’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.” 122 Henry James

At the first stop of the Quaker City in its five-month cruise, the island of Fayal in the Azores, half a dozen passengers made a ten-mile excursion on a cavalcade of braying, obstreperous little donkeys. Mark Twain’s report of this adventure offers an insight into his temperament: “There was that rare thing, novelty, about it; it was a fresh, new, exhilarating sensation, this donkey riding, and worth a hundred worn and threadbare home pleasures.” 123 Twain reveled in novelty, and easily became “dead tired of being in one place.” 124 He liked to travel, see new things, learn about strange customs, exotic peoples, curious facts, odd corners of experience. As a traveler he sought out things “thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign—foreign from top to bottom—foreign from centre to circumference.” 125 As a reporter, he enjoyed bringing new information back to his readers. As an author, he leaned toward topics that were unusual—the Sandwich Islands, the diamond mines of South Africa, the American Far West, the profession of piloting, rafting on the Mississippi, Camelot. “The great Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land,” he said at the beginning of Innocents Abroad, “was a novelty in the way of Excursions—its like had not been thought of before, and it compelled an interest which attractive novelties always command.” How does a writer convey new scenes and unconventional ideas to a reader, given the fact that the human mind processes information in terms of what it already has stored? A writer presents novelties by describing how they are like, and unlike, things known. Comparison and contrast, then, are chief strategies for a reporter of the new. Since both strategies involve dualities, and since dualities are the building blocks of humor, Twain’s attraction to novelty was an appropriate mindset for his career as a humorist. Traveling to strange lands provided Mark Twain with an ideal platform for amusement and satire, as well as for new information and descriptive gymnastics. In the preface to The Innocents Abroad, “Mark Twain,” as both a traveler and the narrator of the journey, promises something different. The purpose of his book “is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who travelled in those countries before him.” His book, that is, will be

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different from conventional travel guides and standard lists of illustrious scenes and monuments. In Constantinople, the narrator reflects on how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel. . . . For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath. . . . Many and many a time, in fancy, I have lain in the marble bath, and breathed the slumbrous fragrance of Eastern spices that filled the air . . . and, finally, swathed in soft fabrics, been conveyed to a princely saloon and laid on a bed of eider down, where eunuchs, gorgeous of costume, fanned me while I drowsed and dreamed. . . . That . . . picture . . . was a poor, miserable imposture. The reality is no more like it than the Five Points are like the Garden of Eden. . . . The [bathhouse in Constantinople] was vast, naked, dreary; its court a barn, its galleries stalls for human horses. The cadaverous, half nude varlets that served in the establishment had nothing of poetry in their appearance, nothing of romance, nothing of Oriental splendor. They shed no entrancing odors—just the contrary. 126

Inside this overarching opposition of expectation and reality are ongoing contrasts of New World and Old, pilgrims and sinners, ignorant Americans and sophisticated Americans, courtly Europeans and thieving Europeans, history past and history present. And weaving through these are scores of specific contrasts that organize many sections and chapters of the book as the excursionists traveled to Gibraltar, Morocco, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Crimean Peninsula, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Spain: the beautiful grisettes of legend and the real thing— “homely. They had large hands, large feet, large mouths; they had pug noses as a general thing, and mustaches that not even good breeding could overlook.” Venice by day and night: “In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again . . . and the old city seems crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago.” Italy as “one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred—and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.” “ancient Greece and modern Greece . . . furnish the most extravagant contrast to be found in history. . . . The fleets that were the wonder of the world when the Parthenon was new are a beggarly handful of fishing-smacks now, and the manly people that performed such miracles of valor at Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered slaves to-day.”

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Damascus at a distance (“the most beautiful, beautiful picture that ever human eyes rested upon in all the broad universe!”) and Damascus close up (“crooked and cramped and dirty . . . a very sink of pollution and uncomeliness”). 127

Contrast works at the stylistic level as well. Like Huck Finn, Twain the traveler uses common terms and homely metaphors to describe exotic and ancient and over-venerated objects, both for the humor of dissonance and to cut such objects down to size, to bring them inside the ken of everyday experience: “The general size of a store in Tangier is about that of an ordinary shower-bath in a civilized land.” “The Arno . . . is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around.” “The Mosque of St. Sophia . . . is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.” 128 Mark Twain’s addiction to novelty and contrast at every level is remarkably strong. In a discussion of the irrepressible Quaker City rhymester, a Long Island farmer named Bloodgood Cutter and nicknamed “the Poet Lariat,” Twain states that “perhaps the savage reader would like a specimen of his style.” Why “savage reader”? Twain explains: “I do not mean this term to be offensive. I only use it because ‘the gentle reader’ has been used so often that any change from it can not but be refreshing.” 129 Another source of refreshment, related to contrast, comes from the manipulation of truth. Travelers are notorious liars; Mark Twain was a notorious traveler. Thus one might expect fabrications to show up in his accounts of foreign peoples and places. There are, however, no outright lies in The Innocents Abroad, at least by Twain’s definition; no “Cannibals, that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders.” 130 or other traveler’s fabrications of the sort that Othello used to woo Desdemona. Instead, we have exaggerations galore. Twain starts with real facts and incidents, and then stretches them out both to amuse and to underline his attitude toward them: The rag-tag [people of Naples] stack themselves up, to the number of twenty or thirty, on a rickety little go-cart hauled by a donkey not much bigger than a cat. Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only in attending church regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and in breaking the ten commandments all the balance of the week. We . . . emerged upon the sea-shore abreast the ships, with our usual escort of fifteen hundred Piræan dogs howling at our heels. The difference in time between Sebastopol and the Pacific coast is enormous. When it is six o’clock in the morning here, it is somewhere about week before last in California. 131

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Occasionally Twain will take an episode—such as the excursionists’ journey on horseback from Jerusalem to the Jordan River—and exaggerate it into a lengthy and richly articulated satire. At breakfast in the hotel before this journey there was much talk of “lawless Bedouins,” “war and bloodshed,” “men killed,” “ambush,” and travel warnings from the American Consul. The men involved talked bravely, but each, in Twain’s account, decided to take up an unostentatious position in the rear of the procession. I think we must all have determined on the same line of tactics, for it did seem as if we never would get to Jericho. I had a notoriously slow horse, but somehow I could not keep him in the rear, to save my neck. He was forever turning up in the lead. In such cases I trembled a little, and got down to fix my saddle. But it was not of any use. The others all got down to fix their saddles, too. I never saw such a time with saddles. It was the first time any of them had got out of order in three weeks, and now they had all broken down at once. I tried walking for exercise—I had not had enough in Jerusalem searching for holy places. But it was a failure. The whole mob were suffering for exercise, and it was not fifteen minutes till they were all on foot and I had the lead again. It was very discouraging. . . . We were moping along down through this dreadful place, every man in the rear. Our guards—two gorgeous young Arab sheiks, with cargoes of swords, guns, pistols and daggers on board—were loafing ahead. “Bedouins!” Every man shrunk up and disappeared in his clothes like a mud-turtle. My first impulse was to dash forward and destroy the Bedouins. My second was to dash to the rear to see if there were any coming in that direction. I acted on the latter impulse. So did all the others. If any Bedouins had approached us, then, from that point of the compass, they would have paid dearly for their rashness. 132

The sketch continues for more than a page, as Twain lampoons this group of cowardly lions as well as the situation itself, since apparently the hired “guards” were in league with the possible or pretended marauders and the only danger was that of extortion. He keeps the tone amiable by including himself in the satire, as he would often do for the next forty years. Having learned his lesson about misleading readers on the Pacific Coast with hoaxes that were taken straight, Mark Twain tips his hand in Innocents Abroad by dropping in qualifiers that signal hyperbole to the reader: “I suppose,” “I think,” “apparently,” “possibly,” “perhaps,” “almost,” “nearly,” “may be,” and “I can not be positive.” Sometimes he will stop to discuss exaggerations explicitly, both his own and those of others: They made me take off my boots [in the Mosque of St. Sophia]. . . . I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with a complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I wore out more than two thousand pair of boot-jacks getting my boots off that night. . . . I abate not a single boot-jack. 133

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It is said that during one of the grand eruptions of Vesuvius it discharged massy rocks weighing many tons a thousand feet into the air, its vast jets of smoke and steam ascended thirty miles toward the firmament, and clouds of its ashes were wafted abroad and fell upon the decks of ships seven hundred and fifty miles at sea! I will take the ashes at a moderate discount, if any one will take the thirty miles of smoke, but I do not feel able to take a commanding interest in the whole story by myself. 134

But the most frequent signal that the ball of hyperbole (a word whose Greek roots mean “to throw beyond”) has been thrown over the top lies simply in its excess: 1500 dogs, not dozens or even scores of dogs; 2000 bootjacks, not two or three. Mark Twain and his fellow excursionists sailed from Marseilles to Genoa on 13 July 1867, and then spent two weeks traveling down the Italian peninsula to Rome. All the way along, it seemed, they were lectured about the multitudinous achievements of Michelangelo. Twain finally erupted: I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo—that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture—great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast—for luncheon— for dinner—for tea—for supper—for between meals. I like a change, occasionally. In Genoa, he designed every thing; in Milan he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of, from guides, but Michael Angelo? In Florence, he painted every thing, designed every thing, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone. In Pisa he designed every thing but the old shot-tower, and they would have attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the perpendicular. . . . He designed St. Peter’s; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope’s soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima—the eternal bore designed the Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted every thing in it! 135

Jane Clemens got it about right: we often need to discount her son’s statements 30 per cent for embroidery; what is left is truth. But embroidery is only one way to play with truth; understatement, exaggeration’s quiet twin, is another. In Constantinople, Twain notes that “the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.” 136 Since understatement and naïve statement tend to sneak up from behind rather than hitting one in the face, they were especially useful for stepping inconspicuously on sacred toes in the chapters devoted to Italy and Jerusalem:

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Chapter 5 We had heard so much of St. Veronica, and seen her picture by so many masters, that it was like meeting an old friend unexpectedly to come upon her ancient home in Jerusalem. The strangest thing about the incident that has made her name so famous, is, that when she wiped the perspiration away, the print of the Saviour’s face remained upon the handkerchief, a perfect portrait, and so remains unto this day. We knew this, because we saw this handkerchief in a cathedral in Paris, in another in Spain, and in two others in Italy. In the Milan cathedral it costs five francs to see it, and at St. Peter’s, at Rome, it is almost impossible to see it at any price. No tradition is so amply verified as this of St. Veronica and her handkerchief. 137

We can see how these humorous strategies play out in The Innocents Abroad, and get some sense of the episodic structure of this article-derived book, by examining a representative section taken from the early part of the trip, before Twain’s amiability and his patience were worn down by the relentless heat of the Syrian desert and the searing piety of the relentless Pilgrims. On 16 July 1867, Twain and several of his companions entrained in Genoa for Milan, and the adventures of the following three days formed the basis for two letters to the San Francisco Daily Alta California (published on 15 and 22 September), and chapters 18 to 20 of Innocents Abroad. Apparently the group had been consulting the guidebooks that Mark Twain both used and parodied, for, as they approached Milan, the author wrote “we were in a fever of impatience; we were dying to see the renowned Cathedral!” When it finally appeared, Twain pulled out all the rhetorical stops and leaned on exclamation points: At last, a forest of graceful needles, shimmering in the amber sunlight, rose slowly above the pigmy house-tops, as one sometimes sees, in the far horizon, a gilded and pinnacled mass of cloud lift itself above the waste of waves, at sea,—the Cathedral! . . . What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems in the soft moonlight only a fairy delusion of frost-work that might vanish with a breath! How sharply its pinnacled angles and its wilderness of spires were cut against the sky, and how richly their shadows fell upon its snowy roof! It was a vision!—a miracle!—an anthem sung in stone, a poem wrought in marble! 138

This exuberant picture-book rhetoric, not much admired today, continues for five pages without qualification or satire or self-conscious remarks like “Copyright secured according to law.” There are similar passages, though usually shorter, elsewhere in The Innocents Abroad and in other early writings, for Twain was only beginning to learn how to embed expressions of beauty and emotion in narrative. The word picturesque, used thrice in this section, is a good index of a narrator not fully in control of his material. Picturesque appears 31 times in The Innocents Abroad (1869), 17 times in

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Roughing It (1872), only once in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and not at all in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Perhaps some uneasiness about his “bursts of eloquence,” 139 as an Alta editor admiringly called them, is hinted at by the sharp turn that chapter 18 takes, after the description of the Milan cathedral, to a long, autobiographical digression about Sam Clemens’ boyhood. Hiding in his father’s office after dark, Sam discovers a “long, dusky, shapeless thing stretched upon the floor” that the rising moon illuminates piece by piece. Finally he sees “the pallid face of a man . . . with the corners of the mouth drawn down, and the eyes fixed and glassy in death! I raised to a sitting posture and glowered on that corpse till the light crept down the bare breast,—line by line—inch by inch—past the nipple,—and then it disclosed a ghastly stab!” Remarkably, and characteristically, this ghostly tale suddenly dissolves in a cascade of comic understatements: “I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort of hurry, but I simply went—that is sufficient. I went out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it.” 140 Returning to Milan, chapter 18 recounts a sacristan’s history of a former bishop which then turns to a contrast between the preserved body of the churchman and the gold crosses and jewels that were placed with it in the sarcophagus: “How poor, and cheap and trivial these gew-gaws seemed in the presence of the solemnity, the grandeur, the awful majesty of Death!” 141 This contrast leads to a discussion of the immense wealth accumulated by the cathedral over the centuries, and then to a disbeliever’s list of its sacred relics: “two of St. Paul’s fingers, and one of St. Peter’s; a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it was black) . . . a stone from the Holy Sepulchre, part of the crown of thorns, (they have a whole one at Notre Dame,) a fragment of the purple robe worn by the Saviour, a nail from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by the veritable hand of St. Luke.” 142 The chapter closes with a recitation of guidebook statistics concerning the size and costliness of the cathedral. Chapter 19, the longest in the Milan-Lake Como sequence, begins with a specimen of what Twain calls “guide English”— “Do you wis zo haut can be?” 143 —thus tapping into a vein of linguistic comedy that runs throughout the author’s works and includes contrasting versions of English (standard vs. Irish brogue, Native American pidgin English, Pike County dialects, Black English, the King James Bible, and Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur) as well as English set off against various foreign languages. “Do you wis zo haut can be?” is the guide’s version of “Do you wish to go up there?” The guide’s brother, perhaps, wrote the advertising “Notish” for a hotel on Lake Como that Twain then reproduces: “This hotel which the best it is in Italy and most superb, is handsome locate on the best situation of the lake, with the most splendid view near the Villas Melzy, to the King of Belgian, and Serbelloni.” 144 In a discussion of the Ambrosian Library, Twain mentions

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some drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, and goes on to note that “They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.” 145 The humorist dodges the charge of xenophobia by being able to see a joke from either end. On the same page that contains the fractured “notish,” Twain reproduces what is ostensibly a note from “young Blucher” (a fictional excursionist who seems to be an amalgam of the young men on the Quaker City) to his landlord in Paris: “Monsieur le Landlord—Sir: Pourquoi don’t you mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it?” Twain is as hard on “old travelers . . . [who] prate, and drivel and lie,” 146 “old connoisseurs from the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a fresco and a fire-plug,” 147 and the majority of the Quaker City tourists, as he is on the beggars, priests, guides, and charlatans of the Old World. The remainder of the chapter presents a string of contrasts concerning Petrarch and his Laura (“But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura?” 148), the charm of leisurely paced European life vis-à-vis American bustle, soapless Milan public baths, hopeless European billiard tables, and Leonardo’s Last Supper, glorified by tourists for its “dignity,” “grace,” “delicacy,” “sublimity,” and “faultless drawing,” but seen by the narrator as “battered and scarred in every direction, and stained and discolored by time.” 149 The chapter ends in a contest of wit when Dr. Jackson, himself a deadpan humorist and a favorite Twain companion, offers to kiss a “good-looking young girl” who demonstrates a remarkable echo at the Palazzo Simonetti. The young woman is not the least abashed, and offers a kiss for a franc. Standing by his offer, the doctor receives the kiss and pays the franc, whereupon the girl explains that she cares not about a single kiss because she has a million left. “Then our comrade, always a shrewd business man, offered to take the whole cargo at thirty days, but that little financial scheme was a failure.” 150 Chapter 20, more or less concerned with Lake Como, presents juxtapositions at every turn. Twain’s party, traveling by rail and then steamer, are captivated by “wild, picturesque hills” and “dreamy bluish snow-clad mountains” with “ruinous castles perched away up toward the drifting clouds.” Then, as they come ashore, they are captured by the police and locked in a stone cell to be disinfected by “fumigating, maccaroni-stuffing organ grinders” who “must keep epidemics away somehow or other, and fumigation is cheaper than soap. They must either wash themselves or fumigate other people.” After being disinfected, the group walks and swims and sails, listens to music floating across the lake, has a midnight luncheon, and takes a last smoke on the veranda facing the lake. They go to bed, where the jumble of the day’s events gradually recedes into an adagio, which the humorist immediately explodes with a sforzando: “Then a melting away of familiar faces, of

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cities and of tossing waves, into a great calm of forgetfulness and peace. After which, the nightmare.” 151 Apparently thinking he must do justice to the famous lake, Twain uncorks several paragraphs of “picturesque” writing: Lake Como “is as beautiful as a picture. . . . The surroundings of this picture are fine . . . a dreamy purple haze . . . a tumbled mass of domes and verdant slopes . . . here indeed does distance lend enchantment to the view . . . the richest of atmospheres have blended a thousand tints together . . . the scenery was striking and picturesque . . . with a wonderful distinctness.” 152 His heart, however, seems not to be in these conventional generalities, and confessing that “enough of description is enough,” Twain turns to his main interest in the chapter, Lake Tahoe, compared to which “Como would only seem a bedizened little courtier.” There is a danger here also of adjectival excess, with Tahoe’s “crystal waters” and “picturesque shores”; “a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!” Another danger is that the Tahoe diversion goes on so long that the dissimilarity with Lake Como loses its freshness and surprise. To skirt that danger, Twain introduces qualifications, contrasts within the contrast. Stating the transparence of Lake Tahoe is so great “one can count scales on a trout at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet,” he then confesses that his statement is not believed, “so I have been obliged to negotiate it at fifty per cent. discount . . . ninety feet.” And he plays with the lake’s name: “People say that Tahoe means ‘Silver Lake’—‘Limped Waters’—‘Falling Leaf.’ Bosh. It means grasshopper soup, the favorite dish of the Digger tribe.” 153 The chapter ends with an unrelated two-sentence squib about a traveling American that Twain happened to meet—the sort of miscellaneous news item common to newspaper travel letters in the nineteenth century. How does all this add up? The Innocents Abroad is a medley of information, description, humor, and satire, casually organized around the fivemonth journey of the Quaker City. Its episodic structure stems from the looseness of the journey motif as well as the humorist’s need to, in Ralph Ellison’s phrase, “change the joke and slip the yoke.” 154 And it stems as well from the circumstances of the book’s composition. Twain had on hand fifty letters to the Alta California and eight others written for the New York Tribune, the New York Herald, and the Naples Observer. “I could weed them,” he wrote to Elisha Bliss, his publisher-to-be, “of their chief faults of construction & inelegancies of expression,” 155 and that is precisely what he did in California from March to July of 1868, after he had negotiated republication rights with the Alta owners. Twain’s revisions were substantial. He deleted many sections, added much new material, moved parts around, and made frequent stylistic changes, such as “it does not” for “it don’t,” designed to appeal less to roughand-tumble California newspaper readers and more to the national audience

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that he now hoped for. Young Blucher’s note to his landlord in Paris quoted above in the Milan chapter (“Pourquoi don’t you mettez some savon in your bed-chambers?”) was originally attributed to “Mr. Brown” in the Lake Como newspaper letter, (“Pourquoi don’t you mettez some savon in your dang bedchambers?”), 156 and Brown retold the sacristan’s tale in the Milan letter (“Well, this rooster lit a tall candle, like a broomstick, and conveyed us through the cellar.”). 157 Mr. Brown was jettisoned from Innocents Abroad, and his role of slangy, sarcastic iconoclast was toned down and divided up among Dan, Dr. Jackson, “Young Blucher,” and the narrator himself. 158 Also eliminated between letters and book was the scene in which Twain and his party drink too much of the sacristan’s beer, and the narrator’s lame joke about his search in Seville for the Barber, in Lyon for the Lady, and in Verona for the Two Gentlemen. Twain semi-apologizes for the book’s haphazard structure with comments about his “digressions,” and he jokes about it in chapter 29. The opening paragraph describes the arrival of a group of the excursionists in Naples and then a subtitle appears: “ASCENT OF VESUVIUS.” The narrator begins with “I shall remember our trip to Vesuvius for many a day” and then drifts to a condemnation of begging and a performance at the Theatre of San Carlo. A new subtitle appears: “ASCENT OF VESUVIUS—CONTINUED.” The narrator talks about religious impostures and the subtitle appears again, followed by a discussion of Neapolitan extortion. There is yet another repetition of the subtitle, the travelers get mules and horses, and the chapter ends with “ASCENT OF VESUVIUS—CONTINUED. This subject will be excellent matter for a chapter, and tomorrow or next day I will write it.” Chapter 30 is entitled—you guessed it— “ASCENT OF VESUVIUS—CONTINUED,” and the phrase is repeated three more times, while the narration meanders around the architecture of Naples, public displays, the King’s palace, wages in Italy, prices in France and Italy and New York, Capri, the Blue Grotto, Nero’s Baths, the ruins of Baiæ, the Temple of Serapis, the Cumæn Sybil, and the Grotto del Cane. Finally, after this fifteen-page prolegomenon, the group makes the climb to the summit. The chapter then snaps shut with a humorous contrast: “THE DESCENT. The descent of the mountain was a labor of only four minutes.” 159 The Innocents Abroad is a kind of bible of travel—fragmented, containing many genres, composed at different times and different places, filled with personal stories as well as historical information, derived from a variety of sources, and sometimes intimate, sometimes declamatory in tone. It does have a single narrator, but that narrator plays so many roles (innocent, sophisticate, enthusiast, skeptic, satirist, chauvinist, citizen of the world) that span such a wide range (from naïve to sensible to outrageous), the effect is one of multiplicity. It is not, however, the biblical qualities that made the work a best seller, one which, in the words of George Ade, appeared just

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“when front-room literature seemed at its lowest ebb,” composed as that literature was of subscription books stuffed with “platitudes, patriotism, poetry, sentimental mush”: Can you see [a] boy, a Sunday morning prisoner, sidling toward the new book with a dull sense of foreboding, expecting a dose of Tupper’s “Proverbial Philosophy”? Can you see him a few minutes later when he finds himself linked arm-in-arm with Mulberry Sellers or Buck Fanshaw or the convulsing idiot who wanted to know if Christopher Columbus was sure-enough dead? . . . “Innocents Abroad” was the most enthralling book ever printed until “Roughing It” [and the others] appeared. . . . Mark Twain . . . converted the Front Room from a Mausoleum into a Temple of Mirth. 160

What made George Ade’s hypothetical-autobiographical boy hug the book “to his bosom and [lose] all interest in Sunday School” were its qualities of exuberance, surprise, irreverence, wit, irony, and especially its success at targeting affectation, which Henry Fielding found to be “the only true source of the Ridiculous.” 161 Using sharp contrasts and exaggerations, Mark Twain continually punctures the inflated balloons of vanity, pretension, and hypocrisy, including those of the narrator himself. Along with the humor, of course, there are serious moments and thoughtful meditations in Innocents Abroad. In Pompeii, Twain is sobered by the vivid and intimate details of the exhumed city, which leads him to contemplate the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame. Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things? A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong)—no history, no tradition, no poetry—nothing that can give it even a passing interest. 162

Many a young writer, striving to make a name for him or herself, has had such thoughts. Shelley, for one, at the age of 25, shortly before he exiled himself to Italy, wrote in “Ozymandias” about the mockery of ambition and power suggested by the shattered, half-buried statue of Ramses II of Egypt. One of the many differences between Shelley and Mark Twain is the way their meditations end. Shelley: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” 163 Mark Twain, without relaxing his grip on the serious meaning, is able to give it an amusing turn: “What may be left of General Grant’s great name forty centuries hence? This—in the Encyclopedia for A. D. 5868, possibly”:

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Chapter 5 URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT—popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A. D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo stated that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A. D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan War instead of before it. He wrote “Rock me to Sleep, Mother.” 164

Mark Twain’s serio-comic strategy not only differentiates him from Shelley; it also sets him apart from other humorists of his time, for he was beginning to transcend the genre of “mere humorist” and the second-class status that term implied in the nineteenth century. Twain believed “man is a suffering-machine and a happiness-machine combined.” 165 By “combined” he meant interwoven. Comedy and tragedy, he thought, were not separate genres, as the ancient Greeks presented them in tetralogies—three tragedies and one burlesque satyric play, often obscene. Rather, in his view the comic and the tragic inhabited contiguous spaces, and tended to invade each other’s territories. Just before his meditation on fame in Innocents Abroad, Twain describes a Roman soldier at Pompeii who “stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could not conquer.” We must remember, Twain adds, that he was a soldier, not a policeman. “Had he been a policeman he would have staid also—because he would have been asleep.” 166 Mark Twain delivered a lecture in Brooklyn on 10 May 1867 that was reviewed the next day by Edward House in the New York Tribune. House wrote that Twain’s treatment was mainly from a comic stand-point, although scraps of practical information and occasional picturesque descriptions of scenery and natural phenomena peculiar to that region were liberally interspersed. The scheme of the lecturer appeared to be to employ the various facts he had gathered as bases upon which to build fanciful illustrations of character, which were furthermore embellished with a multitude of fantastic anecdotes and personal reminiscences. 167

That this review could serve as a synopsis of The Innocents Abroad— even though the subject of the speech was “The Sandwich Islands” and it was delivered a month before Twain departed on the Quaker City trip—suggests the book can be seen as a summary of Mark Twain’s achievements up to 1867. Rather than breaking new ground, Innocents Abroad reads as if it were a collection of newspaper sketches—which of course it was—of the type Twain had been writing for three years. When he explained to publisher Bliss that he could concoct a volume from his newspaper work “that would be more acceptable than any I could now write,” Twain seemed to imply that he was prepared to move beyond the limits of newspaper letters and sketches and to “make my way as an author.” 168 The Innocents Abroad was a half step

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in this direction, and Mark Twain was already incubating a second book that would stretch his talent and demonstrate on a large scale the narrative coherence and character development exhibited in cameo in “The Jumping Frog” and in fragments in Innocents Abroad. It would be not just a journey, but a journey to somewhere. It would be called Roughing It. SAMSON TRIMMED, LIGHTLY When the Quaker City docked in New York on 19 November 1867, eleven days before his 32nd birthday, Mark Twain’s life shifted into high gear. During the next twelve months he wrote for the Alta California, the Territorial Enterprise, the New York Herald, and the New York Tribune, converted his Quaker City sketches into a book manuscript, and launched a successful career as a lecturer on both coasts. He also began to move in new social circles in New York, Washington, and Hartford, circles that included Senator William Steward (for whom he served briefly as a private secretary), various government officials, members of the Washington Newspaper Correspondents’ Club, Henry Ward Beecher, publisher Elisha Bliss, John Hooker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Reverend Joseph Twichell. And he fell in love. In New York, a few days after Christmas in 1867, he “called at the St. Nicholas Hotel to see my Quaker City Excursion shipmate, Charley Langdon, and was introduced to a sweet and timid and lovely young girl, his sister.” 169 Twain saw Olivia Langdon (always known as Livy, since her mother’s name was also Olivia) several times around the turn of the year. On New Year’s Eve he accompanied the Langdon family to Steinway Hall to hear a reading by Charles Dickens, then just beginning his second, triumphal, American tour. The charm of the company doubtless did not obscure, to a young man on the threshold of his career, the example of the most celebrated serio-humorous writer in the English-speaking world who enhanced his fame and his fortune by giving dramatic readings of passages from his works. In the following summer, Twain accepted an invitation to visit the Langdon family in Elmira—a visit that lasted nineteen days. Never one to do things by halves, Mark Twain laid siege to Livy and her family with a courtship fueled by the energy and success of his lectures and publications and his growing reputation. He was half in love with love itself and clearly smitten with the idea of giving up his Bohemian bachelor life for a congenial marriage, like those of his Hannibal schoolmate and fellow steamboat pilot Will Bowen, his Western buddy Steve Gillis, and his new Hartford friend Joe Twichell. In January 1868, shortly after meeting Livy, Twain wrote to Bowen, long since married, that you are . . . very, very fortunately situated, for you have a most excellent wife—a good, kind, affectionate comrade in all the vicissitudes of life & one

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Chapter 5 who will always prefer rather to overlook your shortcomings than criticise them—a treasure you have long ago learned the value of. I wish I had been as fortunate. To labor to secure the world’s praise or its blame either, seems stale, flat & unprofitable, compared with the happiness of achieving the praise or the abuse of so dear a friend as a wife. 170

At the end of his visit with the Langdons, Twain proposed to their carefully sheltered daughter, then only 22. Livy hesitated. She could not say yes, she told him, but she would not say no. Twain left on trips to Cleveland and Hartford and lectured in the East on “The American Vandal Abroad,” returning to Elmira in September, November, and December. In the intervals between visits, he poured out his declarations of love to Livy in a torrent of almost daily sentimental letters—one was 27 pages in length—that would have been applauded by the young lady students in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, whose Examination Day compositions featured a “wasteful and opulent gush of ‘fine language’” and an “inveterate and intolerable sermon” 171 : I do love, love, love you, Livy! My whole being is permeated, is renewed, is leavened with this love, & with every breath I draw its noble influence makes of me a better man. And I shall yet be worthy of your priceless love, Livy. It is the glad task of my life—it is the purest ambition & the most exalted, that ever I have known, & I shall never, never swerve from the path it has marked out for me. 172

Mark Twain, at 32, lost his head as well as his heart to the sweet, timid, and lovely young daughter of a wealthy timber and coal dealer. Twain promised “to create a new & better character,” to “touch no more spirituous liquors,” to read the Bible, attend church, take up prayer, and “be a Christian.” 173 He confessed to “an unaccustomed stirring within me of religious impulses.” 174 Within the opulent gush and inveterate sermons of these surprisingly conventional letters, a reader can find some reservations (“I had been praying, more or less”), 175 some playful teasing (“‘Sicisiors’ don’t spell scissors, you funny little orthographist”), 176 a touch of pulpit and biblical parody (“writing . . . when the spirit moveth him . . . yea, & even though she chooses to take her own time about answering”), 177 and occasional selfcriticism (“I must get a little magniloquent in speech every time I think of you, Livy—I can’t help it. . . . Never mind the foolishness of it”), 178 but Twain was undoubtedly sincere. Thirty years after writing these love letters, he put them into perspective in a preliminary sketch for his unfinished novel “Which Was It?”: Courtship lifts a young fellow far and away above his common earthly self, and by an impulse natural to those lofty regions he puts on his halo and his heavenly war-paint and plays archangel as if he was born to it. He is working a deception, but is not aware of it. His girl marries the archangel. In the course

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of time he recognises that his wings and his halo have disappeared, and that he is now no longer in the business. 179

The projected reform of this archangel of courtship was a spectacular failure, for it was the wife, not the husband, who was converted. While they were courting, Livy sent Twain copies of the Plymouth Pulpit containing sermons by Henry Ward Beecher, with passages carefully marked for her fiancé’s attention. A year after their marriage in 1870, when a friend mentioned the analogy between a wife’s relation to her husband and to God, Livy responded that “if I felt toward God as I did toward my husband I should never be in the least troubled.” 180 Mark Twain went to church for a time, though “it ‘most kills me.” 181 When he eventually stopped going, Livy stopped too, telling her husband, according to W. D. Howells, “if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you.” 182 It is clear Mark Twain’s relationship to Olivia Langdon Clemens did little to alter his freethinking or his penchant for cigars, though many have wondered about her influence on his writing, since she assisted with proofing The Innocents Abroad in their courtship days, and served as audience, literary advisor, and editor for more than three decades. Twain “prized my wife’s respect and approval above all the rest of the human race’s respect and approval,” 183 though he was disappointed that she failed to appreciate his “What Is Man?” project, which he published, anonymously, only after her death. Mark Twain’s attempt to produce a philosophical Socratic dialogue on human selfishness turned into an undistinguished harangue, and it is difficult today to quibble with Livy’s judgment. Her assessment of the opening chapters of Twain’s far more successful “Chronicle of Young Satan” succinctly captures both her hesitation in the face of his iconoclasm, and her appreciation of his talent. “It is perfectly horrible,” Livy told her husband, “and perfectly beautiful.” 184 The question of Livy’s editing is part of a larger question: was the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope tamed and was his writing adulterated by his move east, his respectable in-laws, the advice of well-meaning friends, and his attempt to ingratiate himself with a large national and international readership? In Honolulu in 1866, Twain met Anson Burlingame—former congressman and then minister to China—who arranged for him to interview the Hornet survivors and advised him to “avoid inferiors. Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect and character; always climb.” 185 On board the Quaker City in 1867, Mark Twain and his young male cohort were taken in hand by Mary Mason Fairbanks, a 39-year-old married woman whom they referred to as “Mother Fairbanks.” In California, Bret Harte “read all the MS of the ‘Innocents’ & told me what passages, paragraphs, and chapters to leave out.” 186 After the publication of Innocents Abroad, W. D. Howells became the humorist’s literary confidant, as well as editor, critic, and even proofreader.

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Twain was grateful for the personal advice from Burlingame and Fairbanks, which apparently knocked off some of the rough edges from this boisterous young man who had grown up in the largely masculine company of print shops, steamboats, mining camps, and newspaper offices. After meeting Burlingame, Twain wrote to Will Bowen that “I know better than to get tight oftener than once in 3 months. It sets a man back in the esteem of people whose good opinions are worth having.” 187 Twain told his mother that Mrs. Fairbanks was the most refined, intelligent, & cultivated lady in the ship, & altogether the kindest & best. She sewed my buttons on, kept my clothes in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), lectured me awfully on the quarterdeck on moonlit promenading evenings, & cured me of several bad habits. I am under lasting obligations to her. 188

Twain was grateful as well for literary advice. Bret Harte, he said, “trimmed & trained & schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs & chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.” 189 What Harte (in the early days of their relationship) and Livy and Mrs. Fairbanks and Howells had in common was a recognition of Twain’s talent and a desire to help him segue from a journalistic smart-ass to a probing humorist. That is precisely what Mark Twain himself desired. It is not that he wanted to be wholly respectable—few humorists want that— but he did want to be accepted by, and have his works purchased by, respectable people. In San Francisco, while revising the manuscript of Innocents Abroad, Twain wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks describing a lecture on Venice that he had just delivered: “There is no slang, & no inelegancies in it—and I never swore once, never once was guilty of profanity.” 190 California critics, who had described an earlier lecture as “foul with sacrilegious allusions, impudent humor, and malignant distortions of history and truth,” found the Venice address “wit without vulgarity” and “a fine affair, superior in many respects to his last.” 191 Although he sought advice from close acquaintances and often followed it, Twain also filtered it shrewdly, knowing what to take and what to leave, when to put slang in the mouth of a character and when to remove it from the comment of the narrator. He played a game with Mother Fairbanks, promising to lay off slang, while continuing to use it in his letters to her: “I would like to shake hands with them—[William] Church especially, who is a bully pilgrim. (There it goes again.)” 192 A similar game was played at home: The children always helped their mother to edit my books in manuscript. She would sit on the porch at the farm and read aloud, with her pencil in her hand, and the children would keep an alert and suspicious eye upon her right along,

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for the belief was well grounded in them that whenever she came across a particularly satisfactory passage she would strike it out. . . . For my own entertainment, and to enjoy the protests of the children, I often . . . interlarded remarks of a studied and felicitously atrocious character purposely to achieve the children’s brief delight, and then see the remorseless pencil do its fatal work. I often joined my supplications to the children’s, for mercy, and strung the argument out and pretended to be in earnest. . . . Now and then we gained the victory and there was much rejoicing. Then I privately struck the passage out myself. 193

ROUGHING IT “A man could hardly stumble into such a variety of queer vicissitudes in any other country.” 194 Roughing It

Proofreading and editing The Innocents Abroad were part of the courting rites of Mark Twain and Olivia Langdon. The book appeared in the summer of 1869, and was an immediate success, selling 67,000 copies the first year and favorably reviewed by the Atlantic Monthly and other journals and newspapers. Twain was delighted with the sales and with the reviews, especially that of the Atlantic, which had become one of the chief barometers of literary taste in America, one which rarely stooped to recognize the demimonde of the subscription publishing trade. Marriage to Livy followed early in 1870, and Mark Twain, who four years earlier had been jobless, in debt, and reluctantly resigned to a lonely bachelorhood, suddenly found himself the hero of a fairy tale. Four days after his wedding, he described his new state to Will Bowen, his “First, & Oldest & Dearest Friend”: We all arrived here in a night train (my little wife & I were going to board,) & under pretense of taking us to the private boarding house that had been selected for me while I was absent lecturing in New England, my new father-inlaw & some old friends drove us in sleighs to the daintiest, darlingest, loveliest little palace in America—& when I said, “this won’t do—people who can afford to live in this sort of style won’t take boarders,” that same blessed father-in-law let out the secret that this was all our property—a present from himself. House & furniture cost $40,000 in cash, (including stable, horse & carriage), & is a most exquisite little palace. . . . And now my princess has come down to dinner (bless me isn’t it cosy, nobody but just us two, & three servants to wait on us & respectfully call us “Mr.” and “Mrs. Clemens” instead of “Sam” and “Livy!”) It took me many a year to work up to where I can put on style, but now I’ll do it. My book gives me an income like a small lord, & my paper is a good profitable concern. 195

This newly endowed lord soon found himself immersed in the myriad complications of a triple career as editor, author, and lecturer, and in the many

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demands of family life. Having previously purchased a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express with the assistance of Jervis Langdon, Twain worked as both a contributor and an editor for that paper and wrote a monthly column for the New York Galaxy as well. He gave 34 lectures on James Redpath’s circuit during the winter season of 1869-70. On 6 August 1870, Jervis died of stomach cancer, and later that month, Emma Nye, a classmate of Livy’s, came to visit and console Livy, who was pregnant. Emma contracted typhoid fever and died in the Clemenses’ bedroom in September. Five weeks later, Livy prematurely delivered their first child, who lived only 19 months. Three months after her delivery, Livy became ill with typhoid fever. The Method of Roughing It In the midst of household turmoil, Mark Twain, who helped nurse both Jervis and Livy, set to work on the new book about the West that he had promised his publisher. Roughing It was intended to follow up and capitalize on the success of The Innocents Abroad, a sequence that was emphasized in the title of volume two of the British edition of Roughing It: The Innocents at Home. There were, however, major differences between Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. Twain, after 5½ years west of the continental divide, was no innocent in terms of his subject. And he did not have a stack of already written travel letters to work with. He did have the brief journal which his brother Orion kept during their stagecoach trip west in the summer of 1861, and a description of their meeting with the notorious station agent Slade which Orion wrote at Twain’s request, as well as his own notebook jottings and some of his Territorial Enterprise letters. And he had his correspondence from the Sandwich Islands, which he used to pad the final section of Roughing It, bringing that book, at 600 pages, close to the length of Innocents Abroad. But for the most part, Mark Twain had to reach deeper into his imagination and create a fictional architecture that would sustain his treatment of this newest part of the new world, which in the 1860s was in the midst of overlapping waves of exploration, mining, migration, displacement of natives, farming, and ranching that would settle the land beyond the Mississippi in less than a century after Jefferson instructed Captain Meriwether Lewis to lead an expedition to find “the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent.” 196 The chief prop for this architecture was a newly invented narrator. Twain had experimented with naïve characters and with character narrators, and sometimes conjoined them, as in the Snodgrass letters and in sections of Innocents Abroad. In Roughing It, however, he demonstrated for the first time the extended use of a naïve young narrator. The strategy enabled Twain to educate his readers along with the narrator, as the latter confronts the “curious world” of stagecoaching, coyotes, the Pony Express, the Overland

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Trail, Mormons, the Rocky Mountains, deserts, Indians, and mining. Additionally, a naïve narrator produces a continuous disparity between innocence and experience, and thus provides endless opportunities for humor. Presumably the narrator is the author, “Mark Twain,” who, as Sam Clemens, did indeed head west by steamboat and then stagecoach in July 1861. The illustration in the first chapter is a likeness of the author as a young adult, sporting a vest and mustache. The voice on these pages, however, is that of a youngster, one who has just heard about his elder brother’s upcoming trip west: “I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. . . . He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word ‘travel’ had a seductive charm for me.” 197 In fact, Sam Clemens at the time was 25, had been away from home for eight years, had traveled extensively in the Midwest and East, and had served as a licensed steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. He paid for the stagecoach tickets for both himself and his older brother. The notion of a narrator quite different from his historical self apparently occurred to the author after he was well started on his manuscript. In March 1871, he wrote to Orion, then working for publisher Bliss, that “right in the first chapter I have got to alter the whole style of one of my characters & re-write him clear through to where I am now. It is no fool of a job I can tell you, but the book will be greatly bettered by it.” 198 That character, of course, is the quasi-autobiographical narrator—he is the only major character in the book—and making him more quasi and less autobiographical was an inspiration that energized the first quarter of Roughing It. During the overland trip west, the narrator’s naiveté is constantly reinforced. He stares at the frontier town of Julesburg with astonished “untraveled eyes”; 199 when they arrive at Salt Lake City, Brigham Young put his hand on the narrator’s head, “beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my brother ‘Ah—your child, I presume? Boy, or girl?’” 200 The naiveté, however, does not last. The journey into the West is a journey into experience, and by the time the brothers reach Carson City, the capital of the new Nevada Territory, the narrator has grown up. He still has greenhorn moments, as when he buys a “Genuine Mexican Plug” from the auctioneer’s brother, but he is now an adult, and in chapter 42 he includes a biography that admits to going “out into the world to shift for myself, at the age of thirteen,” 201 and details his former vocations. This maturity dissolves the structural humor of naïve narration, and Mark Twain has to turn to different strategies of organization. The middle of the book contains some more or less autobiographical chapters, accounts of the “queer vicissitudes” of life in Nevada and California in the boom years, and explanations of the adventure and the business of mining (“I judged that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches to novelty”). 202 Interspersed throughout, like the small pockets of gold sought by surface miners, are a number of Twain’s most brilliant early sketches: “Lost

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in the Snow,” “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral,” “Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Old Ram,” “Dick Baker’s Cat.” The anticlimactic last quarter of the work is based on the Sandwich Islands letters published by the Sacramento Union in 1866, with Mr. Brown jettisoned once again, as he had been in the revision of the Alta letters into The Innocents Abroad. What holds the many strands of Roughing It together, in addition to the naïve narration of the first twenty chapters, are patterns of contrast that run throughout. Two of the most important of these contrasts deal with false language and false ideas. Roughing It is a book about how to write a book. Twain may or may not have read Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, but in his own way he was following the poet’s revolutionary conviction that literature should concern “incidents and situations from common life” related in “language really used by men.” 203 The narrator gets his first taste of the language really used by men in the West when he sits at a greasy table with the hostlers at an overland station house: “‘Pass the bread, you son of a skunk!’ No, I forget—skunk was not the word; it seems to me it was still stronger than that. . . . It is the landmark in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains.” 204 Twain employs many kinds of vernaculars to differentiate his characters in Roughing It, and at the same time gives his narrator a loose, limber, flexible, speech-based prose, often stitched together with ands, that is far removed from the complex, Latinate, carefully subordinated, rhetoricbook language of earlier American writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper. Keenly aware of this difference, Twain comments on it a number of times. When the overland passengers, seeking to identify a new driver, ask “Which is him?,” the narrator notes “The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a book some day.” When he starts a sentence with “It was on this wise,” he inserts a parenthesis, “(which is a favorite expression of great authors, and a very neat one, too, but I never hear anybody say on this wise when they are talking).” 205 This increased attention to the narrator’s language results in fewer of the theatrical flourishes that are common in Innocents Abroad. There is still some picturesque writing in Roughing It, but it tends to come in individual words and phrases (“wide wastes of greensward,” “a pretty picture sleeping in the sunlight”) and vacuous generalizations (“enchanting,” “fascinating”), 206 rather than in fully developed set pieces such as the description of the Milan Cathedral. The artificial language in many romantic books is related, in Twain’s view, to the inadequacy of their ideas; and he continually creates situations and characters intended to deflate clichés and erroneous propositions. Instead of a pretty schoolmarm or a genteel Madonna of the plains, the narrator and his companions meet a “sociable heifer” who buries them under a “deluge of trivial gossip”: “Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. I did, b’gosh. Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a bust’n muskeeters and

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wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye.” 207 Instead of the fearless desperado, who, when caught, marches stoically to the gallows, we are given Slade, who in his final moments, cries and pleads “like a child.” 208 The narrator’s encounter with the Goshute Indians, whom he finds “treacherous, filthy and repulsive,” sets him to “examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance.” 209 When the narrator and two other miners become lost in a snowstorm at nightfall, they decide to build a fire and they pile up sagebrush twigs. We could find no matches, and so we tried to make shift with the pistols. Not a man in the party had ever tried to do such a thing before, but not a man in the party doubted that it could be done, and without any trouble—because every man in the party had read about it in books many a time and had naturally come to believe it, with trusting simplicity, just as he had long ago accepted and believed that other common book-fraud about Indians and lost hunters making a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together. . . . Ollendorff applied his revolver, pulled the trigger and blew the pile clear out of the county! 210

Twain’s presentation is often humorous, but just as often his point is serious. He wants to give his reader a fresh view of the West, without the distorting filters of previous opinions and conventions and book-frauds, just as he tried earlier to help the reader of Innocents Abroad look at Europe with his or her own eyes. Twain’s serio-comic strategy is well illustrated by the closing paragraph of chapter 17 in Roughing It. At this point the travelers resume their trip, having stopped in Salt Lake City and laid in a supply of bread, boiled ham, and hard-boiled eggs, as a substitute for the condemned army bacon and slumgullion served in the Overland stations: And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures reveled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe—an old, rank, delicious pipe— ham and eggs and scenery, a “down grade,” a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for. 211

The humor is created by the juxtaposition of the spiritual and the physical, worlds whose dissimilarity is italicized by the images which the rhetoric suggests: on one hand, a dreamy young woman from Godey’s Lady’s Book, with parasol, gazing on majestic mountains; on the other, grimy male passengers, fragrant as their pipes, chowing down on the plainest of foods. Sometimes, when he is on the attack, Twain will set up a contrast to put down one side or the other. More often though, as here, he gives us a contrast, usually

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exaggerated, for the fun of bringing together unlikely pairs and suggesting that each side satirizes, qualifies, and completes the other. Twain criticizes a sappy addiction to the picturesque, but not simply to promote ham and eggs. As a person who enjoyed inviting his friends to many-course dinners at San Francisco’s opulent Lick House, his celebration of ham and eggs is jocular, but not simply to promote a more metaphysical view. It is not a question of one side defeating the other. The narrator has it both ways; he has his scenery and can eat it too. And the author, here and in countless other passages, has it both ways as well. He has fun with a sharply defined contrast, and he uses that contrast to show the pluses and minuses of each side, often satirizing both. This dualistic strategy is at the center of Twain’s career as a seriohumorous writer. And this passage in Roughing It demonstrates how far he had come from the blunt dichotomies of his early newspaper days. The complexity of these developing skills can be seen in the final sentence of the passage: “It is what all the ages have struggled for.” Having linked ham and eggs together with scenery, he then creates a further contrast by opposing this unlikely pairing to the windy platitudes associated with the Proverbial Philosophy of M. F. Tupper and the Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey. Henry Nash Smith maintains that in the narrator’s transition from tenderfoot to veteran in Roughing It, the Western travel narrative acquires “for the first time a moral significance. . . . The standard by which good is distinguished from bad and wisdom from foolishness, is no longer to be found in the settled society which the traveler is leaving behind but in the Far West toward which his journey is taking him.” 212 Smith believes that Twain sets vernacular characters and vernacular values against the effete “point of view of an upper class that considers itself to be the custodian of the official values,” although he admits that “the exact content of the vernacular values is not made clear.” This reading is useful in interpreting Mark Twain’s satire of conventions, but it overlooks the variety of his attitudes toward the West in Roughing It, his complex identification both with vernacular values and with those of the official culture, and his ability to stand aside—in a third position—and contrast those values for humor. The essence of this strategy was laid out in the first humorous piece the 16-year-old typesetter sent beyond the borders of Hannibal. He created an exaggerated representative of the official culture, and named him the “dandy”; the exaggerated vernacular man was the “squatter.” The sturdy squatter knocks the foppish dandy into the river, but the real center of gravity in the story lies neither with the squatter nor the dandy, but with the crowd of onlookers. The squatter wins the combat, but not the young ladies. Once its load of fuel wood is aboard, the steamboat will head downstream with the ladies looking elsewhere for amusement and with the squatter, left behind, staring slack-jawed into the widening distance. The squatter, in spite of his triumph, remains a squatter. The dandy, wet and

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chagrined, sneaks off to an inconspicuous corner. The balancing of these extremes, and the judgment on the dandy’s hubris, is made by the crowd, and they pronounce the sentence which serves as the tale’s conclusion: “The ladies voted the knife and pistols to the victor.” Twenty years later, this strategy has matured into the brilliant contrapuntal duet of Scotty Briggs and the minister, occasioned by the funeral of saloon-keeper Buck Fanshaw in chapter 47 of Roughing It. When Buck dies, his friends decide that the Virginia City minister— “a fragile, gentle, spiritual new fledgling from an Eastern theological seminary”—should be asked to preach at the funeral by Scotty Briggs, a “stalwart rough, whose customary suit . . . was a fire helmet, flaming red flannel shirt, patent-leather belt with spanner and revolver attached.” In case the reader missed it, Mark Twain, who tends to tip his hand in his early writings, tells us that Scotty “formed something of a contrast to the pale theological student . . . unacquainted with the ways of the mines”: “Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?” “Am I the—pardon me, I believe I do not understand?” . . . “Why you see we are in a bit of trouble, and the boys thought maybe you would give us a lift, if we’d tackle you—that is, if I’ve got the rights of it and you are the head clerk of the doxology-works next door.” “I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door.” “The which?” “The spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary adjoins these premises.” . . . “You ruther hold over me, pard. I reckon I can’t call that hand. Ante and pass the buck.” “How? I beg pardon. What did I understand you to say?” . . . “Let’s start fresh. Don’t you mind my snuffling a little—becuz we’re in a power of trouble. You see, one of the boys has gone up the flume—” “Gone where?” “Up the flume—throwed up the sponge, you understand.” “Thrown up the sponge?” “Yes—kicked the bucket—” “Ah—has departed to that mysterious country from whose bourne no traveler returns.” “Return! I reckon not. Why pard, he’s dead” 213

They eventually come to understand each other, and the tale ends, not in a moral defeat of the conventional by the vernacular, but with a convergence. For all their differences, Scotty Briggs and the minister are curiously similar, not only in their linguistic parochialism but in their subsequent experiences. The minister presides at Fanshaw’s funeral in an appropriate and satisfactory manner, for “the obsequies were all that ‘the boys’ could desire.” And Scotty

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Briggs, a generous roughneck whose “inborn nobility of spirit was no mean timber whereof to construct a Christian,” becomes a Sunday school teacher. Mark Twain is sympathetic both with miners, whose toils he had shared for a year, and with the clergy, whose acquaintance he often sought. The minister in the tale is based on Twain’s friend, the Reverend Franklin S. Rising, who, though refined in temperament and frail in health, was “well known and esteemed in California and Nevada,” according to Twain’s letter to the Alta California of 20 May 1867. 214 A year earlier Twain had written his mother that “I am running on preachers now, altogether. I find them gay.” Among those he mentions are Henry W. Bellows, “a man of imperial intellect & matchless power,” who believed that humor was crucial to a healthy “mind and heart”; and Charles Wadsworth, whom he later used as a reference with his future father-in-law. 215 Wadsworth, Twain noted approvingly, could “get off a first-rate joke” in the pulpit. (That skill, and a mind that was “vivid, imaginative, adventurous, with a tendency toward the startling and paradoxical,” also endeared Wadsworth to another nineteenth-century American literary rogue, as she called herself, Emily Dickinson. Wadsworth, she said, was her “closest earthly friend.”) Two of Mark Twain’s closest friends would turn out to be the Reverend Joseph Twichell, pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, in Hartford, and Thomas Beecher, the unorthodox minister of the Park Church in Elmira. Twain said on several occasions that he had wanted to be a preacher, and he had many of the requisites—verbal fluency, platform magnetism, wide reading, metaphysical curiosity, a good tenor voice. All he lacked was religion. The Meaning of Roughing It Roughing It demonstrates an advance in technique over the free-ranging narration, miscellaneous information, jokes dragged in by the ear, and offand-on grandiloquent gestures that characterize much of Mark Twain’s earlier writing. It also shows a deepening in the meaning of his work and demonstrates that his instincts as a humorist—balancing contrasting ideas, seeing many sides of an issue—made him a supple historian. The Innocents Abroad does have a philosophical basis, largely a debunking of what Henry James calls “a superstitious valuation of Europe,” 216 though as Howells gently noted in his generally favorable Atlantic review, “the standard shams of travel which everybody sees through suffer possibly more than they ought.” 217 Roughing It digs deeper, and exemplifies how, as this serio-comic writer gained control over his art, the serio side became more profound without any abatement of the comic side. When Sam Clemens climbed aboard the stagecoach at St. Joseph in 1861, the West was still being created and its meaning was just beginning to be adumbrated. Over the following decades, four differing theories gradually

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arose concerning what eventually would become the complex mythology of the American West. The first is that the West was different—different from the East, different from Europe. 218 The unprecedented size of Western America was the main point made by explorers and travelers, once they discovered they couldn’t see the Pacific from the top of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. But the difference of the West, according to this theory, is not just size, but also type. The geography, with its 14,000-foot mountains and painted deserts, is fundamentally distinct. “East of the Mississippi,” said Walter Prescott Webb, “civilization stood on three legs—land, water, timber; west of the Mississippi not one but two of these legs were withdrawn—water and timber.” 219 In this distinct geography one finds a starkness of scene and harshness of climate: blizzards and northers in winter; hot winds, chinooks, and hailstorms in summer. One also finds distinct species of grasses, flowers, and wildlife: saguaros 30 feet high, sequoias 30 centuries old, bighorn sheep, grizzlies, buffalo, cougars—as well as distinct forms of human civilization: manifold Indian cultures and such exotic white subspecies as mountain men and cowboys. And through it all we encounter the characteristic Western attitudes of independence, individualism, self-reliance, pragmatism. The second theory of the West, its similarity to the East, explicitly contradicts the first. The East, after all, has its mountains, its waterfalls, its great rivers and lakes, its ice-locked winters and searing summers. The deer and the lynx and the bear still roam in the East, as do remnant mountain lions in Florida. The Eastern diamondback rattlesnake is a foot longer than its Western cousin. Buffalo once grazed the Shenandoah Valley, leaving their remains scattered in the atlases: Buffalo, West Virginia, and Buffalo, Kentucky; Buffalo Lick, North Carolina; Buffalo Valley, Tennessee; Buffalo Creek, Virginia. 220 And, at least through the eighteenth century, the East had its rich diversity of Indian cultures, from the Five Nations of the North— Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk—to the Five Civilized Tribes of the South—Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole. A third notion about the West attempts to reconcile the theory based on difference with the theory based on similarity. The main point, according to this third view, is that the West differs from the East not in quality but in quantity. The West is an exaggeration, a pure version, the quintessence of the American experience as a whole. (Or, in a subset of this idea, the West, still in its youth, is a throwback to yesteryear, a glimpse of how things used to be in the now grandfatherly Eastern longitudes.) Thus the East is relatively spacious, but the West is vastly spacious. The East has mountains and wilderness, but the West has higher mountains, wilder wilderness. The East may have its diamondback and its timber rattler, but the West has thirteen species of rattlesnakes, as well as iguanas, horned lizards, and Gila monsters. Traits that characterize Americans in general become intensified west of the Missouri. Confidence becomes brashness, optimism becomes exuberance, casu-

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alness becomes recklessness. Eastern humor is based on subtle shifts: Rip Van Winkle waking up into a new age; Western humor is characterized by the unsubtle exaggerations of the tall tale: a buffalo climbing a tree. British historian James Bryce claimed that “the West is the most American part of America; that is to say, the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strongest relief. What Europe is to Asia, what England is to the rest of Europe, what America is to England, that the western States are to the Atlantic States.” 221 The fourth theory of the West takes a different tack, steers around the geographical and historical arguments, and asserts that, whatever the West really was, the important thing is how people perceived it. This theory has been one of the most powerful ideas in American Studies since the 1950 publication of Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land. Like much twentieth-century thought, it is rooted in the Jamesian notion that part of what our senses perceive in the world around us comes “out of our own head.” 222 History is the accumulation of human behavior; behavior is controlled by perception; perception is a transaction between the object perceived and the perceiver; and the perceiver’s contribution to the transaction depends on his previous experience and present needs. In 1620 the Puritans peered westward from Plymouth and saw “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” 223 Three and a half centuries later, we enacted laws to protect endangered species and to repay Indian tribes for violated treaties. In 1835 the American West appeared to be a desert, in spite of some gardenlike qualities. Three and a half decades later, it was seen as a garden, in spite of some evidence of deserts. For many years we have raced to extinguish fires in the West. Headlines have counted the acres “destroyed” while the “smoke jumper” was the hero, a peacetime warrior against the forces of fiery chaos. Now the Forest Service has discovered that fire can be a constructive process, that many Western grasses and trees are fire-successional, and that some fires need to be protected. The tightly sealed cone of the lodgepole pine opens and releases its seeds only when heated to a temperature between 113 and 140 degrees. 224 Somewhere in America, someone has undoubtedly listened to our songs about Western tumbleweed— “Cares of the past are behind, / Nowhere to go but I’ll find / Just where the trail will wind, / Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweed.” 225 —and then picked up and left school, or job, or spouse, and made a new start, feeling that he or she was performing a quintessentially American act. Yet the tumbleweed is a foreign import, introduced in the 1870s from Russia. Remarkably, Roughing It contained all of these ideas before they had been fully developed and articulated in later nineteenth-century history and literature. The early chapters appear to be based on a theory of difference, on a West that is a wondrous new world to the uninitiated. The enthusiasm that bursts forth from the first page, like Mexican mules springing from an over-

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land station, plunges the reader into a landscape of sagebrush, jackass rabbits, prairie-dog villages, coyotes, buffalo, alkali flats, summer snow, and the Pony Express. An ideal topic for a novelty-loving humorist, the West is “curious,” “new and strange,” “a land of enchantment and . . . mystery.” And these terms apply to the human population as well as the natural setting. Julesburg, on the South Platte River, is “the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.” 226 This novelty is intensified by the wide-eyed innocence of the narrator, who thinks that a thoroughbrace is part of a horse’s leg, that drunkenness is indigestion, and that the epitome of desirable transportation is a genuine Mexican plug. Yet, from the beginning, Mark Twain works to complicate this vision, to undercut the theory of difference. The naïve narrator is too naïve, too credulous, too pantingly eager to discover romantic novelty. When the stagecoach rolls through Scott’s Bluffs Pass, the narrator thrills to see and be able to report his first experience with “genuine and unmistakable alkali water.” At first, Twain reports this event in neutral and matter-of-fact language, letting the naïve narrator call it a “first-class curiosity” and describe its soapy appearance. Then the author begins to twist the incident, as a mature narrator wrests the story away from the innocent traveler. The innocent begins by gushing. “The strange alkali water excited us as much as any wonder we had come upon yet, and I know we felt very complacent and conceited, and better satisfied with life after we had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some other people had not.” 227 Then he compares himself to the simpletons “who climb unnecessarily the perilous peaks,” and we sense the voice of the experienced narrator coming through, like a palimpsest gradually growing more distinct. The experienced narrator then steps forward and unloads a crescendoing tale about simpletons that is crammed into a single, exuberant 147-word sentence: But once in a while one of those parties trips and comes darting down the long mountain crags in a sitting posture, making the crusted snow smoke behind him, flitting from bench to bench, and from terrace to terrace, jarring the earth where he strikes, and still glancing and flitting on again, sticking an iceberg into himself every now and then, and tearing his clothes, snatching at things to save himself, taking hold of trees and fetching them along with him, roots and all, starting little rocks now and then, then big boulders, then acres of ice and snow and patches of forest, gathering and still gathering as he goes, adding and still adding to his massed and sweeping grandeur as he nears a three-thousand-foot precipice, till at last he waves his hat magnificently and rides into eternity on the back of a raging and tossing avalanche! 228

Finally, even that crescendo is capped by an ironic, pun-filled coda: “This is all very fine, but let us not be carried away by excitement, but ask calmly,

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how does this person feel about it in his cooler moments next day, with six or seven thousand feet of snow and stuff on top of him?” This passage not only provides entertainment at the expense of the innocent narrator, it casts suspicion on his enthusiasm for alkali water, his unappeasable thirst for romance, and his naïve vision of an exotic West. The exoticism of the West is diminished in other ways. The narrative thread of Roughing It is continually broken by references to events that puncture the place and time of the story. Twain mentions a “brief sojourn in Siam, years afterward,” a coat-eating camel in Syria, a passage in his “Holy Land Note-book,” an article on trains in the New York Times. These interruptions can be attributed to an author not quite in control of his material or point of view, but they also reveal an author not willing to be saddled with a simplistic view of the West. Even in the most carefully worked passages, those that appear to celebrate experience foreign to an Easterner, the interest often is turned from the content to the rhetoric itself. The jackass rabbit “dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish! Long after he was out of sight we could hear him whiz.” 229 Two chapters later a coyote chased by a dog demonstrates a similarly preternatural velocity: The cayote turns and smiles blandly upon [the dog] once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub” . . . and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude! 230

Here we have an author—as well as a coyote—showing off, glorying in his subject not just for its own sake but for the opportunities it presents for dramatic contrast and rhetorical fireworks. The coyote, as symbol of a mysterious new land, is celebrated in one paragraph and discarded in the next, for Twain’s interest turns to disgust and finally a joke: [The coyote] seems to subsist almost wholly on the carcases of oxen, mules and horses that have dropped out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion, and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men. . . . He will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-frequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat anything they can bite. It is a curious fact that these latter are the only creatures known to history who will eat nitro-glycerine and ask for more if they survive. 231

Mark Twain presents us with a narrative that crackles with exuberant novelty, but one that constantly qualifies and undermines that novelty. As the book lengthens, the view of the youthful narrator is increasingly replaced by that of an experienced adult, formerly a printer and pilot, inter-

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mittently an unsuccessful prospector and speculator, finally a journalist and man about town. This sophisticated narrator continues to look for scenes and characters that would astonish a provincial Easterner—the mining boom, vice, desperadoes—but often the point seems to be that things aren’t so very different after all. The fitful enthusiasms of gold and silver fever in Nevada follow the same patterns, at the same historical moment, as stock manipulations in Charles Yerkes’ Philadelphia. The shady side of Virginia City sounds a good deal like New York’s “Tenderloin”—a comparison that Mark Twain invites: “The [Virginia City] saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the gambling dens, the brothels and the jails— unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining region—in any region for that matter.” 232 Those Californians who abuse and oppress the Chinese are not unique: “The scum of the population do it—they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.” 233 Thus Roughing It presents a view of the West that is simultaneously different from and similar to Eastern experience. The book also provides support for the other strands of the Western myth. A tale filled with exaggerations is an appropriate vehicle for the notion of the West as exaggeration, and Twain highlights the expansive character of life in Nevada Territory. There is nothing novel about the difficulties of dealing with bureaucratic officials, but those difficulties are magnified when red tape is stretched 2,100 miles from Carson City to Washington. Every schoolboy is taught that not all that glitters is gold—the phrase, after all, has been a cliché since the sixteenth century—but the lesson is intensified when it is learned in a goldfield. Boom-and-bust psychology is as old as the Garden of Eden, but the phenomenon exists in its purest form in a community in which today’s grubstaked roustabout may be tomorrow’s princely nabob and next week’s impoverished has-been. And some of the narrator’s adventures prove that he is reading into, not out of, the Western landscape. Thinking they are lost in the desert, in a snowstorm at night, the narrator and his companions sink into the oblivion of death, and Bret Harte’s prose, only to discover the next morning that they are fifteen steps from an overland station. Experience, the narrator learns, even in the West, is often what you think it is—an idea reinforced by the discovery that the condescending Eastern traveler is in turn condescended to by Western settlers: “All the time that he is thinking what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely land, the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting compassion because he is an ‘emigrant.’” 234 Mark Twain winds all the threads of the myth of the West into Roughing It—difference, similarity, exaggeration, and subjectivism—and he knots them together with his concern about their validity. The continuing focus, in

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this collection of short and tall tales, is on credibility. The narrator peppers his work with comments about its truth. Virtually every story, every chapter, contains an aside that indicates how much or how little, why or why not, an incident is to be believed: “This is no fancy sketch, but the truth.” “It is doubtless correct in all essential particulars.” “I have scarcely exaggerated a detail of this curious and absurd adventure. It occurred almost exactly as I have stated it.” “I decline to believe this story, but I give it because it is worth something as a fanciful illustration of a fixed fact.” “I simply state the fact— for it is a fact—and leave the . . . reader to crack the nut at his leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion.” 235 Some of these comments are attempts to mediate between what Twain calls “entertaining nonsense” and “useful information,” between the humorist’s jestbook and the reporter’s notebook, but taken as a whole—there are more than seventy such comments—they illuminate the deeper probings of the book: What can be believed, especially in a new country? How can cultural differences, or similarities, be proved? What are the sources of authority? What are the claims of book learning as opposed to experience? What sort of reality is captured by exaggeration, and by various degrees of exaggeration? Mark Twain’s answers to these questions are complicated, often inconsistent. Published authorities are condemned in one chapter, parodied in another, and relied upon in a third. Many issues are left unresolved. In the three chapters concerning Jack Slade, the overland stage division agent and outlaw, the narrator revels in the contradictions presented by this affable and gentlemanly table companion who has murdered twenty-six men: “The true desperado is gifted with splendid courage, and yet he will take the most infamous advantage of his enemy; armed and free, he will stand up before a host and fight until he is shot all to pieces, and yet when he is under the gallows and helpless he will cry and plead like a child. . . . It is a conundrum worth investigating.” 236 When the Indians along the Carson River accurately predict a flood, the narrator wonders: “How did they get their information? I am not able to answer the question.” 237 After his stay in the Mormon capital, the narrator confesses his perplexities: At the end of our two days’ sojourn, we left Great Salt Lake City hearty and well fed and happy—physically superb but not so very much wiser, as regards the “Mormon question,” than we were when we arrived, perhaps. We had a deal more “information” than we had before, of course, but we did not know what portion of it was reliable and what was not. . . . All our “information” had three sides to it. 238

As a humorist, Mark Twain is necessarily interested in many-sided questions, and he pursues oppositions relentlessly in Roughing It: Cooper’s noble savages and the Goshute Indians, Mormon polygamy and gentile monogamy, blustering bravado and crestfallen cowardice, gold and mica. His confession

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upon leaving Salt Lake City demonstrates how his technique as a humorist connects with his characteristic habit as a thinker, and it reveals the main point about Roughing It. However haphazard, however jumbled, however miscellaneous some of its parts, Twain’s often hilarious journey into the West arrives finally at a complex, shifting, continually questioning, often ironic, three-sided vision of human experience itself. Roughing It is about the truth of the West as well as about various kinds of lies. One of the latter, the special jewel of exaggeration which goes off the scale, is so quintessential to Mark Twain’s talents and so identified with the West and with America itself that it deserves its own chapter. That special jewel is the tall tale.

Chapter Six

Throw in Another Grizzly The Tall Tale in America

“He narrated his career, in fact, from the beginning, through all its variations, and whenever his companion’s credulity, or his habits of gentility, appeared to protest, it amused him to heighten the colour of the episode. [Christopher] Newman had sat with Western humorists in knots, round cast-iron stoves, and seen ‘tall’ stories grow taller without toppling over, and his own imagination had learned the trick of piling up consistent wonders.” Henry James, The American 1

I Americans did not invent the tall tale, but the enthusiasm with which they have embraced the form has made it a peculiarly American genre. Ernest Baughman attempted to provide a statistical basis for this phenomenon in his Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America, and his conclusion reads like a whopper itself: “The tall tale . . . is an overwhelmingly American form (3,710 American [motif] variants, 29 English variants).” More than half of all the American tale variants (3784 out of 7465) in the Type and Motif-Index are humorous, and most of those (3710 out of 3784) are tall tales, which constitute “the largest segment of our published tales.” 2 Baughman’s numbers may be susceptible to minor revisions, but his demonstration of the extraordinary fecundity of tall narrative in America can be substantiated at every turn.

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For Europeans, America began as a tall story. Columbus, bucking for promotion and reward, wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella on 15 February l493 that the island he called La Spanola was “very fertile to an excessive degree”: In it there are many harbors on the coast of the sea, incomparable to others which I know in Christendom, and numerous rivers, good and large, which is marvelous. Its lands are lofty and in it there are very many sierras and very high mountains. . . . All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all accessible and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seem to touch the sky. . . . The harbors of the sea here are such as you could not believe in without seeing them, and so the rivers, many and great, and good streams, the most of which bear gold. 3

This first Euro-American document began a tradition of New World hyperbole that continues down to the latest joke about the weather in Texas, or mosquitoes in Arkansas, or the State of the Union. (“How can your presidents say those things?” I was once asked at a diplomacy institute in Bonn. “No one could possibly believe them.”) Columbus’s account was followed by pamphlets and letters promoting colonization that ranged from Robert Johnson’s comparatively sober account of a land that “yeeldeth naturallie for the sustentation of man, aboundance of fish, both scale and shell; of land and water fowles, infinite store” 4 to the soaring claims of Anthony Parkhurst that he “found pearls above forty in one mussel, and generally all have some, great or small,” and that fish “do come on shore when I command them . . . which I may sweep with brooms on a heap and never wet my foot.” 5 These pamphlets and reports, largely written in England, were echoed by the descriptions of settlers and colonists who made exaggerated claims for every feature of their new home, even “the temper of the air.” According to Francis Higginson of Massachusetts Bay, “there is hardly a more healthful place to be found in the world that agrees better with our English bodies.” 6 As the East was settled, extravagance moved west, beyond verification, and the waves of westward migration that commenced even before the American Revolution made them legal were fueled by unrestrained assertions of endless space, Edenic fertility, and inexhaustible wildlife. At the extreme, a soapbox orator in Missouri urged on the pioneers by describing Oregon as a “paradise [where] the pigs are running about under the great acorn trees, round and fat, and already cooked, with knives and forks sticking in them so that you can cut off a slice whenever you are hungry.” 7 Even travelers as sober and precise as Harvard-trained Francis Parkman were unable to resist the heady air of American inflation, and Parkman reported in The Oregon Trail that “the water [in the Missouri River] is so charged with mud and sand that it is perfectly opaque, and in a few minutes deposits a sediment an inch thick in the bottom of a tumbler.” 8 (Mark Twain, not one to be outdone in exaggeration, reports in Life on the Mississippi that “every

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tumblerful of [the Missouri River] holds nearly an acre of land in solution.”) 9 In December 1848, while Parkman was dictating installments of his narrative for the Knickerbocker Magazine, President Polk sent his annual message to Congress bragging about the recent acquisition of 1,193,061 square miles of Texas, New Mexico, Upper California, and Oregon as the manifestation of the “natural” destiny of the United States. Continuing unbroken the rhetoric of optimism and avarice that began with Columbus, Polk described “recent discoveries” in California as if they were nature’s corroboration that the sun shone brighter and men stood taller on the continent of North America. Restrained at first—the mines were said to be “extensive and valuable”—the President soon began to sound like a frontier yarn spinner concocting a disclaimer intended to sell a dubious listener: “the accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.” 10 Thus tall narrative found a comfortable home in European North America, and not the least reason was that it often pointed true. There was gold in California, and in Nevada and Arizona and Colorado as well, and succeeding discoveries of silver, copper, coal, oil, and uranium gave substance to the dreams of riches pursued by Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Coronado. Of course, many of the claims about the New World stretched the facts, and not a few were ironically, even pathetically, false. Francis Higginson died of tuberculosis in l630, a few months after he published his tract about the salubrity of the New England climate, using himself as his chief example— formerly “very sickly,” now in “perfect health.” But there was considerable truth in the exuberant accounts of a land where bison roamed by the millions, where the freshly broken earth yielded unprecedented harvests, and where new settlements often provided a more healthy environment than the crowded cities of Europe. American infatuation with size and statistics was honestly come by in a nation twice the size of Western Europe, where states would turn out to be larger than European countries—70,749 square miles for the average U.S. state, 50,912 square miles for the average of the 47 European countries west of Russia. 11 Even though Frances Trollope got sucked in by tales of copperheads that bit themselves in rage and alligators that swallowed whole families, she shrewdly pointed out that exaggeration was both logical as a rhetorical device and justified in American reality: In reading this celebrated description [of a storm, while she traveled] in America, and observing how admirably true it was to nature there, I seemed to get a glimpse at a poet’s machinery, and to perceive, that in order to produce effect he must give his images more vast than he finds them in nature. . . . Every thing seems colossal on this great continent; if it rains, if it blows, if it thunders, it is all done fortissimo. 12

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Mrs. Trollope makes two separate, but equally useful points here. The poet she refers to is James Thompson, and his “celebrated description” depicts an English summer thunderstorm in The Seasons. Rereading this passage in the United States, Trollope realizes how Thompson, making good use of poetic license, has exaggerated for effect. And she also realizes that his descriptive fireworks (“explosion vast . . . livid flame . . . convulsing heaven and earth”) are less excessive when applied to America, where fortissimo reality meets exaggeration halfway. There are other reasons for the luxuriant growth of tall narrative in American soil. European emigrants to the new world exaggerated its wonders to justify the trip to themselves and to friends and relatives back home, and to counter Old World claims of superior flora and fauna. They magnified distances and dangers to enjoy the credulity of greenhorns and to exorcise their loneliness and fear. They enticed others to emigrate with mouthwatering descriptions because they wished to share the bounty, because misery loves company, because increased numbers provided safety in a wagon train and a labor supply for farms, because real estate agents needed clients. The citizens of the new republic defended themselves from the ridicule of notebook-toting tourists like Mrs. Trollope by stringing them along, inventing crudeness and inconveniences to top those that could be observed. By the time Samuel Clemens was born in 1835, tall narrative had a two-century foothold on the American continent. Like many species, biological and literary, it developed for historical reasons and then, once underway, generated its own momentum and thus became established as a characteristic part of the landscape of American imagination. Tall tales were told around the hearth and campfire and stove; in bunkhouses and riverboats and barrooms and mining towns and lumber camps; and especially on the frontier, that fertile intermediary space where men shouted into the wilderness and heard the magnified echoes of both their dreams and their fears. The decade of Mark Twain’s birth witnessed the conversion of oral tales to print, the gradual maturation of frontier and Western narrative in which tall tales played a prominent part, and the development of the Western hero, whose arsenal almost invariably included a nimble tongue along with a strong arm and an infallible rifle. Like the wily Odysseus—no mean spinner of tales himself—the American Western hero transcended the virtues of the mere strong man, Hercules in buckskin, and triumphed by means of a quick wit and a fertile imagination. Owen Wister’s The Virginian, published in 1902, summarizes this nineteenth-century evolution. The crucial scene in the novel is not the conflict with Indians, the hanging of the rustlers, the engagement to Miss Molly, or the concluding gunfight with Trampas. The shoot-out is compressed into one paragraph, while the most important and one of the longest chapters, one that both justifies and predicts the outcome of the novel, is devoted to the drawling

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Virginian’s towering tale about frog ranching in Tulare, California, in order to supply the Eastern market: “Same as cattle trains, yu’d see frawg trains tearing acrosst Arizona—big glass tanks with wire over ‘em—through to New York, an’ the frawgs starin’ out.” Trampas—who up to this point has been concocting a mutiny against the Virginian’s leadership—listens with increasing and finally complete belief as the tale spins to a climax with the “disease” that killed the frog trade: “And if ever yu’ see a man that hides his feet an’ won’t take off his socks in company, he has worked in them Tulare swamps an’ got the disease. Catch him wadin,’ an’ yu’ll find he’s webfooted. Frawgs are dead, Trampas, and so are you.” 13 The mutiny ends, the Virginian retains control, and the actual death of Trampas is only a matter of time. The artful narration that defeats Trampas, that enhanced the reputation of frontiersmen and mountain men and lumberjacks and steamboat pilots and cowboys, is well known though not always well understood. The term “tall tale” would seem to explain itself, and most discussions emphasize exaggeration and fantasy. Norris W. Yates’s definition, often cited, is representative: “a fantastic yarn rendered temporarily plausible by the supporting use of realistic detail.” 14 But such definitions miss the subtle rapport of teller and listener, the delicious intertwining of plausible and implausible, the fun of the genre. The essence of the tall tale, the characteristic that binds together its incongruous parts, is humor. Comic enjoyment is the premise, the purpose, and the result of the tall tale. Tall narratives without humor are not tall tales, but lies or hoaxes or confidence games, and their purpose is deception. Thus Columbus’s letter, however tall, does not qualify as a tall tale, for there is no more smile to his account than there is to an undertaker, or a ham. Tall tales are not lies, both because they are not designed to deceive and because, however tall, they often convey truth. A genuine lie, like a snake in the grass, remains hidden; tall tale telling is a game of exposure. True liars never use the words “lie,” or “lying,” or “liar.” Humorous yarn spinners use them constantly, both in the tale and in the opening and closing apparatus. Joseph Baldwin, in “Ovid Bolus, Esq.” explains the difference: “Some men are liars from interest . . . some are liars from vanity . . . some are liars from a sort of necessity . . . some are enticed away by the allurements of pleasure, or seduced by evil example and education. Bolus was none of these: he belonged to a higher department of the fine arts. . . . He lied from the delight of invention and the charm of fictitious narrative.” 15 In Mark Twain’s Roughing It, when the stagecoach stops for repairs after crossing the South Platte River, the passengers turn out for a buffalo hunt. One of them, Bemis, returns on foot from the hunt, explaining that he has been thrown by his horse, chased up a tree by a wounded buffalo bull, and escaped only after lassoing and shooting the bull—which climbed forty feet

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up the tree after him. After Bemis tells his tale, the narrator comments “I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth.” 16 Ostensibly in support of this judgment, the narrator then tells a story about Eckert, an Englishman in Bangkok, that Bemis reminds him of. Eckert is “famous for the number, ingenuity, and imposing magnitude of his lies,” and a favorite local recreation is to draw him out before strangers. On one such occasion, Eckert talks blandly for two hours about a multitude of commonplace things, and then, finally, launches the missile that his visitors have come for: “Oh, by the way! I came near forgetting. I have got a thing here to astonish you. Such a thing as neither you nor any other man ever heard of—I’ve got a cat that will eat cocoanut! Common green cocoanut— and not only eat the meat, but drink the milk. It is so—I’ll swear to it.” 17 His auditors murmur protestations and exchange winks, whereupon Eckert produces his cat and offers her a slice of green cocoanut: “She snatched it, swallowed it ravenously, and asked for more!” Mark Twain, a high-wire performer in the tall tale circus, thus tells a yarn about a liar who turns out to be telling the truth in order to complicate the reader’s too facile dismissal of Bemis’s wild yarn about a tree-climbing buffalo. II The truth component of the tall tale is remarkably elastic, and ranges from actual occurrences told as if they were invented, to actual events exaggerated, to whole-cloth fantasy. “Tall” refers to a disparity between the object or event and our normal experience, and can include an actual seven-foot basketball player or a mythical forty-foot lumberjack. Typically, Mark Twain works the whole range, giving us tales that simply flesh out the facts that he recorded in his notebook (buying worthless gloves from a beautiful charmer in Gibraltar), those that exaggerate the facts (the number of women married to Brigham Young), and those that soar beyond the range of sublunar reality (a buffalo climbing a tree). But whether factual or embellished or invented, most tall narratives attempt to convey some sort of truth. In Rising from the Plains, John McPhee sets out the scientific facts of high-country geology, an account that he prefaces with a caution from U.S.G.S. geologist David Love to “be careful not to exaggerate.” Vividly but carefully, McPhee describes the wind in Wyoming: At the Wyoming Information Center, beside Interstate 80 just south of Cheyenne, eleven picnic tables are enclosed in brick silos, and each silo has a picture window, so that visitors to Wyoming can picnic more or less al fresco and not be blown home. On the range, virtually every house has a shelter belt of trees—and for the most part the houses are of one story. Used tires cover the tops of mobile homes. Otherwise, wind tears off the roofs. Mary Kraus, a

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sedimentologist from the University of Colorado, got out of her car one day in north-central Wyoming and went to work on an outcrop. The wind blew the car off a cliff. 18

Here is the same phenomenon converted to a tall narrative by contemporary cowboy poet Baxter Black: He said, “The wind never blows in Wyoming,” I said, “Mister, where you from? It’ll take the top off a big R.C. Or peel an unripened plum! Wherever you been, you’ve been lied to! I lived in Wyoming, I know. I once seen a horse turned clean inside out From standin’ outside in the blow! You don’t have to shave in the winter, Just pick a cool windy place. Stand there a minute, yer whiskers’ll freeze and break off next to your face. They claim that a boxcar in Rawlins, A Denver and ol’ Rio Grande, Was picked off the track and blowed to the east And beat the whole train to Cheyenne. Why, they tell of a feller in Lander Who jumped off a bale of hay Before he hit ground the wind picked ‘im up He came down in Caster next day! They don’t have to shear sheep in Worland. When they’re ready, they wait for a breeze And bunch ‘em in draws where the willers are thick Then take the wool off the trees. But the windiest tale that I heard Was about the small town of Sinclair. It used to set on the Idaho line Then one spring it just blew over there! I carry this rock in my pocket

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For good luck, and here’s one for you. Every little bit helps in Wyoming, If you’re skinny you better take two! Well, Stranger, you just might be part right. Though, fer sure you ain’t seen Devil’s Tower. Let’s say the wind never blows in Wyoming. . . Under eighty-five miles an hour!” 19 (Baxter Black’s poem, “Why Do the Trees All Lean in Wyoming,” is reprinted with the author’s permission from his Coyote Cowboy Poetry © 1986.) Black’s tale raises the ante from the real car of the real Mary Kraus, which is blown a few feet, to the imaginary boxcar, which soars 150 miles from Rawlins to Cheyenne. But the point is the same: the wind really does blow in Wyoming. And in Nevada as well, according to Mark Twain, who lays out precisely how the truth component works in tall tale telling with a three-part sequence: first a windy tall tale (à la Baxter Black), then a disclaimer to alert the reader (“But seriously”), and finally a more restrained retelling (à la McPhee) which explains how to derive truth from tall. It was two o’clock, now, and according to custom the daily “Washoe Zephyr” set in; a soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view. Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to newcomers; for the vast dust-cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air—things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust—hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sagebrush and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a skurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots. . . . But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stage-coach over and spills the passengers. 20

Twain, however, being an agile climber of the heights of exaggeration, and believing that the ability to create whole-cloth whoppers “belongs to greatness,” can’t resist a breezy finale to this sequence: “tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are looking skyward after their hats.” 21

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Overstatement, as Mrs. Trollope points out, is a linguistic device, used “to produce effect” by poets and, we might add, by everyone else: “It took forever to get there,” “He drives me crazy,” “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” “It weighed a ton,” “I thought I would die.” One of the shrewdest assessments of the celebrated tales of mountain man Jim Beckwourth states that he used to “throw in another grizzly” to embellish a story. The full context of this assessment is illuminating, for it suggests that the extra bear is necessary in order to convey to a greenhorn just how dangerous grizzly bear fighting really is: “When telling stories, Jim Beckwourth allus sized up his crowd. If they was too ignorant to know fightin’ a grizzly bare-handed makes a good story, he’d just throw in another grizzly.” 22 Thus tallness is often a technique for conveying a truth that other means fall short of expressing. It is useful, sometimes even necessary, to explain phenomena that are outside the listener’s or reader’s experience. Much of the exaggeration in Roughing It is of this sort, as Mark Twain attempts to give a sense of the “curious new world” of sagebrush, coyotes, desperadoes, Indians, Mormons, and the flush times of the great Comstock Lode. This truth in tallness helps to explain the disclaimers with which Mark Twain signposts his narrative: “really and truly,” “It is literally true,” “these are actual facts.” These signposts seem to say, sure, I’ve told some stretchers, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t vast spaces, outlandish weather conditions, strange animals, and dizzying cycles of boom and bust in the mining districts. Even when a story is aggressively fictitious, it is often created to suggest a real point. Tree-climbing bison are “not down on any map,” as Melville put it about Queequeg’s native home of Kokovoko, and the aerial escapades of Bemis’s buffalo bull are humorous because they describe ascending levels of physical impossibility. But they also serve to suggest the novelty, the vitality, and the wonder of the West and its exotic creatures, as they were seen by mid-nineteenth-century Americans. III Mark Twain’s use of Bemis as storyteller and his inclusion of the disbelieving comments of the story’s auditors (“Sure as truth itself”; “Oh, exactly”) point to the oral provenience of the tall tale, and demonstrate that it is a social as well as a humorous, and in some ways a truthful, genre. Tales are told in relaxed, convivial circumstances, such as those created by a sagebrush campfire in the evening on the plains, a scene Twain describes near the beginning of Roughing It, which serves to preface the entire book: “Such a fire will keep all night, with very little replenishing; and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly entertaining.” 23 Even in monologue

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performance, Baxter Black frames his windy yarn as a conversation with a “stranger,” to whom he gives the opening line: “He said, ‘The wind never blows in Wyoming.’” This employment of dialogue, of comment and response, suggests that the tale part of the genre is as important as the tall. The tall tale apparently began not as a monologue, but as a dramatic performance, with teller and participating audience, or audiences, since the auditors may be divided into those who are in on the joke and those who are not. The teller spins a tale about unusual or extravagant events which are commonly exaggerations of actual happenings, though they may be sublimely fictitious or, conversely, true to the spirit and even the facts of an incident. However elaborated, the events are narrated in a deadpan fashion as if they were true, given a specific location in time and place, and often attributed to a conveniently absent relative, acquaintance, or roommate, or simply to a generic “they,” as in Black’s “they claim that a boxcar in Rawlins” and “they tell of a feller in Lander.” The narrative pushes on the limits of the listener’s credulity, and as the ante is raised a contest of wit and credibility is engaged between the narrator and his audience: “Bemis, is all that true, just as you have stated it?” “I wish I may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog if it isn’t. . . .” “But if there were some proofs—” “Proofs! Did I bring back my lariat?” “No.” “Did I bring back my horse?” “No.” “Did you ever see the bull again?” “No.” “Well, then, what more do you want?” 24

Sometimes one of the listeners is taken in, perhaps a greenhorn, or a blackshirted villain like Trampas, or a foreigner—which, beyond the l00th meridian, includes Easterners. And that caught fish increases the pleasure for the free swimmers, “the boys” who are insiders, as does the occasional dour literalist who wanders by the scene and misses the point entirely: ‘Why, George,” [says a female tourist to her husband, as the Virginian describes frog trains tearing across Arizona] “he’s merely deceiving them! He’s merely making that stuff up out of his head.” “Yes, my dear, that’s merely what he’s doing.” “Well, I don’t see why you imagined I should care for this. I think I’ll go back [to my Pullman car].” “Better see it out, Daisy. This beats the geysers or anything we’re likely to find in the Yellowstone.” “Then I wish we had gone to Bar Harbor as usual.” 25

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This social dimension of the genre explains how even a true story can play as a tall tale. I was first initiated into the mysteries of richly embroidered narrative on summer evenings in Pensacola, Florida, when fledgling naval aviators gathered in local bars to recount the day’s adventures. I remember one of the first stories I heard, sandwiched between wildly impossible exploits and told with all the apparatus of overstatement to a chorus of disbelief. It concerned the nonchalance with which a student pilot, on his first solo flight, deadsticked his way to a perfect emergency landing after the propeller had spun off of his single-engine aircraft, causing a total power loss as well as a failure of the electrical instruments and the hydraulic system run by the turning propeller shaft. Only later did I discover that this incident, narrated in the same vein as frog ranches and tree-climbing buffaloes, was, or at least was based on, a real event. In his autobiography, Mark Twain recalls dining on turnips and water at the home of his cousin, James Lampton, the model for Mulberry Sellers in The Gilded Age: Many persons regarded “Colonel Sellers” as a fiction, an invention, an extravagant impossibility, and did me the honor to call him a “creation”; but they were mistaken. I merely put him on paper as he was; he was not a person who could be exaggerated. The incidents which looked most extravagant, both in the book and on the stage, were not inventions of mine, but were facts of his life.” 26

A tall tale is an incident told as a tall tale, regardless of how short or elongated the matter may be. The social dimension of tall narrative, with its intertwined roles of telling and listening, deepens our understanding of the disclaimers that follow so many of Mark Twain’s early stories. In part, as we have seen, these disclaimers—especially the “really and truly” kind—make a case for the truth of a statement, even if a substantial percentage must be discounted. These disclaimers can also be seen as the written equivalents of a wink to insiders: Some instinct or other made me set this Johnson down as being unreliable. It may be true, and it may not. I do not endorse that statement—I simply give it for what it is worth—and it is worth—well, I should say, millions, to any man who can believe it without straining himself. 27

These statements seem to say that you and I know it’s getting pretty tall, but let’s enjoy together the fun of seeing how high it can be piled before it topples over. And they lead us to a new definition of the tall tale: an extravagant narrative that, whatever its relation to reality, pushes on the limits of credibility for the amusement of insiders—always the narrator, sometimes the person or persons to whom the story is told, usually the audience that

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witnesses the story-telling performance. Mark Twain’s description captures it precisely: “a very sociable camp-fire . . . around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive and profoundly entertaining”— “sociable” because of the communal dynamics of telling and response, “impossible” because the events appear to contradict the laws of nature and human action, “plausible” because they are told as if they were true, “instructive” because in some ways they may be true, “entertaining” because of their humorous disparity from our normal-world experience and expectations. Thus the tall tale, this most fictional of literary forms, runs counter to the conventions of ordinary fiction. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf notes that successful fiction has “something that one calls integrity . . . the conviction that [the writer] gives one that this is the truth,” 28 a conviction that Coleridge had earlier called a “willing suspension of disbelief.” 29 But the tall tale, told as truth and received as fiction, revels in disbelief instead of suspending it. The tall tale is not “temporarily plausible,” as Yates has it, but apparently plausible. That is, it keeps the trappings of plausibility—citation of authority, comments about its truth, specificity in time and place, and deadpan narration (which Mark Twain called the “first virtue of a comedian”)—yet at the same time raises warning signals with its ascending improbabilities and its humorous baggage of fanciful metaphors, over- and understatements, outlandish names, miraculous coincidences, and winks to the listener or reader. The telling of the tall tale has a presentational logic that is set against the illogic of its meaning, as in the letter Mark Twain wrote in June 1876 to an autograph hunter: “I am a long time answering your letter, my dear Miss Harriet, but then you must remember that it is an equally long time since I received it—so that makes us even, & nobody to blame on either side.” 30 Similarly, the tall tale hangs together and falls apart at the same time: “The wind blew so strong that it blew all the dirt away from around the well, leaving only the hole. It was too long to be good for anything as it was, so we sawed it up for postholes.” 31 The trick of the tall tale, as Henry James’ Christopher Newman learned from western humorists, is “the trick of piling up consistent wonders.” And therein lies the fun, for this special form of humor has, simultaneously, both consistency and wonder, similarity to and disparity from our experience, truth and impossibility. Originally an oral genre, the tall tale was translated into written forms in the early nineteenth century, when newspapermen as well as travelers and lawyers and other occasional writers attempted to capture the flavor of indigenous American regions, characters, and speech. Sometimes the oral setting was reproduced intact, complete with campfire or wood stove and narratoraudience repartee. T. B. Thorpe locates his “Big Bear of Arkansas” on a steamboat with a narrator who walks into the cabin, takes a chair, puts his feet on the stove, and unrolls a series of yarns to an audience that contains both skeptics (“a ‘live sucker’ from Illinois who had the daring to say that

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our Arkansaw friend’s stories ‘smelt rather tall’”) and believers (“a timid little man near me inquired, if the bear in Arkansaw ever attacked the settlers in numbers”). A large percentage of Thorpe’s tale occurs within quotation marks, for the narrator defines his task as reproducing the speech of the yarn spinner: “half of his story consisted in his excellent way of telling it. . . . As near as I can recollect, I have . . . given the story in his own way.” 32 As the numbers of readers increased in America and as literature began to be a means of gainful employment, sketches were succeeded by stories and novels and biographies, and the varieties and subtleties of tall narration multiplied. By the time writers born in the first quarter of the nineteenth century came to maturity in mid-century as humorists and lecturers and local colorists, the oral tall tale had flowered into myriad written species. These ranged from tales written down as if they had been overheard, to those in which the author is the yarn spinner and the reader is the audience, to other forms of tall narrative more distantly related to the tall tale. But regardless of the written varieties, the essence of the oral tall tale remained—humor created by implausible hyperbole told to an inside audience, now readers, by a narrator who plays with extravagance while pretending straightforwardness. And the oral legacy of the written tall tale was not simply an inheritance from a previous generation of talkers, since contemporary performers flourished on the nineteenth-century stage, and continued to influence their writing cousins. In “How to Tell a Story,” Mark Twain focuses exclusively on oral performance, citing the achievements of a group of tale tellers—Dan Setchell, Artemus Ward, Bill Nye, James Whitcomb Riley—who entertained live audiences from the 1860s to the end of the century. Twain’s career has humor at its center, and tallness is a crucial part of humor. Tall tales and exaggerated narratives appear everywhere in his early journalistic writings, and spill over into his first books—The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, and The Innocents Abroad. Roughing It marks a climax, perhaps because the West was, as the “Big Bear of Arkansaw” declares, a “creation state,” whose vast size and exotic features seemed exaggerated to begin with, a tall tale waiting to be told. The loose structure of A Tramp Abroad and the second part of Life on the Mississippi allows for tall yarns, but in general in his later career, Twain made less use of fully developed, free-standing tall tales, submerging tallness into the narrative—as he did in Huckleberry Finn with Jim Gillis’ colorful story of the burning shame—and scaling down hyperbole to the point where it doesn’t interrupt the suspension of disbelief. Yet extravagance never completely disappears, even in wholly satirical pieces, and one could argue that entire narratives, such as Connecticut Yankee, the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, and unfinished works like “The Great Dark” and “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” have a distant-cousin relationship to tall tales. The late autobiographical dictations demonstrate a resurgence of extrava-

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gance and much of their charm comes from the yarn spinner’s wink to the reader, perfectly captured by the last line of the last autobiographical selection Mark Twain published in the North American Review in 1906-07: “Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.” 33 Early and late, Twain relied on the essence of tall narrative—with its exaggeration, interplay between narration and reception, and juxtaposition of logic and illogic, both for the humor of incongruity and as a way of telling truth—not slant, as Emily Dickinson puts it, but tall. 34

IV

Middle Years: The Triumph of Satire (1873–1889)

Chapter Seven

Old Times and New Narrators

“What a fancy you have got! And what sense!” W. D. Howells to Mark Twain 1

In 1865, unmarried, unemployed, impoverished, turning thirty, and “utterly miserable,” Mark Twain wrote a “text for a sermon on Self-Murder” to his brother: “If I do not get out of debt in 3 months,—pistols or poison for one— exit me.” 2 Then, in rapid succession, came publication of the “Jumping Frog,” employment as a special correspondent to the Sandwich Islands, success as a lecturer, the Quaker City expedition, large sales of The Innocents Abroad, and marriage to Olivia Langdon. Five years after the “Self-Murder” letter, Twain could describe his wife as a “princess” and his income as that of a “small lord.” This upward trajectory continued during the next few years, and by 1874 the self-made prince could boast of three successful lecture seasons, an enthusiastic reception in England, publication of hundreds of articles and four books (including three best sellers), a popular play (Colonel Sellers) running in New York, and four sources of income (lecture fees, book and stage royalties, and Livy’s inheritance), which freed him from the daily grind of journalism he had thought would be necessary to support his growing family and increasingly lavish lifestyle. The “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” had become, in his own words, “a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England.” 3 Now living in a 19-room Victorian mansion in Hartford staffed with 6 to 8 servants, the former footloose, Bohemian, printer-pilot-miner-reporter was solidly settled into family domesticity and town citizenship, though he preserved—in the midst of his newfound respectability—a healthy amount of unconventionality, of iconoclasm, of what Howells called “his wild pleasure in shocking people . . . [and] the mere need of loosing his rebellious spirit.” 4 149

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To be sure, there were some complications and qualifications to this American success story. Twain’s stepfather had died in 1870; his first-born child died in 1872. His sister was now a widow, with two young children; and his brother, after his brief stint as secretary of the Nevada Territory, never managed to find regular employment. Twain would provide much of the support for both of these siblings and their families, as well as his longwidowed mother, for the rest of their lives. His four books consisted of a collaboration (The Gilded Age), a collection of revised newspaper articles (The Innocents Abroad), a brilliantly begun work filled out with miscellaneous pieces and journalism from the Sandwich Islands (Roughing It), and a collection of sketches (The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches) whose author was so unhappy with the editing and lack of sales that he purchased the book plates and had them destroyed: “Don’t read a word in that Jumping Frog book, Livy—don’t. I hate to hear that infamous volume mentioned. I would be glad to know that every copy of it was burned, & gone forever. I’ll never write another like it.” 5 Nevertheless, in fall of 1874, Mark Twain, going on 39, had reached a pinnacle of authorial and financial success. We know now that what appeared to be a pinnacle was in fact a base camp for his climb into literary immortality. That climb began with a walk. “OLD TIMES ON THE MISSISSIPPI” I don’t see how you do it. I knew all that, every word of it—passed as much time on the levee as you ever did, knew the same crowd & saw the same scenes,—but I could not have remembered one word of it all. You have the two greatest gifts of the writer, memory & imagination. I congratulate you.” John Hay to Mark Twain 6

Mark Twain had been acquainted with William Dean Howells since 1869 when Howells, an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, had reviewed The Innocents Abroad with perspicacious warmth. These two Midwesterners, both of them young men at the beginning of their careers and both newly established in the East, quickly became friends. In 1872, Howells, by then Atlantic editor in chief, reviewed Roughing It just as favorably, noting that “the book . . . is singularly entertaining, and its humor is always amiable, manly, and generous.” 7 Twain replied, in a fragment of a letter that seems to have been separated from the hundreds of Twain letters that Howells carefully saved: “I am as uplifted & reassured by [your review] as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto.” 8 In the late summer of 1874, Howells apparently asked Twain for a contribution for the Atlantic, presumably part of the magazine’s campaign to intro-

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duce new voices, and new kinds of voices, to its audience. Twain sent two stories—one a science-spoofing animal fable featuring an inebriated dung beetle; the other, “rather out of my line” Twain called it, 9 a retelling in dialect of the history narrated to him by Mary Ann Cord, a former slave and the cook at Quarry Farm in Elmira, where the Clemens family spent most of their summers in the 1870s and 1880s. Howells politely rejected the first story and enthusiastically accepted the second, which is a powerful depiction of the human costs of slavery, often seen as the beginning of Mark Twain’s serious work. This piece—“A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It”—is not only serious but tragic, for when their owner becomes bankrupt, the protagonist and her family are sold separately at auction where the woman’s youngest child is torn from her arms. Yet this first-person narrative is a mixture of adversity and triumph, compassion and comedy. Auntie Cord— Aunt Rachel in the story—is perceptive and heroic, and sympathetically portrayed. The outside narrator notes that “Aunt Rachel had gradually risen, while she warmed to her subject, and now she towered above us, black against the stars.” 10 But she is also naïve, and asks the Northern officers, for whom she eventually works, if they had seen her little boy, not realizing at first that he has become a man in the intervening time. And Rachel is vain concerning her status as a volunteer cook for the white senior officers who have taken over the Southern mansion where she had been enslaved: “Dey wa’nt no small-fry officers, mine you, dey was the de biggest dey is; an’ de way dey made dem sojers mosey roun’! . . . Well, one night we had a big sojer ball . . . in my kitchen . . . ’ca’se it was so big. Mine you, I was down on sich doin’s; beca’se my place was wid the officers, an’ it rasp me to have dem common sojers cavortin’ roun’ my kitchen like dat.” 11

It rasps Aunt Rachel even more when a platoon of black soldiers shows up in her kitchen— “den I was jist a-bilin’! ”—until her long-lost son appears, and her tale of troubles ends in “joy! ” Many readers at the time were puzzled by this story from the author of Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, but one got it exactly right. John W. De Forest, a Civil War company commander turned novelist, wrote that “the story of the old negress . . . was a really great thing, amazingly natural & humorous, and touching even to the drawing of tears.” 12 What Twain’s “rather out of my line” remark meant was that his line was changing, for he was increasingly interested in discovering and presenting the humor complexly woven into the variegated fabric of human life. He was becoming, as Howells put it, one “of our subtile humorists.” 13 As Twain used the phrase later, along with “trademark” (“the public . . . puts a trademark onto your work”), “my line” came to mean “the

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comedy that some people think is my only line,” 14 the comedy which, according to Howells, “the unwise took for the whole of him.” 15 Delighted with this tale, for which the Atlantic paid Mark Twain the unprecedented price of $20 a page, Howells asked Twain on 30 September 1874 if he could “send me some such story as that colored one, for our Jan’y number.” 16 He asked again on 5 October: “Are you going to give me another of those little stories?” Three weeks later, Mark Twain replied that he had been unable to produce the requested article. Then he took a long walk in the woods with his Hartford friend Joe Twichell: “I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steamboating glory & grandeur as I saw them (during 5 years) from the pilot house. He said ‘What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!’” 17 Twain had had a book about his river days on the back burner for years, mentioning it as early as 1866, but his back burner was always crowded and it took a special push to bring a subject to the front. Apparently his desire to appear in the Atlantic, coupled with Twichell’s enthusiasm, did just that, and Twain wrote again to Howells as soon as he returned home from the walk: “Would you like a series of papers to run through 3 months or 6 or 9?—or about 4 months, say?” 18 The topic was novel, it was based on personal experience, and he had a strategy at hand—the naïve character narrator—he had discovered in writing Roughing It and perfected in “A True Story.” Twain was at work within a week on what would become his most successful piece of sustained writing to date—a series of linked articles entitled “Old Times on the Mississippi,” which appeared in the Atlantic from January to August, 1875. Mark Twain was a lover of novelty. He wasn’t the first to write about European travel, the American West, or the Mississippi, but as an early writer on these topics, as an entrepreneur of literary marketing, and as a humorist, he enjoyed bringing fresh material to his readers. Novelty is not necessarily humorous, but it is a potential starting point for humor since newness always involves contrast, often involves surprise, and frequently allows a highly imaginative writer opportunities for exaggeration that familiar topics do not. And, although it may sound contradictory, this highly imaginative writer also enjoyed having a factual basis for his subjects, declaring in his notebook that “if you found on a fact in your personal experience, you will not be likely to go astray.” 19 We need to add two corollaries to this remark. Twain seems to be most successful with personal experience somewhat removed from the immediate present. Events that have just happened, such as those reported the next day in newspaper articles, are not as artistically malleable as those that have acquired the patina of time, which allows for a supple blending of memory and imagination. And the generous portion of imagination that Twain mixes with memory demonstrates his elastic concept of the factual. Rather than being tied down to every jot and tittle of actuality, the humorist used fact the way a high jumper uses the ground—

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as a solid surface from which to spring. However high he jumped, Twain felt he was being true to the spirit of the facts, as he noted in a political speech given in Hartford a week before the election of 1880: “I have spoken somewhat fantastically, but no matter, these fantastic trappings are hung around as solid and real a truth as anyone can utter.” 20 With a fresh subject, and a rich set of memories, properly distanced, Mark Twain needed only a plan of presentation, a point of view, for his new work, and for that he turned to the tenderfoot he had invented in the first 21 chapters of Roughing It. The cub pilot of “Old Times” resembles his predecessor in that he is ignorant, unwisely pretentious, and forever receiving setbacks and putdowns. He is closer in age to the young Sam Clemens than was the westering tenderfoot, since Clemens was 21 when he went on the river, 25 when he journeyed to Nevada Territory. Yet the struggling cub pilot is also very much an invention, as Horace Bixby, the cub’s mentor, suggested in his comment to A. B. Paine: “Sam was always good-natured, and he had a natural taste for the river. He had a fine memory and never forgot anything I told him.” 21 “Old Times on the Mississippi” begins with an adult narrator reflecting about his boyhood on the west bank of the river. A contrast of age and youth, experience and innocence, is established by the first clause— “When I was a boy”—and the narrator sets the scene with amiably humorous condescension to his younger self: “My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that offended him”; “now and then [my comrades and I] had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.” 22 In the next section, the adult narrator fades into the background and the boy takes over the narration, still in the past tense, but from his point of view in the earlier time, a shift that is signaled by the chapter titles that were supplied for republication in Life on the Mississippi—the omniscient “The Boys’ Ambition” is followed by the personal “I Want to Be a Cub-Pilot.” For a few pages a humorous contrast is maintained between the boy’s innocence and the reader’s greater understanding of the events the boy narrates, such as his loan of six dollars to a passenger who agrees to pay it back the day after the steamboat on which they were traveling docked: “But he probably died or forgot, for he never came.” 23 Then Horace Bixby is introduced, a “lightning pilot” who personifies knowledge, skill, and wisdom—all the admirable, formidable, and seemingly unobtainable qualities of the piloting profession and the adulthood to which the boy aspires. He apprentices himself to Bixby, and most of the rest of “Old Times” is a comic yet poignant duet between pilot and cub, man and boy, hardened experience and tender innocence: “What’s the name of the first point above New Orleans?” I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

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Chapter 7 “Don’t know? . . . What’s the name of the next point?” Once more I didn’t know. . . . “Look here! What do you start out from, above Twelve-Mile Point, to cross over?” “I—I—don’t know.” “You—you—don’t know?” mimicking my drawling manner of speech. “What do you know?” “I—I—nothing, for certain.” “By the great Caesar’s ghost, I believe you! You’re the stupidest dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea of you being a pilot—you! Why, you don’t know enough to pilot a cow down a lane.” 24

Bixby, like the mighty river itself, is explosive and menacing at times, smiling and serene at others, and in a calm moment he explains that “when I say I’ll learn a man the river, I mean it. . . . I’ll learn him or kill him.” 25 This process, like most educations and apprenticeships, is both painful and exhilarating, uneven yet gradually cumulative. Over the course of two years and eight well-organized and connected chapters, the cub pilot discovers that he has to memorize 1200 miles of river by heart, and he is appalled to realize that since each boat has two pilots and he and his mentor stand watches for four hours on and four hours off, he is missing half the lesson. Then they arrive at St. Louis and turn around for the return trip to New Orleans, and the cub finds out the river looks different going the other way. Then he learns that the river looks different at night as well. Over the months, as the cubnarrator masters basic skills, Bixby introduces new levels of complexity: memorizing the shape of the riverbanks in order to run at night and in bad weather, learning to recognize what lies below from the appearance of the surface and the color of the water. After more than a year, the sophomoric cub thinks he has come to the end of his training: When I had learned the name and position of every visible feature of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that I could shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans; when I had learned to read the face of the water as one would cull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when I had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array of soundings and crossingmarks, and keep fast hold of them, I judged that my education was complete: so I got to tilting my cap to the side of my head, and wearing a toothpick in my mouth at the wheel. 26

Mr. Bixby, of course, “had his eye on these airs,” and introduces advanced new lessons, such as keeping track of the depth of the water, knowing whether the river is rising or falling, and learning where to take shortcuts when high water permits. And then, for a final exam, he shakes the cub’s faith in his hard-acquired proficiency by demonstrating, through an embarrassing ruse, that confidence and judgment are as necessary to a pilot as

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knowledge and skill. From this point on, beginning with chapter 14, the “I” of the narrative returns to the adult “I” of the beginning. The graduated cub is now a pilot, Bixby has a partner rather than a student, and the rest of “Old Times” drifts to miscellaneous points that Mark Twain, still full of his subject, wants to make about “the science of piloting.” There is interesting information and there are some amusing moments in the final chapters concerning the prestige of piloting, the Pilots’ Benevolent Association, steamboat races, and the constant rechanneling of the Mississippi, but a key part of the comic strategy has been lost. The maturation of the cub, like that of the tenderfoot in Roughing It, erodes the contrast that enlivens the early chapters of both works. The first 10 chapters of “Old Times” continued and improved on what Mark Twain discovered in rewriting the early chapters of Roughing It. The cub-Bixby contrast is sharper than that of the tenderfoot in the West and his elders. The cub is a more fully dimensioned character than the tenderfoot, and the cub’s education is more carefully plotted than that of his predecessor. Roughing It is loosely held together by the journey; “Old Times” is organized by a spiraling process of learning—vividly specific to steamboating and generally applicable to the initiation into knowledge most humans experience. In these chapters, Twain has made a substantial contribution to Bildungsroman literature. Its importance for Twain’s career as a humorist stems from his framework of contrast—reminiscent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Beatrice and Benedict, Yossarian and the Eighth Air Force brass— that sustains a believable, significant narrative while providing on-going opportunities for humor. The serio-humorous alternations in Innocents Abroad and Twain’s early lectures have been transformed into serio-humorous integration in extended fiction. Mark Twain would return to this subject in 1882, when he revisited the Mississippi for two months and wrote the 46 additional chapters that, added to “Old Times on the Mississippi,” constitute Life on the Mississippi. For the moment, however, he was headed in a different direction, impelled by his discoveries of the power of a naïve protagonist and the literary possibilities of his youthful experiences. What if he were to take a Hannibal sort of boy, and have him not grow up? The world would soon find out. THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER “mostly a true book; with some stretchers” Huck Finn’s comment on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 27

While “Old Times” was running in the Atlantic in the spring and summer of 1875, Mark Twain was also bringing to completion a story on which he

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had been working since 1870, one that took him further back in time, deeper into his imagination, than his tales of European travel, Western adventures, and steamboating. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, would prove to be the first of the author’s books based on his Hannibal years, the first to focus on a single coherent narrative, the first that one could call a novel. Or is it? For a century Twain has been a leading candidate for having written at least one great American novel, yet he claimed again and again that he was not a novelist. He could tell a story, create character, and put words in his characters’ mouths that rang true in the reader’s ear; but he stated that he detested novels (along with “poetry, and theology”), and told Howells “I . . . can’t write a novel, for I lack the faculty.” 28 When Twain and Howells concocted a scheme for a series of novelettes, in which “each of twelve authors was to write a story, using the same plot, ‘blindfolded’ as to what the others had written,” Twain attempted to write the master plot, and then confessed: “I would suggest that Aldrich devise the skeleton-plan, for it needs an ingenious head to contrive a plot which shall be prettily complicated & yet well fitted for lucid & interesting development in the brief compass of 10 Atlantic pages. My plot was awkward & overloaded with tough requirements.” 29 As A. B. Paine puts it, Mark Twain’s genius was “given rather to elaboration than to construction,” 30 which perhaps explains why he turned so often to topics derived from autobiography, history, and travels. Sometimes Twain’s plots were underloaded. He would take a joke—an undertaker named Mr. Cadaver whose problems arise when no one dies in his town—and try to stretch it into a plot. 31 As he was finishing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and debating whether to describe Tom’s life as an adult, Twain wrote to Howells that “since there is no plot to the thing, it is likely to follow its own drift, & so is as likely to drift into manhood as anywhere.” 32 Two decades later, the author wrote an essay defining himself as a “jack-leg” for the introduction to Those Extraordinary Twins—an aborted story (though Twain published it anyway) that led to Pudd’nhead Wilson: “A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience.” Twain had discovered that as his comedy developed about an Italian version of Siamese twins, with only one set of legs, other characters began to intrude, and he needed to remove the team I had originally started out with. . . . So at the top of Chapter XVII. I put a “Calendar” remark concerning July the Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic: “Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to see the fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned.” It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn’t notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else. Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and got her out of the way, and that was

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the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two boys and said “they went out back one night to stone the cat and fell down the well and got drowned.” Next I searched around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy Hale where they were aground, and said “they went out back one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got drowned.” I was going to drown some of the others, but I gave up the idea, partly because I believed that if I kept that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy with those people, and partly because it was not a large well and would not hold any more anyway. 33

One wonders if this spoof of meticulous composition and these claims about not being a novelist are statements of modesty in the face of competition with “big literary fish” like Jane Austen and Henry James, 34 or frustration with the patient effort needed to plot long fictional works. Difficulties with plotting are probably part of the reason Mark Twain left dozens of manuscripts uncompleted. He once confessed to working “without plot, plan, or purpose—& enjoying it,” 35 and he seemed most comfortable with the serendipitous structure he finally hit upon for his Autobiography: “talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.” 36 A skeptical reader might add that Twain had employed a similar strategy in earlier books—a strategy more like a tipped-over vase than a well-wrought urn. Whether Mark Twain is a novelist is a question for literary taxonomy, and the answer depends on the definition of the novel. Most definitions are loose and baggy enough to include many of Twain’s longer works, and he would surely qualify if we use Randall Jarrell’s definition of a novel: “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” 37 But more important, in terms of Twain’s career as a humorist, is the potential conflict between the novel and humor. By any definition, a novel is a longer rather than a shorter piece of fiction; the novelist is a miler, rather than, like most humorists, a hundred-yard dasher. One of the pleasures of a traditional novel, or a soap opera or many films, involves the slowly developed sense of a predictable world. We enter it with increasing, and increasingly pleasurable, familiarity. We get satisfaction from not just finding out what happens, but also from how the characters—being true to character—react to what happens. And one of the feelings we have after finishing a novel is the sweet sadness that a world in which we have traveled has come to an end. The desire to have that world not end produces the three-decker novel, the television miniseries, the film sequel. Predictability and consistency, of course, are precisely what the humorist is not about; and he or she faces, in a long work, the dilemma of sustaining unpredictability. This dilemma did not trouble Twain much in his early ca-

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reer, for the books in this period—The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches; The Innocents Abroad; Sketches, New and Old—tended to be collections of short works. But with the early chapters of Roughing It and with “Old Times on the Mississippi,” Twain was beginning to devise a strategy to make longer fictional stories work as narratives, suspending the reader’s disbelief and providing ongoing opportunities for humor as well. This strategy has several possibilities. One way to sustain a humorous narrative is build it on a contrastive framework, such as a dueling couple (Katherina and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew) or an incongruous situation (a 40-year-old man courting a 20-year-old girl in Howells’ Indian Summer), or an ideological dichotomy that runs throughout: “‘[Orr is] crazy,’ Doc Daneeka said. ‘He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But . . . there’s a catch . . . catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.’” 38 Point of view also provides continuing opportunities for comedy. An omniscient narrator, like Fielding in Tom Jones or Thackeray in Vanity Fair, is in a position to be droll about his “puppets,” as Thackeray calls his creations, and to point out the ironies of their actions. A character narrator, especially a naïve one, may interpret his or her world differently than someone else in possession of the same facts. Thus the omniscient narrator, potentially at least, stands in contrast to the characters; a naïve narrator may stand in contrast to the reader. And there is yet another strategy for the longdistance humorist—teasing comedy out of life rather than merely making jokes. This difference is illustrated by the annual joke show on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio. The rapid-fire comic routines in this program are a hodgepodge, and in fact far less humorous than Keillor’s continuing story entitled “The News from Lake Woebegone.” This serio-humorous narrative, the chief feature of each PHC weekly program, wraps together, in the lives of the characters who inhabit the fictional yet autobiographical town, a combination of amiable recollection and wholesale invention, lament for a departed past and relief that it is gone, regional idiosyncrasies and general wisdom, affection for his characters laced with criticism and irony, and satire on contemporary issues. This mixture often affects the listener the way Tom Sawyer’s feigned “mortified” toe affects Tom’s Aunt Polly: “The old lady sank down into a chair and laughed a little, then cried a little, then did both together.” 39 Mark Twain never lost his ability or his propensity for telling jokes, but by the mid-1870s he had learned how to sustain a narrative in which the humor is embedded. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer demonstrates this emerging maturity. It does contain comic exaggerations reminiscent of Roughing It, such as the poodle who sits on a pinch-bug in church and then tears up the aisle like “a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of light.” 40 And there are what might be called short tall tales. A boy of German parent-

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age in Tom’s Sunday School class works so industriously at memorizing the Bible that he “once recited three thousand verses without stopping . . . and he was little better than an idiot from that day forth.” 41 Occasionally Twain’s exuberance leads him to poke a hole in the fabric of his narrative. While Tom is down with the measles, a revival takes place in St. Petersburg, and when he recovers he finds everybody had “got religion;” not only the adults, but even the boys and girls. . . . He found Joe Harper studying a Testament, and turned sadly away from the depressing spectacle. He sought Ben Rogers, and found him visiting the poor with a basket of tracts. He hunted up Jim Hollis, who called his attention to the precious blessing of his late measles as a warning . . . and when, in desperation, he flew for refuge at last to the bosom of Huckleberry Finn [he] was received with a Scriptural quotation. 42

Not likely. Most of the humor in Tom Sawyer, however, is embedded in the story. It derives from the many contrasts on which the novel is based: Tom and his milksop younger half-brother Sid; romantic fiction and rivertown reality; restless pupils and switch-wielding schoolmaster; free-spirited village youngsters and convention-bound adults—a gulf defined by the presence of Huckleberry Finn: “Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle, and lawless, and vulgar and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him.” 43 These and other contrasts are presented by the genial voice of the omniscient narrator, who carefully separates himself from children and adults alike, as if he, detached, were turning the pages of a dusty journal. That voice, in the early chapters of Tom Sawyer, sounds much like the “when I was a boy” narrator of the first chapter of “Old Times on the Mississippi.” The Tom Sawyer narrator is correct, sometimes even fastidious, in his diction: “[Aunt Polly’s] resolution to turn [Tom’s] Saturday holiday into captivity at hard labor became adamantine in its firmness.” 44 He fences himself off from the characters by using quotation marks around their slang expressions and vernacular grammar, dropping in apologetic parentheses— “(as Tom expressed it)”—and making jocular remarks or learned allusions which the townspeople would not have understood. For the first half of the book, the narrator is amiably condescending to children and adults. Tom has “absurd boyish ways” and engages in “grotesque foolishness”; St. Petersburg is a “poor little shabby village.” 45 Much of the humor is provided by the dichotomy between a superior, experienced narrator and a naïve community. The illusion of life, as Henry James called the art of fiction, is provided by Mark Twain’s ability to express both his affection for the past (one of his lifelong favorite quotations was “The days when we went gipsying / A long time ago”) and his disdain for it (we hate the past because “it’s so damned humili-

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ating” he once told Howells). 46 St. Petersburg is a dreamy land of summer sunshine as well as a shabby village. Tom’s life is seen as frolicsome and vivacious on one hand, yet full of doubts and anxieties on the other. One afternoon he skips school and plays Robin Hood on Cardiff Hill; that night he witnesses a murder in the graveyard. It is this complexity of attitude and incident, combined with the complexity provided by the double vision of humor, that takes the book beyond most stories of youthful adventures and captures, as Moncure Conway put it, “the salient, picturesque, droll, and at the same time most significant features of human life.” 47 Like most of Mark Twain’s works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is not overburdened by consistency. The first half of the book is largely an idyll, with Tom often on the receiving end of a joke. He throws himself on the ground under a window in the house of the new girl in town in an agony of unrequited romantic passion. Then “the window went up, a maid-servant’s discordant voice profaned the holy calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr’s remains!” (The deluge in an early draft was not water, but “foul slops.” 48 ) But a change takes place in the second half, starting with chapter 22. At this point idyll turns into adventure, the narrator drops his condescension, humor disappears, and the story becomes what book advertisers call a fast-paced, action-packed thriller. Tom Sawyer—suddenly grown up, even beyond the adults in St. Petersburg—takes charge and leads the village and the reader through the discovery of a chest of treasure worth $12,000, the rescue of Becky Thatcher from the serpentine labyrinths of McDougal’s cave, and the exposure and final disposition of the murderous Injun Joe. Humor has been replaced by mystery. One wonders if the surprises of the mystery and detective genres, unhumorous as they usually are, have a special attraction for a humorist necessarily addicted to surprises. Mark Twain seemed drawn to detective stories and mysteries, though as often as not he burlesques the forms, as in “The Stolen White Elephant,” in which the pachyderm in question is finally found—in the quarters of the detectives who are searching for it. An even more audacious ending is that of “An Awful- - - -Terrible Medieval Romance,” in which the author leads the reader up to the denouement—the certain death of a nobleman’s daughter who masquerades as a young man in order to win the dukedom—and then suddenly breaks off: “The truth is, I have got my hero (or heroine) into such a particularly close place that I do not see how I am ever going to get him (or her) out of it again—and therefore I will wash my hands of the whole business.” 49 Twain had earlier practiced this strategy of narrative interruptus in a letter to his mother, whom he teased about having a “taste for the marvellous.” The letter concerned a pretty, melancholy, Hester Prynne sort of woman who had recently arrived in Carson City and “a sinister looking man”: “One evening, just at twilight, [the neighbors] were paralized to see him thrust his gun through the lonely woman’s back window, take

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deliberate aim, and—I guess it’s about time for me to go to bed, now.” 50 The surprise of mystery clashes with the surprise of humor in these truncated tales, and humor wins. Once the mysteries in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are resolved, the book takes a final turn in the final chapter, back to a younger Tom playing children’s games again, back to a simplistic Huck (who, in the mystery section, had rescued the widow Douglas), and back to a condescending narrator who resumes his drollery at the expense of the little village and its characters: Huck Finn’s wealth and the fact that he was now under the widow Douglas’s protection, introduced him into society—no, dragged him into it, hurled him into it—and his sufferings were almost more than he could bear. The widow’s servants kept him clean and neat, combed and brushed, and they bedded him nightly in unsympathetic sheets that had not one little spot or stain which he could press to his heart and know for a friend. 51

This resumption of patronizing humor seems a little forced, perhaps because it returns Tom and Huck to their status at the beginning of the novel, ignoring what appeared to have been their maturation. Apparently Mark Twain had some difficulty with the ending, for when Howells said, on his first reading of the manuscript, that “I don’t seem to think I like the last chapter. I believe I would cut that,” Twain replied, “I think of just leaving it off & adding nothing in its place. Something told me that the book was done when I got to that point—& so the strong temptation to put Huck’s life at the widow’s into detail instead of generalizing it in a paragraph was resisted.” 52 It is not clear whether Twain revised, reduced, or omitted the last chapter of his first draft, and there are in the book as printed, after the narrator’s comments about “Huck Finn’s wealth” quoted above, statements by Huck that specifically detail his life at the widow’s: The widder’s good to me, and friendly; but I can’t stand them ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won’t let me sleep in the wood-shed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don’t seem to any air git through ‘em, somehow. 53

These statements, of course, sound like the opening of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and it is clear that Mark Twain, as he finished Tom Sawyer, was already thinking about what he had learned as an author and how it might play out in another book. “By & by,” he wrote to Howells, “I shall take a boy of twelve & run him on through life (in the first person) but not Tom Sawyer—he would not be a good character for it.” 54 “In the first person” and “not Tom Sawyer” suggest Twain may have thought the humor of the con-

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descending narrator was not always successful in the first half of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and that Tom was too conventional a hero—too vain, too ostentatious—in the second half. The change to first-person naïve narration and to Huck as unconventional hero would produce a humorous masterpiece, though Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, begun shortly after Twain had finished Tom Sawyer, would not be completed for seven years. In the meantime, Mark Twain had three other books to write—A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, and Life on the Mississippi—as he enjoyed a rapidly growing national and international reputation. Sometimes his evolving humor would prove a little hard to digest, which he discovered at a dinner at the Parker House in Boston, in 1877, the year after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published. A JOKE FOR JOHN: THE WHITTIER BIRTHDAY SPEECH “I am bound to wander out of the straight path & do outrageous things, occasionally.” Mark Twain to Mary Mason Fairbanks 55

Like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells was a Midwesterner with a minimum of formal schooling, experience as a typesetter and reporter, and ambitions for a literary career. In 1859 he sent some poems to the Atlantic Monthly in Boston. After four poems were published by editor James Russell Lowell early in 1860, Howells dashed off a 77-page campaign biography of a free-soil Midwestern politician, and with the $199 he was paid, he set out from Ohio on a pilgrimage to the literary Mecca of America. Howells introduced himself to Lowell, who sent him to the Wayside in Concord, to meet Hawthorne: His name is Howells, and he is a fine young fellow, and has written several poems in the Atlantic, which of course you have never read, because you don’t do such things yourself, and are old enough to know better. . . . If my judgment is good for anything, this youth has more in him than any of our younger fellows in the way of rhyme. . . . let him look at you and charge it To yours always, J. R. Lowell 56

Hawthorne passed Howells on to Ralph Waldo Emerson with a note: “I find this young man worthy.” 57 Howells also met Thoreau and James T. Fields and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he wandered around Boston until 2 a.m. with Holmes’ son, a Harvard senior soon to be a captain in the Union army and later a Supreme Court justice. This was a heady time for a 23-yearold from Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, and it was climaxed by a dinner at the Parker House given by Lowell for Howells, Holmes Sr., and Fields, who was pub-

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lisher of the Atlantic, and about to succeed Lowell as editor. At the end of a four-hour meal filled with the best conversation America had to offer, Holmes turned to Lowell and said: “Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” 58 Seventeen years later, Howells attended another Boston dinner, this time as host, at the Hotel Brunswick. Holmes’ prediction had proved prescient, for after four years in Venice—Howells was rewarded with a consulate when Abraham Lincoln, the subject of his 1859 biography, won the presidency— Howells had joined the Atlantic staff and was now editor, as well as a travel writer and novelist. One of the Atlantic’s recent innovations was a series of dinners for their authors, and on 17 December 1877, the honoree was John Greenleaf Whittier, in celebration of his 70th birthday. Another innovation was Howells’ recruiting of new talent for the magazine from outside New England, and one of his noteworthy recruits was his friend and fellow Midwesterner Mark Twain, whom he had asked to speak at the dinner. Twain, proud to be an Atlantic author himself as well as a best-selling writer whose works far outsold those of the Boston/Cambridge/Concord triad, had carefully prepared a talk in, as Howells later put it, “joyous self-reliance.” 59 At the Brunswick that evening, 58 male commensals were seated at a large table shaped like the Greek letter pi. Across the top were the chief guests of the evening—a kind of murderers’ row of literary heavy hitters: Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Henry Houghton (publisher of the Atlantic), Holmes, and Howells. Lesser guests were placed in two long, perpendicular rows; Mark Twain’s seat was far down on the left side. When he, among others, was called on to speak after dinner, he rose at his place and delivered, from memory, a remarkable oration—part satire, part parody, part burlesque—a tale largely told by a western miner who makes the mistake one snowy evening of opening his door to three rough-looking characters “who had been drinking.” The three represented themselves as “Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. . . . Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed. Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon—he weighed as much as three hundred, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prizefighter.” The miner, “a jaded, melancholy man of fifty,” attempts to offer them the hospitality of his mountain cabin, but they keep badgering him with lofty lines of poetry that are promptly deflated by the common sense of the miner’s responses: Mr. Holmes inspected the cabin, then he took me by the buttonhole and, says he— “Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings: Build thee more stately mansions, O my Soul!”

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Chapter 7 Says I, “I can’t afford it, Mr. Holmes, and moreover I don’t want to.” . . . I started to get out my bacon and beans, when Mr. Emerson came and looked on a while, and then he takes me aside by the buttonhole and says“Give me agates for my meat; Give me cantharides to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and latitudes.” Says I, “Mr. Emerson, if you’ll excuse me, this ain’t no hotel.” . . . I went on a-sweating over my work, and next comes Mr. Longfellow . . . “Honor be to the Mudjekeewis! You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis—” But I broke in, and says I, “Begging your pardon, Mr. Longfellow, if you’ll be so kind as to hold your yawp for about five minutes, and let me get this grub ready, you’ll do me proud.” Well, sir, after they’d filled up, I set out the jug. Mr. Holmes looks at it and then he fires up all of a sudden and yells: “Flash out a stream of blood-red wine! For I would drink to other days.” By George, I was getting kind of worked up. . . . I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, “Looky here, my fat friend, I’m a-running this shanty, and if the court knows herself, you’ll take whiskey straight or you’ll go dry!” 60

In the course of the evening, the three visitors continue to drink, cheat at cards, claim to have written each others’ works, force the miner to stand and sing for them, and get into a scrimmage that is resolved only when “that monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins” and threatened to lie down on and smother the others. Throughout these activities, the unwelcome guests recite bits of poetry by Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes that would have been familiar to the guests at the celebratory dinner. As the three tramps prepare to leave the following morning, the miner notices that Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on, and his own under his arm. Says I, “Hold on there, Evangeline, what are you going to do with them?” He says, “Going to make tracks with ‘em; because “Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime; And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.”

The key to this small but bright gem is the vernacular narrator—the plainspoken miner who is earnest, honest, unpretentious, and authentic—the opposite of his three visitors in every respect. He not only puts down the visitors, but the outside narrator as well, when the latter attempts, not very successfully, to separate the characters in the cabin from the poets at the Hotel Brunswick: “Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were imposters.” This rhetoric— “gracious singers” and “loving reverence and hom-

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age”—seems as phony to the miner as the statements of his visitors, and he has the last word: “Ah—imposters, were they?—are you?” Today this performance strikes us as a stroke of humor, and one loaded with significance. It is a pure form of parody, since the poetry is quoted almost exactly, without the clumsy or corny distortion of many parodic works, and the quotations are woven adroitly into the narrative to provide sharp and surprising contrasts with the gritty reality of the miner’s world and speech. With thirteen decades of perspective, we can glimpse, beyond the clatter of plates at the hotel, the shifting tectonic plates of history and culture: the decline of New England and the rise in importance of the American West, the displacement of poetry by prose as the privileged language of literature, the decay of romantic idealism in the face of realistic pragmatism, and the passing of the torch from the always fading elder generation to the always upstart younger. The average age of the poets at the head table was 71; Mark Twain was 42. The generation that would in turn replace Twain and Howells was already born, and a children’s table at the Brunswick could have been set for Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris. All this was not so clear on that winter evening in 1877. Twain’s speech, anticipating the celebrity roast by several generations, was a mixed success, both at the hotel and in newspaper reviews afterwards. Admirers and critics alike agreed that Twain’s strategy was “bringing these poets and philosophers, whose lives have been passed amid books, in college cloisters, and in refined society, into intimate relations with whisky, cards, bowie-knives and larceny.” 61 From the point of view of physics, the potential for humor was high, since this juxtaposition is unexpected and surprising, especially given its presentation in front of the poets and philosophers themselves. But humor depends on the receiver as well as the sender, and not all the ears of the guests were tuned to find this jest prosperous. Some members of the audience apparently laughed; those who regarded the aged poets with “religious veneration,” 62 as Howells described it, did not. Perhaps Holmes’ later comment represents an average opinion at the time: “the idea was a very amusing one and with a little less of broad farce about it might have pleased everybody as it did so many.” 63 Whether the chief guests were offended is not known. Holmes after all, the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” was himself a celebrated wit. And two years earlier, Longfellow had demonstrated his keen awareness of the wheel of time in the poem he composed for his 50th college reunion at Bowdoin College: “Morituri Salutamus” (“We who are about to die salute you,” the traditional cry of Roman gladiators to the emperor). Boston newspapers printed Twain’s speech and were generally favorable: “There was no mistaking the hearty fun elicited by the droll attitude in which these literary lights were represented”; it “produced the most violent bursts of hilarity.” 64 Outside the cosmopolitan “hub of the solar system”—as Holmes called Boston—reporters and readers were more critical. From

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Springfield and Worchester in Massachusetts, and beyond in Cincinnati and Chicago, came such comments as “coarse and absurd,” “in bad taste,” “vulgar,” “insult,” and “irreverence.” 65 As master of ceremonies, Howells was embarrassed for himself, for Twain, and for the distinguished guests over what he described as “the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe.” 66 Mark Twain too was embarrassed, for this consummate platform performer was used to manipulating audiences and receiving universal applause; a partial success in his view was a failure. Twain’s delight in outrageousness was oddly joined to a highly sensitive nature, and the combination caused him grief many times. He had a tendency to shoot from the hip, and then worry if he had wounded anyone. A week after the dinner he wrote obsequious letters apologizing for his “offense” to Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes: “I am only heedlessly a savage, not premeditatedly.” 67 Twain and Howells both exaggerated the “mistake,” perhaps as a way of coping with the incident by blowing it out of proportion. A sinner can perhaps take some comfort in sin that is spectacular, record-setting, unforgettable. Mark Twain—a doctor of humor-healing himself—also demonstrated his ability to deal with a sting by giving a witty turn to its expression. His “disgrace,” he wrote Howells, added itself to his “list of permanencies—a list of humiliations that . . . keep on persecuting me regardless of my repentancies.” 68 “Ah, well,” he wrote a few days later, “I am a great & sublime fool. But then I am God’s fool, & all His works must be contemplated with respect.” 69 Mark Twain’s responses to the Whittier dinner were more complicated than Howells’, and they vacillated over time. Immediately after the event he wrote: “I must have been insane when I wrote that speech.” 70 But not long afterward, according to Howells, Twain said: “But I don’t admit that it was a mistake.” 71 In February 1878, he wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks that “I am sincerely sorry if it in any wise hurt those great poets’ feelings—I never wanted to do that. But nobody has ever convinced me that that speech was not a good one—for me; above my average, considerably.” 72 After reading a newspaper transcript of the speech many years later, Twain dictated that If it isn’t innocently and ridiculously funny, I am no judge. . . . I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot, it hasn’t a single defect in it from the first word to the last. It is just as good as good can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn’t a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere. 73

A few days later he reversed course: I have examined that speech a couple of times since, and have changed my notion about it—changed it entirely. I find it gross, coarse . . . offensive and

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detestable. How do I account for this change of view? I don’t know. I can’t account for it. . . . I expect this latest verdict to remain. 74

Four months later he rereversed: “It did remain—until day before yesterday; then I gave it a final and vigorous reading—aloud—and dropped straight back to my former admiration of it.” 75 Humor can be a risky business. It skirts the edge of indecorum, tastelessness, insult. Whether it goes too far, over the edge, is often determined by its presentation, as the Virginian explained, playing poker in a Wyoming bar. Trampas, using a Western expression that could be jocular and even affectionate, had said to the Virginian, “Your bet, you son-of-a-bitch.” As he pulled out his revolver, the Virginian famously replied, “When you call me that, smile.” 76 In the most perceptive of his shifting comments about the Whittier dinner speech, Twain wondered if the fault was in his delivery, rather than in the idea or the text he had prepared: “Did I lose courage when I saw those great men up there whom I was going to describe in such a strange fashion? If that happened, if I showed doubt, that can account for it, for you can’t be successfully funny if you show that you are afraid of it.” 77 Twain’s comment seems accurate, especially in the light of other lecture performances that he considered failures. While courting Livy in 1868, Twain lectured in her home town of Elmira before the inquisitorial gaze of her parents. His self-professed “lame delivery” resulted in a lecture that he “closed with a fervent apology for my failure.” 78 Mark Twain had, of course, been roasting people since the beginning of his newspaper career. But usually it was from behind the protective cover of print. In a letter from New York to the San Francisco Alta California in 1867, he creates a scene that foreshadows the Whittier birthday speech. Mistaking a “tenth-rate rum-hole” for a place where “savants were in the habit of meeting to commune upon abstruse matters of science and philosophy,” the narrator attempts to identify leading scientists and philosophers: this surely is Ericsson, albeit in another place I might take him for a burglar; and this must be Professor Morse, I think, notwithstanding the sneaking villainy in his eye . . . and Professor Agassiz conveyed his lady to a small bar which I had not before noticed, and called for drinks for the crowd! 79

The strategy here is identical to that of the Whittier speech, but it is harmless enough, appearing as it did in a newspaper in faraway California. Harmless also were earlier occasions when Twain satirized people who were on stage or in the audience, as he did as Governor of the Third House in Carson City, in situations where jokes were expected and the targets were his comrades and close acquaintances.

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The environment as well as the delivery can make or break a humorous presentation. In January 1869, Twain wrote to Livy from Ottawa, Illinois, that he had made another botch of a lecture!—even worse than Elmira, I think. And it was such a pity—for we had a beautiful church entirely full of handsome, well-dressed, intellectual ladies & gentlemen. They say I didn’t botch it, but I think I ought to know. I closed with a fervent apology for my failure, just as I did in Elmira—& the apology was the only thing in the lecture that had any life or feeling in it. It cuts me to the very quick to make a failure. I did feel so ashamed of myself. 80

He later complained to his lecture manager that “I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church.” 81 Twain’s problem in the Hotel Brunswick in 1877 was that the aged poets had a confidence-eroding formidable stature, like potential parents-in-law, and the audience seemed too much like churchgoers. Howells’ extensive comments on the Whittier birthday speech give us yet another insight into Mark Twain’s humor. Howells was something of a humorist himself, especially in his early career, and his keen observations and gentle ironies enliven works—A Modern Instance, Indian Summer, The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes—that are tragicomedies of manners. Yet Howells understood, with admiration and sometimes trepidation, the far-reaching quality of his friend’s humorous instinct. The chapter of My Mark Twain devoted to the Whittier dinner ends with Howells’ recognition that, however unintended, the personality [of the three chief guests] was trifled with, and I could only end by reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. 82

We need to give Howells credit for his perception here, even if he could not go the distance himself. Early in the spring following the Whittier dinner, the Clemens family departed on a lengthy trip to Europe. That journey was probably no coincidence, as is suggested by Twain’s characterization of his father, John Marshall Clemens, written eight years earlier: “He was a proud man . . . and not a person likely to abide among the scenes of his vanished grandeur and be the target for public commiseration.” 83 Shortly after arriving in Germany, Twain described himself as having “a deep, grateful, unutterable sense of being ‘out of it all.’” 84 Reenergized, with his confidence restored, his pen loosened, and

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with new material laid out in front of him like a vista of the Alps, Mark Twain was already working on his next book. TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL “To walk with you and talk with you for weeks together— why, it’s my dream of luxury.” Joe Twichell to Mark Twain 85

Back in October 1868, Mark Twain had visited Hartford, Connecticut, where his publisher for The Innocents Abroad was located, and where his publisher’s wife introduced him to the Reverend Joseph H. Twichell, pastor of the newly constructed Asylum Hill Congregational Church. Many well-todo Hartford businessmen and their families attended the Asylum Hill Church, which Twain had dubbed the “Church of the Holy Speculators” only moments before meeting its pastor. 86 He wrote to Livy, who by then had agreed to be a “sister” but not a fiancée, that “I could hardly find words strong enough to tell you how much I do think of that man.” 87 Four months later, his courtship with Livy had warmed to fiancée status, and Joe Twichell had become a friend and a confidant in the romance. Writing again to Livy, Twain—on his very best fiancé behavior—reported that “I wrote Twichell a short note yesterday to thank him for his kind efforts in forwarding our affairs. I told him we meant to lead a useful, unostentatious & earnest religious life, & that I should unite with the church as soon as I was settled.” 88 Twichell helped officiate at the marriage a year later, and eventually the Clemenses settled into an active and conspicuous life in Hartford, where Twain united with the pastor but not with the church. Two-and-a-half years younger than Twain, Twichell had graduated from Yale, where, though not a top scholar, he won prizes in English composition and public speaking, rowed on the crew, and was “the most admired and best beloved man of the class of ‘59.’” 89 Son of a deacon and imbued with a desire for public service, Twichell went on to study for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary. In April 1861, two weeks after the shelling of Fort Sumter, he broke off his religious studies and joined the Union army as a chaplain in the 21st New York Infantry. Twichell’s regiment, largely Catholic, was recruited from the streets of New York City, and in a few cases from Blackwell’s Island prison. As the men hardened into a combat unit, their young Protestant chaplain left doctrinal niceties behind as he—teamed with a Catholic priest who became a close friend—assisted the wounded and buried the dead at Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Mustered out after three years service, Twichell completed his studies at Andover Theological Seminary and, in December 1865, became the first pastor of the new Asylum Hill Congregational Church, a position he held

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with distinction for 47 years. The church and its parsonage were located on the west side of Hartford, close to where the Clemenses settled in 1874. As neighbors, Twichell and Mark Twain took walks together for exercise and comradeship, trading stories and debating ideas. Following in the liberal tradition of Horace Bushnell, Twichell believed in the power of rational thought and scientific inquiry, and was more concerned with morality than theology. Good-natured and gregarious, not the least of his virtues was a hearty appreciation of humor, and of Mark Twain. A decade after their first meeting, Twain told Twichell that “you and [I] share a companionship which to me stands first after Livy’s.” 90 Often the two men hiked to the wooden tower on top of Talcott Mountain, eight miles to the northwest, sometimes even farther. 91 One day they decided to walk from Hartford to Boston, a distance of 110 miles. They made 28 miles the first day, stopping for the night at Ashford, Connecticut, when Twain was too lame to continue on. His physical complaints, however, were soon forgotten in his delight when Twichell engaged a local hostler in conversation at the inn, and the latter exploded into a speech “full of enthusiastic horse statistics; poured out with the most fluent facility, as from an inexhaustible crater, and all ablaze from beginning to end with crimson lava jets of desolating and utterly unconscious profanity!” When the dumbfounded Twichell managed to convey that he was a minister of the gospel, Twain’s delight doubled as the hostler, eager to please such a distinguished listener, pitched into a narration about the state of church affairs in Ashford that was “torch-lighted with indelicacies from end to end, which flickered lambent through a misty red hell of profanity rent and torn at four-foot intervals all down the line by sky-cleaving rocket explosions of gorgeous blaspheny!” As the two friends turned in for the night, Twichell had the last word: “There is one comfort, anyway—such as it is: You can’t print it, Mark.” 92 That was true enough, but when they took their next long expedition together, to Bermuda in 1877, Twain printed their adventures in his accurately titled “Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion,” writing Twichell in as “the Reverend” and describing him in the first paragraph as “one of the best of men, although a clergyman.” 93 Twichell got the last word once again, in an exchange that captures the playful banter between the two friends, and illustrates Twain’s willingness to turn a joke on himself: “I said [being in Bermuda] was like being in heaven. The Reverend rebukingly and rather pointedly advised me to make the most of it, then.” 94 One year after the Bermuda trip, and five months after the Whittier dinner, the Clemenses left for a 17-month sojourn to Europe. They disembarked at Hamburg in May 1878, traveled south for an 11-week stay at Heidelberg, continued through southwestern Germany to Switzerland, toured Italy for two months, wintered in Munich, spent the spring and early summer of 1879 in Paris, and visited Belgium, Holland, and England before returning home in

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the fall. The family entourage included Twain, Livy, daughters Susy (age 6) and Clara (4), Livy’s friend Clara Spaulding, German-speaking nursemaid Rosina Hay, and butler George Griffin. Twain invited Twichell to join the group en route for what would be the longest and most celebrated of their semi-pedestrian expeditions. His expenses paid by Mark Twain, Twichell met the Clemenses at Baden-Baden in southwest Germany on 2 August. Sometimes the entire party traveled south together during the next five weeks, but much of the time the two men took trips by themselves in the Black Forest, along the Neckar River, and in the Swiss Alps, arriving on 7 September in Geneva, where Twichell departed for home. Mark Twain went to Europe not only to let the Whittier embarrassment fade and to cut down on household expenses, but to escape the social, business, and professional distractions that dogged his success. Interested in everything, rarely able to say no to anything, and involved with various literary projects as well as investments, inventions, and the minutia of householding and subscription publishing, Twain had written to his mother before the trip that he had a badgered, harassed feeling, a good deal of my time, . . . the consequence is, I cannot write a book at home. This cuts my income down. Therefore, I have about made up my mind to take my tribe & fly to some little corner of Europe & budge no more until I shall have completed one of the half dozen books that lie begun, up stairs. 95

Twain had already contracted for another travel book, and he planned a working vacation. The work started immediately, in Heidelberg, before he had done much vacationing or collected much material, and it did not go well at first. Twain feared he had lost his “faculty of writing sketches of travel,” but six months later, galvanized by the reunion with Twichell and the discovery of his misplaced Swiss notebook, he settled in for the winter in Munich and “went solidly to work—tore up a great part of the MS written in Heidelberg,—wrote and tore up,—continued to write and tear up,—and at last, reward of patient and noble persistence, my pen got the old swing again!” 96 The resulting book, A Tramp Abroad, turned out to be focused almost entirely on the comparatively brief time—5 weeks out of a 73-week trip—that Twain and Twichell were together in Germany and Switzerland. In his inscription in the copy he gave to his tramping companion, who appears in the book as “Harris,” Twain conveyed his affection— “we had a mighty good time”—and his methodology: “You’ll find reminders of things, all along, that happened to us, and of others that didn’t happen; but you’ll remember the spot where they were invented.” 97 A Tramp Abroad is not as fresh and exuberant as Innocents Abroad, and its subject is not as compelling as Roughing It, but the work resembles the

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other travel books with its natural descriptions, curious facts, satiric reflections, cultural juxtapositions, somewhat relevant quotations from other travel books and histories, and often irrelevant yarns—a literary variety show loosely strung together by the chronology and geography of a semi-autobiographical journey. Some incidents that happened at other times in Twain’s life are transported into the narrative, others are made up by the author, and still other others are related as part of wayfaring conversations. For Twain and Twichell, walking and talking went together—a conjunction that is raised to the status of literary theory in chapter 23: The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk. It makes no matter whether one talks wisdom or nonsense. . . . And what a motley variety of subjects a couple of people will casually rake over in the course of a day’s tramp! There being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order, and so a body is not likely to keep pegging away at a single topic until it grows tiresome. We discussed everything we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes, that morning [while walking to Oppenau], and then branched out into the glad, free, boundless realm of the things we were not certain about. 98

This theory opens the door to anything that comes to mind and is, of course, a rationale for the light-handed literary organization Mark Twain favored. It also reflects the realities of nineteenth-century travel, when people walked for exercise and took long trips by stagecoach, steamboat, and rail. Talking and tale telling were part of the journey. As he tried to work his expeditions with Twichell into a book, in Munich and then in Paris, Twain found himself confronted with a number of difficulties. The trip with Twichell was relatively short, and although rich in scenery, it turned out to be thin in human interest. For the most part, Twain respected the sturdy German and Swiss burghers he encountered, and their customs provided middling topics for satire. One can get only so much humor from a farmer’s manure pile, and Twain stretches the limits when he outlines at length a Black Forest novel in which the impoverished hero, rejected by the heroine’s father, redeems himself and wins the girl when, digging for roots, he strikes “a manure mine!—a Golconda, a limitless Bonanza, of solid manure!” 99 Some of the joshing between the two friends that was undoubtedly colorful on site did not transfer well to the page. When a young girl in front of them stumbles and then catches herself on a steep mountain trail, almost falling into the surging river far below, Harris expresses his relief and gratitude that the child was not killed. The narrator, eager for literary material,

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and able to switch gears from poignant to comic faster than either Harris or the reader, silently rebukes his companion: Apparently he did not once reflect upon the valuable details which would have fallen like a windfall to me: fishing the child out,—witnessing the surprise of the family and the stir the thing would have made among the peasants,—then a Swiss funeral,—then the roadside monument, to be paid for by us and have our names mentioned in it. And we should have gone into Baedeker and been immortal. 100

Another difficulty was that Mark Twain did not have a supply of already published articles to rework, as he had for Innocents Abroad and the final quarter of Roughing It. Trapped by the precedent he had set for his humorous travel books and the bulky demands of subscription publishing, he found himself “yoked down to the grinding out” 101 of another 600-page volume—a marathon task for a literary athlete who was essentially a sprinter. As a result, Twain fell back on Twichell’s war stories, guidebooks which he both satirized and quoted straightforwardly, and recycled strategies and characters from Innocents Abroad (the student from New Bloomfield, the grandson, and Cholley Adams in A Tramp Abroad resemble Blucher and the “Interrogation Point” in Innocents Abroad). He reprises his fashion burlesques from the San Francisco Golden Era (“Miss J. W. wore a charming robe polonais of scarlet ruche a la vieille”) 102 with the quaint and comely costume of the Swiss peasants. This consists of a simple gros de laine, trimmed with ashes of roses, with overskirt of sacre bleu ventre saint gris, cut bias on the off side, with facings of petit polonaise and narrow insertions of pâté de fois gras backstitched to the mise en scene in the form of a jeu d’esprit. 103

Sometimes the narrator’s mishaps in A Tramp Abroad are reminiscent of the wild exaggerations of Twain’s Territorial Enterprise days: “I yawned, in a rather ample way, and my upper teeth got hitched on a nail over the door.” 104 At the climax of the anticlimactic French duel—harmless poppistols at 35 yards—one of the unscathed duelists fainted on top of the narrator. Doctors then repaired the broken rib that penetrated the narrator’s lung, reassembled his internal organs, and “set my left arm in two places, pulled my right hip into its socket again, and re-elevated my nose.” 105 Perhaps the clearest evidence of strain is the following pun, which the narrator makes when he visits a spa near Interlaken, and encounters invalids who live out their last days on grapes and whey. One of them explains that “there was no way for him to live but by whey; never drank anything, now, but whey, and dearly, dearly loved whey, he didn’t know whey he did, but he did. After making this pun he died,—that is the whey it served him.” 106 A decade

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earlier, when Twain agreed to create a humorous column for the Galaxy, he allowed that sometimes the humor might be feeble, “but no circumstances, however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient excuse for the admission of . . . the Pun.” 107 Presumably these miscellaneous materials are held together by a threepart organizational framework: “to make the tour of Europe on foot . . . to become a German scholar . . . to study Art, & learn to paint” 108 —a framework that is then exploded by the conspicuous lack of success of all three schemes. The italicized on foot of the first scheme indicates a repetition of the joke involved in the “pedestrian tour” from Hartford to Boston four years earlier. About a third of the way on the second day of that trip, they gave up walking. Twain telegraphed that “we have made thirty-five miles in less than five days. This demonstrates the thing can be done. Shall now finish by rail.” 109 This simple joke is endlessly elaborated in A Tramp Abroad, for the pedestrian part of the European tour is supplemented by travel on canal boat, river raft, ox-cart, buggy, carriage, stagecoach, and train, as well as a slowmoving glacier and the telescope with which they virtually ascend Mont Blanc. Humor of this sort has not much edge to begin with, and is quickly blunted by repetition. The other two parts of book’s framework—learning German and studying art—are mentioned only fitfully. All three collapse into what is the closest thing to a unifying structure—the narrator’s, and sometimes Harris’s, bumbling ineptness and naïve ignorance. Their inabilities provided some bright moments. When the two friends traveled to Mannheim to see King Lear played in German, they “never understood anything but the thunder and lightning.” 110 When they wish to discuss private matters during a train ride, Harris urges the narrator to “speak in German,” 111 so the English-fluent Germans in their compartment would not be able to understand him. Having read in his Baedeker that glaciers are always moving, the narrator, in his simpleton pose, resolves to ride the Gorner Glacier down to the town of Zermatt. Following an afternoon and night in which no motion has been discernable, he decides the glacier has run aground, and dispatches a crew of men to the sides to try to spar it off with logs. During this operation, his companion—whose disguise as “Mr. Harris” only partially conceals Twichell’s clerical collar—concludes the uncooperative ice flow must be “a Catholic glacier. You can tell by the look of it.” 112 Other mistakes, such as repeatedly missing the Alpine sunrise from the summit of the Rigi-Kulm and sleeping through the scenery at the Brünig Pass, are not as humorous, and the simpleton pose itself is often at odds with sharply satirical remarks: “We have the notion in our country that Italians never do heavy work at all, but confine themselves to the lighter arts, like organ-grinding, operatic singing, and assassination.” When reading the Lord’s Prayer, “the average clergyman . . . races through it as if he thought the quicker he got it in, the sooner it would be answered.” 113 Mark Twain’s

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problem in much of A Tramp Abroad is that he often grinds everything in the mill of the comic, even if it has to be forced. He recognized this difficulty, and confessed to Howells that I have destroyed such lots of MS written for this book! . . . I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you mention, but of course a man can’t write successful satire except he be in a calm judicial good-humor— whereas I hate travel, & I hate hotels, & I hate the opera, & I hate the Old Masters—in truth I don’t ever seem to be in a good enough humor with ANYthing to satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it & curse it, & foam at the mouth,—or take a club & pound it to rags & pulp. 114

Twain asked Howells for advice about what to include, and the humorist removed at least eight completed segments, publishing them later in Life on the Mississippi, where they didn’t fit very well either, and in The Stolen White Elephant, Etc., which, as the Etc. in the title unabashedly proclaims, has no pretensions of unity. Uneven as A Tramp Abroad is as a whole, it does contain some gems, most notably two which bracket the book—the first in chapters two and three, the second in an appendix. These two sections are very different, but both demonstrate Mark Twain’s humor machine perfectly tuned. “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” Toward the end of chapter two, after a conventional description of Heidelberg, with its ruined castle and storied past, the narrator tells of his wanderings in the dense woods along the Neckar River and muses on the legends and fairy tales which have “peopled all that region with gnomes, and dwarfs, and all sorts of mysterious and uncanny creatures.” 115 He then describes an afternoon in which he becomes lost in a forest of pines, whose boughs are so thick that a “deep and mellow twilight reigned.” It is a suggestive twilight, as it might be in a tale by Hawthorne or Poe, and the narrator’s reverie is interrupted by the hoarse croak of a raven, “a croak with a distinctly insulting expression about it.” 116 The raven calls in reinforcements and the birds sit in a tree, squawking remarks that the narrator, though he cannot understand them explicitly, interprets as humiliating and insulting. Retreating, he observes that animals talk to one another, though very few people can understand them. That reminds him of the one person he has known who was able to interpret the language of beasts and birds, and almost imperceptibly the scene has shifted to the mountains of California. For an author who is capable of breezily dropping unrelated passages into his narratives, this introduction to a story told by Jim Gillis in the winter of 1864-65 is remarkably nuanced and controlled. Jim was the brother of Steve Gillis, Mark Twain’s close friend, San Francisco roommate, and comrade-in-

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mischief. When Steve’s involvement in a brawl and Twain’s articles criticizing the police made San Francisco a bit warm for the two friends, they left the city and Twain headed for the hills of Jackass Gulch in Tuolumne County, where Jim and Billy Gillis, another brother, were placer and pocket miners. Twain spent three months there and in neighboring Angel’s Camp in Calaveras County, where he did a little unsuccessful mining and a lot of yarn spinning, and heard a tale about a frog filled with buckshot. At some point, he also heard Jim Gillis tell about a blue jay who discovered a knothole in the plank roof of an empty cabin, which it then tried to fill with acorns. Jim Gillis built his extravagant tales around his mild-mannered partner, Dick Stoker, and Stoker becomes Jim Baker in Twain’s retelling of the blue jay story in A Tramp Abroad. Described by the narrator as a “middle-aged simple-hearted miner,” 117 Jim Baker lived alone in the mountains where his only neighbors were birds and mammals. He had studied these creatures for many years, and had come to understand their ways of communication. Of them all, he believed, the blue jay was the most articulate. At this point the outside narrator disappears, and the story, for the rest of chapter two and all of chapter three, is turned over to Jim Baker, who takes his place in Twain’s expanding cast of remarkable character narrators: Simon Wheeler of the frog story, the tenderfoot in the early chapters of Roughing It, Jim Blaine and Dick Baker (another incarnation of Dick Stoker) in Roughing It, the cub pilot in “Old Times,” Aunt Rachel in “A True Story.” Here is how Jim Baker begins his tale: “There’s more to a blue-jay than any other creature. He has got more moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creatures; and mind you, whatever a blue-jay feels, he can put into language. And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book-talk—and bristling with metaphor, too—just bristling! And as for command of language—why you never see a blue-jay get stuck for a word. No man ever did. They just boil out of him! And another thing: I’ve noticed a good deal, and there’s no bird, or cow, or anything that uses as good grammar as a blue-jay. You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does—but you let a cat get excited, once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw.” 118

Jim Baker may not be as grammatical as his blue jays, but his loquacious vernacular and surprising metaphors make him just as articulate as the jays, and his earnest and amiable speech is as expressive of his character as the raucous jay talk is of theirs. The tale Baker tells is built on a comparison— blue jays are just like people—which is, of course, a contrast to ordinary expectations. The jay on the roof of the cabin works up a sweat trying to fill up the hole that opens to the entire cabin, can’t figure out what the problem is, and takes to swearing that makes the profanity in the mines, according to

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Jim Baker, “only just the rudiments.” 119 The noise attracts the attention of several other jays: “They all discussed it, and got off as many leather-headed opinions about it as an average crowd of humans could have done. They called in more jays; then more and more, till pretty soon this whole region ‘peared to have a blue flush about it. There must have been five thousand of them; and such another jawing and disputing and ripping and cussing, you never heard.” 120

Finally one of the elder jays happens to look in the partially open door and sees the acorns scattered on the floor. “He flopped his wings and raised a whoop. ‘Come here!’ he says, ‘Come here, everybody; hang’d if this fool hasn’t been trying to fill up a house with acorns!’ They all came a-swooping down like a blue cloud, and as each fellow lit on the door and took a glance, the whole absurdity of the contract that that first jay had tackled hit him home and he fell over backwards suffocating with laughter.” 121

Only a visiting owl doesn’t see the joke. Twain does manipulate ornithology slightly, for Baker’s jay is the Eastern blue jay of the Mississippi Valley and New England forests, not found west of the Rockies. 122 The California scrub jay, a curious exception to both jay family behavior and California character in general, is shy. But Twain’s manipulation and his exaggeration work well here, since they are built into a narrative that reveals, through dialogue, the nature of both man and bird; and since they have one foot in reality, as anyone knows who has watched a gang of garrulous blue jays commandeer a bird feeder. Even the solemn owl who doesn’t get it seems in character, at least from a human point of view. “The Awful German Language” The Jim Baker yarn, deservingly, has been much anthologized. Appendix D also has a life of its own outside A Tramp Abroad, and is frequently copied for classes by teachers of elementary German. Entitled “The Awful German Language,” it records Mark Twain’s struggles with learning German and demonstrates the many possibilities of interlingual humor. Twain’s first recorded brush with foreign languages came in June 1855, when at age 19 he began a lifelong habit of keeping notebooks. The first entry in the first notebook, apparently copied from an exercise book, is “Lesson 1. Sur la langue Francaise.” 123 Other lessons follow, and later notebooks contain French words and phrases which suggest that steamboat trips to New Orleans and layovers in that multilingual city provided the cub pilot with a growing knowledge of French. Notebook 6, kept in the spring of 1866, contains a “Kanaka [i.e., Hawaiian] Lexicon.” 124 One year later, Twain reported dili-

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gently “rubbing up my rusty French” 125 in preparation for the Quaker City trip, though most of the humor related to language in The Innocents Abroad has to do with the narrator’s and his fellow excursionists’ inabilities and pretensions. Twain’s first extended literary use of a foreign language for humor came in 1873, after he read a French translation of his jumping frog story in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Seeing rich comic possibilities as well as an opportunity to republish his famous story, he replied with a three-part article: “The ‘Jumping Frog.’ In English. Then in French. Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More.” 126 This strategy provided a double contrast. First, the French translator struggled to find equivalents for Jim Smiley’s untamed vernacular in both idiom and structure: “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” “Eh bien! je ne vois pas que cette grenouille ait rien de mieux qu’aucune grenouille.”

Then Twain’s overly literal retranslation bangs against both the French version and the original tale: “Eh bien! I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each frog.”

With an ear exquisitely attuned to the smallest nuances of dialect, Mark Twain seems to have heard the superimposition of one language on another as a roar of contrast. Then there was German, a cousin to English that offers surprising family similarities (komm hier is virtually identical in sound to come here) as well as surprising differences (the German equivalent of for the birds is für die Katze). Having planned to spend most of their European trip of 1878-79 in Germany and Switzerland, the entire Clemens family began the study of German in the early spring of 1878, continued it on board the S/S Holsatia, and attempted to put it into practice as soon as they settled in Heidelberg in May. Nursemaid Rosa was instructed to speak to the children only in German, and the adults struggled with their lessons, as Twain reported to Susan Crane: Clara Spaulding is working herself to death with her German—never loses an instant while she is awake—or asleep, either, for that matter—dreams of enormous serpents, who poke their heads up under her arms & glare upon her with red-hot eyes, & inquire about the Genitive Case and the declensions of the Definite Article. Livy is bully-ragging herself about as hard; [she] pesters over her grammar & her Reader & her Dictionary all day. 127

All this effort and its unpredictable results when tried on the natives—one of whom put up his hands and exclaimed “Gott in Himmel!” when Twain

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addressed him in German 128 —were too much for the humorist to resist, and the family’s linguistic exertions and mishaps are scattered throughout Mark Twain’s letters and notebooks for the period, as well as A Tramp Abroad. Originally he had planned to devote three or four chapters to the German language and German newspapers, but Twain decided that “a plain statement was rather the better satire” and he ultimately devoted two appendices to these topics. 129 What impressed him most forcefully were the ways in which German, with its strong inflections, differed from English, which has lost most of its declensional markers over the centuries and become a word-order language. Realizing these differences were so striking that they needed little exaggeration, he presented, in “The Awful German Language,” a relatively straightforward and accurate introduction to German grammar, couched in colorful examples, witty asides, and the fun and frustration of learning a new subject. Twain begins with the multitude of German case endings: For instance, my book inquires . . . “Where is the bird?” Now the answer to this question,—according to the book,—is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself “Regen, (rain,) is masculine—or maybe it is feminine—or possibly neuter. . . . Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen. . . . I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well—then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion—Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something—that is, resting, (which is one of the German grammar’s ideas of doing something,) and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively,—it is falling,—to interfere with the bird, likely,—and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen.” 130

Having apparently puzzled out the correct case ending, Twain is then told by his teacher that the preposition wegen (“on account of”) trumps the usual case rules and throws Regen into the genitive. Like a cub pilot misled by the shifting sands of the Mississippi, the student of German learns that when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, “Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions.” He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it.

Mark Twain goes on to tackle verb placement (“in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page”), separable verbs (“splitting a

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verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it”), arbitrary gender (“a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female,—Tom-cats included”), the 24 adjectival endings (“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say . . . that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective”), the German habit of compounding words (“Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen”), and unnecessary complications: If one is casually referring to a house, Haus, or a horse, Pferd, or a dog, Hund, he spells these words as I have indicated; but if he is referring to them in the Dative case, he sticks on a foolish and unnecessary e and spells them Hause, Pferde, Hunde. So, as an added e often signifies the plural, as the s does with us, the new student is likely to go on for a month making twins out of a Dative dog before he discovers his mistake; and on the other hand, many a new student who could ill afford loss, has bought and paid for two dogs and only got one of them, because he ignorantly bought that dog in the Dative singular when he really supposed he was talking plural.

Twain does praise some aspects of the German language, especially its precision, consistent spelling, and its evocative words dealing with nature, affection, peace, and pathos, whose sounds in song “can make a stranger to the language cry.” But he concludes by suggesting German be included among the dead languages, “for only the dead have time to learn it.” Mark Twain never fully mastered German, but he continued to study, read, translate, and write the language; and he continued to collect specimens of noun elephantiasis. In 1888 he published “Meisterschaft: In Three Acts,” a play mixing English and German created for the German study group that met at his house. The Clemenses revisited Germany from October 1891 to September 1892, and again in the summer of 1893. Four years later they spent 18 months in Switzerland and Austria. In 1897, he continued his mock attack with a speech, in German (“Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache”; “The Horrors of the German Language”) given to the Vienna Press Club. Bits of German appear in his later works, notably A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where Hank Morgan utters Teutonic incantations as part of his spectacular restoration of the well in the Valley of Holiness: (“MEKKAMUSELMANNENMASSENMENCHENMOERDERMOHRENMUTTERMARMORMONUMENTENMACHER!”), and where the author makes his most memorable comment about German word order: “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.” 131 In 1899 he bagged the biggest catch for his museum of long words, a 95-letter megalosaur he found in a German telegram: “If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone,” he said in a speech, “I should

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sleep beneath it in peace.” 132 Mark Twain’s last and most poignant use of German was the epigraph he composed for his wife’s tombstone in 1904. Livy still sleeps under a sentence that brings together a lifetime of affection and the family’s two-decade struggle as students of German: “Gott sei dir gnädig, O meine Wonne!” (God be gracious to you, O my treasure!). Mark Twain’s best work usually involved either the telling of a tale, as in “Baker’s Blue-jay Yarn,” often in the richly idiosyncratic vernacular of a character narrator; or the use of a subject which the author knew personally and thoroughly, and with which he was fully engaged—subjects such as piloting a steamboat, mining, the Mississippi Valley, or learning German. Both contained opportunities for humor arising from the situation or topic, rather than having it forced upon them. And when they overlapped—a good yarn together with compelling matter, as in Huckleberry Finn—Twain reached his greatest brilliance. The problem with much of A Tramp Abroad is that the desire to produce a book preceded and outran the experiential basis for the book. In many chapters, Twain had neither a tale to tell nor a subject matter to which he was committed. Thus when dealing with unfamiliar topics, such as scaling mountains, he reverts to the facile journalism of his Western years—working up topics rapidly, quoting information from sources, and dressing it up with comic exaggerations and waggish satire. He had a good time tramping with Twichell, but in much of the book that resulted, as in the two later travel books—Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Following the Equator (1897)—Mark Twain was traveling on his reputation. A TURN TO HISTORY: THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER “None of us is always in the comedy spirit.” Mark Twain, “About Play-Acting” 133

Arriving back in America in the fall of 1879, Mark Twain set about finishing A Tramp Abroad, which he now called “this infernal book.” 134 In December he took time out to lay to rest the ghost of his Whittier birthday performance of two years earlier by delivering a tame, even obsequious tribute to Oliver Wendell Holmes at an Atlantic Monthly breakfast in honor of Holmes’s 70th birthday. Twain used the occasion to explain how he had unintentionally borrowed the phrasing of a Holmes book dedication for his own dedication of The Innocents Abroad to his mother. Returning to the infernal book, Twain wrote an additional 600 manuscript pages, tore up half of that, dumped the rest with his publisher in take-it-or-leave-it desperation, and reproached himself for his decision to “make a contract before writing the book.” With the task finally completed, he wrote to Howells of “the unutterable joy of getting that Old Man of the Sea off my back, where he has been roosting more than a year & a half.”

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Part of that joy involved returning to a project Mark Twain had begun before the European trip—a project that provided relief from forced humor and pressing deadlines. Based on his historical reading and his interest in Elizabethan language, The Prince and the Pauper was described by Twain as “a wide departure from my accustomed line,” and he initially considered “smuggling it into publicity with my name suppressed.” 135 He ultimately decided to issue it as a work by Mark Twain, apparently as a way to demonstrate the increasing range that pseudonym encompassed, a strategy enthusiastically endorsed by Howells: I think the book will be a great success unless some marauding ass, who does not snuff his wonted pasturage there should prevail on all the other asses to turn up their noses in pure ignorance. It is such a book as I would expect from you, knowing what a bottom of fury there is to your fun; but the public at large ought to be led to expect it, and must be. 136

Howells proceeded to do his part in leading the public to an expanded sense of Twain’s “accustomed line” with a review of The Prince and the Pauper in the New York Tribune, aimed at “those who have found nothing but drollery in Mark Twain’s books, and have not perceived the artistic sense and the strain of deep earnestness underlying his humor.” 137 One of the ironies of Twain’s career was that his earnest side was developing in the decade of the 1870s at the same time that his skill as a comic virtuoso was becoming widely celebrated. In the spring of 1870, Twain agreed to conduct a humorous department for the New York Galaxy magazine, which advertised on the cover that “MARK TWAIN, the Great Humorist, writes for The Galaxy every Month.” In his introductory contribution, he semi-seriously stipulated that I would not conduct an exclusively and professedly humorous department for any one. I would always prefer to have the privilege of printing a serious and sensible remark, in case one occurred to me, without the reader’s feeling obliged to consider himself outraged. We cannot keep the same mood day after day. . . . I shall never go straining after jokes when in a cheerless mood, so long as the unhackneyed subject of international law is open to me. I will leave all that straining to people who edit professedly and inexorably “humorous” departments and publications. 138

Mark Twain’s 106 sketches for the Galaxy exhibit a wide variety of subjects and moods. Some are thoughtful and serious attacks on pretension, hypocrisy, and corruption, but even these tend to be leavened by caustic comedy and exuberant damnation. One article excoriates a certain Rev. Mr. Sabine for refusing to conduct a funeral ceremony for George Holland, simply because he was a play-actor. The honored and honorable old actor, Twain

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concludes, was “figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling, slimy, sanctimonious, self-righteous reptile!” 139 In 1875, worried that an essay by “Mark Twain” would not be fully comprehended, Twain published a meditation on government anonymously. His satire in “The Curious Republic of Gondour” is a serious attack on the political dangers of ignorance and wealth, yet it is playfully presented in the exaggerated contrast between Gilded Age America and the imaginary utopia of Gondour. In the latter, the suffrage has just been reformed: Every citizen, howsoever poor or ignorant, possessed one vote, so universal suffrage still reigned; but if a man possessed a good common-school education and no money, he had two votes; a high–school education gave him four; if he had property likewise, to the value of three thousand sacos, he wielded one more vote; for every fifty thousand sacos a man added to his property, he was entitled to another vote; a university education entitled a man to nine votes, even though he owned no property. Therefore . . . educated men became a wholesome check upon wealthy men. . . . The head of the government [was] the Grand Caliph. . . . This great office had twice been ably filled by women. 140

A key to understanding Mark Twain is that he can be serious, even excoriating, at the same time he is humorous, even ebullient. That seems to be partly what Joe Twichell meant when he tried to explain his friend to his wife in a letter from Switzerland in 1878: “A strange Mark he is, full of contradictions.” 141 For those who interpret Twain’s career as an evolution from humorist to serious writer, and from optimist to pessimist, The Prince and the Pauper can be seen as a landmark along the way—his first serious book. That notion, however, falls into the trap of either/or, as if the author was either gay or grave, comic or tragic, humorous or serious. Mark Twain spent a lifetime being both. In The Prince and the Pauper, published in 1881, the humorist is presumably on vacation, but not quite. There are only a few jokes in this historical costume drama, and Twain is genuinely outraged by cruel laws and the plight of peasants and slum dwellers in sixteenth-century England. Certainly the jester is on vacation here, but not the serio-comic writer, for the book’s architecture shows the mind of the humorist at work. Perhaps Twain’s most carefully plotted book, the tale is structured by the contrast announced in the title, a contrast sharpened by exaggeration on both ends. The Prince is not any old prince, but the Prince of Wales, and on the death of Henry VIII, he becomes the chief personage in the land, Edward VII, King of England. The Pauper, Tom Canty, is not only poor, but at the very bottom of a rigidly tiered society. He lives in the filth of Offal Court with two slatternly sisters, harassed, starved, and beaten by a drunken father and a witchy grandmother. Following the introduction of the identically featured boys, and their acci-

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dental exchange of positions in chapter 3, the contrast is multiplied: each boy is completely out of whack with his new environment. Most of the book consists of alternating scenes with Tom Canty, in satin and ermine, awkwardly trying to pass as royalty; and the little prince/king, now clothed in rags, disastrously attempting to maintain his sovereignty in the slums. These disparities are variously poignant, satiric, and humorous. On waking after his first night in the palace, Tom is dressed by courtiers: a shirt was taken up by the Chief Equerry in Waiting, who passed it to the First Lord of the Buckhounds, who passed it to the Second Gentleman of the Bedchamber, who passed it to the Head Ranger of Windsor Forest, who passed it to the Third Groom of the Stole, who passed it to the Chancellor Royal of the Duchy of Lancaster, who passed it to the Master of the Wardrobe, who passed it to Norroy King-at-Arms, who passed it to the Constable of the Tower, who passed it to the Chief Steward of the Household, who passed it to the Hereditary Grand Diaperer, who passed it to the Lord High Admiral of England, who passed it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who passed it to the First Lord of the Bedchamber, who took what was left of it and put it on Tom. 142

At his first royal dinner, Tom eats with his fingers and drinks the rose water in his finger bowl (“it hath a pretty flavor,” he observes, “but it wanteth strength”), 143 causing the Court to conclude he has some sort of temporary madness. Similarly, down in the streets, the crowd that Edward, now king, falls in with believe that he is demented, and they taunt and harass the haughty ragamuffin. He is rescued by Miles Hendon, a strong-armed soldier of fortune who admires the boy’s pluck in facing his tormentors. Hendon also thinks the youngster is deranged, but decides to indulge what he hopes is a temporary condition. Taking the young king to his shabby one-bed apartment, Hendon waits on the youngster, assists him in washing and dressing, and has to sleep on the floor. As a reward for his services, Edward knights his protector and grants him the privilege to “sit in the presence of the majesty of England!” 144 Hendon recognizes the humor of this “merry contrast,” as does the reader, even though we know, as Hendon does not, that the disparity between Edward’s circumstances and his behavior is created by the accidental switching of the boys, not by his seemingly delusional regal conduct. This disparity comes to a serio-humorous climax at the nadir of their adventures, in a scene that demonstrates Twain’s ability to have it both ways. Miles Hendon and the boy king journey to Hendon’s ancestral halls, where they are arrested and jailed by a treacherous, inheritance-stealing younger brother. Miles is sentenced to sit in the stocks and when Edward tries to intervene, he is seized and ordered to be whipped. Miles, who loves the boy in spite of what seem to be his suicidal aristocratic delusions, silences Edward and volunteers to take his lashing. Stunned by the brutal beating his magnanimous friend endures, the little king steals to his side after it is over,

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picks up the scourge, touches Hendon’s bleeding shoulders, and whispers “Edward of England dubs thee earl!” Hendon “was touched. The water welled to his eyes, yet at the same time the grisly humor of the situation and circumstances so undermined his gravity that it was all he could do to keep some sign of his inward mirth from showing outside.” 145 Miles Hendon, like Jim Gillis, is a true humorist, with an eye for the sharp contrasts that cut many ways simultaneously. As he sits in jail prior to being placed in the stocks, Hendon muses over the reversal of his expectations of homecoming. The promise and the reality are so different that he can’t decide “whether it was most tragic or most grotesque. He felt much as a man might who had danced blithely out to enjoy a rainbow, and got struck by lightning.” 146 Perhaps it is no accident that Mark Twain assigned himself the role of Miles Hendon in selections from The Prince and the Pauper that the Clemens family performed for their Hartford friends. 147 Twain spoke Miles’s lines on the homemade stage just as Hendon had spoken for his creator in the novel. Some of Mark Twain’s conservative acquaintances and critics welcomed The Prince and the Pauper as “a book which has other and higher merits than can possibly belong to the most artistic expression of mere humor.” 148 More discerning readers, like Joel Chandler Harris, saw the novel not as a turning away from humor, but as a heightening: “All that is really vital in the wild humor of Mark Twain is here, but it is strengthened and refined. The incongruities are nature’s own, and . . . the tragic and comic parade in grim relationship.” 149 This evolution in what we could call the early middle phase of Twain’s career was not smooth or total or permanent. Never a consistent writer, he dropped easily into broad burlesque and towering exaggerations in shorter works and speeches in this period, and later. Howells complained about a piece of inappropriate Southwestern humor in the manuscript of The Prince and the Pauper—a Sut Lovingood sort of yarn about riding a beestung bull into a prayer meeting. Twain obligingly pulled it out of the novel, but he published it separately in the Hartford Bazar Budget and, sixteen years later, used a version in Joan of Arc. 150 Nonetheless, Mark Twain, a master of contrast from the beginning, was discovering the deeper possibilities of disparity—sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, sometimes both at once— that would characterize his best writing to come. He was growing beyond the work of his Western years, and by 1881, when The Prince and the Pauper was published, he had grown beyond one particular Western friend. That friend was an author and editor from whom the young Twain learned a good deal, a man whose career eclipsed Twain’s at first, and which now serves to define Twain’s by contrast. The next chapter concerns Twain’s relationship to Bret Harte, whom he greatly liked for a decade and then greatly disliked. One of the reasons for that dislike has to do with humor.

Chapter Eight

The Non-Example of Bret Harte

Henry James to Mark Twain: “Do you know Bret Harte?” Mark Twain: “Yes, I know the son of a bitch.” 1

The reader of chapter 30 of A Tramp Abroad may find much of that chapter tedious, since it consists mainly of a long report written by “Harris,” who is sent out as a surrogate traveler for the narrator while the latter takes a week’s rest in Lucerne. That reader, perhaps dozing a little, is suddenly brought up short by the chapter’s conclusion, in which the narrator abruptly denounces both the report and its obliging, mild-mannered reporter: There is another set of [ignorant writers] who are like you: they know a word here and there, of a foreign language, or a few beggarly little three-word phrases, filched from the back of the Dictionary, and these they are continually peppering into their literature, with a pretense of knowing that language,— what excuse can they offer? The foreign words and phrases which they use have their exact equivalents in a nobler language,—English; yet they think they "adorn their page” when they say Strasse for street, and Bahnhof for railway station, and so on,—flaunting these fluttering rags of poverty in the reader’s face and imagining he will be ass enough to take them for the sign of untold riches held in reserve. 2

This gratuitous attack seems to be harshly inappropriate to the genial relationship between the narrator and Harris in A Tramp Abroad, as if Mark Twain had a different, unmentioned target in mind for what appears to be an ad hominem attack. We don’t have to go far to discover the specific target. Writing to Howells from Paris in the spring of 1879, while he was composing A Tramp Abroad, Twain mentions he has just read Bret Harte’s An Heiress of Red Dog, and Other Tales 187

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Chapter 8 through tears of rage over the fellow’s inborn hypocrisy & snobbishness, his apprentice-art, his artificialities, his mannerisms, his pet phrases, (such as the frequent “I regret to say,”)—his laboriously acquired ignorance, & his jejune anxiety to display it. O, my God! He rings in Strasse when street would answer every purpose, and Bahnhof when it carries no sharper significance to the reader than “station” would; he peppers in his seven little French words (you can find them in all his sketches, for he learned them in California 14 years ago),—he begins his German substantives with “lower case” generally, & sometimes mis-spells them—all this with a dictionary at his very elbow—what an illustration of his slovenly laziness it is! 3

It is safe to say that by this time the once close friendship between Twain and Harte, formerly comrades of the pen and admirers of each other’s work, was over. What had happened? I Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart, was nine months younger than Mark Twain. He migrated to California in 1854, and by the time Twain came over the mountains from Nevada a decade later, Harte had already graduated from miscellaneous jobs to journalism and literature. The young writer was companion, adviser, and promoter of the group that made San Francisco the literary capital of the early West—Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Henry George, Charles Warren Stoddard, Ina Coolbrith, Clarence King (for a brief period), and Mark Twain. Harte was himself the star of this group, and as a contributor and staff member of the Golden Era and the Californian, first editor of the Overland Monthly, and author of celebrated mining camp sketches—first published in the Overland and collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches in 1870—he was the first Western American writer to win a national reputation. In the mid and late 1860s, Bret Harte was something of a mentor to Mark Twain. Harte “trained & trimmed & schooled me,” 4 according to Twain, suggested revisions to The Innocents Abroad (“I followed [his] orders strictly”), 5 published four extracts from Innocents in the Overland, and praised its author in print: “He has shrewdness and a certain hearty abhorrence of shams which will make his faculty serviceable to mankind. His talent is so well based that he can write seriously and well when he chooses, which is perhaps the best test of true humor.” 6 Twain returned this generosity in kind, writing to his mother in 1866 that “though I am generally placed at the head of my breed of scribblers in this part of the country, the place properly belongs to Bret Harte.” 7 As early as 1869, however, just as the literary careers of these men started to take off simultaneously, their relationship began to sour. Writing from his new home in Buffalo in November 1870, while Harte was still in San Francisco, Twain stated that “Harte does soar, & I am glad of it, notwith-

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standing he & I are ‘off,’ these many months.” The following January he added, “Bret broke our long friendship a year ago without any cause or provocation that I am aware of.” 8 Harte soared ever higher with the publication of The Luck of Roaring Camp and “Plain Language from Truthful James”—later called “The Heathen Chinee” and copied in newspapers and journals throughout the country. Turning down a professorship at the fledgling University of California, Harte came East in 1871 to accept the Atlantic Monthly’s extraordinary offer of $10,000 for a year’s worth of contributions, and resumed his on-and-off friendship with Mark Twain. By the mid 1870s, Harte’s rocketing career had reached its apogee and begun to fall as precipitously as it had risen. His new work turned out to be largely a rehash of the old, he was lackluster in fulfilling his Atlantic contract, which was not renewed, and his one attempt at a novel, Gabriel Conway, was unsuccessful, as was his tour as a lecturer. Harte also strained his Eastern acquaintances by insulting critics and friends alike, borrowing money freely, pasting a veneer of Western casualness on top of his dandified personality, and playing the role of the celebrated author when there was less and less to celebrate. His welcome worn thin, Harte moved east again in 1878, to countries where his stories, like the Western films that came later, were received as accurate representations of New World exotica west of the hundredth meridian. He went first to Crefield in Prussia, as a commercial agent of the United States (a position that Howells, a relative by marriage to President Hayes, quietly helped to obtain, and one which Twain tried to block), then to Glasgow as consul, and finally, for the last seventeen years of his life, to London, where he wrote many volumes in imitation of the early stories that had such a brief, splashy success. “I grind out the old tunes on the old organ,” he stated in a letter to his wife, “and gather up the coppers.” 9 Harte never returned to America or to his family, and his relationship with Mark Twain was ended. 10 Twain outlived Harte by eight years, and he had the last word, dictating a string of vituperative comments that blistered three days of autobiographical dictation in 1906 and one in 1907: “In the early days I liked Bret Harte, and so did the others, but by and by I got over it; so, also, did the others. . . . Harte was one of the pleasantest men I have ever known. He was also one of the unpleasantest men I have ever known. He was showy, meretricious, insincere.” 11 Mark Twain, in these pages and elsewhere, suggests the falling out was Harte’s fault. In 1869, Twain had asked Hubert Bancroft, the West Coast agent for the American Publishing Co., to send Harte review copies of The Innocents Abroad, and Bancroft failed to do so. According to Twain, “Harte wrote me the most daintily contemptuous and insulting letter you ever read—& what I want to know, is, where I was to blame?” 12 Their relationship was reestablished after Harte moved East in 1871, and eventually the two men decided to collaborate on a play, Ah Sin, based on the heathen

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Chinee character of the poem. Bret Harte lived with the Clemenses while the two writers worked together in November and early December of 1876, but the strain of working and living together proved too much for the slender ties of their warmed-over friendship. After departing the Clemenses’ residence on 9 December, Harte wrote a superficially genial letter to “dear old boy,” and sometime later asked the old boy for another loan, on top of the $750 ($1500, according to Twain) that he had already borrowed. Mark Twain turned him down, telling his sister in February that during the collaboration he was “in a smouldering rage, the whole time, over the precious days & weeks of time which Bret Harte was losing for me.” 13 This refusal prompted another contemptuous and insulting letter from Harte, not at all dainty, accusing Twain both of stinginess and of plotting against Harte’s financial interests with Bliss, their publisher in common. One senses in this letter Harte’s resentment of Twain’s accelerating fame and fortune as well as his palatial home and charming wife, and perhaps a grim realization that his own career was declining while Twain’s was now soaring. Harte’s failed novel, Gabriel Conroy, was issued in 1876, the same year that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appeared. In any case, Twain wrote on the back of the letter that “I have read two pages of this ineffable idiotcy—it is all I can stand of it.” 14 Harte’s next correspondence was to “My dear Mr. Clemens” and their thirteen-year relationship was drawing to a close. 15 Margaret Duckett, in Mark Twain and Bret Harte, shifts much of the blame for their fading friendship to Twain. Undoubtedly there was personal animosity on both sides, and professional jealousy as well. Two talented and ambitious young men of similar age, working similar materials at the same time, might well come into competition and conflict. Each man profoundly resented being seen as the other’s satellite. Yet there is another reason, overlooked until now, which reverses the notion that the quarrel occurred because of conflicting similarities. At least part of the dispute, I believe, stemmed from authorial dissimilarities: Harte too was a humorist, but his humor is profoundly different from that of Mark Twain. To understand this point, we first need to understand what kind of writer Bret Harte was. II In that corner of American literary history reserved for half-true maxims— Dreiser lacked everything but genius, Henry James chewed more than he bit off, Poe was a jingle man—we might add a statement about Bret Harte: it is generally agreed that Harte lacks everything but readers. 16 He has not been taken seriously by critics since the demise of the Overland Monthly over seven decades ago, yet somehow his name and his tales endure. Seventy-one Harte titles are currently in print, along with three collections of letters, his

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Complete Poetical Works, and an edition of his collected writings (for $2250). 17 Many works are available in multiple editions—29 of The Luck of Roaring Camp—and there are Harte films, videos, audio cassettes, and an “Author’s Kit” for children 6 to 12, which sells for $353. “Bret Harte Country” is familiar to many Americans who never heard of Melville country, Americans who might identify the James boys, William and Henry, as desperadoes. In 1943, Bret Harte was presumably buried for all time in Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Fiction, a volume designed to teach their generation how to read stories and novellas, just as their earlier Understanding Poetry (1938) had taught it how to read verse. One of the strategies of Understanding Fiction was the surgical dismemberment of a bad story, and for this paradigm the editors chose “Tennessee’s Partner.” Harte is faulted on every ground: his plot is inconclusive, his language is unrealistic, his psychology is unsound, his symbolism is illegitimate. The story is “sentimental,” “strain[ed],” “false,” and probably not even original: Has not Bret Harte taken a theme which, perhaps, he had seen successfully employed for pathetic effects in other fiction, and attempted to trick it out with a new romantic setting, touches of local color (such as descriptions of the community and bits of dialect), and poeticized writing, without ever grounding the story in a presentation of the real psychological issues involved? 18

Three decades later Brooks and Warren, along with their colleague R. W. B. Lewis, published American Literature, the Makers and the Making, which they described as the fruit of many years of reading and discussion, of attempting “to divest ourselves of preconceptions.” Bret Harte is included in volume II, with an introduction gently pointing out that “after the glorious dawn of Harte’s reputation, his promise was never quite fulfilled.” And then in this anthology, remarkable for its astute and voluminous criticism, “Tennessee’s Partner” is reprinted without comment. Somehow, even in their own terms, even in their own anthology, Bret Harte has weathered the critics’ storm. His survival will not be a surprise to teachers of American literature, who often try the Understanding Fiction trick only to have it explode in their faces. Students perversely seem to find the obligatory Harte tale or two among the most memorable selections in a survey course; and if asked to choose between Bret Harte and Henry James—but no matter, that’s a box canyon an experienced instructor avoids. Why is this? Why do we continue to have Bret Harte T-shirts, Bret Harte tours, Bret Harte editions, Bret Harte anthology selections? No one seems concerned about Harte’s paradoxical relationship to the West, an uncongenial environment he abandoned at the first opportunity. No one bothers about his exile, the most complete in American letters. No one seems to care about

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the apparent flaws in his character. No one seems able to resolve Harte’s peculiar fictional mélange of freshness and cliché, of cynicism and sentimentality. His tales and his reputation as a literary founding father sail on, through clear blue skies over mining camps that never existed. What is the source of Bret Harte’s staying power? A century of commentary provides little help. Presumably some of Harte’s first readers were seduced by his combination of new exotic subjects and old maudlin effects. The opening sentence of “The Idyl of Red Gulch”— “Sandy was very drunk”—could have been written by Hemingway. But the development of the story aligns perfectly with the mid-nineteenth-century sentimental novel. Under the benign influence of Miss Mary, a reformed Sandy lugs fresh water to her schoolhouse, picks azaleas for her desk, and picnics with her class, “lying at the feet of the school mistress, gazing dreamily in her face.” 19 Harte’s tales are filled with compassionate whores, altruistic gamblers, rejuvenated Western towns, bleeding hearts that pulse under rough exteriors. Yet other nineteenth-century American sentimentalists have been buried so long that time has effaced their tombstones. Some readers, located in the East, thought at first that Bret Harte was a realist—a term that was just coming into literary discussions when Harte assumed the editorship of the Overland Monthly in 1868. But in the face of increasing information about the West, and increasingly sophisticated writing from the HowellsTwain-James generation that raised the flag of realism over American literature, readers and critics began to agree on a more modest niche for Harte as a local colorist. Eventually he came to be seen as the originator of what was called the local color movement. Here is where the critical writing on Harte converges. He is “a major initiator of the local-color movement in American Literature,” 20 and his “‘Luck of Roaring Camp’ is the father of all Western local color stories.” 21 One suspects that anthologists and writers of surveys, who have their hands full with Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and Faulkner, have been content to pass on what has become, through repetition, the standard wisdom. Harte staked his own claim to this territory when he published “The Rise of the ‘Short Story’” in Cornhill Magazine in 1899. Harte modestly denies that he invented the short story. His contribution was merely to gather up the tentative and imitative rudiments of a provincial tradition, give them form, vitality, economy, a firm location in the American experience, and thus pass on to the world a newly refurbished genre. As Harte describes it, his work “sought to honestly describe . . . life.” His secret “was the treatment of characteristic American life, with absolute knowledge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its methods; with no fastidious ignoring of its habitual expression . . . with no moral determination except that which may be the legitimate outcome of the story itself.” 22

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This claim has more snags than a sluice box. Bret Harte was, one might say, a bastard father of regionalism, and his example and success encouraged others, but a serious case cannot be made for Harte as a local colorist, as an honest describer of American life. The local colorist’s impression of actuality depends on the rendering of a specific place at a specific moment in history. Identified with that place, helping to define it just as they are defined by it, are one or two or a handful of local characters, and they in turn are defined by the peculiarities of their local speech—the language, as Wordsworth put it, “really used by men.” We think immediately of Sarah Orne Jewett’s fishermen, Hamlin Garland’s farmers, George Washington Cable’s Creoles. Some local colorists work in the traditional form of the novel, but often the term sketch is appropriate, for the triple alliance of place, character, and language becomes both plot and theme in the writings of many successful local colorists—Longstreet, Stowe, Eggleston, Cooke, G. W. Harris, Freeman, Murfree, J. C. Harris, Woolson. Bret Harte’s tales demonstrate no comparable impression of actuality. His scenes are copybook productions, often grotesquely bent to accommodate exigencies of the story: The way [for the cart bearing Tennessee’s corpse] led through Grizzly Canyon, by this time clothed in funereal drapery and shadows. The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier. “Tennessee’s Partner” 23

His characters are cardboard mannequins, propped up in front of the scenery: Miss Mary was an orphan [who had] come to California for the sake of health and independence. . . . Jack Hamlin, a gambler having once silently ridden with her in the same coach, afterward threw a decanter at the head of a confederate for mentioning her name in a barroom. “The Idyl of Red Gulch” 24

Harte’s energies are devoted to manipulating his characters for effects, not to realizing them as human beings. Thus the questions of Understanding Fiction—“Why does Tennessee’s Partner forgive Tennessee so easily for stealing his wife?”—are irrelevant; and Brooks and Warren, usually among our most astute critics, seem on this ground like chiding schoolmasters at a frolic. Bret Harte is less interested in dialogue than most local colorists, saving his best lines for the narrator. When he does present dialogue, it seems to be not the language really used by men, but the speech really used by actors in nineteenth-century melodramas:

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Chapter 8 “I’m going,” she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, “but don’t say anything about it. Don’t waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my head, and open it.” Mr. Oakhurst did so. It contained Mother Shipton’s rations for the last week, untouched. “Give ‘em to the child,” she said, pointing to the sleeping Piney. “You’ve starved yourself,” said the gambler. “That’s what they call it,” said the woman. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” 25

A significant argument for Bret Harte as a local colorist cannot be made, for his scenes, characters, and speech are not persuasively local, and his colors are predominantly purple. Harte is not concerned with an impression of actuality. His interests lie elsewhere. Readers in recent decades, nourished on irony and ambiguity and unable to believe that either Harte or his readers could have taken the tales seriously, have sometimes wondered if his fiction might be more complex than it first appears. Could “Tennessee’s Partner” be seen as a subtle contest in which the Partner gets even with Tennessee for wife stealing by deliberately attempting to bribe the jury, knowing that the attempt will misfire and seal the verdict against Tennessee? Is the death of the baby in “The Luck of Roaring Camp” a wry condemnation of a racist, chauvinistic society that exploits and then discards half-breed prostitutes? Does the slam of the coach door that ends “The Idyl of Red Gulch” serve to condemn the nominal heroine, Miss Mary, for being—like the Occidental’s heroine in Roughing It—virtuous to the verge of eccentricity? The answer to these interesting questions has to be no, but they suggest a further dimension in Harte’s work, felt but not discussed, that lies at the center of his power to attract readers. This power, which is indeed ironic, subtle, and wry, is created by the voice of the narrator, and by the astonishing gap that exists between that porcelain voice and the common clay of Harte’s subjects. His crude and sentimental characters are surrounded by narrative commentary that is refined, cynical, and aloof. Like the outside narrators in frame tales by the earlier Southwestern humorists, the narrator in Harte’s writings separates himself from the characters, and in that separation lies the distance, the duality, the juxtaposition required for humor. 26 Harte’s gifts as a writer were limited, but he is a master of juxtaposition— a technique he developed as a parodist at the beginning of his career, and one he continued to mine for three decades. Sometimes these contrasts are merely stated: The young girl reached out her arms [and] caught the sinful woman to her own pure breast for one brief moment. “The Idyl of Red Gulch” 27

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The strongest man had but three fingers on his right hand; the best shot had but one eye. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” 28 Beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” 29

At other times Harte, in the tradition of early nineteenth-century humorists, will oppose crude vernacular usages to the genteel restatement and interpretation of the narrator. A temporary tombstone [had been placed at drunk] Sandy’s head, bearing the inscription, “Effects of McCorkle’s whiskey—kills at forty rods.” . . . But this . . . was a reflection upon the unfairness of the process rather than a commentary upon the impropriety of the result. “The Idyl of Red Gulch” 30

In these instances Harte tends not to oppose one character to another, as does Mark Twain, for example, in Roughing It. Harte’s rough miners have to play against the refined narrator, and they invariably lose. Juxtaposition is everywhere in Harte’s tales, but its most common and characteristic employment is to describe an event or scene in terms that so euphemistically transcend the intelligence and the sensibility of the characters that the latter seem ludicrous. The bigamy of a crude miner is described with a mincing delicacy: Stumpy, in other climes, had been the putative head of two families; in fact, it was owing to some legal informality in these proceedings that Roaring Camp—a city of refuge—was indebted to his company. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” 31

When the whores are run out of Poker Flat, the narrator is a miracle of chivalric restraint: A secret committee had determined to rid the town of all improper persons. This was done permanently in regard of two men who were then hanging from the boughs of a sycamore in the gulch, and temporarily in the banishment of certain other objectionable characters. I regret to say that some of these were ladies. It is but due to the sex, however, to state that their impropriety was professional, and it was only in such easily established standards of evil that Poker Flat ventured to sit in judgment. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” 32

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The narrator provides an elaborate apology for Kentuck, who is so filthy that he is a hazard to the public health of even so casual a community as Roaring Camp: In the carelessness of a large nature and the habits of frontier life, [Kentuck] had begun to regard all garments as a second cuticle, which, like a snake’s, only sloughed off through decay. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” 33

The narrator’s gallantry, pretended sympathy, and elaborate apologetics are largely mockery, and they reduce the characters to fools, even—like Kentuck—to animals. Yet these reductions are not troublesome, and neither the narrator nor the reader feels guilty about the mockery. In this respect Harte is assisted by his exaggerated contrasts and sometimes violent juxtapositions, as well as by his wooden characterizations. We are not concerned about the meaning of Harte’s narrative events because we don’t believe in his characters. The endings of Harte’s tales climax the game of elegant euphemism, and they complicate it by adding sentimentality. “[The baby] is dead,” said one. Kentuck opened his eyes. “Dead?” he repeated feebly. “Yes, my man, and you are dying too.” A smile lit the eyes of the expiring Kentuck. “Dying!” he repeated; “he’s a-taking me with him. Tell the boys I’ve got The Luck with me now;” and the strong man, clinging to the frail babe as a drowning man is said to cling to a straw, drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” 34

Harte’s lilting conclusions, the flourish of his authorial signature, attempt in their excesses to evoke the differing responses of humor and sentimentality, an effort that has conventionally led to comparisons with Dickens. There is, however, a crucial difference. Dickens aligns the two responses, creating laughter that measures his sympathy, his compassion, his involvement with humankind. Harte’s laughter is as disdainful as the gestures of Miss Mary, who, when confronted by a scarlet woman of Red Gulch, “half unconsciously settled her white cuffs and collar, and gathered closer her own chaste skirts.” 35 Harte’s conclusions highlight how his narratives have been misread. A reader who is carried along by the overflow of sentiment has to suspend not only his own disbelief, but also that of the narrator, who subverts the stories all along. The idea that Bret Harte is essentially a humorist could be supported in additional ways, both inside and outside the fiction. The biographers tend to stress Harte’s wit and charm, but lurking behind that portrait is a man, as Howells phrased it, “mostly ironical [that] you never could be sure of.” 36 It is

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tempting to relate Bret Harte the man to the character in his fiction who is treated most sympathetically—the gambler Jack Hamlin. Both were delicate, well-dressed, articulate dandies, who indulged themselves in condescendingly witty remarks as the human comedy paraded by. Harte’s essays turn explicitly to discussions of humor, and embedded in the tales are frequent comments that help us understand how the author interpreted his work. “Tennessee’s Partner” is filled with such comments. The narrator tells us that even Tennessee’s holdups are characterized by the thief’s comic disposition that “no business preoccupation could wholly subdue,” a disposition that is appropriate to “gulches and barrooms where all sentiment was modified by a strong sense of humor.” At the trial, the judge senses that a “sympathy of humor was beginning to humanize the court,” though it does not prevent Tennessee from being hanged. The joke ends only at the burial, when Jack Folinsbee, who had at the outset played a funeral march in dumb show upon an imaginary trombone, desisted from a lack of [the onlookers’] sympathy and appreciation—not having, perhaps, your true humorist’s capacity to be content with the enjoyment of his own fun. 37

Unlike Jack Folinsbee, Harte is what he termed a true humorist. The irony of his ironic style is that, for a century and a half, he has had to be content with the enjoyment of his own fun. III Mark Twain profited from his half-decade friendship with Bret Harte in San Francisco. Harte encouraged him, published him, reviewed him favorably, and advised him well. Harte’s advice, and his example, argued for cleanlimbed prose and a direct narrative line, pruned of the excess to which the young Twain was sometimes tempted. But as Mark Twain matured, he left his fading mentor behind and began to separate himself from Harte as a person, from the parochial school of Western writers that Harte represented in the public mind, and from the literature Harte produced. There are many reasons for the rift between the two men; one of them concerns humor. The secret of Bret Harte’s rock star success and his surprising staying power is that he was a humorist. The usefulness of his example is that he was a very different kind of humorist from Mark Twain. Thomas Hobbes would have admired Harte’s tales, for they provide a casebook example of humor based on superiority. Mark Twain grudgingly admitted, in reply to a comment by Howells, that Harte had a “bright wit,” but he quickly denigrated that wit by observing it “consisted solely of sneers and sarcasms.” 38 Twain, of course, was no stranger to sarcasm, and he certainly sneers at his quondam friend in the Autobiography. But for the most

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part—not always; there is very little about Twain’s works, or life, that can be categorized as always—he created an amiable style of humor which treated the characters in his fiction sympathetically. He could joke about the contrasting speech and personalities of roughneck Scotty Briggs and “the pale theological student” in Roughing It, without putting down either miners or ministers. Like Harte, Twain promoted rough and ordinary characters to protagonist status in fiction, but unlike Harte, Twain gave those characters full standing in the human community. A ragged, ungrammatical river waif who sleeps in a sugar-hogshead is an unlikely hero for fiction in nineteenthcentury America, but Huck Finn turns out to be not only a hero but a moral beacon as well. Twain could make fun of his characters’ shortcomings without losing sight of their strengths, just as he could treat earlier times and foreign places, whether in Hannibal or Heidelberg, with a good-natured blend of satire and sympathy. Even characters that Twain vilifies are often complicated by compassion. The king and the duke in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are unscrupulous, thieving, and vicious, and they well deserve being run out of town on a rail by the citizens of Pikesville. Yet the author, through Huck, leaves us feeling a little ambiguous about them and not especially proud of the townspeople: “I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals. . . . Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” 39 Twain’s humor can be seen as opposed to Harte’s in yet another way. Instead of standing aside in lofty superiority, Twain’s narrators are involved in the joke, sometimes delivering it, sometimes as the target, and often as part of the collateral damage. Harte laughs at others; Twain can laugh at himself. And when he does laugh at others, he realizes he is laughing at a part of himself as well. Mark Twain was brash, ambitious, impatient with fools. But he also had periods of self-doubt, and recognized his own foolishness. Like most of us, he vacillated between poles of confidence and doubt. Unlike most of us, he confessed his self-doubts, wrote them down, and turned them into humor. Twain’s reader is invited to the comic party as well, but not, as in Harte’s case, in superciliousness. Rather, as Howells concludes his summary of Twain’s writings in the Century Magazine for September 1882, “the prevailing spirit of Mark Twain’s humor is . . . a sort of good-natured self-satire, in which the reader may see his own absurdities reflected.” 40 That’s all very well, a skeptic might say, but what about Jim in Huckleberry Finn? Isn’t he an important exception to Twain’s amiable, non-Hartean humor? Aren’t the jokes about Jim’s ignorance, superstitiousness, and gullibility a kind of racism? And since racism stems from an attitude of superiority, isn’t the characterization of Jim an important exception to the general rule about Twain’s Horatian humor? These questions need to be addressed in the next chapter.

Chapter Nine

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“[The book is] rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating. . . . It is the veriest trash.” 1 The Library Committee of Concord, Massachusetts “The Committee . . . have given us a rattling tip-top puff . . . that will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.” 2 Mark Twain

Mark Twain returned from his European sojourn of 1878-79 to become, as he put it, a scribbler of books, and he published a volume a year for the next five years. A Tramp Abroad was issued in 1880, the last book to be published by Elisha Bliss, who died in September of that year. The Prince and the Pauper came out in 1881; The Stolen White Elephant, Etc., a collection of stories, sketches, speeches, and a poem, in 1882—both published by Twain’s friend James Osgood. In the spring of 1882, Twain and Osgood, accompanied by a stenographer, traveled down and then back up the Mississippi by steamboat, warming the author’s memories of his piloting days and collecting materials for the river book he had been projecting for almost two decades. Published in 1883, Life on the Mississippi reprints in chapters 4-17 the cub pilot sketches which first appeared in the Atlantic eight years earlier. To these Twain adds three more chapters from the point of view of the cub pilot, ending with the death of Twain’s brother Henry as a result of the explosion of the steamboat Pennsylvania. At this point the author shifts gears, tosses in a short “Section in My Biography,” and devotes three chapters to a description of his return to the river, initially under a fictitious name. There are flashes of the “Old Times on the Mississippi” humor in these chapters, since Twain posed as an innocent with the pilot of the boat on which he traveled while the pilot pretended not to recognize him. This double 199

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imposture could not last long, and with his incognito exploded, Twain continued his trip, south to New Orleans and then north to St. Paul, as a celebrated returnee. Using the journey as a loose organizing device, Twain fills the remaining three-fourths of Life on the Mississippi with a remarkable but miscellaneous collection of anecdotes, facts, tall tales, history, pilot gossip, quotations from earlier writers, autobiography, attacks on Sir Walter Scott, criticism of Southern “maudlin Middle-Age Romanticism,” pieces cut from the manuscript of A Tramp Abroad, and a section written for Huckleberry Finn. 3 There is humor here, but it tends to be the plug-in variety, since the contrastive structure of Bixby and cub has evaporated, and the latent contrast between past and present is energized only intermittently. Taken as a whole, Life on the Mississippi resembles Roughing It. After sparkling beginnings in both books, Mark Twain seems to run out of steam when his young narrators mature before he has filled the requisite number of pages established by the precedent of Innocents Abroad. It resembles A Tramp Abroad as well, in that the author seems trapped by the press of deadlines and his penchant for miscellaneity. Twain confesses these problems in his notes for Life on the Mississippi (“Throw in incidents from many lands”); in the text itself (“I insert [a story] in this place merely because it is a good story, not because it belongs here—for it does n’t”); and in his letters, where he complains to Howells about “this now apparently interminable book” and mentions a section “mainly stolen from books, tho’ credit given.” 4 According to the count by R. Kent Rasmussen, some 12,800 words in Life on the Mississippi are quoted from other sources, more than in any other Twain book except Following the Equator, an 1897 work written “in hell” he told Howells, in a desperate attempt to get out of debt, which quotes 24,000 words from dozens of authors. 5 In a reply to his publisher’s inquiry about some business details concerning Life on the Mississippi, Twain retorted that he was not interested “in anything connected with this wretched God-damned book.” 6 Mark Twain tends to overstate his enthusiasm when the writing is going well, and his damnation when it isn’t, but it seems fair to say that Life on the Mississippi, like his four other travel books, is a mixed bag. It did, however, turn out to be a stimulus for completing his most important work. Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after finishing Tom Sawyer, and writing in the summer of 1876, he got Huck and Jim as far as Cairo, Illinois. He added some short sections over the next six years, but it wasn’t until 1883, when—inspired by his return to the Mississippi and his renewed command of the details of the river below Cairo—he was energized to finish the work. In April 1883, the Clemens family packed up and headed for their summer retreat in Elmira, an annual ritual they followed almost every year of the two decades they lived in Hartford. The Farmington Avenue mansion was

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the show place of an increasingly celebrated author, and the center of a hurricane of dinner parties, houseguests, business deals, amateur theatricals, publishing schemes, poetry readings, classes in German, billiard games, political debates, visitors, foreign travelers; as well as petitioners of every sort for interviews, lectures, loans, investments, and advice. By contrast Quarry Farm, situated on a hill east of Elmira in rural west-central New York, was “as quiet & peaceful as a South–sea island.” 7 The farm was the home of Susan Crane, Livy’s foster sister, and the Clemenses joined the Cranes there summers until the death of Theodore Crane in 1889. Susan had a one-room study built for her brother-in-law in 1874, separate from the main house, where Twain did much of his best writing. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was begun in that little octagonal study in July 1876, and finished there in August 1883. Published first in England in December 1884, and in America two months later, the book was immediately controversial. It still is. Then the issues had to do with low subject matter, non-standard grammar, and irreverence. Today, when low subjects are common, grammar is discretionary, and irreverence is pandemic, the issue has to do with the novel’s treatment of Jim. We need to deal with that first. THE JOKE ON JIM “There is humor in [him], but . . . the laugh is too expensive.” 8 Mark Twain, on Ambrose Bierce

I had just begun writing this chapter, when I had to take a break and have a minor operation on my hand. My first sentence was “Everyone has a problem with Twain’s portrait of Jim and with the farcical ending of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Unexpectedly, the hospital visit resulted in a major revision of that sentence. I had elected not to have general anesthesia, which left me able to hear, and occasionally participate in, the chatter and chaffing that took place in the margins of the serious business of excising a tendon sheath. At one point the discussion turned to literature, and then to Mark Twain, since several members of the operating-room team had seen a recent article on the Twain project at Berkeley. The surgeon, a bright and well-read man, paused for a moment, straightened up with his scalpel in hand, and declared that the ending of Huckleberry Finn was “the most hilarious passage in all of world literature.” My pedagogical instinct to rise up and correct this opinion was defeated by the straps that held me down. Suddenly as I lay there, I could envisage many teachers over the last fifty years, not restrained as I was, explaining to those students who had enjoyed the ending why they shouldn’t have. Unqualified generalizations about a book that has been read in different ways by millions of readers in hundreds of editions for more than a century

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tend to skate on thin ice. So let me begin again more modestly. At this time in our national history, for reasons that have as much to do with us as they do with Mark Twain, it is important to try to understand why Twain’s depiction of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn strikes many Americans as, in Ralph Ellison’s phrase, “a white man’s inadequate portrait of a slave.” 9 Currently this search for understanding takes the form of a debate. I Those who are upset by the portrait point out that Jim’s statements and actions, and Edward Kemble’s illustrations of a wide-eyed, thick-lipped, minstrel-show darky, are based on racial stereotypes that present AfricanAmericans as ignorant, gullible, superstitious, and cowardly. Jim believes in spirits of the dead and consults a hairball taken from the stomach of an ox. He misunderstands the wisdom of Solomon (“de man dat think he kin settle a ‘spute ‘bout a whole chile wid a half a chile, doan know enough to come in out’n de rain” ), and thinks it’s “blame’ ridicklous” that French people can’t speak English. “Feeling powerful sick,” Jim retreats from the dangers of the wrecked steamboat and returns to the raft. He tells Huck that the stars they see from their raft were laid by the moon and that meteorites were stars that “got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.” Huck, a thirteen or fourteen-yearold boy, soon figures out that the con men they run into “warn’t no kings nor dukes,” but Jim, a full-grown man, doesn’t understand at first: “it warn’t no use to tell Jim, so I didn’t tell him.” 10 The anticlimactic ending reduces Jim to a passive player in Tom Sawyer’s extravaganza of prisoner escape— bristling with unnecessary saws, rope ladders, prison journals, secret messages, disguises, and a coat of arms—cobbled together from his raids into romantic fiction. Many passages throughout the novel, both before and after Huck has presumably learned “how good [Jim] always was” in Chapter 31, give us pause. Huck tells us that Jim’s obstinacy proves “you can’t learn a nigger to argue.” He is appalled by Jim’s freedom fever as they near the clear waters of the Ohio, and by his talk of stealing his children out of slavery, if necessary: “It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, ‘Give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.’” “Well,” Huck says, when the king and the duke stage their lost-brother routine, “if ever I struck anything like it, I’m a nigger.” And at the end of the book, Huck is relieved to discover that Jim had been free during the escapades on Silas Phelps’s farm, so no blame can be attached to Tom as an abolitionist: “I couldn’t ever understand, before, until that minute and that talk, how he could help a body set a nigger free, with his bringing-up.” 11 Some readers assert that all this makes Mark Twain a racist.

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The book’s defenders counter that it is absurd to call Twain a racist, when, published at a time when Negroes in America were being lynched by real racists, Huckleberry Finn presented a sympathetic picture of an estimable black man who befriends a white boy. Jim proves to have “an uncommon level head” and “a good heart.” In the course of his adventures with Huck, Jim demonstrates sound judgment, compassion, generosity, courage, and finally heroism, when he jeopardizes his freedom by staying to assist the wounded Tom. Over the course of the novel, Huck—and the reader—gradually come to recognize that Jim is a human being whose blackness dissolves, whose chains fall away, under the transforming power of friendship. This lesson is especially powerful, for to learn it Huck has to escape the cultural straitjacket of the slave society in which he has grown up, and he doesn’t learn easily. Soon after he meets Jim on Jackson’s Island, Huck plays a trick on him by coiling a dead rattlesnake on his blanket, “thinking there’d be some fun when Jim found him there.” When Jim is bitten, Huck’s reaction centers on himself rather than on Jim: “That all comes of my being such a fool as to not remember that wherever you leave a dead snake its mate always comes there and curls around it. . . . Then I slid out quiet and throwed the snakes clear away amongst the bushes; for I warn’t going to let Jim find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it.” 12 And while Jim is suffering, Huck is unconcerned enough to debate the relative potency of rattlesnake bites and Pap’s whiskey. His next trick comes after they have been separated in a fog. Huck attempts to persuade a sleepy Jim that the episode was a dream. When Jim finally sees the debris on the raft and untangles its meaning, he lectures the white boy for the first and last time: “En when I wake’ up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun,’ de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss’ yo’ foot I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin’ ‘bout, wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ‘em ashamed.”

Huck struggles to overcome his prejudice and finally apologizes to Jim, resolving to “do him no more mean tricks.” His resolve is tested immediately, and it holds. When two armed men in a skiff, searching for runaway slaves, challenge him on the river—“Is your man white or black?”—Huck responds with “He’s white,” and uncorks one of his Homeric lies to prevent the men from checking. 13 Jim is out of sight in the Grangerford chapters; and he is subdued, roped, and painted blue during the siege of the raft by the king and the duke. But Huck’s newly won insight holds firm. When he hears Jim moaning about his family in his sleep, Huck realizes that “he cared just as much for his people

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as white folks does for theirn. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.” This compassion arms Huck for his most difficult battle. When Jim is sold by the king to Silas Phelps, Huck is forced to review the comradeship established during their rafting journey and choose between his friend and his duty to report a runaway slave. “It was a close place,” thinks Huck, in his steamboat vernacular, but he churns through with the courage and resolution of Horace Bixby running a dangerous channel at night. Huck rejects duty, religion, society, and his conscience, and chooses Jim by destroying the letter he started to write to Miss Watson, and deciding to steal Jim out of slavery once more: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” After this moral crisis, the novel, now engineered by Tom Sawyer, takes its notorious downhill slide. Although he is powerless to stem the “evasion,” as Tom calls the escape of “a prisoner of style,” Huck remains true to his friendship and to his opinion of Jim. When Jim refuses to leave until Tom’s wound is treated, and thus is recaptured, Huck summarizes the essential lesson of his adventures: “I knowed he was white inside.” 14 Huck transcends the prejudice of his community even though his metaphor still expresses that prejudice. The criticism of the last quarter of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the evasion section, originally arose in the mid-twentieth century on artistic grounds. The ending was seen by some as an overlong anticlimax, a lessening of the understanding wrung out of the experiences in the more powerful middle sections of the novel. Gradually, as readers’ unhappiness with the characterization of Jim increased, the ending began to be criticized as another joke on Jim. It is that, but one could argue the author of the joke is Tom Sawyer. Jim is made to do foolish things, but Tom is the fool, and his addlebrained romanticism is the chief target of Twain’s satire. Tom’s games in the closing chapters are of a different order than those in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for this time he is playing with a human being; his self-serving concealment of the black man’s freed status and his wish to “leave Jim to our children” 15 align Tom with slaveholders and confidence men. Jim and Huck, logically enough, protest all along. Jim “couldn’t see no sense” in Tom’s plans and Huck doesn’t “give a dead rat what the authorities thinks.” 16 The Jim of the final chapters, burdened as he is by the needless evasion, is more rational, less stereotyped, than the Jim of chapter 2, who boasts he has been ridden by witches. Since chapter 2 was written seven years before the ending, it seems likely Twain at that earlier time was not aware of where the journey, and his characters, were headed. The book’s defenders also draw on the long, documentable list of Mark Twain’s personal acts of respect, generosity, and tribute to AfricanAmericans. It is true that John Marshall Clemens owned slaves, and that his son was raised to believe that there wasn’t “anything wrong about [slavery]; . . . the local pulpit taught us that God approved it.” 17 In his first trip away from home in 1853, a 17-year-old Sam Clemens wrote to his mother

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from New York about “the infernal abolitionists. I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.” 18 But eight years later, when the Civil War forced him off the river, Twain’s service with a unit of Confederate irregulars in Missouri was ambiguous and short. By the end of the conflict, like the titular heroine of John DeForest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, Twain was rooting for the Union and well on his way to becoming, as Howells said of him later, “the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery.” 19 Twain lionized Union generals, married into a leading abolitionist family, 20 settled in Hartford where his closest neighbor was Harriet Beecher Stowe, promoted the career of Frederick Douglass, and believed that one of his greatest accomplishments was talking General Grant into writing his memoirs. In the same year that Huckleberry Finn was published—a year that saw a fifty percent increase in the lynching of black Americans—the author began to pay the expenses of Warner T. McGuinn, one of the first black students to be accepted at the Yale School of Law, writing to the school’s dean that “I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.” 21 Twain remembered blacks he had known with affection, retold their stories vividly and sympathetically, and employed them as characters in his fiction. On his uncle’s farm, he recalled late in his life, We had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and adviser in “Uncle Dan’l,” a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro-quarter, whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile. He has served me well these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as “Jim,” and carted him . . . down the Mississippi on a raft. 22

A mixture of fiction, history, and autobiography, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book about a runaway slave that begins with a joke between the author and a former slave. The first page contains a Notice: “Persons attempting to find a Motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a Plot in it will be shot.” The notice is signed “By Order of the Author, Per G. G., Chief of Ordnance.” “G. G.” apparently refers to George Griffin, a former slave who came to the Farmington Avenue residence one day in 1875 to wash some windows, and stayed on for 16 years as a member of the household, and, in Twain’s words, a “shrewd, wise . . . devoted friend to the

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family.” 23 Griffin’s duties as butler included shielding Twain from unwanted visitors and protecting the house, which he once did with a revolver. II The debate about Jim is irresolvable, not because the two sides are ineluctably opposed, but because they are both right. Abundant textual evidence can be amassed to support the notion of Jim as either foolish or dignified, as being put down or raised up. Half of Mark Twain’s portrait, even for its time, is demeaning and condescending; the other half, especially for its time, is discerning and sympathetic. If we can’t resolve this debate, we can at least understand it better by viewing it from the perspective of a humorist. Such a consideration won’t allay the objections of many readers and there is no reason why it should. Their objections are honestly and decently come by. It may, however, help us comprehend what Mark Twain had in mind, why he wrote what he did, and how he regarded his creation. Let us proceed with some questions. Does Mark Twain employ stereotypes in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Yes. Humorists thrive on stereotypes and caricatures because they are exaggerations, and exaggerations—of ignorance and superstition in Jim’s case—sharpen the contrasts on which humor depends. Jim is not the only victim. African Americans may not be assuaged by the company, but Twain caricatures virtually all of the people that Jim and Huck encounter along the Mississippi: preachers, undertakers, village loafers, backwoods gentry, raftsmen, confidence men. Does Mark Twain make jokes at Jim’s expense? Yes, the author frequently exaggerates Jim’s provincialism and lack of education with numbskull jokes: Huck: “What did you speculate in, Jim?” Jim: “Well, fust I tackled stock.” Huck: “What kind of stock?” Jim: “Why live stock. Cattle, you know. I put ten dollars in a cow.” 24

Sometimes Huck, shrewd as he is on most occasions, joins Jim in the dunce chair. When Jim finds a wooden leg in the floating house, Huck notes that “it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn’t find the other one, though we hunted all around.” 25 These jokes are not limited to Jim and Huck, for Twain’s Mississippi Valley has an ample population of numbskulls. Almost every character is made fun of: Miss Watson (“a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on”); Pap (“Every time he got money he got drunk; and every time he got drunk he raised Cain around town; and every time he raised Cain he got jailed. He was just suited—this kind of thing was right in his line”); Emmeline Grangerford (“Eve-

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rybody was sorry she died . . . but I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard”); The king (“all full of tears and flapdoodle . . . soulbutter and hogwash”); the undertaker at Peter Wilks’s funeral (“he slid around in his . . . softy soothering ways”); Sally Phelps (“every time one of them [snakes] flopped down on her, it didn’t make no difference what she was doing, she would just lay that work down and light out. I never see such a woman. And you could hear her whoop to Jericho”). 26 Do the stereotypes as well as the jokes and the tomfoolery at the end of the book make Adventures of Huckleberry Finn inconsistent? Yes, they do. In fact, all of Mark Twain’s books are inconsistent, though that doesn’t bother us much in compilations like Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi; or in the various collections of heterogeneous tales. Huckleberry Finn, however, is a different matter. While the final chapters constitute an ingenious parody of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask, and similar works, some readers believe that Twain has traded in his satiric cannon for a popgun. Mark Twain had his own notions about consistency, which he explained two years after the publication of Huckleberry Finn in a speech to the Hartford Monday Evening Club. Since change and growth are the laws of nature, he argued, “the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency—and to such a degree that the average man . . . is proud to be ‘consistent,’ unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation that he is so.” 27 Twain is thus willing to sacrifice the long-term logic of his narrative, and Jim’s dignity, for the shortrun opportunities of comedy. Novels normally strive for consistency and the weight of accumulation. Part of their pleasure derives from the predictability, the inevitability, of the patterns of character and action that govern the miniature world created by the author. Humor, on the other hand, is based on quick splashes rather than long rolling rhythms. It is unpredictable, interruptive, subversive, distorting. Although Twain aligns much of his comedy with his plot in Huckleberry Finn, the comedy occasionally undercuts the novel’s generally sympathetic presentation of Jim. Does that spoil the book? Only if you insist that consistency is a necessary virtue of a literary work. You can’t have it both ways, the saying goes, but Mark Twain often does, whether we like it or not, and Jim is both ridiculed and dignified. Asking a humorist not to be inconsistent is like asking the conductor of an orchestra not to make too much noise. Twain also had his own notion about joking. Sometimes his jokes are satiric, and meant as criticism. Other times, as in the jokes on Jim, they are meant to be good natured, part of the “wild play” in Twain’s nature that loved a joke “even if it took the form of a liberty.” Mark Twain was perfectly capable of making fun of a person he had affection and respect for, whether in his family, among his friends, with the characters he invented, and even

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with General Grant (in a daring speech Twain delivered at the Grand Reunion of the Army of the Tennessee in 1879). 28 Admittedly this sort of joking is a tricky, risk-taking business, for the difference between friendly and offensive humor is often small. The secret of this difference, according to black comedian Bernie Mac, lies in the “presentation . . . how to deliver it, [how] to take a topic and be able to present it to the world in a way where it’s not degrading.” In an interview on National Public Radio several years before his death in 2008, Mac goes on to explain that racial humor, even when based on stereotypes, is not necessarily racist or mean-spirited: Bernie Mac: “You know, a lot of comedians make the mistake of tapping in on issues and shoving it down your throat. I don’t want to preach. I don’t want to do that. I’m not a preacher. Maybe God said, ‘OK, we’ve got too many bootleg preachers around here already.’ OK? Everything that I do I tell a message, but in a joking way. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. When I had the maid scene, you know, she was Hispanic. And then when I did a little personal thing with the television, I said something that we often say about each other’s culture, that Hispanics are known to be hard-working people. But I found her asleep and I was disappointed, you know. I said, ‘She must have some black in her,’ you know. You know? And that’s Bernie Mac, you know.” Michele Norris, NPR host: “Now, see, that’s—you want to laugh, but you have to catch yourself. . .” Mr. Mac: “Right. Right.” Ms. Norris: “. . . because you’re thinking, ‘I’m not so sure I should laugh at this.’” Mr. Mac: “Right. But that’s—the honesty of it is where the humor comes from. And the audience is not dumb. They see it. What I just said, you know wasn’t no hate with that; you know it wasn’t no malice with that. It was a joke. I don’t do things with malice, I don’t do things that insult, I don’t do things to harm or hurt anybody. I don’t believe in that.” 29 Mark Twain intended no hurt to Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or to black people in general, for whom he had both affection and sympathy. A nineteenth-century liberal, he would have welcomed the increased sensitivity of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to racial injustice; it is a change he helped bring about. Nevertheless, the joke was the golden apple for which he could not turn aside, and the joke that is perceived as ridicule can be the worst kind of insult. The recent dustup over Alan Gribben’s New South edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (which substitutes

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“slave” for “nigger” and “Indian” for “Injun”) missed a key point: most people find it more humiliating to be ridiculed than to be called hard names. The comic side of Twain’s portrait of Jim doesn’t always align very well with Twain’s social convictions, and even less well with ours. Humorists have a weak sense of decorum, which is why we like them, except when it is our own decorum that is being trampled on. We need to keep in mind also the role of the reader in the creation of humor. A joke, like a completed forward pass, is a complex piece of teamwork, requiring a receiver as well as a sender. When Archie Bunker calls his wife a dingbat and his son-in-law a Polack or a meathead, we understand that the satire is presumably directed at Archie. But a viewer who has a need to disparage women or Polish people may find the joke doubly funny, laughing both at and with Archie. Like warfare, humor can inflict collateral damage not intended, or at least not consciously intended, by the instigator. Most readers interpret Aunt Sally’s thoughtless remarks about blacks as self-satirical; some find that those remarks satirize blacks as well as Aunt Sally. The debate about Jim will continue, as it should. In a later day, if things go well, the jokes about Jim will recede into the landscape of the book as part of all the jokes and satiric jibes aimed at Tom and Huck, and Miss Watson, and the king and the duke, and the Grangerfords and the Phelpses; as well as boorish town loafers, fickle and cowardly mobs, and unconsciously and uncaringly inhumane slaveholders. Until that time of greater equity arrives, it seems wise not to insist that every student, especially every young and every black student, read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an inevitable part of the American school curriculum. And, in the meantime, we still need to consider the humor of the rest of the book. Excluding the jokes on Jim, it is still a great and humorous book and we need to look at why. BEYOND JIM: THE HUMOR OF ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN “The wild western burlesquer, the builder of elephantine exaggerations and comicalities has disappeared, and in his stead we have the true literary artist. . . . The incongruities are nature’s own.” 30 Joel Chandler Harris on Mark Twain

As the Clemens family settled at the farm in Elmira for the summer of 1883, Mark Twain was relaxed and buoyant. He reported that Livy had recovered from a spring illness, “the children are booming, & my health is ridiculous, it’s so robust.” 31 Their bustling family life was now stabilized by three remarkable servants—George Griffin, Katy Leary, and Patrick McAleer—who were part of the household for decades. Twain’s income was robust and stable as well, with royalties from four new books flowing in, and

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he would soon establish his own publishing house. Released from “the chains of slavery” which had bound him to the production of two long travel books, the author could indulge himself in what he called “the highest pleasure to be got out of freedom,” by which he meant writing what he wished. That writing, in July of 1883, included the resumption of a work he had “half-finished two or three years ago.” I haven’t piled up MS so in years as I have done since we came here to the farm. . . . [I] step straight into the study, damp from the breakfast table, & sail right in & sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short of stuff or words. I wrote 4000 words to-day & I touch 3000 & upwards pretty often, & don’t fall below 2600 on any working day. . . . I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more. And I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not. It’s a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer. 32

Thus at age 47, between the grab-bag comedy of his youth and the invective irony of his old age, at the height of his powers of invention, Mark Twain, experiencing midlife without crisis, finished his companion to Tom Sawyer. Located in the middle of a forty-five-year career filled with brilliant, flawed works, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is as close as its author ever came to a complete, balanced, and unified long work of fiction. The secret of this achievement was placing Huck at the center of the narrative, telling the story from his perspective and in his own words, as Twain realized back in 1875, when, having just finished Tom Sawyer, he mused that “I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person.” 33 This realization was undoubtedly stimulated by Twain’s success with first-person narration in “A True Story” and “Old Times on the Mississippi,” both of which were composed while Tom Sawyer was in process. The stunning difference in point of view between the two books can be seen immediately, since the first chapter of Huckleberry Finn reiterates the last chapter of Tom Sawyer (see Table 9.1). Huck Finn is naïve, but riverwise and resourceful; uneducated, but commonsensical and compassionate. At thirteen or fourteen, he is a sharp observer and reporter, who often fails to understand what he reports. Thus the book presents a continuous duality between Huck’s deadpan, nonjudgmental observations and the reader’s conclusions. Since the action of the book lasts months rather than years, Huck, unlike the tenderfoot in Roughing It and the cub pilot in “Old Times,” never grows up, so the contrast between Huck’s understanding and that of the reader established on the first page lasts until the end of the novel. The problem of the long humorous book is solved. The problem of the interrupting narrator is solved as well. Twain, especially in his travel books, likes to jump into his story in many authorial voices— innocent, wise, wisecracking, exaggerating, eloquent, autobiographical— which have their own charms, but often at the expense of the tale. Huck, as

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Table 9.1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, chapter 35

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 1

Huck Finn’s wealth and the fact that he was now under the widow Douglas’s protection, introduced him into society— no, dragged him into it, hurled him into it—and his sufferings were almost more than he could bear. The widow’s servants kept him clean and neat, combed and brushed, and they bedded him nightly in unsympathetic sheets that had not one little spot or stain which he could press to his heart and know for a friend. He had to eat with knife and fork; he had to use napkin, cup and plate; he had to learn his book, he had to go to church; he had to talk so properly that speech was become insipid in his mouth; whithersoever he turned, the bars and shackles of civilization shut him in and bound him hand and foot.

The widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways. . . . The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. . . . The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals; though there warn’t really anything the matter with them.

character narrator, checkmates the authorial narrator and has all the good lines for himself. Silas Phelps, Huck tells us, “never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too.” 34 Huck as naïve narrator is an ideal vehicle for the various modes of disparity which define Mark Twain’s humor. He is the butt of the comedy at the circus, where a presumed tipsy drunk turns out to be a champion horseback rider: “Then the ring-master he see how he had been fooled, and he was the sickest ring-master you ever see, I reckon. Why, it was one of his own men! He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody.” Huck’s innocent enthusiasm over the Grangerfords’ parlor furnishings and their daughter’s accomplishments leaves the reader to draw very different satiric conclusions: “If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain’t no telling what she could a done by and by. Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn’t ever have to stop to think.” And Huck unknowingly passes on ironies that strike the reader with increasing force as the book progresses: “By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers.” More complex are the juxtapositions that unleash a train of linked disparities. In the first chapter, Huck, already nervous about being cooped up indoors, is bullyragged about his spelling and his manners and his posture by Miss Watson, who tells him about hell. Huck responds in kind:

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The passage is humorous at first because of the contrast between Huck’s language and Miss Watson’s and because conventional notions about desiring heaven and avoiding hell have been reversed. The humor builds as the reader perceives that Huck’s world view, as well as his speech, is contrasted to Miss Watson’s, and it climaxes when the reader realizes that, in a contest of theologies between an unkempt river rat and a prim, educated spinster, Huck wins. His apparent impiety turns out to be the higher morality. Huck’s deadpan narration sets up the dualities that make Adventures of Huckleberry Finn both amusing and profound, and it also demonstrates Mark Twain’s solution to the problem of the vernacular that had vexed a generation of American writers. Attempting to introduce democratically common characters and to loosen up book talk with common speech, nineteenthcentury American authors such as George Washington Harris stumbled into phonetic and orthographic swamps: “I tell yu she wer a tarin gal enyhow. Luved kissin, wrastlin, an’ biled cabbige, an’ hated tite clothes, hot weather, an’ suckit-riders.” 36 Mark Twain solved this problem by creating a symbolic vernacular that has the heft of spoken language—run-on rhythms and repetitions, simple connections, colloquialisms, home-grown metaphors and neologisms, and occasional lapses of formal grammar—while observing enough of the conventions of written English to make it readable. All it takes, he discovered, is a touch here and there to flavor the whole: “I got all my traps into my canoe again so as to have them out of sight, and I put out the fire and scattered the ashes around to look like an old last-year’s camp, and then clumb a tree.” 37 Huck’s vernacular expresses his character and experience so casually that it’s easy to overlook how inventive it is. Lies are “stretchers”; Miss Watson wears “goggles”; the clock strikes “twelve licks”; girls “brisken up” their rooms with “jimcracks”; Mary Jane Wilks “had more sand in her than any girl I ever see”; Aunt Sally “was just in a sweat about every little thing that warn’t yard-stick straight.” Huck slips easily into imagery, for Mark Twain has by no means forsaken his talents for eloquence and metaphor in creating the speech of an unsophisticated adolescent. Rather, restrained from entering the fiction himself with story-stopping flashes of imagistic brilliance, the author endows his character with these talents. Huck’s metaphorical imagination propels the tale forward with a surprisingly apt and easy grace: “There was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the

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leaves”; “Towards night it begun to darken up and look like rain; the heat lightning was squirting around, low down in the sky, and the leaves was beginning to shiver.” 38 Huck’s naïve narration is the vehicle for presenting the humor of Huckleberry Finn, and it proves capacious enough to carry all three types of disparity. Organized throughout by the twin rails of Huck’s innocent presentation and the reader’s sophisticated understanding, the novel is simultaneously the most amusing comic work Mark Twain ever wrote, the most bitingly satiric, and the most powerfully ironic. In no other piece are the droll, the sharp, and the wry so successfully balanced and integrated. The comedy of simple difference—the unanticipated against the expected—can be found everywhere, from the king’s naked romp on the courthouse stage in Bricksville to the duke’s mishmash version of Hamlet’s soliloquy: To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep. 39

Simple difference is provided by the homespun originality of Huck’s descriptions: the Widow Douglas is “dismal regular and decent”; Pilgrim’s Progress is “about a man that left his family, it didn’t say why.” Jim’s language works in a similar fashion, with the inventiveness of his phrasing intensified by the dialect, as in his description of Solomon’s harem: “A harem’s a bo’d’nhouse, I reck’n. Mos’ likely dey has rackety times in de nussery.” 40 More complex are the disparities that expand to significance beyond simple juxtaposition. Pap’s tirade against a government that allows a free Negro to vote is humorous because of the dissimilarity between the elegant black college professor and scroungy white Pap, who “was just about to go and vote, myself, if I warn’t too drunk to git there.” 41 This contrast expands to suggest the larger incongruity of allocating human rights on the basis of skin color in a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Similarly, Jim’s fractured logic of the fiscal advantages of running away can be amusing—“I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hundr’d dollars” 42 —but as the reader continues to think about it, Jim’s logic is no more skewed than a system in which humans are commodities, of monetary value to their owners but not to themselves. Thus comedy slides into satire, and the satire of Huckleberry Finn extends over a remarkably wide range. At its highest level, Twain attacks the social attitudes in the prewar Mississippi Valley which denied common humanity to black people. It is not simply a question of white hostility to blacks, although that attitude is ridiculed in Pap’s political oration (“when they told me there was a state in this country where they’d let that nigger

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vote, I drawed out”). 43 Twain’s main concern is to show that inhumanity is a subtle evil, that the degradation of blacks was more a product of the indifference of the Aunt Sallys than the brutality of the Simon Legrees: “We blowed out a cylinder-head.” “Good gracious! anybody hurt?” “No’m. Killed a nigger.” “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” 44

Huck is glad to see Jim on Jackson’s Island (“I warn’t lonesome, now”), and he immediately identifies with him, but he continues to repeat the clichés of a deformed conscience. 45 Twain’s satire thus reaches through Huck to probe the social structure of the Mississippi Valley: “Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.” 46 Twain’s thematic statement of brotherhood is twofold. It is made directly, through Huck’s fellowship with Jim, and obliquely, through the satirical attack on conventional attitudes. Huck never defeats those attitudes and he never learns to generalize about humanity, slavery, or the Negro, but he does learn, as they float along, “talking, and singing, and laughing,” 47 that Jim is the best friend he has. Mississippi Valley religion provided an important prop for slavery and another target for Twain’s satire. Huck distinguishes several varieties: there is the religion of the Widow Douglas with its mouth-watering Providence, the grim asceticism of Miss Watson, the orgiastic hallelujahs of the Pokeville camp meeting, the boondocks preaching of Silas Phelps, and the final rapture of a crippled “Babtist,” who, according to Sally Phelps, had a limb amputated for mortification: “Yes, it was mortification—that was it. He turned blue all over, and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection.” 48 None of these varieties appeals to Huck. He does not explicitly reject religion, but he is unwilling to practice a piety which condemns Jim to slavery, one which can’t even produce fishhooks through prayer. Huck is unable to theorize about the inadequacies of nineteenth-century Midwestern religious beliefs, but his sound heart makes such theorizing unnecessary: he will go to hell for his friend. Slavery and religion are simply the beginning. Twain focuses Huck’s innocent eye, and the reader’s mature understanding, on romanticism, superstition, sentimentality; and especially on the ignorance, greed, and cruelty of the people who live in Pokeville, Bricksville, Pikesville, and the other “shackly” towns along the Mississippi. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a satirical anthology. Twain ridicules fortunetelling (Jim’s hairball); father-toson advice (“If I catch you about that school I’ll tan you good. First you know you’ll get religion, too. I never see such a son”); nineteenth-century

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parlors (clay parrots, crockery dogs and cats, turkey-wing fans, and artificial fruit); feuding (“and by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud”); river-town loafers (“chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching—a mighty ornery lot”); and poetry of the lugubrious American graveyard school (“Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d.”). 49 The list is virtually endless, and the satire is endlessly effective. Irony, satire’s tough cousin, is abundantly present as well, and the novel is rich in situational irony. Huck and Jim’s freedom ride carries them ever deeper into slave country. Tom’s elaborate escape at the novel’s end is contrived for an imprisoned slave who had already been freed. And black Jim, we come to realize, is the whitest man in the river valley. Within these large structural ironies are smaller, complementary ironic situations. Jim’s pious owner, Miss Watson, resolves to sell him down the river. The love between Sophia Grangerford and Harney Shepherdson results in the brutal fish-in-thebarrel shooting of two wounded boys as they attempt to swim to safety. Tom Sawyer experiences his happiest moment of romantic agony when he is shot in the leg. As these ironies unfold and deepen, it becomes clear there is yet another level in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain is not merely a user of the techniques of irony; he is an ironist. Like Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Swift, he believes that ultimately man is an ironic creature, a strange combination of power and impotence, nobility and evil, beauty and disease. Twain’s version of Hamlet’s soliloquy on man (noble in reason, infinite in faculties, and the quintessence of dust) is filtered through Jim’s Missouri Negro dialect in a speech about Pap that is doubly ironic, given Jim’s white and black angelology: “Dey’s two angels hoverin’ roun’ ‘bout him. One uv ‘em is white en shiny en ‘tother one is black. De white one gits him to go right, a little while, den de black one sail in en bust it all up. A body can’t tell, yit, which one gwyne to fetch him at de las’.” 50 Mark Twain would grow increasingly aware of the incongruity between the white angel and the black, between man’s potential and his performance, and immutable irony would come to play a larger role in his writing. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, however, grim irony exists side-by-side with highly specific satire and both are leavened by comedy. The ending, for example, mixes the anti-romantic satire of Tom’s evasion campaign with the comic uproar the campaign causes on the Phelpses’ farm, and both of these are funneled into the concluding irony astutely articulated by Huck, when he answers the doctor’s question about Tom’s condition: “‘He had a dream,’ I says, ‘and it shot him.’” 51 This complex mixture has led to the debates and passions the book has inspired, and provides a key to its future. Huck Finn, like Brer Rabbit, lives on the edge of emergency, negotiating one crisis after another, always battered but always getting through. And the same goes for his book. Every generation seems to discover a new problem with the novel, but every generation continues to read it. Like all great works of art, Adven-

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tures of Huckleberry Finn has the power to unsettle and revise as well as to define and stabilize. It is a mirror of the reader’s dreams and fears, of what we find amusing, what we find admirable, and what we find disturbing in human culture—in Huck Finn’s time, in Mark Twain’s time, and in our own.

Chapter Ten

Comic Contrast and Violent Humor A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

“For ‘tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petar.” 1 Hamlet

After publishing five books in as many years, culminating in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, Mark Twain did not produce another book until 1889, when A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was issued. He was not, however, idle during this time, for the middle 1880s were the busiest and perhaps the happiest period in his life, largely free of the emergencies and disasters that marked the early and late years of the Clemenses’ family life. Twain and Livy were both healthy, as were their troika of daughters, the eldest of whom, Susy, started writing a not inconsiderable biography of her increasingly famous father in 1885, when she was thirteen. The success of Huckleberry Finn that year was a triumph for Twain as publisher as well as author, for it was the first book issued by his new publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Co. Ghost-directed by Charley Webster, Twain’s nephew-inlaw, the subscription company then issued a handsome two-volume edition of the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, which Grant had finished only a few days before dying of throat cancer. The memoirs sold 300,000 copies, and Mark Twain proudly paid the dead general’s impoverished widow unprecedented royalties that ultimately totaled more than $420,000. The memoirs of other war heroes followed, as did a biography of Pope Leo XIII, modestly advertised by the company as “The Greatest Book of the Age!” and one that “Every Catholic in the Land Should Possess.” 2 That advertising, and the project itself, suggests the overleaping imagination of Colonel Sellers, and 217

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even that incurably optimistic entrepreneur would have been awed by the private audience Charley and Annie Webster had with the Pope to discuss their uncle’s global strategies for issuing the papal biography. Immersed in publishing schemes, inventions, patents, lawsuits, and international copyright, Twain was involved with so many activities during this period he hired a business manager. Euphoric about his literary and financial success, he told a friend that “I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.” 3 Like the boom and bust miners in the West he had depicted, Mark Twain was never one to save for a rainy day. During this period, he invested in grape-harvesting shears, a Kaolatype brass-casting process, and a typesetting machine, for as he wrote to Howells, “I must speculate in something, such being my nature.” 4 The Paige typesetter, he was convinced, would revolutionize modern life and earn millions: “[It] is far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived by man.” 5 Amidst this swirl of nonliterary activities, the author/publisher/investor worked fitfully at Mark Twain’s Library of Humor, dramatizations of Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper, a projected book on the Sandwich Islands, an early version of his autobiography, and a half dozen plays presumably to be coauthored with Howells. He also returned to the lecture circuit, giving readings jointly with George Washington Cable during the fall and winter of 1884-85. Stimulated by perusing a copy of Thomas Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur, which Cable gave him during their tour, Twain made a note in his journal: Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the middle ages. Have the notions & habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can't scratch. Cold in the head—can't blow—can't get at handkerchief, can't use iron sleeve. Iron gets red hot in the sun—leaks in the rain, gets white with frost & freezes me solid in winter. Suffer from lice & fleas. Make disagreeable clatter when I enter church. Can't dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down, can't get up. 6

By 1886 Twain was at work, intermittently, on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which he finished in the spring of 1889. COMIC AND SATIRIC CONTRASTS A Connecticut Yankee both recapitulates Mark Twain’s works up to that point in his career, and predicts what will follow. Except for the opening “Word of Explanation” and the closing “Final P. S. by M. T. ,” the story is told by a character narrator, Hank Morgan, who combines Tom Sawyer’s showoff qualities with Huck Finn’s pragmatism. As in Roughing It and “Old

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Times on the Mississippi,” the naïve narrator loses his naiveté as the tale progresses, and, as in the travel books, the voice of the author often intrudes. King Arthur’s ordeal as a slave in A Connecticut Yankee is foreshadowed by Edward VII’s suffering as a commoner in The Prince and the Pauper. And the story of King Arthur’s Court, like the story of Huck Finn’s Mississippi Valley, is trapped in history—modernization didn’t happen in the sixth century, just as emancipation didn’t happen in the 1840s; in each case, Twain invents a somewhat overdone ending which returns the narrative to the culture that the book is meant to undermine. Like his earlier works, Connecticut Yankee is sublimely indifferent to consistency. It is both humorous and serious, for by the late 1880s Twain had become interested in speaking out directly on economic and political issues. Without relinquishing his command of comedy, he became more acerbic in his satire and more aware of the ironies of the human condition. All of Mark Twain’s works are built on dualities, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a cornucopia of contrasts that run the gamut from a frolicsome “jumbling together of extravagant incongruities” to the “pitifully ludicrous” to a “vast sardonic laugh.” 7 At the far edge, Twain’s contrasts are beyond even the grim humor of irony, and his depiction of injustice and suffering lurches into sentimentality. Even there, however, he works from a strategy of exaggerated disparity, which Hank Morgan calls “hideous contrast.” Next to the wretched slave band in the market square of Cambenet, stands an orator “making a speech . . . in fulsome laudation of ‘our glorious British liberties!’” The following chapter, “A Pitiful Incident,” details the death of one woman by burning and another by hanging. The gruesome effect of both scenes is heightened by the innocence of these young mothers with babes at the breast, the barbarism of their inquisitors, and the incredible circumstances of their indictments. The woman who was burned as a witch lived in a village where several cows died mysteriously; the husband of the woman who was hanged was impressed into the Royal Navy, and his desolate wife stole a piece of linen worth ¼ of a cent to buy food for her starving baby. Twain is so wedded to contrast and exaggeration that he tends to use them even when his purpose is not entertainment. How does a humorist get the most mileage out of a contrast? By starting with opposites, and then pushing them to extremes. Take a present-day American, and not just any American but a hardheaded, materialistic “Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment.” 8 Make him a blacksmith and a horse-doctor, and then head superintendent of the Colt Arms Factory. Take this resourceful, no-nonsense man, who is unlikely to believe in fairy tales, and drop him into the past, in Europe, into the most fairy-tale kingdom of them all, lost in the dreamy mists of history and encrusted with the extravagant fancies of chivalric romance. Keep incongru-

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ity fresh by investigating all sorts of dichotomies—political, economic, cultural—and tie the story together with a marriage across the centuries. The title says it all, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court takes its place as the most complex and inventive of the many contrasts on which Twain’s fiction is based. The disparities begin with the reader’s superiority to the naïve narrator, Hank Morgan, whose “passion for art” had been expressed in his house in East Hartford, where every room had an “insurance-chromo” on the wall or “a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home over the door.” 9 Both fascinated and amused by Malory’s language, Mark Twain quickly turns to linguistic confrontations: “Fair sir, will ye just?” said [a knight, after Hank wakes up in the past] “Will I which?” “Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for”— “What are you giving me?” I said. “Get along back to your circus, or I’ll report you.” 10

Twain sets up similar exchanges between Hank and Sandy, his traveling companion, which remind us of those between Scotty Briggs and the minister in Roughing It. Hank also stacks the present against the past with his similes—a knight’s helmet is “a nail-keg with slits in it,” his horse’s trappings hang down “like a bed-quilt”—and with his parody of Sandy’s Maloryesque tales of knightly combat: The fights are all alike: a couple of people come together with great random . . . and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield, and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast his spear, and the other man brast his shield, and down he goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and brake his neck, and then there’s another elected, and another and another and still another, till the material is all used up; and when you come to figure up results, you can’t tell one fight from another nor who was whipped. 11

The language play fades out as Hank learns the lingo and begins to use it himself with words like raiment, sooth, and parley. Increasingly acclimated to the earlier time, he reverses the point of view of his similes and describes a tower “clothed with ivy from base to summit, as with a shirt of scale mail.” 12 Gradually Twain turns in earnest to his chief subject, the chasm between nineteenth-century America and old-time England. By the latter, which he calls the sixth century, Twain means a mélange of the legendary time of Arthur, feudalism, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance—more or less all of British history prior to 1800 mashed together. Unrepentant about this vagueness, the author announces in his preface that inasmuch as

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the ungentle laws and customs touched upon in this tale . . . existed in the English and other civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in practice in that day also. One is quite justified in inferring that wherever one of these laws or customs was lacking in that remote time, its place was competently filled by a worse one. 13

Ostensibly the book is a satire on inherited aristocracy, established religion, and oppressive laws and taxes—conveyed by a contrast within the sixth century between the privileged classes and the oppressed masses, and by a contrast between the sixth century and modern democracy, religious freedom, and legal equality. Here is how Twain described A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court seventeen years later in his Autobiography: That book was an attempt to imagine, and, after a fashion, set forth, the hard conditions of life for the laboring and defenceless poor in bygone times in England, and, incidentally, contrast these conditions with those under which the civil and ecclesiastical pets of privilege and high fortune lived in those times. I think I was purposing to contrast that English life—not just the English life of Arthur's day, but the English life of the whole of the Middle Ages— with the life of modern Christendom and modern civilization—to the advantage of the latter, of course. That advantage is still claimable, and does creditably and handsomely exist everywhere in Christendom— 14

This statement is straightforward enough, but the last sentence continues on, after the dash, with “if we leave out Russia and the royal palace of Belgium.” And then the following sentence in the Autobiography launches a harsh attack on the “wild beast—King Leopold II— who for money's sake mutilates, murders, and starves, half a million of friendless and helpless poor natives in the Congo State every year.” The autobiographical entry mirrors the strategy of the book—contrasting the sixth century to the nineteenth, to the advantage of the latter; as well as comparing the sixth century to the nineteenth, to the disadvantage of both. Feudal slavery suggests black slavery in the U.S. and wage slavery everywhere in the nineteenth century. The feudal peasant who sided with landowners in perpetuating slavery “was just the twin of the Southern ‘poor white’ of the far future.” 15 Thus Twain, through this complex skein of interwoven contrasts and comparisons, is able to satirize both medieval and modern civilizations, expressing his concern with the poverty and oppression of the past as well as the present. There are also moments in which he reverses his primary strategy and gives a positive picture of medieval England—frank and “simple-hearted creatures” living in unspoiled “fair green valleys” 16 —to the disparagement of the present. Even in Hank’s view, permeated as it is with a naïve faith in progress, shoving the sixth century into the nineteenth would not be an unmixed blessing: “Unsuspected by this dark land, I had the civilization of the nineteenth century

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booming under its very nose! . . . There it was, as sure a fact, and as substantial a fact as any serene volcano, standing innocent with its smokeless summit in the blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its bowels.” 17 Two of the most urgent stories of the past two centuries are the achievements of humankind, ascending one technological Everest after another, and the widening wakes of devastation that have accompanied these triumphal ascents. Mark Twain, precociously for his time, had an early notion of this second story. Like those of us who use our computers, smart phones, and the Internet to complain about runaway technology, Twain saw the scientific and industrial miracles of the late nineteenth century as both crown and cross. If this notion seems somewhat jumbled in Connecticut Yankee, joked about one minute and anguished over the next, it is both because Mark Twain is a humorist, never planting himself firmly in one spot, and because he is prescient, glancing into an abyss unrecognized by most of his contemporaries. THE HUMOR OF VIOLENCE A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is not unique among Mark Twain’s fictions for the scenes of violence, death, and destruction it presents. There are, after all, 35 deaths described and reported in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, along with Pap’s beatings and his attempted murder of Huck, Jim’s snakebite, the wrecked steamboat, feuding, the selling of slaves, the tarring and feathering of the king and the duke, and Tom’s bullet wound. Yet Connecticut Yankee, with its vivid depictions of human suffering and its concluding mass slaughter of 30,000 knights, wins the prize as the most violent of Twain’s stories. Huck Finn states that “I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened” 18 when the Grangerford boys are gunned down in the river, but Hank Morgan has no such reticence. The carnage he describes and creates raises an important issue in the work of our most famous humorist—the relationship between humor and violence. From the point of view of the physics of humor, violence would seem to be a good bet, as our terms for a comic event suggest: someone cracks a joke; the punch line strikes us funny; we explode with laughter. A violent act is often sudden, unexpected, surprising—precisely the conditions required for humor. The difficulty lies with the psychology, for an event that is painful or frightening, as violence often can be, is unlikely to be amusing. Comedy, as Aristotle notes, must not be “destructive.” 19 Thus the trick for the humorist is to keep the shock and surprise of violence while disarming the psychological damage. One way to do that is to use expressions of violence that are simply rhetorical or metaphorical. The violence lies in the expression, not in the situation. Mark Twain’s penchant for enthusiastic overstatement often led him to extremes; his expressions are littered with fake corpses. This habit is

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not uncommon, for most people talk offhandedly about being dead tired, sick with grief, starved to death, driven crazy, or so mad I could have killed him. “Drop dead,” we might say, even to a friend, or “go to hell.” These clichés are worn so smooth that their rough surface is no longer felt, and the speaker, in an attempt to reinvigorate them, has to talk loudly, gesture, and toss in intensifiers: “we were literally starving to death,” which, of course, doesn’t mean literally at all. The difference is that Mark Twain, who detested clichés, does it better, creating novel and ingeniously explosive metaphors, and building imaginative violence into tall stories in his letters, lectures, and fiction: I am so happy I want to scalp somebody. 20 Nothing but dynamite can move Mrs. Clemens away from home in the winter season. 21 [Curry] said that Gould sold out [his mining claim] for a pair of second-hand government blankets and a bottle of whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life. 22 I heard lately of a worn and sorely tried American student [of the German language] who used to fly to a certain German word for relief when he could bear up under his aggravations no longer,—the only word in the whole language whose sound was sweet and precious to his ear and healing to his lacerated spirit. This was the word Damit . . . and so, at last, when he learned that the emphasis was not on the first syllable, his only stay and support was gone, and he faded away and died. 23

This sort of violence is purely rhetorical; it doesn’t happen; it is a game of exaggeration played between author and reader. An animal rights advocate and a gentle lover of cats, Mark Twain would not have dreamed of swinging one by the tail, but he liked the phrase “swing a cat” so much he used it in both Innocents Abroad and Roughing It as a way of measuring the size of a room. Also in Roughing It, Twain retells a cat story created by his yarnspinning friend Jim Gillis. The feline lead in the tale is named Tom Quartz who, unacquainted with the new technique of mining quartz with dynamite, settles in for a nap in a shaft where a charge has just been laid. When the charge is touched off, “everything let go with an awful crash, ‘n’ about four million ton of rocks ‘n’ dirt ‘n’ smoke ‘n’ splinters shot up ‘bout a mile an’ a half into the air, an’ by George, right in the dead centre of it was old Tom Quartz a goin’ end over end, an’ a snortin’ an’ a sneez’n,’an’ a clawin’ an’ a reachin’ for things like all possessed.” 24

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Like the cartoon cats in movie shorts for whom Tom is a great grandfather, he finally descends—alive but singed and blackened and stove up— and stalks off with a “cussed prejudice against quartz mining.” The reader is tipped off to the game of purely rhetorical violence by its excess, and it applies to people as well as cats. We don’t get excited about Buck Fanshaw, who “in the delirium of a wasting typhoid fever, had taken arsenic, shot himself through the body, cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his neck.” 25 But what about violence that is real, at least in the sense that fictional happenings have an illusion of reality and that fictional characters are of concern to us? The answer is distance—emotional distance created between the reader and the violent event that reduces the impact of the violence. There are many ways to create emotional distance. Physical distance is one. If a tractor-trailer jackknifes on a freeway in far-off California, spilling four thousand quarts of strawberries, it is easier for a person in the East to joke about a “traffic jam” than it would be if the accident happened on the street in front of that person’s house. Time also can dull the sharp edge of violence, and a disaster safely in the past can often be turned to humorous account. As James Thurber put it, “a man does not pull the pillow over his head when he wakes in the morning because he suddenly remembers some awful thing that happened to him fifteen or twenty years ago.” 26 Another strategy consists of depersonalizing the violence. When Hank Morgan and the king are out adventuring, they are attacked by “a couple of knights.” These are knights in the abstract, without names or faces or personalities or families or histories. When Hank blows them up with a dynamite bomb, the scene is not one of human tragedy, but simply a “steady drizzle of microscopic fragments of knights and hardware and horseflesh.” 27 The tonnage is greater in the concluding battle of the sand-belt, when Hank and his little group of high-tech assistants face off against the massed chivalry of all England, but the impersonalizing strategy is the same. The first phalanx of attacking knights gallops across the sand, which has been mined with dynamite torpedoes, and then the whole front of that host shot into the sky with a thunder-crash, and became a whirling tempest of rags and fragments; and along the ground lay a thick wall of smoke that hid what was left of the multitude from our sight. . . . Of course we could not count the dead, because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogeneous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons. 28

If a character to be disposed of is a recognizable human person and has a larger role in the drama than generalized knighthood, the humorist separates the reader from the negative effects of bloodshed with the time-honored literary tactic of denigrating the person who is to be killed or injured. After the battle of the sand-belt, Hank goes out to help the wounded. When he

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bends over a knight who appeals for help, the knight—Sir Meliagraunce— stabs him, and thus puts himself in the risky category of the black-hatted, foul-mouthed, stubble-bearded, chaos-threatening, shoot-first villains who litter the prairies of American westerns. We are unmoved when Clarence, Hank’s second-in-command, finishes off Sir Meliagraunce. Much of the violence in Connecticut Yankee is either rhetorical or distanced, but not all, for Twain wants to demonstrate that the arrogance of nobility and church and the shackles of poverty and ignorance constantly brutalize the laboring masses. Sometimes his violence is serious, sometimes it is comical; and the author’s ability to shift gears rapidly may occasionally be greater than that of his readers. The section on Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s treacherous sister, demonstrates the author’s quick turns: page 190: When a pageboy slips while serving the queen, “she slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a way as another person would have harpooned a rat! Poor child, he slumped to the floor . . . and was dead.” 196: At a banquet, the crude band plays one of Hank Morgan’s (and Twain’s) least favorite songs, “In the Sweet By and By,” and the queen “had the composer hanged, after dinner.” 197-98: The pageboy’s grandmother suddenly appears and curses Morgan le Fay. The queen orders the woman to be burned at the stake, but the grandmother is rescued by Sandy’s quick thinking and Hank’s reputation as a magician. 198: The band plays “In the Sweet By and By” again, and Hank gives the queen “permission to hang the whole band.” 199-201: Hank descends to the Queen’s grisly torture chambers where a man is being “torn asunder” on the rack. The reader is told what he looked like, and how old he is. We meet his family. The turn of the rack is described, and we hear the young man’s screams. 206-07: Hank describes the executioner as “a good, pains-taking and paingiving official” and makes him the leader of the new band. As a virtuoso in disparity, contrast, and inconsistency, Mark Twain seems not to have worried about these cheek-by-jowl alternations in attitude, though sometimes the effect can be bizarre. The most extreme example is on page 260 of the first American edition of Connecticut Yankee, which contains a 26-line joke about an ancient anecdote followed by five lines concerning a band of slaves that Hank Morgan encounters. Slicing down through the

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joke is Dan Beard’s illustration of manacled, half-naked slaves being driven forward by the trader’s whip (see Figure 10.1). The Iowa/California edition, which attempts to reproduce the appearance of the first edition as precisely as possible, quietly moves the illustration to a position later in the chapter. The difficulty with the illustration is not simply rapid alternation, but the simultaneity of joke and slaves, and Twain sometimes achieves this mixture in the text itself. When Clarence lists the names of their friends who have perished in the war between Arthur and Launcelot that brings an end to Camelot, Hank’s sincere pity (“you tear out my heartstrings”) intermingles with his droll unhappiness in losing key members of the knightly baseball team he has established (“My peerless short-stop! I’ve seen him catch a daisy-cutter in his teeth. Come, I can’t stand this!”). 29 Clarence also describes how a church committee, which had come to demand the surrender of Hank’s group before the final battle, had inadvertently tested the dynamite torpedoes. Hank: “Did the committee make a report?” Clarence: “Yes, they made one. You could have heard it a mile.” 30 Dan Beard’s illustration for this scene, which looks much like the illustration of the detonated Tom Quartz in Roughing It, depicts a monk being blown sky-high. The caption reads “High Church.” 31 If you had asked Mark Twain how something could be simultaneously comic and serious, he might have replied by asking how human beings could be so smart and so dumb at the same time, so compassionate and so indifferent to the same incident. He described Howells’ A Foregone Conclusion, as “absolute perfection of character-drawing & withal so moving in the matter of pathos now, humor then, & both at once occasionally,” 32 and Twain often praised literature of “the sort that makes a reader laugh & cry at the same time.” 33 In 1907, a reviewer of Twain’s Christian Science defined the author’s skill as “the delightfullest imaginable blending of logic and laughter. . . . Its author is funny when he is serious as naturally as a crab goes ahead backward.” 34 Twain summarized this key aspect of both his theory and his practice of humor in a statement made to a reporter in Sidney in 1895: I maintain that a man can never be a humorist, in thought or in deed, until he can feel the springs of pathos. Indeed, there you have a basis of something material to go upon in trying to comprehend what this impalpable thing of true humor is. Trust me, he was never yet properly funny who was not capable at times of being very serious. And more: the two are as often as not simultaneous. 35

What Twain meant by this and dozens of similar comments was simple, but revolutionary in terms of nineteenth-century conventional notions of humor: it is possible, at times even necessary, to laugh about serious matters.

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Figure 10.1. Copy of page 260 of the 1889 edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court ; courtesy of the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

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SATIRE AND POIGNANCY In Three Kings, a film that actor George Clooney describes as “very funny, very dark,” 36 the soldiers dancing in Iraq, just after the opening scene of a grim killing, are reminiscent of Twain’s bicycle-riding knights; and filmmaker David O. Russell’s comment on Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags in relation to Three Kings captures Twain’s notion exactly: “That book showed me that you could have outrageous satire, then suddenly turn the corner and discover real poignancy. They’re not mutually exclusive. . . . I think that mixture of satire and poignancy is what’s good and interesting and funny and emotional.” 37 Yet some critics in our own time, who admire the genre bending and intertextuality of contemporary art, are reluctant to give credit to similar tendencies in the writings of Mark Twain, a post-modern before his time. Troubled by the violence, quick shifts, and inconsistencies, and the fact that Hank Morgan both does and does not speak for Twain, these critics conclude that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a failure. 38 Those who think that Twain was a bitter pessimist in his later career, that he turned from burlesque to nightmare, look for the moment he jumped off the cliff, and find it in the closing chapters of Connecticut Yankee. The difficulty with this view is that Connecticut Yankee, like Twain’s career as a whole, contains serious elements early and comic elements late. Long before the book’s conclusion there are scenes of suffering and brutality and oppression; even during the conclusion there are comic and amusingly satiric moments; and throughout there are ironies that have a wry pleasure. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court does sound deep notes, as Mark Twain responded to labor unrest in America, where political democracy had not produced economic democracy, and to the monarchies which governed most of the world in the late nineteenth century. These notes were precisely summarized in a speech Twain gave four months after the book’s publication, in which he defined the things that made it impossible for a country to be called civilized: “human slavery, despotic government, inequality, numerous and brutal punishments for crimes, superstition almost universal, ignorance almost universal, and dirt and poverty almost universal.” 39 Twain was, as he said, burning to express these issues, and he poured his fire into Connecticut Yankee, while at the same time expanding, rather than abandoning, his career as a humorist. This effort produced a unique book untied to literary unities, mingling kings and clowns, unbroken to the saddle of any known genre. It is a book that will continue to confound critics and apparently please the public, for there are currently 207 editions listed in Bowker’s Global Books in Print, and that number does not include foreign language editions. 40 The remarkable fact about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is that Mark Twain succeeded in writing a work both serious and humorous, historical and fanciful, compassionate and acerbic,

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comic and ironic—it is a “barrel of odds and ends,” as Huck put it about his favorite victuals: “things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.” 41 W. D. Howells was one of the first to recognize the distinctive qualities of Connecticut Yankee, which he read in proof in the fall of 1889. His seriatim responses as he read were increasingly enthusiastic— “original,” “delightful,” “glorious,” “Titanic”— and his comments about the book in Harper’s “Editor’s Study” went beyond his earlier reviews of Twain’s works, positive as those earlier reviews were: The delicious satire, the marvellous wit, the wild, free, fantastic humor are the colors of the tapestry, while the texture is a humanity that lives in every fibre. . . . We must recognize him here as first of those who laugh, not merely because his fun is unrivalled, but because there is a force of right feeling and clear thinking in it that never got into fun before. 42

Responding gratefully, Twain declared that “the satisfaction [the review] affords me could not be more prodigious if the book deserved every word of it.” 43 By this time the two old friends had entered into a sort of partnership in the promotion of the humorist’s works. Howells was useful to Twain not only in encouraging, proofreading, and suggesting revisions, but also in presenting those works to the world. This service is so important it warrants a separate chapter.

Chapter Eleven

The Advocacy of W. D. Howells

“I hope the public will be willing to see me with your eyes. I shouldn’t ask anything better than that.” 1 Mark Twain to Howells

I By 1920, the year of his death, William Dean Howells was regarded by some as a tame Victorian tabby, “an urbane and highly respected old gentleman,” according to H. L. Mencken, “a sitter on committees.” 2 But in the late nineteenth century, Howells was a literary lion. As editor of the Atlantic Monthly, author, reviewer, critic, and four-star general in the war for literary realism, Howells’ influence was as prodigious as his published output: 35 novels; 36 plays; 39 volumes of stories, poetry, travel, criticism, biography, and autobiography; some 1200 essays and reviews. He campaigned to introduce American readers to Tolstoy and Ibsen and other European writers, some of whom he read in French, Italian, and Spanish editions. He helped younger writers get started—Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary N. Murfree, Harold Frederick, Thorstein Veblen, Charles Chesnutt, Hamlin Garland, Abraham Cahan, Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington, Frank Norris. He persuaded the 21-year-old Stephen Crane to “take up his vocation again” 3 by praising Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, after it had been ignored by booksellers, reviewers, and the public; and he introduced Crane and others to the poems of another writer he was just discovering, Emily Dickinson. Howells was a founding member of the NAACP, and was unanimously elected first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters when it was organized in 1908.

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Half of this busy and productive life, four decades, was enlivened by Howells’ close friendship with Mark Twain. Many twentieth-century critics—who divided American authors into Westerners and Easterners, Indians and palefaces, vernacular rebels and upholders of the genteel tradition— enjoyed differentiating the two men. The one derived from Rabelais, Chaucer, the Elizabethans and Benvenuto— buccaneers of the literary high seas, loud laughers, law-breakers, giants of a lordlier day; the other came down from Jane Austen, Washington Irving and Hannah More. The one wrote English as Michelangelo hacked marble, broadly, brutally, magnificently; the other was a maker of pretty waxen groups. 4

Mencken’s colorful contrast has a modicum of truth, but it obscures the many similarities between the two Midwesterners, both of whom grew up on the banks of great rivers (Howells’ Dean uncles were Ohio River steamboat pilots, captains, and owners), left school early for the print shop, began their careers as journalists and then travel writers, and came east in the middle 1860s to pursue their fortunes in literature. A year and three months younger than Mark Twain, Howells was established as assistant editor and chief book reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly in 1869, when he happened across The Innocents Abroad. The Atlantic rarely reviewed subscription books, a somewhat crass and disreputable form of publishing, but Howells was interested in expanding both the readership and the authorship of the magazine, letting fresh winds from the West blow into a Boston that had become, from the point of view of outsiders, a bit stuffy. Something about Innocents caught his eye, and he gave the book a long and warm review, even though the syntactic hesitations in his closing sentence suggest he had difficulty placing the author: “It is no business of ours to fix his rank among the humorists California has given us, but we think he is, in a way entirely different from all the others, quite worthy of the company of the best.” 5 Mark Twain was delighted to be recognized by the influential Atlantic, and he called on the editor, James Fields, who introduced him to Howells. The friendship thus begun would last until Twain’s death, over forty years later. During those years, the two visited one another often in Cambridge, Hartford, Boston, and New York, shared family joys and sorrows—both men had daughters who died in their mid-twenties—and frequently exchanged letters, 683 of which are extant. They collaborated on projects, such as Mark Twain’s Library of Humor, and even attempted, though without success, to coauthor several plays. They read and discussed each other’s works and ideas, and “talked and talked and talked,” as Howells put it, “of everything in the heavens and on the earth.” 6 Each man was generous in his admiration for the other’s writings, and Twain had an expert’s appreciation of Howells’ “unobtrusive, and quiet [humor] which flows softly all around about and over

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and through the mesh of the page [making] no more noise than does the circulation of the blood.” 7 As they aged together, both Twain and Howells grew increasingly critical of corruption in government at home, American imperialism abroad, and the injustice of a capitalistic system in which laborers powered a booming industrial economy without sharing in its benefits. They became increasingly sensitive to the ironies of modern life, and to the ironies of their own lives as well. In 1890, Howells wrote to his father that “I stopped to see Mark Twain at Hartford, and we talked so much all day. . . . He and his wife and Elinor [Howells’ wife] and I are all of accord in our way of thinking: that is, we are theoretical socialists, and practical aristocrats. 8 In addition to their close personal and intellectual ties, Howells was important to Twain professionally. He published Twain in the Atlantic, read his manuscripts, suggested revisions, sometimes even proofread printer’s copy; and then, when Twain’s works were published, Howells praised them to the author in private and reviewed them for the large audience that his position as author, editor, and critic commanded. Howells published thirteen reviews and articles on Mark Twain’s writings in the Atlantic Monthly, Century Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Weekly, the North American Review, and the New York Tribune; and republished eleven of them as a supplement to the biography of his friend he completed in late May 1910—a biography written at astonishing speed and in compounded sorrow, for Elinor Howells died on 7 May, only two weeks after the death of Mark Twain on 21 April. For Howells as well as for Twain, writing could be an antidote to grief, a means of keeping the dead in living memory. If the title of Howells’ biography—My Mark Twain—seems a little proprietary today, Howells had earned it, for his services to Twain as friend, literary consultant, and interpreter to the public helped shape Twain’s development as a writer and the way in which his writings were understood. Almost from the beginning, Howells recognized that Twain was destined for greatness. By 1882, the humorist’s writings had led Howells, as he wrote to Twain, to comprehend “an idea of fame. . . . I wonder how long you will last, confound you? Sometimes I think we others shall be remembered merely as your friends and correspondents.” 9 Years later Howells repeated this idea, which would turn out to be more prophetic than he might have wished, in the penultimate letter he wrote to Twain, joking about the Oxford degrees they had both received late in their careers: “I shall feel it honor enough if they put on my tombstone, ‘He was born in the same Century and general Section of middle western Country with Dr. S. L. Clemens, Oxon., and had his Degree three years before him through a Mistake of the University.’” 10 A few months later, after Twain’s death, Howells summed up his opinion of his friend in the soaring last sentence of My Mark Twain, a sentence that Twain would probably have liked to have on his own tombstone: “Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets,

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seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.” 11 II As Mark Twain’s champion, Howells had his work cut out, for humorous writing in nineteenth-century America, like sex, was privately enjoyed by multitudes but publicly defended by few. An appetite for laughter seemed to represent man’s lower instincts. Art and literature, in the view of many, were “ever pointing upward, and the influence of true art upon man is to make him look upward, too, to that vast where his Ideal sits, ‘pinnacled in the lofty ether dim.’” 12 Nineteenth-century Americans bought the works of Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Bill Arp, Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, and other Phunny Phellows, but they also bought the notions that the humorist was at the low end of a scale which ranked the poet at the top, that entertainment was but a ragged handmaiden to the princess Instruction, and that the “spirit of irreverence [was] the great fault in American character.” 13 Matthew Arnold, in “Civilisation in the United States,” blamed American inferiority on, among other things, “the addiction to ‘the funny man,’ who is a national misfortune there.” 14 Mark Twain lost no time in mounting a spirited response in notes and speeches, where he described Arnold’s idea of civilization as being restricted to a “top class—as in tropical countries snow is restricted to the mountain summits . . . peculiarly hard, and glittering, and bloodless, and unattainable”; 15 and he responded also in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, with Hank Morgan’s denunciations of an inherited aristocracy and a privileged clergy. Matthew Arnold died—of prospective apoplexy, Twain might have said—a year before Connecticut Yankee was issued, but its publication rallied many British critics to Arnoldian assessments. They had cheered Mark Twain earlier when he struck them as a colorful exotic from the provinces, but an outright attack on the British past and present, not to mention Dan Beard’s illustrations of Tennyson as Merlin and Queen Victoria as a sow, was another matter. Mark Twain could shrug off foreign critics, but more problematic was the advice of some of his well-meaning supporters at home—a conspiracy of well wishers who, in various ways, urged our remarkable leopard to change his spots. The Reverend Edwin Pond Parker, a Congregational colleague of Joe Twichell and a member of the Hartford Monday Evening Club, urged Twain to stick to serious writing. Others suggested balancing humor with profundity, or eloquence. Still others advised him to keep the humor but clean it up, eschewing vulgarity, slang, profanity, and irreverence. Twain’s response to these advisers was ambiguous. He appreciated their efforts to see him as more than a mere buffoon, writing to Mary Fairbanks that “I can be

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most laceratingly ‘funny without being vulgar,’” and to Livy, while he was courting her, that “I have had a venerable ex-Member of Congress praising me so lavishly about the serious passages in [my] lecture . . . that I am half ashamed of being a professional Humorist any more!” 16 On the other hand, Mark Twain knew that these supporters fell short of understanding his rich conception of humor, and he spoofed his own endeavors to be “frigidly proper in language & sentiment.” 17 Fortunately, he had another group of contemporary supporters with a more supple and subtle understanding of his talents. Joe Twichell, after Twain read his “Carnival of Crime” essay to the Hartford Monday Evening Club, noted in his journal that it was “very finely written—serious in its intent though vastly funny.” Joel Chandler Harris neatly described Twain’s satiric strategy in his review of the collected sketches in The Stolen White Elephant: “the keen blade of the satire is sheathed in a most kindly humor which by no means interferes with the carving arrangements.” H. H. Boyesen, a Howells protégé, declared that The Prince and the Pauper was an “entirely new departure [for] . . . the boisterous and rollicking humorist”—not a departure from humor, but an evolution to a humor growing freely and spontaneously out of the situations represented,— a sympathetic element, which appeals sometimes shrewdly, sometimes sweetly, to the senses, and is never intrusive or unduly prominent; sometimes, indeed, a humor so tender and subdued as to surprise those who are under its spell with doubts whether smiles or tears shall be summoned to express the passing emotion.

Brander Matthews concluded that “we can see clearly now . . . he is to be classed . . . with Molière and Cervantes, with Chaucer and Fielding, humorists all of them.” 18 And then there was Howells; no one recognized the quality of Twain’s talent more perceptively or was better positioned to encourage and promote that talent. A subtle humorist himself, Howells understood the book-reading public and he made his pitch for Mark Twain in terms they could understand. He assured them in his early reviews that Twain’s humor was amiable and generous. Then, starting with an appraisal of Sketches, New and Old in the Atlantic in 1875, Howells developed a two-part strategy to educate readers who had long associated humor with homicidal pranks, stretched puns, and tortured orthography. The first part accepted, for the purpose of argument, the inferiority of humor assumed by Twain’s critics and supporters alike— critics who sneered that “Mark Twain is a jester, and very little more”; and supporters who claimed that “He is the great American humorist. But he is more than that.” 19 Howells replied that Twain’s writing had “right-mindedness” as well as “extravagance,” “a growing seriousness of meaning” as well

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as “burlesque.” 20 Mark Twain, Howells declared, had an earnest as well as a humorous side. At the same time—part two of his strategy—Howells developed a more subtle and far more important argument in its grasp of the nature of humor and Mark Twain’s achievement. In this part the inferiority of humor disappeared, along with the separation between serious and humorous. For his more discerning readers and colleagues, Howells maintained that humor was itself serious, intertwined with and inseparable from the deeper aspects of life—indeed, humor was one of life’s deeper aspects. This idea was developed in full for the first time in Howells’ review of A Tramp Abroad in 1880: [Mark Twain’s] humor springs from a certain intensity of common sense, a passionate love of justice, and a generous scorn of what is petty and mean; and it is these qualities which his “school” [i.e., other humorists] have not been able to “convey.” . . . It may be claiming more than a humorist could wish to assert that he is always in earnest; but this strikes us as the paradoxical charm of Mr. Clemens’s best humor. Its wildest extravagance is the break and fling from a deep feeling, a wrath with some folly which disquiets him worse than other men, a personal hatred for some humbug or pretension that embitters him beyond anything but laughter. . . . At the bottom of his heart he has often the grimness of a reformer; his wit is turned by preference . . . upon matters that are out of joint, that are unfair or unnecessarily ignoble, and cry out to his love of justice. 21

Two years later, in a long essay in Century Magazine, summarizing the career to date of “the most popular humorist who ever lived,” Howells reiterated this argument, describing Twain’s “indignant sense of right and wrong [and] scorn of all affectation and pretense.” He now raised the ante, claiming that Mark Twain, by his example and his success, had single-handedly transformed American humor. Humorous writing before Twain, Howells declared, “is terrible,” for it demonstrates “stupid and monkeyish cruelty of motive and intention.” Twain, on the other hand, does not “make one morally ashamed of liking him.” The earlier humorous style is steeped in “labored dictionary funning, in affected quaintness, in dreary dramatization, in artificial ‘dialect’; Mark Twain’s humor is as simple in form and direct as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant.” 22 These reviews did not go unnoticed in Hartford, where the campaign for serious humor was headquartered. When Howells’ review of Sketches appeared, Twain wrote Howells that it was “a perfectly superb notice,” especially since it came from “the recognized critical Court of Last Resort in the country.” He added that “Mrs. Clemens says, ‘Tell him I am just as grateful to him as I can be.’ . . . You see, the thing that gravels her is that I am so persistently glorified as a mere buffoon, as if that entirely covered my case— which she denies with venom.” 23 Livy often served Twain as a stalking horse

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for his own opinions, and he was not above putting words in her mouth, but in this campaign he didn’t have to. After the Tramp Abroad review, she had written to Howells herself, telling him that “We do thank you most heartily for your notice of Mr Clemens book—I have wondered so many times why some one did not take note of certain things in Mr Clemens which seemed to me his strong points, and now you have spoken of them so of course I am peculiarly pleased.” And so was Twichell, another charter member of the Mark Twain support group. “Joe Twichell was here last night,” Twain wrote to Howells, “wild with delight over your notice of the ‘Tramp.’” 24 Even little Susy, sponging up the adult conversations around the Clemenses’ dinner table, where the children took meals with their parents, declared in her biography that “[Papa] is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous.” Twain selected this passage for inclusion in the selections from his Autobiography that were published in the North American Review, and he added a footnote: “She has said it well and correctly.” 25 III In the spring of 1891, the frequent visits between the Howellses and the Clemenses were put on hold, for Mark Twain abruptly packed up his family, shuttered the Farmington Avenue house, and departed for Europe. Livy, whose health was always delicate, was in need of rest and mineral baths. Twain’s finances, stressed by down-the-drain investments in the never-quiteperfected Paige typesetter and the increasing costs of Webster and Co., were also suffering, and in need of respite from the “ghastly” expenses of his Hartford mansion and entourage. His overseas excursion was not for pleasure, since the humorist had “seen all the foreign countries I want to see except heaven & hell, & I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of those.” 26 Interrupted by business trips back to the U.S. in the early 1890s, and a world lecture tour in 1895-96, the Clemenses’ European jaunt would ultimately spin out to nine years, and involve more than a score of residences in half a dozen countries. During this quasi exile, Twain and Howells exchanged letters and Howells continued to beat the drums for Twain’s extraordinary merger of humor and gravity. Howells reviewed the first five volumes of a Harper’s multivolume edition of Twain’s works, Joan of Arc, and Paolo Bellezza’s Humour, which cites Mark Twain as “the greatest living humorist,” one who is “intimately seized and pervaded [by] the relations that connect joy and sorrow.” 27 Howells also served as co-editor of Cosmopolitan for four months in 1892, and it seems no accident that the popular monthly accepted three stories by Twain in the following year. Then, when Mark Twain returned to

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America in 1900, trailing clouds of international glory, Howells celebrated the occasion, along with the publication of a new 19-volume edition of the humorist’s works, by writing his longest and most discerning review of his friend’s literature. This comprehensive essay, published in the North American Review in February 1901, set out to introduce Mark Twain to a new generation of readers and to reinterpret him for the previous generation. 28 Howells begins by identifying Twain’s roots in both Western and Southern regions. From the West he seems to have inherited “an instinct of something chaotic, ironic, empiric in the order of experience” which freed him from the fetters of literary conventions and Eastern refinements. Twain, in Howells’ view, writes with vitality and directness, and sets down “the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or the thing that may be about to follow . . . [leaving] the reader to look after relevancies and sequences for himself.” Twain writes as if no one before had treated the topic he is concerned with; for him it is “a new world, and he explores it with a ramping joy, and shouts for the reader to come on and see.” In the South, Howells claims, Twain experienced the grotesque contrasts of “strict religiosity compatible . . . with savage precepts of conduct,” “whimsicality playing through [the] carnage” of a Kentucky feud, and “the ludicrous incongruity of a slaveholding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration of Independence.” Howells notes that Twain’s humor tends to assail overdogs rather than underdogs, and he speculates that growing up with slavery may have “lighted in the future humorist the indignation at injustice which glows in his page.” Howells’ 1901 essay goes on to emphasize the diversity of Mark Twain’s talents and the range of his works, from short sketches to novels, romances, picaresque tales, histories, and autobiographical travel books—all of which contain a unique intermingling of fancy and fact. And he makes a point of mentioning Twain’s new writings of the 1890s— “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” “Stirring Times in Austria,” “Concerning the Jews”—which Howells calls “those criticisms of life and literature which have more recently attested his interest in the greater and weightier things” and which have given Twain an “odd sort of primacy” in public discourse. Howells sees these recent essays not as stemming from personal tragedies and disappointments, but as “evidence of a constant growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in matters of public import,” and asserts that Twain’s “strong convictions, clear ideas, and ardent sentiments” are all intertwined with his humor. Howells’ closing note is an admonition to readers past, present, and future: In the light of the more modern appreciation, we elders may be able to see some things seriously that we once thought pure drolling, and from our experi-

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ence his younger admirers may learn to receive as drolling some things that they might otherwise accept as preaching. What we all should wish to do is to keep Mark Twain what he has always been: a comic force . . . united with . . . an ethic sense.

With Mark Twain back in America and living in New York, where Howells had moved in the late 1880s, the two friends resumed their visits and, from 1900 to 1910, exchanged 125 letters. To the end of Twain’s life, and beyond, for Howells outlived him by a decade, Howells argued that Twain’s example had redefined humorous writing, expanding its range and multiplying its purposes, revealing humor in topics high and low, in corners bright and dark, in matters trivial and profound. Mark Twain was, Howells believed, “the arch-humorist of the century.” 29 That pronouncement contains a touch of Twainian hyperbole, but over a century after it was made, it still seems to be largely accurate. IV Howells, however, did not have the last word, and his view was not the end but only the beginning of the debates about Mark Twain. In 1920, the year Howells died, Van Wyck Brooks got the many twentieth-century disputes off to a rollicking start with The Ordeal of Mark Twain, which brought the humorist to trial for America’s lingering Calvinism, rampant commercialism, and artistic barrenness. Ironically continuing the judgment of the age he was castigating, Brooks claimed that humor was Twain’s problem. Stifled by mother and wife, frustrated by materialism, handicapped by being born in “the barrenest spot in all Christendom . . . for the seed of genius to fall in,” Twain adopted [the role of humorist] unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic self-respect. . . . Thus his humour, which had originally served him as a protective coloration, ended by stunting and thwarting his creative life and leaving Mark Twain a scarred child . . . [who failed, ultimately,] to put away childish things and walk the stage as poets do. 30

The trouble with Brooks, replied Bernard DeVoto in Mark Twain’s America (1932), was his strange thesis that Clemens really wanted to be Shelley. . . . Mr. Brooks dislikes humor. . . . If Mark Twain really wanted to be Shelley, the desire was buried deeper than any research, psychological or skeptical, has revealed. The only fact that can be recovered . . . is that Mark’s earliest experiments with literature were humor, that he wrote humor through all the formative years of his career, and that during that time he wrote nothing but humor. . . . [His best

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In their later works, the two critics reached a certain accommodation. Brooks quoted DeVoto in The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947) and revised his earlier thesis, concluding that some of Twain’s writings, along with those of Melville and Whitman, “were destined to live with the best in America.” Although he had condemned Mark Twain’s humor in 1920, Brooks praised it in 1947, presenting examples of “the comic understatements, the equally comic exaggerations, the contrasts” of our “serio-comic Homer.” 32 DeVoto, after his exuberant defense of humor in Mark Twain’s America in 1932, turned his attention a decade later, in Mark Twain at Work, to the author’s inhibitions, psychic blocks, and “tortured revisions and adjustments,” 33 thus moving perilously close to the psychobiography he had earlier disparaged in Brooks’s The Ordeal of Mark Twain. While this scholarly crisscross was evolving, new debates were springing up, for Mark Twain had become an American icon and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by the 1950s, had become a fixture in American schools. Critics disagreed over whether Huckleberry Finn was a, or the, great American novel, whether the ending was defensible, whether Twain was an untutored genius or a careful artist, whether he was a fresh voice from the West or a captive of Eastern gentility, whether his sympathies lay with Northern abolitionism or Southern racism, whether his late works demonstrated worldweary pessimism or justified censure, and whether Mark Twain should be seen as a penetrating critic of American culture or a prisoner of that culture. In 1962, Henry Nash Smith gave a strong impetus to cultural inquiries in Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. Smith details the conflict between the nineteenth-century “dominant culture” and the “vernacular” language and values of the native humorists, and concludes that The confusion of tastes and attitudes in nineteenth-century American culture made it impossible for Mark Twain to arrive at a workable idea of his vocation. If he hoped to be accepted as a serious writer, he was apparently obliged to conform to the priestly role of the man of letters. If he devoted himself to humor he must be content with the humble function of providing comic relief from higher concerns. 34

Smith, who pays scant heed to Mark Twain’s humor, believes that Twain managed to hold the effects of this conflict at bay in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but was shattered by them in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, “which all but paralyzed his powers of imagination and condemned him to the relative sterility of his last twenty years.” 35 The terms of Smith’s equation, priestly poet versus vulgar comedian, are insightful; the

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difficulty concerns the solution. Was Mark Twain destroyed by, or did he triumph over, the cultural confusion and countercurrents he inherited? In 1897 George Ade, a young reporter for the Chicago Record with a bent toward caricature, praised by both Twain and Howells, began publishing his “Fables in Slang,” which often impaled character types on a single phrase. One of these was entitled “The Music Teacher who came twice each week to bridge the awful chasm between Dorothy and Chopin.” Unlike Dorothy, Mark Twain was able to close the awful chasm, which in his case was that between humor and literature. He brought literature out of the parlor and into the street, and stretched our notions of humor from beer hall burlesque to philosophy, from the comic to the ironic, from the amiable to the excoriating. With one foot in the genteel tradition and the other in what Smith calls vernacular culture, Mark Twain, who so delighted in novelty, was himself a novelty who merged the droll and the serious, democratizing the priesthood of literature and elevating the humble function of humor. And that, as Howells maintained for fifty years, was precisely the source of his genius.

V

Later Years: The Humorist as Ironist (1890–1910)

Chapter Twelve

The Not-So-Gay Nineties

“What a gambling carnival it was! . . . And then—all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction!” 1 Mark Twain, on the boom and bust mining days in Nevada

BUSTED In August of 1889, Mark Twain was euphoric. He had just finished writing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Webster & Co. was reporting profits of $50,000 a year, and the Paige typesetter was apparently perfected. Great riches were in the offing, and Livy spoke of how wonderfully strange it would be to have “unlimited means.” 2 Unfurling his sails to this exhilarating wind, Twain wrote to Howells that Connecticut Yankee “[is] my swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently.” 3 This euphoria turned out to be premature, for Twain’s fortunes and career had already begun to change by the late 1880s. The change commenced gradually, with the predictable slings and arrows of middle age. Twain was in his midfifties and signs of wear and tear were accumulating. He developed rheumatism in his right arm; Livy had eye trouble. More serious was the illness of Charles Webster, whose neuralgia, and Twain’s dissatisfaction with his work, forced him to resign from the publishing business in 1888, the same year that Theodore Crane suffered a stroke. The latter’s death in Elmira the following July signaled an end to two decades of idyllic and productive summers the Clemenses and the Cranes had enjoyed together at Quarry Farm. Webster died in 1891. Both he and Crane were relatively young and their deaths were exceptional. What was not exceptional was the dying off of the generation older than Mark Twain that served as a buffer to oblivion. 245

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Jane Clemens died in October 1890, and shortly after her funeral in Hannibal, Twain went to the deathbed of Livy’s mother in Elmira, who died in November. Beyond the family walls, the generation that had defined Twain’s world was rapidly passing away. By the early 1890s, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, James Russell Lowell, James T. Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Whitman, and Twain’s publishers Elisha Bliss and James Osgood had all died, along with Browning, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Darwin. Queen Victoria was approaching her diamond jubilee, and Victorianism was fading to a close. Henry James, having lost both his parents, was also feeling the pinch of time, and beginning to suffer from gout. He gave the title Terminations to a collection of tales he published in the midnineties. His next book was called Embarrassments. For Mark Twain as well, embarrassments followed on the heels of terminations. In Twain’s case, the embarrassments were two-fold, and both folds were financial. In 1880, six years after trying out one of the Remington typewriters that had just been marketed, he bought a majority interest in Kaolatype, an engraving process, as well as stock in a typesetting machine invented by James W. Paige and constructed in the Colt’s Arms factory in Hartford. Twain’s initial investment in the typesetter was followed by many others throughout the decade, as Paige relocated to Pratt & Whitney’s Hartford works, redesigned his machine, and attempted to perfect it. In October 1889, Twain reported to Howells that after “spending more than $3,000 a month on it for 44 consecutive months, I’ve got it done at last, & it’s a daisy!” 4 Always interested in machines and inventions, the former typesetter was especially fascinated by what he called “this sublime magician of iron & steel,” so much so that he flatly turned down an attractive and sensible offer from the competing Mergenthaler group to join forces on a 50-50 basis. James Paige, a magician himself in terms of his ability to make his patron’s money disappear, kept tinkering with his machine, tearing it down, and reperfecting it. At last, after the Mergenthaler Linotype was already in production, Paige decided he needed to have a new factory built in Chicago. Ever fatally attracted, like Colonel Sellers, Twain gamely tried to secure capital beyond his own, but the failures in test runs of the overly intricate Paige machine, the successes of the competition, and a downturn in the economy in the early nineties made that impossible. The machine was doomed, and Mark Twain had invested some $170,000 in a mechanical turkey. How much is that in real money? It is not possible to give precise twenty-first-century equivalents for late nineteenth-century monetary values, and the ratio varies from one measurement index to another, but the consumer price index multiplier of 26.12 gives an estimate of $4,440,000. Mark Twain’s annual income (in the boom years), the cost of his Hartford house, his investments, his losses and his debts, if figured in 2014 dollars, would all be in the millions. 5

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The financial drain caused by the Paige typesetter put the Clemenses on a restricted budget for the first time since their marriage, and there was collateral damage as well. The Webster Publishing Company had gotten off to a flourishing start with the profitable publications of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, and other works, but later projects were less successful and it soon began to flounder. The reminiscences of other generals were not as marketable as those of the former General in Chief of the Armies of the United States. Catholics throughout the world seemed able to survive without buying copies of the biography of Pope Leo XIII, elaborately published in six languages. In 1887, a Webster & Co. bookkeeper embezzled $25,000. The next year Charles Webster, ailing and—from Twain’s point of view—inept, retired from the company whose heavy expenses and declining profits left it without sufficient operating funds. Financially drained by the Paige typesetter, Mark Twain did not have the means to prop up Webster & Co. At the same time, decreasing income from the company left Twain short of the resources needed to further capitalize the typesetter. By the early 1890s, the two projects were strangling each other, cascading downward to financial collapse. Mark Twain responded by moving to Europe in the summer of 1891 to reduce his personal expenses, and perhaps his embarrassment, though Twain’s notion of economizing, like Thomas Jefferson’s, never interfered with high and comfortable living. The writer returned often in fretful attempts to salvage his business affairs, making, he told a lecture audience in March 1895, 14 ocean crossings in 3½ years. 6 On one of these trips back to the States, Twain became reacquainted with Henry Huttleston Rogers, whom he had met briefly before. Rogers started out as a brakeman and baggage handler on a local Massachusetts railroad. Then, age 21, he migrated to the recently discovered oil fields in western Pennsylvania in September 1861, the same month Mark Twain began his career as a miner in Nevada Territory. Rogers invested his meager savings in a small refinery, worked long hours, lived frugally, invented a process for separating light oil from crude, and eventually rode the oil boom to the top, becoming a vice president and director of the Standard Oil Company, and variously president, vice president, director, and trustee of two dozen copper, steel, railway, electric, natural gas, pipeline, life insurance, and banking corporations. He was energetic and shrewd, described by a contemporary as “one of the most distinguished–looking men of the time, a great actor, a great fighter, an intriguer, an implacable foe.” 7 Like other industrial capitalists of his time, with whom he is grouped in Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons, Rogers was ruthless in business and unapologetic about his career, telling the Industrial Commission investigating price rigging in 1899 that “We are not in business for our health, but are out for the dollars.” 8 Yet he had other dimensions as well, as a convivial companion and a generous, usually anonymous, benefactor. At

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Twain’s suggestion, he put Helen Keller through Radcliffe College and supported her afterward. He befriended Booker T. Washington and endowed more than 65 colleges and schools for African-Americans. He built an 85room summer mansion in his home town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where he also provided the town with two schools, a public library, a town hall, a Masonic lodge building, a Unitarian church and parsonage, the Tabitha Inn, a park, and had the streets paved and public water and sewer systems installed. When he died in 1909, a year before Twain’s death, obituary writers spoke of the “Dual Personality of Henry H. Rogers.” Harper’s Weekly weighed both his business misdeeds and his personal good deeds, noting that “There was nothing bogus about him. He was delightfully free from hypocrisy, and did not know how to be a snob. What was best in his life—his kindness, his companionableness, his benefactions—is largely matter of private knowledge. He did not advertise that side of himself.” 9 Rogers could trade stories with Mark Twain and beat him at billiards. He admired Twain’s wit and writings, and he offered to assist the humorist, an offer that Twain, not one to take advice easily, gratefully accepted. Rogers provided some immediate capital from his own deep pockets, and had his son-in-law keep Webster & Co. temporarily afloat by purchasing its Library of American Literature for $50,000. He carefully inspected the Paige and Webster operations, eventually advising Twain to cut loose from both. Granted power of attorney over Twain’s tangled affairs, Rogers steered Webster & Co. through bankruptcy in 1894, ingeniously arranging for the author’s copyrights to go to Livy, who, since she had contributed her own funds to Webster & Co., was a principal creditor. Rogers thus stopped the financial hemorrhaging that was bedeviling Twain, and worked out the exact amount of his indebtedness—$79,704.80 owed to 101 creditors. 10 With his problems clarified if not resolved, Mark Twain finally turned away from the business life for which he had too much imagination and too little sense, and fell back on the only capital that never deserted him—his talent and his fame. He resolved to pay back every creditor 100 cents on the dollar. A BANKRUPT ABROAD Only two years after announcing that Connecticut Yankee was his swan song and predicting his retirement from literature, the dying swans had turned out to be his business ventures, and Mark Twain, fleeing to Europe, was a bornagain author. As in earlier days, he turned to his pen in a time of need, sometimes with inspiration and sometimes without, often with an eye on the cash box, and he set about earning his living and paying off his debts through literature. The conditions for writing were hardly favorable. Twain was responsible for shepherding six women around the continent—Livy, his three

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daughters, recently widowed Susan Crane, and their ever-faithful household assistant, Katy Leary. They journeyed from place to place—Aix-les-Bains, Lausanne, Berlin, Bad Nauheim, Florence, Munich, Paris; and Twain was continually shuttling back and forth to America, consulting with Rogers and trying in vain to prevent the final smash of both the typesetter and Webster & Co. Mark Twain was disappointed and frustrated by the collapse of his business ventures, and he missed the long, undisturbed summer days in Elmira that nourished his creativity. In spite of these difficulties, he persevered, and in the four years that elapsed between leaving Hartford in 1891 and starting his lecture tour in 1895 Twain produced seven books and a score of tales, sketches, and essays. These works exhibit a wide gamut of subjects, genres, and moods, ranging from the playful to the acerbic, from the hasty to the thoughtful. Many demonstrate a greater interest in paying off debts than in creating monuments of unageing intellect. One of the books, The American Claimant (1892), was salvaged from an unsuccessful play coauthored with Howells that featured a new version of Colonel Sellers, this time as a scientist, along with a crackpot notion of “materialized spirits.” Calling the new Sellers character a “lunatic,” 11 Howells eventually backed out of the collaboration, and Twain rewrote the play into a lackluster novel in 71 days just before departing for Europe. Two volumes were collections. Merry Tales (1892) was a small book that contained only seven pieces, all previously published and two dating back to 1877. The other collection, The ₤1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories (1893), might have been called The ₤1,000,000 BankNote and Two New Articles, for only two of its eight pieces were previously unpublished and only the bank-note tale is actually a story. Much of this volume is devoted to a single article, Mark Twain’s discussion of a sentimental novella so idiotic it is “profoundly and satisfyingly delicious,” hence the title, “A Cure for the Blues.” 12 This obscure novella, The Enemy Conquered; or Love Triumphant, published in 1845 by Samuel Watson Royston, seems beyond satire. In Twain’s view, you have to read it to believe it, and to that end he quotes large slathers of text, often pages at a time. The article contains more Royston than Twain, and then, incredibly, as a follow-up which raises the art of padding to new heights, Twain reprints the entire eighteen-thousand-word novella, including the sections he has already quoted. As a result, one-third of The ₤1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories is a republication of the worst work of fiction Mark Twain ever encountered. Other works in the early 1890s also exhibit the strain of turning the crank for cash. “Mental Telegraphy,” published in Harper’s Monthly in 1891, was written in 1878 for A Tramp Abroad, but omitted from that volume. The “Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story,” published in the North American Review in 1894, not only repeats the frog story, but also recaps an 1875 article entitled “The ‘Jumping Frog.’ In English. Then in French,”

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published in Sketches, New & Old. “The Californian’s Tale” was worked up from notebook entries Twain made in 1865 and 1882. A new string of travel sketches— “Aix-les-Bains,” “Playing Courier,” “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” “Marienbad—A Health Factory,” “The Cradle of Liberty,” “The German Chicago”—was designed to reprise the success of the earlier travel books, a strategy recognized by newspaper editors who gave them such titles as “An Innocent Abroad” and “The Tramp Abroad Again.” 13 Two short novels in this period, Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894, written in 30 days) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), were naked attempts to cash in on the successes of Tom and Huck’s earlier, and more compelling, adventures. Twain’s first title for Tom Sawyer Abroad was New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer, Detective, written in three weeks, was based on the English translation of a nineteenth-century Danish novel about a seventeenth-century murder trial. Yet another attempt, “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” based on a notebook entry— “Tom is disguised as a negro & sold in Ark[ansas] for $10, then he & Huck help hunt for him after the disguise is removed” 14 —was never completed. Nevertheless, Mark Twain was producing new and different works as well. Pudd’nhead Wilson and Joan of Arc are the most substantial books in the period, and there are a handful of interesting shorter writings: “Playing Courier,” “Extracts from Adam’s Diary,” “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us,” “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” “How to Tell a Story.” And, as always with Twain, there are moments of brightness—oddly angled observations, arresting insights, and apt phrasings—embedded even in his least distinguished writings. For a brief moment in Tom Sawyer Abroad, having little to do with the thin Jules Verne balloontravel plot, Huck sounds like his old self when he talks about people “that writes books about birds, and loves them so that they’ll go hungry and tired and take any amount of trouble to find a new bird and kill it.” Their name is ornithologers, and I could a been an ornithologer myself, because I always loved birds and creatures; and I started out to learn how to be one, and I see a bird setting on a dead limb of a high tree, singing, with his head tilted back and his mouth open, and before I thought I fired, and his song stopped and he fell straight down from the limb, all limp like a rag, and I run and picked him up, and he was dead, and his body was warm in my hand, and his head rolled about, this way and that, like his neck was broke, and there was a white skin over his eyes, and one little drop of blood on the side of his head, and laws! I couldn’t see nothing more for the tears; and I hain’t ever murdered no creature since, that warn’t doing me no harm, and I ain’t going to. 15

Taken as a whole, the writings in the first half of the nineties demonstrate a change in the way Mark Twain presented his works to the public. Earlier he tended to produce long books surrounded by short sketches. Now this ten-

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dency was reversed, and for the rest of his career he published longer articles and mostly short books. Twain authored 12 books between 1869 and 1889, 25 between 1892 and 1909. Each of the two volumes of Louis J. Budd’s Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, divided into works before and after 1890, contains 948 pages. Volume 1 has 191 selections; volume 2 has only 80. The reasons for this shift are many. With his reputation established, any volume of any length by “Mark Twain” would sell, and thus the author could now avoid the agonies he endured in writing 600-page subscription books. Moreover, subscription publishing itself was in decline toward the end of the century, perhaps because of a better-educated and more sophisticated reading public, and even Webster and Co. had begun to switch to trade publishing by 1890. In terms of articles, Twain’s extended foreign residence sharpened his interest and his acquaintance with a wide variety of current events and topics, just at the time when his opinions were increasingly in demand. He responded by adding more essays, often lengthy, to the mix of his writings. The titles of his volumes of collections began to refer to essays or stories and essays (How to Tell a Story and Other Essays, 1897; Literary Essays, 1899) rather than sketches (Sketches, New and Old, 1875). Everyone has noticed that Twain’s publications after Connecticut Yankee, both long and short, are more serious than earlier works, and they are more uneven, partly because of the pressure to reduce his debts. What has not been noticed is that while Twain’s topics and his tone have changed, his sharp eye for disparity and his exuberance remain constant. Mark Twain was evolving as a humorist. His early works were often based on the quirks and oddities and accidents of everyday life—a jar of tarantulas overturned in the night. The writings in the middle period focus more on human follies— “tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses.” 16 His later works, while keeping aspects of the first two periods, demonstrate an increased interest in the sources of life’s difficulties—the design of the universe and the nature of man. This evolution of thought is not uncommon, but few feel its stages so keenly or articulate them so aptly as did Mark Twain. By his late fifties, he had become a different kind of humorist—less comic, more satiric, more ironic—but he was still a humorist, and he continued to employ the strategies he had been honing for three decades. Twain never stopped being an exaggerator, “because [as he explained to a London audience in 1900] to exaggerate is the only way I can approximate to the truth.” 17 Exaggerated approximations can emphasize the positive, the negative, or simply be neutral. The Jungfrau is a “towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow . . . as if heaven’s gates had swung open and exposed the throne.” Edward Dowden’s biography of Shelley is a “literary swamp” of “rumor, gossip, conjecture, insinuation, and innuendo.” “The [Berlin horse-car] routes are marvelously intricate, and often the drivers get lost and are not heard of for years.” 18

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Exaggerations are useful in emphasizing the differing sides of a disparity, and most of Twain’s works in the 1890s were, as always, built on contrasts. In “Playing Courier,” the narrator, who has successfully escorted his party without mishap from Aix-les-Bains to Geneva, a two-hour trip, decides he can guide them on the much longer and more complicated journey to Bayreuth. What follows is a logistical maze of wrong tickets, lost luggage, misunderstood French instructions, closed banks, a lost letter of credit, and detainment by the police. The narrator, who “put in work enough to carry a circus to Jerusalem, and yet never even got my gang out of town,” 19 is rescued by a real courier who smoothly took over the expedition and “conducted its complex affairs with little apparent effort or inconvenience.” “The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance” sets the definition of wealth in the Arctic against that of the narrator’s New York City. The maiden in question ranks at the top of Eskimo civilization. Her ice-block mansion is a full seven feet high, and boasts not one but two slop-tubs in the parlor. Her father, “the richest man in this tribe,” possesses 22 fishhooks, “made out of real iron!” 20 Even when Twain starts out with a comparison, as in “The German Chicago,” he quickly reverses course. The narrator cites a few similarities between Chicago and Berlin in the opening paragraphs, announces that “now the parallels fail,” 21 and goes on to detail at length how all American cities differ from the German capital, with its courteous police force, clean streets, student dueling corps, Kommers celebrations of beer and scholarship, and efficient city government overseen by distinguished citizens who serve without pay as aldermen. The subtitle of “About All Kinds of Ships” expresses the point of the article: “The Modern Steamer and the Obsolete Steamer.” Paragraph after paragraph contrasts “the little ships [of] old times” with “the great modern ship . . . of to-day” 22 so relentlessly that Twain, who has a low tolerance for monotony even when he creates it himself, can’t resist lightening the piece by adding “Noah’s Ark” and “Columbus’s Craft” to the roll of obsolete vessels, and he ends even more playfully with a tall tale he attributes to his first ocean voyage, made in a sailing vessel to the Sandwich Islands: The ship lay becalmed [an] entire fortnight in exactly the same spot. Then a handsome breeze came fanning over the sea, and we spread our white wings for flight. But the vessel did not budge. The sails bellied out, the gale strained at the ropes, but the vessel moved not a hair’s breadth from her place. The captain was surprised. It was some hours before we found out what the cause of the detention was. It was barnacles. They collect very fast in that part of the Pacific. They had fastened themselves to the ship’s bottom; then others had fastened themselves to the first bunch, others to these, and so on, down and down and down, and the last bunch had glued the column hard and fast to the bottom of the sea, which is five miles deep at that point. 23

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The narrator of “About All Kinds of Ships” thus segues from a relatively straightforward reporter of modern improvements in shipbuilding to an unregenerate “liar . . . [leaning] against the taffrail,” and thus demonstrates Twain’s lifelong use of a variety of narrative poses. As in his earlier work, he is often most successful with first-person naïve narration, the written equivalent of the humorous oral tale described by Twain in “How To Tell A Story” (1895), in which the teller of a story conceals “the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.” 24 In his “Petition to the Queen of England,” 25 framed as a letter from “Mark Twain” of Hartford to “Her Majesty the Queen, London,” the narrator complains about a tax levied against him, according to the Revenue Office, “In Pursuance of the Acts of Parliament for granting to Her Majesty Duties and Profits.” Harking back to Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, created by young Sam Clemens in the late 1850s, the letter writer is earnest, garrulous, rambling, and innocent of the ways of government and royalty. He sees his problem as a family matter, and thus addresses the Queen as “the head of the family.” MADAM: You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London—that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. I do not know Mr. Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers; for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the early part in Marion county Missouri before the war, and this part in Hartford county Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best that I write your Majesty.

The joke, of course, is on the narrator, and the apparent inappropriateness of the country cousinship he seeks to establish with the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India. The humor is created by the contrast between them, unrecognized by the narrator. Yet, at the same time, this contrast kaleidoscopes into another shape with a very different implication, for the narrator’s failure to understand the elitist trappings of royalty and the fussy conventions of bureaucracy conveys a sturdy democratic truth: the Queen is an ordinary mortal, just like the rest of us. This double-edged satire is similarly employed in the narrator’s discussion of the tax expert he has consulted, a Professor Sloane of Princeton: “a large man and very handsome and absorbed in thought, and if you have noticed such a man on platforms after the train is gone, that is the one, he generally gets left, like all those specialists and other scholars who know everything but how to apply it.” First published in Harper’s Monthly, the letter ultimately did find its way to the royal family. When the Clemenses were summering in Bad

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Nauheim in 1892, Mark Twain met the Prince of Wales at nearby Bad Homburg. The Prince, who would become King Edward VII in 1901, noted that they had met before, a jocular reference to the “Petition to the Queen of England” in which the narrator claims a personal relationship to the Queen because he has already become acquainted with her son “in a quite informal way”: It was in Oxford street, just where you come out of Oxford into Regent Circus, and just as he turned up one side of the circle at the head of a procession, I went down the other side on the top of an omnibus. He will remember me on account of a gray coat with flap pockets that I wore, as I was the only person on the omnibus that had on that kind of a coat.

RAFFISH REVIEWER I A very different kind of first-person narrator, a narrator on the attack and not at all naïve, enlivens a series of related articles in this period that demonstrate Mark Twain’s increasing interest in the essay, which for him meant a thoughtful commentary on a subject he felt seriously about, without jettisoning humor. Twain liked to have a target, a topic he could react against, and a string of books he came across between 1890 and 1895 provided rich opportunities for his lucidity, common sense, and satiric, sometimes satanic, energy. The first of these five books, A Medical Dictionary, was compiled in 1743 by Robert James, a London physician known for his fever powders. Twain calls it “A Majestic Literary Fossil” (“majestic” as in king of fools; “fossil” as in long dead and good riddance), and he presents Dr. James’s collection of antidotes, nostrums, purgatives, plasters, boluses, and recipes, many of them stemming from ancient sources, as examples of ridiculous science. Quoting at length, Twain gleefully cites such remedies as mortared garden snails mixed with salted earth worms and goose dung, ashes of ass foot mixed with woman’s milk (cures chilblains), distilled water of black spiders (for wounds), and frequent bleeding for all manner of ailments, as in the following instance in which Dr. James approvingly quotes Bonetus: A certain Merchant, about forty Years of Age . . . was . . . seiz’d with a violent pain of his Head, which some time after oblig’d him to keep his Bed. I, being call’d, order’d Venesection [opening the veins] in the Arms, the Application of Leeches to the Vessels of his Nostrils, Forehead, and Temples, as also to those behind his Ears; I likewise prescrib’d the Application of Cupping-glasses, with Scarification [laceration], to his Back: But, notwithstanding these Precautions, he dy’d. 26

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So much for “the vigorous old-time practice” of medicine, which, Mark Twain notes, was still being practiced in the days of his youth in Hannibal. If A Medical Dictionary represents the ridiculous in science, The Enemy Conquered; or Love Triumphant, mentioned above, is Twain’s candidate for the ridiculous in art. His article consists of a running commentary on the obscure plot (“romantic powwow and confusion”); potshots at the author’s style, with its “quart of mixed metaphor” and “tempestuous” eloquence; and criticism largely by negation: The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction, excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery, truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations, humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of events—or philosophy, or logic, or sense. No; the rich, deep, beguiling charm of the book lies in the total and miraculous absence from it of all these qualities. 27

II A Medical Dictionary and The Enemy Conquered were obvious targets, and Twain’s reviews can be seen as a warm-up for the more complex essays which followed on more contemporary books. In 1886 Edward Dowden, a Shakespearean scholar and professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, published his Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which would remain the standard biography for the next half century. Reading Dowden’s book six years after its publication, Twain discovered the facts surrounding the life and early death of Shelley’s first wife and wrote a 17,000 word essay in response, entitled “In Defense of Harriet Shelley.” In 1811, after being expelled from Oxford for publishing a pamphlet on atheism, Percy Shelley, then 19, eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook. During the next three years, Harriet bore the poet two children, but was unable to retain his affection. Never one to be bound by convention, Shelley strayed away from Harriet, lived for a time with a friendly widow and her charming daughter, and then abandoned Harriet entirely. In the summer of 1814 he eloped again, this time with 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of Shelley’s mentor William Godwin, a political and social reformer and advocate of free love, though not in his own backyard. On 10 December 1816, Harriet’s drowned body was found in the Serpentine, a lake which winds through London’s Hyde Park. Twenty days later Percy Shelley married Mary Godwin, who by then had given birth to a daughter and a son. The Chancery Court judged Shelley unfit to have custody of his children by Harriet. Mark Twain was not predisposed to find these biographical facts uplifting, for two reasons. Twain’s share of devoutness was modest, but he was a

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devout family man. By his early thirties he had grown tired of boarding houses, “shabby furniture & shabby food,” “sleeping with female servants,” “restless moving from place to place,” and the diminishing pleasures of aging bachelorhood. 28 In the spring of 1868, traveling by steamboat to San Francisco from Sacramento, where he had been lecturing, Twain, then 32, complained that “they gave me the bridal chamber as usual—(a ghastly sarcasm on my lonely state, but intended as a compliment).” 29 Two years later he was rescued from vagabondage by matrimony, and he respected the institution both as a vital fact of his own life and a fundamental basis of society. Twain had little esteem for men who, like Bret Harte, deserted their wives. Twain also had a lifelong, affectionate, catcher-in-the-rye partiality for girls and young women. As a 22-year-old cub pilot, he fell in love with 14year-old Laura Wright, a passenger on board the John J. Roe, when that steamboat was docked next to his for three days in New Orleans. Eight years later, he befriended Alice Hyde, age 22, on the Ajax outbound to the Sandwich Islands. The following year one of his favored companions on the Quaker City trip was 17-year-old Emeline Beach, with whom he corresponded at length after the excursion. And after the return of the Quaker City to New York, Twain reported that “I started to make calls, New Year’s Day, but I anchored for the day at the first house I came to—Charlie Langdon’s sister was there (beautiful girl,) & Miss Alice Hooker. . . . I just staid there & deviled the life out of those girls.” 30 Charlie Langdon’s sister, whom he would marry two years later, was ten years his junior. In the fall of 1892, when he wrote “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” Twain had begun his study of Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake at age 19. That fall his own three daughters were 12, 18, and 20. And late in his life, Twain befriended Mary Rogers, then in her twenties, whom he called his niece, and a series of young girls, his “angelfish,” 31 who served as surrogate granddaughters. (Mark Twain would have a granddaughter of his own, though he never knew her. At the last major gathering of family and friends at Stormfield, in October 1909, Clara Clemens, then 35, was married to pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch. She gave birth to a daughter the following August, four months after Twain was buried.) Thus Mark Twain was not prepared to be sympathetic to what he considered a prima facie case of husband malfeasance, a double crime against matrimony and young women. There is, of course, another side to Shelley’s conjugal history. Harriet first came to the poet’s attention as a refugee from paternal and academic oppression: her father, a well-to-do tavern keeper, compelled her to go to school. Shelley’s own unhappy experiences with formal schooling, his conflict with his father, and his opposition to all forms of tyranny made him sympathetic to her distress. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on the other hand, was precocious, well educated, and brilliant. One could argue that Mary—a student of Latin and Greek, fluent in modern

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languages, and the author of Frankenstein at age 21—was a more appropriate match, a more stimulating companion, for a tempestuous poetic genius. And the record shows that Chancery Court ruled against Shelley’s petition to have custody of Harriet’s children on the basis of irreligion, not immorality. When the perpetually impecunious poet was thrown a lifeline in 1815 by an inheritance from his grandfather providing ₤1000 a year, he gave Harriet an annual stipend of ₤200. Mark Twain, however, was not interested in Mary Godwin’s accomplishments, nor in belaboring Shelley, whose behavior toward Harriet was simply and obviously “the one indelible blot [on a life] otherwise worshipfully noble and beautiful.” 32 Rather, it is Edward Dowden, the biographical spinmaster, that Twain is after. Dowden’s method in the chapters concerning Harriet is to present the facts in a manner that seems straightforward and objective, and then to conclude that the marital breakup was Harriet’s fault, not Shelley’s. This acrobatic leap caught Twain’s attention, and he bores in on it with a 21gun exercise in close reading that might have been entitled “An Attack on Edward Dowden.” Many of Dowden’s facts justifying Shelley’s disaffection, according to Twain, are trivial: Harriet liked new bonnets, her older sister was disagreeable, her studies “dwindled away” after her first child was born. More subtly misleading, in his view, is the biographer’s deceptive phrasing. Dowden describes Shelley’s relationship with the widow Boinville and her daughter at their home in Bracknell as follows: “In the early part of the year 1814, Shelley was a frequent visitor at Bracknell.” This apparently bland statement does not escape Twain’s vigilance: “Frequent” is a cautious word, in this author’s mouth; the very cautiousness of it, the vagueness of it, provokes suspicion; it makes one suspect that this frequency was more frequent than the mere common every-day kinds of frequency which one is in the habit of averaging up with the unassuming term “frequent.” I think so because they fixed up a bedroom for him in the Boinville house. One doesn’t need a bedroom if one is only going to run over now and then in a disconnected way. 33

Even more insidious, according to Twain, are the veiled interpretations and insinuations. “The biographer says of Harriet, ‘If words of tender affection and motherly pride prove the reality of love, then undoubtedly [Harriet] loved her first-born child.’” Twain replies: That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands proved—and in this way, without committing himself, [Dowden] gives the reader a chance to infer that there isn’t any extant evidence but words, and that he doesn’t take much stock in them. How seldom he shows his hand! He is always lurking behind a noncommittal “if” or something of that kind; always gliding and dodging around, distributing colorless poison here and there and everywhere, but always leaving himself in a position to say that his language will be found innocuous if

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This long essay, which spilled across three issues of the North American Review in the summer of 1894, demonstrates the fiercely held convictions and moral outrage characteristic of Mark Twain’s later writings. It also exhibits his remarkable ability to enliven a discussion with sharp contrasts, surprising similes, apt allusions, and colorful overstatements. Dowden’s biography is “a cobhouse of conjectures as big as the Coliseum” and “the strangest book that has seen the light since Frankenstein.” His style is a mincing “cakewalk,” in which the pages parade by “in their Sunday-best, shiny and sleek, perfumed, and with boutonnières in their button-holes.” Twain labels the widow’s enticing establishment as “the Boinville Hysterical Society,” a “mephitic paradise,” a “menagerie,” a “sty,” and an “unwholesome prairie-dogs’ nest.” Attracted into this nest, the poet is proved by his own correspondence to be, as Twain puts it, “a fallen and fettered angel who is ashamed of himself.” The shame continues when Shelley woos 16-yearold Mary Godwin away from “her nursery.” Her father, who borrowed heavily from Shelley, ran a “little debt-factory of a book-shop”; “from [Godwin’s] point of view the last syllable of his name was surplusage.” 35 From his first page to his last, Twain debates the evidence presented by Professor Dowden and reinterprets his interpretations. When the biographer writes, of a letter by Mrs. Boinville, “These sound like words of a considerate and judicious friend,” Twain replies, “That is what he thinks.” 36 When Dowden states, “We may rest content with Shelley’s own [exculpatory] words” concerning Harriet, Twain retorts, “As for me, I do not quite see why we should rest content with anything of the sort.” 37 An author whose most famous scene involves Aunt Polly’s front fence, Mark Twain thought he knew whitewash when he saw it. His attack on The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley is relentless, but without the predictable and tiresome quality of many relentless arguments. The meaning of “In Defense of Harriet Shelley” is a sincere condemnation of Percy Shelley’s behavior and his biographer’s cover-up. The method is a literary romp. III With his book-review scalpel honed on Professor Dowden, Mark Twain was ready to enter into the fray of the nineteenth-century transatlantic culture wars. He had been sparring for several years with British detractors, for like many of his countrymen, Twain was a lively critic of his native land and an even livelier critic of foreigners who presumed to disparage America. Matthew Arnold is often seen as Twain’s bête noir, though their relationship is more complex than that. Arnold’s 1882 essay, “A Word about America,”

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briefly mentioned “the Quinionian humor of Mr. Mark Twain, so attractive to the Philistine of the more gay and light type,” in the course of a perceptive discussion of the large, mobile American middle class, as contrasted to rigid, three-tiered European societies. 38 (Quinion is the vacuously jocular manager of the firm of Murdstone and Grimby in David Copperfield.) Arnold then traveled to the United States in the winter of 1883-84, gave lectures, and was invited to tea in Hartford by the Clemenses, apparently an amiable affair. 39 A year after returning to England, Arnold published his lectures, as Discourses in America, as well as “A Word More about America”—largely a criticism of Great Britain, where “an aristocratical society . . . materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, brutalises our lower class.” “We English of the old country,” Arnold concluded, “may with great profit turn to [the American example].” 40 Arnold toured the United States again in 1886, visited his daughter and her American husband, and then, having met General Grant previously in London and New York, published a lengthy and largely favorable review of the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant in the January and February 1887 issues of Murray’s Magazine. When Mark Twain made a reply in a speech to the Army and Navy Club of Connecticut, he may have seen only the indignant retort to Arnold fired by James B. Fry, Provost Marshal General in the Civil War and later a close acquaintance of Grant. 41 Appearing in the April North American Review, Fry’s comments landed heavily on Arnold’s one-sentence criticism of Grant’s grammar. Twain mentions General Fry’s article specifically in his speech, and the only quotation from Arnold he employs was one used by Fry, which contains alterations Fry made to Arnold’s original. If he relied solely on Fry, Twain would have missed much of the essence of Arnold’s essay, which had high praise for Grant as a commander (“wise, cool, firm, bold, persevering”) and as an author (“possessing in general the high merit of saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression”). 42 In any event, Grant was Twain’s hero and the Memoirs was a work that he had personally recruited, nurtured, and published. Contemptuous of Arnold’s hair-splitting distinction between will and shall pointed out by General Fry, Twain maintained in his speech that all writers in English, including Arnold, have grammatical peccadilloes and peculiarities. As an illustration, he quotes Fry’s version of a tangled section of Arnold’s prose and comments: “To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy; to read it four times would make him drunk.” 43 Then, in a carefully crafted sentence whose opening simile and closing eloquence demonstrate his skills as a debater, Twain brushes by what he took to be Arnold’s quibbling to get at the main point:

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Matthew Arnold would not have disagreed, just as Mark Twain did not disagree with Arnold’s comments, published in 1888, on Dowden’s Life of Shelley. In a long article that Twain read and quoted from four years later, Arnold focused almost exclusively on Shelley’s “ridiculous and odious” behavior toward Harriet, and on Dowden’s “championship of Shelley [that] makes him very unjust to a cruelly used and unhappy girl.” Arnold, like Twain after him, also criticizes Dowden’s style: the “prodigious [two-volume biography] . . . might have been considerably shortened if it had been more plainly and simply written.” 45 But a sharp disagreement was in the offing. In the same month, January 1888, that the versatile and prolific Arnold published “Shelley” in Nineteenth Century, he composed his final statement on America, a lecture and essay entitled “Civilisation in the United States.” The piece begins mildly by reiterating what Arnold had said in his earlier essays, that America had gone a long way toward solving the “political problem,” with democratic institutions that “work well and happily.” 46 The “social problem” has been ameliorated as well, since the U.S. is “a community singularly free from the distinction of classes.” There remains, however, “the human problem,” and at this point Arnold changes his strategy and his tone dramatically. He quotes from and aligns himself with Sir Lepel Henry Griffin, K.C.S.I., a British administrator in India who took a vacation from his duties to engage in the European sport of traveling in America and then writing a book of comment and criticism. His ironically titled The Great Republic, published in 1884, demonstrates evolution in reverse: human society had reached a peak with the British Empire and the English gentleman, and then, in America, had begun to revert to a more primitive species. Arnold sharpens Griffin’s general attack by asserting that although Americans are “plentifully supplied with the comforts and conveniences of life,” they lack the further attributes that are necessary for full civilization—distinction and beauty. What follows is a catalogue of New World shortcomings: The landscape is “not interesting,” the climate is “harsh and in extremes,” American architecture has “hardly anything to please a trained or natural sense of beauty,” “very little has been produced” in the other arts and literature, geographic names are “hideous . . . Briggsvilles, Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles,” the “addiction to ‘the funny man’ . . . is a national misfortune,” Americans are sorely wanting in “the discipline of awe and respect,” and the newspapers are full of “news for the

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servants’ hall.” Arnold’s attack on American journalism, and some of his sourness in general in this essay, may have resulted from the shabby treatment he had received from U.S. newspapers, including a criticism of Chicago published by a New York paper and falsely attributed to Arnold. In any case, he concluded with insult on top of injury. The many shortcomings, Arnold argued, the lack of distinction and beauty in America, would not be so bad if Americans recognized their shortcomings. Instead, they content themselves with self-glorification and self-deception . . . . They have been so plied with nonsense and boasting that . . . where it is a question of things in which their civilisation is weak, they seem, very many of them, as if in such things they had no power of perception whatever, no idea of a proper scale, no sense of the difference between good and bad. And at this rate they can never, after solving the political and social problem with success, go on to solve happily the human problem too, and thus at last to make their civilisation full and interesting.

It is the splenetic last half—eleven pages—of this short essay, that made Arnold a marked man for many nineteenth-century Americans. A lot of them thought he had written an entire book bemoaning the lack of civilization in the United States. There was a volume entitled Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America, “by Matthew Arnold,” rushed into print in America by the Boston firm of Cupples and Hurd several weeks after Arnold died suddenly of a heart attack on 15 April 1888, hence the “Last” in the publisher’s subtitle. Cupples and Hurd knew a profit was to be made in the tweaking of American sensibilities by the leading English critic, but their short book was simply a collection of Arnold’s four essays: “A Word about America,” “A Word More about America,” “General Grant,” and “Civilisation in the United States.” In their haste to condemn Arnold as an aristocratic snob, many Americans, including Mark Twain, lost sight of Arnold’s genuine appreciation of America in these four essays. They ignored his praise of Lincoln and Grant and Arnold’s friend and mentor R. W. Emerson, Arnold’s stern criticism of his own country, his middle-class status as a hard-working and modestly salaried inspector of schools, the at least partial truth in his comments, and his ability, not unlike Mark Twain’s, to use “playful phrases which a little relieve, perhaps, the tedium of grave disquisitions,” as Arnold said of his own prose style in “A Word More about America.” 47 Mark Twain made 47 entries across three notebooks containing ideas for a rebuttal and drafted an essay entitled “Response,” but given Arnold’s death, Twain refrained from a frontal assault. Rather, he reverted to sniping. On 26 June 1888, after Yale University awarded him his first honorary degree, a master of arts, Twain wrote Yale President Timothy Dwight that

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Arnold’s essay perhaps increased Twain’s antipathy to royalty, nobility, and aristocratic privilege, and may have toughened the second half of Connecticut Yankee, on which he was working in July 1888, just after writing the letter to Dwight. Arnold is also specifically and disparagingly mentioned in a Twain speech “On Foreign Critics” delivered in Boston in April 1890. The foreign critics are Lepel Griffin and Matthew Arnold, both of whom Twain quotes, though his quotation from Griffin comes not from Griffin’s Great Republic, but from Arnold’s summary of what Griffin actually wrote. 49 Twain’s speech, both exaggerated and sincere, claims that since civilization necessarily refers to “the humanizing of a people, not a class,” the only real civilization in the world is the one planted by the American Revolution and perfected “when we disposed of our slavery.” A year later, Twain took another whack at Arnold in The American Claimant, using sections verbatim from “The American Press,” a speech Twain drafted just after Arnold’s death but never delivered. The American Claimant is a novel rehashing Colonel Sellers from The Gilded Age (by way of the popular play Colonel Sellers and the unsuccessful Colonel Sellers as a Scientist) and influenced by the pathetic attempts of Twain’s distant relative Jesse Leathers to press his supposed claim to an English earldom. In chapter 10 of the novel, a newspaper editor gives a talk on American journalism introduced with “a couple of paragraphs from Mr. Matthew Arnold’s latest book,” one of which is the following: “‘Goethe says somewhere that “the thrill of awe,” that is to say, REVERENCE,’ is the best thing humanity has.” 50 The jumbled quotation marks here suggest a problem with this citation, and it turns out the statement “that is to say, REVERENCE,’” has been added by Twain to Arnold’s text. Mark Twain often used a reporter’s free hand in citing quotations, though he seldom distorts the meaning. Arnold had restated Goethe’s “thrill of awe” two lines later as “the discipline of awe and respect,” which Twain interpreted as “reverence,” and he was certainly correct in associating Arnold with the many hostile critics on both sides of the Atlantic who accused Twain of unseemly irreverence. The speech-making editor in The American Claimant, speaking for his creator, replies to them all in a blistering paragraph which disparages the concept of reverence fourteen times and concludes with a statement that any American humorist might wish to paste in his or her hat: “a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.” 51

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IV Primed by his dispute with Matthew Arnold, Mark Twain was quick to respond when Paul Bourget’s 425-page Outre-Mer: Impressions of America was launched across the ocean. Bourget was a leading French poet, essayist, novelist, and member of the Académie française, who came to America in 1893 “in the hope of getting back a little faith in the future of civilization.” The great forces at work in the world, according to Bourget, were democracy, science, and racism (by which he meant racial and cultural pluralism), and “now one country has been found where these three forces, so destructive in our old world, have been called upon to construct, out of whole cloth, a new universe.” 52 He traveled widely in America, investigating this new universe, and returned home in the spring of 1894 with a trunk full of journals, which were published serially in Le Figaro and the New York Herald from September 1894 to February 1895, and then collected in book form. Mark Twain wasted no time, writing to H. H. Rogers on 30 September 1894 from Étretat that “I am translating a French article which I wish to abuse in a magazine paper.” 53 After several false starts and reading perhaps four of what would become the eleven chapters of Outre-Mer, he produced “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us” for the January 1895 North American Review. Like most European visitors, Bourget was impressed with American drive, speed, and energy, but deplored “its lack of equilibrium, measure, and taste.” 54 He concluded that “All the defects of this society are summed up in this,—that it has dispensed with time.” Like most Americans, Mark Twain disagreed with many of Bourget’s criticisms, but in addition to contesting these, he widened the scope of his response by examining cultural criticism itself and the qualifications and methods of this particular critic. Bourget, Twain argues, is a “Classifier,” whose labels fail to “catch the elusive shades of . . . subtle things” 55 ; a “Generalizer,” who can capture only the exteriors of a nation: “I think that no foreigner can report its interior—its soul, its life, its speech, its thought. I think that a knowledge of these things is acquirable in only one way . . . absorption.” According to Twain, even a native commentator, such as a novelist, requires many years of conscious observation and unconscious absorption before he or she can lay before a reader the ways and character of “a few people grouped in a certain place.” And even the novelist who succeeds contributes but a single piece to the immense mosaic made up of 70 million people spread across a vast continent: “When a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.” Paul Bourget was a “doomed voyager” in yet another manner. As a relatively young man—16 years younger than Twain—an obvious stranger, intently inquisitive, amiably receptive, with pencil and notebook in hand,

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Bourget was an easy target. The tendency of foraging foreigners like Mrs. Trollope and Arnold and Bourget to criticize their Old World in no way diminished their condescension toward the New, and Americans often protected themselves by what Mark Twain describes as speculation in fanciful tales: There was something about [Bourget] that bred in those [American] speculators a quite unusual sense of safety, and encouraged them to strain their powers in his behalf. They seem to have satisfied themselves that all he wanted was “significant” facts, and that he was not accustomed to examine the source whence they proceeded. It is plain that there was a sort of conspiracy against him almost from the start—a conspiracy to freight him up with . . . strange extravagances.

Paul Bourget was, in Twain’s view, doomed to get it wrong; the title of his article might well have been “Who Cares What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us.” In a spirit of feigned amiability, Twain ends by commenting on Bourget’s joke about American nouveau riches, which he attributes to a friend, apparently French: Yes, Americans have rare and expensive portraits of great European kings hanging on their walls, “but where is their grandfather’s portrait?” 56 Mark Twain, a formidable opponent in a contest of wits, gives himself the last word: “When all other interests fail [a Frenchman] can turn in and see if he can’t find out who his father was!” 57 The last word didn’t last long. Two months after Twain’s article appeared, the North American Review published a rebuttal by Max O’Rell entitled “Mark Twain and Paul Bourget.” “Max O’Rell” was the pseudonym of French writer and cultural comparatist Paul Blouet, and he pitched in energetically in defense of his countryman, taking Twain to task for “calling France a nation of bastards.” According to Blouet, Mark Twain is a double failure as a humorist. His writing is “unkind, unfair, bitter, nasty”; and he misses the subtle humor of Outre-Mer, from which he should have also derived “a lesson in politeness and good manners.” 58 Like King Arthur in Connecticut Yankee, who liked nothing better than to be challenged by an audacious knight, Twain was not one to resist an argument. He replied with “A Little Note to M. Paul Bourget” by pretending that “Max O’Rell” was merely a stalking horse for Paul Bourget, and that M. Bourget, whom Twain addresses directly, “dictated the O’Rell article.” Thus the many defects in the article can be accounted for: If you will re-read it you will notice, yourself, that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wobbly; that it wanders around; that it loses itself early and does not find itself any more. There are some other defects, as you will notice, but I

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think I have named the main ones. I feel sure that they are all due to your lack of practice in dictating. 59

Twain concludes by offering to trade anecdotes: the French nobility can adopt the grandfather joke without indignity, for “they can trace their lineage back through centuries”; Americans will accept the father joke, for “they haven’t any difficulty in finding their fathers.” 60 That way, no one’s family feathers are ruffled. V In chapter 5 of Outre-Mer, Paul Bourget, chasing the ever-receding America frontier westward, tries to imagine the preindustrial landscape of a half century earlier, with its hunters, trappers, and Indians. To assist in this imaginative endeavor, as his train speeds through the night to St. Paul, Bourget rereads J. F. Cooper’s The Pathfinder: “Its style is indifferent, the plot is constructed of childishly improbable events. The characters lack analysis and depth. And yet the book possesses the first of all the virtues of a romance,— credibility.” 61 If he had read that far in Outre-Mer, Twain would have nodded in agreement with Bourget’s comments on Cooper’s indifferent style, superficial characters, and improbable plots, but scoffed at the notion of credibility in The Pathfinder. Perhaps Bourget’s remarks reminded Twain of a pair of articles on Cooper he had written a year earlier, part of a series of lectures “prepared for the last term by Mark Twain, M.A., Professor of Belles Lettres in the Veterinary College of Arizona.” 62 Professor Twain, flourishing his recent Yale M.A. degree, dusted off one of these articles, entitled it “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” and published it in the North American Review in July 1895, just as he was leaving on his twelvemonth lecture tour. The last in his series of reviews in the early 1890s, “Literary Offenses” gave Twain an opportunity to do a thoroughgoing hatchet job on James Fenimore Cooper, whose long shadow, the humorist believed, had blighted American literature. When Twain went west in 1861, a decade after Cooper’s death, he learned, as he put it in Roughing It, that “I had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance.” 63 “Cooper’s Indians” became a tag line in his works, standing for inaccuracy, improbability, and sentimentality. After two decades of brief, sporadic digs at Cooper, Twain attempted to set down his complaints in a more comprehensive form. What makes them memorable is that, in an exaggerated fashion, they “approximate to the truth,” and are wickedly funny as well. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” begins with high praise for Cooper quoted from English professors Thomas Lounsbury and Brander Matthews and novelist Wilkie Collins, praise which Twain detonates by noting the

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imprudence of these men in delivering opinions on Cooper’s literature “without having read some of it.” He then takes on the role of critic himself, declaiming that “there are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two” and that Cooper has violated eighteen of these rules in The Deerslayer. 64 This framework provides both a subtle dig at persnickety literary criticism and a way to organize a wideranging attack on what Twain sees as Cooper’s meandering plots, implausible situations, verbose diction, and wooden dialogue. One of Mark Twain’s best-known short pieces, the “Literary Offenses” has provoked a variety of responses. Many readers enjoy Twain’s wit and exuberance: “Cooper hadn’t any more invention than a horse; and I don’t mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse.” 65 Cooper scholars tend to concede grudgingly that Twain’s criticism sometimes strikes home, even as they complain of his endeavor “to destroy Cooper’s reputation in [a] notorious and calculating essay.” 66 Literary critics, missing part of the satire, often march down Twain’s parade of rules, counting off the ones that are most telling, the ones that are less significant, and the number Twain himself violates. Literary historians, without taking sides, find the essay marks a line of demarcation between antebellum romanticism and fin-de-siècle realism. Many readers note that Twain exaggerates, and that he is unfair, leaving out the effectiveness of Cooper’s “dream full of danger,” 67 as Edmund Wilson calls it, and ignoring the mythic power of DeerslayerHawkeye-Pathfinder-Leatherstocking-Natty Bumppo, who, as Paul Bourget observes, “has passed into legend even in Europe.” 68 The curious thing about these varying comments is that they are all valid. Of course Twain does not mention Cooper’s strengths, just as he ignores the perceptive insights in the writings of Matthew Arnold and Paul Bourget. Mark Twain has no interest in being fair, balanced, and judicious, or in writing the sort of history-source-composition-criticism essay that might be expected from a more conventional reviewer. Twain works by opposition. And, of course, he exaggerates. “Literary Offenses” demonstrates how deftly Mark Twain uses exaggeration both for surprise and fun, and to make a point. That is, exaggeration is an ideal technique for a writer who wants to be amusing and serious at the same time. All readers are aware that Leatherstocking’s speech is oddly inconsistent, but Twain makes this inconsistency unforgettable: “[The rules] require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.” 69 Mark Twain’s skill in the technique of exaggeration is illustrated in his subtle handling of Cooper’s text. When Cooper’s description of Pathfinder’s eagle-eyed vision and sure-shot marksmanship goes over the top in chapter 11 of The Pathfinder, Twain tells it perfectly straight. Pathfinder can not only see the bullet hole made by a previous shooter in a wooden target

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one hundred yards distant, he is able—firing from a standing position and with a borrowed rifle—to hit the bullet inside the hole without touching the surrounding wood. Then, for good measure, he drives home a nail with a bullet, also at a hundred yards. There is no need to stretch these superhuman feats, and Twain doesn’t even bother to mention the more amazing feat a few pages later when Pathfinder, showing off for Mabel Dunham, downs two birds in the air with one bullet. “There are some things which cannot be burlesqued,” the humorist wrote in 1870, “for the simple reason that in themselves they are so extravagant and grotesque that nothing is left for burlesque to take hold of.” 70 But in his recounting of the Indian attack on trapper Thomas Hutter’s barge in chapters 3 and 4 of The Deerslayer, Twain loads the dice by making the river narrower, the barge larger and slower, and the Indians dumber than in Cooper’s text, thus setting up the hilarity—in Twain’s retelling—of six Indians jumping from an overhanging branch onto a 140-foot barge that is only one foot from the shore and traveling one mile an hour. The first Indian misses the 90-foot cabin in the middle of the barge and lands on the stern, where Judith Hutter pushes him into the water. Then, one at a time, the other five Indians drop down from the sapling and fall into the river, each one farther behind the barge than the last. When Cooper’s incidents are not exaggerated enough to make them seem idiotic, Twain generously helps them out. The essay ends as it began, by returning to Thomas Lounsbury’s opinion that Cooper’s Pathfinder and Deerslayer are “pure works of art.” 71 Twain counters with a summary of his own criticism capped by an off-the-charts version of damnation with faint praise that multiplies damnation by reducing the praise from faint to zero. A work of art? [The Deerslayer] has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are—oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that. 72

The blandly innocent tone of the final two sentences demonstrates a satirist in perfect control of his material, and makes an excellent ending for the article. Good as it is, however, that ending was not the end of Mark Twain’s manuscript, which continued for another 900 words, summarizing Cooper’s offenses against literary art. Apparently an editor at the North American Review lopped off this final section, which remained unpublished until 1946, when Bernard DeVoto added it to the end of an unfinished and unpublished second “lecture,” gave the combined manuscript pieces the title of “Fenimore

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Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses,” and published them in the New England Quarterly. 73 The “Further Offenses” continues the spirit and the critique of the original article, zeroing in specifically on Rule 14: “Eschew surplusage” (a rule which, if Cooper had written it, Twain might have trimmed to “avoid verbiage”). Here the humorist not only lambastes Cooper’s verbosity, but rewrites a paragraph in chapter 11 of The Last of the Mohicans to demonstrate how it should be done (see table 12.1). These two versions have differing strengths, and a reader could value either the leisurely Latinate texture of Cooper’s prose or the leaner, crisper style of Twain’s, or both. History, however, is in Mark Twain’s camp, for the two versions neatly demonstrate the evolution of American prose style in the half century between the Leatherstocking Tales and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain helped bring this evolution about, and “Further Literary Offenses” argues for what he calls “the modern requirement in the matter of composition.” By modern he means shorter sentences, less reliance on adjectives and adverbs, and language closer to speech, as well as several other literary virtues that he believes Cooper violates: precise diction: “‘fragments’ sounds all right when we are talking about the wreckage of a breakable thing that has been smashed . . . but when we use it to describe large hunks and chunks like the fore- and hindquarters of a fawn, it grates.”

Table 12.1. Cooper Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight,

Twain During the flight

one of the Indians had found an one of the Indians had killed a fawn opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place.

and he brought it into camp.

Without any aid from the science of cookery, he was immediately employed, in common with his fellows, in gorging himself with this digestible sustenance.

He and the others ate the meat raw.

Magua alone sat apart, without participating in the revolting meal, and apparently buried in the deepest thought.

Magua sat apart.

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omitting extraneous material: “we don’t care whether the Indian carried [the fragments] on his shoulders or in his handkerchief, [or] whether he carried them patiently or struck for higher pay and shorter hours.” consistent point of view: “Cooper . . . does not say who it is that is revolted by the meal. It is really Cooper himself, but there is nothing in the statement to indicate that it isn’t Magua. Magua is an Indian and likes raw meat.” creating an appropriate style: “Cooper’s style is always grand and stately and noble. Style may be likened to an army, the author to its general, the book to the campaign. Some authors proportion an attacking force to the strength or weakness, the importance or unimportance, of the object to be attacked; but Cooper doesn’t. It doesn’t make any difference to Cooper whether the object of attack is a hundred thousand men or a cow; he hurls his entire force against it. He comes thundering down with all his battalions at his back, cavalry in the van, artillery on the flanks, infantry massed in the middle, forty bands braying, a thousand banners streaming in the wind; and whether the object be an army or a cow you will see him come marching sublimely in, at the end of the engagement, bearing the more preferable fragments of the victim patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place.” The success of “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and the “Further Literary Offenses” is that they allowed Mark Twain to make some points concerning prose style he felt strongly about, while simultaneously giving him the opportunity for colorful abuse of an author whose overblown prose and overblown reputation, according to Twain, richly deserved it. In addition to literary essays, travel sketches, and two miscellaneous collections of short pieces, Twain also completed two significant long works in the four years he spent between leaving America in 1891 and commencing his yearlong world lecture tour in 1895. These works differ from one another, and from the other writings of the early nineties, and they demonstrate the variety encompassed in Twain’s continually evolving career as a humorist. One bore, in the first book edition, the tragicomic title of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins. TWAIN’S TWINS: PUDD’NHEAD WILSON Gerald Manley Hopkins loved pied beauty: “All things counter, original, spare, strange.” 74 Mark Twain went a step further; he loved freaks. Twain was fascinated not only by things counter and strange, but also by things bizarre, weird, and fantastic, truths that were stranger than fiction, perhaps because they were disparities already packaged, humor ready to go. Pudd’nhead Wilson has its origin in a bizarre set of twins, Eng and Chang,

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born to Chinese parents in a small village in Thailand in 1811. The Siamese Twins were joined above the waist by a band of tissue 3½″ long and 2″ in diameter, which contained the one navel the twins had in common. After being exhibited in Europe and North America, and in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, the twins retired to Mount Airy, North Carolina, bought a farm, owned slaves, married sisters, and fathered 21 children. In later life, because of financial losses due to the Civil War, the twins came out of retirement and into public notice again. Chang became known as a heavy drinker. All this was too much for Mark Twain to resist, and in 1869 he published the “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins,” which jokes about their indivisibility (“Even as children they were inseparable companions”), their disagreements (during the Civil War, “Eng [fought] on the Union side and Chang on the Confederate”), Chang’s drinking (“They have taken the two brothers and filled Chang full of warm water and sugar and Eng full of whisky, and in twenty-five minutes it was not possible to tell which was the drunkest”), and invites the reader to contemplate their matrimonial arrangements (“they have all lived together, night and day, in an exceeding sociability”). 75 When an even weirder set of teenage twins, Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci, arrived in America in 1891, Twain’s imagination was fired again, and this time the ante was raised. The Tocci brothers were joined from the sixth rib downward, thus possessing a total of two heads, four arms, one abdomen, and two legs. Twain started “an extravagantly fantastic little story with this freak of nature for hero—or heroes,” 76 and he warmed up the Siamese inseparability routine, with appropriate additions, such as weekly rotation of control of the legs by Angelo and Luigi Capello, as he named his Italian twins. Conceiving his story initially as a “howling farce,” 77 Twain tosses in some leftovers from his examination of Dr. James’s Medical Dictionary. The local physician treats the ailing Angelo with a prescription calling for afarabocca, henbane, corpobalsamun, cloves, frankincense, myrrh, saxifrage, brimstone and 64 additional ingredients. The story focuses on the differences in character between the twins—Angelo is religious, thoughtful, and sober; Luigi is freethinking, inconsiderate, and hard-drinking. It ends with a comic hanging. The townspeople of Dawson’s Landing, agitated by the disturbances caused when Angelo and Luigi lead opposing factions in temperance and political campaigns, decide Luigi is the problem and Angelo is innocent, “so they hanged Luigi.” 78 According to Mark Twain’s account, this fantastic story kept expanding and adding new characters, including a pair of quasi twins—look-alike babies born on the same day—who push Angelo and Luigi to the sidelines. It may be that Twain was a little chagrined, or perhaps bored, by his Italian twins story, for he refers to it in the same terms he sometimes used to

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disparage his early work. In one of his notes he mentions “a long and sufficiently idiotic discussion here,” and his “Final Remarks” confess “it was an extravagant sort of a tale, and had no purpose but to exhibit that monstrous ‘freak’ in all sorts of grotesque lights.” 79 It may also be that the setting—the Mississippi Valley in the 1830s and 40s—brought Twain back to his roots and to more powerful stories he had to tell. He radically revised the work to emphasize the new characters, subordinated and divided the Italian twins, and published the resulting short novel as “Pudd’nhead Wilson” in Century Magazine. 80 For later book publication, Twain appended an incomplete, disjointed version of his earlier draft entitled Those Extraordinary Twins, with a forward and a postscript that described how the author “dug out the farce and left the tragedy.” A year later he discussed his revision process again in an article for the 1895 Frank Leslie Christmas Book entitled “Talk About Twins.” In reading though Mark Twain’s works, it is hard not to notice how much talk there is about twins, alter egos, changelings, doppelgänger, similar twosomes, contrasting pairs. Dozens come to mind, beyond the conjoined varieties: the Dandy and the Squatter, the Good Little Boy and the Bad Little Boy, Scotty Briggs and Reverend Rising, Bixby and the cub pilot, George Holland and the Rev. Mr. Sabine, “Edward Mills and George Benton,” The Prince and the Pauper, Huck and Tom at the Phelpses’ plantation, the narrator and his conscience in “The Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” the “real David” Gridley and the “sham David” in “Indiantown,” the reversed identities between master and slave in “Which Was It?,” the workaday selves and the dream selves, known as the duplicates, in “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” which expand in later chapters to triplicates: the Waking-Self, the Dream-Self, and the Soul. When these literary pairings are coupled with the many dualities in the life and career of the man who dubbed himself “Twain,” one is tempted to theorize. Author and business man, entertainer and censor, comedian and tragedian, boomer and buster, Southerner and Northerner, Westerner and Easterner, Sam to some and Mark to others, master of poses on the stage and on the page—this protean humorist has left himself open to the hazardous undertaking Edwin Cady calls “lay psychoanalysis of dead people.” 81 Did Mark Twain have some sort of dual personality disorder, some deep psychic split, or simply a normal version, albeit more flamboyant than most, of the multiple moods and poses that most humans exhibit? Without attempting to answer that much-debated question, we need to recognize a sometimes overlooked fact. As Blaise Pascal pointed out three and a half centuries ago, and writers and dramatists have known for millennia, twins are funny, and provide endless opportunities for surprising comparisons and contrasts, disguises, misunderstandings, comedies of errors. Twins are funny in the first place, because exact likenesses are unexpected. Two identical things are

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unusual in a world in which variety has been privileged by evolution, in which living creatures have tens of thousands of genes, in which seven billion people can be told apart by their fingerprints. Mark Twain discovered at the beginning of his lecture career that “repetition is a mighty power in the domain of humor. If frequently used, nearly any precisely worded and unchanging formula will eventually compel laughter if it be gravely and earnestly repeated.” As proof, he told an old chestnut about Horace Greeley’s rough stagecoach ride in chapter 20 of Roughing It, and then repeated it, all 153 words, three more times. 82 Twins can also upset expectations of similarity as well as difference, for they offer the possibility of a special kind of disparity—the contrast between things that appear to be similar but are not. The extreme differences in personality between Angelo and Luigi that create most of the plot in Those Extraordinary Twins are carried over to Pudd’nhead Wilson, though in the latter book the twins have been physically separated and each individual is provisioned with the requisite number of arms, legs, and heads. This set of twins, however, and the comedy of their disagreements, is eclipsed by another twosome, the unrelated but look-alike sons of Percy Driscoll and of his slave girl Roxana. With this pair, both born on 1 February 1830, Twain found a compelling new use for twinship. Pudd’nhead Wilson begins with an entry from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, lamenting the destructive power of ridicule. The character of the ass “is about perfect, . . . yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complemented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.” 83 This entry is followed by “A Whisper to the Reader,” composed largely of a single 179-word sentence from a garrulous narrator who expresses his thanks for legal advice from a friend in Florence who works at Macaroni Vermicelli’s horse-feed shed which is up the back alley as you turn around the corner out of the Piazza del Duomo just beyond the house where that stone that Dante used to sit on six hundred years ago is let into the wall when he let on to be watching them build Giotto’s campanile and yet always got tired looking as soon as Beatrice passed along on her way to get a chunk of chestnut cake to defend herself with in case of a Ghibelline outbreak before she got to school.

Then we have another entry from the Calendar, which the narrator later defines as “a whimsical almanac . . . with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form, appended to each date.” 84 Finally the novel gets underway, and presents in the first chapter an idyllic picture of a “sleepy and comfortable and contented” antebellum town on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River south of St. Louis. The houses are snug, the gardens are luxuriant, the cats doze in the sun, the country to the west is rich in grain and pork, and the chief citizens are gentlemen of distin-

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guished Virginian ancestry—Judge York Leicester Driscoll and his brother Percy Northumberland Driscoll, Pembroke Howard, Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex. The chapter concludes with a version of the bifurcated execution that ended Those Extraordinary Twins. David Wilson, just arrived in town, is annoyed by the snarling and howling of a local dog, and he announces that he wished he owned half of the dog, so he could kill his half. The townspeople don’t get it, and brand Wilson a pudd’nhead. The tranquil description of Dawson’s Landing is reminiscent of the first sentence of Jane Austen’s Emma: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition . . . had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” The reader is alerted; things are just a little too perfect; something will happen. Less subtle than Austen, Twain surrounds his description with the ironies of the author’s preface, the Calendar entries, and Wilson’s failed joke. He also drops in some hints. This comfortable little town is a “slaveholding” community. And no father is mentioned for Roxy’s baby. The reader waits for the other shoe to drop. And drop it does in the second chapter. Roxy is introduced at first through her language, as she joshes with a slave in the neighborhood, who announces he is planning to come courting: “‘You is, you black mud-cat! Yah—yah— yah! I got somep’n’ better to do den ‘sociat’n’ wid niggers as black as you is.’” Then she is described physically. Roxy has brown hair, a fair complexion, “majestic form and stature,” and “a noble and stately grace.” She is “as white as anybody,” but “the one sixteenth of her which was black” made her a negro and a slave “by a fiction of law and custom.” Her baby son, 31 parts white, has “blue eyes and flaxen curls” just like Percy Driscoll’s son, and Driscoll can tell them apart only by their clothes. That fact soon gives Roxy, who worries about her child being sold “down the river” into the most brutal arena of American slavery, an extraordinary idea. She switches the babies’ clothes, cradles, and names, and this transfer of identity—ostensibly across races, actually across cultures—will govern the rest of the novel as the two boys grow to manhood over the following quarter century. Mark Twain is thus launched on a fiction rather different from his earlier published works. There is some comedy in Pudd’nhead Wilson concerning the upbringing of the two boys and the interactions of the Italian twins. The local fire company responds to a conflagration in a way that prefigures Laurel and Hardy films, by destroying a meeting hall and half drowning the fleeing inhabitants: “Such citizens of that village as were of a thoughtful and judicious temperament did not insure against fire; they insured against the fire-company.” 85 Inconsistent as always, Twain presents Roxy as intelligent, competent, and dignified, but he can’t resist jokes at her expense, as in her criticism of her son’s cowardice:

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In addition to comedy, there is satire directed at the ignorance and pretensions of the citizens of Dawson’s Landing, but the dominant tone of the novel is ironic. Twain seems to have turned a corner, but it is not a turn away from disparity. Virtually all of Twain’s works mix comedy, satire, and irony; the writings of the mid-1890s and beyond are distinctive in that the mixture tends to be weighted toward the ironic side. Irony, like comedy and satire, is based on disparity: what is said diverges from what is meant; what happens contradicts what is supposed to happen. But irony tends to lack surprise. It seems heavy rather than light, like a carbonated drink that has gone flat—the taste is more or less the same, but the effervescence has disappeared. The pleasure in irony often stems from the fulfillment, rather than the overturn, of our expectations. When we learn that a self-righteous politician has been caught with his hand in the till or his pants on the floor, we tend to say “I told you so,” and “it serves him right.” We enjoy the poetic justice of Dante’s Inferno, where flatterers are immersed in a ditch of excrement and hypocrites wear gilded cloaks lined with lead, just as the audience at early Greek plays enjoyed watching the wily Eiron character outwit the bombastic, bragging Alazon—hence the origin of the term irony, originally referring to the dissembling speech of the Eiron. “Cooked in their own juice,” we might say of Dante’s sinners; and, of the fall of Alazons and Goliaths, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” Even when the irony is aimed inward—let’s say we get stopped for speeding to an engagement for which we are already late—the humorist in us might observe that “it serves me right; I should have known better.” As irony moves out to larger concerns, it is sometimes called grim, wry, or sardonic humor, or the irony (or quirk) of fate, or the “pitifully ludicrous,” 87 as Hank Morgan puts it in Connecticut Yankee. This is the kind of humor Twain refers to in Following the Equator, where he notes that “The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow.” 88 Humor based in sorrow contains little surprise and not even the satisfaction of poetic justice. Family friends used to wonder why my father never complained about old age. “There are only two options,” he would say with a smile, “you either get older or you die.” The pleasure in grim humor seems to come from catching fate in the act. If we cannot elude age and sorrow and poetic injustice, we can at least point out, with witty precision, the inconsistencies between the realities of existence and our hopes and expectations. That seems to be a way of

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coping, of talking back, of going down with all flags flying. Is it a pessimistic view of life? Only if you believe that life is all sweetness and light, that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. In his later years, Mark Twain found a lot wrong with the world, and he increasingly turned to irony as a humorist’s strategy of expression. One of the world’s wrongs was slavery. Pudd’nhead Wilson is a tale of ironies that twist and turn and deepen as the story unfolds. Each chapter begins with a wry little aphorism, perhaps a parodic glance at the habit of authors such as Cooper, Scott, Mrs. Stowe, and George Eliot to sometimes preface their chapters with poetic epigraphs: “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” Some of these apothegms have specific reference to events in the novel. The starving dog note precedes chapter 16, in which Tom, having been rescued by his mother Roxy, sells her to a cotton planter down in Arkansas. Others are more general: “October . . . is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.” 89 Presumably these little dabs of philosophy are from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, but given Wilson’s unastringent character, they seem to be more a product of Mark Twain’s notebooks, which, especially in his later years, were enlivened with scores of one and two-sentence aphorisms. He liked the maxim genre, which gave him a chance to say something both pithy and humorous, and he later attached an apothegm to each of the 70 chapters of Following the Equator, listing the source as “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.” Wilson’s calendar is mentioned twice in the text of Pudd’nhead Wilson. David Wilson reads some of the apothegms to the twins; and Judge Driscoll, the other member of the Free-Thinkers’ Society, reads a batch to some of the chief citizens of the town, who, of course, don’t understand. The narrator observes that “irony was not for those people,” 90 a comment that suggests the main function of the epigraphs is to provide an overwash of irony for the entire novel. Names of characters work in a similar fashion. Wilson is a pudd’nhead because the villagers are ignorant. Roxanna and the other slaves have no last names because they are regarded as less than fully human. The fine white gentlemen have fine white English-Virginian names, such as Roxy’s owner, Percy Northumberland Driscoll. Roxy’s attempt to imitate the gentry in naming her son Valet de Chamber is simultaneously a parody of the gentry’s pretentious nomenclature, an appallingly accurate measure of her son’s place in society, and an indication of his character, since valet is related to varlet, which Valet de Chamber assuredly is. These ironies are intensified when Roxy renames Valet de Chamber as “Tom” and Thomas à Becket Driscoll as “Chambers.” Identity and race in Dawson’s Landing turn out to be a matter

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of what your name is, how you talk, what color your skin is, which cradle you are placed in. The cradle switching sets up the central irony of the plot. Roxy attempts to protect her baby from slavery, and is eventually sold by him into slavery after her manumission upon Percy Driscoll’s death. Tom himself is sold down the river at the novel’s end. That phrase, “down the river,” hangs over the novel like the inscription over the gate to Dante’s hell. It is repeated 29 times. Within this central irony are many others. Tom’s mother Roxy, his ostensible father Percy Driscoll (after Roxy’s cradle swap), and his ostensible uncle Judge Driscoll ruin his health and character with petting, rich food, and indulgence. Chambers, on the other hand, receives canings, coarse food, and hard work, and grows up strong and healthy. The strict code of the F.F.V. gentleman demands that “he must keep his honor spotless,” 91 but that code overlooks cohabitation with female slaves: Tom’s real father is Colonel Essex. Tom is only 1/32nd “black,” but Roxy, who has absorbed the racial attitudes of the white community, blames Tom’s wickedness on “de nigger in you.” 92 Together these ironies demonstrate that slavery poisons the well of human relationships. Good masters, bad masters, good slaves, bad slaves, good intentions (even the benign act of freeing a slave could sometimes leave him vulnerable in the white world), bad intentions—all are locked together in a dance of despair. Pudd’nhead Wilson both does and does not have a resolution, for the slavery story is intertwined with a detective story. Mark Twain had a peculiar and somewhat misplaced partiality for detective fiction, and he is rarely successful with the genre, except when he satirizes it, as in “The Stolen White Elephant.” Perhaps as a humorist he enjoyed the surprising puzzles, turns, and revelations, often ironic, of the detective story—who knows who done it? The later chapters of Pudd’nhead Wilson are concerned with the mysterious woman in Tom’s room, the murder of Judge Driscoll, and ultimately the identity of the two boys who were raised from the cradles in which they were switched by Roxy. The novel’s climax comes in the long penultimate chapter, a courtroom scene, in which Wilson employs his hobby, the new science of fingerprinting (new, that is, to the 1890s; Twain, a master of inconsistency, was unruffled by this anachronism in his antebellum story). Wilson’s carefully collected and labeled prints prove that “Tom” is actually Valet de Chamber and the murderer of Judge Driscoll, and that “Chambers” is Thomas Driscoll and no longer a slave. Tom is found guilty, imprisoned, and then pardoned by the governor so, as a slave, he can be sold, in the novel’s closing words, “down the river.” Roxy’s worst fears, like those of King Laius and his son Oedipus, have been brought about by trying to evade them. David Wilson, now mayor, is redeemed: “His long fight against hard luck and prejudice was ended; he was a made man for good.” 93 Yet this neat

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ending to the detective element of the novel provides no resolution of the deeper story around which it is wrapped. Slavery has proved to be a disaster, but no one realizes it. Everyone in Dawson’s Landing, including Roxy and Wilson, continues to accept the fraudulent code of the F.F.V., the superiority of whites, and the abasement of slaves as naturally as they accept the seasons or the southward current of the Mississippi. Dawson’s landing recapitulates the Hannibal of Mark Twain’s youth: In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind. 94

The final irony of this ironic book is that the meaning of the story is lost on the characters who inhabit it. They are all pudd’nheads. PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC For some critics, the ending of Connecticut Yankee is where the humorist jumped off the cliff, and Pudd’nhead Wilson is where he hit bottom. This view holds that personal calamities led to grief and despair, that the humorist turned into a pessimist, and that his talents were paralyzed in his later years—a notion which fails to take into account either Twain’s resilience to financial and family disasters or the new ways in which he was defining himself as a humorist. It is certainly true that he suffered setbacks, disappointments, and family tragedies, but Mark Twain, early and late, tends to be more complex and interesting, more versatile and varied, than any single theory can account for. While he was working out the convoluted ironies of Pudd’nhead Wilson, he also produced “Extracts from Adam’s Diary,” a good-natured parody of Genesis as well as a satire on husbands and wives. Published in 1893, “Extracts” uses first-person naïve narration in which Adam presents himself as a rational, dispassionate, assertive superintendent of Eden, initially critical of the introduction of Eve into his solitary paradise: “this new creature with the long hair . . . eats too much fruit.” 95 When Cain appears—Eve caught it somewhere, according to Adam—he tries to determine whether the little creature is a fish by putting it in water, but Eve snatches it out. She is voluble, spontaneous, passionate, and usually right; and Adam eventually learns that “it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.” 96 The notion of Mark Twain as a developing misanthrope also fails to take into account his next major project, a 461-page celebration of human courage and endurance. While Pudd’nhead Wilson was in the process of being

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printed, Twain was already deep into a new book, his last before embarking on his 1895-96 lecture tour. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is both heroic and ironic; its heroine is a model of intelligence, common sense, selflessness, and piety; yet she is burned at the stake as a heretic. Mark Twain was always interested in uniqueness, marvels, prodigies, exceptional humans; and Joan— “the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages,” as G. B. Shaw called her—seemed to qualify on all of these grounds. 97 In her white armor, disregarding her wounds, the Maid of Orléans rode her black horse at the head of the French armies that captured English-held forts and towns, lifted the siege of Orléans, routed the English army at Patay, and gave legitimacy to the disinherited Dauphin by marching him through enemy territory to be crowned at Reims. Joan seemed to awaken French nationalism, and helped give a Gallic finish to the Hundred Years’ War that ultimately drove the English invaders back across the channel. That’s not bad for an illiterate seventeen-year-old peasant girl. Twain was attracted to tales of great courage and heroism, of deep human depravity, of violent swings between triumph and tragedy. The story of Joan of Arc is all of that. There is a surprising amount of surviving fifteenth-century testimony concerning Jeanne d’Arc, but it is so enmeshed in the crisscross of her condemnation and execution in 1431, followed by her rehabilitation in 1456, that interpretations range widely. At one extreme, Joan has been seen as a triumphant manifestation of divine providence; at the other, a pawn destroyed by the complexities of medieval politics. Mark Twain chose neither of these extremes. Rather, his Joan of Arc is a heroic individual whose brief moment in history is so remarkable that it makes her, as he put it in a later essay, “easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” 98 This essay appeared in Harper’s Monthly in December 1904, the same year that Pope Pius X decreed Joan to be Venerable, one of the steppingstones on the pathway to canonization as a saint, which finally occurred in 1920. Today, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is one of Mark Twain’s least read books, perhaps because readers have a problem with species identification of the sort that bedeviled Twain’s Adam, who couldn’t decide whether the baby that Eve produced was a fish, kangaroo, bear, or parrot. The Personal Recollections is not exactly fiction, and Twain, rare for him, includes in the book edition a bibliography of eleven historical sources he consulted. Yet it is not exactly history either, for the author creates characters and episodes and dialogue to fill out his chronicle, and alters some fifteenthcentury chronology. The reader is warned at the beginning that the story is faithful to Joan’s “official history,” but that there is a “mass of added particulars.” Today we might call it creative nonfiction. And while Joan of Arc is not an overtly humorous book, the strategies of the humorist can be seen

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throughout. The story is told by one of Joan’s compatriots from her natal village of Domrémy, “the Sieur Louis de Conte,” presumably writing a manuscript for his descendents. A translator is also listed, “Jean François Alden,” who is supposed to have unearthed the “original unpublished manuscript in the National Archives of France.” A historical Louis de Coutes was, according to Twain’s sources, one of Joan’s pages, though he was younger than Joan and not from Domrémy; Jean François Alden is perhaps a glance at Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, where Joan of Arc first appeared. There was no mention of “Mark Twain” in the magazine publication, for the author felt that his audience might not understand that a humorist could be in earnest. The title page of the book edition also carried Louis de Conte as author and Jean François Alden as translator, though the publisher, perhaps more interested in sales than understanding, put Mark Twain’s name on the book’s cover and spine. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc begins with a “Translator’s Preface,” which contains Twain’s most extended elaboration of one of his favorite devices: “The contrast between [Joan] and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one.” 99 The contrasts continue with fifteen more examples spread across two pages, and establish the framework for the entire narrative. Inside that framework of contrast, the story is told through another favorite Twainian device, the first-person narrator. The Sieur Louis de Conte is one of the half dozen young men from Domrémy who accompany Joan as aides-de-camp in her fifteen-month crusade to end the English occupation of northern France. His “small nobility” family having been butchered in the aftermath of Agincourt by Burgundian collaborators with the English, de Conte, one of the two people in the village who can read and write, serves throughout Joan’s campaigns as her page and secretary. Many years later, at the age of 82, he writes his personal recollections. This narrator is a double vehicle for satire. As an intelligent and thoughtful person, he sees through the foolishness and deceitfulness around him. Yet as a representative of late medieval culture, he is a naïve narrator and unwittingly displays his own beliefs in the superstitions of the age: “I know that the [dragon] was there before the exorcism, but whether it was there afterwards or not is a thing which I cannot be so positive about.” 100 Since de Conte accepts the teachings of medieval Catholicism and the sometimes miraculous events in mid-fifteenth-century accounts of Joan’s career, Twain is able to avoid having to make modern authorial judgments. The first of the book’s three sections, “In Domrémy,” presents the events of Joan’s early years, to age sixteen. Although there are rumblings of conflict in the background, the pastoral life of the little village is reminiscent of Tom Sawyer days; Domrémy seems a St. Petersburg on the Meuse. Joan is pre-

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sented as precociously wise and spiritedly patriotic, but she tends sheep and cattle with the other youngsters, and is a full participant in their “yarning and laughing and singing.” 101 Part of their fun concerns Edmond Aubrey, derisively nicknamed the Paladin, “a vast structure of brawn and muscle and vanity and foolishness,” 102 who is led into ridiculous feats of boastfulness by little Noël Rainguesson, who plays the eiron to Aubrey’s alazon. These young people are destined to grow up quickly, for the divine voices that Joan hears have commanded her to rescue the French nation. Section 2 of the Personal Recollections, “In Court and Camp,” begins on the eve of Joan’s seventeenth birthday, and narrates the events of her annus mirabilis. Joan is granted an audience with the Dauphin on 25 February 1429, and dictates a challenge to the English the following month. In April, riding in armor at the head of the French army, with her standard and banner of Christ displayed, she leads the attack on the English forts surrounding besieged Orléans, and the city is liberated on 8 May. Then Joan and commanding general Duc d’Alençon attack English strongholds along the Loire River, and defeat the English army at Patay. Following these victories, Joan persuades the hesitant Dauphin to march through English-occupied territory to Reims, the traditional coronation site of French kings. The Anglo-Burgundian towns along the way capitulate and the Dauphin, six years after the death of his father Charles VI, is finally crowned on 17 July with Joan standing nearby. On 24 December 1429, Joan and the entire d’Arc family are raised to the nobility by Charles VII. The next month she turned eighteen. “In Court and Camp,” the middle section of the Personal Recollections, is relentlessly upbeat, with flashing swords and dashing attacks, as Joan moves from victory to victory. While much of it concerns marching and battle, Twain also captures the life of the troops along the way, and heroics often give way to comedy. All the aides-de-camp fall vainly in love with the same girl, Catherine Boucher, daughter of the official who hosts Joan while the army is being recruited. In the taprooms of the inns where soldiers and villagers wait out the long delays of war, there is joking and boasting and tale telling. In this environment the Paladin comes into his own, and Mark Twain gives a remarkable new twist to the stock alazon character. Unlike those warriors who boast and run, the Paladin proves himself in battle. His vast size and strength make him an able soldier, and his courage under fire leads Joan to promote him to the position of her standard-bearer, which puts him at the head of the army and in the thick of the fighting. This new development gives wings to his tongue, and the Paladin—a flamboyant combination of Falstaff and Hotspur—is transformed from a mere braggart to an artist of exaggeration: Most people who have the narrative gift—that great and rare endowment— have with it the defect of telling their choice things over the same way every

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time, and this injures them and causes them to sound stale and wearisome after several repetitions; but it was not so with the Paladin, whose art was of a finer sort; it was more stirring and interesting to hear him tell about a battle the tenth time than it was the first time, because he did not tell it twice the same way, but always made a new battle of it and a better one, with more casualties on the enemy’s side each time, and more general wreck and disaster all around, and more widows and orphans and suffering in the neighborhood where it happened. He could not tell his battles apart himself, except by their names; and by the time he had told one of them ten times he had to lay it aside and start a new one in its place, because it had grown so that there wasn’t room enough in France for it any more, but was lapping over the edges. 103

When the Paladin is wounded at the battle of Jargeau, he was happy and proud, and made the most of his wound, and went swaggering around in his bandages showing off like an innocent big child—which was just what he was. He was prouder of being wounded than a really modest person would be of being killed. But there was no harm in his vanity, and nobody minded it. He said he was hit by a stone from a catapult—a stone the size of a man’s head. But the stone grew, of course. Before he got through with it he was claiming that the enemy had flung a building at him. “Let him alone,” said Noël Rainguesson. “Don’t interrupt his processes. To-morrow it will be a cathedral.” . . . And, sure enough, to-morrow it was a cathedral. I never saw anybody with such an abandoned imagination. 104

Except, of course, for Mark Twain, whose joyful depiction of the Paladin is a mirror of himself: Such style! such noble grace of gesture, such grandeur of attitude, such energy when he got going! such steady rise, on such sure wing, such nicely graduated expenditures of voice according to weight of matter, such skillfully calculated approaches to his surprises and explosions, such belief-compelling sincerity of tone and manner. . . . And oh, the gentle art of the last half of his last sentence—delivered in the careless and indolent tone of one who has finished his real story, and only adds a colorless and inconsequential detail because it has happened to occur to him in a lazy way. 105

Noël Rainguesson, no longer employed with teasing the Paladin, gives his own comic performances of mimicry and recitation, which he mixes with the skill of a true humorist. After an imitation of the Paladin, which sends his audience into “spasms, convulsions, frenzies of laughter,” 106 Rainguesson quickly switches to a sentimental poem: “Noël was clever. He knew the very best background for a poem of deep and refined sentiment and pathetic melancholy was one where great and satisfying merriment has prepared the spirit for the powerful contrast.” 107 Clever himself, Mark Twain was convinced that merriment and melancholy set each other up. “It is a law,” he told

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an interviewer in 1891, “that humor is created by contrasts,” and he went on to explain that the humorously “grotesque things that happen at funerals depend on their solemn background.” Several years later he repeated the point with an analogy: “Set a diamond upon a pall of black if you’d have it glisten.” 108 Book 2 of Joan of Arc thus alternates “the measured tramp of marching battalions” with “dancing, and games, and romps, and screams of laughter”; 109 and Mark Twain also manages to toss in a Pudd’nhead Wilson calendar entry, a bull and bees story reminiscent of Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, a phrase from his General Grant speech, and comments on mental telepathy. In one passage, de Conte resembles the stiff-necked outside narrator of the Jumping Frog story; in another he reminds us of garrulous Jim Blaine from Roughing It. These many strands are held together by Twain’s focus on Joan, who is defined by a series of contrasts: simple, modest Joan and the tinseled and foppish king; honest Joan and the crafty and scheming ministers of state; straightforward Joan and the “holy hair-splitters” of the church; 110 pious Joan and her explosively blasphemous general La Hire. Joan tones down his swearing and finally gets this “cyclopædia of sin” to say a prayer: “Fair Sir God, I pray you to do by La Hire as he would do by you if you were La Hire and he were God.” 111 At this, Joan dissolves in a paroxysm of laughter. In Mark Twain’s view, Joan is a paragon of all virtues, and her sense of humor is part of her charm, and part of her leadership. She laughs easily and often— winning adherents, stymieing opponents, and defusing tense situations. After the defeat of the English army at Patay in June 1429, and the coronation of Charles VII the following month, Joan asks leave to return home to her quiet life in Domrémy. The king insists that she stay with his court, though he is hesitant to take the offensive against Paris and other remaining English strongholds. Joan is a battle maiden, not a courtier, so she puts in her time leading sorties in northern France. Captured by quisling Burgundians at Compiègne in May 1430, she is sold to the English for 10,000 francs, a prince’s ransom. While Charles, incredibly, remains a passive bystander, the terrible last year of Joan’s life is played out. As Mark Twain tells the story in section 3, “Trial and Martyrdom,” the Paladin is dead—cut down as he tried to protect Joan at Compiègne—and the laughter is over, but the contrasts between Joan and her adversaries continue, providing the narrative structure for the rest of the book. The English and the Burgundian French call Joan of Arc “a sorceress, a false prophet, an invoker and companion of evil spirits, a dealer in magic, a person ignorant of the Catholic faith, a schismatic; she is sacrilegious, an idolater, an apostate, a blasphemer of God and his saints, scandalous, seditious, a disturber of the peace.” 112 De Conte, the narrator, tells us that “to know Joan of Arc was to know one who was wholly noble, pure, truthful, brave, compassionate, gen-

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erous, pious, unselfish, modest, blameless as the very flowers in the fields—a nature fine and beautiful, a character supremely great.” 113 After her capture, Joan is imprisoned in a succession of castles, and attempts to escape from one by jumping from a tower into a moat. Finally incarcerated at Rouen, in a castle held by the Earl of Warwick, Joan is chained to a wooden block in a dungeon, sometimes manacled, threatened with torture, spied upon, and guarded day and night by jeering English soldiers, two of whom are stationed inside her cell. Interrogated and harassed for months, Joan is then put on trial under a 70-count indictment before the hostile Bishop of Beauvais, Pierre Cauchon, and the Vice-Inquisitor of France, Jean Lamaître, assisted by teams of eminent ecclesiastics. Through it all, she displays courage and endurance, remains patriotic and pious, and proves to be an able debater, parrying the learned questions, dodging the intellectual traps, and defending herself skillfully, without friend or counsel, against trumped-up charges and a kangaroo court. Toward the end, she recants briefly, on a promise—which turns out to be false—of being released, but quickly withdraws her recantation and is executed on charges of heresy, blasphemy, sorcery, and apostasy on 30 May 1431, at the age of nineteen, in one of history’s most tragically ironic moments. Mark Twain, in the voice of the book’s “translator,” puts it this way: She led [her country] from victory to victory, she turned back the tide of the Hundred Years’ War, she fatally crippled the English power, and died with the earned title of DELIVERER OF FRANCE, which she bears to this day. And for all reward, the French King whom she had crowned stood supine and indifferent while French priests took the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake. 114

Nineteen years later, after the English have been expelled from France and the Burgundians have become French again, Joan’s case is reopened. Following royal and ecclesiastical inquiries and a retrial, Joan is declared innocent of the charges made in 1431 and the earlier verdict is finally annulled in 1456. Although Mark Twain draws heavily on the testimony taken in this rehabilitation process for details of Joan’s life and career, he summarizes the six-year proceeding in two pages, preferring to leave the emphasis of Book 3 of the Personal Recollections on the supreme irony of her first trial and death. No one today seems to take seriously Mark Twain’s 1908 note that “I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; & it is the best.” 115 That note was reproduced in the 1912 biography by A. B. Paine, who claimed that Joan was the author’s “supreme literary expression,” and Paine was so inspired by Twain’s account that he published his own two-volume biography of Joan of Arc in 1925. 116 Today Twain’s note is often cited as evidence that he was a

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notoriously bad critic of his own work, but there are other reasons for his comment. The year of the note, 1908, is also the year a Beatification Decree was conferred upon Joan by the Vatican, which meant she was rounding third base on the way to canonization a dozen years later. Mark Twain was rooting from the grandstand. It may also be that, in Twain’s own mind, Joan of Arc was conclusive proof that an author could be simultaneously serious and humorous. As Howells put it in his carefully balanced review of Joan in Harper’s Weekly, sounding a note Twain loved to hear, “the historical form in fiction . . . was the only form in which [our great humorist] could hope to deliver a message of serious import without being taken altogether in jest.” 117 And looking back from 1908, Twain must have realized that the Personal Recollections was his last book written with his family intact, joining him in the evenings when he read his day’s effort to his favorite audience. Joan of Arc, both girl and book, may well have become a memorial to Twain’s family life, to his daughters, and especially to Susy, the child closest to her father, whom he admired as well as loved. Susy Clemens, eldest of the surviving children, was precocious, high-spirited, talented—a source of pleasure and amazement to her father. Like him, she could sing, write, and act; and Mark Twain was perhaps never happier than when he and Susy trod the household boards as Miles Hendon and the Prince in Livy’s adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper, performed for friends and neighbors. So close were father and daughter that apparently neither one of them could stand the separation when she went away to college, and Susy left Bryn Mawr before her first year was completed. The adjectives used by “Jean François Alden” to summarize Joan—noble, innocent, lovely, adorable—sound like those of a father as well as a historian. GAINS AND LOSSES Mark Twain was deeply immersed in the Joan of Arc project and went through a kind of postpartum depression after it was finished. A note he made in Paris early in 1895 put it this way about a man who has written a long book: The morning after he has revised it for the last time . . . he steps into his study at the hour established by the habit of months—and he gets [a] shock. All the litter and the confusion are gone. The piles of dusty reference books are gone from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters, manuscripts, notebooks, paper knives, pipes, matches, photographs, tobacco jars, and cigar boxes is gone from the writing table. The furniture is back where it use to be in the long ago. The housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there, and tidied it up, and scoured it clean, and made it repellent and awful. 118

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It was, Twain concluded, time to move on, and he would be very much in motion for the next year and a half. With Joan and Tom Sawyer, Detective finished and four other books in print between 1892 and 1894, with the financial drain stopped and Rogers in charge of his business affairs, Twain decided on a bold plan to further his fiscal recovery by turning to the one resource he had in addition to his income as an author—lecturing. Returning to New York, he arranged an east-to-west North American lecture tour, to be conjoined with an international tour following the British flag and Englishspeaking audiences around the globe: Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa. Leaving Jean and Susy at Quarry Farm with Susan Crane, Twain departed from Elmira with Livy and Clara on 14 July 1895. He gave 23 lectures in the American Northwest and in Canada, and then 100 more from Sidney to Cape Town, billed by his manager as “Mark Twain’s Talking Tour Round the World—Nights of Wit and Wisdom.” 119 Arriving back in England on 31 July 1896, Twain had earned approximately $30,000 from his yearlong talking tour and reduced his indebtedness by more than one-third. Now the second part of his plan would kick in, for his world trip had provided the material for yet another travel book, whose sales would help pay off the remaining creditors. On 5 August, Twain re-established his correspondence, interrupted for 12 months, with W. D. Howells: We hope to get a house in some quiet English village away from the world & society, where I can sit down for six months or so & give myself up to the luxury & rest of writing a book or two after this long fatigue & turmoil of platform-work & gadding around by sea & land. Susie & Jean sail from New York today, & a week hence we shall all be together again. 120

A week later, on 12 August, Mark Twain wrote to H. H. Rogers from Guildford to express his gratitude for the progress Rogers had made concerning contracts and copyrights with the American Publishing Co. and with Harper’s, enabling both firms to publish various individual volumes and to move forward with uniform editions of the works of Mark Twain. After five years of hard work, Twain was well on the way to recovering from business failures and financial embarrassments, and looking forward to the reunion of his family, which had been separated for over a year. But Susy and Jean did not appear. Instead, a letter came explaining that Susy had been ill, and then a cable indicated the illness was serious. Livy and Clara caught the first steamer to America, and while they were still in midocean, Mark Twain, remaining alone in England to search for a larger house to accommodate the whole family, received another cable stating that Susy had died of meningitis.

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Five weeks later, when he described the event to Howells, Twain focused both on the immensity of their loss and the malevolent irony of the circumstances: What a ghastly tragedy it was; how cruel it was; how exactly & precisely it was planned; & how remorselessly every detail of the dispensation was carried out. Susy stood on the platform at Elmira at half past ten on the 14th of July, 1895, in the glare of the electric lights, waving her good-byes as our train moved westward on the long trip; & she was brimming with life & the joy of it. That is what I saw; & it was what her mother saw through her tears. One year, one month, & one week later, Livy & Clara had completed the circuit of the globe, arriving at Elmira at the same hour in the evening, by the same train & in the same car—& Susy was there to meet them—lying white & fair in her coffin in the house she was born in.

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Chapter Thirteen

A Subtle Humorist

“When filled up with an experience that deeply interested him, or when provoked by some injustice or absurdity . . . he burst forth, and the outbreak [was] likely to be humorous with a groundswell of seriousness carrying it profoundly forward.” 1 W. D. Howells

RECOVERY When Mark Twain had a problem, he tended to react in two stages. First, he would throw himself energetically into the situation, often magnifying it. After giving his Whittier Birthday speech, he sat down “with a heart which had long since ceased to beat. I shall never be as dead again as I was then. I shall never be as miserable again as I was then.” 2 Then he would turn to his pen. In the case of the Whittier affair, he wrote a contrite letter “to offer my repentance” to Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes, explaining that “I had to write you, for the easement of it.” 3 When Twain was on the receiving rather than the giving end of some real or imagined insult, he would often draft a scorching retort, which he might or might not send. Writing seemed to exorcise a problem, allay an embarrassment, hold a sorrow at bay. In the late summer of 1870, Livy’s father and her visiting schoolmate both died, and shortly thereafter Livy—exhausted and ill—gave birth prematurely to a son and then collapsed with typhoid. Twain, who was frequently on nursing duty, later described some of these days as “among the blackest, the gloomiest, the most wretched of my long life.” Early the following spring, after eight months of “sickness & death,” the Clemens family headed for Elmira, and Twain announced that he was going to “shut myself up in a farm-house alone, on top an Elmira hill, & write.” 4 287

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The days after Susy’s death were also black and wretched, as Twain and his reduced family settled into the gloom of the London fall and winter of 1896. They kept out of public view, restricted their social life to a few friends, and in the wake of what Twain called “our unspeakable disaster,” did not celebrate either Thanksgiving or Christmas. 5 They were facing another disaster as well, for Jean, at age 15, in school in Elmira while her parents were touring in India in February 1896, had suffered the first seizure from the epilepsy that would cloud her life and end it before she reached thirty. As in earlier times, Mark Twain turned to his desk for respite. While waiting for the family to unite, he had begun an article provoked by reports in London newspapers that the Turks had burned the convent of Agharatho in Crete, torturing and killing the prior and burning three monks alive. In the weeks after Susy’s death, the article turned into a meditation, not flattering, on the human condition. Subscribing to the Dantean notion that human intellectual superiority can result in an increased capacity for evil, Twain contrasts man to what he calls the “higher animals.” 6 Only humans, he asserts, are deliberately cruel, revengeful, avaricious, indecent, vulgar, obscene, dishonest, mendacious, and patriotic. “Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. . . . He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.” Twain then goes on to describe man physically as “a rickety poor sort of a thing,” and provides, for proof, a list of 68 infirmities, ailments, and diseases. This bleak analysis is certainly sincere, and included in the list are carbuncles, which had aggrieved Twain during the world tour, and heart problems, which Livy suffered on a recurring basis. Not mentioned, perhaps because they were still too painful, were meningitis and epilepsy. Yet the tone of this piece is less bleak than a summary suggests. Twain presents a series of fanciful imaginary “experiments” to prove his case, such as putting a group of animals in one cage—cat, dog, rabbit, fox, goose, squirrel, some doves and a monkey—and placing in another an Irish Catholic, a Scotch Presbyterian, a Turk, a Greek Christian, an Armenian, a Methodist, a Buddhist, a Brahmin, and a Salvation Army colonel: “Then I stayed away two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh—not a specimen left alive.” He concludes that human beings have reached the bottom stage of development. “Below us—nothing. Nothing but the Frenchman.” In discussing the peculiarities of the human body, Twain notes the uselessness of tonsils and the appendix, and the absurdity of male breasts: “For business, they are out of the question; as an ornament, they are a mistake.” In addition to the intermittent glee woven into the damnation, much of the energy of the article comes not simply from human inadequacies, but from an attack on what Twain sees as false idealism and fatuous optimism. He

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contrasts Sunday piety with weekday reality. He inverts the notion of the ascent of man, common in the late nineteenth century, to the descent of man. His discussion of the Moral Sense— “the ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, necessarily, the ability to do evil”— counters the proposition of those in his time who, when confronted with the ideas of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, felt the need to distinguish between man and the other animals and made the argument that morality is what distinguishes us from them. Thus Twain’s career-long strategy of opposition is at work here, even though it is more subtle than in earlier writings. In this article, as in many to follow, he is not simply railing against the human condition, but setting up an ironic resistance to conventional beliefs. The final sentence, a brilliantly laconic contrast to the earlier fulminations, encapsulates the essence of his later works: “We are not as important, perhaps, as we had all along supposed we were.” Mark Twain did not publish this article, now known as “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” which first appeared, as “The Lowest Animal,” in the Damned Human Race section of Bernard DeVoto’s 1962 edition of collected pieces entitled Letters from the Earth. The year 1896 was the only year between 1860 and 1908 that Twain did not place an article, sketch, or story in print, although Joan of Arc appeared while he was on tour and Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective; and Other Stories came out in the fall. A month after Susy’s death, Twain wrote to Henry Rogers that “I do not come up out of my misery and desolation in the least degree yet; but presently I shall submerge myself and my troubles in work.” 7 One month after that, in late October, he was well submerged and proceeding rapidly with the travel book that would signify his return to financial solvency, even though, as he confessed to Howells, “I am a mud image, & it puzzles me to know what it is in me that writes, & that has comedy-fancies & finds pleasure in phrasing them. . . . The thing in me forgets the presence of the mud image & goes its own way wholly unconscious of it & apparently of no kinship with it.” 8 Howells shared and sympathized with Mark Twain’s many griefs, and observed at firsthand his remarkable capacity for recovery: “Life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its interests after his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested in the world and in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in subjects of curious inquiry.” 9 FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR The last and longest of Mark Twain’s five travel books, and his last book to be sold by subscription, Following the Equator establishes a new record for miscellaneity. It was aimed unabashedly at the profits of the subscription trade, in which the buyers, as Twain wrote to H. H. Rogers, were people not

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“accustomed to read . . . factory hands and the farmers . . . never go to a bookstore; they have to be hunted down by the canvasser.” 10 The 70 chapters are each prefaced, following Twain’s practice in Pudd’nhead Wilson, with a little dab of philosophy, usually ironic, attributed to “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar,” though neither Wilson nor his calendar is mentioned in the text. These chapters offer the reader thumbnail histories and journalistic reports of the past and present in Australia and New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, and South Africa; along with tall tales about Commodore Vanderbilt, Cecil Rhodes, a fox hunt, the Maryborough branch railroad, and Augustine Daly’s Irish doorkeeper; bits of autobiography and entries from a reporter’s notebook (including a facsimile reproduction of a notebook page); and miniature essays on women’s suffrage, General Grant, mental telepathy, Scots pronunciation, practical jokes, shipboard amusements, the bogus claimant to the Tichborne estates, nature’s malignity, irreverence, American ice storms, the Mark Twain Club of Corrigan Castle (total membership: one person), The Vicar of Wakefield (“that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots”), 11 school reform, P. T. Barnum’s preservation of Shakespeare’s birthplace, and bad habits (including the story about an ailing woman who could not recover because she had no bad habits to get rid of: “She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship”). 12 The variety-show narrator invents a yarn-spinning naturalist (“he told me . . . rabbits [in Australia] were so thick in the land that people had to dig trenches through them to get from town to town”; “he said the kangaroo had pockets, and carried its young in them when it couldn’t get apples”; and “the only difference between a dingo and a dodo was that neither of them barked; otherwise they were just the same”). 13 He thrice drops in poetry by Mrs. Julia Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, whose clumsy verses delighted him, and he quotes some 24,000 words from dozens of guidebooks and histories. 14 Some of these quotations usefully fill in details from first-person witnesses, others seem to be shortcuts for a reporter in a hurry, and still others, like the description of the Taj Mahal in Agra, are introduced only to be disparaged. Interwoven throughout are bits of brightness and witty remarks (“This is a poor old ship, and ought to be insured and sunk”; “I am used to being afraid of collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant that feeling is absent”; “Only sixty years ago [the natives] were sunk in darkness; now they have the bicycle”). 15 And there is some inspired nonsense. Always alert for “things . . . so strange, so weird, so new, so uncommonplace, [which make] such a startling and interesting contrast to the other sections of the planet,” 16 the narrator makes a collection of curious town names in Australasia, and turns them into a 12-stanza poem reminiscent of “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll, whom Mark Twain referred to, in Australia in 1895, as “a true and subtle humorist.”

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And Murriwillumba complaineth in song For the garlanded bowers of Woolloomooloo, And the Ballarat Fly and the lone Wollongong They dream of the gardens of Jamberoo. 17

Following the Equator barely mentions the lecturing regimen that occasioned the yearlong trip, but the book follows the chronology of the journey, which, as in the earlier travel narratives, substitutes for a plot. Twain’s decision to follow the flag of the British Empire was dictated by convenience and commerce—English-speaking audiences and book buyers—but the exotica of down under, mysterious India, and southernmost Africa stimulated Twain’s restless curiosity and his interest in “surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities.” 18 These exotica well fit his standard strategies for presentation: exaggeration, sometimes for emphasis, sometimes for fun; contrasts between worlds known and unknown; and ironies of history and human behavior. In 1867, Europe and the Holy Land were unfamiliar to most Americans, as were the far West and Mississippi steamboating. Three decades later, a reporter of new worlds had to go further afield. In bringing these new worlds of empire into perspective, Mark Twain discovered a purpose for his book. This discovery begins gradually in chapter 3, when the narrator, as his steamship approaches Honolulu, reminisces about his Sandwich Islands visit three decades earlier. Into this mixture of autobiography and history, he tosses in the fact that the population of the islands has decreased from 400,000, in the time of Captain Cook, to its current 25,000. There is an implication that missionaries and civilization may have had something to do with this decline, but the connection is left indefinite. Denied permission to land because of a cholera outbreak in Honolulu, the steamship captain turns his ship south toward the Samoan and Fiji islands. Here Twain’s purpose begins to sharpen. He describes the system in which island natives are “recruited” to work on sugar plantations in the Australian province of Queensland, and then devotes two chapters to evaluating this practice. The evaluation is put in the form of a debate between recruiting shipmaster Captain Wawn and the Reverend William Gray, a missionary, using quotations from Wawn’s recent book and Gray’s countering pamphlet. Wawn maintains that the native boys who sign up for three years’ labor are weaned from their savage ways and introduced to the blessings of civilization. Gray counters that the boys are often coerced to sign up, worked eight to twelve hours a day in the fields, paid only ₤25 for three years’ work, and are sometimes killed. Mark Twain, not always sympathetic to missionaries, sides completely with Gray in this instance and closes the discussion with the clergyman’s ringing conclusion:

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Mark Twain’s developing sympathy for native peoples next appears when his steamship lands at Suva, the Fijian capital, and he sees natives for the first time on his round-the-world voyage. His descriptions suggest a new attitude: Handsome, great dusky men they were, muscular, clean-limbed, and with faces full of character and intelligence. . . young girls, blithe and content, easy and graceful, a pleasure to look at; young matrons, tall, straight, comely, nobly built, sweeping by with chin up, and a gait incomparable for unconscious stateliness and dignity. . . . It is a fine race, the Fijians, with brains in their heads, and an inquiring turn of mind. 20

This positive attitude continues when Twain reaches Australia, and learns about the uncanny ability of aboriginal natives to find prey and lost people by following tracks, imperceptible to whites, across the endless miles of scrub and bush, rock and desert, of the outback: “I became convinced that the aboriginal tracker’s performances evince a craft, a penetration, a luminous sagacity, and a minuteness and accuracy of observation in the matter of detective-work not found in nearly so remarkable a degree in any other people, white or colored.” 21 As Mark Twain gets further along in his trip, and deeper into his historical research, his praise for natives turns into criticism of white settlers. Chapter 21 details the decline of the Australian aborigines when sheep ranchers and farmers and miners, roads and railways and telegraph lines, began to spread across the continent in the 1830s. Many natives were killed outright; others suffered the “slow murder” of displacement, robbery, poverty, humiliation, and whiskey. At this point Twain had traveled many miles, and he had come a long way from his ridicule of the Goshute Indians (whom he called the “Goshoots”) in Roughing It. Twain makes it clear that he recognizes his changed attitude by his application of the destructive process of Australian colonization to “many countries,” and by his note to the reader to “See chapter on Tasmania.” 22 That chapter, 50 pages later, chronicles the brutal annihilation of the entire native population of Tasmania, and contains a photograph of the last survivor, who died in 1876. Moving on to New Zealand for five weeks, Mark Twain first views pictures of native Maori chiefs and notes that “nothing could be finer than these men’s features, nothing more intellectual than these faces, nothing more masculine, nothing nobler than their aspect.” 23 As he learns more, he praises the excellence of Maori houses, fortresses, agriculture, military arts and de-

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vices, boat building, and ornamentation. Twain then takes the New Zealand government to task for its monument to the white men who died fighting in the Maori wars of the 1860s—men, according to the monument text, “who fell in defense of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism.” 24 The English settlers may have been brave, Twain concedes, but from the Maori point of view their own warriors were also brave: they were not fanatics, but patriots, defending their homeland. It is a lesson that colonial governments were slow to learn. Twain returned to Australia, sailed along the southern coast, rounded the continent at Cape Leeuwin, and headed northwest, arriving at Ceylon a week later, where his first experience of the charm of the Orient is provided by colorful and radiant native costumes, which provide an “incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms, and beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements, free, unstudied, barren of stiffness and restraint, and”—suddenly the charm is broken, as the door of a nearby missionary school opens to a parade of little Christian girls primly dressed as if for Sunday school in England or America. “Unspeakably ugly,” Twain notes, “barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud.” 25 After spending a night on the island, the Clemens party changes ships and proceeds up the west coast of the Indian subcontinent, disembarking at Bombay, where Mark Twain began his 2½-month tour of India. He enjoyed the strange landscapes and fauna of Australia, and he was interested in the politics of South Africa, but Twain was captivated most by what he called the Indian “land of dreams and romance,” to which he would devote 264 pages. He attempts to convey the romance and the reality with exuberant contrasts “of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels,” 26 which are interrupted by a scene that continues the critique of imperial hauteur. Twain is escorted to his hotel rooms by a white supervisor and a procession of barefooted, cotton-clad natives, one of who kneels to fix a balcony door. Apparently the servant is too slow or awkward to suit his supervisor, who gives the native a stinging cuff on the jaw, and Twain is transported in thought back to the Missouri of his youth, where mistreatment of slaves was a cultural habit. 27 Mark Twain uses the metaphor of a kaleidoscope to describe rapidly changing scenes that whirl by the traveler in India, and it is a metaphor of his narrative technique as well. Immediately after his somber recollection of slavery in Hannibal, which culminates in the murder of a slave for a trifling offense, Twain turns playfully to the Indian crow, a rowdy subcontinental wise guy, who seems to critique the narrator’s “clothes, and my hair, and my complexion, and probable character and vocation and politics, and how I came to be in India, and what I had been doing, and how many days I had got for it, and how I had happened to go unhanged so long, and when would it

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probably come off.” The narrator conjectures that the Indian crow, reminiscent of the German ravens and American blue jays in A Tramp Abroad, has developed its character through reincarnation, a process whose many phases have included being a low comedian, a scoffer, a liar, a lecturer, a practicer and propagator of irreverence, and an infidel. “He will soon turn up again as an author or something.” 28 Kaleidoscopic narration continues as Mark Twain recounts his travels from Bombay to Calcutta, north to the Himalayan foothills at Darjeeling, then northwest to Lahore, in present-day Pakistan. Along the way he notes that “nearly all black and brown [complexions] are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare,” 29 and that the Indians seem more civilized than the peoples of Austria, Germany, and France, in that the latter use women as farm hands. As he travels, Twain does not abandon his notion that the white man’s burden is the brown man’s misery, though this belief is complicated by his reading of Indian history as written by British historians. After recounting the suffocation of scores of English captives in the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756, the murders by strangulation committed by the Thug sect in the 1830s, the practice of suttee (self-immolation by fire of a dead man’s widow), and the massacres of the Great Mutiny of 1857, he concludes that British “administrative ability, reinforced by just and liberal laws,” has rescued the subcontinent from “a hundred centuries of pitiless oppression and abuse.” 30 The contradiction between colonial brutality and colonial enlightenment is left unresolved, for Mark Twain was never one to be bothered by contradictions; indeed, he believed that the world was an incongruous and paradoxical place, which is partly what made him a humorist. But he was ahead of most of his contemporaries in realizing that the differences between native peoples and developed societies was largely a matter of weapons and technology, thus foreshadowing two of Jared Diamond’s three formulations in his 1997 study, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. And while Twain went on after the turn of the century to excoriate the oppression of native peoples in the Philippines and the Belgian Congo, he increasingly defined this behavior not simply as a unique feature of colonial power, but as a general indictment of human nature. This deeper note is hinted at when Twain first lands at Bombay, and discovers that the servant he has employed hires his own servant for emptying the slops, explaining to his employer that “he would lose caste if he did it himself.” 31 At the end of Twain’s Indian journeys, several months and many pages later, the idea is stated explicitly: “ All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth—including America, of course—consist of pilferings. . . . No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen.” 32 Mark Twain is headed here toward a principle that he developed at length in his later works: “the riddle of the painful earth” lies in the nature of man. 33

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By the time he had finished writing up his journeys through India, in April 1897, Twain was well over the 600 pages that his previous subscription travel books had averaged. He thought at first of turning the published work into a two-volume set, with part two devoted to India and Africa. This idea was vetoed by a powerful triumvirate—advisor H. H. Rogers, publisher Frank Bliss, and wife Livy Clemens—so Mark Twain went back to his desk and produced another 67 pages as a relatively brief South African coda to close out Following the Equator. Twain had found South Africa “absolutely barren of interest when I was there, except the political interest,” 34 for just as Twain was leaving Australia, Leander Starr Jameson had made his spectacular dash north into the Boer-occupied Transvaal. Leading a troop of 500 English cavalrymen, Jameson’s ostensible purpose was to aid the reformers being oppressed in Johannesburg, while his real goal, backed by Cecil Rhodes, was to extend British dominion to all of South Africa. Jameson was defeated in five days and thrown in jail, and almost all of Twain’s coda was devoted to what he called “most enjoyable work to me—chaffing Rhodes and making fun of his Jameson Raid.” 35 Following the Equator is a literary example of the outdated biological principle that ontology recapitulates phylogeny, for the book mirrors Mark Twain’s career as a whole. It begins with a joke about a painful carbuncle which kept him in bed for two weeks at the start of the trip. A carbuncle, Twain’s dictionary tells him, is “a kind of jewel.” He then proceeds to shipboard pranks and tall tales on the outbound voyage. As the book develops, it satirizes colonial cupidity and brutality, and ironizes the main point that “there are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.” 36 The final paragraph provides the kind of self-deprecating note that occasionally graces the autobiographical dictations at the end of Twain’s literary career. He describes his feeling of pride, when he finally docks at the Southampton pier, having circumnavigated the great globe in only thirteen months. Then came one of those vanity-snubbing astronomical reports from the Observatory-people, whereby it appeared that another great body of light had lately flamed up in the remotenesses of space which was traveling at a gait which would enable it to do all that I had done in a minute and a half. Human pride is not worth while; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it. 37

Mark Twain is a man of multiple ironies, and he does not exempt himself from ironic scrutiny.

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VIENNA AND LONDON Mark Twain worked hard and steadily at his travel book, finishing the South Africa addition on 18 May 1897 and completing all 714 pages in less than seven months. Following the Equator was published in November, with copious illustrations and, for the first time in his works, photographs. It would be the last milestone on the road to financial recovery. The family was recovering from the death of Susy as well. They resumed their social activities, and Mark Twain was elected an honorary life member of the artistic and literary Savage Club of London, only the fourth person to be so honored. When he learned that the Prince of Wales was one of the four, Twain remarked that “[my election] must make the Prince feel mighty fine.” 38 The Clemenses also recommenced their European travels, spending July and August at Weggis on Lake Lucerne, where Twain wrote “In Memoriam: Olivia Susan Clemens,” a surprisingly conventional allegorical poem describing the disappearance of a beloved temple in a fair valley, elegizing not only Susy, but all the life and times of “long ago—so long ago.” 39 Twain is clearly pulling his punches here, for in an unpublished piece, written at the same time, he excoriates God for “His sorry game” which “gives you riches, merely as a trap . . . to quadruple the bitterness of the poverty which He has planned for you.” 40 Though the scar of Susy’s death would remain, the wound was healing and the Clemenses moved on, this time to Vienna, the vibrant capital of what then was the Austro-Hungarian empire, where Mark Twain reported “I am feeling gay. I had nearly forgotten how it felt.” 41 They would remain until the summer of 1899 in Vienna, where Twain was celebrated for his writings, his financial recuperation, his witty presence in the Viennese society that lionized him, and his colorfully erratic command of the German language. The Hotel Metropole, recognizing the commercial value of Mark Twain’s emerging celebrity status, reduced the rate of the Clemenses’ eight–room suite by 40%. For his part, Twain seemed stimulated by the city of Mahler, Dvořák, Fritz Kreisler, Johann Strauss the Younger, Freud, numerous authors and dramatists, 45 newspapers, and the aging Emperor Franz Josef, with whom he had a private interview. Vienna was also the home of the distinguished piano teacher Theodor Leschetizky, whose students had included Paderewski. Clara, now 23, was accepted as one of his pupils at the end of the year; later she would switch to voice instruction from Viennese contralto Marianne Brandt. In January of 1898, Twain received the “very very good news” 42 from H. H. Rogers that the debts were paid, with $12,000 cash to spare. While Twain was on tour and then at work on Following the Equator, Rogers had shrewdly and diplomatically untangled the intersecting copyrights, claims, and ambitions of Harper’s and the American Century Publishing Company, and engineered a set of contracts that put Mark Twain back on his feet and would

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leave him relatively prosperous for the rest of his life. Twain was profoundly grateful, as can be seen from his dedication of Following the Equator to Rogers’ son Harry, and in the many comments in the 464 letters the two men exchanged, often filled with contract drafts and business minutia that demonstrate how sedulously the famous capitalist (and his able secretary/assistant Katharine Harrison) worked for his famous friend. “You and I are a team,” Twain wrote, “you are the most useful man I know, and I am the most ornamental.” 43 Letters from appreciative and perhaps surprised creditors were sent to Rogers’ office extolling “Mr. Clemens’ manliness,” his “sterling integrity,” and “the high honor and strict business spirit evinced by Mr. Clemens in his endeavor to settle in full the claims against his publishing firm.” 44 Twain’s industry and Rogers’ management not only rescued Twain from what he called “the nine years that we spent in poverty and debt,” 45 they also eased the embarrassment and humiliation of his financial collapse and turned him into something of a cultural hero. Commentators at the time could not resist comparing him to Sir Walter Scott, who, as a partner in a printing business, was dragged into debts of over ₤126,000 that he eventually paid off, although the strenuous exertion was at least partially responsible for his early death. Mark Twain, whose opinion of the romantic author was plainly expressed in the name of the wrecked and dangerous steamboat in Huckleberry Finn—the Walter Scott—probably found these comparisons professionally objectionable as an author, but personally satisfying as a rehabilitated bankrupt. 46 Rogers would continue to manage Twain’s business affairs, arranging a contract with Harper’s in 1903 making them the exclusive publisher of Mark Twain’s works and giving the author a guaranteed annual stipend of $25,000, with additional royalties. At his death, Twain would leave Clara, his sole surviving child, an estate appraised at $471,136, or about 11 million dollars in 2014 figures. 47 During his remaining three years in Europe—20 months in Vienna, 17 in London—Twain published five books in addition to Following the Equator, though these volumes added more to his bank account than to his bibliography. All of them were collections, and four consisted of earlier essays and stories, two of which had identical contents but different publishers. He also wrote some three dozen shorter works. With his debts now behind him, Mark Twain turned to his desk with renewed energies: “Work is become a pleasure again—it is not labor, any longer. I am into it up to my ears.” 48 Freed from the “pot-boiler pen,” Twain was brimming with ideas for translations, plays, novels, articles, stories, and sketches. In October 1898, Livy wrote to a friend that “I have not known Mr. Clemens for years to write with so much pleasure and energy as he has done during this last summer.” 49 Twain composed autobiographical reminiscences; started works that would be finished later, including What Is Man (published in 1906) and Christian Science (1907); and began several that he would never complete. Chief among these were

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versions of what we now call the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, and two long fragments that have in common an idyllic family life, disaster, and dreams. In “Which Was the Dream,” a famous major general turned successful politician, blessed with a loving wife and daughters, is reduced to poverty by the treachery of a trusted subordinate. One of the daughters has the same birth date as Susy Clemens. The general’s financial collapse has echoes of Twain’s difficulties as well as those of U. S. Grant, and “a young man named Grant” rescues the crowd of women and children who have gathered at the general’s house when it catches fire. “The Great Dark” opens with the narrator examining a speck of water under a microscope with his two young daughters, the elder of whom also shares Susy’s birth date. Then he takes a nap and dreams—or thinks he dreams, for he can’t ascertain which life is the dream and which the reality—that he and his family are passengers on a minuscule ship, voyaging through the seas in a droplet of water to an uncertain destination. In addition to these beginnings and fragments, Mark Twain completed a score of articles and stories during his three-year residence in Vienna and London, thirteen of which were published in magazines and journals and then collected in book editions, ten of them in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays, published in 1900. These include a recycled version of his earlier account of the sinking of the Hornet (“My Début As a Literary Person”) and a paean to lost youth (“My Boyhood Dreams”), but most of them were occasioned by his residence in Austria. Like a foraging army, the author lived off the land of his immediate experience. In the fall of 1897, Twain attended, as an observer, several tumultuous sessions of the Reichsrat, the parliamentary assembly of the fracturing Austro-Hungarian Empire, and wrote a lively, satiric report entitled “Stirring Times in Austria”: “When [the Reichsrat] is legislating you can’t tell it from artillery practice.” 50 His acquaintance with a young friend, Polish inventor Jan Szczepanik, produced “The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again” and “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” the latter a tale about Szczepanik’s telectroscope—an early form of television—which Twain turns into an attack on “French justice” as seen in the Dreyfus affair. Most of the Austrian pieces refer to Dreyfus in one way or another, for Twain was deeply disturbed by events leading up to and including the infamous second court-martial, which took place in the late summer of 1899. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish captain in the French army, had been court-martialed in 1894 for selling secret military documents to Germany, and sentenced to life imprisonment on notorious Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Several years later, the deputy of the French Chief of Intelligence committed suicide after confessing he had forged documents that implicated Dreyfus. The Chief, Colonel Picquart, was dismissed from the army; another officer, who had also invented evidence and was apparently

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involved in espionage against France, fled the country. Dreyfus was finally granted a retrial and, incredibly, convicted again, in the midst of a stormy national and international controversy between the Dreyfusards—supporters of Captain Dreyfus—and the anti-Semitic anti-Dreyfusards. (Dreyfus was pardoned by the French President after the second court-martial, and a civilian court of appeals exonerated him in 1906, whereupon he returned to the French army, was awarded the Legion of Honor, and promoted to major. He later served in WWI, commanding an ammunition unit as a lieutenant colonel.) This affair, and Mark Twain’s awareness of anti-Semitism throughout the Habsburg empire as well as in France and Germany, led him to speak directly on the topic of anti-Jewish sentiment. It was not his first effort. In 1890, Twain had responded to the request of the editor of The American Hebrew for opinions concerning the causes of anti-Semitism, and suggestions for dispelling prejudice. His short essay stated that since Jews were generous to the poor and needy, “warm and affectionate” in social relations, and “illustrious for intellectual achievement,” antipathy toward them had to be simply “inherited prejudice . . . among bigoted and unthinking people.” 51 Half a dozen years later he penned a pair of related anecdotes (“Newhouse’s Jew Story,” “Randall’s Jew Story”) in which a narrator opens with praise for Jews, and then substantiates that praise with a tale of a young Jewish man who intervenes when a contemptible, dishonest gambler wins a slave girl in a poker game. The young man, who is courageous as well as perceptive, rescues the girl and defeats the gambler in a duel. Proud of a comment from a Jewish reader who told the author that “there was no uncourteous reference to his people” 52 in his books, and appalled by the treatment of Captain Dreyfus and the anti-Jewish rioting that followed the collapse of the Badeni government in Vienna, Twain decided to develop his ideas in an extensive essay that he told Rogers was “my gem of the ocean. I have taken a world of pleasure in writing it and doctoring it and polishing it and fussing at it. Neither Jew nor Christian will approve of it, but people who are neither Jews nor Christians will, for they are in a condition to know truth when they see it.” 53 Mark Twain begins his gem, entitled “Concerning the Jews,” by claiming that he has no race or color or caste prejudices. He is, in fact, not prejudiced even against Satan: “A person who has for untold centuries maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of the loftiest order.” 54 Twain then ranges haphazardly across history, newspaper reports, letters, the Bible, the Cyclopædia Britannica, and personal experience in an attempt to explain and demolish the reasons for widespread hostility to the Jewish people, which he locates not in religion but in “the average Christian’s inability to compete successfully with the average

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Jew in business.” Twain commends Jews for their intelligence, diligence, honesty, benevolence, good citizenship, and—in a postscript added in later reprintings—martial heroism, but his prediction that the essay would not be appreciated turned out to be accurate. His intentions were sincere, but Twain had more aptitude for attack than defense, and his witticisms and ironies are sometimes flippant and clumsy: “If I may make a suggestion [about combating prejudice] without seeming to be trying to teach my grandmother how to suck eggs, I will offer it”; “It will not be well to let the [Jewish] race find out its strength. If the horses knew theirs, we should not ride any more.” Twain’s strategy in the “Concerning the Jews” article is also flawed, as it was in the earlier short article prepared for The American Hebrew. He makes lists of stereotypes in order to disprove them, but the lists themselves, in spite of their negation, have an unfortunate tendency to keep the stereotypes alive. The problem is identical to that raised by the Barry Blitt cartoon on the cover of the 21 July 2008 New Yorker, which depicted Senator Barack Obama garbed as a Muslim, in order to show that he wasn’t. Irony is a sharp weapon, which can injure the user. And in an essay attempting to combat prejudice, it seems unwise to introduce remarks about the political acumen of the “ignorant Irish hod-carrier.” Pointing out that Jews made up 9% of the population of the Habsburg empire, Twain can’t resist adding that “The Irish would govern the Kingdom of Heaven if they had a strength there like that.” The Jewish Chronicle of London one-upped the humorist in reviewing Twain’s “Concerning the Jews”: “Of all such advocates, we can but say ‘Heaven save us from our friends.’” 55 Fortunately, the Chronicle and the Christian Herald were not privy to Twain’s earlier remark to Rogers: “I am without prejudice. It is my hope that both the Christians and the Jews will be damned.” 56 Even if the essay is only partially successful, Mark Twain’s remarks about anti-Semitism were earnest and serious as well as lively and colorful. Another of the Austrian essays, “About Play Acting,” was not only serious, it was about seriousness itself. In 1898, Twain attended the performance in Vienna of a German tragedy by Adolf Von Wilbrandt, Der Meister von Palmyra. This somber four-hour, five-act poetic drama, set in Roman times, features a male protagonist who is granted eternal life and youth, a woman who is reincarnated in various guises over a period of seventy years, and the figure of death which appears in every act. The action over time reveals disappointed dreams, broken pride, and the afflictions of age. As his friends and family suffer and die, the immortal Master of Palmyra renounces his immortality and falls gratefully at the feet of Death. Powerfully moved, Twain summarized his impression of the play’s meaning: What a silly, poor thing human life is; how childish its ambitions, how ridiculous its pomps, how trivial its dignities, how cheap its heroisms, how capricious its course, how brief its flight, how stingy in happiness, how opulent in

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miseries, how few its prides, how multitudinous its humiliations, how comic its tragedies, how tragic its comedies. 57

In section two of his essay, Mark Twain reprints from a New York newspaper the theatre advertisements for a score of comedies, and suggests the American stage needs more tragedies like Der Meister von Palmyra: “None of us is always in the comedy spirit; we have our graver moods; they come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape them.” 58 As a humorist advocating tragedy, Twain seems to enjoy casting himself against type in this essay, confounding simplistic fans who were unaware that the humorous and the serious go hand in hand, and then reconfounding them with a playful conclusion to a somber essay: “Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of my line: I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on vacation.” 59 Mark Twain had always understood the kinship between comedy and tragedy, but now he was beginning to state it more explicitly. In the Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar entry preceding chapter 10 of Following the Equator, Twain declared that “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” This aphorism does not mean that all humor is tragic, or always based in sorrow. Mark Twain believed that life is both humorously joyful and tragically painful, triumphant and grief-stricken, hopeful and depressing. Human experience alternates between these poles, sometimes over many years, sometimes in the course of an hour, and the clash between them produces irony, even comedy. Often joy and pain are related, in that sorrow may lurk behind humor, and comic elements may be discordantly intertwined with tragic. Twain sought to separate himself from the mere comedian by suggesting that the true humorist recognizes the dualistic nature of reality: “Whilst a man sees what we call the humorous side he must have ever present the obverse.” It is this recognition that helps produce “an imperceptible touch of something permanent that one feels instinctively to adhere to true humor.” 60 These ideas are not new, for Plato explains that a “combination of pleasures and pains exists not only in . . . tragedy and comedy, but also off the stage in the entire tragicomedy of human life.” 61 The first recorded use in English of the term tragicomedy occurs in 1579 in North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives; three years later, Sir Philip Sidney used it in his Defence of Poesie, where he disparages “mingling kings and clowns.” 62 In the modern period, we celebrate the tragic-comic vision of some of our greatest writers, like Frost and Faulkner. Dark humor thrives today, and many a nihilistic novelist is described as a comic genius. The nineteenth century, however, treated its literary genres, like its bathing costumes, with more decorum, and Mark Twain was dogged for most of his career by onedimensional notions of humor held by many of his readers and reviewers. If

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we now live in an age of irony, Twain did not simply precede it; he helped to initiate it. The last significant work stemming from Mark Twain’s European hegira is both tragedy and comedy. Written in Austria in 1898 and published the following year after the Clemenses had moved to London, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” demonstrates Twain’s mastery of irony and his increasing concern with the qualities that constitute human nature. The four-act dramatic story—one of Twain’s longest, most coherent, and most carefully plotted—is framed by the town’s original motto (“Lead Us Not Into Temptation”) and its revision (“Lead Us Into Temptation”)—Twain’s version of Milton’s observation in the Areopagitica that he could not “praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised, and unbreathed, that . . . slinks out of the . . . dust and heat. . . . That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.” 63 Twain’s tale is all about dust and heat, trial and contrariety. Its characters are the nineteen leading citizens of Hadleyburg, and three dissidents: Barclay Goodson, deceased, who was “the only man in the town who could have helped a suffering stranger”; Jack Halliday, a “loafing, goodnatured, no-account, irreverent fisherman, hunter, boys’ friend, stray-dogs’ friend . . . who always noticed everything; and always made fun of it”; and a stranger, once offended by the town, which is notorious for its honesty, and for its mean, hard, and stingy nature. 64 The stranger is determined to bring down Hadleyburg, and he does just that, with a sack of gold coins presumably worth $40,000. The coins are fake, and so is the town’s honesty, as the leading citizens demonstrate in their frantic maneuvers to gain control of what they think is a fortune. The story is organized by the ironic disparity between the outward show of the principal citizens (who “went about shaking hands with each other, and beaming, and smiling, and congratulating, and saying . . . Hadleyburg, synonym for incorruptible—destined to live in dictionaries forever!”) and the inner greed and deception which govern their actions. 65 This hypocrisy is exposed in the tumultuous and hilarious town meeting, which takes up almost half of the story and reveals the fraudulent, conflicting claims of the chief citizens: A ghastly silence followed. First an angry cloud began to settle darkly upon the faces of the citizenship; after a pause the cloud began to rise, and a tickled expression tried to take its place; tried so hard that it was only kept under with great and painful difficulty. . . . At this most inopportune time burst upon the stillness the roar of a solitary voice—Jack Halliday’s: “That’s got the hallmark on it!” Then the house let go, strangers and all. . . . It was a good long laugh, and a tempestuously whole-hearted one. 66

This irony is obvious and the resolution is satisfying; we are happy to see bilking Billson and wicked Wilson pilloried. The story, however, is complicated by another set of ironies, more disturbing, nested inside the main

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framework. This aspect concerns the elderly, well-respected but impoverished bank cashier and his wife, Edward and Mary Richards. The Richardses have a mild case of Hadleyburg fever. They are not mean-spirited or vicious, but they too covet the apparent fortune. In an earlier time, Edward was the only person in the town who knew that the Reverend Mr. Burgess was innocent of a crime he was accused of committing. Because of the pressure of public opinion hostile to the minister, Edward failed to come forward to clear him. Like Billson and Wilson and the other leading citizens, the Richardses submit a bogus claim for the sack, but when Edward rises in the meeting to confess and apologize, his reticence is taken for innocence and he is cheered and then rewarded financially by the assembly. Once again, he is unable to come forward with the truth. Since Mr. Burgess, who chairs the town meeting, quietly palmed the Richardses’ bogus claim, everyone concludes the Richardses are the one honest couple in the town, and they are ultimately presented with the $40,000 which a wealthy businessman of the town pays for the worthless sack to cover his iniquity and further his political career. All this is too much for the old couple. In a cascade of ironies, their lives are poisoned by their good luck, undeserved public acclaim, and the financial bonanza they had wished for. They imagine terrible betrayals and recriminations, destroy the money, become delirious, and as they die, forgive Burgess for exposing them, which, of course, he did not do. This ending confounds a reader’s expectations and perhaps hopes, makes a mockery of poetic justice, and aligns Mark Twain with his fellow realists who scorned works that depended, as Henry James put it, on “a ‘happy ending,’ on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.” 67 The much-debated final sentence of “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” also suggests Jamesian ambiguity: “It is an honest town once more, and the man will have to rise early that catches it napping again.” The phrase “will have to rise early” to catch the town napping seems to mean Hadleyburg has learned its lesson and won’t be caught again; on the other hand, malefactors are often early risers. Twain’s parable has moments of boisterous comedy and satire, such as the roaring chorus, based on a tune from The Mikado, that damns the supposed incorruptibles in the town meeting, but the main energies of the story concern the ironies of the human condition. These ironies are not new. The three rioters in Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale” set out to find death, and find it they do when they kill one another over a pile of gold they discover along the way. Mark Twain’s contribution to the discussion is centered on ideas that become sharply focused in his later writings, ideas concerning the individual, the group, and fate. Twain came to believe the average person is reasonably kind and honorable, except when self-interest gets in the way, which is, of course, much of the time, even with relatively decent people like the Ri-

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chardses. Perhaps this concept explains why Mark Twain was so attracted by the story of Joan of Arc. On the last page of his Personal Recollections, Sieur Louis de Conte summarizes in one paragraph the essence of the triumphant, tragic maiden’s exceptionalism: I have finished my story of Joan of Arc, that wonderful child, that sublime personality, that spirit which in one regard has had no peer and will have none—this: its purity from all alloy of self-seeking, self-interest, personal ambition. In it no trace of these motives can be found, search as you may, and this cannot be said of any other person whose name appears in profane history. 68

Twain believed that human beings in groups also have problems, as the rollicking town meeting in Hadleyburg demonstrates. The crowd is blown from one opinion to another, as the citizens present their conflicting arguments, claims, and rationalizations. Stunning revelations push them this way and that: “The house had gotten itself all ready to burst into the proper tornado of applause; but instead of doing it, it seemed stricken with a paralysis; there was a deep hush for a moment or two, then a wave of whispered murmurs swept the place.” 69 As he did in his report of the Austrian Parliament and in the trial in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain provides stage directions in brackets for the Hadleyburg meeting: “[Tumultuous assent],” “[The house gazed at him, marvelling],” “[Murmurs: ‘Amazing! What can this mean?’],” “[Sensation],” “[Shouts of ‘Right! right!’],” “[General buzz and hum of astonishment and delight].” Mark Twain was fond of crowd scenes, and his fiction is filled with passengers, audiences, processions, pageants, parades, revivals, mutinies, shootings, trials, and funerals. These scenes provide opportunities for dramatic action and sparring contests between individuals and groups, useful for humorous contrasts, advancing the plot, and pointing a moral. Over Twain’s career, these contests undergo a change in purpose and effect. In the early works, the group often acts as a normative force, bringing an errant individual back to his senses. When the hubris of the dandy soars out of control in his belligerent flourish of horse pistols and bowie knife in “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,” he is humiliated by the unfazed squatter, who knocks him into the river, and by “the shout that . . . went up from the crowd.” The ignorant tenderfoot who eagerly buys a “Genuine Mexican Plug” in Roughing It gets a lesson in aerobatics from the horse, much to the amusement of the “sympathetic crowd” who are in on the joke. In later works, including Huckleberry Finn, Connecticut Yankee, Joan of Arc, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and “Hadleyburg,” these roles tend to reverse. Individuals in these works become normative. Crowds are seen as ignorant, gullible, and cowardly; and subject to manipulation by clever and unscrupulous persons. Colonel Sherburn takes the measure of his pursuers with precision and scatters them

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single-handedly: “The pitifulest thing out is a mob.” The heroes of the works of Mark Twain’s maturity stand starkly against their communities, and their moral superiority is measured by the distance that separates them from crowds which oppress and condemn. These crowds are fickle and wrong, and for the most part successful. The heroes are courageous and right, but the fragile victories they achieve tend to be crushed by the community juggernaut. It is the juggernaut of public opinion that rolls over Edward and Mary Richards in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” Edward was unable to stand up to the town when he knew Burgess was innocent, the couple is unable to protest the undeserved praise heaped on them at the town meeting, and at the end it is public opinion wrongly surmised that destroys them (Edward thought he saw condemnation “in a dozen faces after church”). The destruction of the Richardses seems unfair, especially when contrasted to the success of “Dr.” Harkness, a rich purveyor of patent medicines, who buys the bogus gold tokens, stamps them with the name of his opponent in the upcoming legislative election, and hands them out to the voters three days before the election. Harkness wins, and thus will be able to have the new railway located on land that he has purchased. The least guilty lose everything; the most guilty are victorious. That is precisely Mark Twain’s point. Life is often not fair, the best man doesn’t always win, and the meek may not inherit anything. These observations, and their ironic undercutting of notions of a providential universe and human perfectibility, make “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” a down payment on the writings to follow. HOMECOMING By 1900, Mark Twain’s fellow expatriate, Henry James, had settled permanently in the English countryside in Sussex, learned how to ride a bicycle, and, to celebrate the new century, shaved off his beard. Twain, who never shaved his flamboyant mustache and who already knew how to ride a bicycle, left England and came home. He had been in exile long enough, his financial recovery was completed, and treatments for his daughter Jean were now available in the U.S. When Fenimore Cooper returned to America from a seven-year stay in Europe, he asserted, in the words of one of the characters in Home as Found, that “no country has so much altered for the worse in so short a time.” 70 When James visited America after a two-decade absence, he conveyed his reflections in “The Jolly Corner,” which isn’t all that jolly. The story’s protagonist, Spencer Brydon, returns from his decades in Europe to discover a New York that stuns him with “the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses.” 71 Mark Twain also found things changed when his steamship, the Minnehaha, docked in New York harbor on

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15 October 1900. During his 9½-year European residence, America had recovered from the depression of the early 1890s, and increased its population by 21%, to 76 million. Many immigrants were now coming from central and southern Europe, and more and more Americans—40% by the end of the nineteenth century—were living in cities. By 1900 Chicago and Philadelphia each had well over a million inhabitants, and New York, with a population of 3.4 million, had overtaken Boston as the nation’s literary capital. Business in America had become big business; the nation led the world in agricultural production, and was third in steel. The United States had come brawling into maturity, taken its place among world industrial and political powers, and begun an overseas empire by easily defeating Spain in what John Hay, then U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, called “a splendid little war.” 72 It began at dawn on 1 May 1898, when Commodore George Dewey ordered Charles Gridley, captain of the flagship Olympia, to “fire when ready” at the Spanish Pacific fleet anchored in Manila Bay. The Spanish fleet was sent to the bottom by Dewey’s cruisers with the loss of only one American, who died of a heart attack. Two months later, in Cuba, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt led the 1st Volunteer Cavalry, the flamboyant Rough Riders, on foot up Kettle Hill and then San Juan Hill on the ridge which flanked the city of Santiago. This victory forced the Spanish Atlantic fleet out of Santiago Harbor and into the guns of the waiting U.S. Navy, and the little war was over. Another important change, from Mark Twain’s point of view, was that Americans, having heard he had dined with royalty and having read about his travels and triumphs on four continents beyond their own, now treated the author with new respect and interest. The literary establishment seemed to relinquish its former ambivalence. In the spring of 1891, the Chicago Tribune had reported in a 94-word notice that “the humorist” was planning to travel abroad. In the fall of 1900, the New York Times celebrated the return of “the famous writer,” using many headline fonts to shout its 1700-word welcome: MARK TWAIN HOME AGAIN Writer Reaches America After His Prolonged Stay Abroad. GREETED BY MANY FRIENDS Talks Freely of His Travels, His Experiences, and His Triumphs—In the Best of Health. 73 For many Americans, Twain was no longer a mere humorist, but a literary star, and he would be besieged for the rest of his life by reporters, photographers, autograph hunters, pursuers of the famous, hosts of innumerable dinners, heads of charities, great men and crackpots alike. A search of Harper’s

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Weekly for the years 1900 to 1910 reveals 1017 articles by, articles about, and references to Mark Twain. For the same period in the same journal, Theodore Roosevelt is mentioned 353 times. Twain took his celebrity status in stride, enjoyed it, complained about it, exploited it, and kept on writing. He often described himself as being lazy, and as having a bad memory. Both of these self-descriptions are misleading. His memory, even in his later years, was extraordinary, and his laziness was limited to manual labor and boring newspaper work. As an author, he was indefatigably industrious. Mark Twain wrote to earn a living, to try out stories and ideas, to amuse himself, to take his mind off problems, to recapture his past, to vent his outrage, to express what he had learned about life, and as Thoreau put it, to wake up his neighbors. He continued to write until a few months before his death. In the last decade of his life, from age 64 to 74, Twain published 13 books and 43 articles, composed more than three-score unpublished manuscripts, dictated a half-million word autobiography, wrote at least 3500 letters, gave 94 speeches, and filled the last eight of the more than 50 notebooks he kept during his lifetime. The works of Twain’s later life have been much debated and often disparaged. Certainly, there are no Huckleberry Finns lurking in these thousands of pages. And it is true that many works were started and never finished, though that was a lifelong habit with Twain, who began numerous tales and then pigeonholed them until his inspiration tank filled up again. But it seems not true that he was paralyzed by a “psychic block” (DeVoto), that “everything turned to ashes” (Hill), or that he was “finished . . . as a writer” (Cox) and had “nothing more to say” (Smith). 74 To the end, Mark Twain had a good deal to say on a wide range of topics, and much of what he had to say continues to be of interest for his ideas as well as his style. In 1905, for example, the year of his 70th birthday, Twain produced sharp attacks on Nicholas II and Leopold II, a tender treatise on Eve, an argument for abolishing the limitation on literary copyright, condemnation for the consensus of opinion that stifles independent thinking, science fiction about a human turned into a cholera germ, comments by Adam viewing the brontosaurus skeleton at the Museum of Natural History, a double-edged defense (signed by Satan) of John D. Rockefeller’s charitable contributions, iconoclastic articles on God and human nature, the relentlessly ironic “War Prayer”; and considerations of the need for political reform, the impertinence of aspiring writers, the Ten Commandments, the dangers of speeding automobiles, and reaching the age of 70. Taken individually, these writings could be used to theorize various kinds of “late Twain,” but taken all together they demonstrate that Mark Twain in his later writings, as in his earlier works, was versatile, changeable, interested in many things, subject to many moods, and able to write in many modes.

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Twain pitched into the writing of his later years with the tools he had honed over the previous four decades—perception of disparities, contrast, exaggeration, first-person narration, satire, irony, exuberance. The difference is that the disparities he was concerned with were often larger and more ominous; the irony more often had a caustic edge; and the exuberance tended to shift from the wondrous novelty of Roughing It and the balanced satire of Huckleberry Finn to the enthusiastic takedown of human pretension, greed, and oppression. Two of the most significant late works, the mysterious stranger writings and the autobiographical dictations, are treated below in separate chapters. Much of the rest can be considered in the six groupings which follow in this chapter. SATIRIST VS. IMPERIALISTS I When Mark Twain sailed from London to New York in 1900, reporters on both sides of the Atlantic asked if he was an anti-imperialist. “Well, I am,” he replied. “A year ago I wasn’t.” 75 Never a friend to monarchies and increasingly aware of the plight of native peoples after his worldwide lecture trip in 1895-96, Twain originally thought that the attempt to free the Cubans and the Filipinos from the tyranny of Spain was a good idea. The conflict, however, seemed to turn “our war for humanity into a war for coaling-stations,” 76 as Howells put it; and the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War in December 1898, staked out a new overseas destiny, both conspicuous and dubious, for the American democratic republic. By the terms of that treaty, Spain relinquished her claim to Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine archipelago to the United States, which had already annexed the Hawaiian islands during the fighting in Cuba. Acquisition of Guantanamo Bay and the Panama Canal Zone, and deployment of U.S. soldiers and marines to Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Vera Cruz would soon follow. Twain arrived in America just as the election campaign of 1900 was reaching a climax, with William Jennings Bryan facing off, his second try, against the imperialist campaign team of incumbent President McKinley and war hero Roosevelt. In statements that echo eerily today, Twain told reporters that in the Philippines, where the freedom-seeking inhabitants were unable to discern any difference between the oppression and bloodshed of the Spanish and that of the newly arrived Americans, we had gone “to conquer, not to redeem”: I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a

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government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. 77

President’s McKinley’s Republican platform put it differently: “Our authority could not be less than our responsibility, and wherever sovereign rights were extended it became the high duty of the Government to maintain its authority, to put down armed insurrection and to confer the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples.” 78 McKinley and Roosevelt won the election, but Mark Twain soon responded to a foreign policy that, in an era of trust creation and trust busting, he would label the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust.” 79 At the close of 1900, Twain combined his reaction to McKinley’s election victory, what he had learned on his round-the-world lecture tour, and current foreign affairs into a greeting for the new year prepared for Red Cross Society meetings. Changing his mind about the Red Cross, he sent his greeting to the New York Herald, which published it on 30 December: A Salutation-Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth, Taken Down in Short-Hand by Mark Twain I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate-raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass. 80

This concise summary of strong-arm German mercantilism on the Yellow Sea coast of China, the Russian occupation of Manchuria, and the ongoing Boer and Philippine-American wars, was reprinted in newspapers and then widely distributed in card form by the New England Anti-Imperialist League. Mark Twain was soon made a vice president of the League, a position he shared with Carl Schurz and Andrew Carnegie, as well as with Howells, who made a forceful contribution to the cause with “Editha,” his story of a redhaired, white-skinned, blue-eyed maiden whose fatuous jingoism sends her fiancé to his death in Cuba. Mark Twain joined the fray not with fiction but with a series of satiric essays, the first of which, published in February 1901, established the author, according to an editorial writer in the Springfield Republican, as “the most influential anti-imperialist and the most dreaded critic of the sacrosanct person in the White House that the country contains.” 81

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“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” begins, characteristically, with a contrast. A beginning epigraph quotes from the 1900 Christmas Eve edition of the New York Tribune: “Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope and aspiration and good cheer. Such a condition means contentment and happiness.” 82 This Panglossian assertion is immediately countered by lengthy quotations from the Sun and the Tribune that detail the East Side of New York, ruled by Tammany boss Richard Croker, where “murder, rape, robbery and theft go unpunished,” and the situation in China, where “religious invasions . . . by powerful Western organizations are tantamount to filibustering expeditions.” Twain then turns to his ironic main point. What he calls the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust” has been doing a good business in exploiting native peoples around the world, but lately the great powers have become so rapacious and so obvious that the people sitting in darkness are beginning to get wary. Twain’s title comes from Matthew 4:16, which quotes the prophecy of Isaiah: “The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.” 83 That’s just the problem. The advanced nations say they are spreading light and civilization and progress—Christianity, education, law and order, liberty, equality—to the far corners of the globe. These virtues, according to Mark Twain, “will bring into camp any idiot that sits in darkness anywhere.” 84 But the great powers merely talk about these virtues, while in fact they seize lands, steal resources, turn natives into slaves, and kill those who protest. This business, as Twain ironically presents it, has been overextended and is being ruined by greedy and unskillful practitioners. Even the people in the dark can figure it out. They have been “furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious.” For evidence, Twain takes his reader on tour. First to South Africa, where the Christian-against-Christian Boer War was in its second year. This conflict over territory, gold, and diamonds went badly for the Cape British at first, who suffered defeats at the hands of the Dutch, German, and French Huguenot settlers in the interior regions of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In response, British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain poured in a half million British troops, and their commander, Lord Kitchener, finally brutalized his way to victory by burning Boer farms and herding captives, mostly women and children, into concentration camps, where tens of thousands died of disease and unsanitary conditions. The person who sits in darkness asks, “Is this Civilization and Progress? Is it something better than we already possess? . . . Is this an improvement on our darkness?” Then Twain moves on to Germany, and to Kaiser Wilhelm’s demand for a lease on Chiao-chou Bay and the right to build railroads in China. These and similar demands made by Britain, Russia, France, and Japan led to the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion, which was put down by a large international army. China

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was forced to pay reparations of $340,000,000 and suffered other humiliations as well. Twain’s Chinese person sitting in darkness muses that “Civilization is [reputed to be] gracious and beautiful . . . but can we afford it?” And Twain’s tour includes Russia, which has acquired the Liaotung peninsula and railway rights in southern Manchuria. Those in darkness are increasingly enlightened: “It is yet another Civilized Power, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other. Is there no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level?” Finally, Mark Twain moves to his main point and the longest section of the essay. How does America stack up in relation to the other major nations of the world, whose avarice has just been demonstrated? At first, pretty well. We went into Cuba, lifted the yoke of foreign oppression, and got out again. Even President McKinley seemed to be guided by the traditions established during the American rebellion from imperial Britain and by our creation of a republic, for he stated to Congress that forcible annexation of Cuba would be “criminal aggression.” Then came the “Philippine temptation,” which put us in bed with the other great powers. Commodore Dewey had quickly defeated the Spanish Pacific fleet in the spring of 1898. By the summer, the small Spanish army of occupation in Manila had been defeated as well, by a joint force of American troops and the Filipinos led by their charismatic 28-yearold General Emilio Aguinaldo, who had directed the resistance against Spain. Then an unfortunate event happened. At the peace conference in Paris in December, Spain demanded $20,000,000 in compensation for the loss of the 7,100 islands that make up the Philippine archipelago, which Spain had held since the reign of Philip II, over three centuries earlier. Payment of this sum seems to have led the American government to think that in addition to having liberated the Philippine Islands, we now owned them. Filipinos concurred in only the liberation part, and proceeded to hold a constitutional convention, establish a government, and in January 1899, elect General Aguinaldo as their first president. The U.S. replied with an army of occupation, and the Filipino rebellion against Spain turned into an insurgency against America. American commanders adopted the tactics of Lord Kitchener, crushed the nascent republic, sent Aguinaldo into hiding in the mountains, and according to Mark Twain’s account, we “contracted to take care of the friars and their accumulations. I think we also agreed to propagate leprosy and smallpox, but as to this there is doubt. But it is not important; persons afflicted with the friars do not mind other diseases.” The bewildered natives in darkness, suddenly at war with their liberators, conclude there must be two Americas—one that stands for freedom at home; the other that kills natives, steals their land, and bayonets wounded captives. Twain reserves the last word for himself, in his suggestion for a flag for the Philippine Province:

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“just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.” Twain’s tough-minded satire stirred up both friends and enemies. His most dependable friend, W. D. Howells, put it this way to his sister Aurelia: I see a great deal of Mark Twain nowadays, and we have high good times denouncing everything. We agree perfectly about the Boer War and the Filipino war, and war generally. Then, we are old fellows, and it is pleasant to find the world so much worse than it was when we were young. Clemens is, as I have always known him, a most right-minded man, and of course he has an intellect that I enjoy. He is getting some hard knocks now from the blackguards and hypocrites for his righteous fun with McKinley’s attempts to colonize the Philippines, but he is making hosts of friends, too. 85

Another anti-imperialist provided material as well as moral support. Twain had written a jocular note to Andrew Carnegie, stating that “You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with? God will bless you. . . . P.S.—Don’t send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the selection myself.” 86 Carnegie replied by saying he liked the “new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American [Review] . . . better than anything I’ve read in many a day.” Making his own little joke, Carnegie said he was “willing to borrow a thousand dollars” and send the money to the league to distribute the “sacred message.” 87 The New York branch of the Anti-Imperialist League subsequently printed and circulated 125,000 copies of “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” Mark Twain was both widely attacked and widely praised for this essay, and he relished both types of responses, replying immediately with a letter to the New York Tribune and then with a lengthy article, “To My Missionary Critics,” in the April 1901 North American Review. The loudest objections had come from the clergy, and the American Board of Foreign Missions demanded a retraction and an apology. Twain makes some concessions to the good intentions of most missionaries, and he readily admits one of his facts was incorrect. The cablegram in the Sun report which Twain read stated that the Rev. Mr. Ament had compelled the Chinese to pay for all the damages done by the Boxers to missionaries and their property, and in addition had assessed fines “amounting to thirteen times the amount of the indemnity.” 88 The “thirteen” turned out to be a newspaper cable error, a substitution of 13 for 1/3. According to Dr. Judson Smith, Corresponding Secretary for the American Board of Foreign Missions, this mistake nullified Twain’s criticism. According to Twain, it did no such thing. The forced collection of damages from Chinese citizens without any determination of guilt was extortion; the assessment of additional fines, however large or small, was theft. He sweeps away the 13 for 1/3 mix-up with an analogy: “The girl who was

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rebuked for having borne an illegitimate child excused herself by saying, ‘But it is such a little one.’” 89 The Philippine-American War would drag on for another year, with sporadic uprisings and fighting lasting until 1906. Mark Twain continued to follow the Philippine situation closely, and kept up a stream of commentary, even though friends advised that he might be jeopardizing his livelihood, given the wide public support for the war and occupation. Jim Zwick’s Weapon’s of Satire collects 45 essays, speeches, letters, and interviews by Twain concerning what he thought was a wrong-headed foray into imperialism and colonialism. Mark Twain had little regard for the U.S. army commanders in the Philippines, from the military governor, Major General Arthur MacArthur, on down. (MacArthur’s son Douglas, then at West Point, would serve four tours of duty in the Philippines.) Twain was appalled by General Jacob H. Smith, whose “kill and burn” campaign against the guerrillas on the island of Samar was so brutal he was court-martialed into retirement. (“This is no time to take prisoners,” Smith had ordered, “the more you kill and burn the better—Kill all above the age of ten—make Samar a howling wilderness!”) 90 General Leonard Wood—compatriot of Theodore Roosevelt, military governor of Cuba, and governor of Moro Province in the Philippines—was described by Twain as “an ignorant and discredited mountebank.” 91 In 1906 General Wood was responsible for the so-called “Moro Crater Massacre,” in which U.S. soldiers discovered more than 600 Filipino men, women, and children hidden in a village inside the crater of an extinct volcano in the Southern Philippines. Firing down on them from the crater’s rim with artillery as well as rifles, the soldiers killed every one. President Roosevelt cabled General Wood, congratulating him and his men on “the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.” 92 And then there was Frederick Funston. Funston had a miscellaneous civilian career until 1895, when, at age 30, he volunteered for the army and went from nowhere to lieutenant colonel during his service in Cuba. Transferred to the Philippines in 1898 as a regimental commander, he won victories against the insurgents, was awarded the congressional medal of honor for personal bravery, and was promoted to brigadier general. Then in March 1901, an intercepted letter and a turncoat Filipino soldier gave Funston the location of General Aguinaldo’s mountain retreat near the northeast coast of Luzon. Funston disguised himself and four of his staff as captured American soldiers being delivered to the rebel commander by a troop of Macabebe natives, and the group struggled eighty miles through the mountain jungle where they bogged down, with their food supplies exhausted, eight miles short of their destination. Learning of this, Aguinaldo sent them rice and ordered that the putative American captives be well treated. When the group finally arrived at Aguinaldo’s retreat, the Macabebes, loyal to the Americans, gunned down

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the outnumbered rebel guard and Aguinaldo was taken prisoner. This bold stroke ended the main Filipino resistance, and Funston, later promoted to major general, was a national hero. He was riding high when he appeared on 8 March 1902, at the Lotus Club of artists and professionals in New York. Mark Twain often spoke at the Club, where he had been welcomed with a dinner in his honor on his return from Europe. On that occasion he remarked that the “righteous purpose of ours [in the Philippines] has apparently miscarried.” 93 A year later he told Club members that criticism of one’s country was not treasonous unless “the country’s life was in danger.” 94 General Funston had other ideas. Attacking those who were aiding the insurgents by “writing and talking . . . and keeping this warfare alive,” he told Club members in 1902 that “I would rather see any one of these men hanged—hanged for treason, hanged for giving aid and comfort to the enemy—than see the humblest soldier in the United States army lying dead on the field of battle.” 95 Mark Twain’s fuse, characteristically short, was lit. He had been reading Edwin Wildman’s biography of Aguinaldo, copying out long passages and commenting on them, perhaps with a review in mind; and he had already started an article about Funston. Using some of his commentary on Aguinaldo, he now completed the article, which appeared in the May 1902 North American Review as “A Defense of General Funston.” Twain dates the essay as beginning on 22 February, the 170th anniversary of the birth of George Washington, and he uses the occasion to develop his theory of how human behavior is controlled chiefly by nature, a theory that undergirds many later works. According to Twain, Washington had an inborn disposition that was then shaped by training, circumstances, associations, and influences. His inborn disposition, or moral skeleton, was fortunately so perfect that he was led to seek the best associations and influences. These burnished his character to the purest gold, and the accident of history placed him in a position where his character could shine out on the nation and the world. Washington thus becomes an influence on others whose dispositions are worthy enough to recognize a good model. General Funston, according to the “Defense,” was not one of these. His inborn disposition was flawed at the outset, and only got worse. Twain lists forgery, bribery, lying, treachery, and baseness among his deficiencies, and claims that Funston’s example has contributed to the perception of Filipinos as inferior, and to the use of torture by water-cure, concentration camps, and the slaughter of prisoners. And now General Funston was on the lecture circuit, promulgating his perverse brand of Stephen Decatur’s “our country, right or wrong” patriotism. All this, according to Twain’s behavioral theory—here, of course, used ironically, as if Funston’s actions could be excused by his nature—can be attributed to Funston’s “native predilection for unsavory conduct” and the fact that “his conscience leaked out through one of his

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pores when he was little.” His disposition “took as naturally to moral slag as Washington’s took to moral gold.” 96 That is his defense. After the capture of Aguinaldo, the Philippine-American War more or less quieted down, but Mark Twain continued to advocate independence for the islands, which did not come until 1946. He kept his pen sharpened for other causes as well, and persisted in opposing exploitation of native peoples. Twain maintained that America should stand for the self-determination of all nations, that religion should resist bloodshed, that capitalist greed should not be allowed to drive foreign policy, and that “an inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war.” 97 He served as a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League for the rest of his life. II In 1905, Mark Twain returned to first-person narration with an incongruous quartet of soliloquies, which demonstrate both his versatility with the form and, in two of them, his continued interest in anti-imperialism. “Adam’s Soliloquy” and “Eve’s Diary” are amiably satiric. “The Czar’s Soliloquy” has a sharper bite, and the possibilities for irony inherent in first-person narration are engaged caustically. Written following the “Bloody Sunday” massacre of unarmed protesters in St. Petersburg Square in January, the essay begins with a comment in the London Times about the personal habits of the Russian emperor, Nicholas II: “After the Czar’s morning bath it is his habit to meditate an hour before dressing himself.” Twain then creates the meditations the Czar might have conceived while viewing himself naked in his fulllength mirror: “Without my clothes . . . nobody could tell me from a parson, a barber, a dude.” 98 The thoughts that follow about power, clothes, and autocracy have many antecedents in Twain’s writings, starting with the reception of the Quaker City passengers in 1867 at the summer palace in Yalta of Alexander II, grandfather of Nicholas II. At that time, the narrator of Innocents Abroad noted the peculiar puissance of a man who ruled “a seventh part of the habitable globe and a countless multitude of men . . . and yet if I chose I could knock him down.” 99 The act that precipitates the tale of The Prince and the Pauper is the exchange of Edward Tudor’s silks and satins for the poor rags of Tom Canty. In Connecticut Yankee, a man is imprisoned for stating that humans were “about all alike,” and that “if you were to strip the nation naked . . . a stranger . . . couldn’t tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel clerk.” 100 Repeatedly, Mark Twain philosophizes that “without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things and much of a size” (“The Memorable Assassination”); that we are “all just alike on the inside, and when our clothes are off, nobody can tell which of us is which” (“Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?”).

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Yet “The Czar’s Soliloquy” moves beyond clothes to encompass Twain’s current concerns. The Czar reflects on the history of monarchy, established and sustained by “murder, treachery, perjury, torture, banishment and the prison.” 101 The peasants are like horses, far stronger than the rider who commands and mistreats them. Some day they are going to wake up, discover their strength, and realize that true patriotism is loyalty not to a crown and a family, but to the nation. The Czar then reviews two recent articles in the New York Times that Twain quotes in full—one describing the knouting of Polish women by Cossacks, the other describing the servile adulation of his subjects as Nicholas conducts the blessing of the troops. “It is a picture! [comments the czar]. To think that this thing in the mirror . . . is an accepted deity to a mighty nation . . . and nobody laughs . . . nobody murmurs about incongruities and inconsistencies! Is the human race a joke?” 102 The Czar puts on his clothes, and thus his power, at the end of his soliloquy, but even he realizes that royalty is riding for a fall. In October 1905, seven months after Twain’s article was published, unrest in the Russian countryside, strikes in the cities, and mutinies in the army forced the Czar, in spite of his regal apparel, to establish an elected legislative assembly. Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was slaughtered in 1918, was on the horizon. Having had his say about Russia, Mark Twain then turned to the Congo River basin, which had been organized in 1884-85 by European powers, and approved by the U.S., as the Congo Free State (later the Belgian Congo, then Congo, then Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), with Leopold II, king of Belgium, as its head of state. Leopold organized this huge area, larger than Alaska and Texas combined, as a private fiefdom, extracting rubber, ivory, and palm oil for his personal wealth by means of forced labor. The treatment of the natives by Leopold’s black soldiers, Belgian overseers, station agents, and subcontractors was so brutal—beatings, hostage-taking, mutilations, killing of men, women, and children—that the native population was reduced by more than half; some 15 million people died under this regimen. Mark Twain’s long article, “King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule,” is located somewhere between a dramatic monologue and a research paper. Twain opens with Leopold throwing down pamphlets attacking his Congo policy that he has been reading and commenting on as he angrily walks the floor. He continues to read and walk and comment, and since he is reading aloud, Twain is able to insert quotations, some as long as 400 words, from over a dozen pamphlets, reports from consuls, depositions by missionaries, accounts in newspapers, diaries from witnesses, and poems, which describe the “organized system of plunder and outrage,” the “hunger, terror, grief, shame, captivity, mutilation and massacre” in Leopold’s Congolese fiefdom. 103 Since the king examines photographs from “the incorruptible kodak,” Twain inserts photographic illustrations of nine natives, each of

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whom has a hand chopped off. All this is damnation enough, but Twain doubles it—adding fiction to historical documentation—by the comments he gives to Leopold. The King denies nothing, and adds details to the evidence against him. His one regret is that sixty women were crucified, because “it will make a stir” throughout Christendom: “It was wrong to crucify the women, clearly wrong, manifestly wrong, I can see it now, myself, and am sorry it happened, sincerely sorry. I believe it would have answered just as well to skin them.” As sovereign of both Belgium and the Congo Free State, Leopold presents only one defense against the mountain of criticism against him: the divine right of kings. The king is “a sacred personage and immune from reproach, by right of his selection and appointment to his great office by God himself.” When Mark Twain mounts his high horse of satiric attack, he sometimes gets one-sided, piling up the negatives and ignoring whatever virtues the characters being pilloried may have. His portraits of Generals Wood and Funston and of President Roosevelt too easily dismiss their merits. In assailing Boss Croker of Tammany Hall in a long 1901 speech printed in Harper’s Weekly, Twain uses Edmund Burke’s impeachment speeches against Warren Hastings, a controversial Governor-General of Bengal in the 1770s, without noting either Hastings’ accomplishments or the fact that he was acquitted of Burke’s prosecutorial accusations. In the case of Leopold, however, Twain’s vituperation is justified by history, and he may have devised the strategy of heavy documentation in order to protect himself from the charge of gratuitous exaggeration. The author complained in Following the Equator that “I never could tell a . . . truth that anybody would believe.” 104 Twain did not exaggerate in “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” and the one comic interlude he could not resist, when Leopold lashes out at the poets who have criticized him, seems hopelessly out of place: “Swilburne (English, I think), and a pair of Americans, Thomas Bailey Eldridge [i.e., Aldrich] and Colonel Richard Waterson Gilder [Richard Watson Gilder], of the sentimental periodical called Century Magazine and Louisville Courier-Journal.” 105 Twain’s essay was rejected by Harper’s, by then Mark Twain’s exclusive publisher, but they allowed it to be issued as a pamphlet by the Congo Reform Association. This pamphlet, reprinted several times and then reissued in a second edition, added fuel to the international condemnation of Leopold II. In 1908, the Belgian parliament abolished the Congo Free State, removed the area from the King’s control, and took over the administration of what then became the Belgian Congo. III Early and late, Mark Twain was sometimes amused, sometimes outraged by specific iniquities. In the writings of his last decade, he became increasingly

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interested in the general principles behind the seemingly endless wickedness of human beings. Three of these principles concerned wrong-headed patriotism, misguided religious faith, and dishonorable war, and in yet another 1905 composition, he worked out the relation between the three and expressed it in a brief anti-war, anti-imperialism tale that raises satire to high art. “The WarPrayer” had its origin in the debates over the Boer war that Twain observed, and engaged in, while living in London at the end of his nine years abroad. On 26 January 1900, he wrote to Howells that “I love to see the holy ones air their smug pieties & admire them & smirk over them. . . . I notice that God is on both sides in this war. . . . But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybody here [i.e., in England] thinks He is playing the game for this side, & for this side only.” 106 Twain’s story, only 1200 words long, opens with the martial excitement of an unnamed town about to send its young men off to an unspecified war. The drums beat, the flags fly, orators stir crowds of cheering citizens, and the volunteers march down the avenue in their bright new uniforms. On Sunday, the day before the men are scheduled to leave, the church is filled and the pastor prays that the ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset, help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory.

A stranger enters the church, ascends to the pulpit, and explains to the congregation that this prayer has two parts, only one of which was expressed by the words of the pastor. The other part, if spoken, would contain the following meaning: “O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land . . . for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”

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The tale concludes with a brief notation: “It was believed afterwards, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.” This evocative narrative, unpublished during Twain’s lifetime, first appeared in truncated form in A. B. Paine’s biography in 1912, where Paine describes the circumstances of nonpublication as follows: To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the “War Prayer,” stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. “Still you are going to publish it, are you not?” Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. “No,” he said, “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” 107

Paine sometimes mines dialogue from letters, and he doesn’t let the facts stand in the way of biographical story telling. We now know that Twain submitted “The War-Prayer” to Harper’s Bazar, where it was turned down, and then he wrote to Dan Beard, repeating a comment he had made in his notebook, that “I don’t think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.” 108 Paine ultimately published the tale in full in 1923, after World War I, an event that went a long way toward sucking the religious glory out of war. In Twain’s day, the imperialists largely won, but the pen, if not mightier than the sword, can be more enduring, and “The War-Prayer” has been much reprinted and anthologized in the five decades from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. Mark Twain continues to speak to us because his writings keep their relevance of subject matter as much as they do their pungency of expression. ADAM AND EVE A casual reader of Mark Twain’s writings might be surprised to learn that the author and his family owned some thirty copies of the Bible in a variety of editions, including an 1872 Doré and a German Neue Testament. Twain had grown up in a religious home and community which accepted the Bible as the inerrant word of God. Although his childhood faith had eroded by age 29, when he wrote to his brother that “there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor,” 109 Twain retained an interest in biblical tales, reviewing a library copy of a 1621 Apocryphal New Testament for the Alta California in June 1867. Two weeks later he sailed for Europe and the Holy Land, using a Bible as a reference work and sending his mother a British and Foreign Bible Society King James Version inscribed to “Mrs. Jane Clemens / From Her

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Son— / Jerusalem, Sept. 24, 1867.” 110 After his return, Twain made an apparently sincere effort to study the Bible with Livy, aspiring, under the pressure of courtship, to lead an “earnest religious life” 111 and to join the church. That didn’t work out, but the exercise gave him ammunition for a lifetime of reference to scriptural doctrines, stories, and characters—freely reshaped and retold for the author’s own purposes, which varied from one writing to another. Having published “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” in 1893, Mark Twain returned to his favorite biblical character, whom he called “the only solitary celebrity” 112 in his family, early in 1905. In a short playful sketch called “Adam’s Soliloquy,” our first ancestor descends from heaven to view the brontosaurus skeleton newly installed in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Adam complains that Noah and his sons failed to include the huge saurians in their ark collection, while taking aboard “a multitude of useless [creatures], such as flies, mosquitoes, snakes.” The piece ends with a quip: Adam explains to a young woman he meets that she need not be afraid of seeing the original Adam since he is “a distant relative of yours.” That sketch seems to have stirred up memories of his earlier campaign to memorialize “the Father of the Human Race,” for Twain published “A Monument to Adam” a few months later, in July. This account describes the jocular discussion with friends in Elmira in 1879, after the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man, in which the humorist suggested that Adam was in danger of being replaced by a monkey, and that he ought to be rescued from oblivion by the good citizens of Elmira. Accordingly, Twain drew up a petition to Congress “to issue a decree restricting to Elmira the right to build a monument to Adam.” 113 This joke was taken seriously by several local bankers, and that made it an even better joke, leading Mark Twain to pass the petition on to Joseph Hawley, Representative to Congress from Connecticut. General Hawley showed it members of the House and Senate, but shelved the petition when they told him “it would not do.” The project died a historical death, but was resurrected in fiction, for Twain makes a monument to Adam the “noble dream” of George Sterling in “The Refuge of the Derelicts,” a manuscript also dating from 1905. Later that year, warming to his sense of play with biblical narrative, Twain returned to the story of Adam and Eve. This time, however, he gives it from Eve’s point of view, undoubtedly as a tribute to his wife. In the summer of 1902, Livy Clemens had suffered a violent attack of what was apparently asthma, which may have affected her heart, and she was very ill for much of the rest of her short life. In an era when travel, rest cures, and warm climates were standard medical prescriptions, Twain moved Livy to Florence in the fall of 1903, where she died of heart failure the following June. She was 58 at the time of her death, after years of fragile health perhaps initiated or intensified by a skating accident when she was a teenager. “Eve’s Diary” is an

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elegy for Livy, a tribute to women in general, and an expression of the Victorian concept of ideal womanhood. Eve is emotional, impulsive, curious, and voluble. She befriends all creatures, delights in beauty, and loves Adam “with all the strength of my passionate nature,” in the manner promulgated by Lord Byron in Don Juan: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, / ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.” 114 Twain endorsed the Victorian notion by presenting Eve’s emotional impulses as almost always right, and with Eve’s comment on Adam that “he loves me as well as he can.” 115 He also gently satirized the notion with his exaggeration of Eve’s naïve exuberance, and he presents Adam as practical but a little stuffy, rational but often bumbling. God is barely mentioned in her diary, there is no Satan or serpent, and the Fall is more than offset by what Eve has gained: “The Garden is lost, but I have found him, and am content.” Him, of course, is not God but Adam, and he, gradually enlightened and improved over the course of their relationship, has the closing line, uttered at Eve’s grave and intended as a memorial to Livy as well: “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” Mark Twain’s Adam reminds us of Milton’s Adam, who, “linked in love,” pledges to live and die with Eve in spite of sin, the Fall, and expulsion from Eden: “to lose thee were to lose myself.” 116 This resemblance is perhaps not accidental. A month before his wedding, Twain sent Livy Langdon, his “Other Self,” an elegant edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, illustrated by Gustave Doré, and wrote that “I am so glad the Milton pleases my idol—I am delighted. Oh, we’ll read, & look at pictures when we are married!” 117 “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” and “Eve’s Diary” are human, not doctrinal, stories. God, Satan, and the Fall are minor players. The stars are Adam and Eve, as first husband and first wife, and the lesson they learn in Eden and after is that they are redeemed from life’s trials, not by a savior or a newfound obedience to God, but by their love for one another. Nevertheless, Mark Twain is interested in biblical doctrine; that is, interested in turning it upside down, and he does just that in a series of related unpublished sketches: “That Day in Eden” (the Fall, narrated by Satan), “Eve Speaks,” “Extract from Eve’s Autobiography,” and “Passage from Eve’s Autobiography.” In these heretical rereadings of Genesis, Adam and Eve are innocents, “poor ignorant children,” who know nothing about fear, pain, death, and evil, or for that matter, obedience. Eve doesn’t disobey or sin. She simply likes fruit and eats an apple. She and Adam are no more responsible for the Fall of man than the tiger is for its fangs. Satan too is innocent. In what is perhaps a unique argument in the long history of biblical interpretation, Satan is not a tempter, but a sympathetic bystander and counselor. God is largely absent from the scene, but by implication he bears responsibility for the Fall by introducing a concept of disobedience that has no meaning for prelapsarian humans. In later writings, those in 1906 and after, Twain turned implication into allegation, asserting that the villain in the Garden of Eden was God himself.

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Yet another reference to Adam in Mark Twain’s works comes in the author’s last published book, Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, though in discussing heaven Twain seems more interested in countering conventional beliefs than in reworking the Bible. In his view, heaven, if there were one, would be very different from what some religious people think it might be. With this topic, characteristically, he employs both gentle and tough-minded satire; Stormfield’s Visit represents the soft approach. The titular captain has a long history in fact and fiction, originating with the colorful skipper of the steamship America, Edgar Wakeman, with whom Mark Twain traveled from San Francisco to Nicaragua in December 1866. Twain was so impressed with Wakeman’s able seamanship, autocratic command, extravagant yarns, salty vernacular, and feats of blasphemy that he jotted down notes totaling 2600 words during his two weeks on shipboard, concluding that “I had rather travel with that old portly, hearty, jolly, boisterous, good-natured old sailor, Capt Ned Wakeman than with any other man I ever came across.” 118 These notes, later reminiscences in nine other notebooks, and Twain’s memory would stretch across 40 years and produce many versions of Wakeman—in four letters to the Alta California (as Captain Wakeman, then Captain Waxman), Roughing It (Captain Ned Blakely), “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion” (Captain Hurricane Jones), “The Great Dark” (Captain Davis), and “The Refuge of the Derelicts” (Admiral Stormfield). A successful steamboat pilot himself, Twain not only admired Wakeman’s type, he identified with it. Captain Davis, for example, was, like his creator, a man of many moods: At times he was the youngest man in the ship, and the most cheerful and vivacious and skittish. . . . Sometimes he was sarcastic, sometimes he was serious even to solemnity, sometimes he was stern, sometimes he was as sentimental as a school-girl . . . sometimes he was talkative and argumentative. . . . He was entirely self-educated. . . . He was an affectionate creature, and . . . in the eyes of his daughters he was . . . a mixed sun-god and storm-god, and they feared him and adored him accordingly. He was fond of oratory, and thought he had the gift of it; and so he practiced it now and then, upon occasion, and did it with easy confidence. 119

Twain met Wakeman a second time, in Panama, when the author was returning from a trip to California in 1868, and it was apparently to that meeting that Twain referred to in an autobiographical dictation made 38 years later: “Captain Wakeman had a fine large imagination, and he once told me of a visit which he had made to heaven. I kept it in my mind, and a month or two later I put it on paper.” 120 Twain continued to put it on paper and made revisions to the story for decades, never quite melding the various versions together, and finally published a selection from them as Extract

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from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven in Harper’s Monthly in December 1907 and January 1908. Book publication followed in 1909. Stormfield’s Visit gets off to a promising start. Recently deceased, the captain finds himself skimming through the vastness of space, like a fully rigged ship racing before a following wind. He overhauls a comet and, à la Mississippi steamboat pilots, thumbs his nose at the comet’s captain and shouts an insult as he passes. That turns out to be a mistake, for the comet crew piles on canvas, heaves “a hundred million billion tons of brimstone” 121 into the furnaces, dumps its cargo, and roars out of sight. This first section reads like vintage Twain, but once Stormfield gets to heaven, the author encountered a structural problem, which perhaps explains why he never quite completed the tale. Twain is eager to elaborate what heaven is like, or rather, what it is not like, and since Captain Stormfield has just arrived, he needs to be informed. For that purpose, Twain invents an old hand in heaven, a baldheaded angel named Sandy McWilliams, who befriends the Captain. The two of them lie around in the shade, smoke pipes, and Sandy explains what heaven is all about. Thus Sandy, who is not much of a character, takes over the narrative, and Stormfield, now more a seaman apprentice than a captain, is reduced to a succession of interjections and questions: “What did they look like, Sandy?”; “Go on—tell me about it”; “Did you talk with those archangels and patriarchs, Sandy?” This tame, inquiring listener is a far cry from the Captain Ned Wakeman, autocrat of the America, who so captured Mark Twain’s imagination, and whom he described to readers of the Alta California in 1866 as “a burly, hairy, sunburned, stormy-voiced old salt, who mixes strange oaths with incomprehensible sailor phraseology and the gentlest and most touching pathos, and is tattooed from head to foot like a Fejee Islander.” 122 Compared to Wakeman and his vivid fictional counterparts—Captains Waxman, Blakely, Jones, Davis, and Admiral Stormfield—who enlivened the humorist’s fiction for four decades, the heavenly Captain Stormfield is only a pale imitation. Another problem is that Sandy’s narration turns out to be a one-dimensional joke based on the disparity between the fundamentalist notion of paradise the Captain arrives with and the reality that confronts him (see table 13.1). This simplistic joke, of the straw man variety, has some bright moments, and it gives Twain the opportunity for deflation. Sandy explains that in the vast spaces of heaven, which serves all of the universe, the earth is known as “the Wart”; English-speaking whites are a microscopic minority among the billions who have died across the eons of time; and famous luminaries of history are outshone by unknowns, since a person in heaven is judged by “what he would have been” if he or she had had the opportunity. Nevertheless, a straw-man joke is a weak foundation for a long narrative.

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reality

everyone in heaven wears a halo and has these things, handed out because a harp, hymnbook, and palm branch newcomers ask for them, are soon dumped all are furnished with wings

after floundering around, and crashing, they give up wings

the inhabitants are all young and beautiful after trying younger ages, the inhabitants revert to their ages at death newcomers to heaven would be warmly greeted by Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the like

heaven, not a republic, is organized, and segregated, by rank

The energy, and the bite, missing in Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven can be seen in “Letters from the Earth,” where Mark Twain addresses the same topic from a tougher point of view. Twain’s target is still wrong-headed human expectations about heaven, but the perspective is reversed. The report is not from heaven but from earth, and the reporter is not an old bald-headed angel but the prince of demons himself. Satan, always a Twain favorite, has been temporarily tossed out of heaven for making sarcastic remarks about God’s creations, and is touring in space. He drops in on earth to “see how the Human-Race experiment [is] coming along,” and reports back in letters to his archangel comrades. 123 Human beings, he writes, are a curiosity. Satan cites their one supreme joy, sexual intercourse, and then lists the things most of them dislike: praying, singing, playing musical instruments, going to church, mingling with different races, loud noises, and boredom. Yet humans imagine a heaven which omits the joy and is filled with the dislikes, since all the races of earth are jammed together in heaven for endless, unvarying prayers and church services amid a thundering cacophony of hymn singing and harp playing. Mark Twain, through Satan’s letters, then launches into a spirited attack on what he calls “the Bible God,” who “has one code of morals for himself, and quite another for his children”; and on the Bible, which “has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and some execrable morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.” He describes Noah’s deficiencies as a builder of boats (the ark has no rudder, no sails, no compass, no pumps, no anchors), God’s insane partiality toward typhoid-carrying flies, and God’s commands to the people of Israel, as detailed in Numbers and Deuteronomy, to slaughter all the males in the cities of their enemies and take as booty the women, children, cattle, and everything else. And in the half dozen cities particularly obnoxious to “the Lord your God,” the Israelites are ordered “to save alive

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nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them.” How in the world, Mark Twain asks, can people attribute love and mercy to a God who rains down destruction on innocent people, a God who has created a system that contains the countless “pains and diseases and miseries” that flesh is heir to? And, once more, Twain revisits the story of Adam and Eve and comes to the same conclusion he had reached long before, though now—he is writing in the fall of 1909—he puts it more forcefully: Adam and Eve were innocents, “assassinated” by the God of the Bible. Twain is appalled by the notion that the so-called punishment for their so-called sin is supposed to continue on down to all succeeding generations, and to animal life as well. Thus Mark Twain rejects anything like conventional religious belief, and his restaging of Genesis—with a malevolent God, an admirable Satan, a guileless Adam and Eve, and a silly, boring heaven—is calculated to raise Cain with the pious. Nevertheless, the story of the Fall is iconic for Twain, who believed that we all start young and innocent, grow to strength and knowledge, experience pleasure and pain, suffer weakness and disease over time, and decline in old age until death is a boon—the last of “the five boons of life” in his short essay by that title. Life is both comedy and tragedy, the latter softened by love and compassion. This boom-to-bust saga is peculiarly appropriate to Mark Twain’s life story, but his point is that it represents everyone’s story; it’s the way we are made. The fault lies not in ourselves, but in the stars, in the system, although, in Twain’s view, if you believe in an all-seeing, omnipotent God as creator of the universe and man, it has to be His fault. Mark Twain’s “last bit of continued writing,” according to A. B. Paine, was done between bouts of chest pains in the humorist’s final days in Bermuda, in the spring of 1910, shortly before he sailed for death at his Stormfield estate and burial in Elmira with his wife, son, and two daughters. It was also about heaven, but more in the spirit of Captain Stormfield’s Visit and Twain’s 1881 burlesque of etiquette books than that of “Letters from the Earth.” This bit consists of several pages of advice to someone arriving at heaven’s gate: Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It is not your place to begin. Do not begin any remark with “Say.” . . . Wait patiently in the queue till it comes your turn to apply for a ticket. Do not look bored, and don’t scratch your shin with your other foot. When applying for a ticket, avoid trying to make conversation. St. Peter is hard-worked and has no time for conversation. If you must talk let the weather alone. St. Peter cares not a damn for the weather. And don’t ask him what time the 4:30 train goes; there aren’t any trains in heaven, except the through-trains for the other place, and the less information you get about them, the better for you. . . .

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THE HIGHER ANIMALS One of the reasons Mark Twain rejected the biblical story of the fall of man was the fundamentalist interpretation that expulsion from Eden included, through no responsibility or apple-eating of their own, all of the species that shared the earth with Adam and Eve. And, though innocent, animals were excluded from a human-imagined heaven as well. The narrator of “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” protests this exclusion whenever and wherever there was a friendly dog wagging his affectionate tail, and looking up at me with his kind eyes and asking me to swap love for love with him; or a silken cat that climbed into my lap, uninvited, for a nap, thus flattering me with her trust; or a gracious horse that took me for a friend just by the look of me and pushed his nose into my pocket for possible sugar and made me wish he could impart his nature to my race and give it a lift up toward his own. 125

Complaining to Howells about American tea party goers in Austria, Twain noted their conversation “should make a dog shudder.” Then he added, in parentheses, “I take back the slur on the dog—the dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s.” 126 Mark Twain may have owed his predilection for animals, as well as his sympathy for underdogs of all species, at least in part to the influence of his mother. Shortly after Jane Clemens died in 1890, he wrote that All the race of dumb animals had a friend in her. By some subtle sign the homeless, hunted, bedraggled and disreputable cat recognized her at a glance as the born refuge and champion of his sort—and followed her home. His instinct was right, he was as welcome as the prodigal son. We had nineteen cats at one time, in 1845. 127

And this predilection was in turn passed on to his children, especially Jean, as he explained on the day of her death. “She was a loyal friend to all animals and she loved them all, birds, beasts and everything—even snakes—an inheritance from me.” 128 Early and late, Twain was an unapologetic lover of animals, and they played a prominent part in both his life and his fiction. He opposed sport hunting, bullfighting, and vivisection; and dozens of cats, dogs, birds, horses, and other creatures are intertwined with his experiences in Hannibal and the

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American West and abroad, and with his family life in Hartford and Elmira. Returning from his 1882 trip to revisit the Mississippi, the humorist gave his ten-year-old daughter Susie, as the family then spelled her name, a Tauchnitz edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, with the following inscription: “To Susie Clemens, / These volumes, (in place of a promised mud turtle,) are presented, with the love of Papa. / May 25, 1882 / N.B. The turtle was to have been brought from New Orleans, but I gave up the idea because it seemed cruel. S. L. C.” 129 Tramping with Twain in Switzerland in 1878, Joe Twichell wrote home to his family that “I never knew a person so finely regardful of the feelings of others . . . [and] his sensitive regard for others extends to animals. When we are driving his concern is all about the horse. He can’t bear to see the whip used, or to see a horse pull hard.” 130 Twichell later described an instance of Twain’s regard for animals that occurred while the two friends were climbing Gornergrat, a ten-thousand-foot ridge south of Zermatt: As we paused for a rest, a lamb from a flock of sheep near by ventured inquisitively toward us, whereupon Mark seated himself on a rock, and with beckoning hand and soft words tried to get it to come to him. On the lamb’s part it was a struggle between curiosity and timidity, but in a succession of advances and retreats it gained confidence, though at a very gradual rate. It was a scene for a painter: the great American humorist on one side of the game and that silly little creature on the other, with the Matterhorn for a background. Mark was reminded that the time he was consuming was valuable—but to no purpose. The Gorner Grat could wait. He held on with undiscouraged perseverance till he carried his point: the lamb finally put its nose in his hand, and he was happy over it all the rest of the day. 131

In the summer of 1901, the author noted that “beautiful little tan-colored impudent squirrels” had invited themselves to an outdoor tea, which the family shared with them. 132 Several summers later, on a cold, rainy day, a fire was lit in Twain’s room and immediately clawed apart and doused with water, because he remembered “there is a brood of swallows in the chimney. The tragedy was averted.” 133 In the summer of 1906, two years after Livy died, a lonely Twain brightened up his residence in New Hampshire by renting three kittens from a neighbor. He provided for their subsequent care when he returned to New York in September. In a 1909 article about Mark Twain’s final home in Redding, Connecticut, Albert Paine noted that the cats had the run of the entire house, including the billiard table. When, as is likely to happen at any time during the game, Sinbad or Danbury or Billiards may decide to hop up and play with the balls, the game simply adds this element of chance, and the uninvited player is not disturbed. The cats really own Stormfield. 134

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Mark Twain’s empathy with animals and his tendency to think of fictional incident as proceeding from character produced dozens of memorable, personified creatures in his writings. We think immediately of the jumping frog, “so modest and straightfor’ard as he was, for all he was so gifted,” 135 and the other animal characters who share that early story—the unpromising “fifteen-minute nag” who always manages to win a race, and Andrew Jackson, the bull-pup who died of a broken heart when he is put up in a fight against “a dog that hadn’t no hind legs for him to take holt of.” Innocents Abroad gives us the pilgrim-bird, the donkeys of Horta, the dogs of Constantinople, and the narrator’s decrepit horses, Jericho and Baalbec, the latter so named because he is “a magnificent ruin.” Animal life is crucial to Roughing It, both in Mark Twain’s presentation of the exoticism of the West and in his depiction of the life of lonely miners whose pets substitute for family. Thus we have the jackass rabbit, “‘streaking it’ through the low sage-brush”; the coyote who “glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile”; the buffalo “head down, tongue out, tail up, bellowing like everything”; the spirited “Genuine Mexican Plug” and the spiritless horse Oahu, who “went along peaceably enough, but absorbed in meditation”; and Tom Quartz’s sagacious cat, blown up in a mine blast— “after that you never see a cat so prejudiced agin quartz mining as what he was.” Tom Sawyer gives us the poodle who sits on a pinch-bug, and the somersaulting cat Peter, to whom Tom had given a dose of Aunt Polly’s “Pain-Killer.” Twain’s interest in what he sees as the chattering, chaffing, scolding, laughing commentary of ravens and blue jays is demonstrated in A Tramp Abroad, and in Following the Equator he adds to the group the Indian crow, “the hardest lot that wears feathers.” The Satan characters in all three of the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts demonstrate their superior qualities by taming, befriending, and conversing with animals. An entire chapter of “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” concerns cat nature. In “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” the wild creatures trooped in from everywhere, and climbed all over Satan, and sat on his shoulder and his head, and rummaged his pockets, and made themselves at home—squirrels, rabbits, snakes, birds, butterflies, every creature you could name; and the rest would sit around in a crowd and look at him and admire him and worship him, and chatter and squawk and talk and laugh, and he would answer back in their own languages. 136

Young Satan admires even the rattlesnake, explaining to Lilly that “he never strikes without first giving warning, and then does not strike if the enemy will keep his distance.” Lilly’s father confesses he had not looked at it that way before, and speaking for the author, concludes the rattlesnake has “better morals than some men have.” 137 With these and the other creatures who enliven his writings, Mark Twain could be accused of the so-called fallacy of anthropomorphism, but as hu-

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mans learn more about animal behavior, it has become increasingly apparent that many creatures experience fear, pain, and curiosity, and express their likes and dislikes, in ways similar to humans. In this respect, as in others, Twain seems ahead of his time, and his lecture on animal intelligence in What Is Man? foreshadows contemporary scientific research. He gives many examples of what he calls the “thought-machinery” of nonhuman creatures, and rejects the term “dumb beast”: “It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.” This serious point is nailed home with a satiric joke: “Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.” 138 Throughout Mark Twain’s writings, animals are described in human terms, while humans are judged by their understanding and their treatment of animals. In his later works, the role animals play is sharpened, for they demonstrate a vulnerability to human cruelty and thoughtless action that the author uses to dethrone the belief Homo sapiens has in its species superiority. In “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” the village loafer of Eseldorf, Hans Opert, beats his faithful dog, and when the village boys try to restrain him, he clubs out one of its eyes. Opert, drunk, falls over a precipice, and eventually dies, even though his dog manages to rouse the townspeople to come to the aid of his master. One of the boys complains about Opert’s inhuman brutality. Satan corrects his terminology, explaining that brutes are not brutal and only humans are inhuman: “ [The dog] only wanted help for the man who had misused him, and he thought only of that, and has had no food nor sought any. He has watched by his master two nights. What do you think of your race? Is heaven reserved for it, and this dog ruled out, as your teachers tell you?” 139 In two fragments Mark Twain composed in late 1896, while working on Following the Equator, he told the story of a ship bound for Australia with blasting powder and provisions, whose crew adopts a friendly St. Bernard just before sailing. Intelligent and amiable, the dog soon becomes the crew’s pet and proves his worth by alerting all hands to a fire that has broken out in the hold, next to the volatile cargo. Saved from an explosive death, the Captain sends the men into lifeboats and then ties the dog to the mainmast. Asserting that a dog would be too much of a nuisance to take along, the Captain, backing up his commands with a revolver, orders the dismayed crew to pull away, leaving the pleading, terrified St. Bernard to be consumed by flames in the sinking ship. Judgment is not long in coming. The boats are rescued by another freighter whose master has perished, so the Captain takes over and steers straight into a fierce gale that drives the ship south toward Antarctica and into the deathtrap of the Devil’s Race Track, a bewitched domain at whose center lies “the silence and peace and solemnity of a calm which is eternal.” 140 This tale was cut out of Following the Equator, and

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never published, but its spirit resurfaced in two works issued in Twain’s last decade. The first is a short story, “A Dog’s Tale,” probably influenced by Robert Browning’s poem “Tray,” which has a very similar plot. The poem appeared in 1879 in Dramatic Idyls, one of two dozen Browning volumes that Twain owned, and one that the humorist had marked up to assist him in group discussions of the poet’s work for which Twain was leader and chief reader. 141 “A Dog’s Tale” was published in Harper’s Monthly in December 1903, and issued the following year as a short book. The punning title Mark Twain could not resist is followed by an inspired opening sentence: “My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian.” What ensues begins as a pleasant history of three generations of a dog family, narrated by Aileen Mavourneen, the middle dog, thus continuing the first-person narration that structures much of Twain’s writing, both early and late. Aileen describes her mother as kind and brave, with a passion for big words she doesn’t understand, like Mr. Ballou in Roughing It. Ballou casually salts his conversation with “bituminous” and “meretricious”; Aileen’s mother astonishes the neighborhood dogs with “unintellectual,” “synonymous,” and “supererogation.” Eventually Aileen grows up and is sold to a family of strangers. The pain of separation from her mother is softened by the comfort and affection of life with the new family—a large house and garden, a kindly mistress, a distinguished scientist for a master, a ten-year-old girl and a baby for playmates. Aileen thrives in this setting, and when her own puppy is born, “the dearest little waddling thing,” which is welcomed by the family, her happiness is complete. These pleasantries turn to irony as Mark Twain springs what he called a “tragedy-trap.” 142 One winter day, a spark from the fire sets the crib ablaze and Aileen heroically drags the baby to safety, an act that the master misunderstands as an attack. He beats the dog fiercely, and Aileen, nursing a broken leg, hides in the garret until the family figures out the truth and makes amends. Tranquility follows for a spell, then the mother and children leave on a journey, and the master assembles some of his colleagues for a debate concerning brain injury and blindness. In an attempt to help “suffering humanity,” they decide to test their theories, using Aileen’s puppy as a subject. By inducing the brain injury under discussion, they blind the puppy, and as the group congratulate themselves, it dies. Disconsolate, Aileen stakes herself out at the puppy’s grave for weeks, without eating, and is near death when the story ends. The servants, sympathetic, steel themselves to report to the returning family members that Aileen has “gone where go the beasts that perish.” This mocking conclusion is the capstone to a triply ironic tale. The dog’s owners think of themselves as enlightened and caring, but turn out to be destructive. Like Oedipus, the harder Aileen tries to understand and help, the more she is enmeshed in disaster. And although the dog is the most

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moral, Christian character in the tale, her reward is the ultimate indignity of being shut out of the family’s religion. This story is not much admired by critics. Yet, as it often does, Twain’s irony carries a moral for our time. Most Americans love their pets, enjoy the birds in their yards, vote to ban dog and cock fighting, and are shocked by cruelty to animals. Many support their local SPCAs and make contributions to animal welfare organizations. Yet, at the same time, we live in a society that largely takes for granted road kill, slaughterhouses and factory farming of animals, product testing and scientific experimentation on live mammals, extermination companies, pet abandonment, traffic in exotic species, puppy mills, and the loss of wildlife habitat. It seems a normal part of contemporary life, part of the price of modern civilization, that millions of animals live in pain and fear, and many species are being eradicated. Mark Twain’s irony makes us think about these things, which is why the British National AntiVivisection Society had the story reprinted and circulated as a pamphlet. Robert Browning, at one time a vice president of the Victoria Society for the Protection of Animals, would have approved. In one sense, Twain goes beyond Browning. He was deadly serious in his condemnation of vivisection, but he also believed, and continually proved, that humor could dance along the edge of the heavy stage of pathos. On 26 May 1899, he wrote to the London Anti-Vivisection Society that his enmity to inflicting pain on unconsenting animals was so strong that I am sure I could not even see a vivisector vivisected with anything more than a sort of qualified satisfaction. I do not say I should not go & look on; I only mean that I should almost surely fail to get out of it the degree of contentment which it ought of course to be expected to furnish. 143

A Horse’s Tale is similar in title, content, and tragedy trap to A Dog’s Tale, but it is a horse of a different color, for here the sentiment of the dog story takes a leap into sentimentality. Mark Twain was prompted in writing this work by actress and antibullfight activist Minnie Maddern Fiske, and undoubtedly encouraged by his youngest daughter Jean, an enthusiastic horsewoman, who sent a letter to the editor of Harper’s Weekly on the cruelty to horses caused by checkreins and martingales that was published in April 1905, a few months before Twain composed his story. A Horse’s Tale is yet another example of first-person narration, as the author noted in his autobiography the following year: “I did not tell the ‘Horse’s Tale,’ the horse told it himself through me. . . . When a tale tells itself there is no trouble about it.” 144 What Twain meant in general was that he often worked best by conceiving a character, then finding a voice for that character, and after that it was smooth sailing. What he didn’t say was that in this particular case, A

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Horse’s Tale has not one first-person narrator, but a half dozen, equine and human, none of them effectively realized. The collective tale these narrators tell centers around Soldier Boy, Buffalo Bill Cody’s favorite horse, and Cathy Alison, a precocious, nine-year-old, fictional successor to the real girls Mark Twain admired—Joan of Arc, Helen Keller, Marjorie Fleming, Mary Rogers, and Susy Clemens. With both her parents deceased, Cathy is shuffled around to relatives, and finally winds up living with her uncle, the commandant of Fort Paxton, which is located somewhere between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. Bright, strong, fearless, fluent in five languages, Cathy quickly masters horsemanship, soldiering, and bugling, and captures the affection and respect of the friendly Indians nearby and the soldiers whom General Alison commands. Injured in an attempt to rescue Buffalo Bill after he is ambushed, Cathy herself is rescued by Soldier Boy, who kills and scatters the wolves closing in on the downed girl at night. The grateful scout gives his horse to Cathy, and then the plot takes a long jump to Spain, where Soldier Boy is stolen and sold to a succession of brutal owners. Finally, a blindfolded wreck, he serves in the bullring as target for a frustrated and enraged bull. Just as he is gored, Soldier Boy is recognized by Cathy in the stands and she rushes down into the ring to embrace him. Their mutual recognition and reunion is heartfelt but brief, for the bull charges again, and horse and mistress find death in the afternoon together. Mark Twain was aiming for a mixture of humor and pathos in this tale, the sort of mixture he and Howells praised in each other’s work and Twain admired in Rab and His Friends, “that pathetic and beautiful masterpiece,” as Twain put it, by John Brown, an Edinburgh physician who was a close acquaintance of the Clemenses. 145 Dr. Brown’s well-known story, still in print, concerns a gruff, battered mastiff, fiercely protective of an elderly couple who have befriended him. The demise of his friends triggers an obstreperous dejection on the part of the dog, which results in his death as well. The spare narration and laconic ending both convey and restrain the emotion of Rab and His Friends in precisely the way Twain was unable to do in A Horse’s Tale, which overshoots the mark. The difference between sentiment and sentimentality is exaggeration, and exaggeration is sometimes a humorist’s special liability. Sentimental or not, the horse story gives Mark Twain a chance to condemn bullfighting, which was his purpose, and to take a few slaps at religion. He has a Western cowboy, born in Spain, describe the “grand sport” to a companion: “Oh, that first bull . . . tore the bowels out of two horses so that they gushed to the ground, and ripped a third one so badly that although they rushed him to cover and shoved his bowels back and stuffed the rents with tow and rode him

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against the bull again, he couldn’t make the trip; he tried to gallop, under the spur, but soon reeled and tottered and fell, all in a heap. For a while, that bullring was the most thrilling and glorious and inspiring sight that ever was seen.” 146

After listening to this description, the cowboys’ two horses, Mongrel and Sage-Brush, talk it over: “To me, Sage-Brush, man is most strange and unaccountable. Why should he treat dumb animals that way when they are not doing any harm?” “Man is not always like that, Mongrel; he is kind enough when he is not excited by religion.” “Is the bull-fight a religious service?” “I think so. I have heard so. It is held on Sunday.” . . . “When we die, Sage-Brush, do we go to heaven and dwell with man?” “My father thought not. He believed we do not have to go there unless we deserve it.”

Taken as a group, Mark Twain’s writings about animals in his later years allow him to express two ideas about human life which he held with increasing conviction. The first is that all living things, animals as well as people, face a constant struggle. There is nothing theological here, no notion of a sinful Fall in which nature participates, but simply the belief that animals share with us an imperfect world where pain and loss are the price of life and love, and that they feel these things as sharply as do humans. The second idea is rooted in contrast rather than comparison. Although the difficulties Twain finds in human life extend to the animal world as well, the faults he finds in human nature usually do not. Animals, whom “we impertinently call the Lower Animals,” 147 do not have the moral sense, which enables humans to know right from wrong, and thus gives them the capacity to choose evil. Human superiority in knowledge is a mixed blessing, for it can be used for good or ill. Animals can be cruel, acting out the logic of their genes, but they tend not to be malicious or deceitful. Satan, taking this point to the extreme in “Letters from the Earth,” tells us man is “always foul-minded and guilty and the beast always clean-minded and innocent.” 148 Well, not quite always, as Mark Twain suggests in “Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?” All the human race loves a lord—that is, it loves to look upon or be noticed by the possessor of Power or Conspicuousness; and sometimes animals, born to better things and higher ideals, descend to man’s level in this matter. In the Jardin des Plantes I have seen a cat that was so vain of being the personal friend of an elephant that I was ashamed of her. 149

The cat in the Jardin reminds us that Mark Twain is no slave to consistency and that animals in the late works are not merely stalking horses for

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humans. They often have interesting lives of their own, and can be comic as well as tragic. One of the best is Bags (short for Bagheera, a nod to Kipling), Admiral Stormfield’s favorite cat in “The Refuge of the Derelicts.” When a visitor is surprised to learn that Bags enjoys playing with fire, the old mariner replies that “it’s because he found out that other cats don’t. That’s the way he’s made—originality’s his long suit; he don’t give a damn for routine; you show him a thing that’s old and settled and orthodox, and you can’t get him to take any int’rest in it, but he’ll trade his liver for anything that’s fresh and showy.” 150 That’s not a bad self-portrait of the humorist, who, in a letter to Howells in 1904, a year before writing “Refuge,” characterized himself as an “author-cat.” THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AUTOCRACY I Mark Twain published thirteen books in his last decade, three of which were collections. Most of the rest were short, about 150 words per page—a strategy used by Harper’s for turning stories and essays into books on the assumption, true enough, that anything between covers with Twain’s name on it would sell. The one exception to this strategy was a full-length treatment, perhaps overly full at 362 pages with 200 words per page, of Christian Science and its founder and generalissima, Mary Baker G. Eddy. In the fall of 1898 while living in Vienna, Twain became intensely interested in the new psychosomatic religion and the storm of celebrity surrounding Mrs. Eddy, who had published her Miscellaneous Writings in 1897 and yet another edition of Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures in 1898. He started writing what he originally thought might be a series of articles, the first of which, “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy,” appeared in Cosmopolitan in October 1899. Three years later, back in America, Twain published three more articles on Christian Science, as well as a reply to Mrs. Eddy’s response, in the North American Review, while producing new material to fill out a book-length study which Harper’s set in type to be issued early in 1903. The publisher, however, had second thoughts. Harper’s general manager, Frederick Duneka, thought Twain’s commentary was “mighty strong meat,” and publication was delayed for four years, until public sentiment had soured somewhat on Mrs. Eddy. 151 When it finally appeared in 1907, Twain’s Christian Science was a repetitious patchwork, consisting of 9 chapters in Book I, all published earlier, 15 chapters of new material in Book II, 6 appendices, the previously published “Mrs. Eddy in Error,” a final chapter, largely about part-time Christians and dishonest politicians, and, as announced in the subtitle (“With Notes Containing Corrections To Date”), addenda scattered throughout reflecting Mark Twain’s further thoughts

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across the years of the volume’s production. This strung-together organization reminds one of A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator, and the work might be thought of as a book of travel to the exotic land of Christian Science, with special interest in its Queen. Christian Science gets off to a frolicsome Twainian start in the first four chapters with a bit of fiction. The author/narrator invents a story, in which he falls off a 75-foot cliff in the Austrian outback and fractures “some arms and legs and one thing or another.” 152 Discovered by local inhabitants, he is taken to a farmhouse, and since there is no doctor in the neighboring village, a Christian Scientist vacationing in the area, who “could cure anything,” is sent for. Mrs. Fuller, a thrice-widowed Eddy look-alike from Boston, agrees to come, but not until the following day; in the meantime the injuries can be dealt with by “absent treatment.” When she finally arrives, Mrs. Fuller explains that the pain, hunger, and thirst that the narrator is suffering are delusions: “One does not feel” she states, “there is no such thing as feeling; therefore, to speak of a non-existent thing as existent is a contradiction. Matter has no existence; nothing exists but mind; the mind cannot feel pain, it can only imagine it.” The narrator protests, and Mrs. Fuller proceeds to unload a barrage of unfathomable aphorisms— “God-all, all-God, good God, non-Matter, Matteration, Spirit, Bones, Truth”—and quotations drawn from Eddy’s Science and Health, then in its 148th edition. Now suffering mentally as well as physically, the narrator turns to a local horse-doctor who cures him, after a fashion, with bran mash and a drench composed of turpentine and axle grease. The veterinarian charges half a shilling for his services. Mrs. Fuller presents her bill, itemized by the number of fractures, for $234. Since she has maintained that fractures, suffering, and matter itself are all imaginary, the narrator writes her an imaginary check. The rest of Book I continues with an essay on opinions, which concludes “that in disputed matters political and religious, one man’s opinion is worth no more than his peer’s, and hence it follows that no man’s opinion possesses any real value.” And then Twain investigates the skill of what he calls the Christian Science Trust in acquiring money, none of which is contributed to charity; and he presents the reasons, in addition to the acquisition of capital, for the success for the new faith: a small authoritarian inner circle, disciplined organization, “a new personage to worship,” and the offer of “present health and a cheerful spirit.” This formidably equipped upstart religion began with 15 followers in 1879, and in three decades could boast over 1,000 congregations. Twain projects, with customary exaggeration, that the number of worshippers would reach double-digit millions by 1920, and that by 1940 Christian Science would become “the governing power in the Republic.” Book I also contains a surprise. Mark Twain confesses he is a fellow traveler with adherents of Christian Science, but that he goes only part of the way, a part he variously designates as one half or four fifths. Twain did

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believe that “the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body.” 153 He had a clear understanding of what was defined in 1880 as a “placeboic remedy,” known today as the placebo effect; and he concedes that many of the miraculous cures recorded in both religious and secular history—cures effected by kings, quacks, saints, physicians, medicine men, faith healers, hypnotists—actually happened. Part of this belief came from experiences close to home. His mother was cured of toothaches by a faith healer who lived near Hannibal. And in 1862, a “traveling ‘quack’” named Dr. J. R. Newton lifted a partially paralyzed teenager out of the bed she lay in, and told her to “Walk!” 154 The young woman proceeded to walk, for the first time in two years. Eight years later she walked to the altar with Mark Twain. (This is the story as Twain told it in a footnote in Christian Science in 1903, and then elaborated in his Autobiography three years later; both versions apparently overdramatized the facts.) But Twain also knew that successful healers had no mysterious powers, but simply the ability to inspire the confidence of their patients. The problem with Christian Science, Twain reasoned, was that it took a sensible principle and stretched it into nonsense, sometimes dangerous nonsense, while needlessly hooking it to religion. He stated his opinion most succinctly in a note, dated 10 December 1902, describing a debate he had in his home with William D. McCrackan, director of the New York Christian Science library bureau, and, according to Twain, Christian Science’s chief writer. The dispute “finished where we began . . . he believing that the mind, with Christian Science, can cure all ills, mental and physical, I believing that the mind can cure only half of them, and that it is able to do this powerful and beneficent work without being obliged to call in the help of Christian Science.” 155 Chapters 1-4 of Twain’s Christian Science were originally published in Cosmopolitan in 1899; chapters 5-9 were published in late 1902 and early 1903 in the North American Review. On 17 January 1903, Mary Baker Eddy, then 81 and semi-retired in New Hampshire, made the mistake of replying in the Boston Herald. Mark Twain, never one to duck an argument, fired back in the April NAR with “Mrs. Eddy in Error.” He begins this piece of citation warfare by quoting Eddy’s letter and then crosscutting her comments with incompatible quotations from her Manual of the Mother Church and statements in the Christian Science Journal. He charges “Mother Mary” as she titled herself, with self-deification and with exercising autocratic control of every aspect of doctrine and organization of the Supreme Church (that is, the Christian Science church in Boston) and the hundreds of branch churches. Twain concludes emphatically, “she is the only absolute sovereign in all Christendom.” 156 Twain was able to respond to Mrs. Eddy’s remonstrance with some precision, for while the Book I chapters were running in the North American Review, he was at work on another 15 chapters which would become Book II of Christian Science. Twain had acquired a library of volumes

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that might stock a modest Christian Science reading room, and he had been steeping himself in Eddy’s Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures (in various editions), Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896, Retrospection and Introspection (her autobiography), Manual of the Mother Church, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, various issues of the Christian Science Journal, and Frederick William Peabody’s 1901 pamphlet entitled A Complete Exposé of Eddyism, or Christian Science and the Plain Truth in Plain Terms Regarding Mary Baker G. Eddy, Founder of Christian Science. Book II is twice the length of Book I; its purpose, according to Mark Twain’s Preface, is “to present a character-portrait of Mrs. Eddy, drawn from her own acts and words.” 157 It begins with her autobiographical Retrospection, and sketches her life story by interspersing Eddy quotations with humorously satiric commentary. Twain ridicules her vanity, ambition, and presumption, noting Mother Eddy’s tendency to mention herself alongside of, even in front of, the Virgin Mary and Jesus of Nazareth. And he pitches into her literary style with the relish he demonstrated in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” alleging that her prose is “consistently confused and crippled and poor.” Twain focuses on three specific problems, for which he cites copious examples. The first is the clumsiness of Mrs. Eddy’s statements, often bordering on incoherence. Describing the death of Phineas Quimby, a mesmerist who treated her in the early 1860s, and from whom she borrowed more than she admitted, Mrs. Eddy writes, “After his decease, and a severe casualty deemed fatal by skilful physicians, we discovered that the Principle of all healing and the law that governs it is God, a divine Principle, and a spiritual not material law, and regained health.”

Then there is metaphorical malfeasance: “What plague spot, or bacilli were gnawing at the heart of this metropolis . . . and bringing it on bended knee? Why, it was an institute that had entered its vitals. . . . Parks sprang up . . . electric street cars run merrily through several streets, concrete sidewalks and macadamized roads dotted the place. . . . Shorn of its suburbs it had indeed little left to admire, save to such as fancy a skeleton above ground breathing slowly through a barren breast.”

And finally there is schoolgirl gush of the sort memorialized in the Examination Day recitations in Tom Sawyer. Here is Mrs. Eddy, firing on all cylinders: “Into mortal mind’s material obliquity I gazed, and stood abashed. Blanched was the cheek of pride. My heart bent low before the omnipotence of Spirit, and a tint of humility, soft as the heart of a moonbeam, mantled the earth.

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For contrast, Mark Twain tosses in several competent passages, but his purpose with these is devious, for he suggests Mrs. Eddy, when coherent, may have had the assistance of a ghostwriter, and by that Twain does not mean the Holy Ghost, from whom Mother Mary sometimes claimed inspiration. Later research has proved his guess to be accurate. Book II then moves on to a lengthy analysis of the Manual of the Mother Church, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, which contains the Christian Science bylaws and marching orders first codified in 1895, as part of Mrs. Eddy’s attempt, in the latter part of her career, to establish a long-term structure for the Christian Science movement. At that time she abolished the office of pastor in the Boston and branch churches, designating Science and Health as “pastor-universal” and reserving for herself the misleading title of “Pastor Emeritus.” (One might just as well, Twain notes, designate the Czar of Russia as “Emperor Emeritus.”) To be a church member, the Manual states that a person had to believe in Christian Science “according to the platform and teaching contained in the Christian Science text-book, ‘Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures,’ by Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy.” 158 Preaching was eliminated from church services, which were to be conducted by two readers—one to read passages from the Bible, the other to read from related interpretive sections in Science and Health. The readers were warned to “make no remarks explanatory of the LessonSermon at any time during the service,” thus prohibiting differing interpretations of scripture and the consequent formation of splinter sects. In spite of the satirical tone that governs Twain’s romp through the Manual, he admits to being impressed by the iron control Mrs. Eddy established over every aspect of church organization and doctrine. The National Christian Science Association is governed by a Board of Directors. Candidates for the Board are “approved by the Pastor Emeritus.” The Board elects a President, “subject to the approval of the Pastor Emeritus.” Readers are elected by the Board of Directors, but “the Board shall inform the Pastor Emeritus of the names of candidates for readers before they are elected, and if she objects to the nomination, said candidates shall not be chosen.” The Readers, like all other Christian Science officials, serve for a single year, presumably to prevent the establishment of an ingrown bureaucracy. They must read from Science and Health at each church service, and “before commencing to read from this book, [they] shall distinctly announce its full title and give the author’s name.” “The Pastor Emeritus of the Mother Church shall have the right . . . to remove a reader from this office in any Church of Christ, Scientist, both in America and in foreign nations.” In case someone should

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wish to protest, “this By-Law can neither be amended nor annulled, except by consent of the Pastor Emeritus.” Mark Twain has a grudging respect for Mary Baker Eddy’s strict governance and business acumen, and he is amazed by her chutzpah. Somehow this “complacent, commonplace, illiterate New England woman” 159 has come out of nowhere to create a new religion and win wealth, power, and fame. She even discovers herself in the Bible, in Revelation 12:1: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” Not only that, but in Mrs. Eddy’s view, her writings are foretold in Revelation 10:1-2, when a mighty angel comes down from heaven, “and he had in his hand a little book open.” Surely the little book is a reference to Science and Health, which, after all, is subtitled A Key to the Scriptures. This key even unlocks the Trinity, defined by Mrs. Eddy as consisting of “God . . . Christ . . . [and] Divine Science.” 160 The Holy Ghost, according to Mrs. Eddy’s less than pellucid prose, “is expressed in Divine Science, which is the Comforter, leading into all Truth, and revealing the divine Principle of the universe,— universal and perpetual harmony.” “It is,” according to Twain, “the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that a Voice has gone crashing through space with such placid and complacent confidence and command.” 161 Mark Twain’s amazement and his grudging respect are encapsulated in the summary statement he uses as both an introduction to Book II and a conclusion to “Mrs. Eddy in Error”: “In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary.” 162 Taken out of context, this statement might appear to be positive, as if Twain rejected the religion but admired its founder. Actually, the reverse is true. He thought Christian Science was partially accurate, for he knew that some ailments can be mollified, exacerbated, or even created by the mind, but the founder of the Mother Church of Christian Science, while remarkable, was far from admirable. Seen in the full context of Christian Science, what Mark Twain means by “interesting” and “extraordinary” is that Mary Baker Eddy is a spiritual freak without precedent. She is a unique robber baron of religion—Twain calls her a “buccaneer” who runs a “trust”—whose success lies in tyrannical management, elimination of competitors, avaricious and dishonest accumulation of wealth, and shameless self-aggrandizement. His private comments were even harsher, as can be seen in a letter to a Springfield, Massachusetts librarian: Mrs. Eddy [is] the queen of frauds and hypocrites . . . in one or two ways she is the most extraordinary woman whom accident and circumstance have thus far vomited into the world. She is the monumental Sarcasm of the Ages and it seems to me that when we contemplate her and what she has achieved it is

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A century later, perhaps the most intriguing question is not about the merits of Christian Science or the character of its founder, but why Mark Twain seemed to be so obsessed by them. Between 1898 and 1903, he labored through the labyrinthine volumes produced by Mrs. Eddy (“I would rather saw wood”) and composed five articles and a book in response. 164 Whatever else she was, Mrs. Eddy was the sort of exotic phenomenon that always fascinated Mark Twain. Her rise to celebrity as a bestselling author and lecturer, and interpreter of God and man, may also have triggered his competitive instinct, as might a rival steamboat, however battered and leaky, that somehow demonstrates surprising speed. Mrs. Eddy was constantly in the newspapers and magazines, which Twain constantly read. During the period when he was researching and writing about Christian Science, 151 articles about Mary Baker Eddy were published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. At first, Twain tells us, when he was in Vienna he “was assured by the wise that Christian Science was a fleeting craze and would soon perish.” 165 Four years later, in spite of criticism from skeptics, the movement had grown by hundreds of branch churches, thousands of adherents, and millions of dollars, and Twain thought he was witnessing the establishment of a new religion that “must be reckoned with by regular Christianity.” 166 II The rise of Christian Science seemed to confirm Twain’s long-held belief in the gullibility of the public, and his more recent fin-de-siècle worry that democracy was slouching toward autocracy. As a way to satirize the dangerous tendencies of religious zealots and self-serving politicians, he composed, while he was working on Book II of Christian Science, a related manuscript entitled “The Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire,” not published until 1972 in John S. Tuckey’s edition of Mark Twain’s Fables of Man. Tuckey included this long, unfinished manuscript in the section he titled “The Nightmare of History,” an evaluation concurred in by Hamlin Hill, who called the manuscript “an apocalyptic vision of history in the next millennium.” 167 The first dozen pages warrant that description, for they sketch out the thousand years following 1901, when Mark Twain began this story, in which a religio-totalitarian Empire of Holy Eddypus, based on Christian Science, takes over the government of the world, except for China. It’s a grim Orwellian picture, with repression, persecution, slavery, and book burning, yet at the same time these pages are leavened by Twainian historical capers (Uncle Remus is remembered a thousand years later as a famous

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explorer who journeyed with Columbus in the Mayflower) and burlesque etymologies. Eddymania is the name of what becomes the Only True Religion; religion itself is known as Eddygush; the birthday celebration of Our Mother is Eddymas; Eddyflats, formerly Boston, is the home of the PopeEmperor and his attendants, who are Eddymaniacs; Eddyville is the new name for heaven. And the sacred incantation, uttered with genuflections five times a day by all worshipers, as they face Eddyflats, is Eddycant—the Scientific Statement of Being; the formula “Blood, Bones, Hash—Mortal Mind, Immortal Mind, Vacant Mind—God, Good, All-Good, Good-God—Ante-up, Play Ball, Keno!” . . . In all times of danger or of sickness the Eddychant is recited, to save the supplicant by keeping him reminded that there is no such thing as danger or sickness. 168

This introduction is conveyed in letters to a friend written in 2901 by a narrator who is “an antiquary and student of history,” a subversive occupation in the eyes of the Church-Government, which supplies its own version of earlier times along with copies of Science and Health. At the request of his friend, the 2901 narrator then switches from present to past, and attempts to outline a history of the world preceding the establishment of the theocratic Empire of Holy Eddypus, which takes up all the rest, 57 printed pages, of Mark Twain’s story. In trying to recover knowledge of previous civilizations, the 2901 narrator researches the few documents that have survived eradication by the church—unreliable documents based largely on oral tradition. From these he pieces together a madcap history of the past: Louis XIV, King of England, who was beheaded by his own subjects for marrying the Lady Mary Ann Bullion . . . was succeeded by his son, William the Conqueror, called the Young Pretender, who became embroiled in the Wars of the Roses, and fell gallantly fighting for his crown at Bunker Hill. He was succeeded by his nephew Saxton Heptarky, so called on account of the color of his hair . . . and under his patronage Sir Francis Shakspeare translated the philosophies of William Bacon into tragic verse. 169

The 2901 narrator then turns to his chief source, the only surviving thousand-year-old work of “wholly unassailable historical veracity,” a personal history of the nineteenth century entitled “Old Comrades” by a certain “Mark Twain . . . sometime Bishop of New Jersey, hanged in A.D. 1912.” (A certain W. D. Howells would have appreciated this insider joke, for he had just published a personal history of his own called Literary Friends and Acquaintance.) Not much is known about “Mark Twain,” except that he mentions having had dozens of “children,” such as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Since he refers to miscellaneous mothers for these children, and since none of them have his family surname, the narrator concludes they were illegitimate. From

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this conclusion “we get a flood of light upon the manners and morals of the clergy of the Bishop’s time [and can infer] the high clergy had harems.” The 2901 narrator is obviously a naïve narrator, separated as he is by a millennium from the text he interprets. The Mark Twain who wrote “The Secret History of Eddypus” gets a good deal of fun from that narrator’s misunderstandings of the “Mark Twain” who wrote “Old Comrades.” Some of these misunderstandings are linguistic. When “Mark Twain” makes a reference to “Tom, Dick, and Harry,” the narrator notes that “since he does not explain about these people it is inferable that they were persons of note in his day.” The narrator also misunderstands the “Maxims for the Instruction of Youth” appended to the manuscript of “Old Comrades.” Claiming “Mark Twain” lacked a sense of humor, the straight-man narrator demonstrates his own lack by rewriting the maxims to show what “Twain” meant “to convey, and what he should have said.” Thus, “No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.” becomes “No real gentleman will utter obscenities in the presence of ladies.” “Truth is the most precious thing we have. Let us economise it.” becomes “The truth is precious; do not be careless with it.”

Twain also enjoys many pages of misinterpretations of later generations (“the colossal copper statue of Her Divine Grace Mary Baker G. Eddy Enlightening the World” is dug out of the mud where the city of New York once stood and moved to Holy Square in Eddyflats [Boston]), and the easy disparities created by jumbling historical events together (Marat was butchered in the bathtub by his mother who was burned at the stake for delivering France). There is method in this madness, for Mark Twain’s historical burlesque reminds us how little we really know about the distant past, how history is distorted as it is told and retold, and how the confident certainty of later interpreters is often unwarranted. And Twain makes other serious points amid the drollery, and looses some of his favorite hobbyhorses. He notes that civilization carried abroad by force is “a pestilence” to native peoples, and that “phrenology is the ‘science’ which extracts character from clothes,” since a phrenologist operates by assessing the exterior appearance of a customer. Reflecting his readings in Lyell, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, Twain states that “evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill”; and that human life is governed by uncontrolled circumstances and an “irresistible tidal-wave of accumulated accidents.” The World-Empire of Eddypus is barely mentioned after the opening pages of Twain’s manuscript, since most of the work is devoted to “Mark Twain’s” history of the nineteenth century, as outlined in “Old Comrades” and interpreted by the narrator in the twenty-ninth century. In developing that

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history, the real Mark Twain presents a cyclic view of civilization rising from dark ages to spectacular increases in material comfort, scientific knowledge, and technological capabilities in the nineteenth century, and then declining in the face of the resistless and destructive forces which that century also created. “The Secret History of Eddypus” gives Twain a way to talk about the possible fate of civilization. Of course he is wrong about Christian Science, for that movement peaked about 1930 at some 2500 branch churches and 270,000 members worldwide, and has been in decline since WWII. However literally Twain thought that Christian Science might become dominant is open to question, but it is true that he was not sanguine about the future, and the notion of an Eddypus empire gave him an opportunity to express his doubts and fears. Even those who think Twain was a little nutty about nightmare scenarios have to admit that we are now only a little more than a century toward the millennium between 1901 and Twain’s fanciful 2901, and if this period hasn’t been exactly a nightmare of history, it has certainly furnished plenty of material for bad dreams—two world wars and a hundred regional ones, dictators and totalitarian states left and right, nuclear bombs, religious fanaticism, genocide, degradation of the environment, and species extinction. The “Eddypus” manuscript demonstrates two characteristics of Mark Twain’s later writings in general. It presents a bleak view of history, past and future, which perhaps has more truth in it than we like to admit. At the same time, in the midst of the bleakness, under the gloomy umbrella of negative predictions about the future of the human race, Twain creates smaller disparities of wit and comedy along with the larger ironies of history. Like the clown in The Winter’s Tale, he does “love a ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter merrily set down.” 170 There is yet another chapter in the story of Mark Twain and Christian Science, one that demonstrates Twain’s life, like his writing, was full of irony. Clara, the only one of his four children who made it to adulthood and an independent life, became a Christian Scientist, and in 1956, her 82nd year, published Awake to a Perfect Day; My Experience with Christian Science. Clara recounts her many illnesses, ailments, and accidents, and her early infatuation with Oriental religions. She describes how, later in her life, she became a convert to Christian Science, and she attempts to explain away her father’s criticism of the religion and its founder by accurately noting his “healthily inconsistent disposition” and inaccurately cherry-picking his statements to conclude, astonishingly, that “in his serious moods he gave wholehearted reverence to the Cause.” 171

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE LAW Published in 1909, two years after Christian Science, Mark Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? begins with a list of “claimants historically notorious.” Prominent among these, not surprisingly, is Mary Baker G. Eddy, and Twain once again ridicules her claim that “she wrote Science and Health from the direct dictation of the Deity.” Then he turns to Shakespeare, reviewing the publication of Delia Bacon’s The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded in 1857, and his own amusing cub-pilot-days discussions of Ms. Bacon’s notion that Francis Bacon and others wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Twain pitches into the debate anew to investigate whether the claim that the man from Stratford was the author of Shakespeare’s plays is as notoriously flimsy as Mrs. Eddy’s claim of divine authorial assistance. The premise for Twain’s approach was set down two decades earlier in his notebook, where he laid out the thesis for an article he projected, but never completed, for the New Princeton Review: If you attempt to create & build a wholly imaginary incident, adventure or situation, you will go astray, & the artificiality of the thing will be detectable. But if you found on a fact in your personal experience, it is an acorn, a root, & every created adornment that grows up out of it & spreads its foliage & blossoms to the sun will seem realities, not inventions. You will not be likely to go astray; your compass of fact is there to keep you on the right course. Mention instances where you think the author was imagining. Others where he built upon a solid & actually lived basis of fact. 172

Seen in this light, Mark Twain’s investigation of the Shakespearean dilemma has two parts. Do the plays seem to demonstrate realities, not just inventions? And did the man from Stratford have the actually lived basis of fact on which to found apparent realities? Twain briefly mentions various biographical facts of Shakespeare’s life that might be related to the knowledge embedded in the dramas, and decides to concentrate on just one aspect, that concerning the legal profession. The reason for this concentration concerns a fact in Mark Twain’s own biography. On a weekend in early January 1909, Helen Keller came to Stormfield for a visit, bringing with her Anne Sullivan, the blind girl’s lifelong companion, and Anne’s husband, John Macy. 173 Then 32, Macy would later become known as a socialist, literary critic, and editor. On this occasion, he brought with him galley proofs of the forthcoming Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon by William S. Booth, and he discussed the authorship of Shakespeare’s works with Twain. A few weeks later Macy sent him another new book that, as Twain writes in the first chapter of Is Shakespeare Dead?, reignited “my fifty years’ interest in that matter.” This book was by a British lawyer who listed himself on the title page as “G. G. Greenwood, MP. Of the

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Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law, Sometime Scholar of Trinity Coll. Camb.” Granville George Greenwood, later Sir Granville, was a distinguished lawyer with a literary bent, best known for his liberal politics, agnostic rationalism, animal rights legislation, and his interest in Shakespeare, about whom he wrote three books and many articles. His Shakespeare Problem Restated, published in 1908, is a massive 215,000-word review of the arguments of both the Stratfordians and the Baconians, and comes down squarely in the middle. Greenwood states that “I hold no brief for the Baconians . . . [but] I have long found it impossible to believe that the Stratford Player was the author of the Plays and Poems of Shakespeare.” 174 That author, Greenwood maintains, had “a very extensive and accurate knowledge of law,” and he cites the concurrence of leading legal authorities, such as Lord Chancellor Campbell and Lord Penzance, both of whom wrote books on Shakespeare’s “Legal Acquirements.” Mark Twain read his copy of Greenwood’s book carefully, making, as Alan Gribben notes, “prolific annotation in both pencil and black ink.” 175 Twain summarizes and repeats Greenwood’s contentions, which he calls “well restated and closely reasoned,” and uses a 4000-word quotation from The Shakespeare Problem Restated as his central chapter in Is Shakespeare Dead? Greenwood’s presentation, he concludes, is so strong, so direct, so authoritative; and so uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so’s, and might-have-beens, and couldhave-beens, and must-have-beens, and the rest of that ton of plaster of paris out of which the biographers have built the colossal brontosaur which goes by the Stratford actor’s name, that it quite convinces me that the man who wrote Shakespeare’s Works knew all about law, and lawyers. Also, that that man could not have been the Stratford Shakespeare—and wasn’t. 176

And that explains his title. Is Shakespeare Dead? echoes a running joke in Innocents Abroad (“Christopher Colombo—pleasant name—is—is he dead?”) 177 as well as a story Twain published in 1893 (“Is He Living or Is He Dead?”) and a play unpublished and unproduced in the author’s lifetime. With the Shakespeare book, the title meant something like this: given the recent works of Greenwood and Booth, hasn’t the notion finally been put to rest that the “distinctly commonplace person—a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence” 178 could have been the towering dramatist “equipped, beyond every other man of his time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind, grace and majesty of expression”? If this notion has not been put to rest, so much the worse for human beings, for whom “disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby . . . is a very slow process.” If so, if the idea that the dramatist was the Stratfordian actor is finally buried, Twain is left with a problem. “Who did write these Works, then?” he muses,

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“I wish I knew.” He leans toward the Baconians and cites T. B. Macaulay’s “Essay on Bacon” at length in two later chapters of Is Shakespeare Dead?, but Twain has to admit the proof is not there and, if nothing else, his essay is a meditation on the necessity of real proof. Like Greenwood, Mark Twain remains an agnostic concerning the Shakespeare Problem. Twain was as wrong about Shakespeare as he was about the impending global triumph of Christian Science. He might be partially excused since there was less known in his time about Shakespeare’s life than there is now, after a century of biographical discovery and scholarship. And Twain’s conclusions were reasonable given his belief, certainly valid for him, in “the sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person who has lived what he is talking about, not gathered it from books and random listenings.” 179 The lack of such lived experience may be one reason he broke off “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,” since it was set in a West unfamiliar to him, between the Mississippi and the Rockies. It could be pointed out that Twain managed to create a vivid trial scene in Pudd’nhead Wilson without legal experience other than a night spent in jail, attendance at the adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher, and involvement in various lawsuits. And the author bragged a bit about describing a bullfight in A Horse’s Tale without having to see one. Still, the main flaw in Twain’s analysis of the authorship of Shakespeare’s works is curious, for he had faced a similar dilemma with Joan of Arc, and settled it in a very different way. How could the unlettered seventeen-year-old daughter of a tenant farmer in a small village, unschooled in military art and court intrigue, lead French armies to victory over the English occupation and reshape the course of history in fifteenth-century Europe? Here’s how Mark Twain resolved what might be called the Joan problem: Who taught the shepherd girl to do these marvels—she who could not read, and had had no opportunity to study the complex arts of war? I do not know any way to solve such a baffling riddle as that, there being no precedent for it, nothing in history to compare it with and examine it by. For in history there is no great general, however gifted, who arrived at success otherwise than through able teaching and hard study and some experience. It is a riddle which will never be guessed. I think these vast powers and capacities were born in her, and that she applied them by an intuition which could not err. 180

It is regrettable that Mark Twain did not apply this theory—the exceptionalism of genius—to the vast powers and capacities of the man born in a little market town on the banks of the Avon in Warwickshire, a century and a half after the birth of Joan of Arc. Is Shakespeare Dead? has some of the meandering charm of Twain’s Autobiography—the book’s subtitle is From My Autobiography—with stops at various ports of call and investigations of interesting byways. It includes

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vignettes of Hannibal, an account of his Sunday school interest in Satan, a defense of irreverence, and skepticism about idols in general and what he calls Stratfordolatry in particular. But much of the energy of the work is devoted to a larger principle of which Stratfordolatry is only one example, and a still useful function of the essay is its presentation of Twain’s analysis of human reasoning: We always get at second hand our notions about systems of government; and high-tariff and low-tariff; and prohibition and anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace and the glories of war; and codes of honor and codes of morals; and approval of the duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs concerning the nature of cats; and our ideas as to whether the murder of helpless wild animals is base or is heroic; and our preferences in the matter of religious and political parties; and our acceptance or rejection of the Shakespeares and . . . the Mrs. Eddys. We get them all at second-hand, we reason none of them out for ourselves. It is the way we are made. 181

This principle—reasoning things out for ourselves—informs two other topics, ranging far beyond Shakespeare and Mrs. Eddy, that occupied much of Mark Twain’s attention in his last decade. GOD AND MAN Mark Twain was interested in history, astronomy, simplified spelling, nutrition, social reform, evolution, radium, fingerprints, philosophy, animal rights, the publishing business, mental telepathy, copyright protection, dreams, paleontology, theology, women’s rights, politics, the downfall of monarchy, trade unionism, anthropology, foreign affairs, the new macro and micro worlds revealed by science, and all manner of things current in his time; and he expressed his opinions in conversation, interviews, speeches, dictation, notebooks, letters, and print. Nevertheless, nailing down Twain’s opinions is not always easy or simple, for all of the usual reasons, and for some that are peculiar to him. The usual reasons, which apply to most people, have to do with changes brought about by personal maturation and cultural transformation. A lifetime of varied experience and intellectual growth affirmed, complicated, altered, and overturned the ideas young Sam Clemens had absorbed in a small river town in the 1840s, just as the nation that youngster had grown up with had been transformed by the later decades of the nineteenth century. In 1835, the year of Twain’s birth, America was a rural, insular, agricultural country of 14 million people and 24 states, half of which sanctioned slavery and only two of which were west of the Mississippi River. Major commercial activities included hunting whales and trapping beaver. By Mark Twain’s death in 1910, the United States had become a

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multiethnic, imperial, industrial power from sea to shining sea, with 46 stars in its flag and a population of 92 million. Commerce was defined by Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. In addition to reacting to these opinion-shifting circumstances which affected all Americans of his day, Twain exhibited a number of special characteristics that influenced his sometimes protean convictions. He was, from the beginning, an exaggerator, with a flair for the dramatic, who pushed the opposing sides of a contrast out to extremes to make sparks fly and rattle the cages of listeners and readers. He had a highly sensitive personal barometer, which could shoot up with a day of successful writing or a fat royalty check, and plunge downward with a botched lecture, the illness of a family member, or some real or imagined affront. He had a combative streak—sometimes humorous, sometimes contentious, often both—which led him to put pressure on received opinion, to take the opposite side, though he reined himself in somewhat for publication, especially in his last decade, pigeonholing manuscripts “which I or editors didn’t das’t to print.” 182 And Twain was thoughtful, though not a systematic or rigorous thinker, and blithely indifferent to consistency in a manner reminiscent of Emerson (“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”) and Whitman (“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself.”) 183 Especially in matters of religion and politics Mark Twain argued, consistency was “false and most pernicious.” 184 Thus Mark Twain’s opinions tended to vary, depending on what had triggered his interest, when they were expressed, what had recently happened in his life, whether he was exaggerating; and whether he was writing for print, for posterity, to let off steam, or simply to clarify what he thought. On two topics he spent a lifetime thinking about, divinity and humanity, he left a series of complex opinions that coalesced into positions in his later years, which, if not single points of light, are at least identifiable constellations of belief. What Is God? In 1866 Mark Twain wrote that I was brought up a Presbyterian, and consider myself a brevet member of Dr. Wadsworth’s church. I always was a brevet. I was sprinkled in infancy, and look upon that as conferring the rank of Brevet Presbyterian. It affords none of the emoluments of the Regular Church—simply confers honorable rank upon the recipient and the right to be punished as a Presbyterian hereafter; that is, the substantial Presbyterian punishment of fire and brimstone instead of this heterodox hell of remorse of conscience of these blamed wildcat religions. 185

This statement is accurate both for its description of the Presbyterian orthodoxy Twain had grown up with, and the fact that he had, at an early age,

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grown away from orthodoxy, away from belief in a providential universe and human perfectibility. By the time he wrote the “Jumping Frog” story in 1865, he had been mustered out from even brevet Presbyterianism. Yet this was precisely the time when he was realizing his literary gifts and launching his career as a humorist, and he was discovering that the language of reverence was useful for both high rhetorical effects and the high jinks of deflation. Nineteenth-century Americans could be moved by the capitals and exclamation points of veneration, with which Twain concludes his Innocents Abroad description of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, “the last resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of Peace!” 186 And they could also be startled, and thus possibly amused, by a religious reference that casts a new light on its subject. After his tour of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa, Twain remarks: We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one, also, in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him, if necessary. 187

Mark Twain used both strategies, reverence and irreverence, from his earliest days to his last. He admired a “reckless, hilarious, admirable” fellow apprentice, Wales McCormick, who possessed “the most limitless and adorable irreverence.” 188 But when tragedy struck, and his younger brother died following a steamboat explosion in 1858, Twain reverted to the language of the church in a letter to his sister: “Hardened, hopeless,—aye, lost—lost— lost and ruined sinner as I am—I, even I, have humbled myself to the ground and prayed as never man prayed before, that the great God might let this cup pass from me. . . . Pray for me, Mollie, and pray for my poor sinless brother.” 189 Similarly, late in life, Mark Twain could travel both ways on the road to reverence. In “Mock Marriage,” an unpublished story, dated 1903 by A. B. Paine, a young couple meant for each other are brought together at a masked ball, then separated by circumstances. The family stews around, talking about the mysterious ways of providence and what God has done, until a commonsensible, cigar-smoking aunt intervenes. She solves the problem by telling them to forget the “twaddle . . . [about] what God can do” and take action for themselves. 190 “Thoughts of God,” written about the same time as “Mock Marriage,” takes up one of Twain’s favorite targets, the “squalid and malevolent” fly. In an age of open windows and streets littered with horse manure, flies were a menace, which is why the automobile was heralded as solving the pollution problem. Twain describes at length the activities of the fly—harassing men and beasts, torturing sick children and wounded soldiers, bringing filth and germs to the dinner table. Then he turns to the fly’s creator:

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“We hear much about His patience and forbearance and long-suffering; we hear nothing about our own, which much exceeds it.” 191 Yet, the following year, when Livy died, Twain turned to the vocabulary of prayer and God’s grace— “Gott sei dir gnädig”—in what may be the most carefully considered sentence he ever wrote, the inscription for her gravestone. The combined use and abuse of the language of reverence is consistent throughout his career, but Twain’s religious beliefs are harder to chart. His slide away from traditional religious doctrine was halted, if not reversed, by his energetic courtship of Livy Langdon preceding their marriage in February 1870. He promised Livy to “strive to walk as you do in the light & the love of God,” and advised her to “turn toward the Cross & be comforted—I turn with you. . . . The peace of God shall rest upon us.” 192 After the wedding they tried family prayers, saying grace at meals, and reading the Bible, but these disappeared in the course of time, and Twain resumed smoking cigars and continued his march deeper and deeper into the territory of what the nineteenth century called freethinking. Later in 1870, according to A. B. Paine, Twain composed a personal statement describing how earlier notions of God needed to be revised for the modern era. The ancient God, the God of the Bible, was a small potatoes affair, whose “sole solicitude was about a handful of truculent nomads.” This God was “irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle.” Now that science has expanded our understanding, we realize there is a true God “whose beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of his colossal universe is proof that he is . . . just and fair.” 193 Some four years later, Twain wrote on a flyleaf of his copy of Moncure Conway’s The Sacred Anthology that “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” 194 By the 1880s, Mark Twain was ready to refine his religious belief, which he did in a series of short, unpublished writings, probably written concurrently, that were collected and published by Paul Baender as “Three Statements of the Eighties.” These papers begin with a clear, ringing affirmation: “I believe in God the Almighty.” 195 Then, having put that squarely in his basket of religion, Twain proceeds to throw almost everything else out, and the rest of the first Statement and the two following are devoted to what Mark Twain disbelieves. This strategy parallels exactly the first chapter of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, a book Twain first read as a cub pilot “with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power.” 196 Twain does not think that God inspired the Bible, that God has ever communicated in any way with any human being, or that God bothers himself with special providences (they do not exist), with establishing moral laws (they are made by men), or with condemning sinners to hell (there is no such place). As for life after death, “there may be a hereafter, and there may not be. I am wholly indifferent about it. . . . If annihilation is to follow death, I shall not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore not care a straw about it.” 197

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The last of these Statements of the 1880s, truculent deism we might call them, pitches into the Bible. In Twain’s view, the Bible was not only not authorized or inspired by God, it was not written by especially capable men, and contains admonitions and examples that are sometimes valuable and sometimes vicious, providing authority for religious atrocities of the past. Here, as often elsewhere, Twain mixes the statement of his own beliefs with the deconstruction of the beliefs of others. At the same time, like Jefferson, and again echoing Thomas Paine, he thinks that religious beliefs are opinions, not facts, and he counsels forbearance: “I would not interfere with any one’s religion, either to strengthen it or weaken it. I am not able to believe one’s religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life— hence it is a valuable possession to him.” 198 Mark Twain’s religious truculence increased as the eighties turned into the nineties, a shift that was perhaps spurred by the collapse of his publishing firm and the failure of his investments in the Paige typesetter. Yet he could be good-natured about his beliefs as well. Returning to Quarry Farm in the late spring of 1895, where they had not summered since 1889, the Clemenses prepared for their upcoming world tour and renewed their close friendship with Julia and Thomas Beecher, the latter an independent-minded minister in Elmira (who preferred to be called a “teacher”), whose siblings included Catharine Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. One day, after a difference of opinion about immortality with Julia, Mark Twain made a compact with her, to be preserved in stone—literally, for he wrote out the poetic agreement on three thin leaves of stone she had found. Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher I If you prove right and I prove wrong A million years from now, In language plain and frank and strong My error I’ll avow To your dear mocking face. II If I prove right, by God His grace, Full sorry I shall be, For in that solitude no trace There’ll be of you and me, Nor of our vanished race. III A million years, O patient stone, You’ve waited for this message. Deliver it a million hence! [Survivor pays expressage.] Mark Twain 199

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In “Reflections on the Sabbath,” where Mark Twain had described himself as a Brevet Presbyterian in 1866, he said he was tempted to “offer suggestions” for improving the “affairs of Providence,” but would restrain himself: “Let us take things as we find them—though, I am free to confess, it goes against the grain.” 200 Over time, taking things as he found them went increasingly against the grain, and Twain’s suggestions for providential improvement became more frequent and more pugnacious. By the late 1890s, he had become ever more unhappy with religions, suspicious about notions of God, and skeptical about human nature. This was the time when Mary Baker Eddy was creating a stir, and, reading Science and Health in Vienna, Twain began to respond in articles and ultimately a full volume. Between the “Science and Health” and the “Key to the Scriptures” sections of her book, Mrs. Eddy had inserted a questions and answers chapter called “Recapitulation,” meant to “elucidate scientific metaphysics.” Two of her questions, “What is God?” and “What is Man?,” may have reinforced Mark Twain’s desire to address these topics himself, and they may have suggested the title for his 1906 book, What Is Man? They may also explain why Twain is so relentlessly critical of Mary Baker Eddy, for he was asking the same questions and getting very different answers. Mrs. Eddy responds to her What is God? question as follows: “Answer.—God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love. . . . The attributes of God are justice, mercy, wisdom, goodness, and so on.” 201 During the eight years that he worked over Christian Science, from the publication of “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy” in 1899 to his book Christian Science in 1907, Twain composed more than a dozen writings, some unfinished and all unpublished, which attempt to define a God with attributes directly opposed to those on Mrs. Eddy’s list. Three biblical pieces make the charge of Edenic entrapment. God creates Adam and Eve, endows them with curiosity and climbing ability, and tells them, upon pain of death, not to eat from a tree that is good for food, pleasant to the eye, and will make them wise. They have no understanding of the meaning of death, they eat from the forbidden tree, and they are punished with expulsion, age, infirmity, and death. That, according to Twain, is punishment that goes far beyond the crime, especially since it extends to the innocent offspring of Adam and Eve, all of the humans that follow, and, in a gratuitous blast of collateral damage, all other life forms. Other writings mock the notions that God has created a benign universe (“The Victims”), that He ought to be worshipped (“Goose Fable”), and that He deserves to be praised (“God”). In “The Synod of Praise,” an outline for a beast fable, the monkey provides a closing line which summarizes the attitude toward God expressed in all of these pieces: “My praise is that we have not two of him.” 202 Then, in June 1906, two years after Livy’s death and four years before his own, Mark Twain decided to make a final, comprehensive statement of his

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religious beliefs and the nature of God. He took a break from his regular autobiographical dictations, on which he had been working since the beginning of the year, and spent the week of 19-25 June dictating, as he wrote to Howells, five chapters that “will get my heirs & assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of 2006 A.D.” This final summation was designed for posterity, and Twain later extended his embargo to “the edition of A.D. 2406,” informing Howells that “I got [these ideas] out of my system, where they had been festering for years—& that was the main thing. I feel better, now.” 203 The embargo, enforced by A. B. Paine and Clara Clemens, lasted 57 years, and these chapters were omitted from all four versions of the Autobiography published in 1906-07, 1924, 1940, and 1959. In 1960, when she was 86, Clara withdrew her objections and Mark Twain’s Summa Theologica finally appeared, as “Reflections on Religion,” in the autumn 1963 Hudson Review. One of the five chapters begins with a newspaper clipping describing the mass murder of Jews in Bialystok, Russia, on 15 June 1906, by the “ultraChristian” government. This incident, according to Twain, is merely the latest in a nineteen-hundred-year industry of spreading “the one and only religion of peace and love” through “massacre and mutilation.” And now Christian nations are attacking other Christians: Within this last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer, and more and more effective ways of killing Christians—and, incidentally, a pagan now and then—and the surest way to get rich quickly, in Christ’s earthly kingdom, is to invent a gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing gun.

Other chapters dismiss the “impossible” idea of the virgin birth of Jesus (which Twain miscalls Immaculate Conception), reject the idea of heaven (“there is no evidence that there is to be a heaven hereafter”), and repeat the argument Twain had been making since Connecticut Yankee that man is a product of “his temperament—which he did not create—and . . . circumstances which hedge him round from the cradle to the grave.” 204 The two most important chapters in “Reflections on Religion” take up the question of godhead directly, and Mark Twain carefully divides this discussion into two sections, just as he did in his statement of 1870. The first deals with the biblical God, that is, God as conceived by those who take the Bible as holy writ. (Twain used the capital G to indicate an omniscient, all-powerful supreme being, whether real or imagined. And he makes no allowances for half or partial believers, or those who accept certain parts of traditional doctrine and reject others. He assumes all believers are what Huck might call whole-hog believers.) According to Twain, the biblical God is called the

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“source of mercy,” though he never seems to demonstrate any, and the “source of morals,” in which he is clearly lacking: In the Old Testament His acts expose His vindictive, unjust, ungenerous, pitiless and vengeful nature constantly. He is always punishing—punishing trifling misdeeds with thousand-fold severity; punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending populations for the misdeeds of their rulers; even descending to wreak bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and lambs and sheep and bullocks, as punishment for inconsequential trespasses committed by their proprietors.

The New Testament preaches justice, charity, mercy, and benevolence, and then invents “a lake of fire and brimstone in which all of us who fail to recognize and worship . . . God are to be burned through all eternity.” 205 So much for the God of the Bible, the God that myopic religious people believe in. By way of contrast, Twain then turns to the real God— “the genuine God, the great God, the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real universe.” This God is grand and imposing, and Twain enjoys describing how far He transcends the petty and trivial gods of religions imagined by men. With the “unthinkable grandeur and majesty” of the real God established, Twain undertakes a survey of His character and actions. He turns out to be unjust, uncharitable, unkind, and unmerciful, for Twain cannot find not a single instance in which God has answered the prayers of an individual or a nation, or intervened to relieve suffering or ameliorate misery. The real God has created the entire universe with one flash of thought, and with another has established its immutable laws, but by these laws every creature suffers unnecessary pain and is designed “to inflict misery and murder on some fellow creature and suffer the same, in turn, from some other murderous fellow creature.” We call this God our heavenly Father, Twain notes, yet a human father who persecuted his baby with colic, teething, mumps, measles, scarlet fever, and all the rest, would be jailed or hanged. The explanation from the pulpit for manifold God-given crimes and cruelties, visited on unoffending animals as well as on man, is the same as that given by the mother of “Little Bessie,” written two years after the “Reflections on Religion” dictations; they are “to discipline us and make us better.” Bessie doesn’t buy this explanation and neither does Mark Twain. He finds no way to “reconcile these grotesque contradictions” between an omnipotent real God of grandeur and majesty and the pain and suffering of the real world. Suddenly, as Twain neared the end of his dictation for 23 June 1906, he realized he had failed in his attempt to contrast the real God with the biblical God. The distinction that he set up so carefully had turned into a distinction without a difference. The chapter ends limply: “The real God, the genuine God, the Maker of the mighty universe, is just like all the other gods in the list.” 206

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Well, there you are, as characters in the fiction of Henry James are fond of saying, often wondering just where the devil they, in fact, are. What can we conclude about Mark Twain’s religion? It is clear that he did not believe in heaven and hell, angels and devils, the divinity of Jesus, or the intervention of God in human affairs. He believed no one had ever heard a divine voice or had a prayer answered. He reasoned that the multitude of differing religions, all claiming a lock on absolute truth, proved that none of them possessed it. He thought the Christian Bible was composed by humans, and the notion that “In Adam’s fall / We sinned all,” as the New England Primer put it, was nonsense. He was dubious about the possibility of an afterlife. Twain had a harder time, however, dismissing the existence of God. He liked proof, and he could find no evidence for the existence of God, no evidence that God did not exist. He was sure of one thing: if God did exist, he/she/it would be nothing like the God posited by religions, nothing like the God or gods that human beings, including himself, had ever imagined. This set of beliefs and disbeliefs left him with a problem. Any notion of a transcendent God would seem to require an all-knowing, all-powerful supreme being; any experience with life on earth demonstrated, along with wonders and joys, a full slate of disappointments, disease, disasters, and death. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, the creator of all things, then he has to be accountable for the defects in the world he has created and for the actions of his creations. Mark Twain, master of disparity, inconsistency, and having it both ways, was never able to come to terms with a flawless Creator and a flawed creation. That was too much irony even for him, and he continued to wrestle with it in unpublished manuscripts written after the reflections on religion dictated in June 1906. “The Private Secretary’s Diary” (1907), records the cabinet meetings of F., S., and H. G., which begin with a report on a four-year-old girl who has broken the Sabbath by laughing. These doings are reported to heaven, and at this point the reader realizes the firm is that of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This threesome sentences the child to scarlet fever, followed by a lifetime of intermittent illnesses, with the punishment continuing on to her son (brain fever) and grandson (idiocy). “Things a Scotsman Wants to Know” (1909) was apparently intended as a letter to the editor of Harper’s Weekly, which had published theological questions from a Donald Ross in July 1909, followed by responses from two readers. Mark Twain’s contribution to the discussion summarizes his thinking during the final decade of his life. Nobody knows, says Twain, but “my guess is” that God is personal, supreme, all-powerful, and “the Creator of the universe and everything in it.” He goes on to define “everything” as including poverty, hunger, grief, religion, the fly, and 38 diseases which he lists specifically, including meningitis, epilepsy, and heart failure. Since God is the creator of everything, He is necessarily “the author of evil.” Twain goes on to describe an animal world of fear and murder, and concludes that “if our Maker is all-powerful for good

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or evil, He is not in His right mind.” 207 Twain never published this response, and when he partially unveiled his religious ideas to the public, he tended to put them more whimsically, as he did at a CCNY alumni banquet in 1908. The “In God We Trust” motto on coins, he maintained, was “a statement made on insufficient evidence” and ought to be revised to “Within certain judicious limitations we trust in God.” 208 Mark Twain was clearly a freethinker, though that is definition by negation—someone who does not accept, who disbelieves, who is freed from authority, dogma, church teachings, and other people’s ideas about God and religion. But what did he believe? If we have to put a name, an ism, to the final phase of Mark Twain’s religion, we might locate it somewhere—the exact position varied from time to time—inside a triangle whose three points could be labeled deism (there seems to be a God out there somewhere, though Twain’s growing awareness of the billions of years in geologic time and the trillions of orbs in the universe kept pushing God farther away), agnosticism (we really don’t know), and ethical humanism (the morals agreed upon by most religions are sound, but they were created by humans from experience and common sense, and are enforced only by humans). Mark Twain’s multiple belief system is further complicated, since its three components have characteristically idiosyncratic twists. Few deists have ever supposed that their distant creator might be “shifty, malicious, and uncertain”; many agnostics have more serenity in their not-knowing than Twain allowed himself; and humanists tend not to have so many doubts about humans. 209 In addition, toward the end of his life, Twain looked increasingly to science for explanations of the origins of the universe and sometimes referred, as in “Flies and Russians,” to the governing force and responsible party in the universe as “Nature,” rather than a personal, creative god. Mark Twain never resolved the contradictions among these ways of believing. He died, as Willard Farnham said of Hamlet, “on the search for truth that all men die on.” 210 What Is Man? The difficulties Mark Twain had with defining God and determining the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays stemmed from a lack of evidence. He might well have said of God, as he did of Shakespeare, that “I wish I knew.” But if Twain was unable to come to final conclusions about transcendental topics, man was another matter. Here was no need for guesses, suppositions, and inferences, for the author had all of human history to draw on, his own inner and outer lives, and the daily newspapers. In his Autobiography, Twain reported that “the last quarter of a century of my life has been pretty much constantly and faithfully devoted to the study of the human race,” 211 and this study brought him once again to conclusions rather different from those of

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Mary Baker Eddy. In her “What is Man?” essay, Eddy defines man as “spiritual . . . perfect . . . Truth and Love . . . pure and holy . . . immortal.” Not exactly, according to Mark Twain, who as early as 1885 characterized the human species as conformist, selfish, intolerant, and at times malicious: “the tail-end of a tape-worm eternity of ancestors extending in linked procession back—and back—and back—to our source in the monkeys.” 212 Our post-monkeyhood condition, he believed, is determined by temperament and circumstance. In such unpublished works as “In the Animal’s Court,” “The Ten Commandments,” “Reflections on Religion,” and “Letters from the Earth,” Twain states that all living creatures have certain temperaments or dispositions, which in other animals are often expressed as single qualities: the rabbit is timid; the tiger is predatory. Humans get a richer mixture, for each individual receives, in differing shades and degrees, all the various Moral Qualities, in mass, that have been distributed, a single distinguishing characteristic at a time, among the non-speaking animal world—courage, cowardice, ferocity, gentleness, fairness, justice, cunning, treachery, magnanimity, cruelty, malice, malignity, lust, mercy, pity, purity, selfishness, sweetness, honor, love, hate, baseness, nobility, loyalty, falsity, veracity, untruthfulness—each human being shall have all of these in him, and they will constitute his nature. 213

In some people, what we call the better characteristics will dominate; others will be governed by those that are base. Circumstance then acts as an editor, highlighting certain qualities, grouping others, and suppressing still others. By circumstance, Mark Twain means all the layers of family, acquaintances, associations, culture, region, political party, religion, and personal and historical events which wrap and influence the temperaments we are born with. Together, the two forces of temperament and circumstance, Twain’s version of heredity and environment, determine how we act and what we believe. He argues that these forces are so powerful that the behavior of any individual can be predicted. Man is like a machine: put certain pieces together in a certain way, and you get a predetermined outcome. In his last published article, “The Turning Point of My Life,” Twain turns to another metaphor. Disposition or temperament is analogous to the parts of a watch; circumstance winds them up and makes them run. And here he adds a final touch to his theory. Rejecting the request from Harper’s Bazar to describe the crucial event which turned him to a literary career, Twain insists that events are linked together in long iron chains of circumstance over which humans have little or no control. For proof he claims that “the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old,” and then he cites a sequence of incidents which proceeded inexorably from illness to authorship. 214 An afterthought takes the origin of all human turning points back to the Garden of Eden, suggesting the semi-

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serious nature of these elaborate and not always consistent arguments, which can be very simply glossed: we have less control over our lives than we think. Trapped as he is by temperament and circumstance, or as Twain calls these forces in Connecticut Yankee, heredity and training, the individual human is further plagued by an additional set of oddly paired limitations. Humans are intensely concerned for their own welfare. At the same time, they bend easily to public opinion, even to the point of taking their own estimation of themselves from the judgments of others. These tendencies make them selfish on one hand, obeisant and conformist on the other. This dark picture does contain a ray of light, as exemplified by qualifying phrases in the unpublished 1901 essay “Corn-pone Opinions.” Here Mark Twain maintains that “in general terms, a man’s self-approval . . . has its source in the approval of the people about him”; “as a rule, we do not think, we only imitate;” and “morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking.” 215 The qualifiers— “in general terms,” “as a rule,” “almost entirely”—are important, for they allow Twain to disparage man in the mass, yet leave room for the few who are not trapped by circumstance and public opinion. Some people, some of the time, can resist the tide by preserving a quantum of unfettered thought, a grain of originality, what Hank Morgan calls the “one microscopic atom in me that is truly me.” 216 Mark Twain believed independence of thought and behavior was difficult and rare, and highly to be prized. He admired freethinkers in religion like Robert Ingersoll, urged his friends to bolt the Republican Party in the Mugwump election of 1884, spoke out against mindless jingoism at the turn of the century, and defended biologist Jacques Loeb and others from the condemnation of naysayers who impede discovery and innovation. Twain filled his fictions with various types of insightful outsiders: rebel (Satan), outcast (Huck), freethinker (David Wilson), blasphemer (Mr. Hollister in “Little Bessie”), time traveler (Hank Morgan), martyr (Joan of Arc), cynic (Mr. Brown of the Sandwich Island sketches), subversive (Roxana), irreverent town loafer (Jack Halliday); as well as the many narrators of stories and articles who make hit and run raids on the public treasury of received opinion, unexamined assumptions, and smug rationalizations. Even though he demonstrates a deep affection for ordinary people, for the common plight of common humanity, for the communal virtues of brotherhood, sympathy, and compassion; he also reveals a penetrating mistrust of people in the mass, of the idiocy and conformity of the lowest common denominator, of the folly that is multiplied by multitudes. This ambiguity in the fiction carries over into the analysis of human beings that is a continuing purpose of the late philosophical essays. In his last decade, Mark Twain vacillated between the notion that the “vast majority . . .

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are right-hearted and compassionate,” and the idea that most people were irrational, cowardly, and gullible, doomed to inferiority by the “Law of Intellectual Averages” and trapped on a treadmill of repeated mistakes by the “Law of Periodical Repetition.” 217 He also wavered in defining himself in relation to people in the mass. Often he saw himself and mankind in the same boat, leaky as it was: “I am quite sure that the average man is built just as I am.” 218 Occasionally, while still thinking of himself as part of the common lot, he assigned himself a special mission to help others see more clearly and independently, as he explained in the preface to Innocents Abroad; and to be a spokesman for the timid or inarticulate, stating what everyone felt but few could express. Yet, when the occasion or Twain’s mood demanded, he could stand apart from what he called, in a letter to Twichell, “the class which is numerically vastly the largest bulk of the human race, i.e. the fools, the idiots, the pudd’nheads.” He went on to define that bulk— “9 in 10 of the species are pudd’nheads”—and the next year raised the ante in “The United States of Lyncherdom”: “Moral Cowardice . . . is the commanding feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000.” 219 These shifting opinions demonstrate the characteristic variety of Mark Twain’s thought on complex issues, and they also hint at a schizophrenic dilemma in American democracy—the tightrope balancing act of the uncommon man, from Jefferson to Lincoln to John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, who is simultaneously among and above the commons. It is a dilemma still with us, as contemporary politicians strive to claim the mantle of leadership while steering clear of the charge of being “elite,” a word recently converted to a smear in spite of its etymology, which means “to elect.” PESSIMIST? I Do these complex and varying opinions on God and man, which darkened in his later years, mean that Mark Twain was guilty of pessimism, as is often charged against him? Well, yes and no. Mark Twain often said that a young person who is a pessimist is a tragedy, an old person who is an optimist is a fool. Sometimes he located the dividing line between young and old at age forty-eight, sometimes at age fifty. On the far side of fifty, Twain was a pessimist in the way that all older persons are pessimists. There is no life, however brilliant and joyful, that doesn’t have its share of mistakes and disappointments, its physical aches and pains, its sense of impending finality; there is no family, no matter how well regulated, that doesn’t have its share of soap opera. Of course Mark Twain was a pessimist, for he lived 24 years after age fifty and he was no fool. But his pessimism has its own idiosyncratic shape

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and convolutions and purposes. Twain was what might called a foul-weather pessimist. When the occasion seemed compelling, and the facts provided evidence, he was on deck with appropriate disparagement and colorful damnation: “I believe,” he said, “that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.” 220 Such memorable statements, cut loose from their contexts and often gathered together in Wit and Wisdom collections, tend to make Twain seem more dour than he actually was. The man/monkey quotation was the lead sentence in a lively 2000-word essay on the failure of the British House of Lords to understand that books and ideas are property, just as solid in Twain’s view as real estate, sheep, textiles, railroads, and beer; and just as worthy of adequate protection. The contrary opinions of the Copyright Committee, and others, ignorant of authorship and publishing, justified Twain’s image and allowed him to complete the joke several pages later. Their opinions provided “formidable evidence, and possibly even proof, that in discarding the monkey and substituting man, our Father in Heaven did the monkey an undeserved injustice.” Twain’s writings abound in damnations that, in his opinion, are supported by formidable evidence. “There are times,” says Hank Morgan, “when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.” 221 This statement comes from his frustration in seeing Marco the coal burner endorse the caste system that keeps him oppressed in Arthur’s kingdom. “Isn’t human nature the most consummate sham & lie that was ever invented?” is Twain’s comment in a letter that excoriates friends for supporting James G. Blaine, tainted by charges of corruption, in the election of 1884, simply because Cleveland, a bachelor, “had private intercourse with a consenting widow!” 222 When publisher Frank Bliss refused to offer an appropriate remuneration to Howells to write an introduction for a collected edition of the humorist’s works, Twain exploded with “Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.” 223 His was a wide-angle cannon, that often swept the neighborhood even when it was aimed at a single specific target. Twain could also be called a professional pessimist, whose self-appointed task was to take a point of view contrary to the unwarranted optimism of the Pollyannas of his day, to puncture the sappy morals of McGuffey’s Readers, to question the holy hereafters of church doctrine. But that doesn’t mean he was inevitably and unwaveringly bitter, melancholic, despairing, misanthropic, or psychotic, as is sometimes alleged. Mark Twain was never unwaveringly anything, as he declared in a 1906 piece of shrewd self-analysis: “periodical and sudden changes of mood in me, from deep melancholy to half insane tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life.” 224 In a dictation the following month he made a similar observation about his brother Orion, “in whom pessimism and optimism were lodged in exactly equal proportions.” 225 Perhaps the brothers had more in common

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than is usually thought, a commonality that Twain extends to humankind in general in a letter to a friend in 1905: “No man is born either pessimist wholly or optimist wholly, perhaps; he is pessimistic along certain lines and optimistic along certain others. That is my case.” 226 In every stage of his varied and eventful life, differing portraits of Mark Twain could be painted. In his Western days, he could be portrayed as one of the roughs, in blue woolen shirt and boots; or as an ironic commentator on the scene, standing apart, nattily dressed for banqueting “like a lord” at the luxurious Lick House Hotel in San Francisco. 227 In his Eastern phase, he could be seen as a bull in a china shop, careless of the breakage, trampling on the tender sensibilities of genteel traditionalists; or as a solid citizen, ensconced in a 19-room Victorian mansion, an honorary member of the Church of the Holy Speculators. The same is true for the last period of his career, from the death of Susy in 1896 to his own death in 1910. In this decade and a half, Twain experienced financial hardship, family grief, the inability to complete manuscripts, and loneliness; as well as financial recovery, remarkable resilience, continuous publication of books and articles, and worldwide fame. Both versions—tragedy and triumph—have their truth, and taken together this double truth illustrates Twain’s notion of the Manichean nature of life. His career was more dramatic than most, his highs were higher, and his lows were lower, but his personal story of boom and bust can be seen as an exaggerated version of the more temperate ups and downs that most people experience. Toward the end of “Letters from the Earth,” Twain spells out this dualistic philosophy. The joys of this world are “embittered by sorrows”; pleasure is “poisoned by pain”; “delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses” are interspersed with “miseries, griefs . . . disappointments . . . and despairs.” 228 He suggests in this passage that the negatives outweigh the positives, though elsewhere he maintains that “the sum of wrong & misery shall always keep exact step with the sum of human blessedness.” 229 However the equation is balanced, human existence according to Mark Twain is a rollercoaster of youth and age, laughs and tears, success and failure, serenity and turmoil, joy and tragedy, wealth and poverty, love and anger, birth and death—as predictable as day and night, summer and winter, sunshine and rain. In “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” Satan’s nephew puts this philosophy into a single sentence: “Every man is a suffering-machine and a happinessmachine combined.” 230 Mark Twain’s suffering-machine seemed to go into overdrive in his later years, but—a man both of “deep melancholy and soaring spirits,” 231 as his daughter Clara put it—he never completely abandoned the lighter side. Twain touched bottom on 24 December 1909, when his youngest daughter Jean, at 29, died in her bathtub, apparently the result of an epileptic seizure. He sat down almost immediately and, as he told Clara, “poured my heart out with the pen,” writing of his love and grief in an empty

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house decorated for Christmas and scattered with the presents that Jean had been preparing. This essay, his last, was a threnody of mourning for Susy and Livy as well as Jean, and for others recently dead—George Griffin and Henry Rogers and Charles Dudley Warner and Richard Watson Gilder—and for life itself. Yet even in this bleakest of moments, he wrote a note suggesting the interweave of suffering and happiness that defined his own temperament: “Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. . . . My temperament has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long at a time.” 232 II Mark Twain was critical of the human race, deriding, ridiculing, condemning, goading in ways in which his wit and energy and exaggeration were seldom left behind. Few writers have gotten more fun out of damnation, and his satiric remarks continue to echo round the world because they hit their targets with both accuracy and panache. Yet with all his damnations, Mark Twain wished for better things, even if they seemed unlikely. Two of his best late narratives, unpublished in his lifetime, demonstrate strategies for hope along with continuing attacks on the inscrutability of God and the deficiencies of man. “The Great Dark” (1898) begins as a happy family narrative. The wife, Alice Edwards, is preparing an evening birthday party for one of her two daughters. Her husband Henry and the girls are bent over a powerful microscope, examining the living creatures in a drop of water. The girls are then marched off to get ready for the party, Henry takes a nap, and the Superintendent of Dreams enters the narrative. The S. D. offers to shrink the family members many thousandfold, provide them with a minuscule ship and crew, and send them sailing off for adventures in a waterdrop. Instantly, shouts of sailors ring out and we are ten days into a journey in which the weather is often rough, the charts are of no use, it is always nighttime (the ship is outside the luminous circle of the microscope), and since there are no stars or moon, the Captain is unable to take bearings. As the journey to who knows where continues, there is some comedy in the nautical language, the antics of the Superintendent of Dreams, who appears and disappears unexpectedly, and a fully developed tall tale about a whaling captain who is bullied into submitting an application to a temperance society the night before he leaves on a three-year voyage. He is immediately sorry, suffers the entire trip without his beloved grog, and upon returning home buys a jug and rushes to the temperance office to submit his resignation. There he is told that his application was blackballed upon submission and that he had never been a member of the society.

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Life on shipboard becomes more ominous as the journey progresses, and Henry Edwards is increasingly unable to tell which of his lives, the former on shore or the current one afloat, is real, and which is the dream. Years pass, the animals in the sea—a huge whale with spider legs, a man-eating spider squid, a colossal squid whose tentacles rock the ship—are a constant menace, and the crew’s patience wears thin. A mutiny breaks out, the sailors take over the ship’s guns, and the carpenter, who leads the insurrection, levels a pistol at Captain Davis and orders him to turn back. The Captain, who had the foresight to have the weapons disabled, meets the challenge head on, and regains control of his ship with the power of his speech that ends the narrative. “Are we rational men, manly men, men who can stand up and face hard luck and a big difficulty that has been brought about by nobody’s fault, and say live or die, survive or perish, we are in for it, for good or bad, and we’ll stand by the ship if she goes to hell! . . . I’ll tell you how the thing stands. I don’t know where this ship is, but she’s in the hands of God, and that’s enough for me, it’s enough for you, and it’s enough for anybody but a carpenter. If it is God’s will that we pull through, we pull through—otherwise not. We haven’t had an observation for four months, but we are going ahead, and do our best to fetch up somewhere.” 233

“The Great Dark” brings together Mark Twain’s interest in dreams, ships, and science fiction, and there are many personal references in the tale. Henry Edwards is a writer, he is ten years older than his wife, they have a servant named George, and cherished daughters, the elder of whom has the same birthday, 19 March, as Susy Clemens. Captain Davis can be seen as an idealized but not inaccurate portrait of the author himself. It is tempting to read the story biographically, as an indication of what had happened to Mark Twain, or even, what was wrong with Mark Twain. But we shouldn’t neglect a different sort of question: What is Mark Twain telling us about ourselves? One way to answer that question is to switch from the microscopic to the macrocosmic, a view that Twain may well have had in mind, given his keen interest in the astrophysics of his day, and his enjoyment in multiplying out the number of miles in a light-year and computing the distance to the nearest star. Here we are on planet earth, spinning through an ever-expanding universe filled with dark energy and dark matter we do not understand, heading for a rendezvous with a cosmic destiny which we can only guess at—perhaps being swallowed by our own exploding sun. As Captain Davis knew, there is no going back. All we can do is sail on with courage, and see where we fetch up. “The Great Dark,” like much of Mark Twain’s writing, has a moral for our times as well as his. “The Refuge of the Derelicts” (1905-06) retires the nautical metaphor, literally, for its key figure, Admiral Abner Stormfield, is a bluff and hearty

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whaling captain who has come ashore after 70 years at sea. Yet another version of Captain Ned Wakeman, the Admiral, whose title is honorific, devotes his retirement to assisting people who have run aground on the rocks and shoals of life. There is much vintage Twain in this unfinished tale, including a naïve narrator, George Sterling, an artist-poet absorbed in his own career who takes up residence with the Admiral and presents most of the story through entries in his dairy. Woven into the story are such Twain favorites as a cat who doesn’t “give a damn for discipline,” the idea of a monument for Adam, a defense of Satan (“Well, he’s out of luck . . . and a body has to pity him”), and the salty, tempestuous, garrulous speech of the Admiral. 234 Woven in also are a biography of Orion Clemens, a fictional vignette of Howells’ early career, a cameo appearance of ill-fated inventor James Paige, and the theological disputations at Quarry Farm of Mary Ann Cord (Aunt Rachel in “A True Story”) and John Lewis, and well as Lewis’s 1877 rescue of Ida Langdon, her baby daughter, and a nursemaid when he grabbed their runaway carriage horse in full speed. And Twain creates many humorous moments, from an Abbott and Costello routine (“What are you talking about with your which she?”) 235 to a repeat of the temperance-pledge tale from “The Great Dark,” although in this version he adds a sexual analogy of the kind he didn’t allow himself when writing for publication. The irreparable loss of three year’s drinking for the captain is compared to the situation of a bridegroom who lies in a trance for three years after his wedding: “would not he recognize that he could never catch up?” 236 More subtle and most successful, since they express character, are the Admiral’s speeches in praise of his cat, in biblical exegesis, in judgment of the disputes in his household, and in his philosophical musings, such as his account of the “speculative and uncertain” theory of human origins put forth by “Darwin and that crowd”: “Adam is fading out. . . . He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can’t see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church. They take that speck and breed from it: first a flea, then a fly, then a bug, then cross these and get a fish, then a raft of fishes, all kinds, then cross the whole lot and get a reptile, then work up the reptiles till you’ve got a supply of lizards and spiders and toads and alligators and Congressmen and so on, then cross the entire lot again and get a plant of amphibiums, which are half-breeds and do business both wet and dry, such as turtles and frogs and ornithorhyncuses and so on, and cross-up again and get a mongrel bird, sired by a snake and dam’d by a bat, resulting in a pterodactyl, then they develop him, and water his stock till they’ve got the air filled with a million things that wear feathers, then they cross-up all the accumulated animal life to date and fetch out a mammal, and start-in diluting again till there’s cows and tigers and rats and elephants and monkeys and everything you want down to the Missing Link, and out of him and a mermaid they propagate Man, and there you are!

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Everything ship-shape and finished-up, and nothing to do but lay low and wait and see if it was worth the time and expense.” 237

“The Refuge of the Derelicts” is vintage late Twain as well. His title refers to the nautical definition of derelict—an abandoned ship, unclaimed, adrift on the high seas. The people for whom the Admiral provides a refuge have, in various ways, been cut loose from the moorings of home, family, occupation, and purpose. Their stories include alcoholism, loss of employment, death of loved ones, failed speculations, faded glories, crimes, greed, and overreaching, for some of their sorrows are caused by blind fate, others by wrongful action, still others by good intentions gone awry. The Admiral opens his heart, his home, and his wallet to all, and the “Anchor Watch,” as he calls the derelicts, gather daily in his “wardroom” to sit and read and talk and smoke, and for occasional entertainments which their host provides. The closing chapter recounts one such entertainment, a lecture/slide show whose strategy of disparity harks back 40 years to Twain’s 1866 “Sabbath Reflections,” which contrasted pulpit rhetoric with Sunday morning street noises in San Francisco. The slide show demonstrates a similar misfit, but the ante has been raised from a harmless discordance to a violent cacophony. The lecturer is the Reverend Caleb Parsons, a pious and sentimental preacher nicknamed “Dr. Lo” by the bos’n, the Admiral’s chief assistant, because “he was always getting thunderstruck over the commonest every-day things the Creator did, and saying ‘Lo, what God hath wrought!’” Dr. Lo failed to coordinate his lecture on “The Benevolence of Nature” with the naturalist who provided and projected the illustrations. Thus we have a series of benign little stories conjoined with fierce pictures of natural predation: In a sunny meadow [a wasp had dug] a hole and prepared a cosy home for the dear offspring she was expecting. Now she was abroad to secure food for that offspring. Her happy heart was singing, and the burden of that grateful song was, “Nature will provide.” She hovered over [a] mother-spider, then descended upon her— Instantly it was on the screen! A wasp the size of a calf swooped down upon wide-spreading wings, gripped the struggling mother-spider, and slowly drove a sting as long as a sword, deep into her body. The audience gasped with horror to see that hideous weapon sink in like that and the spider strain and quiver and rumple its legs in its agony. 238

Perhaps suggesting what the public reaction at the time might have been to some of Twain’s late unpublished manuscripts, the narrator notes that “there were some subdued and scarcely audible chucklings here and there, but they lasted only a moment.” Mark Twain later wrote that he left “The Refuge of the Derelicts” “half finished,” but as it stands it has a kind of completeness, well representative of

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his last decade’s work. 239 He presents an unsparing view of the toughness of nature and the many sorrows that afflict human beings, whether their fault or not. These sorrows cannot be evaded, but they can be countered by compassion, which is the lesson that George Sterling gradually learns. Initially selfabsorbed, smug, interested only in advancing his own career, the artist-poet warms to the community formed by the Admiral’s household and the Anchor Watch, and he begins to paint their portraits. Over time, the sitters open up to him and relate their stories, and George discovers there are no uninteresting people “when you get on the inside of them,” and that “there’s a good spot tucked away somewhere in everybody.” 240 He describes himself as a “trader in shadows who has struck the substance. I have found the human race.” These discoveries are assisted by the bos’n, who gives George an excuse for his initial aloofness by telling him “you ain’t to blame, you can’t help the way you’re made,” while urging him toward sympathetic understanding. The satirical bos’n, like Twain himself, is an inconsistent fatalist, often arguing that we can’t help our inherited dispositions, yet insisting that we can and should do better. These two late narratives can be seen as fictional answers to the “what is” questions that Twain wrestled away from Mary Baker Eddy. We don’t know what God is and we sail in unknown seas. But at least we can go forth bravely. We know all too well what man is, for we live in a human world in which disappointment lurks around the corner, and in a natural world of wasp-spider predation, but at our best we can soften the edges of these worlds with compassion and community. We can’t defeat the waves, the Admiral might say, but we can try to assist the survivors of the storms at sea. In his final years, Mark Twain had the grit to pursue tough questions, and the humor to help us cope with uncomfortable and inscrutable answers. He looked into the darkness, and made it brighter for the rest of us. The reports of his pessimism are an exaggeration.

VI

Remnants

Chapter Fourteen

Mysterious Strangers

“All life seems, when he began to find it out, to have the look of a vast joke, whether the joke was on him or on his fellow-beings . . . or on their common creator.” 1 W. D. Howells

At his death in the spring of 1910, Mark Twain left more than 500 unpublished manuscripts, many of them unfinished, along with notebooks, letters, and a half million words of dictated autobiography. Albert Bigelow Paine— his biographer, companion, billiards competitor, and literary executor—did a useful job in preserving and beginning to sort this mass of material; a bad job of editing, which was riddled by omissions, inaccuracies, and an attempt to perpetuate a defanged image of the author; and an energetic job of bringing to print ten posthumous volumes of notebooks, letters, speeches, autobiography, essays, and sketches, along with his flawed but still valuable 1,719-page biography, all published by Harper’s. After Paine’s death in 1937, Bernard DeVoto, a better editor, continued the publication by issuing some parts of the autobiographical dictations that Paine had omitted (Mark Twain in Eruption, 1940), and selecting provocative essays and fragments tiptoed around by Paine for a collection (Letters from the Earth) that Clara Clemens refused to sanction. Twenty years after the publication of Eruption, and five years after DeVoto’s death in 1955, Clara withdrew her proscription, clearing the way for the 1962 publication of Letters from the Earth and the establishment of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, which began its remarkable work of meticulously editing and reissuing the works Twain published in his lifetime, bringing out authoritative editions of the writings Twain did not publish, and opening the Mark Twain archive to scholars. A number of manuscripts unpublished in Twain’s lifetime have been discussed in previous chapters, but two deserve special consideration. The 369

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Mysterious Stranger manuscripts and the autobiographical dictations were major projects of Mark Twain’s later career, and they stand out, both for their intrinsic interest and because the fractured nature of their posthumous publication has skewed an understanding of Twain’s final years as a humorist. First, the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. THE TEXTS In August 1897, with the first anniversary of Susy’s death passed and with royalties coming in from Following the Equator, Mark Twain felt he had “turned the corner.” 2 He resumed his literary career with renewed strength and enjoyment, and initiated a two-part regimen he would follow for the rest of his life. While continuing to write for publication and profit, he also began composing stories and essays for his own pleasure, for which he was the chief audience, whose purpose was to express his unfettered ideas, however heretical, as directly and honestly as he could. As he settled in for a long stay in Austria, a project in this second category occurred to him, on which he would work for over a decade. He had been thinking about, and jotting down in his notebooks, a number of ideas about the nature of human life—how behavior is shaped by heredity and environment, how difficult it is to escape self-interest, how human beings knuckle under to crowd pressure, how pleasures are mixed with pain, how people falsely assume they are superior to animals, for the latter are not intentionally cruel or deceitful. His jottings also concerned the positive powers of music, laughter, companionship, compassion, independent thought, and imagination. Some of these ideas had appeared, almost in lecture format, in Connecticut Yankee and elsewhere. But what if, instead of lectures and essays, he could give them greater carrying power, more lasting interest, by embedding them in a compelling fictional narrative? One might, for example, create a character with unusual perception who, in a series of adventures and discussions, imparts wisdom to a younger, naïve but open-minded person. Perhaps the younger person could narrate such a Bildungsroman. Not surprisingly, as Twain started composing in the fall of 1897, he turned to familiar faces and places. Why not Huck Finn, and a Tom Sawyer look-alike called George, and why not set the tale in the 1840s in a village reminiscent of Hannibal and already used in Tom Sawyer called St. Petersburg? For the truth-telling character, how about someone for whom Twain seemed to have a lifelong affection, even admiration, perhaps identification? Satan, after all, was the ultimate outsider; he had the omniscience of God without the baggage, without the responsibility, as Twain saw it, of having created all the problems. Always a contrarian, Mark Twain enjoyed putting Satan up as much as he enjoyed putting God down. 3

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Twain wrote nineteen manuscript pages in this vein, a kind of pumppriming exercise, shortly after settling in Vienna in September 1897. Then, apparently absorbing something of the Austrian ambience, he changed George to Theodor, Huck to Nikolaus, and moved the setting to 1702 in Eseldorf (Asstown), where “it was still the Middle Ages in Austria. . . . Some even [said] it was still the Age of Faith [though] they meant it as a compliment, not a slur.” 4 Mark Twain was started in earnest on the story that would ultimately become “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” and in the next three months he completed two chapters and parts of two others that introduced a good priest and a bad priest along with a Satan nephew. He then abandoned this start, and toward the end of 1898, relocated the scene to America and composed six chapters (“Schoolhouse Hill”) in which Satan’s son appears as the new boy in school in Petersburg, around 1850. Abandoning that manuscript as well, Twain wrote a long letter to Howells the following May explaining the novelty of his conception, his enthusiasm in its execution, and where he was in the project: What I have been wanting was a chance to write a book without reserves—a book which should take account of no one’s feelings, no one’s prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, illusions, delusions; a book which should say my say, right out of my heart, in the plainest language & without a limitation of any sort. I judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth.There was no condition but one under which the writing of such a book could be possible; only one—the consciousness that it would not see print. It is under way, now, & it is a luxury! an intellectual drunk. Twice I didn't start it right; & got pretty far in, both times, before I found it out. But I am sure it is started right this time. It is in tale-form. 5

At that point, May of 1899, Mark Twain returned to the “Chronicle” manuscript, and by the fall had completed chapters three through five, and part of six, writing in London and then in Sanna, Sweden. Another letter to Howells, dated 19 October, reported that “I could write a fine & readable book now, for I’ve got a prime subject. I've written 30,000 words of it & satisfied myself that the stuff is there; so I am going to discard that MS & begin all over again & have a good time with it.” 6 Apparently he did not discard that manuscript, for the following summer in London, Twain returned again to the “Chronicle,” completed chapters six to ten, wrote a few pages into chapter eleven, and broke off the narrative in the middle of a scene in India, where Satan and Theodor were touring. Mark Twain then returned to America, where, busy with other projects, he let the Satan narratives languish until November 1902, when in New York, he decided once more to begin all over again. He reused the first chapter of the “Chronicle,” altering the date to 1490, and created a new boy narrator, August Feldner, an apprentice in an Austrian print shop which

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becomes the staging area for an entirely new narrative. Twain then composed about six more chapters of what he called “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” Having moved to Florence in October 1903, in search of a healthful and comfortable climate for Livy, Twain wrote another seventeen or so chapters before her death on 5 June 1904, along with a separate section, a dream ending, he entitled “Conclusion of the book.” A year later, summering in Dublin, New Hampshire, he returned to the narrative, destroyed some of what he had already done as “too diffusive,” and wrote seven new chapters. 7 Twain’s final work on “No. 44” came in 1908, when he wrote several pages in an apparent attempt to link his 32 completed chapters to the “Conclusion” he had drafted in 1904. Those pages were his last effort on the Satan project, which, rather than a one-time intellectual drunk, turned out to be an eleven-year, intermittent, never finished series of compositional inebriations. At his death in the spring of 1910, Mark Twain left three related but very different manuscripts of his Satan-on-earth story, all incomplete. “The Chronicle of Young Satan” Set in Eseldorf, Austria, in the summer of 1702; narrated by Theodor Fischer, a boy about Tom Sawyer’s age; 10½ chapters, 423 manuscript pages, totaling about 55,500 words; written Nov. 1897-Jan. 1898; May-Oct. 1899; JuneAug. 1900. “The Chronicle” presents the story of an altercation between two priests in a little Austrian village buried in late medieval times and stultifying religious doctrine. Father Peter, “good and gentle and truthful,” has been suspended by the Bishop for heterodoxy, since he has been accused of suggesting that “God was all goodness and would find a way to save all his poor human children.” 8 His accuser and antagonist, who wants Peter’s job, is the “dissolute and profane and malicious” Father Adolf. 9 Impoverished because of his suspension, and about to have his mortgage foreclosed, Father Peter is briefly rescued by money he finds on a path. But Father Adolf accuses Father Peter of stealing the money, he is thrown in jail, and after a time comes to trial. Intertwined with this plot is a second narrative that concerns three Eseldorf boys, including Theodor, the narrator, and a stranger who befriends them—a charming, handsome youth, who strolls onto the scene, somehow reading their thoughts and mysteriously filling their pockets with fruits and sweets. This stranger, they discover, has an earth alias of Philip Traum, but he is really Satan’s nephew and namesake. He has been everywhere, seen everything, forgotten nothing, and can create worlds before their eyes. These two narratives are connected, for Satan involves himself in village affairs, producing the gold coins which assist and then imprison Father Peter.

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Acting on Theodor’s wish that Father Peter have a happy life, Satan manipulates the trial and the good priest is acquitted. Satan then goes to the jail and tells Father Peter he was convicted and disgraced. This shock destroys his reason, and Father Peter spends the rest of his life cheerfully thinking he is the Emperor, handing out kingdoms with liberal abandon to the Grand Chamberlains, Field Marshals, and Princesses he sees around him. Theodor is aghast, so Satan explains the lesson: given the realities of human life, no sane person can be happy. This and other interventions by Satan lead Theodor to conclude that “we fully believed in Satan’s desire to do us kindnesses, but we were losing confidence in his judgment.” 10 The misfit between sanity and happiness is only one of the lessons Theodor struggles with, as Satan elucidates the many ideas that Twain packs into his narrative. Satan whisks Theodor to a prison torture chamber and then to a French factory to demonstrate conduct Theodor describes as “brutal,” for which he is chastised by Satan for misusing a term that applies more to humans than to the “Higher Animals.” 11 In several episodes of witch hunting, Theodor discovers that most people “are not malicious or unkind by nature . . . [but are] not manly enough nor brave enough” to oppose the tide of violence created by a mob. And throughout, Satan expounds the curious life of humans, whose days are few, whose pleasures are mixed with pains, whose actions are inexorably determined by circumstance and environment, whose history is “wars, and more wars, and still other wars,” whose “fine large opinion of themselves [has] nothing to found it on,” and whose “foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction.” Satan does argue for humor, however, especially against the triple powers of monarchy, aristocracy, and church which control Theodor’s world: “Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.” “Schoolhouse Hill” Set in Petersburg around 1850, in winter, the action lasts one day; thirdperson narration; 5½ chapters, 139 manuscript pages, totaling about 18,500 words; written Nov.-Dec. 1898. A new boy appears at the village school, mingling with Tom and Sid Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and, on the fringes, Huck Finn. Apparently around age fifteen, the new youngster speaks only French, and gives his name as Quarante-quatre. The boy astounds the class and its schoolmaster by learning English in a few minutes from student recitations, and goes on to master Latin, Greek, and mathematics at a sitting by simply flipping through the pages of the textbooks. When school lets out, Forty-Four defeats the bully who challenges him, and when the bully’s father intervenes to whip FortyFour, the boy’s defensive grab crushes the man’s wrist.

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The scene switches to the house of Oliver Hotchkiss, where Forty-Four is lodging, and the narrative pauses for a gently satiric description of Hotchkiss, based on Orion Clemens, who had died in 1897. Hotchkiss is a good-hearted and talented man, but “a weather-vane” who “changed his principles with the moon, his politics with the weather, and his religion with his shirt.” 12 His current religion is spiritualism, and he presides at a rapping-medium séance which pokes fun at Margaret and Catherine Fox, Canadian-born sisters whose Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge created a fad in midnineteenth-century America. Lord Byron, Shakespeare, and Napoleon are contacted during the séance, and Forty-Four is materialized from his home in hell, where he was visiting briefly. Forty-four confesses his father is Satan, and the boy’s miraculous feats, appearances and disappearances, and his retinue of little red servants, smoking hot from hell, astonish the villagers, consternate the slaves, and win him a female admirer. Forty-Four then explains to Oliver Hotchkiss that he has come to earth to make amends for his father’s error in the Garden of Eden in not realizing that the fateful apple brought, along with the knowledge of good and evil, the disposition to do evil. His plan is to ameliorate the condition of the human race, and he enlists the help of Hotchkiss in this mission. The narrative stops at this point. “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” Set in Eseldorf, Austria, during the winter of 1490; narrated by August Feldner, age 16, a print shop apprentice; 34 chapters, 530 manuscript pages, totaling about 74,000 words; written 1902, 1903-05, 1908. The mysterious stranger is a teenage boy who is never specifically identified as a Satan kinsman, although he has all the miraculous powers of Philip Traum of “The Chronicle” and Forty-Four of “Schoolhouse Hill.” He has a mischievous streak as well, and states that “I love shows and spectacles, and stunning dramatics, and I love to astonish people, and show off, and be and do all the gaudy things a boy loves to be and do.” 13 This version begins with a repetition of Chapter 1 of “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” and then launches into a new tale centering about a print shop located in a medieval Austrian castle. The characters are the master and his entourage, which includes an astrologer/sorcerer/magician named Balthasar Hoffman, a work crew of seven men and boys, a malicious priest, and an itinerant happy-golucky compositor named Doangivadam, who doesn’t. One day a hungry, illclothed “most forlorn looking youth, apparently sixteen or seventeen years old” appears, and is taken in by the master, who gives him food, lodging, and employment at menial tasks. 14 Mistreated by most of the household and shop crew, the boy, whose name is 44, accomplishes his work so well and willingly he is promoted to an apprenticeship over the protests of the printers, who

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haze and badger him at every turn. He demonstrates extraordinary mental and physical feats, but these are attributed to the astrologer, and 44, though befriended by the narrator, continues to be treated as a tramp. Resenting what they see as his undeserved promotion, the printers go on strike just prior to completing an important contract with the University of Prague for 200 Bibles. The master is threatened with ruin, but 44, always crediting his magic to the astrologer, saves the day by inventing a crew of invisibles who finish the work order and rescue the master’s business. In the second half of the narrative, 44 materializes the invisibles by creating a double for each member of the print shop—identical in physical characteristics but not in opinions or politics. The nonunionized Duplicates, needing neither food nor sleep, take over the work of the print shop, and the story turns in new directions. Twain’s interest in dreams comes to center stage, and he marvels at the ability of the dreaming self to fracture reality, to soar around the earth and the cosmos, to dive through the past and into the future; and the inability of the wide-awake self to comprehend the richness of the dream experience. The attempt of the dream-self to communicate with the awake-self, as August’s dream-self Duplicate puts it, is like “emptying rainbows down a rat-hole.” 15 Forty-Four takes this notion even further, stating that “each human being contains not merely two independent entities, but three—the Waking-Self, the Dream-Self, and the Soul.” 16 He makes this idea vivid by materializing dream-selves, and thus provides a cast for a complicated romance that winds through chapters 23 through 29: August’s Soul-Self has a convoluted love affair with the Dream-Self of pretty, seventeen-yearold Marget Regen, the master’s niece, which conflicts with the love affair August’s Dream-Self (a obstreperous Duplicate named Emil Schwarz) conducts with Marget’s Waking-Self. All this is further complicated by the power that 44 has bestowed on August to make himself invisible at will. In one way or another, 44 is the key player in this and all the other various and sometimes miscellaneous actions in the closing chapters. Forty-Four ferries August to different locales to show and tell the fragilities of human nature, and he performs minstrel show routines, creates an eclipse, transmutes a lady’s maid into a cat, retrieves a phonograph and camera from the future, makes time run backward (and Twain gives us a paragraph written in reverse), demonstrates the difficulties of interpretation using an example from Mary Baker Eddy— “part . . . in school-girl and the rest in Choctaw,” and resists August’s attempt to make him a Christian because he doesn’t want to be “the only one”—one of Twain’s many riffs on the notion that the only trouble with Christianity is that it has never been tried. 17 In the penultimate chapter, written in 1908, 44 conjures up an Assembly of the Dead, a massed formation of marching skeletons from all ages of human history, and then closes with the “Conclusion” composed in 1904, in which he lists, for

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August, the complaints against God, biblical and real, that Twain had been compiling for decades: “a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones . . . who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who . . . mouths mercy, and invented hell . . . who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself.”

These things are so impossible, so insane, they must be a dream, and thus “there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And You are but a Thought—a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!” After this speech, 44 vanishes, leaving the appalled narrator to realize that “all he had said was true.” 18 EDITORIAL PAIN After Jean’s death, which occurred on the day before Christmas in 1909, Mark Twain retreated from the Connecticut snows and his lonely mansion to the balmy breezes and welcoming friends in Bermuda, where he lived until spring in the home of the American vice consul, William H. Allen. Suffering from labored breathing and from the chest pains of angina pectoris, Twain was brought back to Stormfield, where he died on 21 April. Two days later, a memorial service was held at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City. Four hundred tickets were given out to the author’s friends and associates, but when the doors were opened early because of the crowd in the streets, 1500 hundred people pressed in to fill the church for the brief twentyminute service. Henry van Dyke, Presbyterian minister and professor of English literature at Princeton, read from Scripture and delivered a short address, noting that “Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humor means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world.” Mark Twain’s gift of “lambent and irrepressible humor,” according to van Dyke, ridiculed “the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical . . . and made us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life’s realities.” 19 The service was closed by Joseph Twichell, whose voice broke as he offered a prayer for his friend of 41 years. The casket was then opened ninety minutes for viewing, and three thousand well-wishers filed by as Twichell caught a train back to Hartford, where his wife Harmony died that night. Albert Paine, Frederick T. Leigh, and Frederick A. Duneka (Leigh was treasurer and Duneka was general manager of Harper’s) received guests in the church vestibule, and the three

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of them and family members then traveled to Elmira, where Mark Twain was laid to rest the following day in the family plot that already contained Livy and three of their four children. Eleanor Howells died two weeks later. Mark Twain’s will left his estate to his daughter Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch, who would give birth to the author’s only grandchild four months after his death. His literary property went to the Mark Twain Company, incorporated by Twain in 1908 to perpetuate his copyrights. Albert Paine, who had signed on as the humorist’s biographer in 1906 after winning his spurs with his biography of cartoonist Thomas Nast two years earlier, was appointed literary executor. For the next three decades, Clara, Paine, and Harper’s teamed up to control both the publication of Twain’s posthumous works and his public reputation. Paine’s 1912 biography was dedicated to Clara, and she returned the favor in her dedication of My Father, Mark Twain in 1931: “To Albert Bigelow Paine, who understood my father and faithfully demonstrated his love for him.” The nature of their control and their understanding can be seen in a letter from Paine to Harper’s in 1926: I think on general principles it is a mistake to let any one else write about Mark Twain, as long as we can prevent it. ... As soon as this is begun (writing about him at all, I mean) the Mark Twain that we have “preserved”—the Mark Twain that we knew, the traditional Mark Twain—will begin to fade and change, and with that process the Harper Mark Twain property will depreciate. 20

The traditional Mark Twain, in Paine’s view, was the Twain whose greatest book was Joan of Arc (“Mark Twain’s supreme literary expression, the loftiest, the most delicate, the most luminous example of his work”), the Twain whose “burlesque note . . . was so likely to be [his] undoing,” the Twain whose fulminations did not obscure his “forgiveness and generosity and justice.” 21 The last chapter of Paine’s three-volume biography is entitled “Religion,” and he seeks to reassure readers that although Mark Twain was unconventional he was not really unorthodox. Paine tells us that in his closing years Twain’s “belief in God, the Creator, was absolute,” he “never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave,” and he “never questioned that the wider scheme of the universe was attuned to the immutable law which contemplates nothing less than absolute harmony.” 22 As Jake Barnes puts it, in the last sentence of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” 23 An editor for St. Nicholas Magazine and a prolific writer himself of novels, stories, children’s books, biographies, and travel narratives, in addition to his baker’s dozen volumes of Twain biography and editions, Albert Paine was not one to let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. He invents dialogue in his Twain biography, omits words and sections from quotations, and repeats some of Twain’s inventions and exaggerations as

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historical fact, such as the tale of adopting the pseudonym “Mark Twain” as a “tribute to the old man [Captain Isaiah Sellers] he had thoughtlessly wounded.” 24 Isabel Lyon, who served for over six years as Twain’s secretary, bookkeeper, and household manager, was distrusted by Clara, and is dismissed from Paine’s biography of Twain in less than a sentence. Near the end of the biography, Paine recalls Howells’ last meeting with his friend of many years, on 4 January 1910, the night before the humorist sailed to Bermuda. Paine was present, and when Howells rose to leave, Paine reports I went also, and as we walked to his near-by apartment he spoke of Mark Twain’s supremacy. He said: “I turn to his books for cheer when I am down-hearted. There was never anybody like him; there never will be.” Clemens sailed next morning. They did not meet again. 25

Howells may have said that; we will never know. But we do know Howells had written a letter two months earlier to Mark Twain, in which he stated that “I have gone again to your books for my good night cheer after downhearted days, and found you as gay as you used to be, in those blessed short things of yours. There never was anybody like you, and there won’t be.” 26 Since Paine had this letter in his possession when he wrote the biography, it seems likely he converted the letter to dialogue to conclude his chapter, and then covered his tracks by omitting any mention of it from his edition of Mark Twain’s Letters, Arranged with Comment by Albert Bigelow Paine in 1917. Paine’s tendency to play fast and loose as an editor and his protection of the “traditional” Mark Twain are nowhere more apparent than in the first of the ten posthumous Twain publications he undertook after finishing the biography in 1912. Having helped to bury Mark Twain, Paine and Frederick Duneka proceeded to exhume the literary remains. First on their list were the three unfinished works concerning little Satan, which we now know as the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Reasonably enough, the “Chronicle” struck them as the best text to publish, but they thought it needed to be trimmed, altered, and finished to make it acceptable and marketable. Some editing was certainly necessary. In chapter 2, Theodor explains that he is the son of the church organist and Nikolaus’ father is the chief judge of the local court. In chapter 5, written after an interlude of a year and a half, Theodor’s father has been promoted to the judgeship. And the tale ends abruptly, in the middle of a scene, only 600 words into chapter 11. Nevertheless, Paine and Duneka undertook, in a manner that seems incredible today, to cut and revise and even rewrite Twain’s manuscript. What they produced is not so much an edition of “The Chronicle of Young Satan” as another version, which they entitled “The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance by Mark Twain,” and pub-

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lished first in Harper’s Monthly, May-November 1916, then in an elaborate children’s book edition, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, in October of that year, timed for the Christmas trade. Their version was republished in 1922 in The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (edited by Paine, issued by Harper’s), and yet again as volume 27 of The Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition, in 1923 (introduction by Paine). There was no mention of the changes they had made, at the time of publication or later, and for a half century the Paine-Duneka Mysterious Stranger was thought to be the final work from the pen of Mark Twain. It was not until 1963, after the death of Clara and the opening of the Mark Twain papers to public scrutiny, that John S. Tuckey broke the story in his monograph Mark Twain and Little Satan; The Writing of “The Mysterious Stranger,” which first worked out the dates of composition of Twain’s three manuscripts and indicated the heavy-handed editing that had produced The Mysterious Stranger in 1916. The Paine-Duneka edition differs from Twain’s original in three major ways. The first concerns changes in substance. Paine and Duneka pushed the date of the “Chronicle” story from 1709 back to 1590, and relocated it in “winter,” in place of Twain’s “May.” They kept the two priests, but cleaned up Father Adolf from “dissolute and profane and malicious” (Twain) to “very zealous and strenuous,” (Paine-Duneka), and moved him to a minor role. To fill his place as principal villain, Paine and Duneka invented an entirely new character, “the astrologer who lived in a tumbled old tower up the valley.” They got the idea for this character, though not his personality or his key role in the fiction, from the astrologer/sorcerer/magician in “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” and then shamelessly advertised his new location and significance in their version of the “Chronicle” by pasting a full-color 4″ x 5″ N. C. Wyeth illustration of the astrologer on the front cover of the book, just under large gold lettering that proclaimed “by Mark Twain” (see figure 14.1). And while Paine and Duneka were rummaging in “No. 44,” they lifted the entire last chapter—the dream ending that logically concludes the dream-self second half of “No. 44,”—and attached it to the end of “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” after removing Twain’s chapter 11 and much of chapter 10 from “The Chronicle.” Paine and Duneka wrote two paragraphs themselves to work in the astrologer, and two more to provide a bridge from the truncated chapter 10 of the “Chronicle” to the ending borrowed from “No. 44.” Albert Paine apparently realized he had exceeded even the most liberal interpretation of editorial license. Mark Twain’s “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” exists in both manuscript and typescript. On the manuscript copy Paine wrote: “2nd form of Mysterious Stranger not to be used in any way A. B. P.” On the typescript he added: “Should be destroyed.” 27 The second major change inflicted on Mark Twain’s “Chronicle of Young Satan” concerns omissions. Twain’s “Chronicle” contains about

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Figure 14.1. Cover for the Paine-Duneka 1916 edition of The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance by Mark Twain ; courtesy of the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

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55,500 words; the Paine–Duneka version, one third shorter, is only 37,000 words. There are five extensive cuts: 1800 words from Twain’s chapter 1: Father Adolf is introduced rolling down the road with “a load on,” singing of “the wine-cup and the lass.” Adolf chastises Frau Marx for reading the Bible for herself, and he practices “the sacredness of his office” by whacking dull oafs who are insufficiently reverent at funerals and by making sure that a stake is driven though the bodies of suicides. This section also contains a tale about a crafty prior who cheats the Devil. 8400 words from the end of Twain’s chapter 4, all of 5, and part of 6: This long section concerns Satan’s interaction with the villagers in Eseldorf. Satan defeats the local chess champion, plays music, composes and recites poetry, does embroidery, and saves a man from drowning—all with ease, grace, and astonishing skill. Father Peter’s niece and Theodor’s sister both fall in love with Satan. 5000 words from the end of Twain’s chapter 8, and the beginning of 9: This section includes Satan’s sympathetic relationship with animals, whose languages he speaks: “He often said he would not give a penny for human company when he could get better”; an episode with the keepers of the prince’s hunting preserves who try to arrest Satan, which ends in a tall tale satirizing trials and juries; the Tom Sawyer success Theodor and a friend have by getting Satan to predict future events and then betting on them with other boys (“we stripped them clean”); and a flying trip to Scotland to witness the smothering of a woman accused of papist sympathies, thus demonstrating that Protestants are as effective as Catholics in dealing with religious apostasy. 1300 words from Twain’s chapter 10: After stating that humans fail to perceive “the ten thousand high–grade comicalities” in their world, Satan goes on to explain that “no religion exists which is not littered with engaging and delightful comicalities . . . [especially] Papal Infallibility and God-subordinating Papal Authority.” And he adds that “nothing can be more deliciously comical than hereditary royalties and aristocracies . . . [and] all forms of government—including republican and democratic.” 1200 words at the conclusion of Twain’s chapter 10 and all of his unfinished chapter 11: This segment includes the end of Satan and Theodor’s first experience in India and part of their second, in which Satan unmasks a local magician. (In its place, Paine and Duneka wrote a 115-word transition and then inserted the last chapter of “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” changing 44’s name to Satan, and August’s name to Theodor.)

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There are also many smaller omissions from Mark Twain’s text, ranging from a few lines to a page or more, including a reference to Satan (young Satan’s uncle, the proprietor of hell) as “a sacred character, being mentioned in the Bible”; the Pope’s description of Martin Luther as a liar; a discussion of Satan’s business, trading in souls, misunderstood by Marget as shoe soles; the official language of hell, which is French; the mention of the “dear sweet things” Marget says to Wilhelm; and various jokes, e.g., “when you are in politics you are in the wasp’s nest with a short shirt-tail.” 28 Paine and Duneka remove the priest from the torture-chamber scene, omit the observation that the priest in the French village is fattened with the farthings of the impoverished and starving workers, else “he would have to work for his living,” and expunge Twain’s statement that the Pope had issued ruthless interrogation procedures for witch commissions. They also cut the remark that Satan was “a great help to the clergy—but for him they would have to go out of business,” the description of the Holy Inquisition, and the passage detailing “the insults and oppressions” of Christian missionaries in China. 29 In addition to these outright omissions, Paine and Duneka made hundreds of revisions, including changes in punctuation, paragraphing, chapter organization, capitalization, and italics, as well as changes in names necessitated by their fabrication of the astrologer and the carry-over of text from “No. 44.” Sometimes they introduced mistakes, such as “clouds” for Twain’s “clods,” and “improving” for “proving.” And finally, Paine and Duneka made scores of changes in wording, usually to mute Twain’s candor and mask his religious satire 30 (see table 14.1). These and many other omissions and revisions demonstrate that Paine and Duneka changed not only the length of Twain’s work, but its tone and character as well. Most of the comedy is gone, along with much of Satan’s playfulness and some of the Tom Sawyer shenanigans and the Huck Finn shrewd naiveté. Twain’s irony is diffused by the elimination of the evil priest and the substitution of a fairy-tale astrologer, skulking about in fantastic garb in the Wyeth illustration. And Satan’s sharply cynical remarks are dulled down to general complaints when the specific targets of the cynicism, the historical examples, are omitted. Satan—and Twain—substantiate their unsparing view of human history with references to the Inquisition, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the battles of Blenheim and Ramillies, Napoleon and Frederick the Great, the Boer War and Jameson’s Raid, the French Revolution, the Boxer Rebellion, and Pope Leo XIII’s official suppression of Queen Margherita’s prayer for her assassinated husband, King Humbert of Italy, because he had been excommunicated. Leaving out the specifics adulterates the force of Mark Twain’s satire against “monarchies, aristocracies and religions,” 31 especially against religions, and most especially against the hanging, stoning, pressing to death, and burning of humans accused of witchcraft by religious authorities in earlier times.

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Table 14.1. Twain

Paine-Duneka

Mainly we were trained to be good Catholics

. . . trained to be good Christians

The priests said that knowledge was not good for the common people

Knowledge was not good for the common people

he called him by every vile and putrid name

he called him by every name

But the Bishop suspended him for talking around in conversation

Some people charged him with talking around in conversation

[She] said God would provide. But she [She] said God would provide. But she said that from habit, for she was a good said that from habit, for she was a good Catholic and such speeches were a slang Christian. of the trade. he was suspected of being an unsound Catholic

he was suspected of being a heretic

He said the dog had forgiven the man that He said the dog had forgiven the man that had wronged him so, and maybe God had wronged him so, and maybe God would accept that absolution in place of would accept that absolution. the priest’s, though it was furnished gratis and therefore was not really official and regular. “Hell and Flinders! this must be looked into.”

“This must be looked into.”

it would be bad for him to be suspected of witching a priest

it would be bad for him to be suspected

[Satan] told us privately there was no purgatory, now, it having been discarded because it did not pay, there being none but Catholic custom for it.

[Satan] told us privately that there was no purgatory

we saw Noah lying drunk on Ararat

we saw Noah overcome with wine

You have a bastard perception of humor

You have a mongrel perception of humor

Near the close of The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance, Paine and Duneka bring together two of Satan’s statements about humor, which are often quoted as the humorist’s defense of his vocation: “The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from [humans’] dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little,

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In Twain’s “Chronicle of Young Satan,” there is a full page of text between the first two sentences quoted above from the Paine-Duneka version—between “dull vision” and “Will a day come.” That page contains a discussion of the “delightful comicalities” of hereditary aristocracy, government, and religion, ending with “the Pope’s infallibility . . . which even God on his throne is obliged to submit to.” It is those comicalities that are the explicit antecedent of “these juvenilities” in Twain’s text, and they give a specific bite to Twain’s most eloquent evocation of the power of humor. By 1900, when this passage was written, Mark Twain had progressed a long distance from his 1865 denigration of humor as a “poor, pitiful business.” Satan’s declaration is the triumphant cry of a humorist who has forged a career he can now fully believe in. Twain would have been distressed, no doubt outraged, by the way his text had been chopped up, but he probably would not have been surprised. In June 1906, he was incensed to discover that Frederick Duneka and Harper’s were republishing, without his permission, a largely reworked edition of Mark Twain’s Library of Humor, which originally appeared in 1888, and he complained to H. H. Rogers that Duneka was “not merely a thief, but a particularly low-down sneak-thief.” 33 The following month he sharpened his complaint in an autobiographical dictation, and foretold exactly what would happen with “The Chronicle of Young Satan”: Last summer, Mr. Duneka wanted to look at one of these stories, a story whose scene is laid in the Middle Ages, and in it he found a drunken and profane Catholic priest—a spectacle which was as common in Europe four hundred years ago as Dunekas are in hell to-day. Of course it made him shudder, and he wanted that priest reformed or left out. 34

When The Mysterious Stranger was first published in 1916, there was no mention of editing, no indication that the text was anything other than Mark Twain’s final production. And it need hardly be said that Twain’s autobiographical dictation about Duneka was omitted from Paine’s two-volume edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography. Also omitted from that edition was Twain’s dictation in August 1906 which specifically mentioned his “unfinished book . . . The Mysterious Stranger [referring to “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”]. It is more than half finished. I would dearly like to finish it, and it causes me a real pang to reflect that it is not to be . . . but I am tired of the pen.” 35 Albert Paine did, however, write an introduction to The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, when it was published in 1923 as volume 27 of The Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition. For the first time he

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discussed the text, but the story he tells differs significantly from Twain’s autobiographical note. According to Paine’s account, The author made three extended attempts at this story, and one of them—the first, and by far the best—he brought very nearly to conclusion. . . . [Years afterward, to me] he said: “I always had a good deal of fancy for that story of mine, ‘The Mysterious Stranger.’ I could finish it, I suppose, any time, and I should like it some day to be published.”. . . A considerable time after his death . . . I found among a confusion of papers that tremendous final chapter, which must have been written about the time of our conversation. It may even have been written prior to that time, laid aside, and forgotten, for his memory was very treacherous during those later days. . . . Happily, it was the ending of the story in its first form [that is, “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” though Paine knew that the “tremendous final chapter” had been written for “No. 44”]. 36

If that story was concocted as a cover-up, it was reconcocted, redialogued, and extended to incorporate Twain’s advance consent when Paine, twelve years later, in his edition of Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935), added the following annotation to Twain’s note about the “Schoolhouse Hill” text. The writer of these lines recalls a day in 1909 when Mark Twain, pointing to a drawer containing some manuscripts, said: “There are a few things there which might be published, if I could finish them; but I shall never do it, now. There is one, The Mysterious Stranger, that I could finish very easily, almost any time. Perhaps I shall do that one, and then some day you can get it in shape for publication.” He died the following April. So far as I then knew he had not added anything to the story, which it seemed he had undertaken in several forms. But two or three years later, among some loose papers, I found that amazing final chapter, of the best version, probably written (and forgotten, for his memory had become very uncertain) about the time of our conversation. 37

Mark Twain may have made such a statement to Paine, for they were close in Twain’s last years. But it seems unlikely, coming from an author who, when he found out that a proofreader was messing with his punctuation, “telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.” 38 It was Paine’s concealment of his editing, not Mark Twain’s memory, that was “very treacherous.” SYMBOLS, AND A THEORY, OF DESPAIR The repeated publication of the Paine-Duneka text of “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” its reputed position as Twain’s last work, its enshrinement in The Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition and in various anthologies,

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and the rigid control over Mark Twain’s papers and manuscripts exercised for decades by Albert Paine and Clara Clemens have given us the curious situation that Mark Twain’s literary career, even his biography, was judged in the light of a fraudulent work for 47 years. These judgments, built up over two generations of readers and scholars, have created a momentum whose force continues to be felt. Even John Tuckey, who first discovered the fraud, thought it necessary, when he published a collection of critical essays on the story in 1968 (Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger and the Critics), to include the Paine-Duneka version as “Part One/The Text.” The critical articles that follow, by Fussell, Parsons, Stone, Smith, Cox, et al., are based on the corrupt text. Jim Cox makes the extraordinary claim that “Paine’s edition was clearly a brilliant performance [and] the closest thing to Mark Twain's intention that we shall ever have.” 39 And even though all three of Mark Twain’s versions are now available in University of California Press volumes, the corrupt version, still entitled The Mysterious Stranger, continues to be reprinted today, as, for example, in Walter Blair’s otherwise excellent anthology, Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain. The textual problem might have been identified much earlier, by Bernard DeVoto. He entered the arena of Twain studies in 1932 with Mark Twain’s America, an evocative celebration of the American West which highlighted Western humor. DeVoto called his study an “essay in the correction of ideas,” by which he meant the wrong-headed ideas of Van Wyck Brooks in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920). He also had some corrections to suggest about the tightly held proprietorship of A. B. Paine, who, he complained in his foreword, “denied me access to the unpublished material.” In addition, DeVoto told the executors and directors of the Mark Twain estate that the manuscripts “must some day be accounted for” and whimsically added that “public benevolence constrains me to offer the Estate my services.” 40 When Paine died five years later, the directors demonstrated their own sense of humor by appointing DeVoto to succeed Paine as the literary editor, unsalaried, of the Twain estate. During his eight-year editorship, DeVoto moved the Twain papers to Harvard’s Widener Library and continued Paine’s work of cataloging and organizing. He prepared an edition of previously unpublished manuscripts, emphasizing later and darker works (Letters from the Earth, compiled in 1939 but not published until 1962 because of Clara’s objections); a volume of autobiographical dictations (Mark Twain in Eruption, 1940) that were omitted by Paine in the latter’s 1924 two-volume edition; and in 1942, a volume entitled Mark Twain at Work which might have been called “Bernard DeVoto at Work.” This volume contained several short selections from unpublished Twain manuscripts and three extensive essays by DeVoto on Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Twain’s career from Connecticut Yankee to The Mysterious Stranger. The third essay, entitled “The Symbols of De-

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spair,” was DeVoto’s attempt to make sense out of the last half of Mark Twain’s career, and it has enjoyed a central place in Twain scholarship for seven decades. According to the “despair” thesis, Mark Twain went into a steep decline after the publication of Connecticut Yankee in 1889. The early and mid-nineties saw the collapse of Twain’s publishing firm, the failure of the Paige typesetter, bankruptcy, the death of Susy, the onset of Jean’s epilepsy, Twain’s increasing age and illnesses, and the invalidism that would pursue Livy to an early grave. From 1897 on, claimed DeVoto, Twain was “hellridden” by failure, disgrace, and guilt, and his literary productions were fragmentary, usually unfinished, and focused on catastrophic falls from fortune and perilous sea voyages, often embedded in dreams. Then, in 1905, Mark Twain finally defeated his demons and came through to triumph at last . . . [with] the book which . . . was to achieve the completion denied many of its predecessors, the book which we know as The Mysterious Stranger. . . . [Here] we see the psychic block removed, the dilemma solved, the inhibition broken, the accusation stilled, and Mark Twain’s mind given peace at last and his talent restored. 41

This powerful essay, reprinted in Tuckey’s anthology and elsewhere, provided speculative but useful insights into what DeVoto called “the no man’s land” between psychology and literary criticism, and it furthered the serious study of Twain’s works initiated by the face-off between Brooks’s The Ordeal of Mark Twain and DeVoto’s earlier Mark Twain’s America. “The Symbols of Despair,” DeVoto boasted, “is grounded on a vast accumulation of data which Mr. Paine ignored and Mr. Brooks never heard about. . . . [It] indicates the true ordeal of Mark Twain.” 42 DeVoto deserves credit for calling attention to the unpublished manuscripts and for bringing the Twain papers into the open, but his thesis of despair and recovery is deeply flawed. It is a chronological argument that gets the chronology dead wrong, reversing the sequence of “The Chronicle” and “No. 44.” The triumphal work that DeVoto thought rescued Mark Twain in 1905, “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” was written in 1897-1900, in what DeVoto described as the nadir of Twain’s despair. Wallace Stegner suggests that the despair thesis, which DeVoto discussed with his psychoanalyst, was not unrelated to the ordeal of Bernard DeVoto, who at the time was trying to work “his own emotional entanglements into the order and safety of art.” 43 In any case, DeVoto had the manuscripts in front of him, but he never managed to figure out their dates of composition, and he never realized the enormity of the fraud perpetrated by Albert Paine and Frederick Duneka. A footnote in DeVoto’s Mark Twain in Eruption actually complements Paine for one of the major components of that fraud, the pasting of the last chapter of the final version of the mysterious stranger story onto the end of the first version. Getting the facts

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exactly wrong, DeVoto states that “Albert Bigelow Paine’s greatest service to Mark Twain was to recognize that the last chapter of an earlier version of the book was the right ending for the final version which Mark had abandoned unfinished.” 44 DeVoto also had Mark Twain’s notebooks in front of him, and in one of the later ones he could have found a statement that appears to suggest Twain’s philosophical pessimism might have stemmed from psychological disasters: It is the strangest thing that the world is not full of books that scoff at the pitiful world, and the useless universe and violent, contemptible human race— books that laugh at the whole paltry scheme and deride it. Curious, for millions of men die every year with these feelings in their hearts. Why don’t I write such a book? Because I have a family. There is no other reason. Was this those other people's reason? 45

Yet the most important aspect of this notebook entry may be its date. The entry was made between 6 and 27 November 1895 in New Zealand, during Mark Twain’s world tour, which was extending his fame and repairing his financial difficulties, and nine months before Susy’s death. For much of his life, Twain puzzled over why people seemed unable to talk about two topics they all thought about—the inexplicability of God and the deficiencies in the human species. These topics are still often avoided in polite conversation, in church, and in politics, for they represent the third rail that would wreck any politician’s attempt to seek public office. To Mark Twain’s credit, he discussed them, wrote about them both humorously and seriously in later years, and, after the death of his wife, published such works as “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” and What Is Man? Were he alive today, Twain would undoubtedly be writing about what many people now think but few (and even fewer clerics or politicians) articulate: human beings are fast using up the only planet they are ever going to own. 46 To be fair, DeVoto thought of “The Symbols of Despair” as a provisional “report,” and he stated in his preface to Mark Twain at Work that he hoped someday to “study at book length the material treated in this essay.” He never did so, resigning his position as editor of the Twain papers in 1946 in frustration with Clara Clemens’ obstinacy and the fussy demands of Thomas Chamberlain, a new director of the Mark Twain Company appointed by Clara, in order to pursue other projects, such as completing his trilogy of the American West with Across the Wide Missouri (1947; Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize) and The Course of Empire (1952; National Book Award). Bernard DeVoto’s last effort as Twain editor came in 1946, when he compiled The Portable Mark Twain for Viking, an 800-page anthology which reproduced yet again the Paine-Duneka Mysterious Stranger, described by DeVoto in the introduction as a masterpiece and “the highest reach of [Twain’s] last period.” DeVo-

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to’s own last period would soon follow, for he died of a heart attack in 1955, at age 58. Like Copernicus, who revolutionized astronomy without quite being able to reject the notion of heavenly crystal spheres, Bernard DeVoto broke the lock that Albert Paine and Clara Clemens had placed on Twain studies without rejecting the editorial deceptions of Paine and Duneka, and he unwittingly extended the life of their flawed Mysterious Stranger. DeVoto was the first to recognize the significance of the late unpublished manuscripts, and he probed them with questions we are still attempting to answer today. Nevertheless, his theory of despair followed by triumph, contradicted by those manuscripts, has muddied the waters of interpretation. Mark Twain’s despairs and triumphs were more complicated and more mixed than that, and his manuscript of “The Chronicle of Young Satan” is much more of a triumph, and more humorous, than the Paine-Duneka version that DeVoto inherited, sanctioned, and unfortunately passed on.

Chapter Fifteen

An Uncharted Sea of Recollection Mark Twain’s Autobiography

This book is already perfectly outrageous, in spots, but that’s nothing—it’s going to be worse by & by. . . . I don’t care for my other books, now, but I dote on this one.” 1 Mark Twain, in a 1906 letter to W. D. Howells

The other significant project of Mark Twain’s last years, also published chaotically for half a century, was his Autobiography, especially the autobiographical episodes he began dictating in January 1906, at the age of 70. He dictated in a sustained fashion for a year and a half, then sporadically through 1909. All writers, of course, are autobiographical, but some are more so than others, and Twain was surely one of the more-so types. From the beginning, his trademark brand of personal journalism relied on people he had known and events he had witnessed, often embroidered, and this practice continued when he graduated to writing sketches and stories. His travel books concerned real trips—to Nevada and California, to the Sandwich Islands, to Europe and the Holy Land, to Germany and Switzerland, around the world— and they related a mixture of actual events, exaggerated experiences, and whole-cloth inventions. At first, Twain dealt with recent events, often recorded on site and then revised, as with The Innocents Abroad, recycled from his newspaper accounts. But for his next book, Roughing It, Twain reached further back in time, a distance that allowed for greater perspective and more creative molding. This success led him deeper and deeper into the well of memory, to the piloting stint captured in “Old Times on the Mississippi,” and finally to his youth in Hannibal, transmuted from the raw materials of boy-

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hood memories into the imaginative gold of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In addition to semi-autobiographical fiction, this most autobiographical of writers published many pieces throughout his career which presented events based, more or less, on his personal life. The loose structure of his travel books allowed Mark Twain to drop in personal anecdotes, and he moves easily in Innocents Abroad from the Milan Cathedral to a Hannibal remembrance with only the slenderest of transitions: “I remember . . . once, when I was a boy.” Throughout his career, Twain scattered dozens of sketches and stories about his life in magazines and reprinted them in volumes of miscellaneously organized collections. Typical are “My First Literary Venture” (1871), “How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel” (1872), “A Literary Nightmare” [also known as “Punch, Brothers, Punch”] (1876), “My Military History” (1877), “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion [to Bermuda]” (1877), “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (1885), “Aix-lesBains” (1891), “Playing Courier” (1891), “Mental Telegraphy” (1891), “Marienbad—A Health Factory” (1892), “Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” (1894), “At The Appetite-Cure” (1898), “My Début as a Literary Person” (1899), “Italian Without a Master” (1904), “A Monument to Adam” (1905), “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey” (1906), and “The Turning Point of My Life” (1910). In addition to his published works, Twain had the habit of jotting down and dictating events and ideas he wanted to remember, such as “The Tennessee Land” (1870), “Early Years in Florida, Missouri” (1877), “Happy Memories of the Dental Chair” (1884-85), “The Character of Man” (1885), remembrances of his relationship with General Grant (dictated in 1885), “The [Paige] Machine Episode” (1890), “Jane Lampton Clemens” (written after the death of his mother in the fall of 1890), “Early Days” (Paine’s title for “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” the finest of a series of autobiographical sketches written in Vienna in 1897-98), “Villa Quarto” (dictated, along with remembrances of John Hay, R. L. Stevenson, and H. H. Rogers, to Isabel Lyon in Florence in 1904), “A Family Sketch” (1901, rev. 1906); and then the hundreds of miniature narratives, short essays, and reminiscences dictated in 252 sessions from 1906 to 1909 and totaling some 450,000 words. Finally, a complete listing of autobiographical fragments should include scores of speeches and interviews, the voluminous notebooks Twain kept all his adult life (49 still exist), and many of his even more voluminous letters, of which more than 11,000 are extant. Mark Twain’s life was a good story and he drew on it in various ways during all phases of his career, but what we are specifically concerned with here—the works that collectively have become known as Mark Twain’s Autobiography—are the explicitly autobiographical writings, such as “Early Days,” and the dictations of 1885, 1904, and 1906-09. Twain’s first attempt

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at dictating, to a theological student he hired as a secretary for his trip to England in 1873, was a failure: “my sentences came slow & painfully, & were clumsily phrased, & had no life in them—certainly no humor.” 2 More than a decade later, he began to discover the possibilities of dictated autobiography through his relationship with General Grant, near the end of the ex-president’s life. Impoverished by the Ponzi scheme (35 years before the phrase was coined) engineered by Ferdinand Ward, the corrupt partner in the investment firm of Grant and Ward, the general was encouraged by Mark Twain to recoup his losses by composing an account of his life and war history. Twain became commandant of this project, insisting on generous royalties for the unassuming general and ultimately issuing the two-volume, best-selling Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant through his own firm, Charles L. Webster & Co. As part of his supervision, Twain hired a shorthand writer for the fading Grant, and reported “it was a thorough success.” On the crest of a busy and for-the-moment triply successful career as author, publisher, and investor, Twain engaged for himself the services of his friend and former lecture agent James Redpath—a journalist, abolitionist, and lyceum impresario skilled in shorthand—to whom he dictated reflections about his business and personal relationship with the most famous American of the day. In Vienna in 1897-98, Twain worked on written remembrances with an eye to their immediate publication, but by February 1899 he had changed his mind. “I have abandoned my Autobiography,” he wrote to Richard Watson Gilder, “and am not going to finish it.” Five years later, living with his family in a 61-room palatial villa overlooking Florence, where the gentle weather and unhurried pace seemed to produce intermittent remissions in what would prove to be Livy’s final illness, Twain returned to autobiographical dictation, taken down this time by his secretary and household assistant Isabel Lyon. Although depressed by Livy’s fluctuating regressions and angered by his obstinate landlady (“I should wish the Countess to move out of Italy; out of Europe; out of the planet”), 3 Twain was enthusiastic about his developing autobiography. In January 1904 he wrote to “Dear ‘Owells” that I’ve struck it! . . . You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography. . . . And you will be astonished (& charmed) to see how like talk it is, & how real it sounds, & how well & compactly & sequentially it constructs itself, & what a dewy & breezy & woodsy freshness it has, & what a darling & worshipful absence of the signs of starch, & flatiron, & labor & fuss & the other artificialities! . . . There are little slips here & there, little inexactnesses, & many desertions of a thought before the end of it has been reached, but these are not blemishes, they are merits, their removal would take away the naturalness of the flow & banish the very thing—the nameless something—which . . . makes good talk so much better than the best imitation of it that can be done with a pen. 4

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Mark Twain took pleasure in his dictation. “It makes my labor amusement— mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless,” 5 he declared, but the Florentine enterprise was short-lived, perhaps because Miss Lyon took dictation only in long hand, perhaps because of the increasing severity of Livy’s condition. She died on 5 June 1904, and soon after the gloomy trip back to yet another funeral in Elmira, Clara had a nervous breakdown and Jean, while riding horseback, had a collision with a streetcar that killed her horse and threw her fifty feet, rendering her unconscious and breaking her ankle. It wasn’t until eighteen months later, in January of 1906, that Mark Twain resumed the amusement labor of autobiographical dictation—a happy accident this time, involving a cartoonist, three dinners, and Albert Bigelow Paine. After growing up in the Midwest and working for a decade as a photographer, photographic supplies dealer, and occasional author, Paine came to New York in 1895 at the age of 34 to pursue a career as a writer and editor. Like many others, he sent Mark Twain a copy of a book he had written, and he had the opportunity to thank the humorist for a kind note in response at a Players Club dinner in 1901, where Twain gave the Founder’s Night speech in honor of Edwin Booth. Paine then undertook a biography of Thomas Nast, and corresponded with Mark Twain concerning letters he wished to publish. Twain consented to their publication, and Paine had a second opportunity to express his personal thanks as one of the 170 guests at the grand Mark Twain seventieth birthday dinner celebration, complete with 40-piece orchestra, that Colonel Harvey arranged at Delmonico’s on the evening and far into the morning of 5-6 December 1905. 6 Paine sent Twain a copy of his Nast biography the following day, and a month later, at yet another Players Club dinner, took advantage of this third opportunity for conversation to ask if he might call on Mark Twain at his 21 Fifth Avenue residence. When he called, three days later, he hesitatingly proposed to write Twain’s biography, a proposal that was adopted so enthusiastically that in another three days Paine was established in a study in the Twain household with complete access to the author’s manuscripts, letters, and notes. Over the next 4½ years, Paine’s association with Mark Twain would expand from biographer to personal assistant, errand runner, trip escort, and late-night companion. Twenty-five years younger than the humorist, Albert Paine was to some extent the grown-up son that Mark Twain never had. It was Paine, living near Redding, Connecticut, who persuaded Twain to buy a neighboring piece of land on which his final residence, Stormfield, would be constructed. When Twain took his last journey to Bermuda early in 1910, Paine and his family moved into Stormfield, and it was Paine who fetched him home at the last. It was Albert Paine’s idea to hire a stenographer, so he could ask his subject questions pertaining to his biographical research and have the answers recorded for his use. Twain agreed to dictate, for he said he was tired

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of writing by hand and he had already experimented successfully with dictation. From the beginning, however, Twain commandeered the two-hour sessions for his own purposes, recalling and elaborating earlier times, commenting on current ideas and events, describing people he had known, responding to correspondence and newspaper articles—whatever happened to occur to him at the time of dictation and with whatever associations these happenings suggested. This procedure proved so agreeable and so productive that the autobiography Mark Twain produced in several hundred dictation sessions over the next four years took on a life of its own, related to but separate from the biography that Paine was simultaneously pursuing. Paine states that when he and the newly hired stenographer, Josephine Hobby, came to Twain’s New York residence to commence work on the morning of 9 January 1906, he was in bed when we arrived, and . . . he remained there during almost all of these earlier dictations, clad in a handsome silk dressing-gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows. He loved this loose luxury and ease, and found it conducive to thought. . . . We never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning; then he went drifting among episodes, incidents, and periods in . . . the fashion of table-conversation, as he said, the methodless method of the human mind. 7

Never a purist in the matter of genres, Mark Twain persuaded himself he had invented a new way to tell the story of his life, one that would last the rest of his career and one for which, as he said of Grant, he was “peculiarly qualified and equipped.” 8 In 1904 he had thought of his autobiography as a series of additions to his existing books to extend copyright protection, but by 1906 he had switched over to the idea of more complete posthumous publication, in line with his late-blooming notion, expressed in a Pudd’nhead Wilson calendar entry in Following the Equator, which declared that freedom of speech was “unspeakably precious,” as was the prudence “never to practice” it. 9 In 1905 Twain wrote in his notebook that “free speech is confined to the dead,” 10 and amplified the idea in an unpublished essay entitled “The Privilege of the Grave.” Most people are timid, he thought, and not willing to risk their popularity or the comfort of their families by sailing against the tide of public opinion. A humorist, of course, is always crossgraining expectation and belief, but Twain thought there were limits for the living, and he looked forward to firing his last unrestrained shots, especially about religion and politics, from the grave: “There is free speech there, and no harm to the family.” 11 The pleasure of speaking his mind freely in the late autobiographical dictations was buttressed by the freedom of subject matter allowed by his theory of dictation:

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Twain always tended to write without extended outlines or careful plans. He had trouble with long-range plotting and often revised a story simply by starting over, a procedure that sometimes produced differing and unintegrable versions. He was brilliant at organizing short pieces, which he could do in his head, jotting them down on paper in bursts of writing or delivering them orally at the dinner table or lecture hall. Most of his books are collections of discrete short pieces, travel vignettes, and episodic adventures, held together largely by the conventional devices of chronology and geography. Thus freewheeling dictation played to his strengths and dodged his weaknesses. It required little preparation or research, and talking at home to a small, appreciative audience had much of the pleasure and none of the pain of lecturing on the road. Twain could reel off about 1500 words an hour orally, many more than with a pen. Always keeping an eye on his production rate, he calculated his writing speed in earlier days averaged from 300 to 400 words per hour. In Florence, when his dictation was taken down in longhand, he produced 1000 wph, and the shorthand of his later amanuenses was even faster, allowing him to complete a day’s work in several hours—an agreeable circumstance for an author then in his seventies. 13 But this production was not casual or careless, as can be seen in the remembrance, phrased in the third person, of Mary Louise Howden, a young English woman who served as Twain’s secretary/stenographer from October 1908, after Josephine Hobby had been dismissed, until April 1909, when Jean moved into Stormfield and took over secretarial duties: Mark Twain dictated so slowly, with such long pauses between the sentences that, green beginner as she was, she could take notes with perfect ease. . . . Sometimes there were four or five minute pauses between sentences. But the phrase when it came was always perfectly formed. He put in the punctuation himself [later, in the typed copy]. His stenographer was never allowed to add so much as a comma. 14

It is unfortunate that the autobiographical writings and dictations, on which Twain labored intermittently for 3½ decades and which were the main effort of his final years, have, until recently, been published in piecemeal and haphazard fashion. Between 1906 and 1959, four book-length, incomplete, overlapping versions appeared. These editions are differently focused and organized, often defectively edited, and incomplete even if considered collectively, since the four altogether still omit portions of the late dictations. Some of the omitted material has been published elsewhere, such as “Reflec-

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tions on Religion” in the Hudson Review (1963) and “Comments on the Moro Massacre” in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire (1992). The confused and deficient presentation of Twain’s Autobiography is now being remedied by the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, which issued the first volume of a projected three-volume comprehensive edition of Twain’s autobiographical writings and dictations in November 2010. Volume 2 appeared in 2013, and these volumes are discussed below, but first we need to consider the four editions that for a century have blunted Mark Twain’s humor, obscured his opinions, and prevented us from seeing the Autobiography as belonging to the pantheon of Mark Twain’s major works. FOUR TWENTIETH-CENTURY EDITIONS “Chapters from My Autobiography—by Mark Twain.” Twenty-five chapters published from 7 Sept. 1906 to Dec. 1907 in the North American Review. About 125,000 words. Rerun in the Sunday Magazine, a supplement prepared for newspapers, from 27 Oct. 1907 to 27 Sept. 1908. Reprinted as Mark Twain’s Own Biography: The Chapters from the North American Review, introduction and notes by Michael J. Kiskis, in 1990 (reissued in 2010); and reprinted in facsimile in the Oxford Mark Twain, 1996. Mark Twain enjoyed thinking about the posthumous publication of his Autobiography, and he sported with differing notions of exactly what posthumous meant: a “distant future day,” “five years hence,” when “I have been dead a century” and “A.D. 2406.” 15 In 1904 he projected that editions should be issued at 25-year intervals, with controversial “things that must be left out” 16 of the first edition made incrementally available later, along with, not incidentally, renewed copyrights. Twain’s enthusiasm for the project grew as typescript piled up from his almost daily dictations starting in January 1906, and by the early spring he was sending portions to W. D. Howells. In June he bragged playfully to Henry Rogers that “Howells says . . . the form of this book is one of the most memorable literary inventions of the ages. And so it is. It ranks with the steam engine, the printing press and the electric telegraph. I’m the only person who has ever found out the right way to build an autobiography.” 17 As word got out about Mark Twain’s latest project, George Harvey, Twain’s friend and publisher, got wind of it and decided Twain’s autobiography would be an attractive feature for the North American Review, which he edited, especially since S. S. McClure was angling for it as well. Colonel Harvey had bought NAR in 1899, and the following year became president of Harper and Brothers, Mark Twain’s exclusive publisher after 1903. Harvey traveled to Twain’s summer headquarters in Dublin, New Hampshire in early August 1906, spent three days reading through Twain’s autobiographical

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writings and dictations—which at that point totaled about 250,000 words— and made the author an offer he couldn’t refuse: $30,000 for 100,000 words. Harvey arranged to issue segments of the Autobiography in 25 issues of the North American Review starting on 7 September 1906, the first number of his refurbished NAR, which on that date began fortnightly publication. Mark Twain was only halfway along in his autobiographical dictations, and in this respect he was a little like Pap Finn, who would catch a raft of floating logs when the Mississippi began to rise in June, and hurry them to market without waiting for others which would inevitably follow. The $30,000 prompted Twain to begin construction of a new residence in Redding, Connecticut, designed by Howells’ son John on a piece of land adjacent to Paine’s property, which for a time would be called the “Autobiography House.” Michael Kiskis, who reprinted the North American Review selections in 1990, maintains in his introduction that the 25 chapters published in 1906-07 constitute “the autobiography of Samuel Clemens” since “Clemens was involved in the choices for the installments, had final control over the revisions that were made to the texts, and gave his approval for their publication.” 18 Mark Twain did indeed superintend this publication and his stipulated conditions were met: no quarrelsome “expressions of opinion” and no “words of mine which can wound the living.” 19 It is less clear how much specific editorial control Twain exercised. On 3 August 1906, while George Harvey was visiting him in New Hampshire, Twain wrote to Howells that As to the Autobiography, you’re going to get it—in the neck! as the vulgar say. Harvey will go hence with it, to you, to-morrow. . . . The Colonel has done some wonderful editing of this MS. He has selected five 5,000-word instalments, & pieced them together so cleverly that the seams don’t show, & each seems to have been written by itself. 20

The next day Twain wrote to Mary Rogers, Henry Rogers’ daughter-in-law, that Harvey “has carried the whole of the MS. to Howells, so that he can do some more selecting.” A. B. Paine reiterates this point in his biography: “Colonel Harvey agreed to take a copy of the dictated matter and make the selections himself, and this plan was carried out.” 21 It is possible also that Frederick Duneka, who would later serve as Paine’s co-conspirator in reworking the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, was involved in editing the Autobiography. Formerly one of George Harvey’s colleagues on the New York World and brought to Harper’s by Harvey as general manager in 1900, Duneka, according to Twain, “seems to do four-fifths of the editing” at Harper’s. 22 Lewis Leary, whose careful editing of the Twain-Rogers correspondence took him deep into the relationship between Twain and Harper’s, states, without citing his evidence, that Duneka “was largely responsible for editing Clemens’s ‘Chapters from My Autobiography’ for serial publication

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in North American Review (1906/07).” 23 David Munro, associate editor of the North American Review, may have assisted as well, since his handwriting, along with that of eight other persons, can be identified on the typescripts. 24 However the effort was distributed in bringing these before-the-grave selections from Twain’s autobiography-in-progress to print, the published result contains many defects. Mark Twain’s methodless method of organizing by chronology of composition, rather than chronology of events, has been ignored, writings and dictations have been interwoven, and dictations from different days have been spliced together. Chapter 2, for example, mixes three pieces written in Vienna with dictations made in 1904 in Florence and 1906 in New York. Chapter 22 contains dictations made on 12 March, 10 October, and 20 December 1906, along with a dictation from 13 May 1907 and an unfinished essay on dueling written in Vienna in 1898. There are also many editorial changes and omissions, since the NAR chapters included, as George Harvey wrote in his “Editor’s Diary” introduction to the first segment, only “such portions as could by no possibility give offence to any one now living.” 25 In his preface to the “Unpublished Chapters from the Autobiography of Mark Twain” in Harper’s Magazine in 1922, A. B. Paine noted that much of Twain’s “choicest work” had been omitted in the 1906-07 NAR publication. 26 Finally, the 125,000 words apparently selected by the Colonel constitute only a quarter of the total of some half million words of Autobiography. Mark Twain continued to dictate for two years after the last NAR chapter was published in December 1907. On 25-27 August 1877, Mark Twain wrote a 2000-word letter to Howells describing in detail John Lewis’ life-saving arrest of Ida Langdon’s horse and carriage as they plunged out of control down the steep hill from Quarry Farm. Howells was moved by the story, and by Twain’s pointed conjunction of the black farmer’s humble station and his skillful, selfless, heroic act. Calling the story “one of the most impressive things I’ve ever read,” Howells pleaded to have it for the Contributors’ Club in the Atlantic Monthly, but Twain refused: I don’t really see how the story of the runaway horse could read well with the little details of names & places & things left out. They are the true life of all narrative. It wouldn’t quite do to print them at this time. . . . Delicacy—a sad, sad false delicacy—robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories. 27

Almost three decades later, presumably writing for posthumous publication, Twain lifted half of this embargo, using the John Lewis story in “The Refuge of the Derelicts” and devoting large portions of his autobiographical dictation to family narratives. The embargo on obscenities was never lifted. Twain did

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much of his dictating to an audience of three persons, two of them female: Josephine Hobby, stenographer, with Isabel Lyon and Paine sitting in. Clara and Jean, and Mary Rogers, sometime heard or read sections. There were, Twain wrote to Howells, “certain irremovable drawbacks” in dictating to “a she person [for] there are so many thousands & thousands of things you are suffering to say, every day, but mustn’t, because they are indecent.” 28 The NAR autobiographical chapters are devoted largely to decent stories of family life—tales about Jane and John Marshall Clemens and their slave boy Sandy, Twain’s brother Orion, his uncle John Quarles, who owned a farm about forty miles inland from Hannibal, cousin James Lampton, the original of Colonel Sellers, young Sam’s schoolmates in “the days when we went gipsying /A long time ago,” 29 and family and friends of the adult Samuel Clemens: Livy, their three daughters, the long-employed servants who became brevet family members, numerous cats and other animals, Twichell and Nook Farm residents in Hartford, and summer companions at Quarry Farm in Elmira. Ten of the twenty-five NAR chapters contain excerpts from Susy’s biography of her father, which she started a month after her thirteenth birthday and continued for over a year. Twain was delighted with Susy’s biography, both when he learned about it in 1885 and when he rediscovered it in 1906, in “rummaging in a pile of ancient note-books of mine which I had not seen for years.” 30 He reprints dozens of excerpts, about 43% of Susy’s 131 pages, and comments in a freewheeling style on everything from Susy’s remarks on the personality of Sour Mash, a favorite Clemens cat, to her precociously philosophical view of life: “What is it all for?” 31 Two of the chapters, 6 and 18, contain more Susy than Sam. And this quote-andcomment strategy is extended by excerpts from “The Children’s Record,” a book “in which Mrs. Clemens and I registered some of the sayings and doings of the children, in the long ago.” 32 The Twain presented in the North American Review chapters is not the Mark Twain of Hamlin Hill’s God’s Fool or Karen Lystra’s Dangerous Intimacy; rather, it is the Mark Twain of Paine’s biography, of Susy’s biography, of Clara Clemens’ My Father, Mark Twain, of Katy Leary’s A Lifetime With Mark Twain (as told to Clara’s friend Mary Lawton), and of Caroline Harnsberger’s Mark Twain, Family Man (she was also one of Clara’s friends). Along with the good times and pranks and affectionate amusements of young parents with young children, portions of the NAR chapters might be labeled elegies written for a family graveyard, for Twain details the deaths of his father and father-in-law, his brother Henry, his son Langdon and daughter Susy, and his wife Livy. When Jean died on 24 December 1909, two years after the publication of “Chapters from My Autobiography,” Twain penned a moving reminiscence, his last essay, and wrote across the top of the manuscript: “Closing Words of My Autobiography.” 33

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Mark Twain’s Autobiography, with an Introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. (separately paginated and indexed). New York, Harper & Bros., 1924. About 200,000 words. In 1912, Albert Bigelow Paine published his massive biography of Mark Twain. He continued, in his role as literary executor, to bring to print editions of Twain’s letters, speeches, notebooks, and three volumes of stories and essays. By 1922 he was at work on the Autobiography, releasing sections in Harper’s Magazine and then issuing a two-volume edition in 1924. This edition supplies additional material, corrects some of the problems of the NAR publication, and creates new problems of its own. Mark Twain conceived of his Autobiography as an archive as well as an autobiography, a repository of unpublished works, written and dictated, early and late, including his long-considered chip off the old Captain Wakeman block published in 1909 as Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. Also published in 1909, Is Shakespeare Dead? is subtitled From My Autobiography, and its first sentence refers to “the stacks of unpublished manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and Diary of mine.” Paine adopted this expansive view, and most of his first volume (266 out of 361 pages) is devoted to materials which precede the 1906-09 dictations, divided into four sections: “Early Fragments, 1870-1877”; “The Grant Dictations, 1885” (to which is added “The Machine Episode,” written in 1890); “Chapters Begun in Vienna, 1897-8” (including a 1900-word piece concerning the “immeasurable idiot” who undertook to correct Twain’s article on “Saint Joan of Arc”); and “Chapters Added in Florence, 1904.” The remainder of this volume is devoted to the dictations from 9 to 19 January 1906. Volume II continues with the dictations from 23 January to 11 April 1906, and the selections in both volumes, as Paine notes, “in accordance with the author’s wish, are arranged in the order in which they were written [or dictated], regardless of the chronology of events.” 34 This arrangement preserves the stream of associations in the late dictations that Mark Twain saw as the connective tissue of his project, since it mimics “the thoughts which swarm through our heads . . . almost constantly, almost continuously, accompanied by a like swarm of reminders of incidents and episodes of our past.” 35 Then, curiously, this edition of the Autobiography abruptly stops. Mark Twain dictated through 1909, but the last three years were ignored by Paine, who used only 72 of the 252 late autobiographical dictations. In his “Introduction,” Paine hinted at further volumes when discussing Twain’s last essay, written at Christmas, 1909: “‘The Death of Jean,’ written (not dictated) immediately following that tragic event, was to be the closing chapter [of Twain’s Autobiography], and such in time it will become.” That time never came. It has been conjectured that poor sales of his two-volume work might have discouraged Paine from continuing, although according to Harper’s

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historian Eugene Exman, The Autobiography of Mark Twain ranked high on best-seller lists in 1924. 36 Perhaps Paine’s attention was diverted by his other projects at the time, which included a 746-page biography of Joan of Arc, Maid of France, published in 1925, for which he was decorated by the French government as a Chevalier in the Légion d’honneur . Paine’s two volumes overlap the NAR chapters, since almost all of the Twain dictations through April 1906 published by NAR are repeated in the Paine edition. The difference is that Paine incorporates more pre-1906 dictations and writings, including six sections about General Grant; adds material omitted by NAR, such as the essay denigrating “The Character of Man”; uses less of Susy’s biography, and stops abruptly with the dictation for 11 April 1906. The deficiencies of the Paine edition are not limited to incompleteness, for his heavy-handed manner of editing The Mysterious Stranger shows up in the Autobiography as well. Paine tends to eschew controversial statements and he tones down Twain’s graphic language. When the slave boy Sandy comments on smoked herring, “Dey eats ‘em guts and all!,” Paine waters “guts” down to “innards.” In the scornful criticism young Sam receives on his first day at school— “Here is a boy seven years old who can’t chaw tobacco”—Paine renders “chaw” as “chew.” When Twain dictates a 2000word cannonade against publisher Elisha Bliss on 21 February 1906, Paine cuts it down to popgun size, 500 words, eliminating entirely the sections that characterize Bliss as a “rat-eyed professional liar and scoundrel” and a “bastard monkey.” 37 Perhaps drawing too casually on his decade-long experience as an editor for St. Nicholas Magazine, Paine proceeded to edit the Autobiography freely, as was first noticed by Bernard DeVoto, who, working on his own edition of the Autobiography, inspected the typescripts of the dictations with greater care than he had taken with the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. DeVoto summarized his complaints in a July 1940 letter to Charles Lark, a trustee of the Twain estate: Mr. Paine’s editing was capricious, arbitrary, and sometimes incomprehensible. There are passages in our book [DeVoto’s Mark Twain in Eruption] which he elided from the middle of passages which he published. There are other passages which he partly published not in the Autobiography but in other books of Mark Twain’s and in his own Biography. There are other passages which he used in his Biography as alleged conversations with Mark Twain, and still other passages which he wove into his text as his own, without benefit of quotation marks. 38

Mark Twain in Eruption; Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events. Edited, with an introduction, by Bernard DeVoto. New York: Harper & Bros., 1940. (The title was created by Harper’s, not DeVoto.) About 105,000 words. DeVoto notes in his introduction that Paine “used something

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less than half of the typescript” of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, and that Mark Twain in Eruption “uses about half of the remainder.” The pagination in the 1968 Capricorn Books paperback reprint is identical with that of the 1940 edition. Given DeVoto’s description in Mark Twain’s America of his response to Van Wyck Brooks’s The Ordeal of Mark Twain as an “essay in the correction of ideas,” we might call Mark Twain in Eruption DeVoto’s endeavor in the correction of editorial method, specifically the method of A. B. Paine, whom the pugnacious DeVoto succeeded as editor of the Mark Twain Papers in 1938, a year after Paine’s death. DeVoto undertook to publish the materials left out of the two previous editions, to break through the genteel prohibitions imposed by Paine and Clara Clemens, and to demonstrate a new concern in following Twain’s texts precisely. He largely accomplished all three of these goals in a volume that picks up the dictations where Paine left off on 11 April 1906, adds several vigorous passages from the January-April dictations that Paine bypassed, has only a few overlaps with the NAR selections, and quotes just four words from Susy’s 131-page biography. DeVoto’s Twain, like DeVoto himself, is more of a social critic, more on the attack, more pungent, than the Twain of the NAR and Paine editions. Since Mark Twain in Eruption was designed to fill the holes left by the two earlier editions, and since DeVoto felt the autobiography needed “a more coherent plan than Mark Twain’s,” he ignores the chronology of the dictations and groups them by topics: Roosevelt, Carnegie, “The Plutocracy,” “Hannibal Days,” Twain’s volatile relations with his publishers, his comments about the composition of his works, “Various Literary People” (60% of which is devoted to dismembering Bret Harte), Twain’s 1907 trip to England, and a miscellaneous collection of pieces too good to omit straightforwardly entitled “Miscellany.” DeVoto aimed at a new completeness and accuracy in presenting Mark Twain to a mid-twentieth-century audience. The NAR edition, for example, gives merely a tame half-sentence mention of the “celebrated conversation” between Twichell and the profane hostler on the walk to Boston in 1874. DeVoto prints Twain’s rollicking, five-page account in full. Bernard DeVoto’s chief problem, as he saw it, concerned the many objections— “capricious requirements” and “irresponsible insults” he called them—made by Clara Clemens, who had already prohibited the publication of DeVoto’s collection of Twain’s late writings, Letters from the Earth. 39 DeVoto agreed to tone down his introductory remarks about the inadequacies of Paine’s editing, and to omit some of Twain’s comments about God, Bret Harte, publishers, a possibly libelous reference to Judge Landis, and remarks that might be offensive to the Aldrich family, but he dug in his heels and threatened to quit if she were allowed to vitiate further his edition of the

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Autobiography. In the course of this vociferous debate, DeVoto sent Clara an 1800-word letter, a lecture really, defending his “editor’s standards and obligations” and demonstrating how well he understood his subject: [Mark Twain] has little to say about the plutocracy that has not been said by others and accepted by nearly everyone. The special value of what he says is not in the novelty of what he describes but the color and vividness his personality gives it, and above all the vigor and splendor of his prose. . . . The passages about Webster which you dislike seem to me so charmingly wrapped in an obvious burlesque that no one can be hurt—and I am quite sure that Mark Twain calculated precisely that effect. He counted on the gusto of exaggeration, which takes the reader into his confidence with a wide and enjoyable wink, to take the personal sting out, to focus enjoyment on Mark Twain himself, not on the butt of his humor. 40

Mark Twain in Eruption was finally cleared for publication, but tired of Clara’s censorship and the procrastination of the Estate in granting permission to publish various items, DeVoto eventually gave up on the other Twain editions he had projected—letters, notebook, anthologies. “To hell with them,” he wrote to Harper’s, resigning his curatorship of the Mark Twain Papers in the fall of 1946. 41 The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Including Chapters Now Published For the First Time. “As Arranged and Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Charles Neider.” New York: Harper & Bros., 1959. About 178,000 words. Neider’s claim in his introduction of adding “30,000 to 40,000 words which have never before seen print” is perhaps a little high, because he counted only the Paine and DeVoto book editions, and not the NAR magazine articles, as “print.” Reprinted by Harper’s, with differing pagination, in Perennial Classic (1966), Perennial Library (1975), and Perennial Modern Classics (2000) paperback editions. Charles Neider’s version of Twain’s Autobiography is an omnium-gatherum, drawing on and overlapping the three previous editions, and adding new material. Thus many of the published entries in the four twentieth-century editions appear two and even three times—51% are duplicated, 18% are triplicated—while some autobiographical dictations remained unpublished. Neider joins with DeVoto in attacking Paine for silent omissions in the interest of fuddy-duddy propriety, and he restores passages that were suppressed in the earlier editions, including some omitted by DeVoto himself, such as the assault on Mrs. Aldrich and her son that Twain had embargoed “for seventy-five years.” 42 And like DeVoto, Neider had difficulty with Clara Clemens, who, age 85 in 1959, still refused to permit publication of the dictations of late June 1906, in which Twain made his most ambitious at-

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tempt to define “the real God.” (In 1960, a year after the publication of Neider’s Autobiography of Mark Twain, Clara relented, removed all her restrictions, and Neider eventually published the June dictations in The Hudson Review.) In the introduction to his edition of the Autobiography, Neider gives mocking thanks to both Paine and DeVoto for doing their editions badly, thus leaving him room to do it right. By right he meant ignoring Mark Twain’s oft-stated autobiographical philosophy and converting his mountain of sketches, stories, and comments into the flat chronological sequence of conventional autobiography—childhood-young manhood-first love-marriagematurity—often starting with the autobiographer’s birth (David Copperfield) or forebears (Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography). Neider’s cut-and-paste strategy required a good deal of weeding and transplanting, and a multitude of small changes in wording, punctuation, and paragraphing to make the sections fit together. Again like DeVoto, who didn’t hesitate to leave out what he called “trivialities, irrelevancies, newspaper clippings, and unimportant letters,” Neider also omits what he thought were “dated, dull, trivial and journalese sections.” 43 These omissions include Mark Twain’s leisurely meanderings— “it is my purpose to wander whenever I please and come back when I get ready”—and his bemused and often enlightening comments on how he proceeded from one topic to another. 44 In the first week of the late dictations, in January 1906, Twain reported that he had made an important discovery, the discovery of the wide difference in interest between “news” and “history”; that news is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form, and that history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it. . . . Consequently my autobiography is diary and history combined. The privilege of beginning every day in the diary form is a valuable one . . . for it brings together widely separated things that are in a manner related to each other, and consequently pleasant surprises and contrasts are pretty sure to result. . . . Both ends of a contrast are equally delightful to me. 45

Neider does not reprint that passage, for his editing strips away the diary aspect of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, thus missing Twain’s process of thought and one end of the odd contrasts and surprising similarities that he relished. While Neider does present a large amount of excellent material, his strategy ignores the relationship of history to diary, which often sheds light on the facts and helps interpret why Twain said what he did at any particular moment. Such interpretation is especially useful in understanding a mind as wily and protean as Mark Twain’s, since his attitudes on many subjects often varied, pushed by the winds of time and circumstance. Narrowing the scope of Twain’s autobiography into a linear chronology is a little like attempting to dredge and straighten the Mississippi River. A tamed river carries the

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freight efficiently, but without the attractions of its capricious corners and byways, the surprise of its twists and transitions, the charm of its curves and turns. Twain himself had mixed opinions about the attempts of the engineers on the River Commission “to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct,” to, as his character Uncle Mumford put it, “have the old thing all reorganized, and dredged out, and fenced in, and tidied up.” 46 There is a moral here for editors as well as engineers. THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DEFINITIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 1. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith et al. at the Mark Twain Project. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. This large volume—736 pages, about 500,000 words—is divided into four major sections: a substantial introduction that details the detective work involved in sorting through multiple manuscripts and typescripts, as well as authorial revisions, corrections, and instructions, in order to produce “an unmodernized, critically constructed . . . final text that Clemens intended his ‘heirs and assigns’ to publish after his death”; a section of preliminary autobiographical manuscripts and dictations composed between 1870 and 1905; 47 dictations from January to March 1906; and 182 pages of explanatory notes. 47 Textual notes, too voluminous for an already hefty volume, are available online at marktwainproject.org, as is the entire printed text. Volume 2, containing 104 dictations from April 1906 to February 1907, was issued in 2013. The third and final volume will be published in due course. Some reviews of volume one of the new California edition in 2010 noted that much of Mark Twain’s Autobiography is already in print in one form or another. What they neglected to say is how profoundly different the text presented in the new edition is from those that preceded it. If we think of the twentieth-century editions as having hit singles, the California edition is a bases-loaded home run. It differs from the others in four significant ways. The first is that while the text does not include all of Twain’s writings and dictations that happen to be autobiographical, it does include all those that he indicated should be a part of what he called the “AUTOBIOGRAPHY of MARK TWAIN” on the title page he designed. 48 Twain left a surprising number of notes and instructions scattered throughout his papers that concerned the composition and posthumous publication of his Autobiography. Sometimes he designated specific manuscripts and dictations as autobiographical “chapters,” and directed precisely where earlier writings and other materials should be inserted into the late dictations. Ignored until recently, these instructions have been followed punctiliously by a team of editors headed by Harriet Smith and Benjamin Griffin at the Mark Twain Project.

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Their nine years of work have produced, for the first time, a comprehensive and accurate text of the autobiography as planned by the author himself. A second measure of the superiority of the California edition is that it faithfully preserves Twain’s theory of autobiography. He wrestled a good deal with the genre, starting one fragment in the winter of 1897-98 with an ellipsis: “**** So much for the earlier days, and the New England branch of the Clemenses.” 49 Apparently he was going to fill in information about early relatives, and he designated this fragment as “From Chapter II,” but the ellipsis was never filled in and chapter I was never written. Eight years later in Florence, Twain figured out his problem: [The fragment] starts out with good confidence, but suffers the fate of its brethren—is presently abandoned for some other and newer interest. This is not to be wondered at, for its plan is the old, old, old unflexible and difficult one—the plan that starts you at the cradle and drives you straight for the grave, with no side-excursions permitted on the way. Whereas the side-excursions are the life of our life-voyage, and should be, also, of its history. 50

This discovery allowed Mark Twain to surge forward with the autobiography he had been toying with for decades. Breaking the tradition of birth-to-oldage chronology freed him for the kind of meandering storytelling reminiscence he preferred and in which he excelled, a strategy that is faithfully preserved in the California edition. The new edition also preserves Twain’s exact words. Precise phrasing— “it is the phrasing,” he once said, “that makes a piece of literature valuable” 51 —and even his habits of punctuation were important to him. The editors take a conservative position, ferreting out and cancelling changes in texts made by people other than Mark Twain, and those made by Twain himself that were “aimed at shortening, taming, or softening the texts selected for publication in the North American Review.” 52 Mistakes in names and facts made by Twain are left uncorrected, but identified in the accompanying explanatory notes. When the newly established text is compared to the earlier editions, countless alterations and omissions can be found in those editions. Perhaps the most notorious example, irresistible to reviewers, is the statement the author made about James W. Paige, the inventor of the failed typesetter that cost Twain so much grief and so many dollars. According to A. B. Paine’s Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Twain said that “Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.” What Twain really said was “if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.” 53 Less flamboyant but more typical are the scores of subtle omissions that often destroy Mark Twain’s jocular meaning, such as Paine’s removal of the word “honest” from Twain’s description of the impact of his scoop about the sinking of the

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clipper ship Hornet, sent to the Sacramento Union from the Sandwich Islands: “I was there four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known honest man on the Pacific coast.” 54 Charles Neider keeps the “honest,” but gratuitously rewrites Twain’s prose: “After about four or five months I returned to California.” The editors of the new Autobiography are not in the business of deleting and rewriting Twain’s text, or correcting his idiosyncratic notions concerning autobiographic form, or presenting interpretations and theories about Mark Twain’s life and works. Rather, they seek to establish, through accurate texts and wide-ranging research, the foundation on which all future interpretations will have to be based. The editors’ research constitutes the fourth category of difference between the California edition and those that preceded it. The Paine, DeVoto, and Neider editions contain only a handful of notes, some of them inaccurate. By contrast, the introduction, explanatory notes, appendixes, headnotes, references, index, and a note on the text in volume one of the new edition total 331 pages, about 45% of the volume as a whole. This factual matter elucidates Twain’s texts by identifying persons, incidents in Twain’s life, and historical events that figure in the autobiographical episodes, and it often provides new insights. Mark Twain quotes, with parental pride and a fellow free-thinker’s admiration, a remarkable statement made by nine-year-old Susy to her mother about how she changed her evening prayer after learning that American Indians had multiple gods: “Well, mamma, the Indians believed they knew, but now we know they were wrong. By and by it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray that there may be a God and a heaven—or something better.” Twain tells us that Susy had been learning about Indians from “Miss Foote (the governess).” The notes tell us that Miss Foote was Lilly Gillette Foote, a remarkable young woman who was an early graduate of Cambridge University’s Newnham College, established for women in 1871, and the niece of Harriet Foote Hawley, a founder of the Connecticut Indian Association. They further tell us that Susy’s statement, which sounds suspiciously like one her father might have made, was in fact Susy’s own, for her parents wrote it down at the time, in 1881, in their “Record of the Small Foolishnesses of Susie & ‘Bay’ [Clara] Clemens.” 55 The notes then give the appropriate quotation from the unpublished “Record,” which apparently Twain consulted for his autobiographical dictation twenty-five years later, in February 1906. This level of detail is particularly valuable in the case of Mark Twain, for the notes enable the reader to navigate with ease around his autobiographical islands of accuracies, inaccuracies, misrememberings, and elaborations to make a good story better. Twain reports in a 1906 autobiographical dictation that in a visit to the office of Grover Cleveland, when the latter was governor of New York, he clumsily set off sixteen alarm bells by sitting on them, and sixteen clerks soon appeared. The explanatory note quotes from a letter to

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Livy written at the time of the incident in 1884: “Then I sat down on four electrical bells at once . . . & summoned four pages.” 56 The notes also provide authoritative answers to many questions about Mark Twain’s life that are given varied answers by biographers and critics, and even Twain himself: Did Mark Twain’s ancestor “Geoffrey Clement . . . help . . . to sentence Charles [I] to death”? “Gregory (not Geoffrey) Clements (1594-1660) . . . was a member of the high court of justice that tried Charles I. . . . Extensive genealogical research has not revealed any [Clemens] family connection to Gregory.” 57 How much land in Tennessee did John Marshall leave to his heirs? “Ten years after his death, the family had ownership records for twenty-four tracts of unknown acreage. After surveying the land in 1858, Orion concluded that he could establish title to some 30,000 acres, less than half of the 75,000 acres that Clemens estimates.” Was eleven-year-old Sam Clemens “taken from school at once, upon my father’s death” in March of 1847? “Clemens remained in school part-time until at least 1849.” Did Livy suffer “a partial paralysis [at age sixteen] caused by falling on the ice” which was remedied by a miraculous two-day treatment given by the non-medical healer J. R. Newton? “She became ill earlier, and recovered later, than Clemens allowed. . . . Already ‘in very delicate health’ at the age of fourteen (1860), she was treated by doctors and spent time at the Elmira Water Cure, . . . a sanatorium in Washington, D.C., and then . . . the Institute of Swedish Movement Cure in New York City . . . [for] more than two years . . . [and finally] a second stay at the Movement Institute in 1866 [which] recovered her considerably.” When did Mark Twain and Livy Langdon first meet? “The dictation of 13 February 1906 states that they were introduced on 27 December 1867 and met again five days later; this ignores a known meeting on 31 December, when Clemens went with the Langdons to hear Dickens read at Steinway Hall. . . . It is possible that this, and not the twenty-seventh, was the day he met Olivia.” Is Twain correct in stating that his negligence was the cause of the illness and subsequent death of his first-born child? “[Langdon] died . . . from diphtheria. . . . In 1911 [Twain’s] sister-in-law, Susan L. Crane, remarked that ‘Mr Clemens was often inclined to blame himself unjustly.’”

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What royalties were paid by Twain’s publishing company to Julia Grant, the General’s widow? “The amount of money ultimately paid to Mrs. Grant has not been determined, but Webster Company records show that by 1 October 1887 she had received checks totaling about $397,000. . . . Clemens estimated that she received between $420,000 and $450,000.” Whatever happened to Huck Finn, that is, to Tom Blankenship, the prototype for Huck who, according to Twain, became a “Justice of the Peace in a remote village in Montana, and was a good citizen and greatly respected”? “Blankenship, who remained in Hannibal, was arrested repeatedly for stealing food. . . . No evidence has been found that he went to Montana.” Thus the notes to the Autobiography of Mark Twain, volumes 1 and 2, added to the notes of the six volumes of Twain letters already published by the Mark Twain Project, are creating an information bank that, when the two series are completed, will constitute the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Mark Twain we are ever likely to have. Until volume three of the Autobiography of Mark Twain is completed, the previous four editions of the Autobiography, especially those of DeVoto and Neider, will continue to have some value in making portions of the later dictations available to the public. However, when AMT 3 is issued, the earlier editions will be useful largely as museum pieces, demonstrating what Twain would call the wrong way to do his final, posthumous autobiography and illustrating the inaccurate ways he was presented to the public in his lifetime and for decades after his death. With the exuberance he often exhibited when literary work was going well, and with the prescience that enabled him to predict television, cell phones, forthcoming threats to democracies by religious and autocratic regimes, and devastating new engines of war, Twain wrote to Howells in the summer of 1906 that “The edition [of my autobiography] of AD. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out.” 58 He also made a note that things should be left out of the earlier editions, but in “the fifth—the whole Autobiography can go, unexpurgated.” 59 In 2010, exactly a century after his death, volume 1 of the fifth edition of the Autobiography of Mark Twain appeared, unexpurgated. It was a best seller. “THE RIGHT WAY TO DO AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY” I Mark Twain thought a good deal about his autobiography, and he scattered dozens of instructions and musings throughout his writings, dictations, and

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letters. It was to be candid, since it would be published “after my death. It may be five years from now, it may be ten, it may be fifty . . . even . . . a century,” and thus he did not have to pull his political and religious punches or worry about individuals feeling abused or embarrassed. 60 Twain thought that a true autobiography should be the autobiography of the mind. Since the mind, he believed, worked by association, the appropriate structure for autobiography is not the chronology of external events and carefully sorted facts, but a stream of mental associations. In his dictation on 16 October 1906 about old friends, Twain mentions that Joel Chandler Harris “was the bashfulest grown person I have ever met.” 61 Then, reaching back fifty-six years to his youth, he notes that “Jim Wolf was as bashful as Harris” and proceeds to unwind a tale about Jim’s stony immobility in the presence of ladies even though he was sitting in a colony of wasps. Often Twain begins a dictation, “with something which I have just read, or something which I have just been talking about. . . . As soon as I wander from the present text—the thought of to-day—that digression takes me far and wide over an uncharted sea of recollection.” 62 This structure—a present-tense dramatic framework that envelops events and sketches from earlier times—gives a dual perspective to Mark Twain’s autobiographical dictations. Occasionally the diary of the present is at odds with recollections of the past. On 8 March 1906, Twain received a letter from Aleck Tonkray, a Hannibal resident whose brother had been misidentified as the model for Huck Finn, and that triggered a cascade of reminiscences about schoolmates in the 1840s. The next day, a cablegram to Washington from the commander of U.S. forces in the Philippines was revealed in the press, and Twain dropped his amiable school-day recollections for a week in order to excoriate General Leonard Wood and President Roosevelt for the ruthless slaughter of natives that became known as the Moro Massacre. Most of the time, however, diary and history blend together in a ceaseless web of relationships that is only apparently random. The linked dictations made in mid-January 1906 provide a representative illustration. With his newly started autobiography on his mind, and having just given two speeches, Twain begins on 10 January by developing a concept of banquet speechmaking that has implications for autobiography as well. 63 The trick consists in living off the land. Twain describes a recent Players Club dinner, at which he asked to be placed last in the list of speakers. Those who preceded him tended to ignore each other’s remarks, for “they were trying to keep in mind the little preparations which they had made, and this prevented them from getting something new and fresh in the way of a text.” Mark Twain, on the other hand, coming empty-handed, listened carefully, “and these boys furnished plenty of texts for me, because my mind was not absorbed in trying to remember my preparations—they didn’t exist.” He then projects his plan for addressing the Gridiron Club, a group of newspaper

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correspondents whose invited guests included President Roosevelt and Vice President Fairbanks, for a banquet to be held on 27 January. All a speaker need do is prime himself by scanning the newspaper headlines for the day, and then turn his mind loose, since “life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.” Twain notes there is no lack of headline material for an after-dinner speaker in late January 1906, with Standard Oil battles, a threatened overhaul of the Panama Canal Commission, church and state contending in France, threat of war in Morocco, a failed revolution in Russia, and three U.S. Army regiments on the way to China; and to that full menu of topics can be added the Washington scandal of the day known as the Morris incident. Twain then pauses to describe the incident, which involved a Mrs. Minor Morris, “a lady of culture, refinement, and position,” who called at the White House to speak to the President and was thrown out—literally, for upon the orders of one of Theodore Roosevelt’s private secretaries, she was dragged out screaming and then carried bodily down the street by two policemen and a servant. Twain admits that this contretemps, while headline news at the moment, will soon be forgotten, but he insists that human life consists of little incidents as well as big ones, and he draws the moral for autobiography: “ An autobiography that leaves out the little things and enumerates only the big ones is no proper picture of the man’s life at all; his life consists of his feelings and his interests, with here and there an incident . . . big or little to hang the feelings on.” Twain finishes the day’s dictation by hanging a moral on the Morris incident: an impulsive, intemperate private secretary suggests an impulsive, intemperate Chief Executive. The trouble with Roosevelt is that “his newest interest is the one that absorbs him; absorbs the whole of him from his head to his feet, and for the time being it annihilates all previous opinions and feelings and convictions.” Mark Twain should know, we might add. In Roosevelt’s case, the result is “the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States” as well as “a sufficiently queer President.” The next day, 11 January 1906, having just dictated a letter responding to an inquiry concerning his Whittier Birthday speech in 1877, Twain comments on that earlier affair and inserts the entire speech. On the following day, he picks up the thread of speechmaking by discussing the dinner that Colonel Harvey arranged in honor of the author’s 70th birthday. He mentions that the dinner had to be moved from his actual birthday, 30 November, to 5 December, because President Roosevelt had declared 30 November to be Thanksgiving Day. After some comments not flattering to presidents or people who give thanks to God for exterminating American Indians, Twain turns to his birthday speech, which he “expected everybody to discount . . . 95 per cent.” That remark reminds him of his mother’s habit of discounting his “embroidery” and that word leads to “a jump of forty years [from 1845 to

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1885], without breaking the connection” when the word embroidery “was used again in my presence and concerning me.” The occasion was a meeting of the Monday Evening Club, a group of twenty prominent Hartford citizens and their wives. A dozen or so of the members would usually attend the fortnightly meetings, which consisted of the presentation of an essay on a current topic, ten-minute responses by the men, and then dinner. Twain presents a colorful history of this discussion group and its members, climaxed by a story about the night the Club met at the Clemenses’ residence where the only cigars available after dinner were the cheap kind that Twain purchased in boxes of 200 which, as butler George Griffin put it, “kill at thirty yards.” The cigars were handed round, lit, smoked for a few puffs, and then one after another the guests found excuses to leave, tossing their cigars away once they got outside the front door. The dictation continues with “now by this roundabout and gradual excursion I have arrived at that meeting of the Club at Reverend Frank Goodwin’s house which I spoke of a while back” when Twain was accused of embroidery. He first describes each of the speakers and what they had to say about dreams, the topic of the evening. What strikes him as most significant about their presentations is that each man—whether a clergyman, businessman, governor, editor, lawyer, or scholar—inevitably ended his comments with an unnecessary and distracting pious remark. That closes the dictation for 12 January 1906, but Twain picks up the topic without missing a beat on the 13th. He describes more pieties, gratuitous in his opinion, including that of William Franklin, formerly a major general and corps commander in the Civil War. Fed up with “these intolerable and inexcusable exudations of misplaced piety,” Twain tells the Club that “these tiresome damned prayermeetings might better be adjourned to the garret of some church, where they belonged.” This rebuke had an instant and lasting effect, and the concluding piety was abandoned at this and all future meetings of the Monday Evening Club. It was so effective that Mark Twain felt a little chagrined, which perhaps explains why he was able to remember that particular evening in such detail twenty years later. He goes on to express his regret in a conventional manner, and then reconsiders: “Possibly when I said that about regret, I was doing what people so often unconsciously do, trying to place myself in a favorable light after having made a confession that makes such a thing more or less difficult. No, I think it quite likely that I never regretted it at all.” Twain then recounts his contribution to the Club’s discussion at Frank Goodwin’s house—his description of a vivid dream he had in 1858, which seemed to foreshadow, in precise detail, the death of Henry Clemens a few weeks later. The next dictation, on 15 January, begins with Nathaniel Burton’s skeptical response to Mark Twain’s dream, which he suggests was embroidered, followed by Twain’s defense. He then moves on to a tale about the burglar alarm in Goodwin’s house, and to another tale about the Morris

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wallpaper in the house of Goodwin’s father, and that reminds him of Mrs. Morris, so he inserts verbatim into his autobiography the New York Times account of the Morris incident he had discussed five days earlier. Such is Mark Twain’s method in the late dictations, organized by his process of thought rather than by the chronology of events. Each section usually begins with either a continuation of the previous dictation or with whatever he has been thinking about at the time—a newspaper article just read, a letter received prior to the morning’s dictation, a recent event attended, an entry from Susy’s or Livy’s diary, a current election, an anniversary, one of his published works—and then wanders far and wide over personal reminiscences, history, philosophy, politics, and religion, taking note of striking contrasts, odd coincidences, humorous happenings, and behavior characteristic of the author and all humankind. It is a stroll, rather than a march, with the feel of coffeehouse conversation rather than desktop lucubration—a richly unconventional approach to a remarkably unconventional life and career, a high-wire operation that could be sustained only by a brilliant talker and storyteller. II Mark Twain’s Autobiography is his most extreme demonstration of the composite order of literary architecture. It consists of hundreds of stories, sketches, vignettes, facts, tallish tales, reminiscences, anecdotes, reports, essays, opinions, comments, and information about the composition and issue of his works. Interpolated into this matrix are newspaper articles, letters received and sent, telegrams, and family documents. Composed across many years and many moods, Twain’s autobiographical writings and dictations are by turns comic, satiric, ironic, tragic, sentimental, iconoclastic, lighthearted, and heavy-handed, and they well depict many of the exterior and some of the interior worlds of their remarkable author. The Autobiography follows no geographical or chronological template, but manages in the course of its hundreds of thousands of words to stop at Twain’s many residences and ports of call, which in the early years stretched from the Mississippi west to the Sandwich Islands, and from New York City and Washington D.C. east to Palestine, then centered around Hartford and Elmira, later included major cities and retreats in Europe and around the world, and finally ended in New York and Connecticut. Twain takes us inside his uncle’s farmhouse and slave quarters, his brother’s print shops, steamboat pilothouses, mining camps, editorial offices, the Christy minstrel show in St. Louis, Carnegie Hall, the Hartford Monday Evening Club, the New York Players Club. His autobiographical narratives stretch from a preindustrial America where John Marshall Clemens could purchase many thousands of acres of northeast Tennessee for a few hundred dollars, through the “raging, tearing, booming nine-

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teenth century,” 64 to the presidency of William Howard Taft and a modern world whose technological marvels seemed unable to counter, and in some ways increased, economic injustice, political corruption, tyrannical government, and war. Twain’s acquaintances, like his geographical travels, were numerous and diverse. He talks a good deal in his Autobiography about his family, especially his mother (“a slender small body, but a large heart”), his elder brother Orion (“the strangest compound that ever got mixed in a human mould”), young Henry (“Sid in Tom Sawyer, but . . . a very much finer and better boy than ever Sid was”), Livy (“whose memory is the only thing I worship”), and his daughters. 65 His three best friends inspire many anecdotes and much praise: Howells (“fine thought and perfect wording are [his] natural gift”), Twichell (“We used to laugh ourselves lame and sore”), and Rogers (“one of the best friends I ever had, and the nearest perfect, as man and gentleman, I have yet met among my race”). 66 In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain notes that his piloting days made him “personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history.” 67 But that was only in America and Twain was only in his mid-twenties. The number of his acquaintances increased with age and fame, and the indexes to the complete Autobiography of Mark Twain will constitute a miniature Who’s Who in America and Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth. Many of the people Twain knew and commented on were authors: Ambrose Bierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, George Washington Cable, Joaquin Miller, Joel Chandler Harris, James Russell Lowell, Finley Peter Dunne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, J. M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling. Others were politicians and leading figures in science and industry and culture: Presidents Grant, Hayes, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt; John Hay, John Burroughs, Carl Schurz, John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Jr., Thomas Nast, territorial Governor and U.S. Senator James W. Nye, Henry Ward Beecher, General Nelson Miles, Edwin Booth, Andrew Carnegie, Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, S. F. B. Morse, Guglielmo Marconi, Henry and Lady Stanley, Winston Churchill, Archdeacon Wilberforce, Herbert Spencer, Ellen Terry, Henry Irving. On 20 February 1892, at a private dinner in Berlin, Mark Twain was seated at the right hand of Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, and across from the Emperor’s brother, Prince Heinrich. According to Twain’s later autobiographical account, expanded considerably from the note he made at the time, his eleven-year-old daughter Jean exclaimed, “Why, papa, if it keeps going on like this, pretty soon there won’t be anybody left for you to get acquainted with but God.” 68 In spite of his famous friends, Twain notes that “I rejoice when a king or a duke comes my way and makes himself useful to this

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autobiography, but they are rare customers; . . . for real business I depend upon the common herd.” 69 Many of his best sketches concern people known to history only through Mark Twain’s reminiscences. Wales McCormick is one, a printer’s apprentice who worked alongside Sam Clemens, on Joseph P. Ament’s Hannibal Missouri Courier. Stuck on a Saturday with printing a sermon by visiting preacher Alexander Campbell, McCormick found it necessary to correct a typesetting mistake by shortening a line, which he did by reducing “Jesus Christ” to “J. C.” Quick to spot the change in proof, Campbell came thundering down on the boys, commanding them to never diminish the name of the Savior, to “put it all in.” Whereupon, in the next take, McCormick upgraded “J. C.” to “Jesus H. Christ.” 70 Another colorful character in Twain’s common herd was Maria McLaughlin, a wet nurse hired for Clara in 1874-75: There was never any wet-nurse like that one—the unique, the sublime, the unapproachable! She stood six feet in her stockings, she was perfect in form and contour, raven-haired, dark as an Indian, stately, carrying her head like an empress. . . . She was as healthy as iron, she had the appetite of a crocodile, the stomach of a cellar, and the digestion of a quartz-mill. Scorning the adamantine law that a wet-nurse must partake of delicate things only, she devoured anything and everything she could get her hands on, shoveling into her person fiendish combinations of fresh pork, lemon pie, boiled cabbage, ice cream, green apples, pickled tripe, raw turnips, and washing the cargo down with freshets of coffee, tea, brandy, whisky . . . anything that was liquid; she smoked pipes, cigars, cigarettes, she whooped like a Pawnee and swore like a demon; and then she would go upstairs loaded as described and perfectly delight the baby with a banquet which ought to have killed it at thirty yards, but which only made it happy and fat and boozy. 71

Another category of persons of interest to the Autobiography concerns those against whom Mark Twain held a grudge. He felt that Lilian Aldrich had treated him shabbily, and he replied in kind, confessing that he was “perhaps prejudiced”: “I do not believe I could ever learn to like her except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.” 72 Marie Corelli, as the romantic novelist Mary Mackay called herself, inveigled Twain into visiting her home at Stratford-on-Avon during his trip to Oxford in 1907, and set up a series of entertainments surreptitiously designed to aggrandize herself. He reports that “she is the most offensive sham, inside and out, that misrepresents and satirizes the human race today.” 73 Twain vigorously resented being taken advantage of, sometimes without having much evidence, and he pitches into almost all of his various publishers, including the nephew-in-law he hired, for financial malfeasance. He also takes pot shots at various public figures, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie, though here there

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is some ambiguity since Twain confesses at times to liking both men. His chief complaint against the President is that Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off, and he would go to hell for a whole one. 74

When President Roosevelt, along with Mark Twain and Howells, was in New Haven in 1901 for an honorary degree, he asked Twain about the wisdom of a controversial presidential decision to invite Booker T. Washington to a White House luncheon. Twain’s reply was surprisingly muffled, given his clear admiration for Washington. Apparently he felt he had been one-upped by Roosevelt, and his criticism of the President’s Tom Sawyerism may suggest something about his own showy side. Andrew Carnegie comes in for criticism in terms that may also reflect back on Mark Twain. In conversation, according to Twain, Carnegie has “but one theme, himself.” Not that he brags about his long climb upward and his many accomplishments. Rather, he talks constantly of “the attentions which have been shown him,” especially by the world’s great men: King Edward VII, President Roosevelt, Kaiser Wilhelm II. 75 When he is with Carnegie, Twain tolerates the telling and retelling of these attentions, explaining that all people wish to be associated with those of high rank and can refrain only with difficulty from mentioning whatever regal contacts they may have had. He boasts that he himself has abandoned the game of name-dropping, and then qualifies his boast by playing a trump card: In my own case, I have so carefully and persistently trained myself in this kind of self-denial that today I can look on calm and unmoved when a returned American is casually and gratefully playing the earls he has met; I can look on, silent and unexcited, and never offer to call his hand, although I have three kings and a pair of emperors up my sleeve. 76

Perhaps Twain’s criticism of Carnegie, Roosevelt, Mary Baker Eddy, and others stems in part from his perception, conscious or subconscious, that they were competitors for the public’s attention. Bret Harte may fit that category as well, at least in the early days, for Mark Twain was vexed to be enrolled by critics and reviewers in the Bret Harte School of Western American Fiction, and even more unhappy with the accusation in 1870 that he had plagiarized from Harte. Bret Harte died in 1902, in London, after 24 years of self-imposed exile from America and from his wife and family—a desertion, according to Twain, that he found unforgivable. A few years later, Harte was the target of four days of Twain’s dictation:

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Much of the pyrotechnics in these attacks on Harte and others is genuine, though Mark Twain enjoyed letting himself loose and has such a rollicking good time with his antagonists that the bitter edge is sometimes smoothed off. He also relents at times, even with Bret Harte, as is demonstrated in the concluding philosophical section, omitted by DeVoto in Mark Twain in Eruption, which asserts that human beings inherit certain temperaments which their lives play out with the relentless and immutable logic that commands the lion to bite and the rabbit to run. I have been heaping blame after blame, censure after censure, upon Bret Harte, and have felt the things I have said, but when my temper is cool I have no censures for him. The law of his nature was stronger than man’s statutes and he had to obey it. It is my conviction that the human race is no proper target for harsh words and bitter criticisms, and that the only justifiable feeling toward it is compassion; it did not invent itself, and it had nothing to do with the planning of its weak and foolish character. 78

Mark Twain’s criticism of Bret Harte and others raises the issue of how much his Autobiography is to be trusted. Just how candid is he, and how accurate is his tale? Twain talks repeatedly about speaking from the grave, and instructs future editors to suppress all possibly hurtful comments “until all whom they could pain shall be at rest in their graves.” Such doubly posthumous publication, he claims, leaves him unrestrained by the decorum that muffles so much human interaction. It allows him to “speak frankly and freely,” 79 with a kind of unique candor that has escaped other autobiographers. W. D. Howells was not fooled: You always rather bewildered me by your veracity, and I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself. But all of it? The black truth, which we all know of ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even you wont tell the black heart’struth. 80

Of course Howells was right, as Twain admitted on 6 April 1906, after three months of dictating: “I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet.” 81 The remarks he made earlier about Mary

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Baker Eddy’s autobiographical Retrospection and Introspection have come home to roost: An autobiography is the most treacherous thing there is. It lets out every secret its author is trying to keep; it lets the truth shine unobstructed through every harmless little deception he tries to play; it pitilessly exposes him as a tin hero worshiping himself as Big Metal every time he tries to do the modest-unconsciousness act before the reader. This is not guessing; I am speaking from autobiographical personal experience; I was never able to refrain from mentioning, with a studied casualness that could deceive none but the most incautious reader, that an ancestor of mine was sent ambassador to Spain by Charles I, nor that in a remote branch of my family there exists a claimant to an earldom, nor that an uncle of mine used to own a dog that was descended from the dog that was in the Ark; and at the same time I was never able to persuade myself to call a gibbet by its right name when accounting for other ancestors of mine, but always spoke of it as the “platform”—puerilely intimating that they were out lecturing when it happened. 82

Twain’s candor is outer rather than inner-directed, and while he tells episodes about his own blundering when they make good stories, and he wryly comments on the flaws he has in common with others, he omits many episodes that continued to be painful. There is no mention of what went wrong at Bryn Mawr for Susy. Twain found it difficult to acknowledge and deal with Jean’s epilepsy, which perhaps affected him almost as much as Susy’s death. He says little in the dictations about the collapse of his household organization after he returned to the U.S. following Livy’s death in Florence in 1904, though he says a great deal about it, in painful detail, in the unpublished Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript. Twain had always maintained that Livy was weak in body but strong in spirit, and that it was she who held a complicated household together, managed the servants, and brought up the girls with “foresight, wisdom, accurate calculation, good judgment and the ability to see all sides of a problem.” 83 Her death proved him correct, for with his daughters unsettled and with accusations and recriminations concerning both his secretary/household manager and his business manager, Twain’s life had passed from the idyll of the Hartford-Elmira time, to the determined recovery in the years spent abroad, to soap opera. The latter phase was finally ended in 1909 with the firing of Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft, Clara’s marriage, and the return of Jean from sanatoriums to be happily reunited with her father at Stormfield for the rest of her short life. Thus Mark Twain, like other autobiographers, tosses garlands to friends, raspberries to his enemies, puts his most impressive foot forward, gives a one-sided version of disputes, and is not above gloating, reporting with glee the statement publisher George Carlton made many years after turning down Twain’s first book of sketches: “for this I stand without competitor as the

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prize ass of the nineteenth century.” 84 Yet, to his credit, Twain doesn’t exempt himself entirely from criticism. He notes that his first platform readings with G. W. Cable were “a botch,” reluctantly concedes that business sense is “a talent which [I] do not possess,” and confesses to a “dull head in the matter of conundrums and perplexities.” 85 He admits to vanity, foolishness, prejudice, indiscretion, meanness, selfishness, heedlessness, and being “born to indolence, idleness, procrastination, indifference—the qualities that constitute a shirk,” though the tales corroborating these criticisms often contain a subtle redemption: the author as hero as well as goat. 86 Twain reports not being trusted by Livy to remove his overshoes at a reception, but the reception just happens to be at the White House during the first term of Cleveland’s presidency. The Cleveland story has it both ways, as do many of Twain’s self-deprecating, self-justifying, self-aggrandizing narratives; and as does the Autobiography as a whole. Throughout, he sees himself as gifted, independent-minded, a best-selling author, and a humorist whose creations seem to have escaped the trap of ephemerality that dooms most humor; yet he also avows his full share of the negative traits he finds in all people: “I am only human, although I regret it.” 87 If Mark Twain’s candor is a very speckled egg, how about his truth? Here too, there are many complexities, many different kinds of truths, different ways in which his Autobiography can be believed. When John Hay, three years younger than Twain and raised upriver from Hannibal in Warsaw, Illinois, read the first installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi” in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1874, he wrote to Twain that he had perfectly captured the levee scenes and people of an earlier day, and congratulated him on having “the two greatest gifts of the writer, memory and imagination.” 88 Mark Twain’s memory enabled him to vividly reconstruct the past in semiautobiographical works like “Old Times” and in the Autobiography itself. In a remarkable section of the latter, composed in Vienna in 1897-98, Twain recreates the sights and sounds and feel of his uncle’s inland farm in the mid 1840s, where young Sam Clemens spent his summers. His 12,000-word reminiscence, with its cornucopia of details introduced by “I remember . . . I can see . . . I can feel again . . . I know how . . . I can hear” and the like, richly fulfils his boast that “I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was.” 89 Similarly, notes that Mark Twain jotted down in “Villagers of 1840[5]3” in Switzerland in the summer of 1897 have the snap of fact and the crispness of accuracy, and these can be verified. His list of 168 mid-nineteenth-century Hannibal residents, along with their histories, vocations, religious beliefs, holidays, sentimental songs, marriages, adulteries, drunkenness, and murders, “prove to be entirely correct” according to Walter Blair, “with remarkably few exceptions.” 90 Sharp as Mark Twain’s memory could be, there are minor factual errors in his Autobiography, since he ranges over the events of almost seven

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decades without, for the most part, using notes, or consulting documents or even his own published works. And his stenographer, his secretary, and his biographer were not disposed to question statements of the man they called “the King.” Fact checking was not in their job descriptions. Twain’s dates, for example, are sometimes off by a year or two, and occasionally by more. He gives Bret Harte’s residence in Europe as 26 years, instead of 24. The meeting with George Carlton referred to above took place, according to Mark Twain, in Lucerne, 21 years after Carlton’s rejection of The Jumping Frog and Other Sketches, which would make it 1888. Twain, however, was in America throughout the 1880s. He was in Lucerne in 1878, 1891-92, and 1897. Twain’s story about Orion coming to Hannibal at night from St. Louis, and climbing into bed with two old maids in the house the Clemenses had recently vacated, could not have happened the way he tells it. Twain claims that Orion was 23 or 24 years old, and mistook one of the old maids in the dark for their brother Ben. Orion would have been 23 or 24 in 1848-49; Benjamin Clemens died in 1842. On another occasion, describing the first lecture series following his Cooper Union address, Twain stated that “I don’t believe these details are right, but I don’t care a rap. They will do just as well as the facts.” 91 This statement is often quoted as an example of Mark Twain’s tendency to ignore factual precision in favor of the high ground of the imagination, but the rest of the statement suggests he is aiming for at least approximate accuracy. “What I mean to say is, that I don’t know whether I made that lecturing excursion in that year or whether it was the following year. But the main thing is that I made it.” In fact, the Cooper Union speech was made on 6 May 1867, shortly before Twain departed for Europe on the Quaker City. The lecturing excursion was the following year, in the fall of 1868 and spring of 1869. In addition to approximations and minor mistakes, the Autobiography contains a number of things Mark Twain either misremembered or forgot. He claimed he made two voyages with Captain Wakeman, but apparently it was one voyage and another meeting on land. He forgot that he had written the Snodgrass letters in 1856-57. He confused the sequence of James Osgood’s publication of three of his books. He inadvertently listed “Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Crane” among the old friends who tended Susy in her last hours in 1896, although Theodore died in 1889. He misremembered his blue jay story in A Tramp Abroad as “a tale of . . . innocent and ignorant woodpeckers.” 92 He incorrectly reported the destruction of manuscripts that have survived. In a dictation made nine years after the report-of-my-death statement, Twain apparently remembered it as spoken rather than written. He claimed that after assiduously courting Laura Wright for three days in May 1859, he “hadn’t seen her for forty-eight years” and that “no word has ever passed between us since,” but there is evidence that he both corresponded with and visited her after their initial meeting. 93 In some cases, Mark Twain may be passing

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along bits of family history that were inaccurately handed down to him. He mistakenly believed his father had been “elected County Judge by a great majority,” and that he was “taken from school at once, upon my father’s death.” 94 And finally, there are flat out errors. Twain repeatedly used Old Times on the Mississippi as the title for Life on the Mississippi, and he inveighs against the concept of immaculate conception—a doctrine asserting that Mary was born free of original sin—when he means the virgin birth of Jesus. A very different kind of inaccuracy in Mark Twain’s Autobiography concerns intentional distortions of truth. Perhaps the most obvious are the comic exaggerations that Twain could not resist, even in his seventies. In describing the cast-off clothing furnished to him as a printer’s apprentice by the proprietor of the Hannibal Courier, Twain states that “I had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them short enough.” When, left by himself on the third floor of the Courier office building, he ate half a watermelon “until the juice ran out of my ears,” and then dropped the hollow shell on his brother Henry, who was passing by on the street below: “That shell smashed down right on the top of his head and drove him into the earth up to the chin.” 95 The Unabridged Dictionary that Sam and Orion Clemens carted out to Nevada “weighed about a thousand pounds, and was a ruinous expense, because the stage-coach Company charged for extra baggage by the ounce.” 96 When Twain lets out a yell in Mary Mapes Dodge’s dining room, “the entire dinner company jumped as one person, and punched their heads through the ceiling, damaging it, for it was only lath and plaster, and it all came down on us, and much of it went into the victuals and made them gritty, but no one was hurt.” 97 Beyond these comic inflations are whole-cloth stories that drift toward tall tales, such as those concerning the fleecing of Captain Osborn by a wandering tramp in San Francisco, Captain Isaiah Sellers’ use of the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” and possibly the misanthropic Macfarlane in Cincinnati, who may or may not have existed. 98 More subtle, and many more in number, are the episodes in the Autobiography in which imagination mingles with memory, and in this respect Twain demonstrates precisely what Wallace Stegner said of himself late in his career: “I have tried autobiography and found that I am not to be trusted with it. I hate the restrictiveness of facts; I can’t control my impulse to rearrange, suppress, add, heighten, invent, and improve. Accuracy means less to me than suggestiveness; my memory is as much an inventor as a recorder.” 99 Like Stegner, Mark Twain had a multiplying imagination. Many autobiographical tales are based on a factual episode which is nudged into a better story by a sharper contrast, a more poignant conclusion, a heightened irony. The jumping frog sketch, Twain claimed, “appeared in the last number” of the New York Saturday Press in November 1865, “and killed it on the spot.” 100 Actually, the Saturday Press published two more Twain sketches,

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and did not expire until June 1866. In his enthusiastic attack on blind party loyalty and the support of most of the Hartford community for Republican James G. Blaine (“an unscrupulous scoundrel” according to Twain) in the 1884 presidential election, 101 Twain states that the few holdouts were pressured and punished: Charles Dudley Warner was forced to resign the editorship of the Hartford Courant and Joe Twichell narrowly escaped being dismissed by his congregation. Neither of those events happened, although there was much debate with those, like Twain, who bolted the party to vote for the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland. On 28 September 1868, Mark Twain was leaving the Langdons in Elmira, after a one-day visit, when he tumbled out of a wagon with a loose seat and stayed over another day. Almost forty years later, in an autobiographical dictation, he recalled the accident happened after a week’s visit, and that, feigning injury, he “got a good three days’ extension [which] pushed my suit [with Livy] forward several steps.” 102 Other tales that leap beyond the restrictiveness of facts include Jim Gillis and the inedible greengages, Jim Wolf and the cats, the Hannibal mesmerizer, and swearing in the bathroom. Mark Twain’s embroideries and over-the-top exaggerations serve to brisken up a story and to provide an enjoyable contrast between real and fanciful experience, “yet,” he writes, “all through my life my facts have had a substratum of truth.” 103 Sometimes he feels the need to create signposts for the reader pointing out that truth. Fascinated with numbers in the millions and billions that were coming into use in astronomical science, Twain notes that “light year” is “the most stupendous and impressive phrase that exists in any language.” 104 He prefaces this remark with “without doubt.” Similarly, his attack on the king of Belgium— “In fourteen years, Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battle-fields of this planet for the past thousand years”—is followed by “In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives within the mark.” 105 Usually, however, he is content to state, as he does after the tale of General Miles and the twice-sold dog, that “some of it is true,” and let readers sort it out for themselves. 106 Mark Twain’s soaring imagination can leave literal truth in tatters, but he is after larger game, as he explains in an autobiographical dictation that harks back to his farcical account in A Tramp Abroad of the duel between M.M. Fourtou and Gambetta, an explanation that represents the Twainian truth of the Autobiography as a whole: the “account . . . had some inaccuracies in it, but as an exhibition of the spirit of that duel, I think it was correct and trustworthy.” 107 A final question remains. Do the three hundred or so writings and dictations that make up Mark Twain’s Autobiography have enough unity to constitute a coherent literary work? Composed over many years, these associative, nonchronological segments, with their various scenes and characters and their varying levels of candor and truth, are given a kind of unity by a

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series of ideas about which the author circles and to which he repeatedly returns. God is and will always remain inscrutable, Providence is a “superstition,” and long ago, Twain states, “I . . . lost my belief in immortality—also my interest in it.” Death for him is not a stairway to paradise but an anodyne for the pains of earthly mortality: “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born.” 108 Man, on the other hand, is all too scrutable. We know what man is because human nature doesn’t change over time, and because each person is a microcosm, containing both defects and virtues that are mixed together and expressed individually for each person by circumstance. The virtues include the bonds of community and compassion for those in need; the defects make up a longer list. Most humans, according to Mark Twain, including those who write autobiographies, are cowed by public opinion. They put self-interest first, and worship material gain and persons of higher status. Human obeisance to “gauds, titles, distinctions, power” may ultimately, in Twain’s view, lead democracy to drift into monarchy, or perhaps an imperial presidency. 109 He is skeptical about political parties and jingoistic patriotism, and distrusts “vast power and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruption,” 110 yet he believes that humans have the capacity to reform corruption and resist the drift to autocracy, just as he finds some shards of optimism in his experience that “hard-hearted people are very rare everywhere.” 111 Mark Twain both playfully and seriously excoriates the “damned human race,” but his excoriation is qualified by his belief that we are damned by fate not, or at least not entirely, of our own making. And withal, humans have one saving attribute, denied even to the God that we have created: “We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision true—humor.” 112 Humor suggests a second kind of unity in the Autobiography, created by the instantly recognizable voice of the narrator. However varied their topics, these tales are vintage Mark Twain—vintage in that most of them were composed near the end of his life, and vintage also in that they are representative of his whole career. Twain is able to sketch an autobiographical scene in a sentence or two, and capture character with a bit of dialogue. He demonstrates a kaleidoscope of tones—amiable, mocking, sentimental, acerbic, wise, and wise-cracking—and plays across the full humorous range of comedy, satire, and irony, fulfilling the prophecy of Charles Henry Webb, who, way back in 1867, predicted in his preface to The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches that its author would be known as The Moralist of the Main as well as The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope. Many a page of the Autobiography demonstrates what Webb defined even then as the “quaint similes, keen satire, and hard good sense which form the staple of his writings.” Twain reports that just after he and Livy were married, “Ellen, the cook, came in to get orders for the morning’s marketing—

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and neither of us knew whether beefsteak was sold by the barrel or by the yard.” 113 When told that Grant wished to have Twain’s opinion about the literary quality of the general’s memoirs, he “was as much surprised as Columbus’s cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating.” 114 Twain is skeptical about the virgin birth of Jesus because its “authenticity rests entirely upon human testimony—the testimony of but one human being, the Virgin herself, a witness not disinterested.” 115 He defines the difference between presidents Cleveland and Roosevelt as “the contrast between an archangel and the Missing Link.” 116 He quotes Carlyle’s statement that “a lie cannot live” and comments “It shows that he did not know how to tell them.” 117 And he concludes that “we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.” 118 Much of this humor is what Howells called “good-natured self-satire,” and it governs many short quips and aphorisms as well as entire tales, such as Twain’s extended account of the “new sport” of dueling, which became fashionable in Virginia City when he was city editor of the Territorial Enterprise. No young man at the time was able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one himself. . . . I was ambitious in several ways, but I had entirely escaped the seductions of that particular craze. I had had no desire to fight a duel; I had no intention of provoking one. I did not feel respectable, but I got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe. I was ashamed of myself; the rest of the staff were ashamed of me—but I got along well enough. I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation. 119

Thus the Autobiography presents many sides of the many-sided Mark Twain, and it proves two crucial facts about his life and career. In spite of his troubles, Twain was not “tormented and faltering” 120 at the end of his life, though on occasion, and often for cause, he could be cantankerous and irascible; and he was certainly not silenced after The Mysterious Stranger, when, according to H. N. Smith, he had “nothing more to say.” He had a lot more to say, and now that it is finally and accurately being published in its entirety, the Autobiography can be seen as Twain’s last major work, and one that appropriately closes out his half century as a humorist. In Vienna in 1898, with renewed interest in his Autobiography, Mark Twain made an entry entitled “Life” in his notebook that might well serve as his—he would say mankind’s—epitaph: We laugh and laugh, Then cry and cry— Then feebler laugh,

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But the work of genius lives on. When we recently commemorated the centennial of the death of America’s, perhaps the world’s, most extraordinary and most complex humorist, it was clear that his writings are still very much alive.

Appendix

BOOKS BY MARK TWAIN: A SELECTED LIST OF AMERICAN EDITIONS PUBLISHED IN HIS LIFETIME Mark Twain’s works were aggressively marketed during his career, especially after his own publishing company was forced into bankruptcy in 1894. During the mid and late 1890s, his writings were simultaneously published by the American Publishing Company and Harper & Brothers, and after 1897, a number of multivolume editions appeared. Many of his published sketches, stories, and essays were reissued in overlapping single-volume collections, often miscellaneously and unchronologically arranged. Several shorter works, particularly in Twain’s last decade, were issued separately as small books or pamphlets. Beyond these, various ephemeral works, pirated editions, and unauthorized collections emerged from time to time. If redundancies are factored out, Mark Twain produced about three dozen volumes in the forty-two years from 1867 to 1909. Works that are currently available in definitive, hardbound University of California Press editions, with the original illustrations, are indicated by a UCP designation; compact, inexpensively priced Mark Twain Library editions, also published by the University of California Press—in both paper and hard cover—are designated as ucp. All of the volumes listed below, with minor rearrangements and two exceptions noted, are available in The Oxford Mark Twain, 1996, a 29-volume facsimile edition of American first editions of Twain’s works as they appeared, most of them with illustrations, in his lifetime. 1867 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches [the title page reads And other]. New York: C. H. Webb. 198 pp.; 27 sketches, inc. 5 concerning Hawaii. Unhappy with the “dam427

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nable errors” and low sales of this volume, and thinking it might be in conflict with his American Publishing Co. contract, Twain bought the plates and destroyed them in 1870. 1869 The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress; Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; With Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, As They Appeared to the Author. Hartford: American Publishing Co. 1872 Roughing It. Hartford: American Publishing Co. UCP (1972, revised edition 1993), ucp. Vol. 2 of the 2-volume Routledge & Sons English edition was entitled The Innocents at Home. 1873 The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day. Hartford: American Publishing Co. Coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner. 1875 Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old. Hartford: American Publishing Co. 316 pp.; 63 sketches, inc. 9 from the 1867 collection; others reprinted largely from the Galaxy, a New York monthly magazine, and the Buffalo Express, a daily newspaper co-owned and co-edited by Twain from 1869 to 1871. 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with illustrations by True Williams. Hartford: American Publishing Co. UCP, ucp. The California edition contains The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896). The latter two are also available together in a California Mark Twain Library edition, as is, separately, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 1880 A Tramp Abroad. Hartford: American Publishing Co. 1881 The Prince and the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages. Boston: James R. Osgood. The title page is dated 1882, but the book was printed and officially issued late in 1881. UCP, ucp. 1882 The Stolen White Elephant, Etc. Boston: James R. Osgood. 306 pp.; title story plus 17 additional stories, sketches, and speeches. 1883 Life on the Mississippi. Boston: James R. Osgood. Chs. 4-17 originally published as “Old Times on the Mississippi” in the Atlantic Monthly, January-June and August, 1875. 1885 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with illustrations by E. W. Kemble. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. UCP (1988, revised edition 2002, the first edition to take into account Twain’s original manuscript, the first half of which was not discovered until 1990), ucp. Published in England as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in December 1884, two months before the America edition was issued. 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, with illustrations by Daniel C. Beard. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. UCP, ucp.

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1892 Merry Tales. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. 209 pp.; 7 pieces, inc. Meisterschaft, a three-act play interweaving English and German. 1892 The American Claimant. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. First published in the New York Sun, January-March, 1892. Later Harper editions, entitled The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches, combined The American Claimant with the stories from Merry Tales and The £1,000,000 Bank-Note. 1893 The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. 260 pp.; 9 selections, including long quotations—some 22,000 words—from a sentimental novella of “romantic powwow and confusion” by Samuel Watson Royston. 1894 Tom Sawyer Abroad, By Huck Finn, Edited by Mark Twain (serialized in St. Nicholas magazine, Nov. 1893-Apr. 1894). New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. UCP, ucp. See entry above for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). 1894 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson; And the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins (serialized in Century Magazine, December 1893June 1894, as “Pudd'nhead Wilson, A Tale”). Hartford: American Publishing Co. Later Harper editions were entitled Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins. 1896 Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective; and Other Stories, Etc., Etc. New York: Harper & Bros. 410 pp.; title stories, plus reprints of 18 others. See entry above for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). 1896 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by the Sieur Louis de Conte (Her Page and Secretary); Freely Translated Out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the National Archives of France by Jean François Alden. New York: Harper & Bros. Originally published anonymously in Harper’s Monthly, April 1895-April 1896. Book publication carried “Mark Twain” on the cover, but not on the title page. 1897 How to Tell a Story and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Bros. 233 pp.; 8 essays, devoted largely to reviews of works by J. F. Cooper, Paul Bourget, Paul Blouet, and Shelley biographer Edward Dowden. Harper’s issued an enlarged edition in 1899, entitled Literary Essays, which reprinted the eight essays from the 1897 edition and added eight more pieces, including Twain’s poem “In Memoriam” and Samuel Moffett’s “Mark Twain: A Biographical Sketch.” In May 1900, the American Publishing Co. issued their version of Harper’s enlarged edition with Harper’s original title, How to Tell a Story and Other Essays.

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1897 Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Hartford: American Publishing Co. Twain’s last volume to be published by subscription, and the first to include photographs in addition to illustrations. Issued in England, with textual changes and no illustrations, as More Tramps Abroad. 1900 The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays. New York: Harper & Bros. 398 pp.; collects 15 magazine and newspaper articles published from 1893 to 1900. 1902 A Double-Barrelled Detective Story. New York: Harper & Bros. First published in Harper’s Monthly, January-February, 1902. Reprinted in My Début as a Literary Person with Other Essays and Stories (1903) and in The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906). 1903 My Début as a Literary Person with Other Essays and Stories. Hartford: American Publishing Co. 367 pp.; title story and 13 others, inc. A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, all previously published. This volume was the American Publishing Co.’s last, since a contract in 1903 made Harper & Bros. the exclusive publisher of Twain’s works. It is not included in the Oxford Mark Twain edition, for eight of these essays and stories are available in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays, and the other six are in The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories. 1904 A Dog’s Tale. New York: Harper & Bros. 35 pp., about 4700 words, illustrated by W. T. Smedley. First published in Harper’s Monthly, December 1903; then reprinted as a pamphlet and distributed by the National Anti-Vivisection Society of Great Britain. 1904 Extracts from Adam’s Diary, Translated from the Original MS. 89 pp., 4400 words, with 45 illustrations by Frederick Strothmann. New York: Harper & Bros. Revised from the first publication in 1893 in The Niagara Book, and revised again, for inclusion in The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories in 1906. 1905 King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule. Boston: P. R. Warren Co. 1906 What Is Man? New York: De Vinne Press. UCP. Written in 1898, revised 1898-1904, privately and anonymously published in an edition, not offered for sale, of 250 copies in August 1906, two years after the death of his wife, who, Twain reported in 1899, “loathes, & shudders over [it], & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it.” 1906 Eve’s Diary, Translated from the Original MS., with an interpolated “Extract from Adam’s Diary” and 55 illustrations by Lester Ralph. New York: Harper & Bros. First published in Harper’s Monthly in December 1905.

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1906 The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Bros. 523 pp.; 38 pieces, inc. “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (published as a book in 1902) and “A Biographical Sketch” by Mark Twain’s nephew (and namesake) Samuel E. Moffett. 1906-07 “Chapters from My Autobiography,” North American Review, September 1906 to December 1907. These 25 chapters were reprinted in book format in 1990; differing selected editions of Twain’s autobiographical writings and dictations were published in 1924, 1940, and 1959. A comprehensive, definitive three-volume edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography is being issued by the University of California Press; volume one appeared in 2010, volume two in 2013. 1907 Christian Science, With Notes Containing Corrections To Date. New York: Harper & Bros. UCP (in What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings). The nine chapters of Book I and one chapter in Book II were originally published as five articles in Cosmopolitan and the North America Review between 1899 and 1903. 1907 A Horse’s Tale, with five illustrations by Lucius Hitchcock. New York: Harper & Bros. First published in Harper’s Monthly in August and September 1906; not included in the Oxford Mark Twain edition. 1909 Is Shakespeare Dead? from My Autobiography. New York: Harper & Bros. 1909 Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. New York: Harper & Bros. First published, in part, in Harper’s Monthly, December 1907 and January 1908. 1916 (posthumously published) The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance, as abbreviated, revised, and heavily edited by A. B. Paine and Frederick Duneka; with 7 full-page color illustrations by N. C. Wyeth. Serialized in Harper’s Monthly, May-November; book publication by Harper & Bros. in October. Reprinted in The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (edited by Paine, issued by Harper’s in 1922) and as vol. 27 of The Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition in 1923 (introduction by Paine). A corrected, truly definitive edition, Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, was issued by the University of California Press in 1969. TALES AND SKETCHES Mark Twain wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands, of signed and unsigned articles, sketches, and tales from the beginning of his newspaper career in 1863 to his emergence as “a scribbler of books” in the early 1870s. Alongside the books he produced in the next three and a half decades, he continued to write sketches and stories, and later essays, many of which were collected

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in a dozen volumes published by the American Publishing Co., James Osgood & Co., Charles L. Webster & Co., and Harper and Brothers. Early short works from various sources have been collected and edited in the California Mark Twain Project as Early Tales & Sketches, 2 vols. to date, to 1865. When completed, the five-volume set will include 360 short pieces published by Twain between 1851 and 1871. Volume 1 (1852-1890) of Louis J. Budd’s Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays (Library of America) reprints 32 of the 152 works published in ET&S, vols. 1 and 2, and also makes use of the texts prepared for the next three volumes projected for Early Tales & Sketches. Budd’s comprehensive two volumes contain 271 short works issued from 1852 to 1910. POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED WORKS At the time of his death in 1910, Mark Twain left hundreds of unpublished and often unfinished manuscripts, totaling thousands of pages. Various individual pieces and collections from these materials have been published over the years, starting with the truncated and heavily edited version of The Mysterious Stranger brought out by Harper’s in 1916. In the early 1960s, programs were initiated at the University of California and the University of Iowa to publish scholarly editions of Twain’s writings. In 1967 these endeavors coalesced into the Mark Twain Project, housed at Berkeley, which has undertaken to produce definitive editions of writings published in the author’s lifetime (The Works of Mark Twain), indicated in the above list by UCP and ucp, as well as those previously unpublished (The Mark Twain Papers, described below). As of 2014, over 35 volumes have been produced, with many more to come. In addition to the complete letters (Mark Twain’s Letters, 6 vols. to date, covering to 1875), journals (Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, 3 vols. to date, to 1891), and autobiography (Autobiography of Mark Twain, 2 vols. to date, to Twain’s dictation of 28 February 1907), the following hardcover volumes of Papers, with extensive notes, are now available: Mark Twain’s Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, ed. John S. Tuckey, 1966. Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, 1867-1894, ed. Hamlin Hill, 1967. Mark Twain’s Satires & Burlesques, ed. Franklin R. Rogers, 1967. Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck & Tom, ed. Walter Blair, 1969. An appendix identifies, insofar as possible, the 168 Hannibal residents mentioned by Twain in “Villagers of 1840-[5]3.” Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, ed. William M. Gibson, 1969. This edition contains the three manuscripts, all unfinished, on

Appendix

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which Twain worked from 1897 to 1908: “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” “Schoolhouse Hill,” and “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” There is also a Mark Twain Library edition containing just “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians (described below) contains “Schoolhouse Hill.” Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 18931909, ed. Lewis Leary, 1969. Mark Twain’s Fables of Man, ed. John S. Tuckey, 1972. What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings, ed. Paul Baender, 1973. Includes, along with 21 shorter works, “Letters from the Earth” and two of Twain’s published books—Christian Science and What Is Man? The University of California Press has also published two shorter works, available in hardback and paper, which reprint selections from the volumes in the Works of Mark Twain and the Mark Twain Papers listed above: The Devil’s Race-Track: Mark Twain’s Great Dark Writings; The Best from Which Was the Dream? and Fables of Man (1980, ed. John Tuckey). “The appendices of those volumes, as well as most of the editorial notes, have been omitted from this book to provide a clear reading text.” Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, and Other Unfinished Stories (1989, ed. Walter Blair et al.). “The best of what Mark Twain wrote—but did not publish—about the Matter of Hannibal,” this collection reprints 11 selections from Hannibal, Huck & Tom; Satires & Burlesques; Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective; and Mark Twain’s Letters, vol. 4. Since new information was discovered between the publication of the earlier volumes and this collection, “the editors have therefore corrected the texts wherever possible, and have included an extensive correction and enrichment of the editorial commentary first published with these several selections in The Mark Twain Papers and Works of Mark Twain.”

Sources

In general, my quotations from Mark Twain’s writings are taken from the more than thirty-five volumes in the ongoing, definitive University of California edition of the Mark Twain Papers (previously unpublished writings) and Works of Mark Twain (those published in Clemens’ lifetime); and other definitive modern editions, such as Henry Nash Smith & William M. Gibson’s Mark Twain-Howells Letters, Paul Fatout’s Mark Twain Speaking, and Louis J. Budd’s Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays (Library of America). When modern editions are not available, I have relied largely on The Oxford Mark Twain, 1996 (designated OMT below), which reprints, in facsimile and thus with the original illustrations, the first American editions of the author’s works published in his lifetime (with the slight exception of the last volume, Mark Twain’s Speeches, which appeared on 22 June 1910, two months after Twain’s death). The California editions, produced by the most extensive, comprehensive, and sustained project ever devoted to an American author, are, volume by volume, replacing all other editions. Full citations are contained in the Key to Abbreviations below, and in the Works Cited section following. References to multivolume works contain volume and page numbers separated by a colon (e.g., LTRS, 2:215). KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS AMCLAIM The American Claimant. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1892. OMT. ATA A Tramp Abroad. Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1880. OMT. AUTO-AMT Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith, Benjamin Griffin, et al. 2 vols. to date. Berkeley: University of Cali435

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fornia Press. Note: The word “Autobiography” used throughout my text, without italics or quotation marks, refers to the whole body of Mark Twain’s autobiographical writings and dictations, as defined by AUTO-AMT, 1:672-73. The twentieth-century “AUTO-” volumes listed below contain limbs from this body; they consist of incomplete, overlapping, and variously organized selections from the much larger work. See ch. 15 for a detailed discussion. AUTO-D Mark Twain in Eruption; Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events by Mark Twain, ed. Bernard DeVoto. New York: Harper & Bros., 1940; rpt., with identical pagination, Capricorn Books, 1968. AUTO-HR “Reflections on Religion,” ed. Charles Neider. Hudson Review, Autumn, 1963, 329-52. AUTO-N The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider. New York: Harper & Bros., 1959. Quotations are keyed to the 1959 hardbound edition, not to the much reprinted Perennial Classic, Perennial Library, and Perennial Modern Classics paperbacks, which contain the full text but with differing pagination. AUTO-NAR “Chapters From My Autobiography,” published in 25 sections in the North American Review from September 1906 to December 1907. Reprinted in Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review, ed. Michael J. Kiskis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990; reissued 2010), which adds “The Death of Jean” as an appendix. AUTO-P Mark Twain’s Autobiography, [edited by and] with an Introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. (separately paginated). New York: Harper & Bros., 1924. BIBLE The Bible According to Mark Twain, ed. Howard G. Baetzhold & Joseph B. McCullough. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. CJF&OS The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. New York: C. H. Webb, 1867. OMT. CT Mark Twain Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, ed. Louis J. Budd. 2 vols., separately paginated and indexed. New York: Library of America, 1992. This collection contains 271 short works “drawn from The Works of Mark Twain edition [Early Tales & Sketches] being published by the University of California Press, from Mark Twain Speaking (1976), edited by Paul Fatout, and from initial printed appearances.” Budd notes that Twain occasionally revised stories and sketches for subsequent collections, and that “many of Twain’s revisions were intended to soften or eliminate passages that might have been considered coarse, objectionable, or offensive by his later, larger literary audience. In general, the initial periodical printings of Twain’s stories and sketches represent the freshest and most biting versions of

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his works.” The collection also contains an authoritative 50-page “Chronology” of the life of Mark Twain. CY A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Bernard L. Stein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. The Mark Twain Library edition issued in 1983 contains the same text, with minor corrections and with pagination that is 46 pages lower than the 1979 Works edition. Originally published in 1889. DÉBUT My Début as a Literary Person with Other Essays and Stories. Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1903. Contains the title story and 13 others, inc. A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, all previously published. This volume is not included in the Oxford Mark Twain edition; 8 of these essays and stories are available in HADLEY, the other 6 are in $30K. DRT The Devil’s Race-Track: Mark Twain’s Great Dark Writings. The Best from Which Was the Dream? and Fables of Man, ed. John S. Tuckey. Berkeley: University of California Press (Mark Twain Library ed.), 1980. Selections of previously unpublished works reprinted from WWD and FABLES. EARTH Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard DeVoto, with a preface by Henry Nash Smith. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. (The many reprintings—Crest Book, Fawcett World Library—use smaller type and are differently paginated.) During his tenure as editor of the Mark Twain Papers, Bernard DeVoto prepared a volume of Twain’s then unpublished writings in 1939, in which “Letters from the Earth” is one of 13 selections. Clara Clemens disapproved, and the book did not appear until after DeVoto’s death, when Clara finally withdrew her objections. WIM, issued in 1973, contains authoritative modern editions of “Letters from the Earth” and related works. E&E Europe and Elsewhere, ed., with an intro., by Albert B. Paine, and an “Appreciation” by Brander Matthews previously published as “Biographical Criticism,” an introduction to Harper’s 1899 Uniform Edition of Twain’s writings. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923. A collection of 35 pieces, edited and sometimes abridged by Paine, who notes that “a number of articles in this volume, even the more important, have not heretofore appeared in print.” ET&S Early Tales & Sketches, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, with the assistance of Harriet Elinor Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vol. 1 (1851-1864), 1979; vol. 2 (1864-1865), 1981. This edition of 152 early works focuses on the more literary of the several thousand newspaper and journal pieces written by Mark Twain from his fifteenth to his thirtieth year. Three more volumes are projected, which will bring the collection to 360 short works published by Twain between 1851 and 1871. Many of the texts published in

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vols. 1 and 2, and prepared for the forthcoming vols. 3-5, are reprinted in the first volume of CT. FABLES Mark Twain’s Fables of Man, ed. John S. Tuckey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Previously unpublished, often unfinished works “on such large topics as God, providence, Christianity, and human nature,” “the best” of which are reprinted in DRT. FEq Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1897. OMT. HADLEY The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories and Essays. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900. OMT. HAWAII Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, ed. A. Grove Day. New York: Appleton-Century, 1966. A reprinting of the 25 letters that Twain wrote as a travel correspondent for the Sacramento Union during his five-month trip to the Sandwich Islands in the spring and summer of 1866. About a third of this material was used in the later chapters of Roughing It. HF Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade), ed. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. This edition is based on the author’s complete manuscript, the first half of which was not discovered until 1990. It supersedes the earlier California edition of 1988, edited by Walter Blair and Victor Fischer. The pagination is identical with that of the Mark Twain Library edition, issued in 2001. Originally published in England and Canada on 10 Dec. 1884, in America on 18 Feb. 1885. HF&TS Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, and Other Unfinished Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press (Mark Twain Library ed.), 1989. Containing “the best of what Mark Twain wrote—but did not publish—about the Matter of Hannibal,” this volume reprints selections from Hannibal, Huck & Tom; Satires & Burlesques; Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective; and Mark Twain’s Letters, vol. 4. Errors identified in these texts since they were first published have been corrected in this reprinting. HH&T Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck and Tom, ed. Walter Blair. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Previously unpublished and often unfinished writings concerned with “the Matter of Hannibal.” Seven of the ten items are reprinted in HF&TS. HORSE A Horse’s Tale, illus. Lucius Hitchcock. New York: Harper & Bros., 1907. IA The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims’ Progress; Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; With Descriptions of Countries, Nations,

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Incidents and Adventures, as they Appeared to the Author. Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1869. OMT. INTERVIEWS Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews, ed. Gary Scharnhorst. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Contains 258 interviews with Mark Twain, from December 1871 to May 1910. Completes and replaces Louis J. Budd’s “A Listing of and Selection from Newspaper and Magazine Interviews with Samuel L. Clemens, 1874-1910.” American Literary Realism 10 (Winter 1977), i-100; and “Mark Twain Talks Mostly about Humor and Humorists.” Studies in American Humor 1 (April 1974), 4-22. JOAN Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. New York: Harper & Bros., 1896. OMT. Not yet edited in a modern edition by the Mark Twain Project, the first-edition text is also currently available in the Library of America volume entitled Mark Twain: Historical Romances. LAIFI Life As I Find It, ed. Charles Neider. Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1961. “Essays, sketches, tales, and other material, the majority of which is now published in book form for the first time.” LECTURES-F Paul Fatout. Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (Arcturus Books Edition), 1969. Originally published in 1960. LECTURES-L Fred W. Lorch. The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain’s Lecture Tours. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968. LOM Life on the Mississippi. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883. OMT. LTRS Mark Twain’s Letters. Berkeley: University of California Press, various editors. Vol. 1 (1853-1866), 1988; vol. 2 (1867-1868), 1990; vol. 3 (1869), 1992; vol. 4 (1870-1871), 1995; vol. 5 (1872-1873), 1997; vol. 6 (1874-1875), 2002. In progress. A comprehensive, extensively and sometimes miraculously annotated edition of all known Twain correspondence—currently more than 11,500 letters, two-thirds of which have never before been published. As these volumes become available, the notes and commentary, which make up about half of the page total, are beginning to constitute, in piecemeal form, our first comprehensive and accurate biography of America’s best known writer. Robert Hirst, director of the Mark Twain Project, and his staff avoid evaluation and interpretation; rather, they provide the factual basis for all future biographical, cultural, and literary studies of Mark Twain. The editors have invented an innovative method for transcribing letters from manuscript to print which they call “plain text.” This method is a compromise between the extremes of “clear text,” which subordinates details of manuscript errors and revisions to notes, so that the text can be easily read; and “genetic text,” which reproduces these details through symbols that make reading difficult. Plain text takes the middle ground, providing a readable transcription that incorporates

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some of the idiosyncrasies of the manuscript in order to give the feel of the handwritten letters. In quoting from the letters, I have made plain text a little plainer by omitting some of the symbols, such as carets and slash marks, that indicate manuscript idiosyncrasies. Some 2300 letters written by Twain between 1853 and 1880 are currently available online at marktwainproject.org, with notes and commentary for letters through 1876. LTRS-LIVY The Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Dixon Wecter. New York: Harper & Bros., 1949. Contains, in addition to the courting correspondence, letters from Twain to his wife from their marriage in 1870 to Livy’s death in 1904. LTRS-MARY Mark Twain’s Letters to Mary [Mary Benjamin Rogers, daughter-in-law of Henry H. Rogers], ed. Lewis Leary. New York: Columbia University Press (Columbia Paperback edition), 1963, with pagination identical to that of the original publication in 1961. LTRS-MT-H Mark Twain-Howells Letters, ed. Henry Nash Smith & William M. Gibson. 2 vols., paginated consecutively. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. An expertly edited collection of the 681 extant letters between Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, which includes many of Twain’s best letters and details one of the most remarkable friendships—both professional and personal—in American literary history. A later selected edition (1968) added two Twain letters that came to light after 1960. LTRS-MT-MF Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, ed. Dixon Wecter. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1949. LTRS-MT-PUB Mark Twain’s Letters to His Publishers, 1867-1894, ed. Hamlin Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. LTRS-PAINE Mark Twain’s Letters, Arranged with Comment by Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols., paginated consecutively. New York: Harper & Bros., 1917. A very partial selection of letters, extensively abridged, sometimes silently revised. LTRS-ROGERS Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893-1909, ed. Lewis Leary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. MERRY Merry Tales. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1892. OMT. MMT William Dean Howells. My Mark Twain. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997. (Originally published by Harper’s in 1910, shortly after Mark Twain’s death, with the title My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms). Part 1 is Howells’ brief, personal, affectionate, and insightful biography of Mark Twain; Part 2 reprints a dozen reviews and essays on Twain published by Howells during the humorist’s lifetime.

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Mr.BROWN Mark Twain’s Travels With Mr. Brown, Being Heretofore [26] Uncollected Sketches Written by Mark Twain for the San Francisco Alta California in 1866 & 1867, Describing the Adventures of the Author and His Irrepressible Companion in Nicaragua, Hannibal, New York, and Other Spots on Their Way to Europe, ed. Franklin Walker & G. Ezra Dane. New York: Russell & Russell reprint of the 1940 Knopf edition, 1971. MS1916 The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance by Mark Twain, as abbreviated, revised, and edited by A. B. Paine and Frederick Duneka; with 7 full-page color illustrations by N. C. Wyeth. New York: Harper & Bros., 1916. The corrupt text; see MSM, below. MS&OS The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Bros., 1922. Reprints the corrupt text of the 1916 The Mysterious Stranger, along with “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” “My Platonic Sweetheart,” “The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm,” “A Horse’s Tale,” “A Fable,” and “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey.” Republished the following year, with an introduction by A. B. Paine, as vol. 27 of The Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition. MSM Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, ed. William M. Gibson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. “Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance, as published in 1916 and reprinted since that date, is an editorial fraud. . . . The truth is that Mark Twain attempted at least four versions of the story, which survive in three manuscripts.” The three manuscripts (“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” “Schoolhouse Hill,” “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”) “are presented here for the first time as they came from their author’s hand.” “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” is reprinted in a Mark Twain Library edition (1982). “Schoolhouse Hill” is one of the selections in the 1989 Mark Twain Library Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians. MT&LOM Horst H. Kruse. Mark Twain and “Life on the Mississippi.” Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. MTABROAD Dewey Ganzel. Mark Twain Abroad: The Cruise of the “Quaker City.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. MT:A-Z R. Kent Rasmussen. Mark Twain, A to Z. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. MTBIO Albert B. Paine. Mark Twain, A Biography, 3 vols. New York: Harper & Bros., 1912. This work went through twelve editions in Paine’s lifetime, in various 2, 3, and 4-volume editions (all with identical pagination, thus my references are to page numbers only). Paine’s biography is definitive in terms of the abundant materials that were available to him, his close relationship to the author, and his sedulousness in preserving documents. It is undefinitive in terms of

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Paine’s failure to document sources, his invention of dialogue, his reliance on Twain’s good but not always precise memory, his tendency to swallow some of Twain’s autobiographical whoppers, and his (and Clara Clemens’) apparent need to present a tidied-up, unproblematic, even pious Mark Twain to the world. Paine defines his own editorial deficiencies when he complains that George Harvey, in arranging the selections from the autobiographical dictations for the North American Review, failed “to edit them with the more positive documents as a guide”(MTBIO, 1322). MTCall Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco, ed. Edgar M. Branch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Mark Twain contributed several articles to the San Francisco Daily Morning Call from Virginia City, and then went to work full time for the California daily when he moved from Nevada to California in 1864. This toil (“awful slavery for a lazy man,” he called it) lasted four months, in which he produced perhaps 1500-2000 pieces. Unlike the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise articles, which, after February 1863, tended to be signed “Mark Twain,” the Call pieces were anonymous. Edgar Branch, basing his detective work on both external factual and internal stylistic evidence, identifies 471 Call items that “lay serious claim” to having been written by Twain, of which he reprints 206, organized topically. MTENCY The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, ed. J. R . McMaster and James D. Wilson. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993. MTEnt Mark Twain of the Enterprise: Newspaper Articles & Other Documents, 1862-1864, ed. Henry Nash Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Complete files of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the daily newspaper for which Mark Twain worked full time for two years and then for several more as an occasional correspondent, have not survived. Thus we have only a fraction of his first full-time work as a reporter (which may have totaled from 1500 to 3000 items), preserved in reprints from other newspapers and in Clemens family scrapbooks. Smith’s edition of 42 articles and letters derives largely from the collection of Twain’s sister, Pamela Clemens Moffett, and her family. MTExp From the summer of 1869 to early 1871, Twain was part owner and coeditor of the Buffalo Express, to which he contributed 60 feature stories and sketches, 31 editorials, and miscellaneous brief items. These works have never been collected, though they are catalogued by Joseph B. McCullough in “A Listing of Mark Twain’s Contributions to the Buffalo Express, 1869-1871.” (American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, Winter 1972). A number of the Express pieces were reprinted in the Galaxy and SN&O.

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MTGal Contributions to The Galaxy, 1868-1871 by Mark Twain, ed. Bruce R. McElderry. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961. Contains 106 items that Twain contributed to the monthly Galaxy, which he described as “a first-class New York magazine” that allowed him to “write to suit myself.” MTGold The Washoe Giant in San Francisco, ed. Franklin Walker. San Francisco: George Field, 1938. “Heretofore uncollected sketches by Mark Twain published in the [Golden Era] in the [eighteen-] sixties, including ‘Those Blasted Children,’ ‘The Lick House Ball,’ ‘The Kearny Street Ghost Story,’ ‘Fitz Smythe’s Horse,’ and thirty-four more items.” MTLIB Alan Gribben. Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction. 2 vols. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980. MTPO Mark Twain Project Online, website of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley: marktwainproject.org MTTIMES Mark Twain in His Times. Web site: twain.lib.virginia.edu. Maintained by Stephen Railton, University of Virginia. N&J Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, ed. Frederick Anderson et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vol. 1 (1855-1873), 1975; vol. 2 (1877-1883), 1975; vol. 3 (1883-1891), 1979. In progress. NOOK Kenneth R. Andrews. Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969. Originally published in 1950. NOTEBOOK-P Mark Twain’s Notebook. Prepared for Publication with Comments by Albert Bigelow Paine. New York: Harper & Bros., 1935. OMT The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin. 29 vols., unnumbered, which are facsimile copies of the American first editions of Mark Twain’s works published in his lifetime (with the exception of the volume of speeches, which was issued a month after Twain’s death). Each volume includes an introduction, afterword, bibliography, and notes on the text and—for those first editions which contained them—illustrations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ₤1M The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1893. OMT. P&P The Prince and the Pauper, ed. Victor Fischer & Lin Salamo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. The Mark Twain Library edition, 1983, contains minor corrections and is paginated 44 pages lower than the 1979 Works edition. Originally published 1881. PEN A Pen Warmed-up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest, ed. Franklin Anderson. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Contains 23 selections, several published for the first time, concerning “wrongs evidently in-

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escapable in contemporary society.” These wrongs are divided into two sections: “On War,” and “The Human Condition.” PW The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson; And the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins. “With marginal illustrations.” Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1894. OMT. References to the second part of this volume, Those Extraordinary Twins, are cited as PW/TET. PW/TET See previous entry. QUARREL Mark Twain’s Quarrel with Heaven, ed. Ray B. Browne. New Haven, CN: College & University Press, 1970. Reprints Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, additional Stormfield pieces not published by Twain, “The Late Reverend Sam Jones Reception in Heaven,” and relevant passages from Twain’s notebooks. REVIEWS-CH Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage, ed. Frederick Anderson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. REVIEWS-CR Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Louis J. Budd. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. RI Roughing It, ed. Harriet E. Smith & Edgar Marquess Branch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. This revised and corrected edition, with 500 pages of reference materials, supersedes the earlier, leaner, unillustrated California edition of 1972, edited by Franklin R. Rogers and Paul Baender. The pagination is identical in the 1996 Mark Twain Library edition. Originally published in 1872. S&B Mark Twain’s Satires & Burlesques, ed. Franklin R. Rogers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. A collection of Twain’s writings, mostly unfinished, that he never published. SCH Dixon Wecter. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Sentry paperback edition, with original edition (1952) pagination, 1961. Appointed literary editor of the Mark Twain papers in 1946, Wecter died in 1950 after completing a draft of what he had planned as the first part of a two-volume biography. His wife prepared the work for posthumous publication in 1952. SHAK 1601, and Is Shakespeare Dead? OMT. Is Shakespeare Dead? was subtitled From My Autobiography in the original 1909 edition published by Harper’s. SN&O Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old. Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1875. OMT. SNODGRASS The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, ed. Charles Honce. Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1928. A limited edition of Twain’s three Snodgrass letters published in 1856-57. SPEECHES-F Mark Twain Speaking, ed. Paul Fatout. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976. Reprints “composite versions” of 195 of Mark Twain’s speeches and lectures.

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SPEECHES-H Mark Twain’s Speeches, with an Introduction by William Dean Howells, 1910. OMT. This edition of 104 speeches, compiled by F. A. Nast for Harper & Brothers, was published on 22 June 1910, a month after Twain’s death on 21 April. SPEECHES-P Mark Twain’s Speeches, ed. A. B. Paine. New York: Harper & Bros., 1923. A revised edition of SPEECHES-H. STORMFIELD Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. New York: Harper & Bros., 1909. OMT. SUSY Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain, by Susy Clemens, his Daughter, Thirteen, with a Foreword and Copious Comments by Her Father, ed. Charles Neider. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985. Neider’s introduction reprints selections from Susy’s passionate letters to her Bryn Mawr classmate Louise Brownell. SWE The Stolen White Elephant, Etc. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1882. OMT. TELL How To Tell a Story, and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897. OMT. $30K The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Bros., 1906. OMT. TIA Traveling with the Innocents Abroad: Mark Twain's Original Reports from Europe and the Holy Land, ed. Daniel Morley McKeithan. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. A reprint of the 58 letters (50 for the Daily Alta California, 6 for the New York Tribune, and one each to the Naples Observer and the New York Herald) that Mark Twain wrote during his five-month trip on the Quaker City in 1867, and then revised into The Innocents Abroad. TS The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. I have used this Mark Twain Library edition since it updates the 1980 edition (see next entry), on which it is based: “portions of the [1982] text have been reset to correct errors and to accommodate the original illustrations by True W. Williams.” Originally published in 1876. TS+ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective, ed. John C. Gerber, Paul Baender, and Terry Firkins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. This volume is unillustrated, though all other works issued by the University of California Press since 1979 reproduce original illustrations in both regular and library editions. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (see above entry) and Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective are reprinted in Mark Twain Library editions (1982), with original illustrations and with errors in the 1980 text corrected. TSABROAD Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. See previous entry.

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WHOMT Who Is Mark Twain? New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Twentyfour miscellaneous short pieces for the general reader, some unfinished, most previously unpublished, which constitute about half of the remaining short manuscripts in the Mark Twain Papers that have not yet been published in a scholarly edition. WIM What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings, ed. Paul Baender. Berkeley: Iowa Center for Textual Studies and University of California Press, 1973. This volume includes Mark Twain’s previously published philosophical writings, along with What Is Man? (1909; published anonymously), Christian Science (1907), and “Letters from the Earth” (1962), as well as related unpublished items. In 1917, A. B. Paine brought out a volume entitled What Is Man? and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Bros). This collection of two short books (What is Man? and Is Shakespeare Dead?) and 14 essays, from 1886 to 1909, includes several that were previously unpublished (“A Simplified Alphabet,” “As Concerns Interpreting the Deity,” “The Bee”), and others not collected elsewhere (“The Memorable Assassination,” “How to Make History Dates Stick,” “A Scrap of Curious History,” “English As She Is Taught”). Given his highhanded editing, Paine’s texts cannot be relied on. WIM&OE What Is Man? and Other Essays. See previous entry. WWD Mark Twain’s Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, ed. John S. Tuckey. University of California Press, 1966. Contains writings unpublished in Twain’s lifetime and often unfinished, “the best” of which are reprinted in the Mark Twain Library volume entitled The Devil’s Race-Track. (University of California Press, 1980). ZWICK Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Collects 45 essays, letters, speeches, interviews, and notes by Mark Twain on the “Philippine Insurrection” of 1899-1902. OTHER WORKS CITED In addition to those listed in the Key to Abbreviations above: Aldrich, Lilian W. Crowding Memories, By Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1920. Mrs. Aldrich’s memoir gives her side of the mutual dislike between herself and Mark Twain, and she also unwittingly exhibits the vanity that made her a choice target for Twain. Arnold, Matthew. Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America. Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1888. An apparently unauthorized collection of four essays by Matthew Arnold (“A Word about America,” “A Word More about America,” “General

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Grant,” and “Civilisation in the United States”), which appeared several weeks after Arnold’s death in 1888. The contents page, but not the first page of the article, gives the title of the Grant piece as “General Grant. An Estimate.” “An Estimate” was first added to Arnold’s title by the publisher—then Cupples, Upham—in their 1887 pamphlet publication, also unauthorized, of the Grant article. ———. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super. 11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77. Austen, Jane. Emma. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957. Originally published in 1816. Baender, Paul. “The ‘Jumping Frog’ as a Comedian’s First Virtue.” Modern Philology, 50 (1963), 192-200. Baetzhold, Howard G. Mark Twain and John Bull: The British Connection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Baughman, Ernest W. Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America. The Hague: Mouton & Co., Indiana University Folklore Series Number 20, 1966. Billington, Ray Allen. The Far Western Frontier, 1839-1860. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Originally published in 1956. ———. Westward to the Pacific. St. Louis: Jefferson National Expansion Historical Association, 1979. Black, Baxter. “Why Do the Trees All Lean in Wyoming?” Coyote Cowboy Poetry. Denver, CO: Coyote Cowboy Co., 1986. (Coyote Cowboy Co., P.O. Box 2190, Benson, AZ 85602; baxterblack.com.) Blair, Walter. Mark Twain and Huck Finn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. ———. Native American Humor. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1960. Originally published 1937. ———. Essays On American Humor: Blair Through The Ages, selected and edited by Hamlin Hill. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Blair, Walter, and Hamlin Hill. America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Blair, Walter, and R. I. McDavid, Jr., eds. The Mirth of a Nation: America's Great Dialect Humor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Blouet, Paul. See Max O’Rell (Blouet’s pseudonym) below. Bourget, Paul. Outre-Mer: Impressions of America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895. Branch, Edgar M. The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain; With Selections from His Apprentice Writing. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950. Brooks, Cleanth, Jr., and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction. New York: F. S. Crofts, 1943. Brooks, Cleanth, Jr., R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren. American Literature: The Makers and the Making. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970. This edition reprints the 1933 edition, a slightly revised version of the work originally published in 1920. ———. The Times of Melville and Whitman. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947. Brown, Carolyn. The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. Brown, John, M. D., Rab and His Friends. New York: Anson D. F. Randolph & Co., n.d. Originally published in 1859. Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth, 2 vols., rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1919. Originally published in 1888. Budd, Louis J., Mark Twain: Social Philosopher. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Originally published in 1962. ———. “Mark Twain’s Visual Humor.” Collected in Messent and Budd, Companion. Cady, Edwin H., The Road to Realism, The Early Years of William Dean Howells and The Realist at War, The Mature Years. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956 & 1958. Cady, Edwin H., and David L. Frazier, eds. The War of the Critics over William Dean Howells. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson and Co., 1962. Camfield, Gregg. “Mark Twain and Amiable Humor.” Collected in Messent and Budd, Companion.

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Notes

1. THE SHAPE OF A HUMORIST’S CAREER 1. Book 1, satire 1, line 24 of the Satires of Horace, from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 261, trans. Wickham. Horace’s similar “utile dulci” statement is in Ars Poetica, line 343: “He has gained every vote who has mingled profit with pleasure by delighting the reader at once and instructing him.” Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 256. 2. AUTO-AMT, 1:161. 3. MTBIO, 1611; MTCall, 21; LTRS, 3:408. 4. MTBIO, 228. 5. LTRS, 5:311; LTRS-MT-H, 1:318; LAIFI, 52. 6. LTRS, 1:137. 7. AUTO-D, [xxix]. 8. PW, 166. 9. AUTO-AMT, 2:377. 10. AUTO-AMT, 2:385. 11. SPEECHES-F, 330-31. 12. LTRS, 2:191, 1:370, 3:457. 13. REVIEWS-CR, 25. 14. LTRS, 1:323. Twain’s underscore of “laughter” I have rendered as italics. 15. LTRS, 5:346. 16. AUTO-N, 272. 17. CT, 1:214, 216. 18. CY, 255. 19. LTRS-P, 2:719. 20. CY, 122-23. 21. LTRS-MT-H, 1:160. 22. LTRS-MT-H, 2:533-34. 23. LTRS-MT-H, 2:841. 24. PW, 309, 311. 25. In the mid-1870s, Twain noted on the back of an envelope that “I like history, biography, travels, curious facts & strange happenings, & science. And I detest novels, poetry & theology” (MTBIO, 512). In 1895, he told a reporter for the Sidney Morning Herald that “I read little but the ‘heaviest’ sort of literature—history, biography, travels” (INTERVIEWS, 205). Like many of Twain’s autobiographical statements, this note and the interview comment

455

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Notes

need to be taken with several grains of salt, for they considerably understate his lifelong habit of wide and various reading. 26. From a handbill advertising Twain’s Sandwich Islands lecture at the Cooper Institute, New York City, on 6 May 1867. MTBIO, facing p. 316. 27. LTRS, 4:498. 28. LTRS, 2:210. 29. LOM, 324. 30. LTRS-MT-H, 2:695-99. 31. MSM, 493. 32. Morison, Oxford History, 618. 33. Matthews, 899-900. 34. Richardson, 1:521. 35. LAIFI, 94. 36. AUTO-AMT, 2:153. 37. LTRS-PAINE, 2:527-28. 38. REVIEWS-CH, 94. 39. MMT, 141. 40. Freud’s book on humor was first published in Leipzig and Vienna in 1905 with the title Der Witz und Seine Beziehung Zum Unbewussen. It was translated into English in 1916 by A. A. Brill as Wit and Its Relationship to the Unconscious. Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious is the title used by James Strachey in his translation of 1960, which is now vol. 8 in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.). 41. AUTO-D, 18. 42. MMT, 34, 185. 43. REVIEWS-CH, 264, 267, 266. 44. Cardwell, 222. 45. Budd, xvii. 46. Thurber’s moral to “The Bear Who Let It Alone” in The Thurber Carnival, 253. 47. ET&S, 2:172. 48. ET&S, 2:11. 49. LTRS, 1:322. 50. LTRS-MT-H, 1:49. 51. LTRS-MT-H, 1:146. 52. MTENCY, 545. 53. Arnold, Prose, 11:361, 10:14. 54. twainquotes.com (Twain’s letter of 26 June 1888 was reprinted in the Hartford Daily Courant on 29 June, p. 5). 55. LTRS-PAINE, 2:495. Clarke replied that “You are ‘the only literary animal of your particular subspecies’ in existence.” 56. AUTO-N, 349, 348-49.

2. THE PHYSICS OF HUMOR 1. INTERVIEWS, 132. 2. Since the 1960s, there has been a boomlet in humor research, some of it highly technical, in psychology and sociology, and to a lesser extent, in anthropology, linguistics, and medicine as well. For an introduction to this material, see Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul H. McGhee, eds., The Psychology of Humor (New York: Academic Press, 1972); Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot, eds., Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research, and Application (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1976); Christopher P. Wilson, Jokes: Form, Content, Use and Function (London: Academic Press, 1979); Jeffrey H. Goldstein and Paul H. McGhee, eds., Handbook of Humor Research, 2 vols. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983); Mahadev L. Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Humor: Interna-

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tional Journal of Humor Research (initiated in 1988); and Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). William F. Fry Jr. and Waleed A. Salameh have coauthored the Handbook of Humor and Psychotherapy: Advances in the Clinical Use of Humor (1986), Advances in Humor and Psychotherapy (1993), and Humor and Wellness in Clinical Intervention (2001). Lewis gives the following summary of “the broad distinctions and principles emerging from social science research. Most broadly, if we are going to think precisely about humor in literature, we need to distinguish between its form, content, function and context. As clearly as possible, and noting that each of these elements is interconnected with the others, critics writing about humor need to indicate when they are focusing on humor as an element of context (as in an analysis of the way we are either prepared or not prepared to expect the porter’s scene in Macbeth, that is, the place of this joking in the play), of content (as in an analysis of what the porter jokes about), of function (as in an analysis of what the porter’s joking does for Macbeth, for the porter or for the reader/viewer) or of structure (as in an analysis of the porter’s use of incongruity-resolution materials). . . . When we use the phrase sense of humor, in reference to a character or group of characters, we need to indicate whether we are focusing on humor appreciation, humor creation or both. And we need to avoid tripping over crucial terms by distinguishing the broad phenomenon of humor from both laughter (a response to some humorous and some nonhumorous stimuli) and comedy (a genre)” (8) . After a warning about “the danger of universalizing or globalizing literary humor”(x), Lewis states his own view of the universals: “humorous experiences originate in the perception of an incongruity . . . humor appreciation is based on a two-stage process of first perceiving an incongruity and then resolving it . . . humor is a playful, not a serious response . . . the perception of an incongruity is subjective . . . humor is an exercise of power” (8-13). The International Society for Humor Studies sponsors the quarterly journal Humor, a newsletter, an annual international conference, and various seminars and workshops. The Society’s executive secretary, Don L. F. Nilsen, has produced four reference guides: Humor in Irish Literature (1996); Humor in British Literature, From the Middle Ages to the Restoration (1997); Humor in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Literature (1998); Humor in Twentieth-Century British Literature (2000); and, with Alleen Pace Nilsen, Encyclopedia of 20th-Century American Humor (2000). A recent research effort concerns the neural basis of humor, using a magnetic resonance imaging machine. In 2002, William M. Kelly’s team scanned the brains of participants for nerve-cell activity while they watched an episode of Seinfeld: “As a participant viewed something funny, regions of the brain’s left hemisphere—the posterior temporal cortex and inferior frontal cortex—initially crackled with activity. Neuroscientists have previously associated these regions with resolving ambiguities, says Kelly. “A few seconds later, presumably as the person responded to the humor, brain regions called the insula and amygdala became active across both hemispheres of the brain. The insula plays a role in emotional sensations, while researchers usually link the amygdala to memory processing.” Science News, vol. 162 (16 November 2002), 309. 3. Lauter, 14; Sidney, 299 (from The Defence of Poesy, 1595); Henri Bergson: “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Sypher, 84. (Originally published in London in 1911); Lauter, 355; Paolo Bellezza: Humour (Strenna a Beneficio del Pio Instituto dei Rachitici, 1900); quoted by Howells in the North American Review for February 1901 and collected in MMT, 160-61. 4. Freud, 54; Lauter, 315; Lauter, xviii. 5. ET&S, 1:87. 6. WIM, 405. 7. The World Almanac, 1994. Mahwah, NJ: Funk & Wagnalls, 1993; 356-57. 8. Selected American Prose, ed. Stegner, 20. Some pre-Twain humorists, notably George Washington Harris, used variations in spelling in an attempt to reproduce differences in regional pronunciations, though Josh Billings was rarely guilty of that sort of sophistication. 9. See slate.com/bushisms. Weisberg’s capacious collection is now available in four printed volumes. 10. Horace, Epistles, xii, 19. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 257.

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11. The Thurber Carnival, 290. Rose Hartwick wrote the poem in 1867, submitted it to the Detroit Commercial Advertiser in 1870, and married E. C. Thorpe in 1871. 12. Donne, 29 (from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”). 13. FEq, 615. 14. Ricoeur, 131. 15. Cohen and Dillingham, 183-84 (from “Mrs. Yardley’s Quilting”). 16. Mr.BROWN, 221. 17. HF, 232. 18. HF, 65. 19. AUTO-AMT, 1:340. 20. LTRS, 1:368. 21. N&J, 3:172. This statement is enclosed in quotation marks in Twain’s notebook, following “Someone has said.” The someone, as the N&J editors point out in note 152, may have been Sydney Smith, and Twain was apparently projecting an essay on wit and humor. He never composed it, perhaps because the distinction between the two tends to produce more smoke than fire. 22. CT, 2:184. 23. RI, 201. 24. CJF&OS, 147. This statement is often rendered, and attributed to Mark Twain, as “the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces,” possibly because Walter Blair misquoted it that way in his influential Native American Humor in 1937 (p. 148). 25. AUTO-AMT, 2:288. 26. CT, 1:946. Twain liked the lightning-bug/lightning contrast, which he credited to Josh Billings and used several times (SPEECHES-F, 424). 27. Frear, 431. This statement is from Twain’s Sandwich Islands lecture, which he gave, with variations, “almost one hundred times in the United States and England, usually announcing the title as ‘Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands’” (SPEECHES-F, 4). This version was published in the Brooklyn Eagle on 8 Feb. 1873. 28. SN&O, 94. Twain’s recollection was not exact; the poem actually addressed “Miss Katie,” and it was his eleventh, not his first, literary venture, according to E. M. Branch’s calculation. See ET&S, 1:92-97. 29. No. 1222 in Thomas H. Johnson’s Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 538. 30. Mark Twain Tonight! Columbia Record OS 2019. 31. FEq, “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar” epigraph to ch. 27. 32. HF, 13. 33. “How To Tell a Story,” CT, 2:201. Twain also notes that “The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length— no more and no less—or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble.” (2:204). In his Autobiography, Twain discusses his reading of “His Grandfather’s Old Ram” and points out that at one point, “A pause after the remark was absolutely necessary with any and all audiences because no man, howsoever intelligent he may be, can instantly adjust his mind to a new and unfamiliar, and yet for a moment or two apparently plausible, logic.” AUTO-D 227. 34. RI, ch. 53. 35. Thoreau, 4, 10. 36. Smith, Frank, 54, 61. 37. Sypher, 82. 38. Hutto, 158.

3. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMOR 1. Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, V, ii, 851. 2. Tales of the Brothers Grimm, London: Paul Hamlyn, 1961. The second climax of the tale attempts to unload the terror of the first: a hunter happens by, cuts open the wolf’s stomach,

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and Grandmother and Little Red Riding-Hood jump out unharmed. This brief and facile happy ending was added by the brothers Grimm to the earlier, grimmer tale. 3. HF, 42. 4. LTRS, 1:366, 374. 5. RI, 146. 6. James, William, 2:103. 7. Smith, Frank, 54. 8. Nilsen, 335-36. 9. Swift, 1:216 (“To Mr. Delany, Nov. 10, 1718”). 10. Homer, 403. 11. “Even as Rabbah before he commenced [his discourse] before the scholars used to say something humorous, and the scholars were cheered”: Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Shabbath Folio 30b come-and-hear.com. 12. Frost, 2 (from “The Figure a Poem Makes.”) On the other hand, another of Frost’s definitions of poetry on the same page— “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom”—could serve as a succinct summary of Twain’s art. 13. Derrida, 268. 14. INTERVIEWS. 519-20. 15. Thurber, 239, 241. 16. Frost, 137. 17. Cicero, in Lauter, 25. 18. LTRS, 1:308-09. 19. Shurcliff, 360. 20. Wellness Letter: The Newsletter of Nutrition, Fitness, and Self-Care, University of California, Berkeley, March 2004, 8. A follow-up summary in August 2005 warns that laughter is not a cure for serious disease, but adds evidence that humor may assist in improving immunity, tolerating pain, and living a healthy life. The 2010 update appeared in the April Letter. 21. King James Bible, Proverbs 17:22. 22. King James Bible, James 4:7, 9; 5:13. 23. Lauter, 14. 24. Lauter, 24. 25. Hobbes, 32. 26. Leacock, 21. Leacock believes that modern humans have transcended their “ruder and more primitive beginnings.” Consequently, humor may now “be defined as the kindly contemplation of the incongruities of life” and “the essence of the definition lies in the word ‘kindly’” (11-12). 27. Grotjahn, in Lauter, 524-25. 28. AUTO-D, 291. 29. AUTO-D, 294. 30. Thurber quoted in Eastman, 343. 31. Valéry, 111. 32. Some film critics speak of “Hitchcock’s black humor” or “comic relief,” though both these terms miss the point. There is no relief from the crescendoing terror in his films; and the humor is not of the “black” or “graveyard” school, since it is humor about ordinary topics that takes place in a dark setting. 33. from the prefatory “Advertisement” by J[ohn] P[aul], i.e., Charles H. Webb, to JF&OS. 34. AUTO-AMT, 1:206-07. 35. LTRS-MT-H, 2:541.

4. THE SOCIOLOGY OF HUMOR 1. SPEECHES-F, 586. 2. As far as we know, humor is universal in human civilizations, and that seems reasonable since the needs humor serves—relaxation, coping, dominating, among others—apparently ap-

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ply to all humans. The smile seems to be recognized and understood in encounters between advanced and aboriginal peoples. Some researchers, Jane Goodall for example, are persuaded that chimpanzees, and perhaps other primates, smile as well; and that raises the fascinating question of whether other mammals possess humor. If they do, it is probably a phenomenon of mammals with a highly developed social structure, such as dolphins and canids, in addition to primates. The most interesting of my family’s many dogs was a border collie who had a keen eye for disparity—a new piece of furniture, a box left in the yard, a strange car in the driveway. These out-of-place objects were not necessarily humorous; a stranger had to be run down, stopped, and smellchecked. But often a sudden change in the routine, if no apparent threat were involved, would trigger what appeared to be a comic response. If, during a walk in the woods, I slipped behind a tree and hid, the collie would come tearing back, and when he found me he would jump and bark and race around in circles. 3. from ch. 13, “Literary Characteristics of Democratic Times,” in vol. 2, bk. 1 of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 352. 4. Blair and Hill, 8, 20 (the authors are quoting Mark Twain in the second passage). 5. Billington, Westward, 6. 6. Potter, 21, 42. Potter believed that the complexities of national character could be probed only by interdisciplinary cooperation among historians, sociologists, and psychologists: “Although the practitioners of this oldest and these newest of disciplines may not be very congenial academic teammates, the fact remains that, if they are ever to scale the heights on which they hope to find a science of man, they must go roped together like other mountaineers” (xxi). 7. Jefferson, 84. 8. Crèvecœur, 39. Born in Normandy in 1735 and educated partially in England, MichelGuillaume Jean de Crèvecœur, known as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, migrated to Canada as a teenager, served under Montcalm, explored the Great Lakes and Ohio River area, and arrived in New York in 1759. After travels in the colonies as far south as the Carolinas, he became a naturalized American citizen, married, and settled into farming in Orange County, NY. He sat out the American Revolution, about which he had mixed feelings, in France, returning to America in 1783 to discover that his wife had died and his home had been burned in an Indian raid, and to eventually serve as French consul in New York. The last years of his life were spent in the country of his birth. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (1925), this partially assimilated foreigner created a memorable portrait of life in the new world and an eloquent celebration of democracy and rural life: “Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe. . . . We are a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory, communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable. We are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself. . . . We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world.” Letters, 35-36. The rapturous statements in the early chapters of the Letters were much admired, and anthologized, by Americans, who were not so appreciative of Crèvecœur’s less sanguine statements later, such as his depiction of “the horrors of slavery” in South Carolina. 9. Tocqueville, perhaps our most perceptive foreign visitor ever, summarized his view of American culture in his introduction to Democracy in America: “Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed” (p. 3). 10. Chaucer, 68. In modern English: “The greatest scholars are not the wisest men.” 11. LTRS, 3:358.

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12. REVIEWS-CH, 56. 13. Washington Post, 30 Aug. 1982, C4. Peter (creator of “The Peter Principle”) adds, after “somebody,” “—maybe with the exception of wordplay.” 14. After a century of underground publication, this short speech is now available in SPEECHES-F, 125-27 and CT, 1:722-24. Mark Twain had reached a national and international audience with the publication of The Innocents Abroad in 1869, and after that he was careful, in public, to stay within the boundaries of nineteenth-century authorial decorum. In private though, he resisted, complaining to Howells in 1877 that a “sad, sad false delicacy robs literature of . . . obscene stories.” For an idiosyncratic ramble through Twain’s “erotic and scatological pieces,” see G. Legman’s introduction to his edition of The Mammoth Cod (Maledicta Press [Milwaukee], 1976). Twain’s authorship of “The Mammoth Cod” is disputed. 15. NPR Report on “Comedy and Race in America” originally broadcast on NPR’s All Things Considered on 9-11 December, 2002. 16. The Satires of Juvenal, trans. Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958; 19 (Satire 1, ll. 59-62): Satire? What else, in an age when a youth can hope for a cohort, Spending the family funds, to the last red cent, on the horses, Dashing at breakneck speed, like the charioteer of Achilles, Down the Flaminian Way, showing off to his top-coated girl friend? 17. Mr. Butz was Secretary of Agriculture in the Nixon/Ford administrations. He was forced to resign in 1976 because, in the unbuttoned atmosphere of a cocktail party in an airplane cabin, he gave a joking (in his view), demeaning (to some of his listeners) definition of AfricanAmericans. Trent Lott, trying to be convivial at Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party and fishing for something positive to say about the guest of honor, made the mistake of commending Thurmond’s States’ Rights (hence segregationist) bid for the presidency in 1948. Thurmond lost the election; Lott lost his position as Senate Majority Leader. 18. N&J, 1:127, 149. 19. AUTO-AMT, 2:155. 20. CT, 1:665, 663. 21. Emily Wax, “In Times of Terror, Teens Talk the Talk,” Washington Post, 19 March 2002, p. A01. 22. LTRS, 3:358. 23. RI, 340. 24. IA, 55, 209, 369, 368, 460, 559. 25. RI: 224, 297, 162, 321, 307, 477. 26. RI, 491. 27. RI, 374. See also the strongly worded “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” which blames the entire culture of San Francisco, and especially the newspapers, for teaching its children “that a Chinaman had no rights that any man was bound to respect; that he had no sorrows that any man was bound to pity . . . [that] everybody, individuals, communities, the majesty of the State itself, joined in hating, abusing, and persecuting these humble strangers.” SN&O, 119. This article was published in the Buffalo Galaxy in May 1870. In a footnote Twain describes a brutal attack on a Chinese man, and notes that “I was in the employ of a San Francisco journal at the time, and was not allowed to publish it because it might offend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the paper.” SN&O, 119. Two years earlier, in a front-page article in the New York Tribune, Twain had praised the anti-persecution clause of the recent treaty with China: “They can never beat and bang and set the dogs on the Chinamen any more. . . . I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done him.” LTRS, 2:239. 28. RI, 375. 29. RI, 687. 30. Most critics who treat the issue find that Mark Twain “despised” the natives and “remained rabidly hostile to Native Americans throughout his life” (MTENCY; 393, 614), treated them with “moral condemnation” (Elizabeth I. Hanson, Mark Twain Journal, 1981;11), and was “unfailingly hostile” (Helen L. Harris, American Literature, Jan. 1975; 495). These assess-

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ments, while valid for certain texts and at certain moments in Mark Twain’s career, don’t do justice to the full range of his writings about Indians or to his intellectual growth. It is often tempting to believe that an author has a consistent set of unchanging beliefs across the years, a notion that is less true for Twain than for most. 31. RI, 33. 32. RI, 127. 33. “A Day at Niagara” (1869), CT, 1:302. 34. RI, 255. 35. RI, 129. Mark Twain attacked Cooper whenever he found an opportunity, which was often. Cooper’s towering mid-nineteenth-century reputation graveled the younger author, who, along with W. D. Howells and Henry James among others, was steering American literature in new realistic directions. Twain’s choicest comments are contained in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which appeared in the North American Review in 1895. Clearly enjoying this critical romp, Twain continued the subject in a manuscript, not completed, that was posthumously published as “Fenimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses.” Both parts are contained in CT, 2:180-200. 36. “The Noble Red Man” (1870), CT, 1:442-43. 37. RI, 129. 38. LTRS-MT-H, 2:496. 39. HF&TS, 34. 40. HF&TS, 50. 41. RI, 129. 42. QUARREL, 63. 43. LTRS-MT-H, 1:172. Twain misspells Dodge’s middle name as Irwin. For other Twain comments on Native Americans, see LTRS, 1:51, 174-79; “Parting Presentation,” ET&S, 2:78; IA, ch. 20; SN&O, 264-70; “The Indian Row,” Mr.BROWN, 264-66; ATA, 203; LOM, chs. 1-2 and 58-60; CY, chs. 2, 15; “The French and the Comanches,” EARTH, 183-89; AUTOAMT, 1:268; PEN, 170-73. 44. AUTO-AMT, 1:397. 45. Morison, Oxford History, 3. 46. RI, 126-27. 47. FEq, 691. 48. FEq, 174, 207. 49. FEq, 212. 50. ZWICK, 65 (from a letter of 18 March 1901 to Albert Sonnichsen, thanking him for his book, Ten Months a Captive Among Filipinos, and agreeing with Sonnichsen’s enlightened view that the islanders “are as entitled to be called civilized as other nations”). 51. See CT for the texts of these essays. See also Jim Zwick, ed., Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire.

5. THE STRATEGY OF COUNTERPOINT 1. Mr. BROWN, 202. 2. AUTO-N, 138. 3. Twain comments on his father, disguised as Judge Carpenter, in “Villagers of 1840[5]3,” HH&T, 39. 4. HH&T (“Jane Lampton Clemens”), 43, 52, 44. 5. HH&T, 52. In The Ordeal of Mark Twain, Van Wyck Brooks gives a very different impression of Jane Clemens, who, according to his characterization, is “the embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism . . . which perceived the scent of the devil in any least expression of what is now known as the creative impulse” (52-53). 6. LTRS, 2:39. Even though some 11,000 Twain letters have survived, most of the letters to his mother were destroyed. When Jane died in 1890, her letters passed to Orion; when Orion died in 1897, they went to his wife Mollie; and when she died in 1904, the administrator of her

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estate, acting apparently in accordance with the wishes of the author, burned every letter. There were almost four trunks full, and “it took him several long evenings to complete the job thoroughly.” See LTRS, 1:459-61. 7. MTBIO, 1591-92. 8. ET&S, 1:62. Twain sometimes spells Wolf as Wolfe. 9. ET&S, 1:64-65. 10. ET&S, vol. 1, section 1. 11. SNODGRASS, 32. 12. MTBIO, 148. 13. MTBIO, 149. 14. AUTO-N, 102. 15. There is evidence that younger brother Sam—by then a full-fledged pilot of two years standing even though he was only 25—may have assisted in securing Orion’s appointment as secretary of the Nevada Territory. See LTRS, 1:114n9. 16. RI, 147. 17. LTRS, 1:205-07, 220-21. 18. White, Richard, 260. 19. These letters are no longer extant. 20. MTEnt, 128. 21. from “Silver Bars–How Assayed,” Territorial Enterprise, February (exact date uncertain) 1863; ET&S, 1:212. 22. Apparently Sam Clemens first used this pseudonym to sign a “Letter from Carson City” printed in the Territorial Enterprise on 3 February 1863. In ch. 50 of LOM and in AUTOAMT, 2:230 Twain tells a sentimental story, elaborated by Paine in MTBIO, of how he “confiscated” the “nom de guerre” of deceased Captain Isaiah Sellers, a venerable steamboat pilot who was the target of Twain’s burlesque “River Intelligence,” published in the New Orleans Crescent on 17 May 1859. Since all of the published pieces by Sellers we know of bear his own name, and since the Captain did not die until 1864, the accuracy of this story is in doubt. Kevin Mac Donnell recently discovered “the first known usage in print of [“Mark Twain”] as a proper name” in a short, anonymous satirical piece in Vanity Fair for 26 January 1861. Since Clemens would have been familiar with Vanity Fair, a leading humor magazine of the day, Mac Donnell asserts, persuasively, that Clemens adopted the pseudonym and covered his tracks with a fictitious story about Captain Sellers to separate himself from the “phunny phellows” of the humor magazines of his time. (See Mac Donnell’s “How Samuel Clemens found ‘Mark Twain’ in Carson City” in the Mark Twain Journal, vol. 50, Spring/Fall 2012, 947.) The nautical term “mark twain” refers to marks, either knots or strips of material, placed at intervals on a weighted line that was thrown into the water to determine its depth. Each mark indicated a fathom, or six feet, so two marks equaled twelve feet, usually enough to float shallow-draft steamboats. 23. from “A Sunday in Carson,” in the Territorial Enterprise for February or March, 1863; ET&S, 1:222. 24. MTEnt, 35. 25. ET&S, 1:159. 26. LTRS, 1:242. 27. “A Couple of Sad Experiences,” CT, 1:389. This essay, published in 1870, gives Twain’s version of the publication and reception of both “The Petrified Man” and “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson.” Looking back after seven years, Mark Twain was amiably condescending to his earlier strings of “roaring absurdities.” Three years later another essay about his Western journalism (“License of the Press”) demonstrated how his strategies of humor had matured: “I know from personal experience the proneness of journalists to lie. I once started a peculiar and picturesque fashion of lying myself on the Pacific coast, and it is not dead there to this day. Whenever I hear of a shower of blood and frogs combined, in California, or a sea serpent found in some desert, there, or a cave frescoed with diamonds and emeralds (always found by an Injun who died before he could finish telling where it was), I say to myself I am the father of this child—I have got to answer for this lie.” CT, 1:553.

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28. “In funny literature,” Fitzhugh Ludlow wrote in the San Francisco Golden Era in November 1863, “that Irresistible Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position. He makes me laugh more than any Californian since poor Derby died. He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself.” ET&S, 1:23. Washoe, from Washo—a tribal name, meaning “man,” of the natives in the Lake Tahoe area—became a local name for Nevada. 29. ET&S, 1:324. In 1870, when yet another hoax—about a new Agricultural Department that Twain announced for the New York Galaxy—went awry, he somewhat ruefully described the problem in “A Couple of Sad Experiences”: “I purposely wrote the thing as absurdly and as extravagantly as it could be written, in order to be sure and not mislead hurried or heedless readers. . . . To write a burlesque so wild that its pretended facts will not be accepted in perfect good faith by somebody, is very nearly an impossible thing to do.” “A Couple of Sad Experiences,” MTGal, 47-50 and CT, 1:388-89. 30. LTRS, 1:291. 31. MTEnt, 204. The specific cause of these outbursts was a joke that miscarried. Twain had written that “it was feared” the money raised by the ladies of Carson City for the Sanitary Fund (to assist sick and wounded Civil War soldiers) might be diverted “to aid a Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East.” MTEnt, 200. 32. R. G. Lillard, “Studies in Washoe Journalism and Humor,” unpub. diss., 11.; quoted in MTEnt, 100-01. 33. LTRS, 1:275. 34. LTRS, 1:269. 35. LTRS, 1:268. 36. Mark Twain’s departure from Nevada may have been hastened by two semi-serious fracases he was involved in—one involving the Sanitary Fund, the other concerning insults and duel challenges with an opposition newspaper editor. The surviving documents and other evidence concerning these events is presented by Henry Nash Smith in part 3 of MTEnt, “‘The Affair Was a Silly Joke,’” 183-205. Mark Twain skips over these apparently embarrassing episodes in RI, and winds the duel challenge into something of a tall tale in AUTO-AMT, 1:294-98. He would undoubtedly have left in any case, since he had outgrown Nevada, and his ambitions, growing with his talents, were pointed for San Francisco, where he had already published in the Morning Call and the Golden Era. The arresting barroom statistic is from P. M. Zall’s article on San Francisco in MTENCY, 651. 37. AUTO-AMT, 2:115. 38. from an article by Arthur McEwen, in the San Francisco Examiner, 22 Jan. 1893, 15. Quoted in MTEnt, 30. 39. ET&S, 2:242. 40. “Sabbath Reflections,” which appeared in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise for 28 Jan. 1866, reprinted in WIM, 37. 41. ET&S, 1:176. 42. “Ye Sentimental Law Student,” ET&S, 1:217. Editor Joe Goodman called this 1863 sketch the “first special article” contributed by “Mark Twain.” ET&S, 1:215. Twain’s best parody of “the infernal phraseology of the law” would come two decades later, in Life on the Mississippi, when he described a prohibition bill that had been introduced in Burlington, Iowa as “a most sobering bill . . . to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the state of Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water” (561). 43. ET&S, 2:64. 44. HAWAII, 283. In an earlier letter to his mother, on 30 Jan. 1862, Twain gave another example of this comic alternation of different poems and described its rationale: “You see, madam, my method is very simple and easy—thus: When I wish to write a great poem, I just take a few lines from Tom, Dick and Harry, Shakespeare, and other poets, and by patching them together so as to make them rhyme occasionally, I have accomplished my object. Never mind the sense—sense, madam, has but little to do with poetry.” LTRS, 1:146-47. 45. ET&S, 1:226-28. 46. ET&S, 1:235. Mark Twain misspells Balaam as Baalam.

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47. ET&S, 2:24. 48. ET&S, 2:325. 49. LTRS, 1:137. 50. N&J, 1:200, 189, 184. 51. N&J, 1:184. 52. In his first four major books: i.e., IA, RI, ATA, LOM. Twain uses the word “contrast” less in his later works, not because he is using the strategy less, but because the contrasts are built into the writings, and thus don’t have to be pointed out or commented on. 53. SPEECHES-F, 354. 54. LTRS-MT-H, 2:746. Huck makes the point himself in “Huck and Tom Among the Indians”: “It’s always my disposition to stretch [the facts].” HH&T, 105. 55. SN&O, 109. 56. “Frightful Accident to Dan De Quille,” ET&S, 1:360-61. 57. The original is a signed autograph note in the Special Collections Department, MSS 6314, box 1, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. There are seven versions that followed the original statement. They are listed here in chronological order: Twain’s notebook entry for June 2, ‘97 (misdated as “Jan. 2, ‘97” in NOTEBOOK-P, 327-28, reprinted in LTRS-ROGERS, 281-82); “Mark Twain Amused,” by Frank Marshall White, New York Journal, 2 June 1897, reprinted in INTERVIEWS, 317-18; Twain’s dictation unrevised in AUTO-D 252-53; dictation revised in AUTO-AMT, 2:10-11, and see 463; Frank Marshall White, “Mark Twain as a Newspaper Reporter,” Outlook, 24 Dec. 1910, 961-67 (where White suggests that “The report of my death is an exaggeration” became “The reports of my death are grossly exaggerated” by “process of repetition”); MTBIO, 1039; Margaret Lente Raoul, “Debunking a Famous Story,” The Bookman, Aug. 1931, 607-08; Twain states in his notebook entry, written at the time, that White came to see him, carrying cables of inquiry from the Journal, and that he “gave him a cable” text in reply. White’s 1897 interview quotes what Mark Twain “said” to “a Journal representative.” Twain’s autobiographical dictation in 1906 mentions an Irish reporter from the Evening Sun to whom he gave a spoken reply, and another Irish reporter from the New York World. White’s 1910 article states that he sent a reporter to check on Mark Twain’s health, and that Twain gave the reporter the “report of my death” note which was carried back to White, who visited and talked with Twain later in the day. 58. MTBIO, 1039. 59. ET&S, 1:258. 60. AUTO-AMT, 1:268. 61. HAWAII, 141. The disaster was the sinking of the clipper ship Hornet and the subsequent ordeal of the 15 survivors, which Twain, then in Honolulu, reported to the Sacramento Union in June 1866. Later in the year he revised and expanded his report into his first article in a major Eastern magazine, “Forty-Three Days in an Open Boat. Compiled from Personal Diaries,” published in Harper’s Monthly. The article consisted largely of excerpts from the journals of the survivors, appeared without an author’s name, and was attributed to “Mark Swain” in the index. The material was briefly rehashed in a short piece (“Short and Singular Rations”) in CJF&OS, and reprised in 1899 as “My Début as a Literary Person. By Mark Twain (Formerly Mike Swain).” 62. RI: flour sack, 295 and 661; Brigham Young, 100 and 599-600; Kilauea, 507 and 734. 63. LTRS, 1:84; LOM, 241. 64. Letter to J. H. Burrough, a St. Louis boarding-house roommate, written 1 Nov. 1876; Quoted in N&J, 1:15. 65. AUTO-AMT, 2:307. 66. HF, 1. Herb Block made a similar point about exaggerated drawings in an NPR interview on 20 October 1993. He explained that people recognize that cartoons are exaggerated, but they also realize that cartoons reveal a truth. 67. HF&TS, 83. 68. LTRS-MT-H, 2:533. 69. LTRS, 2:101. From a private letter sent to Joe Goodman in late October, as the Quaker City headed home. Goodman, of course, irrepressible Western journalist that he was, promptly published these remarks in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, which he edited.

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70. LTRS-MT-H, 2:866. 71. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life” (1838), in The American Poets, 18001900 (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1966) 157. 72. Hemingway, Farewell, 196. 73. MTLIB, 1:421. 74. ET&S, 1:67. 75. LTRS, 3:455. 76. IA, 93. 77. “‘Mark Twain’ in the Metropolis,” ET&S, 2:10. 78. LTRS-P, 2:824. 79. SPEECHES-F, 227. 80. In an autobiographical reminiscence in Roughing It, Twain notes that when he was a city editor in Nevada, “I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too often when there was a dearth of news” (RI, 275). 81. MTCall, 65. 82. MTCall, 23. 83. Mark Twain gives only a brief mention of his hiring and firing at the Call in his semiautobiographical account in ch. 58 of Roughing It, perhaps because, as he put it 41 years after the fact, “it was the only time in my life that I have been discharged, and it hurts yet” (AUTOAMT, 2:117). On that later occasion, an autobiographical dictation for 13 June 1906, Twain tells a story about how George Barnes of the Call had refused to run Twain’s report of the stoning of a Chinese man in the streets of San Francisco, and he implies that the “deep shame” led him to neglect his work (AUTO-AMT, 2:115-16 ). Since the Call’s pro-Irish, anti-Chinese stance can be substantiated (MTCALL, 25), and since we know of a number of pro-Chinese articles that Twain published elsewhere, there is no reason not to believe his assertion in 1906, though it is difficult to tell how much it figured in his dismissal/resignation from the paper. It is probable that, like the duel challenges in Nevada, the article suppression may have accelerated and perhaps justified, but did not initiate, Twain’s action. His departure from the Call was as inevitable as his graduation from Virginia City. 84. N&J, 1:80. 85. from Twain’s “The Private History of ‘The Jumping Frog’ Story,” first published in the North American Review in April 1894, and reprinted in both How to Tell a Story and Other Essays and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays. An error, reversing the roles of Jim Smiley and the stranger in Twain’s discussion of the tale, was corrected in the later “authorized Uniform Edition” and in ET&S, 2:264. My quotations from the tale itself are from ET&S, 2:282-88. First entitled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” the tale was reprinted as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” in Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867); and again, as “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” in Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old (1875), which included a translation in French which Twain then “clawed back into a civilized language”—an overly literal retranslation that provided new opportunities for humor: “It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim Smiley: it was in the winter of ‘49, possibly well at the spring of ‘50, I no me recollect not exactly.” The later “Private History” version and its reprintings, noted above, contain an abbreviated rendition of the original story, discussion of a possible analogue, and the French translation and retranslation. Mark Twain continued to tinker with the text as well as the title of his most famous story in these various reprintings. “He was planted as solid as an anvil” in CJF&OS becomes “solid as a church” in the SN&O version. Twain’s use of “Celebrated” and “Notorious” in later titles, and “The Only Reliable Account” in an unpublished early draft, acknowledge his debt to the miner, probably a former Illinois River pilot named Ben Coon, who first told him the story. Twain mentions Coon in his Angel’s Camp notebook (N&J, 1:75) and casts him as the narrator of a pre-jumping frog tale in March 1865 (ET&S, 2:137-43), but he never explicitly in print mentions him in connection with the jumping frog story. His friend Billy Gillis did make that connection, according to George West (LTRS, 1:321).

Notes

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86. Two preliminary attempts (“The Only Reliable Account of the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “Angel’s Camp Constable”), never published in Twain’s lifetime, are printed in ET&S, 2, nos. 117 and 118. 87. Louis J. Budd summarizes MT’s skill as a deadpan performer in “Mark Twain’s Visual Humor,” an article which concludes that Twain “could seldom talk or write without somehow spending his comic urge. . . . If Twain’s genome had a master gene, humor was its code.” Collected in Messent and Budd, Companion. 88. ET&S, 2:268-69. 89. LTRS, 1:325. 90. LTRS, 1:322-24. Since the California text seeks to present something of the appearance of the letter manuscripts, it is overnuanced for my purpose here, which is to present a clear reading text. Thus I have omitted some of its minor features, such as strikeovers, carets, and various typographical equivalents of Twain’s differing underscores. My text is thus identical to that produced in My Dear Bro: A letter from Samuel Clemens to His Brother Orion (Berkeley: The Berkeley Albion, 1961). “Unmistakeable” is Twain’s spelling. In his essay on “Mark Twain and Amiable Humor,” Gregg Camfield suggests that Twain’s early disparaging comments about humor as a profession bear “the marks of Twain’s Presbyterian upbringing.” Collected in Messent and Budd, Companion. 91. N&J, 3:238. 92. Lauter, 246-52. 93. LTRS, 1:327. Many critics have wrestled with what Edgar Branch calls “this low opinion of his sketch” (ET&S, 2:272). Paul Baender speaks of Twain’s “disgust” with his tale (“The ‘Jumping Frog’ as a Comedian’s First Virtue.” Modern Philology, 60, Feb. 1963, 198). My guess is they have not given enough allowance to Twain’s humorous extravagance. 94. LTRS, 1:327-28. 95. A full discussion of the many versions, reprintings, and revisions of “The Jumping Frog” is contained in ET&S, 2:262-82. The later titles, using the words “celebrated” and “notorious,” seem designed to indicate Twain’s acknowledgment that he was retelling a story, that another version of the frog story preceded his. 96. LTRS, 2:27. There is no known proof, outside of Twain’s claim, that Lowell ever made such a statement. See LTRS, 2:28n3. 97. LTRS, 3:423. 98. “Advertisement” facing the contents page of JF&OS, signed by “J. P.,” that is, John Paul, a pseudonym for Charles Henry Webb, who published this first of Mark Twain’s many books in 1867. 99. “My Début as a Literary Person” in HADLEY, 87. For the newspaper report itself, see letter 15, “BURNING OF THE CLIPPER SHIP HORNET AT SEA,” in HAWAII, 137-60. The friend who arranged for Mark Twain to be carried to the hospital and who did the interviewing, was Anson Burlingame, then enroute to his post as U.S. Minister to China. On Mark Twain’s return to San Francisco later in the summer, his fellow passengers included Hornet Captain Josiah Mitchell, who was not present at the hospital interviews, and two other survivors, and the additional information Twain received from them led to another article, “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat,” published in Harper’s Magazine in December, 1866. Mark Twain told the story again in “My Début as a Literary Person” (Century, Nov. 1899), considered using the Hawaii letters in a book, did use about a third of the materials in Roughing It, wrote at least part of a Sandwich Islands story around 1884, and delivered a famous encomium on the Islands, celebrated as a “prose poem,” at a baseball dinner given by A. G. Spalding in 1889 (SPEECHES-F, 244-47). Perhaps the best-known single sentence in English about Hawaii comes from a Twain letter of 1908 thanking the Hawaiian Promotion Committee for their gift of a carved wooden mantel which he installed in the billiard room at Stormfield, Mark Twain’s final home: “It will be a great pleasure to me, daily renewed, to have under my eye this lovely reminder of the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean” (LTRS-P, 2:824). 100. AUTO-AMT, 1:226. 101. LECTURES-L, [iii]. A slightly different version is given in MTBIO, 292. 102. LECTURES-F, 40-41. 103. SPEECHES-F, 4.

468

Notes

104. N&J, 1:374. 105. LTRS, 2:21. 106. LTRS, 1, 315, 328-29, 361. 107. LTRS, 1:373. 108. LTRS, 1:370. 109. LTRS, 2:19. 110. from the Cooper Union lecture handbill reproduced in MTBIO, facing p. 316. It is not known whether this phrase was coined by Twain or his friend, Frank Fuller, former acting governor of Utah Territory and Twain’s agent for the Cooper Union lecture. Even if the phrasing was Fuller’s, Twain would have to have known of and approved it, since he was anxiously involved in every aspect of the preparation and publicity for this first venture in the big leagues of lecturing. 111. LTRS, 2:43. 112. LTRS, 2:43. 113. IA, 19. 114. IA, 20. 115. IA, 32. 116. LTRS, 2:50. 117. Mr.BROWN, 247-48. 118. IA, 28. 119. Solon Severance told A. B. Paine that “there was a charmed circle on the steamer, Mr. Clemens, Mrs. Fairbanks, Mrs. Severance, [Charles] Langdon, and Yours Truly. [Also] Emma Beach, Dan Slote, Jack Van Nostrand, and [Julius] Moulton.” The list of Twain’s close shipboard friends totals ten, if we add Dr. Abraham Reeves Jackson, the witty “Doctor” of Innocents Abroad, and intrepid traveler Julia Newell (“thrown from her horse in the ascent of Mount Carmel, she wiped the blood from her face and remounted; accosted by Bedouin thieves at the Dead Sea, she scoffed them down”). Jackson and Newell married in 1871. LTRS, 2:124; MTABROAD, 48-49. 120. LTRS, 2:406. Ultimately the Herald article, with a few changes, was reprinted as the penultimate chapter (“An Obituary”) of The Innocents Abroad. “Skurrying” is Twain’s spelling. 121. Published—and to some extent selected and edited—by Mark Twain’s California friend Charles Henry Webb, this small book, with a gold frog stamped on the cover, contained 27 sketches written in California and Nevada. Upon its publication, Twain wrote to Bret Harte, who had encouraged the project, that “It is full of damnable errors of grammar & deadly inconsistencies of spelling in the Frog sketch because I was away & did not read the proofs” (LTRS, 2:39). Twain was also unhappy about the low circulation, and in 1870 he bought and destroyed the plates (ET&S, 1:503-46). 122. James, Henry, Selected Letters, 93. 123. IA, 60. 124. LTRS, 2:136. Before the Quaker City trip, Twain wrote to his mother that “I am wild with impatience to move—move—Move!” In a letter to a fellow passenger and friend after the return of the Quaker City, Twain wrote: “I am in a fidget to move. It isn’t a novel sensation, though—I was never any other way.” LTRS, 2:49-50, 138. 125. IA, 76. The passage, concerning the trip Twain made to Tangier, continues: “foreign inside and outside and all around—nothing any where about it to dilute its foreignness— nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. 126. IA, 376-77. 127. IA, 151, 221, 258, 354, 456. 128. IA, 80, 247, 362. 129. IA, 400. 130. Othello, 1:3, ll. 143-45. 131. IA, 318, 369, 351, 387. 132. IA, 588-90. Of the many passages W. D. Howells quotes from IA in his 1869 favorable review in the Atlantic, he seems to have liked the journey to the Jordan River best, for he quotes it at length. See MMT, 107-12.

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133. IA, 362. 134. IA, 325-26. 135. IA, 287-88. 136. IA, 368. 137. IA, 574-75. 138. IA, 171-72. 139. LTRS, 2:13. 140. IA, 177. This Hannibal digression was not in Twain’s letter to the Alta, but added during Twain’s revisions for book publication. 141. IA, 178. 142. IA, 180. 143. IA, 183. 144. IA, 189. It could be, of course, that Twain invented this “notish,” a suspicion that tends to be undercut by the fact that it is also contained in the Alta letter written shortly after the visit to Milan. On the other hand, there are some slight changes between the version in the Alta letter and The Innocents Abroad text, which suggest that if Twain did not invent the notice, he did tune it up. The existence of Twain’s notebook for this period might settle the point, but it is not extant. Possibly the engraver for Innocents Abroad borrowed the notebook to make the engraving of Twain’s notebook sketch of the echo used in ch. 19, and did not return it to the author. See IA, 197 and N&J, 1:370-71. For the Alta letters that were revised into The Innocents Abroad, see TIA. 145. IA, 185. 146. IA, 111. 147. IA, 364. 148. IA, 184. 149. IA, 190. 150. IA, 198. In a later chapter (27) referring to an earlier experience (in Genoa) teasing the guides, Twain notes that “The doctor asks the questions, generally, because he can keep his countenance, and look more like an inspired idiot, and throw more imbecility into the tone of his voice than any man that lives.” IA, 290. 151. IA, 199-201. 152. IA, 203. 153. IA, 204-05. According to Kelsie B. Harder’s Illustrated History of Place Names, United States and Canada (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), Tahoe comes from the Washo Indian word for “big water.” 154. The phrase is the title of Ellison’s 1958 essay in Partisan Review, collected in 1964 in Shadow and Act. 155. LTRS, 2:119. 156. TIA, 56. 157. TIA, 50. 158. Dewey Ganzel has an excellent discussion of “Brown-Blucher” in MTABROAD, 70-74. 159. IA, 308-26. 160. “Mark Twain and the Old-Time Subscription Book,” which originally appeared in The American Review of Reviews, June 1910; collected in Revived Remarks on Mark Twain by George Ade, compiled by George Hiram Brownell. Chicago: privately printed, 1936; 13. 161. Henry Fielding, Author’s Preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), in Lauter, 251. 162. IA, 336. 163. Shelley, 550. 164. IA, 336. 165. MSM, 112. 166. IA, 335. 167. LTRS, 2:418. 168. LTRS, 2:119. 169. AUTO-D, 213. Twain’s statements about his first meeting with Livy vary slightly. See also AUTO-AMT, 1:355 (and 577-78n), and LTRS, 2:145-46n3.

470

Notes

170. LTRS, 2:167-68. As his letters demonstrate, Mark Twain had been thinking about marriage for a long time. In 1862, from Carson City, he wrote—confidentially—to his sister-in-law that “I am not married yet, and I never will marry until I can afford to have servants enough to leave my wife in the position for which I designed her, viz:—as a companion. I don’t want to sleep with a three-fold being who is cook, chambermaid and washerwoman all in one. I don’t mind sleeping with female servants as long as I am a bachelor—by no means—but after I marry, that sort of thing will be ‘played out.’” In 1866 he wrote to his mother that “I resign myself to a long & useful bachelordom as cheerfully as I may”; and to Will Bowen, “Marry be d—d. I am too old to marry. I am nearly 31. I have got gray hairs in my head. Women appear to like me, but d—n them, they don’t love me.” In 1868, three months before his visit to the Langdons in Elmira, he wrote to Quaker City friend Mary Fairbanks that, on the steamboat trip from Sacramento to San Francisco, “they gave me the bridal chamber as usual—(a ghastly sarcasm on my lonely state, but intended as a compliment).” LTRS, 1:145 (cf. 195), 337, 359; 2:212. 171. TS, 156. 172. LTRS, 2:290. The courting letters from Mark Twain to Olivia Langdon, carefully preserved by Livy and numbered from 1 to 184, are contained, with full annotation, in volumes 2-4 of LTRS. They are also collected in LTRS-LIVY. 173. LTRS, 2:284-85. 174. LTRS, 3:403. The full quotation is revealing: “an unaccustomed stirring within me of religious impulses, not grand and strong, it is true, but steady & hopeful—the subdued & faroff cadences of approaching music, as it were.” 175. LTRS, 2:318. 176. LTRS, 3:45. 177. LTRS, 2:266. 178. LTRS, 2:352. 179. from “Indiantown,” in WWD, 170. 180. LTRS, 4:510. Livy was writing to her husband about a conversation she had with their new neighbor, Susan Lee Warner, the wife of author Charles Dudley Warner. “I did not tell her,” Livy continued, “how almost perfectly cold I am toward God.” See LTRS, 2:353, for Twain’s receipt of the Plymouth Pulpit. 181. MMT, 31. 182. MMT, 32. 183. AUTO-AMT, 1:349, 359, 346. 184. LTRS-MT-H, 2:699. 185. AUTO-AMT, 1:369. Twain echoes Burlingame’s advice in the passion-filled letter he wrote to Mary Fairbanks on the day that Livy agreed to become engaged: “I shall climb— climb—climb—toward this bright sun that is shining in the heaven of my happiness.” LTRS, 2:284. 186. LTRS, 4:248. 187. LTRS, 1:359. 188. LTRS, 2:130. This and later letters refer to Mrs. Fairbanks as Mother Bear, and to himself, Charley Langdon, and Julius Moulton (“Moult” in Innocents Abroad) as “her family of uncouth & unruly cubs” (LTRS, 2:241, 243-44). 189. LTRS, 4:316. 190. LTRS, 2:234. 191. LTRS, 2:210, 235. 192. LTRS: 2:223. 193. AUTO-AMT, 1:349. 194. RI, 405. 195. LTRS, 4:52. 196. Jefferson’s letter to Lewis of 20 June 1803. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols., ed. Paul Leicester Ford. New York: Putnams, 1892-99; vol. 8 (1801-06), 194. 197. RI, 1. 198. LTRS, 4:341. 199. RI, 40.

Notes

471

200. RI, 93. 201. RI, 271. 202. RI, 405, 415. 203. “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed., 1800, Norton Anthology, 2:102. 204. RI, 25-26. 205. RI: 37, 118. 206. RI: 11, 80, 13, 20. 207. RI, 9. 208. RI, 74. 209. RI, 129. 210. RI, 211. 211. RI, 120-21. 212. Smith, Development, 54,63,55. In “Transformation of a Tenderfoot,” ch. 3 of Henry Nash Smith’s Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (revised from an earlier essay entitled “Mark Twain as an Interpreter of the Far West: The Structure of Roughing It” in The Frontier in Perspective, 1956), Mr. Smith finds the Buck Fanshaw episode disappointing, because it is the point at which Mark Twain abandons his “sympathy with vernacular characters” and “identifies himself with the responsible citizens of Virginia City as against the propertyless miners and prospectors.” Thus, in Smith’s “two ways of viewing the world,” honest and robust vernacular values are defeated by the pompous and outworn traditional culture. I believe that Mark Twain is a more nimble-footed humorist than Smith’s discussion suggests, and that Twain uses each culture to satirize the excesses of the other, and sometimes, as in the Buck Fanshaw sketch, satirizes both simultaneously. He noted in an autobiographical dictation in 1906 that “both ends of a contrast are equally delightful to me” (AUTO-AMT, 1:281). Nevertheless, Smith’s book is rich in perceptive insights and authoritative scholarship, and it inaugurated a new appreciation of the serio side of Twain’s serio-comic achievements. 213. RI, 310-12. Twain prefaces the dialogue between Scotty and the minister with a note that suggests his interest was more linguistic than judgmental: “The slang of Nevada was the richest and the most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps.” RI, 309. 214. Mr. BROWN, 202 (written in May, the letter was published on 7 July). Saddened to hear about Rising’s death, at age 35, in an Ohio River steamboat disaster, Twain noted that he was “a noble young fellow—& for three years, [in Virginia City, Nevada], he & I were fast friends. I used to try to teach him how he ought to preach in order to get at the better natures of the rough population about him.” LTRS, 2:333. 215. LTRS, 1:368-69. On 1 June 1867, just before the Quaker City departed for Europe, Twain wrote to his family that his shipmates would include “professional preachers—there are none I like better to converse with—if they ain’t narrow minded & bigoted they make good companions” (LTRS, 2:50). For Henry Bellows see also LTRS, 1:308-09. For Charles Wadsworth, see LTRS, 2:361; ET&S, 2:536-37; MTCall, passim; and ch. 20 in Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson. Sewall reprints Dickinson’s remarks on roguery (454), and her comments about Wadsworth to James Clark and T. W. Higginson (450). Mark Twain’s 1866 report on Wadsworth’s preaching in the Golden Era is reprinted in WIM, 39-41. It is possible that Wadsworth’s humorous comment, which Twain quotes, about “the good little boys in [the Sunday school books] who always went to Heaven, and the bad little boys who infallibly got drowned on Sunday” was influenced by Twain’s “The Christmas Fireside,” later known as “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief,” first published in the Californian in 1865; and that Wadworth’s comment in turn influenced Twain’s “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper,” which appeared in the Galaxy in 1870. 216. Henry James to Charles Eliot Norton, 4 Feb. 1872. James, Henry, Selected Letters, 93. 217. MMT, 108. 218. The theory of the West’s difference is dominated by Frederick Jackson Turner, who began his campaign with “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” an essay read to the American Historical Association at the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893. A 92-item bibliography of “The Frontier Hypothesis and Frederick Jackson Turner” is contained

472

Notes

in The Frontier and the American West, comp. R. W. Paul and R. E. Etulain (Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM Publishing Corp., 1977). 219. The Great Plains, 9. In A Natural History of Western Trees, Donald Culross Peattie states that the 100th meridian is a botanical line of demarcation: “There are only about twenty species, out of more than two hundred, which cross this boundary between the western and the [northeastern] sylvas, and approximately the same number, though quite a different lot of species, do so in Texas where the western and southeastern floras just meet on the almost treeless plains” (xii). 220. Buffalo Lick was the original name of the site on the north fork of the Yadkin River settled by Squire Boone and his family, including young Daniel, in 1751. In addition to the locations cited in the text, there is a Buffalo Gap, Virginia; a Buffalo, Tennessee; and another Buffalo, Kentucky. 221. Bryce, 2:892. Bryce also suggests the concept of difference: “There has been nothing in the past resembling its growth, and probably there will be nothing in the future. A vast territory, wonderfully rich in natural resources of many kinds . . . in many places marvellously fertile; in some regions mountains full of minerals, in others trackless forests where every tree is over two hundred feet high . . . these are phenomena absolutely without precedent in history” (ch. 121, “The Temper of the West”). 222. James, William, 2:103. 223. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, in The American Puritans, ed. Perry Miller (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 17. 224. Donald Culross Peattie, in A Natural History of Western Trees, 104, states that “[Lodgepole] seed life, sealed between the scales by a heavy coat of stiff resin, is not killed by . . . fire. Indeed, the resin is melted, the cones are roasted till their scales pop open, and out leaps the seed crop that has been dormant for years.” See the USDA “Revised Fire Management Policy” (Washington: Department of Agriculture, n.d., effective February 1978). 225. Bob Nolan, “Tumbling Tumbleweed,” Songs of the West (Columbia record CL659). 226. RI, 40. 227. RI, 52. 228. RI, 52-53. 229. RI, 13. 230. RI, 32. 231. RI, 33. 232. RI, 339. 233. RI, 339. 234. RI, 120. 235. RI, 150, 67, 217, 447, 254. 236. RI, 74-75. 237. RI, 200. 238. RI, 116-17.

6. THROW IN ANOTHER GRIZZLY 1. Henry James, The American (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978) 97. Classic works on the tall tale include Franklin J. Meine, ed., Tall Tales of the Southwest (New York: Knopf, 1930); Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931); Walter Blair, Native American Humor, 1800-1900 (New York: American Book Co., 1937) and Tall Tale America: A Legendary History of Our Humorous Heroes (New York: Coward-McCann, 1944); Richard M. Dorson, Jonathan Draws the Long Bow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946); Mody C. Boatright, “The Art of Tall Lying” (Southwestern Review, 1949); Vance Randolph, We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951). More recent discussions include Carolyn S. Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature (Knoxville: Uni-

Notes

473

versity of Tennessee Press, 1987) and Henry B. Wonham, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 2. Baughman, xvi-xvii. 3. Following Columbus’s landing in the central Bahamas in 1492, he explored the northeastern coast of Cuba and the northern coast of Hispaniola where his flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked. He then set sail for home on the Niña, stopping at the Azores, where he composed a letter to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. The quotations from the letter are taken from the Spanish edition, translated by Samuel Eliot Morison, which predates the more widely known Latin edition, and is appended to Morison’s Christopher Columbus, Mariner, 203-13. 4. Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent Fruites by Planting in Virginia (London, 1609), 11; reprinted in Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, collected by Peter Force (New York: Peter Smith, 1947). 5. Anthony Parkhurst, in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, 1589; reprinted in Louis B. Wright, The Elizabethans’ America, 78-79. 6. Francis Higginson, New England’s Plantation, 1630; reprinted in Wright, The Elizabethans’ America, 279. 7. Edward H. Lenox, Overland to Oregon, 1904; reprinted in Billington, The Far Western Frontier, 85. 8. Parkman, 38-39. 9. LOM, 252. Having heard and undoubtedly told many jokes about the river water, Twain continues with a long paragraph of fluidic hyperbole. “If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink.” 10. James K. Polk, “Fourth Annual Message,” 5 December 1848. Printed in the documents section of James K. Polk, 1795-1849, ed. John J. Farrell (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1970), 79. 11. These 47 countries are those recognized by the United Nations as defining Europe, with two exceptions. The UN recognizes Vatican City as a country, but not Kosovo. I have included Kosovo, but not Vatican City, in my calculations. 12. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 88. Mrs. Trollope, who wrote more than 40 books in a literary career that didn’t begin until she was 53, was the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope. 13. Wister, 123-25. 14. Yates, 150. 15. Cohen and Dillingham, 252-53. 16. RI, 47. 17. RI, 48. 18. McPhee, 66. 19. Baxter Black, “Why Do the Trees All Lean in Wyoming?” Coyote Cowboy Poetry. Benson AZ: Coyote Cowboy Co., 1986. 20. RI, 138-39. 21. RI, 136, 139. 22. Mari Sandoz, Old Jules, 58. Beckwourth recounted his richly colored adventures as mountain man, scout, trader, and Crow chief to Thomas D. Bonner, whose Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth was published in 1856. The book’s truth content is still being debated, for Beckwourth, unlike Twain, did not distinguish between tall tales and lies. The University of Nebraska Press issued a modern edition of the Life and Adventures, with introduction and notes by Delmont R. Oswald, in 1972. 23. RI, 15. 24. RI, 47. 25. Wister, 123. 26. AUTO-AMT, 1:206. 27. RI, 106, 66, 249. 28. Woolf, 75.

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Notes

29. The phrase comes from chapter 14 of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, first published in 1817, in which he recounts his joint authorship, with William Wordsworth, of Lyrical Ballads. In their division of labor, Wordsworth was to address himself to “the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us,” while Coleridge directed his endeavors “to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Norton, 2:274). 30. available from the Mark Twain Project Online, and printed in the project’s Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004; 15). 31. my retelling of a tale reported by Roger Welsch, Shingling the Fog and Other Plains Lies (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1972), 20; as quoted in Carolyn Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature, 23. 32. Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s story first appeared in the Spirit of the Times in 1841, and was collected and revised for The Hive of “The Bee-Hunter,” in 1854. I have used the later version, as reprinted in Cohen and Dillingham, 268-79. 33. AUTO-NAR, 242. 34. Dickinson’s poem 1129 (“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”) in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 506-07.

7. OLD TIMES AND NEW NARRATORS 1. LTRS-MT-H, 1:224. 2. LTRS, 1:324. 3. LOM, 246. 4. MMT, 34. 5. LTRS, 2:369-70. See also LTRS, 2:39. For a full discussion of the editing and publication of Twain’s first book, see ET&S, 1:503-46. For Twain’s fulminations against Charles Henry Webb, the co-editor (along with Twain) and publisher of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, see AUTO-AMT, 2:49-50. Webb’s version of the transaction is contained in ET&S, 2:381-82. In addition to the unsupervised editing, shoddy proofreading, low sales, and lack of royalties, the unhappiness Twain expressed with the volume perhaps stemmed from his changing sense of himself, his increasing ambitions as an author. Only 9 of the 27 sketches in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches were carried over into Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, published in 1875. In spite of his comment to Livy— “I’ll never write another [book] like it”—Twain did produce a very small volume in the same vein, in 1871, entitled Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance. A year or two after publication, according to Paine (MTBIO, 433), Mark Twain bought and destroyed the plates of this 47-page book. 6. Mark Twain liked Hay’s comment and he copied it into a letter to Howells on 18 Dec. 1874. John Hay was a year younger than Twain, and grew up in Warsaw, Illinois—a Mississippi River town located 40 miles north of Hannibal. LTRS-MT-H, 1:55. 7. MMT, 114. 8. LTRS, 5:95. This comment, perhaps a postscript to a letter from Twain to Howells, exists now only in a transcription in A. M. Broadley’s Chats on Autographs, published in 1910. Howells referred to the comment, but did not quote it, on the first page of My Mark Twain, the biography he composed just after his friend’s death. At that time, Howells misremembered the occasion, thinking Twain’s remark referred to a review of Innocents Abroad rather than Roughing It, but the remark itself, he said, was “stamped . . . into my memory” as an example of Twain’s “graphic touch . . . which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate.” Howells went on to say that “I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them.” MMT, 3-4. 9. LTRS-MT-H, 1:22.

Notes

475

10. SN&O, 204. 11. SN&O, 204-05. 12. LTRS-MT-H, 1:25. 13. W. D. Howells, in his Atlantic review in December 1875, of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old, in which he maintains that “by far the most perfect piece of work in the book is “A True Story.” MMT, 120, 123. 14. INTERVIEWS, 132; cf. 229, 262. 15. MMT, 101. 16. LTRS-MT-H, 1:32. 17. LTRS-MT-H, 1:34, and LTRS, 6:262-63. 18. LTRS-MT-H, 1:34. 19. N&J, 3:343 (1887). Three years later, in a letter to an unidentified person, Twain agreed with that person that “I confine myself [in fiction] to life with which I am familiar,” and then went on to detail the many and varied facets of his personal experience. The Portable Mark Twain, ed. Bernard DeVoto, 773-75. 20. SPEECHES-F, 143. 21. MTBIO, 123. This statement, or something like it, may have been made to A. B. Paine by Horace Bixby when Paine visited Bixby, still piloting steamboats at the age of 81, in the spring of 1907. Two qualifications are in order. Paine’s quotations are not always to be taken literally. And since Mark Twain became famous in his lifetime, comments on his early years made later by former associates may have been nudged one way or another by that intervening fame. 22. LOM, 65-66, 62-63. Quotations from “Old Times on the Mississippi,” originally published in installments in the Atlantic Monthly (January-June, August, 1875), are taken from Life on the Mississippi (1883), where the seven Atlantic installments became chapters 4-17 of the book. 23. LOM, 79. 24. LOM, 85-86. 25. LOM, 111. 26. LOM, 123. 27. HF, 1. 28. MTBIO, 512; LTRS-MT-H, 246. 29. LTRS-PAINE, 1:275; LTRS-MT-H, 1:160. 30. MTBIO, 926. 31. WHOMT, 111-24. See LTRS-MT-H, 1:206. 32. LTRS-MT-H, 1:87-88. For a summary of the composition of TS, see John C. Gerber’s “Introduction” to the 1980 California edition, 3-30. 33. PW/TET, 309, 312-14. Twain continued to work on Those Extraordinary Twins and finally discovered the problem was “two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy. So I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy. This left the original team in, but only as mere names, not as characters. Their prominence was wholly gone; they were not even worth drowning; so I removed that detail. Also I took those twins apart and made two separate men of them. They had no occasion to have foreign names now, but it was too much trouble to remove them all through, so I left them christened as they were and made no explanation.” PW/TET, 315. 34. LTRS-MT-H, 1:160. 35. LTRS-MT-H, 1:173. 36. AUTO-AMT, 1:220. 37. Randall Jarrell, “An Unread Book”; as quoted in Lawrence Howe, Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority; p. 1. Howe describes his thesis this way: “By examining how Twain’s novels juxtapose and even confuse different classes of narrative—epic and bildungsroman, picaresque and heteroglot travel narrative, historical romance and dystopian novel, and slave romance and detective novel, to name a few—I will show how his texts subvert conceptions of order. For these distinct narrative classes are ideologically loaded with assumptions about the organization of social power. Consequently, his exemplary career says as much about the conflicts within American culture at large as about analogous conflicts in the American novel.” Clearly subversion, in Twain’s works and elsewhere, has to do with author-

476

Notes

ity, power, and conflict. But we need to keep in mind also that subversion is a chief function of a humorist. 38. Heller, 45. 39. TS, 46. 40. TS, 43. 41. TS, 30-31. 42. TS, 163-64. 43. TS, 47-48. 44. TS, 9. 45. TS, 20, 5. 46. LTRS-MT-H, 2:685; MMT, 30. 47. Moncure Conway, in an unsigned review in the London Examiner, 17 June 1876; as quoted in REVIEWS-CH, 64. 48. TS, 25. See TS+, 605, 454-55. Apparently the change was prompted by Howells’ note: “Don’t like the slops-incident at all.” 49. CT, 1:339. 50. LTRS, 1:268. 51. TS, 255. 52. LTRS-MT-H, 1:111, 113. In Supplement B to TS+, Paul Baender, after a thorough review of the available textual evidence, concludes that “Mark Twain probably removed a closing chapter” (452). 53. TS, 256. 54. LTRS-MT-H, 1:92. 55. LTRS, 2:181. 56. Letters of James Russell Lowell, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York, 1894), 1:305-06; as quoted in William Dean Howells: Representative Selections, ed. Clara and Rudolf Kirk, li. The Kirks’ 170-page introduction to their Howells anthology is a succinct biography. For a comprehensive biography of Howells, see Edwin H. Cady,The Road to Realism and The Realist at War. The most complete discussion of the Whittier Birthday Speech is by Henry Nash Smith: “‘That Hideous Mistake of Poor Clemens’s,’” Harvard Library Bulletin, vol. 9, no. 2, Spring 1955, 145-80; a condensed version of which is converted into ch. 5 (“The California Bull and the Gracious Singers”) of Smith’s Mark Twain: the Development of a Writer. As cited below, Howells gives his side of the dinner story in MMT; Twain gives his several versions in his autobiographical dictations for 11 and 23 Jan. 1906 (AUTO-AMT, 1: 260-67, 310). 57. Kirks, Howells, li. 58. Kirks, Howells, li. 59. MMT, 59. 60. SPEECHES-F, 110-115. 61. Reprinted from the Cincinnati Commercial via the Boston Daily Globe in Smith, “Hideous Mistake,” 158. 62. MMT, 59. 63. from O. W. Holmes’ letter to Mark Twain, 29 Dec. 1877, in Smith, “Hideous Mistake,” 165. 64. Smith, “Hideous Mistake,” 147-48. 65. Smith, “Hideous Mistake,” 157-60. 66. MMT, 60. 67. Smith, “Hideous Mistake,” 164. 68. LTRS-MT-H, 1:212. 69. LTRS-MT-H, 1:215. 70. LTRS-MT-H, 1:212. 71. MMT, 62. 72. Twain letter of 5 Feb. 1878, MTPO; also in LTRS-MT-MF, 217. 73. AUTO-AMT, 1:261, 267. 74. AUTO-AMT, 1:310.

Notes

477

75. Smith, “Hideous Mistake,” 175; AUTO-AMT, 1:310. H. N. Smith first discovered this comment in Twain’s hand as a footnote to the previous quotation (“I expect this latest verdict to remain.”) in the typescript of the Autobiographical Dictation. 76. Wister, The Virginian, 23. The 1902 text reads “Your bet, you son-of-a——.” “Bitch” didn’t appear until the novel was published in Wister’s Collected Works in 1928. 77. SPEECHES-H, 15-16. 78. LTRS, 2:288, 285n1, 320-21. 79. Mr.BROWN, 270-71. 80. LTRS, 3:30. 81. LTRS, 3:35. Nevertheless, on other occasions Twain did report success with lectures that he delivered in churches. See LTRS, 3:404n2. 82. MMT, 63. 83. AUTO-AMT, 1:62. 84. LTRS-MT-H, 1:227. 85. LTRS-PAINE, 1:332. 86. MTBIO, 370. For a biography of Twichell that focuses on his relation to Twain, see Leah A. Strong’s Joseph Hopkins Twichell, Mark Twain’s Friend and Pastor. Ms. Strong well presents the close personal relationship that existed between the two men in spite of a thoroughgoing difference of opinion in matters transcendental, though she somewhat overargues the spiritual nature of Twichell’s pastoral relationship to Twain, as opposed to the official nature (marrying and burying). To her credit, Strong gives full evidence on all sides of the question, and even concedes that Twichell’s assistance to Twain in the latter’s time of troubles was “because of the personality of Twichell and their close friendship rather than because of his being a minister” (104-05). Now that the early Twain letters are fully available, we can see that the reference to the two men kneeling together in prayer—which Strong makes much of— probably refers to the brief moment in his courtship days when Twain studied his Bible and experimented with becoming a believing Christian. For a recent biography of Twichell, see Steve Courtney, Joseph Hopkins Twichell: The Life and Times of Mark Twain's Closest Friend. 87. LTRS: 2:267. 88. LTRS: 3:102-03. 89. Strong, 18. 90. LTRS-PAINE, 1:338. 91. Twain, in a speech, describes the “walk to the Talcott Tower, ten miles distant,” and when he and Twichell arrive there, mentions “the ten-mile post” (SPEECHES-F, 309). Steve Courtney, in “To the Tower” estimates the one-way distance as “about eight miles.” (Hartford Courant, 14 Jan. 1996, and on the Web at ahcc.org/TWAIN/ToTheTower.htm.) Sometimes Twain and Twichell walked both ways; often they caught a train at the Bloomfield station for part of the distance. The tower of an earlier day, superintended by tavern keeper Matthew Bartlett, was replaced by the Heublein Tower in 1914. Since 1965 the tower and its mountain ridge have been part of the Talcott Mountain State Park. 92. AUTO-D, 369, 371. The incident is authenticated in LTRS, 6:277-79; N&J, 2:87; and AUTO-AMT, 2:380. Written by Twain in 1882, this account is technically not a part of Twain’s Autobiography, as DeVoto conjectured it was, and thus is not included in AUTOAMT (see note 380.2-3 in AUTO-AMT, 2:620). Twain’s first thought was to write the account “for private reference.” When it was written, he put it in, and then took it out of, the manuscript of Life on the Mississippi. 93. SWE, 36. 94. SWE, 67. 95. Twain letter of 17 Feb. 1878, MTPO; also, with slight variations, in LTRS-PAINE, 1:319-20. 96. LTRS-PAINE, 1:349. 97. MTBIO, 667, 666. 98. ATA, 221-22. 99. ATA, 212. 100. ATA, 407. 101. LTRS-MT-H: 1:248.

478

Notes

102. ET&S, 1:310. See also “The Lick House Ball,” ET&S, 1:314-19. 103. ATA, 340. 104. ATA, 301. 105. ATA, 81-82. 106. ATA, 356-57. 107. LAIFI, 93-94. 108. LTRS-MT-H, 1:249. 109. LTRS-MT-H, 1:36. 110. ATA, 83. 111. ATA, 103. 112. ATA, 456. 113. ATA, 155, 403. 114. LTRS-MT-H, 1:248-49. This letter suggests an attitude many critics associate with an aged, presumably bitter and pessimistic author. The fact that it was penned relatively early (30 January 1879), when Twain was 43, demonstrates that his career was not a simple slide from humorist to pessimist. 115. ATA, 31. 116. ATA, 32. 117. ATA, 36. 118. ATA, 36-37. I have silently corrected a typo on page 36, line 28, of the first edition, adding an s to “creature” in the second line of the quoted material. 119. ATA, 40. 120. ATA, 41. 121. ATA, 41. 122. Fred Brenner seems to have been the first to point out that Twain’s blue jay is an Eastern species. His comment occurs in a book jacket statement about the illustrations he created for the New York Orion Press edition of Jim Baker’s Bluejay Yarn in 1963. 123. N&J, 1:17. 124. N&J, 1:234. 125. N&J, 1:328. 126. SN&O, 34, 38, 42. The French version originally appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes on 15 July 1872. Twain wrote his retranslation in London in June 1873, and sent it to his publisher with the suggestion that it be issued, with some other sketches, as a pamphlet. (LTRS, 5:409-10.) Elisha Bliss, however, held it back until the publication of Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old in 1875, at which time Twain revised his earlier manuscript. 127. Twain letter of 2 June 1878, MTPO; also, with small variations, in MTBIO, 622. 128. N&J, 2:82. 129. LTRS, MT-H, 1:249. 130. ATA, Appendix D, 602. The quotations which follow in this paragraph are from ATA, Appendix D, 601, 604, 604, 607, 606, 612, 606, 616, 618. 131. CY, 259. 132. SPEECHES-H, [55]. 133. CT, 2:271. 134. This quotation, and others that follow in the paragraph, is from LTRS-MT-H, 1:286-87. 135. NOOK, 191. 136. LTRS-MT-H, 1:338. 137. LTRS-MT-H, 1:378. 138. MTGal, 37. 139. MTGal, 129. 140. CT, 1:634-35, 638. 141. MTBIO, 630. 142. P&P, 157. 143. P&P, 100. 144. P&P, 144-45. 145. P&P, 288-89. 146. P&P, 273.

Notes

479

147. The first family production was at Christmas time, 1884. As a welcome home surprise for Mark Twain, who had been on the road lecturing with George Washington Cable, the children in the Clemenses’ neighborhood performed an adaptation of the novel made by Livy. Delighted, Twain made some additions to the script for other performances, and took the role of Miles Hendon himself. Four years later, Abby Sage Richardson dramatized The Prince and the Pauper for a production that ran in Philadelphia and then New York. MTBIO, 787-90, 883-86. 148. REVIEWS-CR, 205 (by Hartford Congregational Minister Edwin Pond Parker). 149. REVIEWS-CR, 204. 150. This yarn is reprinted in appendices in NOOK, 243-46 and P&P, 376-80. The Joan of Arc version is contained in JOAN, 286-88. The tales by George Washington Harris that Twain may have had in mind are “Sicily Burns’s Wedding” and “Old Burns’s Bull-Ride,” from Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool,” a collection favorably reviewed by Mark Twain in 1867 (Mr.BROWN, 221).

8. THE NON-EXAMPLE OF BRET HARTE 1. This oft-quoted exchange—it is the opening sentence of Richard O’Connor’s biography of Bret Harte—comes from Mr. Dooley Remembers, ed. Philip Dunne, 244. These memoirs were composed in the mid-1930s, many years after the events they record took place. And Dunne, Twain’s friend and a charter member of the Damned Human Race Luncheon Club, loved a good story, even if he had to invent it. He sets up the conversation by putting down Henry James: “Once Henry James, the flawless, the sedate, the impeccable Henry asked him, ‘Do you know Bret Harte?’” Since there is no record of Twain’s response being overheard by anyone other than Dunne, and since Dunne’s editor was not a fact checker but an admiring son, it is possible that the exchange is too good to be literally true. 2. ATA, 321-22. Twain apparently recognized the inappropriateness of his attack on Harris, for he adds a closing paragraph to the chapter attempting to account for what he calls his “blistering words”: “I can be dreadfully rough on a person when the mood takes me.” ATA, 322. 3. LTRS, MT-H, 1:261. In fairness to Mark Twain, and to Harte, it should be noted that Twain read the Red Dog tales a second time and found, as he told Howells in the same letter, “a most decided brightness,” a circumstance that made him wish “this ass . . . would do his work honestly & with pains.” 4. LTRS, 4:316. 5. LTRS, 4:248. 6. Quoted in Duckett, 28. 7. LTRS, 1:328. 8. LTRS, 4:248, 316. 9. Letters of Bret Harte, ed. G. B. Harte, 154. 10. It is generally assumed that the two authors never saw one another again, though Paul Fatout notes that Harte and Twain both attended a dinner, at which Twain made a speech, given in honor of Sir Henry Irving in London on 9 June 1900. SPEECHES-F, 338. 11. AUTO-AMT, 2:417,119. 12. LTRS, 4:249. 13. Selected Letters of Bret Harte, ed. Scharnhorst, 144; Twain letter of 27 Feb 1877, MTPO. 14. Selected Letters of Bret Harte, ed. Scharnhorst, 149. 15. Selected Letters of Bret Harte, ed. Scharnhorst, 149. 16. This section is based on my article entitled “The Outcast of Literary Flat: Bret Harte as Humorist” (American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, Winter 1991, 52-63). 17. As listed by globalbooksinprint in 2005. That same year, Bowker’s Books in Print listed 378 separate entries for Bret Harte, including multiple editions, story collections, and various formats. 18. Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction, 219-20.

480

Notes

19. Harte, Outcasts, 139. 20. Joseph B. Harrison, Bret Harte: Representative Selections, v. 21. Wallace Stegner, Literary History of the United States, 867. (LHUS lists twenty-five separate entries for Harte.) Other critics present a more tempered version of the same general point. Constance Rourke is representative: “Bret Harte has been credited with having loosed a sea of local color. . . . Yet with all the local picturing that followed, some of it plainly modeled upon effects which he had created, it cannot strictly be said that Harte was a primary influence in this direction.” American Humor, 179. 22. Cornhill Magazine, July 1899, 8. 23. Harte, Outcasts, 131. 24. Harte, Outcasts, 140, 138. 25. Harte, Outcasts, 121. 26. Humor is mentioned in previous discussions of Bret Harte, though the references are fragmentary, often limited to a single sentence or phrase: “He had humor, a good ear, a style that was disciplined and clean” (Stegner). One exception to these nominal references to humor is G. K. Chesterton’s celebratory article written for Pall Mall Magazine on the occasion of Bret Harte’s death in 1902. Chesterton makes perceptive remarks about American humor, parody, characterization, and San Francisco, and he deserves credit for recognizing Harte as a humorist. His theory of Harte’s humor, however, is precisely the opposite of what this chapter attempts to prove. Chesterton maintains that “With . . . distinctively American humour Bret Harte had little or nothing in common. The wild, sky-breaking humour of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities, not only of supreme importance to life and letters, but of supreme importance to humour—reverence and sympathy. And these two qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte’s humour.” (“The Ways of the World: Bret Harte,” Pall Mall Magazine, July 1902, 429.) 27. Harte, Outcasts, 143. 28. Harte, Outcasts, 102. 29. Harte, Outcasts, 123. 30. Harte, Outcasts, 135. 31. Harte, Outcasts, 102. 32. Harte, Outcasts, 112. 33. Harte, Outcasts, 108. 34. Harte, Outcasts, 111. Harte apparently liked this ending so much he used it again in “Mrs. Skaggs’s Husbands”: “His head sank, and the rushing river, invisible to all eyes save his, leaped toward him out of the darkness, and bore him away, no longer to the darkness, but through it to the distant, peaceful, shining sea.” Mark Twain pens a similar statement in a purple passage of a courting letter to Livy written a year after the publication of “The Luck of Roaring Camp”: The “passion-torrents [of my heart] are left behind, its rocks & shoals are passed, its restless rivulets are united, & so, in one stately river of Peace it holds its unvexed course to that sea whose further tides break upon the shores of Eternity” (LTRS, 3:404). This may be a double joke, glancing at Harte’s prose and going off the scale of love letter rhetoric. If so, it seems likely that Livy didn’t fully understand either part. 35. Harte, Outcasts, 140. 36. W. D. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 247-48. 37. Harte, Outcasts, 126, 125, 128, 131. 38. AUTO-AMT, 2:418. 39. HF, 290. 40. MMT, 144.

9. ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN 1. as quoted in the Chicago Tribune, 23 March 1885, 5; and then by Arthur Lawrence Vogelback in “The Publication and Reception of Huckleberry Finn in America,” American Literature, XI (November 1939), 270.

Notes

481

2. LTRS-PAINE, 2:452-53. 3. Horst H. Kruse, in Mark Twain and “Life on the Mississippi,” studies Twain’s manuscript (now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City) in detail, and provides much useful information about the composition of the later chapters of Life on the Mississippi. He demonstrates that the author did considerable planning and research for these chapters, and often used his materials ingeniously. But Kruse’s contention that Twain’s “method of digression” was the fruit of an organized and coherent plan for a “standard work” is, as Huck might put it, a stretcher. MT&LOM, 14. 4. N&J, 2:482; LOM, 386; LTRS-MT-H: 1:418, 417. Twain, usually an excellent speller, even in casual letters, wrote “intermidable” for “interminable.” 5. MT:A-Z, 284, 145. 6. Webster, 207; as quoted in MT&LOM, 118. 7. LTRS-MT-H, 1:143. 8. LTRS, 6:102. The full quotation is as follows: “There is humor in Dod Grile [a Bierce pseudonym], but for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders & a vomit. The laugh is too expensive.” 9. Ellison, from “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act, 72. 10. Quotations in this paragraph are from HF, 95, 97, 81, 158,165. 11. Quotations in this paragraph are from HF, 98, 124, 210, 358. 12. Quotations in this paragraph are from HF, 93, 354, 64-65. 13. Quotations in this paragraph are from HF, 105, 105, 125. 14. Quotations in this paragraph are from HF, 201, 270, 271, 333, 341. 15. HF, 310. 16. HF, 309 and 307. 17. AUTO-AMT, 1:212. 18. LTRS, 1:4. This letter of 24 August 1853 is the first of thousands of Twain’s surviving letters. 19. MMT, 35. 20. The abolitionist credentials of Jervis and Olivia Lewis Langdon (Livy’s parents) were impeccable. When Jervis died in 1870, Mrs. Langdon received a letter which read in part as follows: “Pardon the Liberty, but as one who nearly thirty years ago, learned something of the noble character of your lamented Husband, I beg you to allow me to enroll myself among the many who to day hold his name and history in grateful memory. If I had never seen nor heard of Mr Langdon since the days that you and himself made me welcome under your roof in Millport, I should never have forgotten either of you.” It was from Frederick Douglass. LTRS, 3:428. 21. Fishkin, Lighting Out, 101. 22. AUTO-AMT, 1: 211. 23. The other, though less likely, possibility for Chief of Ordinance is General Grant. See HF, Explanatory Notes, 376, which also cites the “shrewd, wise . . . devoted friend” quotation from “A Family Sketch.” 24. HF, 55. 25. HF, 62. 26. Quotations in this paragraph are from HF, 3, 29, 138, 213, 232, 330. 27. CT, 1:916. 28. Twain’s speech managed to compliment Grant and tickle the audience by suggesting that the “illustrious Commander in Chief of the American armies,” as a baby, succeeded where others failed in getting “his own big toe into his mouth” (SPEECHES-F, 133). 29. Excerpt from NPR Report titled “Stand-up Comic and TV Dad Bernie Mac” originally broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered on 11 December 2002. 30. This comment by J. C. Harris, which occurs in his review of Twain’s P&P, applies as well to HF, as Harris’ later review of that work makes clear. REVIEWS-CR, 204, 279-80. 31. LTRS-MT-H, 1:435. 32. LTRS-MT-H, 1:427, 435. 33. LTRS-MT-H, 1:91-92. 34. HF, 285.

482

Notes

35. Quotations in this paragraph are from HF, 194, 140, 4, 3-4. 36. from Harris’ description of Sal Yardley in “Mrs. Yardley’s Quilting,” Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, 115. 37. HF, 49. 38. Quotations in this paragraph are from HF, 1, 3, 5, 220, 244, 336, 45, 167. 39. HF, 179. 40. HF, 1, 137, 94. 41. HF, 34. 42. HF, 57. 43. HF, 34. 44. HF, 279. 45. HF, 51. 46. HF, 124. 47. HF, 270. 48. HF, 279. 49. HF, 24, 146, 181, 139. 50. HF, 22. 51. HF, 343.

10. COMIC CONTRAST AND VIOLENT HUMOR 1. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, III, iv, lines 207-08. 2. Webster & Co.’s announcement, in MTBIO, tipped in following p. 834. 3. MTBIO, 831. 4. LTRS-MT-H, 1:439. 5. MTBIO, 909. 6. N&J, 3:78. 7. CY, 275, 158. The following quotations in this paragraph are from CY 16 and 391. 8. CY, 50. 9. CY, 98-99. 10. CY, 51. 11. CY, 177. 12. CY, 102. 13. CY, 45. 14. AUTO-AMT, 2:306-07. 15. CY, 343. 16. CY, 68-69, 144. 17. CY, 128. 18. HF, 153. 19. Lauter, 14. 20. LTRS, 2:294. 21. LTRS-MT-H, 1:418. 22. RI, 301. 23. ATA, App. D, 614. 24. RI, 418. 25. RI, 308. 26. The Thurber Carnival, 239. 27. CY, 318. 28. CY, 476, 478. 29. CY, 460. 30. CY, 468. 31. CY, 479. Illustrator Beard entered so fully into the author’s conception that Twain declared “the illustrations are better than the book—which is a good deal for me to say, I reckon.” CY, 15.

Notes

483

32. LTRS-MT-H, 1:17-18. 33. LTRS-MT-H, 1:246. 34. REVIEWS-CR, 579. 35. INTERVIEWS, 204-05, cf. 242. 36. Warner Bros. Three Kings, DVD 17862, “Behind-the-Scenes Documentary“ in “Special Features.” 37. “Kingmaker,” Amherst, Fall 1999, 23. 38. The most notable of these critics is Henry Nash Smith in his thoughtful and influential Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in “A Connecticut Yankee,” 1964, which is a reworked discussion of ch. 7 of his 1962 Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. Professor Smith regards Connecticut Yankee “as on the whole a failure” and asserts that “the writing of this fable coincided with and perhaps precipitated in Mark Twain something like a negative conversion, a loss of faith in progress and human perfectibility which all but paralyzed his powers of imagination and condemned him to the relative sterility of his last twenty years.” (Fable of Progress, 5, 3.) His second chapter is entitled “From Burlesque to Nightmare.” Fifteen years after the Fable of Progress, Smith softened this criticism in his introduction to the Iowa-California definitive edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which concludes, after a survey of the widely varying early reviews of the book, that “the basic fable has continued to hold its charm” (CY, 30). 39. SPEECHES-F, 258. 40. globalbooksinprint.com, 28 June 2010. 41. HF, 2. 42. LTRS-MT-H, 2:612, 614, 617, 619; MMT, 145, 149. 43. LTRS-MT-H, 2:624-25.

11. THE ADVOCACY OF W. D. HOWELLS 1. LTRS-MT-H, 1:405 2. from Prejudices: First Series (1919), as reprinted in Cady and Frazier, The War of the Critics, 128. 3. Lynn, William Dean Howells, 312. 4. H. L. Mencken, in Cady and Frazier, The War of the Critics, 130. See also Robert E. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature (1955); Henry S. Canby, Turn West, Turn East: Mark Twain and Henry James (1951); Philip Rahv, “Paleface and Redskin,” in Image and Idea (rev. ed., 1957). 5. MMT, 112. 6. MMT, 9. 7. CT, 2:727. The Howells chapter of Leland Krauth’s Mark Twain & Company, 49-86, perceptively compares the humor of the two writers. 8. LTRS-MT-H, 2:628. 9. LTRS-MT-H, 1:391. 10. LTRS-MT-H, 2:851. 11. MMT, 101. 12. from “Novel-Writing as a Science,” an anonymous review of The Rise of Silas Lapham that appeared in The Catholic World, November 1885. Reprinted in Cady and Frazier, The War of the Critics, 36. 13. from the Boston Advertiser, as quoted in the Boston Transcript for 4 April 1885. Cited by Vogelback, “Publication and Reception,” 269. 14. Arnold, 11:361. 15. SPEECHES-F, 259. 16. LTRS, 2:188, 335. 17. LTRS, 2:188. 18. The preceding quotations in this paragraph are from LTRS-MT-H, 1:120, REVIEWSCR, 220, 200. That by Matthews is from “Biographical Criticism,” an introduction to the

484

Notes

Harper’s uniform editions of Twain’s works which commenced in 1899. My source is Harper’s Hillcrest Edition of 1906, 1:xxxiii. 19. REVIEWS-CH, 58, 234. 20. MMT, 120-21. 21. MMT, 130-31. 22. MMT, 134-44. 23. LTRS-MT-H, 1:106-07. 24. LTRS-MT-H, 1:298, 300. 25. AUTO-NAR, 168-69. 26. LTRS-MT-H, 2:645. 27. MMT, 161, 160. 28. The quotations in this and the following two paragraphs are from “Mark Twain: An Inquiry,” in MMT, 165-185. 29. MMT, 155. 30. Brooks, Ordeal, 46, 117, 266, 325. 31. DeVoto, Mark Twain’s America, 101, 231, 240. 32. Brooks, Melville and Whitman, 464, 287, 300. 33. DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work, 127. 34. Smith, Development, 110. See also ch. 1 (“Two Ways of Viewing the World”), esp. 4-7. 35. Smith, Fable of Progress, 3.

12. THE NOT-SO-GAY NINETIES 1. RI, 396-97. 2. MTBIO, 908. 3. LTRS-MT-H, 2:610-11. 4. LTRS-MT-H, 2:615. 5. For CPI, GDP, and other indexes, see measuringworth.com. The $170,000 estimate comes from Twain’s autobiographical dictations of 28 March 1906 (AUTO-AMT, 1:455) and 2 June 1906 (AUTO-AMT, 2:80). Paine’s estimate was “about $190,000” (AUTO-P, 1:78). 6. SPEECHES-F, 274. 7. Josephson, 280. 8. Tarbell, 2:225. 9. LTRS-ROGERS, 8, 9. 10. LTRS-MT-PUB, 365. 11. LTRS-MT-H, 2:556. 12. ₤1M, 78. 13. San Francisco Examiner, 3 Jan. 1892; Illustrated London News, 14 and 28 Nov., 19 and 26 Dec. 1891. 14. HF&TS, 289. 15. TSABROAD, 32. In “A Family Sketch,” written seven years later, Twain describes his own very similar childhood experience in bird killing and his, like Huck’s, subsequent remorse. Fishkin, Book of Animals, 3, 154-55. 16. “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It,” CT, 2:446. 17. SPEECHES-F, 337. 18. CT 2:49; TELL 47, 22; ₤1M, 218. 19. ₤1M, 208. 20. HADLEY, 207. 21. ₤1M, 213. 22. ₤1M, 154-63. 23. ₤1M, 182-83. 24. TELL, 4. 25. ₤1M, 233-40. 26. ₤1M, 241-60. Twain calls it the Dictionary of Medicine.

Notes

485

27. ₤1M, 78. 28. LTRS, 2:195; 1:145; 2:58. 29. LTRS, 2:212. 30. LTRS, 2:144. 31. See Cooley, Mark Twain’s Aquarium. 32. TELL, 89. 33. TELL, 38-39. 34. TELL, 54-55. 35. The brief quotations in this paragraph are from TELL, 81, 18, 17, 18, 36, 58, 35, 48, 28, 57, 72, 73, 75. 36. TELL, 42. 37. TELL, 64. 38. Arnold, Prose, 10:14. 39. Paine, in MTBIO, 758-59, describes a more elaborate dinner affair, in which Twain “kept a perpetual gale of laughter going” and “Arnold seemed dazed by it.” Paine is probably not to be trusted here, since the tea party for Arnold, his wife, and his daughter, is authenticated by Twichell’s diary entry made at the time (15 Nov. 1883). Andrews, Nook Farm, 92. 40. Arnold, Prose, 10:213, 203. 41. John Y. Simon, editor of Grant’s Papers, notes in his book publication of Arnold’s review of Grant’s Memoirs, with Twain’s speech adjoined, that “the passage [Twain] quoted does not appear in this form in the article or the Boston reprint” (General Grant by Matthew Arnold, 56.) Paul Fatout, in SPEECHES-F, takes it a step further: “Mark Twain apparently did not read Arnold’s review, but took his cue from Fry’s splenetic outburst” (230). For the original Arnold quotation, Fry’s version, and Twain’s version, see Arnold, Prose, 11:170; Fry, “Grant and Matthew Arnold,” 353; SPEECHES-F, 226. General Fry also wrote “An Acquaintance with Grant” (North American Review, Dec. 1885) and replied, again indignantly, to Arnold’s “Civilisation” essay (North American Review, May 1888). 42. Arnold, Prose, 11:178, 146. 43. SPEECHES-F, 226. 44. SPEECHES-F, 227. Mark Twain liked the close of this sentence so much he restated it in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: “I . . . felt a great impulse stirring in me that was like what one feels when he hears the roll of the drums and the tramp of marching men” (69). 45. Arnold, Prose, 11: 309, 321, 306. 46. These quotations, and those following in this paragraph, are taken from “Civilisation in the United States,” Arnold, Prose, 11:350-69. 47. Arnold, Prose, 10:195. 48. twainquotes.com (from Twain’s letter of 26 June 1888, reprinted in the Hartford Daily Courant, 29 June, p. 5). Twain’s notes on Arnold are contained in N&J, vol. 3, notebooks 2729. 49. For the Tinker to Evers to Chance double play quotation, compare Griffin, 4; Arnold, Prose, 11:350; SPEECHES-F, 257-58. 50. AMCLAIM, 96. For Arnold’s original and different version, see Arnold, Prose, 11:360. “The American Press” is now available in WHOMT, 199-206. 51. AMCLAIM, 98-99. 52. Bourget, 7, 6. 53. LTRS-ROGERS, 79. 54. Bourget, 423. 55. TELL, 183; other quotations from “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us” in this and the next paragraph are from TELL, 187, 186, 188, 188-89, 195, 193-94. 56. Bourget, 53. 57. TELL, 208. 58. O’Rell, 308, 304, 310. 59. TELL, 213-14. I have changed Twain’s “wabbly,” a variant, to the more common form, wobbly.” 60. Tell, 232-33. 61. Bourget, 145.

486

Notes

62. Twain’s manuscript note, EARTH, 290. 63. RI, 129. 64. TELL, 94. 65. TELL, 100. 66. Railton, 4. 67. Wilson, 581. 68. Bourget, 145. 69. TELL, 96. 70. LTRS, 3:367. 71. TELL, 93. 72. TELL, 115-16. 73. Quotations from the “Further Literary Offenses” in the following paragraph are from EARTH, 137-45. 74. Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” Norton, 2:1436. 75. SN&O, 208-11. 76. PW/TET, 311. 77. LTRS-MT-PUB, 319. 78. PW/TET, 431. 79. PW/TET, 428, 432. 80. Mark Twain’s manuscript title for this story was “Pudd’nhead Wilson, A Tale.” It was first published in Century Magazine from Dec. 1893 to June 1894, with the title “Pudd’nhead Wilson. A Tale by Mark Twain.” Since Mark Twain’s Webster & Co. had folded in April 1894, the American Publishing Co. brought out the first book edition. They padded the volume by using large type, wide margins, illustrations on the side and bottom margins of almost every page, and adding ten chapters from the earlier “Extraordinary Twins” draft labeled “The Suppressed Farce.” By way of description and justification, the AP Co. entitled the book The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson And the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins, and Twain provided an introduction to the Twins chapters explaining how he “pulled out the farce and left the tragedy.” Later Harper’s editions kept the Extraordinary Twins segment, but dropped “tragedy” and “comedy” from the title. 81. from a conversation with Professor Cady. 82. AUTO-AMT, 2:200-203; RI, note 135.10-12, pp. 609-10. 83. PW, 15. 84. PW, 70-71. 85. PW, 154. 86. PW, 189. 87. CY, 158. 88. FEq, 119. 89. epigraph preceding ch. 13, PW. 90. PW, 71. 91. PW, 156. 92. PW, 188 and 189. 93. PW, 300. 94. AUTO-AMT, 1:212. 95. $30K, 414, 416. 96. $30K, 429. 97. “Preface” to Saint Joan, in Shaw, Complete Prefaces, 604. 98. $30K, 159. 99. JOAN, vii-viii. 100. JOAN, 9. 101. JOAN, 22. 102. JOAN, 83. 103. JOAN, 116. 104. JOAN, 234. 105. JOAN, 302-03. I have added an l to Twain’s British skilfully. 106. JOAN, 165.

Notes

487

107. JOAN, 165. 108. INTERVIEWS, 132, 266. 109. JOAN, 231. 110. JOAN, 124. 111. JOAN, 146-47. 112. JOAN, 393. 113. JOAN, 392. 114. JOAN, ix. 115. MTBIO, 1035. In interviews during his 1895-96 world tour, Twain mentioned HF most often, and P&P occasionally, when asked to name his personal favorite among his works. In Missouri in 1902, he stated that “I have no favorite of my own.” INTERVIEWS, 416. 116. MTBIO, 1029. 117. MMT, 151. 118. E&E, 299. 119. LECTURES-F, 241, 265; LECTURES-L, 254-55. 120. LTRS-MT-H, 2:661. 121. LTRS-MT-H, 2:663.

13. A SUBTLE HUMORIST 1. MMT, 178. 2. AUTO-AMT, 1:266. 3. Smith, “‘That Hideous Mistake,’” 164. 4. AUTO-AMT, 1:362; LTRS, 4:347, 365. 5. LTRS-ROGERS, 235. 6. the quotations in this and the following paragraph are from “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” WIM, 80-89. 7. LTRS-ROGERS, 237. 8. LTRS-MT-H, 2:664. 9. MMT, 91. Wallace Stegner put it this way: “Mark Twain was a professional writer, which may be described as a body that will go on moving a pen even with its heart cut out.” The Uneasy Chair, 328. 10. LTRS-ROGERS, 249. 11. FEq, 612. 12. FEq, 32. 13. FEq, 101. 14. Rasmussen, 145. 15. FEq, 345, 582, 94. 16. FEq, 118. 17. Baetzhold, 36; FEq, 328. 18. FEq, 169. 19. FEq, 89-90. 20. FEq, 93-94, 98. 21. FEq, 174. 22. FEq, 212-13. 23. FEq, 287. 24. FEq, 321. 25. FEq, 343. 26. FEq, 347. 27. Mark Twain’s enthusiasm here for his newly conceived connection between late nineteenth-century colonial brutality and antebellum American slavery apparently leads him to focus on his father’s cuffings of their slave boy and the murder of a slave in Hannibal. In a different mood a year or so later, in his Autobiography, Twain states that “In Hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm, never” (AUTO-AMT, 1:212).

488

Notes

28. FEq, 355, 354. 29. FEq, 381. 30. FEq, 518, 506. 31. FEq, 364. 32. FEq, 623. 33. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Palace of Art,” line 213; in Poems, 45. 34. LTRS-ROGERS, 274. 35. LTRS-ROGERS, 276. 36. FEq, 213. 37. FEq, 712. 38. MTBIO, 1041. 39. $30K, 351. This refrain, repeated a half dozen times, echoes the phrase in a poem by Edwin Ransford that Twain described as one of the “most pathetic, moving things in the English tongue”: “The days when we went gipsying /A long time ago.” LTRS-MT-H, 2:68586; NOTEBOOK-P, 319. The “In Memoriam” poem was first published in Harper’s Monthly, Nov. 1897. 40. from “In My Bitterness,” in FABLES, 131-32. 41. LTRS-ROGERS, 310. 42. LTRS-ROGERS, 315 and 317n1. 43. LTRS-ROGERS, 310. 44. LTRS-ROGERS, 306n1. 45. AUTO-AMT, 1:321. 46. When told by a reporter that he had been compared to Scott in terms of debt repayment, Twain replied “Nice, but purely personal.” INTERVIEWS, 360. 47. MTENCY, 256. 48. LTRS-ROGERS, 316; LTRS-MT-H, 2:698. 49. WWD, 101. 50. HADLEY, 334. 51. FABLES, 446-47. Mark Twain’s essay did not appear in the “Symposium By Foremost Christians” published in The American Hebrew. Twain may not have submitted it, the editor may have chosen not to use it, or he may have received it too late for inclusion. Twain’s article, dated simply “March,” begins with an apology for having lost the editor’s request; the “Symposium” issue appeared on 4 April. The essay remained unpublished until FABLES, in 1972. 52. HADLEY, 253. 53. LTRS-ROGERS, 354. 54. HADLEY, 254-55. Quotations following in this paragraph from “Concerning the Jews” are from HADLEY, 266-67, 275, 278, 271-72. 55. Dolmetsch, MTENCY, 415. 56. LTRS-ROGERS, 354. 57. HADLEY, 242-43. 58. HADLEY, 248. 59. HADLEY, 251. 60. INTERVIEWS, 205-06. 61. Lauter, 8. 62. Sidney, 298. 63. Milton, Poems,746. 64. HADLEY, 14-15, 22. 65. HADLEY, 21. 66. HADLEY, 47-48. 67. “The Art of Fiction,” 505. 68. JOAN, 461. 69. HADLEY, 41. 70. Cooper, 210. 71. James, Complete Tales, 12:194. 72. from a letter to Theodore Roosevelt on 27 July 1898: “It has been a splendid little war; begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by

Notes

489

that fortune which loves the brave.” Freidel, 3. The following month Hay was made secretary of state by McKinley. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris, and continued on as secretary of state when Roosevelt became president in 1901. 73. Chicago Tribune, 17 May 1891, p. 2; New York Times, 16 October 1900, p. 3. 74. DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work, 128; Hill, xviii; Cox, 284; Smith, H. N., Development, 188. 75. Zwick, 4. 76. LTRS-MT-H, 2:673. 77. ZWICK, 5, 4; cf. INTERVIEWS, 351. 78. ZWICK, 22. 79. PEN, 64. 80. New York Herald, 30 Dec. 1900, p.7. Also in PEN, [1]; ZWICK, 12-13; CT, 2:1006. 81. ZWICK, xix. 82. PEN, 60, 63-64. 83. Matthew 4:16, King James Version; cf. Isaiah, 42:7, Micah 7:8. 84. PEN, 65. The quotation following and those in the next two paragraphs are from PEN 64, 66, 67, 68-69, 69 (cf. CT, 2:1032n466.5-6), 69, 73, 76. 85. Howells, Selected Letters, 4:258; Life in Letters, 2:142. 86. DeVoto, Portable MT, 782; also Gibson, 461. 87. Gibson, 462. 88. PEN, 61 89. E&E, 285. 90. ZWICK, 131. As Mark Twain notes, this quotation was “summarized by the press” from testimony at Smith’s court-martial. 91. ZWICK, 155. 92. ZWICK, 172-73. The Moro massacre is also detailed in AUTO-AMT, 1:403-09, and in PEN, 78-85. 93. SPEECHES-F, 350. 94. SPEECHES-F, 394. 95. ZWICK, 113. 96. ZWICK, 129. 97. from “Glances at History,” FABLES, 393. 98. CT, 2:642. 99. IA, 395. 100. CY, 213. 101. CT, 2:644. 102. CT, 2:647. 103. CT, 2:666, 672. The four quotations following in this paragraph are from CT, 2:682, 678, 678, 663. 104. FEq, 610. 105. CT, 2:680. 106. LTRS-MT-H, 2:716-17. Quotations from “The War-Prayer” are from PEN, 88-91. 107. MTBIO, 1234. 108. ZWICK, 156. Cf. Hill, 99 and NOTEBOOK-P, 393 (where Twain listed three different versions of the idea that only the dead have free speech.). 109. LTRS, 1:324. 110. MTLIB, 1:65; Clemens family Bibles are listed on pp. 63-69. 111. LTRS, 3:103. 112. SPEECHES-F, 179. The notion of Adam as the “original first man” (IA, 566) tickled Mark Twain’s imagination throughout his career, starting with a satiric sketch at age 16 which questions Adam’s respectability (“he never had a mother!” CT, 1:10). In The Innocents Abroad, the narrator is shown the tomb of Adam in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and he delivers a mock threnody that concludes with the inversion of a pulpit cliché: “Noble old man—he did not live to see me, . . . his child. And I—I—alas, I did not live to see him. Weighed down by sorrow and disappointment, he died . . . six thousand brief summers before I was born. . . . Let us take comfort in the thought that his loss is our eternal gain” (567).

490

Notes

113. FABLES, 450. 114. $30K, 308; Don Juan: Canto I, stanza 194, Norton, 2:340. 115. $30K, 308. The two quotations following are from $30K, 308, 310. 116. Paradise Lost, bk. 9, ll. 970, 959, in Poems of John Milton, ed. Hanford, 417. 117. LTRS, 4:27-28. See also MTLIB, 1:476. 118. N&J, 1:253. 119. WWD, 147. 120. AUTO-AMT, 2:193. 121. STORMFIELD, 6; the three quotations following are from STORMFIELD 78, 68, 79. 122. Mr.BROWN, 22. 123. WIM, 405. The following six “Letters from the Earth” quotations are from WIM, 425, 418, 412, 447 (cf. Deuteronomy 20:16-17), 428, 418. 124. BIBLE, 208-09; cf. MTBIO, 1566. 125. WWD, 494-95. 126. LTRS-MT-H, 2:692. 127. HH&T, 46. 128. AUTO-N, 376 and AUTO-NAR, 250. 129. MTLIB, 1:105. 130. MTBIO, 629. 131. MTBIO, 631. 132. MTBIO, 1135. 133. NOTEBOOK-P, 391. 134. Harper’s Monthly Magazine, May 1909, 958. 135. ET&S, 2:286. The following short quotations in this paragraph are from ET&S, 2:284, 285; IA, 476; RI, 13, 32, 44, 159, 437, 419; TS, 94; FEq, 353. 136. MSM, 140. 137. MSM, 98. 138. WIM, 194, 195, 193. 139. MSM, 76. 140. “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness,” WWD, 76. 141. MTLIB, 1:91-106; the quotations following from “A Dog’s Tale” are from CT, 2:56171. 142. Twain used this phrase in a letter to Howells concerning “Which Was the Dream.” LTRS-MT-H: 2:676. 143. Fishkin, Book of Animals, 139. 144. AUTO-AMT, 2:190. 145. AUTO-AMT, 1:329. 146. HORSE, 125-26. 147. $30K, 272. 148. WIM, 416. 149. $30K, 285. 150. FABLES, 174. 151. WIM, 23. 152. WIM, 216. The quotations in this and the following paragraph are from WIM, 216, 216, 219, 223, 237, 240, 241, 251. 153. WIM, 231. 154. WIM, 233; AUTO-AMT, 1:356 (see 590-91nn). 155. WIM, 514. 156. WIM, 391. 157. WIM, 215. The following quotations in this paragraph are from WIM, 293, 270 (cf. 363), 272, 277. 158. WIM, 308. The quotations following in this paragraph and the next are from WIM, 298, 295, 296, 299, 300, 306, 307. 159. WIM, 289. 160. WIM, 339.

Notes

491

161. WIM, 230 and 216. Twain used this sentence to end ch. 3 of book I, as well as for the epigraph to the volume as a whole. 162. WIM, 265 and 394. There are slight differences between the two statements. 163. FABLES, 21. 164. WIM, 340. 165. WIM, 258. 166. WIM, 263. 167. “Afterword” by Hamlin Hill, in OMT Christian Science, 6. 168. FABLES, 324. 169. FABLES, 326. The “Eddypus” quotations following are from FABLES, 325, 318-19, 337-38, 343, 339-40, 335, 369, 327, 353, 378, 382. 170. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, 189-90; page 407 in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. C. J. Sisson (New York: Harper & Row, 1953). 171. Clemens, Clara, Awake, 16. 172. N&J, 3:343. 173. MTLIB, 1:77, 276-77. 174. Greenwood, xv-xvi, see also 371. 175. MTLIB, 1:276. 176. SHAK, 101. Mark Twain’s chapter 8 consists of 21 pages quoted from chapter 13 of Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated, with a final paragraph by Twain. 177. IA, 292. 178. SHAK, 142. The three following quotations are from SHAK, 116, 130, 101. 179. SHAK, 69. 180. JOAN, 235. 181. SHAK, 128. 182. LTRS-MT-H, 2:811 183. from “Self-Reliance.” Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960, 153; and from “Song of Myself.” Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. John Kouwenhoven. New York: Random House, 1950, 74. 184. CT, 1:916. 185. WIM, 40. 186. IA, 573. 187. IA, 165. 188. AUTO-AMT, 1: 456-57. 189. LTRS, 1:80-82. 190. FABLES, 297. 191. FABLES, 113, 114. 192. LTRS, 2:345-46. 193. MTBIO, 412. 194. MTBIO, 1584. Conway’s Sacred Anthology was published in 1874. See also MTLIB, 1:158. 195. WIM, 56. 196. MTBIO, 1445. 197. WIM, 57. 198. WIM, 57. Thomas Paine put it this way: “I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine.” The Age of Reason, 1:19; Project Gutenberg Etext, reproduced from vol. 4 of The Writings of Thomas Paine, Collected and Edited by Moncure Daniel Conway. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894-96. 199. WIM, 79. The brackets are Twain’s. 200. WIM, 39. 201. Eddy, 465. 202. FABLES, 143. 203. LTRS-MT-H, 2:811; AUTO-AMT, 2:522; LTRS-MT-H, 2:815. 204. Quotations in the preceding paragraph are from AUTO-AMT, 2:133, 133, 132, 134, 131, 140, 142.

492

Notes

205. Quotations in the preceding paragraph are from AUTO-AMT, 2:128, 129, 128, 129. 206. Quotations in the preceding paragraph are from AUTO-AMT, 2:136,136,139; FABLES, 34; AUTO-AMT, 2:140, 140. 207. WIM, 398, 400. 208. SPEECHES-F, 624. 209. NOTEBOOK-P, 394. 210. Introduction to the Penguin Books Hamlet (Baltimore, 1957) 24. 211. AUTO-AMT, 2:383. 212. WIM, 61. 213. WIM, 404. 214. WIM, 462. 215. WIM, 94-95. 216. CY, 208. 217. from “The United States of Lyncherdom,” PEN, 155; and “Passage from a Lecture,” FABLES, 399. 218. WIM, 90. 219. LTRS-P, 2:690; PEN, 155. 220. AUTO-AMT, 2:288. 221. CY, 348. 222. LTRS-MT-H, 2:501. 223. LTRS-MT-H, 2:695. 224. AUTO-AMT, 1:362. 225. AUTO-AMT, 1:452. 226. LTRS-P, 2:785. 227. LTRS, 1:256. 228. WIM, 443. 229. MTBIO, 1469. 230. MSM, 112. 231. Clemens, Clara, My Father, 33. 232. MTBIO, 1554, 1552. 233. WWD, 150. 234. FABLES, 180, 195. 235. FABLES, 178. 236. FABLES, 189. 237. FABLES, 220-21. 238. FABLES, 247. The previous quotation, and the one following, are from FABLES, 21415, and 247. 239. AUTO-AMT, 2:196. 240. FABLES, 196, 232. The two quotations following are from FABLES, 206, 205.

14. MYSTERIOUS STRANGERS 1. MMT, 179. 2. LTRS-MT-H, 2:685. 3. In July 1897, Twain wrote to H. H. Rogers: “How far are you along with [your Bible reading]? You are getting pretty old—don't you think you would better glance through my book [Following the Equator] first? You wouldn't like to appear before Satan . . . familiar with a work which he does not allow on the premises, and ignorant of the book of his nearest friend.” LTRS-ROGERS, 294. 4. MSM, 35. 5. LTRS-MT-H, 2:698. 6. LTRS-MT-H, 2:710. 7. MSM, 413n403.17; MSM, 10, and 412-13n353.19. 8. MSM, 42.

Notes

493

9. MSM, 37. 10. MSM, 132. 11. MSM, 72. The quotations following in this paragraph are from MSM, 82, 135, 94, 113, 166. 12. MSM, 190. 13. MSM, 386. 14. MSM, 235. 15. MSM, 378. 16. MSM, 342. 17. MSM, 384, 302. The “trouble with Christianity” quotation is attributed to G. B. Shaw by Clifford Geertz in The Religion of Java, 1976, p. 337. A similar statement has been attributed to G. K. Chesterton. 18. MSM, 404-05. 19. New York Times, 24 April 1910; p. 3. 20. Hill, 268. 21. MTBIO, 1029, 1030, 1585. 22. MTBIO, 1581-84. 23. Hemingway, Sun, 247. 24. MTBIO, 150. 25. MTBIO, 1557. 26. LTRS-MT-H, 2:848. 27. MSM, 412-13. 28. MSM, 41, 90, 37. 29. MSM, 73, 71, 136. 30. MSM, 36, 36, 41, 42, 63, 72, 76-77, 81, 86, 129, 134, 164; MS1916, 2, 2, 3, 4, 40, 52, 59, 66, 75, 109, 116, 141. 31. MSM, 155. 32. MS1916, 142. 33. LTRS-ROGERS, 611. 34. MSM, 492-93 and AUTO-AMT, 2:146. 35. AUTO-AMT, 2:196-97. 36. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories by Mark Twain, vol. 27 of The Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition, 1923; ix-x. 37. NOTEBOOK-P 369-70. 38. LTRS-MT-H, 2:610. 39. Tuckey, 211-12; reprinted from the penultimate chapter of Cox’s Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, 271-72. 40. DeVoto, Mark Twain’s America, xi, xiii. 41. DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work, 127-28. 42. DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work, viii-ix. 43. Stegner, The Uneasy Chair, 216. 44. DeVoto, Mark Twain in Eruption, 198. 45. NOTEBOOK-P, 256. 46. I have borrowed, reversing and raising the ante on, a figure of speech used by Page Stegner in American Places, where he optimistically conjectures, in 1981, that Americans “have become less commonly raiders and more commonly conservers and stewards of the only continent they are ever going to possess” (203).

15. AN UNCHARTED SEA OF RECOLLECTION 1. LTRS-MT-H, 2:811. 2. N&J, 1:526. 3. AUTO-AMT, 1:239. The “Countess” refers to the American-born wife of Count Massiglia.

494

Notes

4. LTRS-MT-H, 2:778. 5. AUTO-AMT, 1:220. 6. The dinner is described in full in a front-page article in the New York Times for 6 Dec. 1905, pp. 1-2. The official name of the association Mark Twain refers to as the Players Club was simply The Players. 7. MTBIO, 1267-68. 8. AUTO-AMT, 1:381. 9. FEq, 195. 10. NOTEBOOK-P, 393. 11. WHOMT, 60. 12. AUTO-AMT, 1:441. 13. AUTO-AMT, 1:228; LTRS-MT-H, 2:778, 810. 14. “Mark Twain as His Secretary at Stormfield Remembers Him,” New York Herald, 13 Dec. 1925, Section Seven, pages 1-4; rpt. twainquotes.com and Scharnhorst, 320-21. 15. LTRS-MT-H, 2:834; AUTO-AMT, 2:433; LTRS-MT-H, 2:815; AUTO-AMT, 2:522. 16. AUTO-AMT, 1:222. 17. LTRS-ROGERS, 611. 18. AUTO-NAR, xxvi, xxiv. 19. AUTO-AMT, 1:221; AUTO-NAR, xviii, and “Second Preface, in Three Parts,” in AUTO-AMT, 1, Textual Commentaries, MTPO. 20. LTRS-MT-H, 2:817-18. 21. LTRS-MARY, 39; MTBIO, 1322. 22. MSM, 493. 23. LTRS-ROGERS, 737. 24. AUTO-AMT, 1:672. 25. North American Review, 7 Sept. 1906, 443. 26. Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 1922, 273. Other “unpublished chapters” followed in March and August, since Paine was working on the Autobiography for his two-volume edition that followed in 1924. 27. LTRS-MT-H, 1:194-99, 202, 202-03. 28. LTRS-MT-H, 2:844. 29. LTRS-MT-H, 2:685; NOTEBOOK-P, 319 (there spelled “gypsying”) . 30. AUTO-AMT, 1:337. 31. AUTO-AMT, 1:326. 32. AUTO-AMT, 2: 222-25. 33. Lystra, 247. 34. AUTO-P, 1:1. 35. AUTO-AMT, 2:359. 36. Exman, 214. 37. AUTO-AMT, 1:156; AUTO-P, 1:127. Neider (AUTO-N, 38) follows the Paine reading. AUTO-AMT, 1:216; AUTO-AMT, 1:370, 372. 38. DeVoto, Letters, 76. 39. DeVoto, Letters, 74. See also 75-80, 83; AUTO-D, x-xii; and Stegner, The Uneasy Chair, 228. 40. DeVoto, Letters, 81-83. 41. DeVoto, Letters, 102. 42. Assuming, of course, that Paine’s penciled note on the typescript refers to Twain’s prohibition, not Paine’s. See AUTO-D, 292. 43. AUTO-D, vii-viii; AUTO-N, xx. 44. AUTO-AMT, 1:373. 45. AUTO-AMT, 1:283, 281. 46. LOM, 302, 307. 47. AUTO-AMT, 1:672. One significant autobiographical document missing from AUTOAMT is “A Family Sketch,” a 64-page manuscript written in 1901 and revised in 1906. The Mark Twain Project acquired this manuscript in July 2010, just as AUTO-AMT, vol. 1 was

Notes

495

going to press, outbidding all others at a Sotheby’s auction for a final price of $249,500. They will publish it in due course. 48. AUTO-AMT, 1: Figure 2 [34]. 49. AUTO-AMT, 1: Figure 1 [14] and p. 203. 50. AUTO-AMT, 1:203. 51. INTERVIEWS, 277. 52. AUTO-AMT, 1:673. 53. AUTO-P, 1:78; AUTO-AMT, 1:106. 54. AUTO-AMT, 1:226; AUTO-P, 1:242; AUTO-N, 143. 55. AUTO-AMT, 1:326, 579-80. 56. AUTO-AMT, 1:391-92, 606. 57. References in this paragraph are from AUTO-AMT, 1:204, 526; 469; 455, 644; 356, 590-91; 577-78; 634; 487; 397, 609. Additional information about the Tennessee land is contained in AUTO-AMT, 2:469. See AUTO-AMT, 2:73, 497-98 for further information about the royalties paid to Mrs. Grant. 58. LTRS-MT-H, 2:811. For prescience see LTRS-MT-H, 2:674; AUTO-AMT, 2:198; and “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904” (1898; CT, 2:273-83). 59. AUTO-AMT, 1:222. 60. AUTO-AMT, 1:281. In 1906, Twain stated that “Finally, in Florence, in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment.” (AUTO-AMT, 1:220). 61. AUTO-AMT, 2:260. 62. AUTO-AMT, 1:283. 63. The quotations which follow, from Twain’s dictations of 10 to 15 January 1906, are from AUTO-AMT, 1:255-73. 64. SPEECHES-F, 244. 65. HF&TS, 83; AUTO-AMT, 1:452; AUTO-AMT, 1:350; MTBIO, 1259. 66. AUTO-N, 367; AUTO-AMT, 2:156; AUTO-N, 372 and AUTO-NAR, 247. 67. LOM, 217. 68. AUTO-AMT, 2:310; cf. NOTEBOOK-P, 223-24. 69. AUTO-AMT, 2:12. 70. AUTO-AMT, 1:458. 71. Harnsberger, 17. 72. AUTO-D, 295, 293. 73. AUTO-D, 325-26. 74. AUTO-D, 49. 75. AUTO-D, 36-37. 76. AUTO-D, 46-47. 77. AUTO-AMT, 2:424-25. 78. AUTO-AMT, 2:430. 79. AUTO-AMT, 2:69. 80. LTRS-MT-H, 2:781. 81. AUTO-AMT, 2:27. 82. WIM, 266-67. 83. AUTO-N, 261. 84. AUTO-AMT, 2:47. 85. AUTO-N, 176; AUTO-AMT, 1:378, 342. 86. AUTO-N, 263. 87. AUTO-AMT, 2:431. 88. LTRS, 6:326. 89. AUTO-AMT, 1:216. 90. HH&T, 24; the text is completed and updated in HF&TS. Mark Twain’s title, “Villagers of 1840-3,” was apparently a slip, since, as a note in HF&TS indicates, “his recollections actually span the years 1840-53, the length of his residence in Hannibal” (HF&TS, 279).

496

Notes

91. AUTO-AMT, 2:40, 482. Twain conflated his lecture tour of 1868-69 with his first Redpath tour of 1869-70. 92. AUTO-D, 361. 93. AUTO-AMT, 2:149, 151; see LTRS, 1:114. 94. HF&TS, 104, see also AUTO-AMT, 1:454 and SCH, ch. 9; AUTO-AMT, 1:455, see LTRS, 1:113-14. 95. AUTO-AMT, 1:455, 458-59. 96. AUTO-AMT, 1:461-62. 97. AUTO-AMT, 2:252. 98. AUTO-AMT, 2:324-26; AUTO-AMT, 2:230, cf. LOM, ch. 50; WIM, 76-78. First printed in AUTO-P, the Macfarlane story was written by Twain in the 1890s and is excluded from AUTO-AMT as not meeting “the criteria for inclusion,” which was “to publish the complete text as nearly as possible in the way Mark Twain intended it to be published after his death.” See AUTO-AMT, 1:2-3. 99. Stegner, Collected Stories, ix. 100. AUTO-AMT, 2:230 and 47; cf. LTRS, 1:330n5, and INTERVIEWS, 181. 101. AUTO-AMT, 1:314. 102. LTRS, 2:256-58; AUTO-AMT, 1:358. 103. AUTO-AMT, 1:268. 104. AUTO-AMT, 2:194. 105. AUTO-AMT, 2:307. 106. AUTO-NAR, 242. 107. AUTO-AMT, 1:299. 108. AUTO-AMT, 1:458; AUTO-AMT, 2: 68, 69. 109. AUTO-AMT, 2:314. 110. AUTO-D, 2. 111. HH&T, 50. 112. MSM, 26; from a 1902 notebook entry. 113. AUTO-AMT, 1:322. 114. AUTO-AMT, 2:71. 115. AUTO-AMT, 2:131. 116. AUTO-D, 347. 117. AUTO-AMT, 2:304. That exact quotation by Carlyle has not been discovered. The closest version is “Nature admits no lie” (AUTO-AMT, 2:591). 118. AUTO-AMT, 1:340. 119. AUTO-AMT, 1:294. 120. MTENCY, 562. 121. NOTEBOOK-P, 346.

Index

Ade, George, 111, 241 Aldrich, Lilian W., 416 Allen, Fred, 43 Allen, Woody, 43 American west, theories of, 124–126 Aristotle, 23, 47 Arnold, Matthew, 17, 234, 260–262, 446–447, 485n39, 485n41 Atlantic Monthly, 117, 150, 152, 181, 232; Whittier dinner (see Whittier, John Greenleaf) Austen, Jane, 8, 28, 273 Baldwin, Joseph, 137 Baughman, Ernest W., 133 Beach, Emeline, 256 Beard, Daniel C., 319 Beckwourth, Jim, 141, 473n22 Beecher, Henry Ward, 100 Beecher, Julia and Thomas, 351 Bellezza, Paolo, 23, 237 Bellows, Henry Whitney, 44, 124 Bergson, Henri, 23, 31 Bible. See King James Bible Billings, Josh, 25, 28 Billington, Ray Allen, 54 Bixby, Horace, 74, 153–155, 475n21 Black, Baxter, 139–140 Blair, Walter, 53–54, 420, 458n24 Bliss, Elisha, 100, 199, 402

Blouet, Paul. See O’Rell, Max (Blouet’s pseudonym) Boston Carpet-Bag, 73 Boston Evening Transcript, 6 Bourget, Paul, Outre-Mer: Impressions of America, 263–265 Bowen, William, 113–114, 117 Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 235 Brooks, Cleanth, Jr., and Robert Penn Warren, 191 Brooks, Cleanth, Jr., R. W. B. Lewis, and R. P. Warren, 191 Brooks, Van Wyck, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, 239–240 Browning, Robert, 330, 331 Brown, John, MD, Rab and His Friends, 332 Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, 126 Budd, Louis J., 16, 251, 436 Buffalo Express, 118, 442 Burlingame, Anson, 115 Bush, George W., 25, 27 Cable, George Washington, 218 Cady, Edwin H., 271 Camfield, Gregg, 467n90 Campbell, Alexander, 416 Cardwell, Guy, 456n44 Carlton, George, 419, 421 Carnegie, Andrew, 312, 417 497

498

Index

Century Magazine, 198 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 58, 303 Chicago Tribune, 305 Christian Science, 334–343 Cicero, 44, 47 Clemens, Clara, 343, 369, 377, 403–404 Clemens, Henry, 199, 349 Clemens, Jane Lampton, 71–72, 87, 88, 160, 462n5 Clemens, Jean, 331, 361 Clemens, John Marshall, 462n3 Clemens, Langdon, 60, 409 Clemens, Olivia Langdon (Livy), 100, 113–117, 236–237, 320, 470n180 Clemens, Olivia Susan (Susy), 10, 217, 237, 284, 285–286, 296, 400, 408 Clemens, Orion, 75, 94 Clemens, Pamela (Mrs. William A. Moffett), 72 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne: on Adam and Eve, 319–321, 325, 489n112; on animals, 326–334; as anti-imperialist, 68, 308–315; and Australia, 291–293; as autobiographer (see works of Mark Twain, autobiographical writings and dictations); bankruptcy, 246–248, 296–297; and Bret Harte (see Harte, Bret); as businessman, 217–218, 246–248, 249, 420; complexity of opinions, 347–348; courtship and marriage, 113–114, 169, 350, 480n34; criticism of, 12–16; and crowds, 304–305; on death, 400, 424, 425–426; death and funeral of, 376–377; deaths of family members, 10, 60; and detective stories, 160, 276; early career, 3–4, 71–131; eloquence of, 89–90; as exaggerator (see humor, exaggeration); and factual experience, 344; family life, 72, 117–118, 170, 200–201, 209–210, 217–218, 237, 245–247, 285–286, 287–288, 297, 419; and fictional outsiders, 358; and German, 178–181; and girls and young women, 256, 332; homecoming in 1900, 305–307; honorary degrees, 17–18, 261–262; on human reasoning, 347; on humor, 6, 16–18, 21, 30, 33, 51, 94–95, 182, 226, 281–282, 296, 301, 360, 383–384,

424–425, 463n27; (see also humor, serio-humor); and Jews, 298–299, 488n51; (see also works by Mark Twain, “Concerning the Jews”); and inconsistency, 207, 219, 348; in India, 293–295; investments, 75, 218, 237, 246–247; and irony, 215, 302; (see also humor, and irony); irreverence, 58, 262, 349–350; as journalist, 3, 73, 462n6, 495n83; later career, 307–308, 425; as lecturer, 9, 97, 99, 281, 285; (see also works by Mark Twain, “Whittier Birthday Speech”); and lying, 77, 82; on mankind, 24, 356–359, 366, 418, 424; memory of, 76, 150, 153, 163, 307, 420, 422; and native peoples, 62–68, 291–293, 461n27, 461n30, 462n43; as novelist, 8, 156–158, 207; in Nevada, 66, 75, 76, 79, 81; and obscenity, 38, 60–61, 399, 461n14; and pessimism, 359–366, 388, 478n114; and preachers, 30, 124, 471n215; pseudonyms of, 25, 74, 76, 463n22; Quaker City (steamboat) trip (1867), 100, 468n119; on religion, 324–325, 348–356, 366, 424; residence abroad (1891-1900), 237, 247, 248; residence in Hartford, 149, 152, 169, 205, 249; resiliency of, 287–289, 296–297; as reviewer, 254–269; Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) trip (1866), 97; in San Francisco, 79, 442, 443, 461n27; and Satan, 321, 324–325, 328, 364, 370, 492n3; (see also works by Mark Twain, Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts); schooling, 72; as serio-humorist (see humor, serio-humor); and sexuality, 59, 60–61, 324, 400, 461n14, 470n170; and Shakespeare, 31, 37, 61, 217, 343, 344–347; and slavery, 67, 151, 205, 221, 238, 262, 277, 487n27; (see also works by Mark Twain, “A True Story” and Pudd’nhead Wilson); in South Africa, 295; as steamboat pilot, 3, 74, 94, 97, 119, 152; summers at Quarry Farm, 151, 200–201; and twins, 35, 271–272; in Vienna, 296–302; and war, 373; (see also Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, as anti-imperialist); world

Index tour (1895-96), 285. See also works by Mark Twain Cleveland, Grover, 408, 420 Clooney, George, 228 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 144 Columbus, Christopher, 67, 134, 473n3 Conway, Moncure, 160 Cooper, James Fenimore, 64, 265–269, 305, 462n35 Cord, Mary Ann, 151 Cousins, Norman, Anatomy of an Illness, 45 Cox, James M., 386 Crane, Susan and Theodore, 200–201 Crèvecœur, Michel-Guillaume Jean de (aka J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur), 56, 460n8 Custer, George Armstrong, 59, 66 Darwin, Charles, 46, 320, 364 De Forest, John W., 151 De Quille, Dan (pen name of William Wright), 83 Derrida, Jacques, 42 DeVoto, Bernard, 239–240, 369, 386–388, 402–404, 437 Diamond, Jared M., 294 Dickens, Charles, 113, 196 Dickinson, Emily, 32, 145 Donne, John, 28 Douglass, Frederick, 481n20 Dowden, Edward, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 255–258 Dreyfus, Alfred, 298–299 Duckett, Margaret, 190 Duneka, Frederick, 334, 376, 378–385, 398 Dunne, Finley Peter, 479n1 Dwight, Timothy, 261–262 Eddy, Mary Baker G., 334–343 Edwards, Jonathan, 7 Ellison, Ralph, 109, 202 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 163–164, 348 Exman, Eugene, 402 Fairbanks, Mary Mason, 115–116, 162, 470n188 Fielding, Henry, 95, 111

499

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 443, 481n21, 484n15, 490n143 Ford, Ford Madox, 34 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 22, 23 Frost, Robert, 42; “Fire and Ice”, 43 Fry, (General) James B., 259 Fry, William F. Jr., 40 Funston, Frederick, 313–315 Galileo Galilei, 62 Ganzel, Dewey, 469n158 Gillis, Jim, 71, 175–176, 223 Gillis, Steve, 175–176 Goodman, Joseph T., 75, 79, 465n69 Grant, Ulysses S., 259–260, 425 Greenwood, Granville George, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, 344–346, 491n176 Gribben, Alan, 345 Griffin, George, 205–206 Griffin, Sir Lepel Henry, 260, 262 Grossmith George, 6 Grotjahn, Martin, 47 Hannibal Journal, 23 Hannibal Missouri Courier, 416, 422 Hannibal Western Union, 72–73 Harnsberger, Caroline Thomas, 400 Harper and Brothers, 397 Harper’s Bazar, 319 Harper’s Weekly, 306–307 Harris, George Washington, 29, 212, 479n150 Harris, Joel Chandler, 185, 209, 235 Harte, Bret, 187–198; career and writings, 188–189; humor of, 194–197, 197–198, 480n26; and Mark Twain, 48, 116, 188–190, 417–418, 479n3 Hartford Courant, 17 Harvey, George, 397–398 Hay, John, 150, 306, 391, 474n6, 488n72 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 158 Hemingway, Ernest, 89, 377 Higginson, Francis, 134, 135 Hill, Hamlin, 53 Hitchcock, Alfred, Shadow of a Doubt, 49–50, 459n32 Hobbes, Thomas, 47, 197 Hobby, Josephine, 395, 396

500

Index

Holbrook, Hal, Mark Twain Tonight!, 32–33 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 163–164 Homer, The Odyssey, 41 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 269 Horace, 3, 26, 455n1 Howden, Mary Louise, 396 Howells, W. D., 50, 83, 150, 162–163, 166, 168, 182, 229, 231–241, 378 humor: of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 209–215; and aggression, 46–48; American humor, 51–58; Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, 62; of Bret Harte (see Harte, Bret, humor of); contrast, 71, 79–82, 101–103, 120, 121–122, 219, 252, 279, 281–282, 465n52; and coping, 42–46; deadpan narration, 93; disparity, 4–5, 24, 27, 30, 31, 34, 49, 185, 211, 213–215, 219, 272; exaggeration, 82–88, 251, 266, 423; first-person narration, 151, 153, 162, 210, 253, 254, 279, 315, 330, 331; (see also humor, naïve narrator); and health, 45–46; hierarchy humor, 47–48; hoax, 77, 83, 104, 137, 464n29; interlingual humor, 177–181; and irony, 4–5, 215, 274–276, 295, 302; and metaphor, 28, 29; morality of humor, 58–62; naïve narrator, 118–119, 211–213, 253; of non-humans, 459n2; physics of, 21–36; and political correctness, 62; political humor, 52; psychology of, 37–50; pun, 12, 13, 23, 34, 173, 174; racial humor, 48, 208; and relaxation, 40–42; research concerning, 456n2–457n3; and satire, 4–5, 175, 213–215, 228, 235, 318; selfsatire, 89, 104, 198, 425; selfdeprecating humor, 48; serio-humor, 13, 89, 99, 112, 121–122, 182, 183, 219, 226, 228–229, 236, 239, 301; sexual humor, 59–61, 461n14; shaggydog story, 33–34; slapstick humor, 25; sociology of, 51–68; tall tale, 133–145; theories of, 21–36; (see also humor, psychology of, research concerning, sociology of); and timing, 32; and twins, 35, 271–272; and violence, 222–226; and wit, 458n21; See also Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, on humor

Hutto, Joe, 35 Hyde, Alice J., 98, 256 Jackson, Andrew, 54 James, Henry, 101, 133, 187, 303, 305 James, Robert, A Medical Dictionary, 254, 270 James, William, Principles of Psychology, 39, 126 Jefferson, Thomas, 56 Joan of Arc, 277–284, 346 Johnson, Robert, 134 Johnson, Samuel, 42 Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons, 247 Juvenal, 60 Keillor, Garrison, 28, 158 Kelly, Walt, 48 King James Bible, 46, 310, 353–354, 492n3 Kiskis, Michael, 398 Kruse, Horst H., 481n3 Lampton, James, 50 Lang, Andrew, 13 Langdon, Charles, 100 Langdon, Jervis and Olivia Lewis, 114, 118, 481n20 Larson, Gary, 55 Lauter, Paul, 23 Leacock, Stephen, 47, 459n26 Leopold II (King of Belgium), 87–88, 221, 423 Lewis, Paul, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches, 457n3 Lincoln, Abraham, 12, 57 “Little Red Riding-Hood”, 37 local color writing, 192–193, 480n21 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 89, 163–164 Lowell, James Russell, 162 Mac, Bernie, 208 Mac Donnell, Kevin, 463n22 Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, CA, x, 432–433 Martin, Rod A., 45 Matthews, Brander, 12, 235

Index McCormick, Wales, 416 McLaughlin, Maria, 416 McPhee, John, 138–139 Melville, Herman, 232 Mencken, H. L., 231, 232 Miles, (General) Nelson, 415 Milton, John, 302, 321 Moffett, Samuel, 431 Monday Evening Club (of Hartford), 413 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 67 Naples Observer, 445 National Public Radio, 208 Neider, Charles, 404–406 New Orleans Daily Crescent, 463n22 New Yorker, 26, 61 New York Galaxy, 118, 174, 182, 443 New York Herald, 309 New York Saturday Press, 422 New York Times, 306 New York Tribune, 112 Nickolas II (Czar of Russia), 315–316 Nilsen, Don L. F., 39 Nixon, Richard, 27 Norris, Michele, 59, 208 North American Review, 397–400 O’Rell, Max (pseudonym of Paul Blouet), 264–265 Osgood, James, 199 Overland Monthly, 188 Oxford University, 18, 233 Paige, James, 246, 407 Paige typesetter. See Paige, James Paine, Albert Bigelow, 369, 376, 401–402; as Twain’s biographer, 394, 441–442; as Twain’s editor, 377–385, 402 Parkhurst, Anthony, 134 Parkman, Francis, The Oregon Trail, 134 Pascal, Blaise, 35, 271 Peattie, Donald Culross, 472n224 Perry, Oliver Hazard, 48 Peter, Lawrence, 58 Phelps, William Lyon, 12 Philippine-American War, 311–315 Plato, 301 Potter, David M., People of Plenty, 55

501

Railton, Stephen, 266 Rasmussen, R. Kent, 200 Raymond, James T., 50 Rice, Clement, 81 Richardson, Charles F., 12 Ricoeur, Paul, 28 Rising, Franklin S., 124, 471n214 Rogers, Henry Huttleston, 247–248, 297 Roosevelt, Theodore, 307, 417 Rourke, Constance, 480n21 Royston, Samuel Watson, The Enemy Conquered, 248, 255 Russell, David O., 228 Russell, Mark, 32 Sacramento Union, 97 San Francisco, 188 San Francisco Alta California, 167 San Francisco Daily Alta California, 99 San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 85, 91, 442, 466n83 San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 94 San Francisco Examiner, 79 San Francisco Golden Era, 79, 173 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 23 Scott, Walter, 297 Setchell, Dan, 16 Shakespeare, William, 31, 37, 217, 344–347 Shaw, George Bernard, 278 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 111, 255–258 Shirvanian, Vahan, 43 Shurcliff, Arthur, 44 Siamese twins, 156, 269–270 Sidney, Sir Philip, 23, 301 Simon, John Y., 258 Slote, Dan, 100 Smith, Frank, Understanding Reading, 34–35, 39 Smith, Henry Nash, 122, 240, 425, 471n212, 483n38 Sommer, Theo, 53 Spanish-American War, 306, 308 Springfield (MA) Republican, 309 Stegner, Wallace, 387, 422 St. Louis Missouri Democrat, 7 St. Louis Missouri Republican, 99 Strong, Leah A., 477n86 Swift, Jonathan, 41

502 Talmud, 41 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 234 Thoreau, Henry David, 34, 307 Thorpe, Thomas Bangs, “The Big Bear of Arkansas”, 144–145 Thurber, James, 16, 26, 49; “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, 43; My Life and Hard Times, 43 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 53, 460n9 Trollope, Frances, 135–136, 141 Tuckey, John S., 379, 386 Twichell, Joseph, 169–171, 183, 235, 376, 477n86 University of California Press, 427, 431–433, 435 Valéry, Paul, 49 Van Dyke, Henry, 376 Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise, 75–76, 425, 442 Wadsworth, Charles, 124 Wakeman, Edgar, 322–323 Washington Post, 61–62 Webb, Charles Henry (pseudonym Jean Paul), 23, 96, 424 Webb, Walter Prescott, 125 Webster, Charles L., 247 Weisberg, Jacob, 25, 61 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, 415 White, Frank Marshall, 84, 85, 465n57 White, Richard, 75 Whitman, Walt, 348 Whittier, John Greenleaf, Atlantic dinner for, 162–168 Wilson, Edmund, 266 Wister, Owen, The Virginian, 136–137, 142, 167 Wolf, Jim, 73, 411 Woolf, Virginia, 144 works by Mark Twain: “About All Kinds of Ships”, 252; “About Play Acting”, 181, 300–301; “Adam’s Soliloquy”, 320; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 29, 33, 161, 198, 199–215, 304–305, 438; The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, 74; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 155–162,

Index 328; “Advice for Good Little Boys”, 79; The American Claimant, 249, 262; autobiographical writings and dictations, 391–397, 410–426, 495n60; (see The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Neider; Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed.Smith; “Chapters From My Autobiography”; Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. DeVoto; Mark Twain’s Autobiography, ed. Paine; “Reflections on Religion”); The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Neider, 404–406; (see also autobiographical writings and dictations); Autobiography of Mark Twain, vols. 1 & 2, ed. Smith et al., 406–410; (see also autobiographical writings and dictations); “The Awful German Language” (from A Tramp Abroad), 177–181; “An Awful- - - Terrible Medieval Romance”, 160; “A Bloody Massacre near Carson”, 77; “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral” (from Roughing It), 123–124, 471n212, 471n213; “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (see “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”); The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, 99, 100, 150, 424, 468n121, 474n5; “Chapters From My Autobiography” (North American Review), 397–400; (see also autobiographical writings and dictations); Christian Science, 334–343; “The Chronicle of Young Satan”, 328, 329, 361, 372–373; (see also Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts); Colonel Sellers (play), 50; “Concerning the Jews”, 299–300, 488n51; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , 217–229, 483n38; “Contract with Mrs. T. K. Beecher”, 351; “Cornpone Opinions”, 358; “A Couple of Sad Experiences”, 463n27, 464n29; “A Cure for the Blues”, 249, 255; “The Curious Republic of Gondour”, 183; The Czar’s Soliloquy”, 315–316; “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter”, 73, 122, 304; “My Début as a Literary Person”, 298, 465n61, 467n99; “A

Index Defense of General Funston”, 313–315; “Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?”, 315, 333; “A Dog’s Tale”, 330–331; “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness”, 329; “The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance”, 252; “Eve’s Diary”, 320–321; Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, 66, 322–324, 444; “Extracts from Adam’s Diary”, 277; “A Family Sketch”, 416, 494n47; “Fenimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses”, 267–269; “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”, 265–267, 462n35; “The Five Boons of Life”, 325; “Flies and Russians”, 356; Following the Equator, 67, 289–295, 328; “Frightful Accident to Dan De Quille”, 83; “A Gallant Fireman”, 72–73; “The German Chicago”, 252; The Gilded Age, 143; “Goose Fable”, 352; “The Great Dark”, 298, 362–363; “Hannibal, Missouri”, 89; A Horse’s Tale, 331–333; “How to Tell a Story”, 33, 145, 458n33; “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians”, 65, 346; “In Memoriam: Olivia Susan Clemens” (poem), 296; “In My Bitterness”, 296; The Innocents Abroad, 101–113, 328, 468n119; Milan-Lake Como sequence, 106–109; Is Shakespeare Dead?, 344–347; “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn”, 175–177; “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”, 91–93, 96, 178, 249, 328, 466n85, 467n93; King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 316–317, 423; “Letters from the Earth”, 60, 289, 324–325, 333, 361; Life on the Mississippi, 199–200, 406, 481n3; (see also “Old Times on the Mississippi”); “A Majestic Literary Fossil”, 254; “Man’s Place in the Animal World”, 288–289; “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”, 302–305; Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. DeVoto, 402–404; (see also autobiographical writings and dictations); Mark Twain’s Autobiography, ed. Paine, 401–402; (see also autobiographical writings and dictations); “Meisterschaft: In Three Acts”, 180; “The Memorable

503 Assassination”, 315; “Mental Telegraphy”, 249; Merry Tales , 248; “Mock Marriage”, 349; “A Monument to Adam”, 320; “My Boyhood Dreams”, 298; “My Début As a Literary Person”, 298, 465n61, 467n99; “My First Literary Venture”, 31–32, 458n28; Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, 11, 369–372, 376–388, 441; (see “The Chronicle of Young Satan”; The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance by Mark Twain; “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”; “Schoolhouse Hill”); The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance by Mark Twain, 377–385; (see also Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts); “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”, 328, 374–376; (see also Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts); “Old Times on the Mississippi”, 152–155; (see also Life on the Mississippi); The £1,000,000 BankNote and Other New Stories, 249; “On Foreign Critics” (speech), 262; “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” (lecture), 97–98, 458n27; “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins”, 269–270; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 277–284, 346; “Petition to the Queen of England”, 253–254; “Petrified Man”, 77; “Playing Courier”, 252; The Prince and the Pauper, 181–185, 479n147; “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed”, 50; “The Private Secretary’s Diary”, 355; “The Privilege of the Grave”, 395; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 269–277, 486n80; “Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion”, 170; “Reflections on Religion” ed. Neider, 353–354; (now included in the Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 2, ed. Smith et al.; see autobiographical writings and dictations); Reflections on the Sabbath”, 352; “The Refuge of the Derelicts”, 334, 363–366; “the report of my death”, 84–85, 465n57; Roughing It, 33, 38–39, 64, 65, 117–131, 137–138, 140–142, 272, 328; “Sabbath

504 Reflections”, 80, 365; “Schoolhouse Hill”, 371, 373–374, 385; (see also Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts); “Die Schrecken der Deutschen Sprache”, 180; “The Secret History of Eddypus”, 340–343; “1601. Conversation . . . in the Time of the Tudors”, 60–61; “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”, 59; “Stirring Times in Austria”, 298; “The Stolen White Elephant”, 160; “Synod of Praise”, 352; “Things a Scotsman Wants to Know”, 355; “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass” letters, 74; Those Extraordinary Twins, 156, 270–271, 475n33; “Thoughts of God”, 349–350; “Three Statements of the Eighties”, 350–351; “Three Thousand Years

Index Among the Microbes”, 326; Tom Sawyer Abroad, 250; “To My Missionary Critics”, 312; “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, 310–312; A Tramp Abroad, 169–181, 187, 236, 328, 423; “A True Story”, 151–152, 475n13; “The Turning Point of My Life”, 357; “The United States of Lyncherdom”, 359; “The Victims”, 352; “Villagers of 1840-[5]3”, 420, 495n90; “The War-Prayer”, 318–319; What Is Man?, 329; “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us”, 263–265 Wright, Laura, 256, 421 Yale University, 261 Yates, Norris W., 137