Who Is Mark Twain? (2 page)

In some cases they were experiments, practice for more ambitious or more successful work, or just something to test against one of his usual pre-publication readers. We know that Bret Harte, for instance, at Mark Twain’s request, read the entire manuscript for
The Innocents Abroad
and recommended several cuts, including “The Devil’s Gate,” originally part of chapter 21, where Mark Twain describes Italian scenery. Harte commented in the margin “
apropos des bottes
” (that is, apropos of nothing) and Mark Twain took it out. He tried again, in 1882, to weave this anecdote into
Life on the Mississippi,
and was again advised to take it out, which he did. That later version has been published, but “The Devil’s Gate” has not.

“The Undertaker’s Tale” stands out here as something Mark Twain had tested (unfavorably) against his own personal “focus group.” He seems to have been slow to grasp exactly why it failed, or even to agree that it did fail. The basic idea, also quite modern (think “Six Feet Under”), was to throw a typical Horatio Alger hero into a family of undertakers (ladies and gentlemen, meet the Cadaver family) and then let the formulaic story work itself out. Paine reminds us that during the summer months Mark Twain typically spent the day writing, up on a hill above the family home in Elmira, at the end of which he descended and read aloud his day’s work to the family:

A few weeks later Mark Twain asked his friend William Dean Howells to “tell me what is the trouble with it.” We don’t know what Howells told him, but Mark Twain obviously did not throw the manuscript away. It is published in full for the first time here, and very possibly for the first audience capable of appreciating its humor as the author intended.

“Happy Memories of the Dental Chair” is manifestly autobiographical, and possibly incomplete—a report of his first encounter with a dentist, but in this case a rather extraordinary one: John Mankey Riggs of Hartford, who gave his name to Riggs’s Disease (what your dentist would call “pyorrhea”). Mark Twain is here characteristically fascinated by technical procedures, including Riggs’s part in the discovery and use of anesthetic: “an event of such vast influence, magnitude, importance, that one may truly say it hardly has its equal in human history.” Much as he admires Riggs for his part in that discovery, he also has him squarely in his sights: “He was gray and venerable, and humane of aspect; but he had the calm, possessed, surgical look of a man who could endure pain in another person.” Riggs died in 1885, shortly after this sketch was written, and that may have been partly why Mark Twain did not publish it.

Mark Twain also declined to publish, or sought to publish anonymously, things he thought would so outrage his audience that he would lose their support and undermine his family’s income. These are not heavily represented in this selection, but “The Missionary in World-Politics” manifestly qualifies. Its barely suppressed rage at European exploitation of the Chinese was intended for publication in the London
Times
shortly after the Siege of Peking, during the Boxer Rebellion. On 16 July 1900, Clemens wrote a cover letter for the manuscript to C. Moberly Bell, one of the
Times
’s editors, but he never sent either. The piece itself is not signed “Mark Twain,” but rather “X”—such sharply critical things could only be published, if at all, behind a cloak of anonymity. “Don’t give me away, whether you print it or not” he wrote Bell. It seems likely that he decided not to send it when the news reached him that the “massacre of the Ministers” (referred to bitterly in the penultimate paragraph) was only a false rumor, most of the diplomats having survived being attacked by the Boxers. In any case, Mark Twain’s withering denunciation of cultural imperialism—the cynical use of the missionaries by “the Concert of Christian Birds of Prey” to exploit the Chinese—has lost none of its relevance for today. “My sympathies are with the Chinese,” he wrote privately to Twichell. “They have been villainously dealt with by the sceptered thieves of Europe, & I hope they will drive all the foreigners out & keep them out for good. I only wish it; of course I don’t really expect it.” (He was less than a year away from his decision to publicly criticize American imperialism in the Philippines, beginning with a justly famous essay titled “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”)

This pattern of second thoughts arising to restrain publication is evident throughout his career. “I Rise to a Question of Privilege” was written in May 1868 in direct response to a public rebuke he received from a Baptist clergyman in San Francisco—“and in very good grammar, too, for a minister of the gospel.” It was prepared specifically for publication in the San Francisco
News Letter and California Advertiser,
but Mark Twain probably never sent it, having thought twice about the effect so frank a critique of conventional religion might have on his then still fragile reputation. And he did not even finish writing “Interviewing the Interviewer,” an 1870 sketch written to retaliate against criticism aimed at him by Charles A. Dana, the famous editor of the New York
Sun,
almost certainly because he realized the futility of such public combat.

Eventually, in the last decade of his life, Mark Twain evolved the habit of writing what he wanted to write, no matter how incendiary, knowing all the while that he would not publish it, but simply put it into that “box of Posthumous Stuff” and let it be published after his death. He stipulates to this strategy in “The Privilege of the Grave,” written on 18 September 1905, the thesis of which is that a dead man “has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person: free speech.” Most of us, most of the time, suppress the truth about our genuine beliefs. “Sometimes we suppress an opinion for reasons that are a credit to us, not a discredit, but oftenest we suppress an unpopular opinion because we cannot afford the bitter cost of putting it forth. None of us likes to be hated, none of us likes to be shunned.” Of the pieces published here, perhaps only the dialect sketch called “The Snow-Shovelers” falls into this category. Its devilish needling of the “socialis” and the “anerkis” is quietly conveyed through the earnest conversation of two black laborers “in the elegant-residence end of a large New England town.” (Mark Twain lived in Hartford at the time, and doubtless overheard the real-life exchange that he here turned into satirical fiction.) But the finished piece was probably made to seem inappropriate by the Haymarket Riot of 4 May 1886, in which ostensible “anarchists” killed more than a dozen policemen and civilians with a bomb, and it remained unpublished.

Taken together, these short works give us a window into Mark Twain’s literary workshop, a fresh glimpse of his remarkable talent, lavished even on work he decided, for various reasons, not to publish. Most of them are quite capable of standing on their own merits: shrewdly observed, written with preternatural clarity, and often very funny, they are not simple rejects. Their range of subjects and techniques is itself impressive, even when Mark Twain declined to complete his own experiment. And for these and other reasons, I hope their publication now will pique the curiosity of today’s readers about just who Mark Twain is. The success of his masterpiece,
Huckleberry Finn,
has tended to overshadow the fact that he experimented constantly in various short forms, even in the things he
published
during his long career. Public curiosity about him and what he wrote in this vein goes back to at least November 1865, when his friend Charles Henry Webb said that to his way of thinking, “Shakspeare had no more idea that he was writing for posterity than Mark Twain has at the present time, and it sometimes amuses me to think how future Mark Twain scholars will puzzle over that gentleman’s present hieroglyphics and occasionally eccentric expressions.” Not even Webb, however, anticipated that “future Mark Twain scholars” and readers would still be encountering previously unpublished work of this quality, a century after his death in 1910.

ROBERT H. HIRST
General Editor, Mark Twain Project

Note:
I have described all twenty-six pieces as “previously unpublished,” by which I mean not printed or otherwise made readily accessible to the general reader. More strictly speaking, all of them were included in a microfilm edition issued by the Mark Twain Project in 2001. Also in 2001 twenty-two of these twenty-six pieces were printed in
Twenty-Two Easy Pieces by Mark Twain
, a special limited edition published by the University of California Press. Four have been previously printed for a very limited audience. “Interviewing the Interviewer” and “The American Press” were included in
Mark Twain: Press Critic
, commentary by Thomas A. Leonard, published by The Friends of The Bancroft Library in 2003. “Jane Austen,” with editorial comment inserted between almost every sentence, was published by Emily Auerbach in the
Virginia Quarterly Review
for Winter 1999. “The Walt Whitman Controversy” was published by Ed Folsom and Jerry Loving in the
Virginia Quarterly Review
for Spring 2007. “Happy Memories of the Dental Chair” was not printed in full but only quoted by Sheldon Baumrind in “Mark Twain Visits the Dentist,”
The Journal of the California Dental Association
, in December 1964. But
Who Is Mark Twain?
represents the first time any of these manuscripts has been published for a general audience.

The date of composition if known, or an approximate range for it, is given for each manuscript. When the title is enclosed in square brackets, I have supplied it because Mark Twain left the manuscript untitled.

[Whenever I Am about to Publish a Book]
1881–1885

[Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture]
May–July 1895

Conversations with Satan
October 1897–February 1898

Jane Austen
1905

The Force of “Suggestion”
July–August 1907

The Privilege of the Grave
18 September 1905

[A Group of Servants]
4 June 1898

The Quarrel in the Strong-Box
July–November 1897

Happy Memories of the Dental Chair
1884–1885

[Dr. Van Dyke as a Man and as a Fisherman]
29 April 1908

[On Postage Rates on Authors’ Manuscript]
September 1882

The Missionary in World-Politics
16 July 1900

The Undertaker’s Tale
September–October 1877

[The Music Box]
1879

[The Grand Prix]
1879

[The Devil’s Gate]
June 1868

The Snow-Shovelers
March–May 1886

[Professor Mahaffy on Equality]
15–31 August 1889

Interviewing the Interviewer
5–6 January 1870

An Incident
September 1887

[The Jungle Discusses Man]
1902

I Rise to a Question of Privilege
18–23 May 1868

Telegraph Dog
1907

The American Press
June–September 1888

The Christening Yarn
March 1889

The Walt Whitman Controversy
March 1882

W
henever I am about to publish a book, I feel an impatient desire to know what kind of a book it is. Of course I can find this out only by waiting until the critics shall have printed their reviews. I
do
know, beforehand, what the verdict of the general public will be, because I have a sure and simple method of ascertaining that. Which is this—if you care to know. I always read the manuscript to a private group of friends, composed as follows:

 


Man and woman with no sense of humor.


 


 


Man and woman with medium sense of humor.


 


 


Man and woman with prodigious sense of humor.


 


 


An intensely practical person.


 


 


A sentimental person.


 


 


Person who must have a moral in, and a purpose.


 


 


Hypercritical person—natural flaw-picker and fault-finder.


 


 


Enthusiast—person who enjoys anything and everything, almost.


 


 


Person who watches the others, and applauds or condemns with the majority.


 


 


Half a dozen bright young girls and boys, unclassified.


 


 


Person who relishes slang and familiar flippancy.


 


 


Person who detests them.


 


 


Person of evenly-balanced judicial mind.


 


 


Man who always goes to sleep.


 

These people accurately represent the general public. Their verdict is the sure forecast of the verdict of the general public. There is not a person among them whose opinion is not valuable to me; but the man whom I most depend upon—the man whom I watch with the deepest solicitude—the man who does most toward deciding me as to whether I shall publish the book or burn it, is the man who always goes to sleep. If he drops off within fifteen minutes, I burn the book; if he keeps awake three-quarters of an hour, I publish—and I publish with the greatest confidence, too. For the intent of my works is to entertain; and by making this man comfortable on a sofa and timing him, I can tell within a shade or two what degree of success I am going to achieve. His verdict has burned several books for me—five, to be accurate.

Yes, as I said before, I always know beforehand what the general public’s verdict will be; but I never know what the professional reviewer’s will be until I hear from him. I seem to be making a distinction here; I seem to be separating the professional reviewer from the human family; I seem to be intimating that he is not a part of the public, but a class by himself. But that is not my idea. He
is
a part of the public; he represents a part of the public, and legitimately represents it; but it is the smallest part of it, the thinnest layer—the top part, the select and critical few. The crust of the pie, so to speak. Or, to change the figure, he is Brillat-Savarin, he is Delmonico, at a banquet. The five hundred guests
think
they know it is a good banquet or a bad one, but they don’t absolutely
know,
until Delmonico puts in his expert-evidence. Then they know. That is, they know until Brillat-Savarin rises and knocks Delmonico’s verdict in the head. After that, they don’t know what they do know, as a general thing.

Now in my little private jury I haven’t any representative of the top crust, the select few, the critical minority of the world; consequently, although I am able to know beforehand whether the general public will think my book a good one or a bad one, I never can know whether it really
is
a good one or a bad one until the professional reviewers, the experts, shall have spoken.

So, as I have said, I always wait, with anxiety, for their report. Concerning my last book the experts have now delivered their verdict. You will naturally suppose that it has set me at rest. No, you are in error. I am as much bothered as I was before. This surprises you?—and you think my mind is wandering? Wait, and read the evidence, and you will see, yourself, that it is of an unsettling nature. I am going to be fair: I will make no quotation that is not genuine; I will not alter or amend the text in any way.