Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  This depresses me. It always saddens the professional lightning-bug when he flares up under the mole’s nose and finds that the mole doesn’t know that anything has happened. The Westminster’s man is unaware of the privileges of our profession. He thinks we must stick to the facts, when we use them, and not profane them; whereas by the privileges of our order we are independent of facts; we care nothing for them, in a really religious way. If in their integrity they will not work into our scheme with the kind of effect which we wish to produce, we re-arrange them to meet the requirements of the occasion. When we are hot with the fires of production we would even distort the facts of the multiplication-table, let alone the facts of Genesis. We have no inflamed respect for facts. We could keep our head and be calm in their presence even if one in thirty-five of them was true. Even if I had known the unimportant fact that it was not Eve who named the animals, I should have coldly ignored it, in the interest of art. I should have altered the fact to suit my fiction. If I had felt it best to turn the whole fable of creation inside out, I would have done it without compunction. The Gazette says: “It is always well to be sure of one’s ground—even before attempting a joke.” We look at it the other way. One of our principal by-laws says “Do not try to be sure of your audience before attempting a joke; it will always contain at least one person whose quartz its diamond drill cannot penetrate.”

  As to my irreverence, I am sure I was never irreverent in my life; I am also sure that no irreverent person has ever existed in the earth. It is not the privilege of governments, or laws, or churches, or even editors, to tell us what we must revere. In this matter we may choose for ourselves, and we always do. We do not revere Mahomet; we do not revere the gods of India; we do not hold in awe the mosques, the temples, and the other things that are sacred in the eyes of those peoples. And we are not found fault with for assuming this attitude. All our fellow-citizens forgive us for it and concede that we are merely exercising an indisputable right. Then those fellow-citizens face the other way, and naïvely require us to revere their sacred things and personages. They even pass laws exacting this reverence of us—laws which punish us if we decline to obey them. These fine intelligences talk about freedom of conscience, and then tell our consciences how to act, under pain of penalties! In permitting us to withhold reverence from the sacred things and personages of India and Turkey, and from the sacred personages and things of Rome and Greece, these citizens grant us the right to withhold our reverence from any other sacred things and personages, here or elsewhere.

  Properly, no such thing as irreverence is possible. No man can be irreverent toward the things which he holds sacred in his heart—the thing is impossible; but he is free to say disagreeable things about any other person’s gods and Bibles—even those of the Indians, the Turks, the Romans and the Greeks. No one denies him this right. Certainly, then, the word irreverence is a word which has no meaning, and no rightful place in the dictionary, since it describes something which has never existed and is never going to exist. I revere a number of things, and I never speak of them disrespectfully, nor even think of them disrespectfully. If I should do either of these things my act could be described as irreverence; but as it is not possible for me to do them the word is impotent and meaningless in my case, as it is in all other cases. I repeat, there are things which are sacred to me and which I hold in reverence—but I do not count Adam and Eve in this list, nor their fabulous history.

  At last we have heard from Higbie, and there is no denying that I am depressed. Higbie is the silver miner who was my cabin-mate in Aurora, Esmeralda, during two or three months, forty-five years ago. We talked about him in a chapter away back yonder in the winter, or the spring. He was proposing to write for the New York Herald, upon guarded invitation, some account of his life and mine out on the frontier in the long ago, and he proposed to pass his manuscript through my hands to see if I might like what he was going to say about me.

  It was then that a warm old-comrade impulse surged up in me and disordered my judgment. I encouraged him. It was wrong to do this—wrong and foolish. I ought to have reserved my reply until my judgment could have a chance to cool down and get straightened out—and of course I didn’t do that. I jumped at once to a conclusion, and, by all the laws of human experience, it was necessarily an erroneous one. I remembered Higbie perfectly well—a most kindly, engaging, frank, unpretentious, unlettered, and utterly honest, truthful, and honorable giant; practical, unimaginative, destitute of humor, well endowed with good plain common sense, and as simple-hearted as a child. Under the warrant of these facts, I jumped to a conclusion—the apparently entirely trustworthy conclusion that the real Higbie,—the genuine Higbie, the engaging Higbie, the unhumorous Higbie, the unimaginative Higbie—would appear in his manuscript and win the heart of every reader. It ought to have occurred to me that no human being who attempts literature for the first time can be his natural self—but it didn’t. I imagined Higbie telling about those old days in the simple and unaffected language of a Robinson Crusoe, and charging his words with the honesty, the truthfulness and the sincerity that were born in him. Such a narrative could not fail to be inviting and acceptable; I knew this perfectly well. Now then, how could an artificial Higbie ever occur to me? I could not imagine such a thing. I could as easily have imagined the silver and gold amalgam in a retort turning to slag and rubbish—and yet that is what happened to Higbie when he took the unaccustomed pen in his hand. The natural Higbie, the real Higbie, the delightful Higbie, the honest Higbie, the truthful Higbie, the sincere Higbie, the childlike Higbie, went up in the vapor of the quicksilver and left nothing behind but slag—just slag, only slag, and not worth thirty cents a ton in any market of the precious metals.

  In Higbie’s essay there are seventeen thousand five hundred words; thirteen thousand of the words are such extravagant distortions of the actual facts that hardly an unimpeachable grain of truth is discoverable in them. This Higbie of seventy-five immature years is not the splendid and stalwart Higbie I cabined with forty-four years ago. His paper is headed “A Little Experience in Nevada and Surrounding Country in the Early Sixties, Leading up to My Acquaintance with Samuel L. Clemens, ‘Mark Twain.’” His Introduction, of four thousand words, leads gradually up to me, and is an unadorned statement of his goings and comings, and sounds true—doubtless is true. Then he encounters me, and the newly-born literary artist sets his fancy afire and the conflagration begins. Evidently he sat down with my book “Roughing It” before him and reproduced every detail of my Esmeralda chapters from it, translating each and every detail into his own language. Manifestly, when those texts gave out he filled in with his fancies, and whenever he fetched me on the stage he evidently felt the necessity of bursting into frenzies of humor, and he did it. It is sad, it is pathetic; Higbie was always gravity, seriousness, practicality itself. I can almost imagine a humorous camel, but a humorous Higbie is beyond my strength.

  If only Higbie were a stranger! Then I could write him an uncharitable letter and return his manuscript to him—but we can’t treat friends in that way. We have to write them gently; we have to write them candidly, too. Therefore we do it, but we do not enjoy it. It hurts, and we are glad when the uncomfortable task is achieved. I have written Higbie the following letter, which will not see print until years after both of us are dead.

  Dublin, New Hampshire.

  Dear Higbie:

  I have read it, and the fact is, I am greatly disappointed. It is mainly second-hand news, worked over. In “Roughing It” I have already told about the Wide-West blind lead; and about your locating it; and about our dreams of what we would do when we got the money; and about your going cementing and my going off to nurse Nye; and about the relocating of the blind lead; and about my joining the staff of the ”Enterprise;” and about Lake Mono; and about the robbery on the divide—and so forth and so on. To make the retelling of these things valuable there is only one way, not two: they must be better told than I told them. You have not
done that, and any editor would say so at once; and he would add that he could not use matter, anyway, that had already been used. I exhausted that ore-pile, and left nothing behind but waste rock.

  You have invented some new things—such as the flap-jacks and the ball—but any editor would strike them out, because such things are without value except when funny, and you have not made them funny. And how could you? You are a straight, honest, practical, sincere man, and no schooling, no training, no diligence would ever qualify you to write humorously—it is out of your line; and even if it were not, you could not pick up that exacting art in a day.

  You have made me pretty ridiculous, but I shan’t mind that if the editors will buy your MS. But I clearly perceive that it would damage its chances for me to offer it to them, for the reason that they would certainly ask me for a paragraph in praise of it and I could not furnish it. In print I have never praised anything which I could not praise with heartiness and sincerity. For in my way I am as honest as you are, Cal.

  But there is one thing I can do, and this I will gladly do if you say the word: I can send it to the Herald, through my literary agent, and he can say you passed it through my hands to see if there was anything in it that would wound me, and that I found it innocent of reproach in that respect. Shall I do that? Let me hear from you, old friend.

  Sincerely yours,

  S. L. Clemens.

  In justice to Higbie—for it may be that his humor will appeal to others, although it has gone over my head—I here append his flap-jack episode—an episode which resembles his extravagant ball, in this: that neither of them happened. Both are exudations of his unschooled fancy.

  At that time I was very fond of hot-cakes—slap-jacks the miners called them—and when alone would have them every morning as they could be made very quick with good flour, yeast powder, and water. The first slap-jacks made after Sam’s arrival, there was nothing said and I supposed he liked them as well as myself, so we had hot-cakes several mornings in succession. I thought I discovered a frown of disapproval at those cakes, but he said nothing. When I happened to be at home at mid-day we would have slap-jacks for both breakfast and dinner, and when I was sure he didn’t like them we had them three times a day regular with no dishes on the side. I was wondering what would happen next and ran away with the foolish idea that I had him in a tight place and would compel him to go to work and cook something for himself that he liked rather than feed on flap-jacks three times a day forever.

  At that time I was not aware of the resources of the man or his disinclination for any kind of physical exertion and supposed that any kind of a mortal under the circumstances would pitch in and cook some kind of a dish that would suit his taste. Not he. So with desperation in every fiber I would renew the attack and make it my particular business to be home at every meal and stack up in front of him a pile of flap-jacks as high as his head and in diameter the size of a large frying-pan. I went on the principle of quantity versus quality. I couldn’t help but admire his patience and perseverance, but saw that the barometer was low and a storm brewing, and proceeded to batten down hatches, take in sail, and make everything snug before the gale struck: and as an extra safeguard pilled more cakes on the table as ballast.

  With a fearful scowl and a glance of contempt and defiance at that pile of cakes, he leaned back from the table and opened up that innocent mound of flap-jacks.

  “Hot-cakes,” he says, “hot-cakes three times a day the year round. Why man they would ruin the digestive organs of the most able-bodied ostrich that ever roamed the wilds of Africa.” Then he went into a learned dissertation on the injurious effects of yeast powders in combination with flour and water straight; that it would ruin the constitution of any man alive to keep that kind of a diet up for any length of time; and with other very decisive opinions on the subject. All this time I had been stowing away hot-cakes for dear life with the inward conviction that he was coming to time. In fact had eaten more than I should otherwise have done in order to give him time to finish his eloquent discussion. As a final appeal he says, “For Heavens sake man, lets have a change. Hot cakes, hot-cakes! Straight three times a day with nothing on the side. Why I never heard of such a thing.”

  By this time I was nearly exploding with hot-cakes and laughter, but I said, “All right, Sam. I am so fond of hot-cakes myself that I think nothing about the wants of others and if there is anything you would particularly like our credit is good up at the store. Get anything you like and fix it up to suit yourself and it will suit me.”

  “Thats the talk,” he says, “we’ll have a change to-morrow. Good lord man. its a wonder we are alive to-day stuffing ourselves with nothing but hot-cakes,” and in a mollified tone “I will admit you make fine large cakes and use great skill in tossing them into the air and catching them upside down in that frying-pan, but as a regular diet three times a day the year round, I will admit my constitution will not stand the strain.”

  Saturday, August 11, 1906

  Man incapable of originating a thought; simply receives suggestions from the outside—Note to Andrew Carnegie, asking for hymn-book—The pension for John T. Lewis—Mr. Rogers’s doubt as to the existence of John T. Lewis—Two letters from Lewis—Kipling comes to America—Visits Mr. Clemens in Elmira.

  From the beginning of time, philosophers of all breeds and shades have been beguiled by the persuasions of man’s bulkiest attribute, vanity, into believing that a human being can originate a thought in his own head. I suppose I am the only person who knows he can’t. In my own person I have studied him most carefully these many years—indeed for a quarter of a century—and I now know beyond doubt or question that his mind is quite incapable of inventing a thought, and is strictly limited to receiving suggestions from the outside and manufacturing second-hand thoughts out of them. The expert in hypnotism takes pride in the notion that in powerfully moving his subject by suggestion, he has discovered a new thing, whereas no human being has ever been moved to any act or idea by any force except suggestion. The reason that I can come to this dictation-industry every morning unprepared with a text, is that I know quite well that somebody’s passing remark, or a paragraph in the newspaper, or a letter in the mail, will suggest something which will remind me of something in my life’s experiences and will surely furnish me, by this process, one or more texts.

  The first thing I notice in this morning’s paper is a note which I wrote to Andrew Carnegie some years ago, and which, for a certain reason, flashes John T. Lewis into my mind, although Lewis is not mentioned in the note.

  My dear Mr. Carnegie,—I see by the papers that you are very prosperous. I want to get a hymn-book. It costs six shillings. I will bless you, God will bless you, and it will do a great deal of good.

  Yours truly,

  Mark

  P.S.—Don’t send me the hymn-book; send me the six shillings.

  The note suggests that fine old colored friend, John T. Lewis, because of the suspicious form of it. Many a stranger would think that the hymn-book was only a blind; that at bottom I didn’t really want the hymn-book, but only wanted to get my hands on the money. Such a suspicion would do me wrong. I only wanted the hymn-book. I was most anxious to get it, but I wanted to select it myself. If I had succeeded in getting the money I would have bought a hymn-book with it and not any other thing. Although I have no evidence but my own as to this, I believe it to be trustworthy and sufficient. I am speaking from my grave, and it is not likely that I would break through the sod with an untruth in my mouth.

  It is a strange thing, when you come to examine it—Andrew Carnegie has built a Peace Palace on the other side, for the housing of that great and beneficent modern institution, the Hague Tribunal, at a cost of ten million dollars; he has built, and endowed with ten millions, that other most noble and inestimably valuable benefaction, the Carnegie Institute; he has established a permanent fund of fifteen million dollars for the dignified and respectable maintenance of veterans of both sexes who have devoted thei
r long lives to the higher grades of teaching, and in their old age find themselves poor, forlorn, and without support—a benefaction of so fine and gracious a sort that it brings the moisture to one’s eyes to think of it; he has distributed eighty million dollars’ worth of free libraries around about the planet for the intellectual elevation of men of all grades and creeds and colors—and yet when he could save a tottering soul from destruction with six shillings’ worth of hymn-book, he turns coldly away and leaves that soul to perish. Truly there are a good many different kinds of people in the world, and Andrew Carnegie is one of them. If not several.

  The unworded doubt which his silence cast upon the purity of my intentions was duplicated, in another way, by another man, Henry Rogers. In a previous chapter I have told how John T. Lewis saved the lives of a rich man’s wife and daughter, thirty years ago, when not another man in the State could have done it, and was rewarded with thanks—repeated thanks, lots of thanks, plenty of thanks. About five years ago the rheumatism took hold of him and he was not able to get a livelihood out of his farm. It took all the money he could make to pay the interest on the money he borrowed in that ancient day—a loan which I mentioned when I was speaking of it before. Something had to be done for his relief, therefore Susy Crane and Jean and I contributed a monthly sum, in the form of a pension, so that he might live the rest of his days without work. I offered Henry Rogers a chance to enlarge that pension, and he was quite willing, and said he would send his check to John T. Lewis on the first of every month.