Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  Thus far, the boy has not applied to me. I am ready to hold the pen for him in case he shall desire it, but he must tell his story himself. If I should try to tell it for him it would be poorly done, and would damage my reputation. I cannot afford to damage my reputation for the sake of a boy I am not acquainted with, and who is so dim and shadowy in my mind as this one is.

  I now arrive at a couple of letters which were handed to me by a neighbor yesterday—a man of good character and established veracity—and he gives me his word of honor that they are genuine; otherwise I should say they are too good to be true. They flow delightfully along without a break anywhere, from beginning to end, the genial and happy stream suffering not even the momentary interruption of a comma, from the first word to the last. The spelling is so free, so independent, so majestically lawless, that Susy’s is a slave to rule by comparison with it. The source of these letters is this:

  When the appeal for clothing for the sufferers by the San Francisco fire and earthquake went abroad over the land the kind-hearted writer of these letters took a suit of clothes belonging to her brother’s wife and carried them to the Armory in her town and generously devoted them to the cause, delivering them to Miss Blank Blank, chairman of the committee in charge of the matter, and receiving in return Miss Blank’s cordial thanks. This is letter No. 1:

  Miss Blank dear freind i took some Close into the armerry and give them to you to Send too the suffrers out to California and i Hate to truble you but i got to have one of them Back it was a black oll woole Shevyott With a jacket to Mach trimed Kind of Fancy no 38 Burst measure and passy menterry acrost the front And the color i woodent Trubble you but it blonged to my brothers wife and she is Mad about It I thoght she was willin but she want she says she want done with it and she was goin to Wear it a Spell longer she ant so free harted as what i am and she Has got more to do with Than i have having a Husband to Work and slave For her i gess you remember Me I am shot And stout and light complected i torked with you quite a spell about the suffrars and said it Was offul about that erth quake i shoodent wondar if they had another one rite off seeine general Condision of the country is Kind of Explossive i hate to take that Black dress away from the suffrars but i will hunt round And see if i can get another One if i can i will call to the armerry for it if you will jest lay it asside so no more at present from your True freind.

  i liked your

  appearance very Much.

  She wrote that divine letter on the 1st of May. On the following day she got a note from Miss Blank grieving over the fact that the brother’s wife’s all-wool suit of clothes had unfortunately passed out of her hands before the letter requiring its return had reached her. She was sincerely sorry that this calamity had been added to the San Franciscan disaster, and was also sorry that there seemed no way to repair the damage. On the 3d, she received the following reply in rebuttal. Both of this good soul’s letters are winning and eloquent—splendidly and stirringly eloquent—in spite of their departure from the customary shop-worn literary forms, and in spite of their paralysing originality, and I think it is because they came not out of that good woman’s head—in any large degree—but right out of her heart.

  Providence R. I.

  May the 3th 1906

  Miss Blank dear frei-

  nd i got your Letter all Right now dont you worry eny More about the Black Sute when I told Mame what you said she felt reel Bad about your fretin over it and she says good lord, she must think im meaner than dirt i give Her one of them feathar boars such as is all the Go and she was tickled to death over it and it kind of made it up to her about loosing the Sute she is reel amable By nature but she has ben orful tried this spring what with one thing and Another and she ant herself Jim says to me one day go slow for a spell with Mame she is orful tried what with the young ones and the spring cleening and a fire broke out in our bacement that thretend to lose our little all the same weak As the california erthquake every one Has there trubles an take it right strate throgh our crosses ant eny hevyer thane we can Bare theys a hire power that waches Over us and protects us from injerry i hope you have had good luck about your good work no more at present from yure true freind.

  I am glad I have lived to read those letters. They are a benefaction. They have brightened my life and made me glad to continue it for the present—indefinitely, in fact, if I may have the privilege of hearing further from the writer of them from time to time. There is a charm about their limpid and flowing simplicity and their abounding and spirit-stirring eagerness which is graciously and benignantly satisfying to me. To my mind they are altogether delicious, and I think it would be hard to match them in the literature of any age or of any country.

  Still pursuing our subject, I will now insert an extract from a letter written by Captain Ned Wakeman to the Reverend Joseph H. Twichell twenty or twenty-five years ago. I first knew Captain Wakeman thirty-nine years ago. I made two voyages with him, and we became fast friends. He was a great burly, handsome, weatherbeaten, symmetrically built and powerful creature, with coal black hair and whiskers, and the kind of eye which men obey without talking back. He was full of human nature, and the best kind of human nature. He was as hearty and sympathetic and loyal and loving a soul as I have found anywhere, and when his temper was up he performed all the functions of an earthquake, without the noise. He was all sailor, from head to heel; and this was proper enough, for he was born at sea, and, in the course of his sixty-five years, he had visited the edges of all the continents and archipelagoes, but had never been on land except incidentally and spasmodically, as you may say. He had never had a day’s schooling in his life, but had picked up worlds and worlds of knowledge at second-hand, and none of it correct. He was a liberal talker, and inexhaustibly interesting. In the matter of a wide and catholic profanity he had not his peer on the planet while he lived. It was a deep pleasure to me to hear him do his stunts in this line. He knew the Bible by heart, and was profoundly and sincerely religious. He was always studying the Bible when it was his watch below, and always finding new things, fresh things, and unexpected delights and surprises in it—and he loved to talk about his discoveries and expound them to the ignorant. He believed that he was the only man on the globe that really knew the secret of the Biblical miracles. He had what he believed was a sane and rational explanation of every one of them, and he loved to teach his learning to the less fortunate.

  I have said a good deal about him in my books. In one of them I have told how he brought the murderer of his colored mate to trial in the Chincha Islands before the assembled captains of the ships in port, and how when sentence had been passed he drew the line there. He had intended to capture and execute the murderer all by himself, but had been persuaded by the captains to let them try him with the due formalities, and under the forms of law. He had yielded that much, though most reluctantly, but when the captains proposed to do the executing also, that was too much for Wakeman, and he struck. He hanged the man himself. He put the noose around the murderer’s neck, threw the bight of the line over the limb of a tree, and made his last moments a misery to him by reading him nearly into premature death with random and irrelevant chapters from the Bible.

  He was a most winning and delightful creature. When he was fifty-three years old he started from a New England port, master of a great clipper ship bound around the Horn for San Francisco, and he was not aware that he had a passenger, but he was mistaken as to that. He had never had a love passage, but he was to have one now. When he was out from port a few weeks he was prowling about some remote corner of his ship, by way of inspection, when he came across a beautiful girl, twenty-four or twenty-five years old, prettily clothed and lying asleep with one plump arm under her neck. He stopped in his tracks and stood and gazed, enchanted. Then he said,

  “It’s an angel—that’s what it is. It’s an angel. When it opens its eyes, if they are blue I’ll marry it.”

  The eyes turned out to be blue, and the pair were married when they reached San
Francisco. The girl was to have taught school there. She had her appointment in her pocket—but the Captain saw to it that that arrangement did not materialize. He built a little house in Oakland—ostensibly a house, but really it was a ship, and had all a ship’s appointments, binnacle, scuppers, and everything else—and there he and his little wife lived an ideal life during the intervals that intervened between his voyages. They were a devoted pair, and worshiped each other. By and by there were two little girls, and then the nautical paradise was complete.

  When the Captain told me about that first encounter with his passenger he got out the pictures of his family, and he had previously described them, in the extravagant way which was natural to him, as being beautiful beyond the power of words to describe; but this time he had not overstated the case. The trio really were beautiful beyond the power of words to describe, and also sweet and winning beyond expression.

  Captain Ned Wakeman was honored and beloved by San Franciscans as not many men have been honored and loved. He met with reverses, and when he died he left his family in straitened circumstances. I was living in Hartford at the time, and some one in San Francisco wrote me and said that as I was known to be an old and warm friend of the Captain it was desired that I should write a paragraph for publication in the Alta California, proposing a subscription of several thousand dollars for the benefit of his family. I did it, of course. I do not now remember what the proposed sum was, but Ralston, the banker, took the matter up and raised it in an hour. It was good evidence of the respect and affection in which the veteran was held.

  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—this was in the first quarter of 1868, I think. It made a small book of about forty thousand words, and I called it “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” Five or six years afterward I showed the manuscript to Howells and he said, “Publish it.”

  But I didn’t. I had turned it into a burlesque of “The Gates Ajar,” a book which had imagined a mean little ten-cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island—a heaven large enough to accommodate about a tenth of 1 per cent of the Christian billions who had died in the past nineteen centuries. I raised the limit; I built a properly and rationally stupendous heaven, and augmented its Christian population to 10 per cent of the contents of the modern cemeteries; also, as a volunteer kindness I let in a tenth of 1 per cent of the pagans who had died during the preceding eons—a liberty which was not justifiable, because those people had no business there; but as I had merely done it in pity, and out of kindness, I allowed them to stay. Toward the end of the book my heaven grew to such inconceivable dimensions on my hands that I ceased to apply poor little million-mile measurements to its mighty territories, and measured them by light-years only! and not only that, but a million of them linked together in a stretch.*

  In the thirty-eight years which have since elapsed I have taken out that rusty old manuscript several times and examined it with the idea of printing it, but I always concluded to let it rest. However, I mean to put it into this Autobiography now.† It is not likely to see the light for fifty years, yet, and at that time I shall have been so long under the sod that I shan’t care about the results.

  I used to talk to Twichell about Wakeman, there in Hartford, thirty years ago and more, and by and by a curious thing happened. Twichell went off on a vacation, and as usual he followed his vacation-custom—that is to say, he traveled under an alias, so that he could associate with all kinds of disreputable characters and have a good time, and nobody be embarrassed by his presence, since they wouldn’t know that he was a clergyman. He took a Pacific mail ship and started South for the Isthmus. Passenger traffic in that line had ceased almost entirely. Twichell found but one other passenger on board. He noticed that that other passenger was not a saint, so he went to foregathering with him at once, of course. After that passenger had delivered himself of about six majestically and picturesquely profane remarks Twichell (alias Peters) said,

  “Could it be, by chance, that you are Captain Ned Wakeman of San Francisco?”

  His guess was right, and the two men were inseparable during the rest of the voyage. One day Wakeman asked Peters-Twichell if he had ever read the Bible. Twichell said a number of things in reply—things of a rambling and non-committal character, but, taken in the sum, they left the impression that Twichell—well, never mind the impression; suffice it that Wakeman set himself the task of persuading Twichell to read that book. He also set himself the task of teaching Twichell how to understand the miracles. He expounded to him, among other miracles, the adventure of Isaac with the prophets of Baal. Twichell could have told him that it wasn’t Isaac, but that wasn’t Twichell’s game, and he didn’t make the correction. It was a delicious story, and it is delightful to hear Twichell tell it. I have printed it in full in one of my books—I don’t remember which one.

  Perhaps these prefatory words will answer well enough as an introduction to that extract from Wakeman’s letter to Twichell which I mentioned a while ago. I shall not meddle with Captain Wakeman’s spelling and construction, but put in the extract exactly as it came from his pen.

  Christmas day. Cal.

  Brooklyn, East Oakland

  Rev. Joseph. H. Twichell. Sir—last Eve right in the Midst of Enjoying all the pleasure there is or can be, round the Christmas tree that unlike any other Tree I Ever see, Bears Fruit in Every Clime which is the finest and the greatest variety and of Most Excellent flavour that I ever knew, it is a Golden fruit of a Devoted Mothers Love and Effection towards five of the Most Beautiful Children you ever see, and in effect far excells any other Tree there is in the world, as I was enjoying, hugely the happy emotions of the Bigger Children as they with difficulty restrained their Joyish feelings, as they Plucked the fruit that God had sent them and turning towards their mother with all the tenderest words of Love and Effection and with Eyes that was beaming of what my Poor Pensel cannot Portray, whilst the little ones ran Perfectly frantic with Joy Btueen the Tree and ma-ma Lap, and I was enjoying in a cosy Parlor of our little Hut, that which filled me with feelings of not only Present but Past, it was in watching that heavenly Smile which now and again Broke out in a hearty Girlish Laugh on the most Beatic Countinance of a Mother 40 years old that I Ever see, just at this time your letter was put into my hands, the Perusal of which I can assure you added much to my unbounded pleasure to hear from you so soon and from my old friend Don Carlos Flucha which Brought Back Volumes of Pleasant Remissises, all Bound in Gilt, any one of which were in the hand of our Mutual friend Mark Twain would make a Small Book Bound in Calf.

  * “Light-year.” This is without doubt the most stupendous and impressive phrase that exists in any language. It is restricted to astronomy. It describes the distance which light, moving at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, travels in our year of fifty-two weeks.

  † Three hours later. I have just burned the closing two-thirds of it. M.T.

  Thursday, August 30, 1906

  Mr. Clemens’s method of writing stories—Tells how some of his stories were commenced, how they were sometimes left for several years unfinished—Some of them have never been finished—Trouble with telephones—Miss Lyon’s long-distance message to Clara Clemens—Mr. Scovel gives a clause of telephone law.

  I was never willing to destroy “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” Now and then, in the past thirty years, I have overhauled my literary stock and transferred some of it to the fire, but “Stormfield’s Visit” always escaped. Secretly and privately I liked it, I couldn’t help it. But never mind about that, I wish to speak of something else now.

  There has never been a time in the past thirty-five years when my literary shipyard hadn’t two or more half-finished ships on the ways, neglected and baking in the sun; generally there have been three or four; at present there are five. This has an unbusinesslike look, but it was not purposeless, it was intentional. As l
ong as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind. Then I examined my unfinished properties to see if among them there might not be one whose interest in itself had revived, through a couple of years’ restful idleness, and was ready to take me on again as amanuensis.

  It was by accident that I found out that a book is pretty sure to get tired, along about the middle, and refuse to go on with its work until its powers and its interest should have been refreshed by a rest and its depleted stock of raw materials reinforced by lapse of time. It was when I had reached the middle of “Tom Sawyer” that I made this invaluable find. At page 400 of my manuscript the story made a sudden and determined halt and refused to proceed another step. Day after day it still refused. I was disappointed, distressed, and immeasurably astonished, for I knew quite well that the tale was not finished, and I could not understand why I was not able to go on with it. The reason was very simple—my tank had run dry; it was empty; the stock of materials in it was exhausted; the story could not go on without materials; it could not be wrought out of nothing. When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon-hole two years I took it out, one day, and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work at other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on. There was plenty of material now, and the book went on and finished itself without any trouble.