Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1
Page 24
It is to the credit of the men that they did not kill the rooster that crowed so gallantly, mornings. He lived eighteen days, and then stood up and stretched his neck and made a brave weak effort to do his duty once more, and died in the act. It is a picturesque detail; and so is that rainbow, too—the only one seen in the forty-three days—raising its triumphal arch in the skies for the sturdy fighters to sail under to victory and rescue.
With ten days’ provisions Captain Josiah Mitchell performed this memorable voyage of forty-three days and eight hours in an open boat, sailing four thousand miles in reality and thirty-three hundred and sixty by direct courses, and brought every man safe to land. A bright, simple-hearted, unassuming, plucky, and most companionable man. I walked the deck with him twenty-eight days—when I was not copying diaries—and I remember him with reverent honor. If he is alive he is eighty-six years old, now.
If I remember rightly, Samuel Ferguson died soon after we reached San Francisco. I do not think he lived to see his home again; his disease had doubtless doomed him when he left it.
For a time it was hoped that the two quarter-boats would presently be heard of, but this hope suffered disappointment. They went down with all on board, no doubt. Not even that knightly chief mate spared.
The authors of the diaries wanted to smooth them up a little before allowing me to copy them, but there was no occasion for that, and I persuaded them out of it. These diaries are finely modest and unaffected; and with unconscious and unintentional art they rise toward the climax with graduated and gathering force and swing and dramatic intensity, they sweep you along with a cumulative rush, and when the cry rings out at last, “Land in sight!” your heart is in your mouth and for a moment you think it is yourself that have been saved. The last two paragraphs are not improvable by anybody’s art; they are literary gold; and their very pauses and uncompleted sentences have in them an eloquence not reachable by any words.
The interest of this story is unquenchable; it is of the sort that time cannot decay. I have not looked at the diaries for thirty-two years, but I find that they have lost nothing in that time. Lost?—they have gained; for by some subtle law all tragic human experiences gain in pathos by the perspective of time. We realize this when in Naples we stand musing over the poor Pompeian mother, lost in the historic storm of volcanic ashes eighteen centuries ago, who lies with her child gripped close to her breast, trying to save it, and whose despair and grief have been preserved for us by the fiery envelop which took her life but eternalized her form and features. She moves us, she haunts us, she stays in our thoughts for many days, we do not know why, for she is nothing to us, she has been nothing to any one for eighteen centuries; whereas of the like case to-day we should say “poor thing, it is pitiful,” and forget it in an hour.
Vienna, October, 1898.
Mark Twain
The manuscripts for these next three pieces (“Horace Greeley,” “Lecture-Times,” and “Ralph Keeler”) are all in the Mark Twain Papers. Clemens wrote all three in Vienna at about the same time, either in late 1898 or (more likely) in early 1899. He had apparently abandoned (at least briefly) the autobiography as he had originally conceived it in favor of a “portrait gallery of contemporaries,” as he told one interviewer in May 1899: “A man cannot tell the whole truth about himself, even if convinced that what he wrote would never be seen by others.... For that reason I confine myself to drawing the portraits of others” (“Mark Twain’s Bequest,” datelined “Vienna, May 22,” London Times, 23 May 1899, 4, in Scharnhorst 2006, 333–34).
Although Clemens here placed the encounter with Greeley in 1871, it almost certainly occurred slightly earlier, sometime between 12 and 17 December 1870, while Clemens was on a week-long trip to New York (RI 1993, 825 n. 78). He told a nearly identical version of the story in 1905 (3 Oct 1905 to the Editor of Harper’s Weekly, RPB-JH, published in SLC 1905e). Paine did not include this anecdote in his edition of the autobiography, but a brief typescript of it prepared for him suggests that he very likely considered doing so. He had already quoted still another version of the story in his 1912 biography (MTB, 1:472). Neider likewise omitted it, but Bernard DeVoto published it in the “Miscellany” section of Mark Twain in Eruption, which he said was “composed of fragments lifted from contexts that did not seem to me interesting enough to be run in their entirety” (MTE, xii–xiii, 347–48).
Horace Greeley
I met Mr. Greeley only once and then by accident. It was in 1871, in the (old) Tribune office. I climbed one or two flights of stairs and went to the wrong room. I was seeking Colonel John Hay and I really knew my way and only lost it by my carelessness. I rapped lightly on the door, pushed it open and stepped in. There sat Mr. Greeley, busy writing, with his back to me. I think his coat was off. But I knew who it was, anyway. It was not a pleasant situation, for he had the reputation of being pretty plain with strangers who interrupted his train of thought. The interview was brief. Before I could pull myself together and back out, he whirled around and glared at me through his great spectacles and said—
“Well, what in hell do you want!”
“I was looking for a gentlem—”
“Don’t keep them in stock—clear out!”
I could have made a very neat retort but didn’t, for I was flurried and didn’t think of it till I was down stairs.
This manuscript, begun in Vienna in late 1898 or early 1899, was left incomplete, ending in mid-sentence at a moment of unresolved suspense. Like “Horace Greeley” and “Ralph Keeler,” it seems to have been intended as part of a series of biographical portraits of friends and acquaintances which Clemens had temporarily adopted as a substitute for the autobiography as first conceived. The names of Nasby, De Cordova, and Hayes printed in the margins are comparable to the marginal dates Clemens later used to guide the reader in his nonchronological Autobiographical Dictations.
Clemens had long had an interest in writing up his experiences on the lecture circuit. As early as July 1869, having completed his first lecture tour of the eastern states, he used his correspondence with the San Francisco Alta California to describe his friend and fellow lecturer David Ross Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby): “Well, Nasby is a good fellow, and companionable, and we sat up till daylight reading Bret Harte’s Condensed Novels and talking over Western lecturing experiences. But lecturing experiences, deliciously toothsome and interesting as they are, must be recounted only in secret session, with closed doors. Otherwise, what a telling magazine article one could make out of them” (SLC 1869b). Despite that caveat, his interest in writing about those experiences remained alive. In a letter to Olivia written in January 1872, he mentioned a manuscript (later published as “Sociable Jimmy”) which he had sent home as something he hoped to include in his “volume of ‘Lecturing Experiences’” (10 and 11 Jan 1872 to OLC, L5, 18, 20 n. 6; SLC 1874d). But “Lecture-Times” and the sketch following it here, “Ralph Keeler,” are as close as he ever came to fulfilling that plan.
Paine included part of “Lecture-Times” under his own title, “Old Lecture Days in Boston. Nasby, and others of Redpath’s Lecture Bureau,” omitting the last four unconcluded paragraphs devoted to Isaac I. Hayes (MTA, 1:147–53). Neider took his text directly from Paine—duplicating his errors—and he reversed sections of the text, which he then interlarded with material extracted from “Ralph Keeler” and the Autobiographical Dictations of 11 and 12 October 1906 (AMT, 161–69). The present text is therefore the first time this manuscript has been published in full, as written.
Lecture-Times
Nasby
I remember Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby (Locke) very well. When the Civil War began he was on the staff of the Toledo Blade, an old and prosperous and popular weekly newspaper. He let fly a Nasby letter and it made a fine strike. He was famous at once. He followed up his new lead, and gave the copperheads and the Democratic party a most admirable hammering every week, and his letters were copied everywhere, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and read and laughe
d over by everybody,—at least everybody except particularly dull and prejudiced Democrats and copperheads. For suddenness, Nasby’s fame was an explosion; for universality it was atmospheric. He was soon offered a company; he accepted, and was straightway ready to leave for the front; but the Governor of the State was a wiser man than were the political masters of Körner and Petöfi; for he refused to sign Nasby’s commission, and ordered him to stay at home. He said that in the field Nasby would be only one soldier, handling one sword, but at home with his pen he was an army—with artillery! Nasby obeyed, and went on writing his electric letters.
I saw him first when I was on a visit to Hartford; I think it was three or four years after the war. The Opera House was packed and jammed with people to hear him deliver his lecture on “Cussed be Canaan.” He had been on the platform with that same lecture—and no other—during two or three years, and it had passed his lips several hundred times, yet even now he could not deliver any sentence of it without his manuscript—except the opening one. His appearance on the stage was welcomed with a prodigious burst of applause, but he did not stop to bow or in any other way acknowledge the greeting, but strode straight to the reading-desk, spread his portfolio open upon it and immediately petrified himself into an attitude which he never changed during the hour and a half occupied by his performance except to turn his leaves: his body bent over the desk, rigidly supported by his left arm, as by a stake, the right arm lying across his back. About once in two minutes his right arm swung forward, turned a leaf, then swung to its resting-place on his back again—just the action of a machine, and suggestive of one; regular, recurrent, prompt, exact—you might imagine you heard it clash. He was a great burly figure, uncouthly and provincially clothed, and he looked like a simple old farmer.
I was all curiosity to hear him begin. He did not keep me waiting. The moment he had crutched himself upon his left arm, lodged his right upon his back and bent himself over his manuscript he raised his face slightly, flashed a glance upon the audience and bellowed this remark in a thundering bull-voice—
“We are all descended from grandfathers!”
Then he went roaring right on to the end, tearing his ruthless way through the continuous applause and laughter and taking no sort of account of it. His lecture was a volleying and sustained discharge of bull’s-eye hits, with the slave-power and its Northern apologists for target, and his success was due to his matter, not his manner; for his delivery was destitute of art, unless a tremendous and inspiring earnestness and energy may be called by that name. The moment he had finished his piece he turned his back and marched off the stage with the seeming of being not personally concerned with the applause that was booming behind him.
He had the constitution of an ox and the strength and endurance of a prize-fighter. Express trains were not very plenty in those days. He missed a connection, and in order to meet this Hartford engagement he had traveled two-thirds of a night and a whole day in a cattle-car—it was mid-winter—he went from the cattle-car to his reading-desk without dining; yet on the platform his voice was powerful and he showed no signs of drowsiness or fatigue. He sat up talking and supping with me until after midnight, and then it was I that had to give up, not he. He told me that in his first season he read his “Cussed be Canaan” twenty-five nights a month for nine successive months. No other lecturer ever matched that record, I imagine.
He said that as one result of repeating his lecture two hundred and twenty-five nights straight along, he was able to say its opening sentence without glancing at his manuscript; and sometimes even did it, when in a daring mood. And there was another result: he reached home the day after his long campaign, and was sitting by the fire in the evening, musing, when the clock broke into his reverie by striking eight. Habit is habit; and before he realized where he was he had thundered out, “We are all descended from grandfathers!”
I began as a lecturer in 1866, in California and Nevada; in 1867 lectured in New York once and in the Mississippi valley a few times; in 1868 made the whole western circuit; and in the two or three following seasons added the eastern circuit to my route. We had to bring out a new lecture every season, now, (Nasby with the rest,) and expose it in the “Star Course,” Boston, for a first verdict, before an audience of twenty-five hundred in the old Music Hall; for it was by that verdict that all the lyceums in the country determined the lecture’s commercial value. The campaign did not really begin in Boston, but in the towns around; we did not appear in Boston until we had rehearsed about a month in those towns and made all the necessary corrections and revisings.
This system gathered the whole tribe together in the city early in October, and we had a lazy and sociable time there for several weeks. We lived at Young’s hotel; we spent the days in Redpath’s bureau smoking and talking shop; and early in the evenings we scattered out amongst the towns and made them indicate the good and poor things in the new lectures. The country audience is the difficult audience; a passage which it will approve with a ripple will bring a crash in the city. A fair success in the country means a triumph in the city. And so, when we finally stepped onto the great stage at Music Hall we already had the verdict in our pocket.
De Cordova
But sometimes lecturers who were new to the business did not know the value of “trying it on a dog,” and these were apt to come to Music Hall with an untried product. There was one case of this kind which made some of us very anxious when we saw the advertisement. De Cordova—humorist—he was the man we were troubled about. I think he had another name, but I have forgotten what it was. He had been printing some dismally humorous things in the magazines; they had met with a deal of favor and given him a pretty wide name; and now he suddenly came poaching upon our preserve, and took us by surprise. Several of us felt pretty unwell; too unwell to lecture. We got outlying engagements postponed, and remained in town. We took front seats in one of the great galleries—Nasby, Billings and I—and waited. The house was full. When De Cordova came on, he was received with what we regarded as a quite overdone and almost indecent volume of welcome. I think we were not jealous, nor even envious, but it made us sick, anyway. When I found he was going to read a humorous story—from manuscript—I felt better, and hopeful, but still anxious. He had a Dickens arrangement of tall gallows-frame adorned with upholsteries, and he stood behind it under its overhead-row of hidden lights. The whole thing had a quite stylish look, and was rather impressive. The audience were so sure that he was going to be funny that they took a dozen of his first utterances on trust and laughed cordially; so cordially, indeed, that it was very hard for us to bear, and we felt very much disheartened. Still I tried to believe he would fail, for I saw that he didn’t know how to read. Presently the laughter began to relax; then it began to shrink in area; and next to lose spontaneity; and next to show gaps between; the gaps widened; they widened more; more yet; still more. It was getting to be almost all gaps and silences, with that untrained and unlively voice droning through them. Then the house sat dead and emotionless for a whole ten minutes. We drew a deep sigh; it ought to have been a sigh of pity for a defeated fellow craftsman, but it was not—for we were mean and selfish, like all the human race, and it was a sigh of satisfaction to see our unoffending brother fail.
He was laboring, now, and distressed; he constantly mopped his face with his handkerchief, and his voice and his manner became a humble appeal for compassion, for help, for charity, and it was a pathetic thing to see. But the house remained cold and still, and gazed at him curiously and wonderingly.
There was a great clock on the wall, high up; presently the general gaze forsook the reader and fixed itself upon the clock-face. We knew by dismal experience what that meant; we knew what was going to happen, but it was plain that the reader had not been warned, and was ignorant. It was approaching nine, now—half the house watching the clock, the reader laboring on. At five minutes to nine, twelve hundred people rose, with one impulse, and swept like a wave down the aisles toward the doors!
The reader was like a person stricken with a paralysis; he stood choking and gasping for a few moments, gazing in a white horror at that retreat, then he turned drearily away and wandered from the stage with the groping and uncertain step of one who walks in his sleep.
The management were to blame. They should have told him that the last suburban cars left at nine, and that half the house would rise and go then, no matter who might be speaking from the platform. I think De Cordova did not appear again in public.
Dr. I.I Hayes
There was another case where a lecturer brought his piece to Music Hall without first “trying it on a dog.” Everybody was anxious to get a glimpse of Dr. Hayes when he was fresh from the Arctic regions and at the noon of his celebrity. He wrote out his lecture painstakingly, and it was his purpose to read all of it from the manuscript except the opening passage. This passage was of the flowery eloquent sort, and he got it by heart, with the idea of getting out of it the moving effect of an offhand burst. It was not an original idea; novices had been bitten by it before. Not twice, of course, but once.
The vast audience received him with inspiring enthusiasm as he came down the big stage, and he looked the pleasure he felt. He laid his manuscript on the desk, and stood bowing and smiling and smiling and bowing for a stretch of minutes. At last the noise died down, and a deep hush of expectancy followed. He stepped away from the desk and stood looking out over the sea of faces a while, then slowly stretched forth his hand and began in measured tones and most impressively, somewhat in this fashion:
“When one stands, a lost waif, in the midst of the mighty solitudes of the frozen seas stretching cold and white and forbidding, mile on mile, league on league, toward the remote and dim horizons, a solemn desert out of whose bosom rise here and there and yonder stupendous ice-forms quaintly mimicking the triumphs of man, the architect and builder—frowning fortresses, stately castles, majestic temples, their bases veiled in mysterious twilight, their pinnacles and towers glowing soft and rich in the rose-flush flung from the dying fires of the midnight sun—”