by Mark Twain
Eight hundred and three remarks, filterable twelve ways by subject or six ways by the move that lands the joke. Plus a wire, a letter to the editor, a classifieds column, a galley proof, a faux newspaper, a spelling-reform catastrophe, and a cigar that actually burns.
tags: humor, satire, american, twain, aphorism
Select any combination of entertainments. Draw at random from the remaining pool, or peruse the full catalogue below. 803 items on the bill, drawn from the novels, the Autobiography, the Notebooks, Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Huckleberry Finn, and everything else that survived.
the act of the human nature
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
The Late American Humorist presents -
Being a compleat collection of three hundred & fifty-eight · remarks, squibs, ironies & proverbs · culled from the Notebooks, Novels, Letters & after-dinner Speeches of Samuel L. Clemens, also Called Mark Twain · gathered here for the amusement of the reader.
Samuel Clemens kept notebooks the way a printer keeps type: a steady accumulation of small sharp objects, sorted, reset, and struck off again whenever he needed a line. The compleat working corpus is above - eight hundred and three of them, drawn from the novels, the Autobiography, the Notebooks, and everything else that reached the page. What follows is the rest of the show.
On a steamboat going up the Mississippi, the leadsman stood at the bow with a knotted line weighted with lead and a sounding-pole. He dropped the lead, called out the depth, and pulled it up. The line was marked at six fathoms in the way a sailor would recognise; the calls were the words a pilot in the wheelhouse needed to hear over a paddle’s wash. Click each mark.
Twelve feet. Safe water. The leadsman calls it long and loud. Sam Clemens heard it for the first time as an apprentice in 1857; took the call as his pen-name in 1863.
Sam Clemens worked the river from April 1857 to April 1861. He held a fully-licensed pilot’s certificate by 1859. The Civil War shut down commercial river traffic; he went west, signed first as “Josh,” and on 3 February 1863 in Virginia City, Nevada, signed the byline that traveled. The river had already given him the name. He just hadn’t needed it yet.
13 brief facts about the man - the comet, the river, the cigars, the Paige machine, the white suit, and the four children.
Twain’s third-floor study at the Hartford house: part billiard parlour, part writing room, part smoking lounge. He wrote here for seventeen years, between fortunes. Click any object.
A small mahogany table by the eastern window. He wrote Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) on this surface. He wrote standing or sitting, in pencil, in long mornings, with the door shut.
The Hartford house was completed 1874, sold in financial distress in 1891, restored 1955–1974, and is now the Mark Twain House & Museum. Open to the public; the billiard room is the last stop on the standard tour.
A Treatise Upon the Machinery
Read Twain by topic (politics, religion, travel) and you learn what he thought. Read Twain by technique - the mechanical move he made to land the line - and you learn how he thought. Six moves follow.
- he turns the proverb on its head -
Opens with a familiar expectation - cliché, aphorism, common sense - then yanks the rug. The meaning flips in the last phrase.
Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
- Notebook
Be good and you will be lonesome.
- Following the Equator
When in doubt tell the truth.
- Following the Equator
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
- Following the Equator
Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
- Note to Young People’s Society
Do right and you will be conspicuous.
- Mark Twain: A Biography
Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
- “Adam’s Diary”
Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
- Following the Equator
Heroine: girl who is perfectly charming to live with, in a book.
- More Maxims of Mark
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
- More Maxims of Mark
A few signature moves, slowed down so you can watch them land.
I have made it a rule
- Seventieth Birthday speech
Familiarity breeds contempt -
- Notebook
Truth is the most valuable thing we have.
- Following the Equator
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
- Attributed
A wire, just in from Elmira - charge paid at origin.
The editor receives his morning mail - one letter on the subject of illusions, composed by a reader who did not sign her name in the right corner.
Sir,
I have been reading your correspondence columns for many years and have observed, with dismay, the modern fashion of surrendering one's illusions at the earliest possible convenience. This is no small matter; I offer to your readers the following hard-won observation, at my own expense.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
I remain, as ever, yours in distress,
Mrs. R. Carson
Below the fold, the classifieds column - where every notice is a Twain aphorism wearing a disguise.
Notices · Personals · Lost & Found · Sundries
Rate: 2¢ per word · Remittance must accompany copy · Closing 4 p.m. Wednesday
All advertisements set in agate · Reader’s discretion advised · Claims & corrections addressed to the Editor, Page 1
Run off the evening edition, set overnight by the printer and still warm. Reshuffle the columns if you like - the front page is different every time.
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- -
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court -
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- H. H. Boyesen, unsigned review, Atlantic, 48 (December 1881), 843–5, in Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews (1999), edited by Louis J. Budd, p. 201 -
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- Ch. 23 -
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- Following the Equator -
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- Address at a meeting of the Berkeley Lyceum, New York, November 23, 1900. Quoted in Mark Twain's Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 146 (The speech is titled "Public Education Association" in that book, but also referred to elsewhere as his "I am a Boxer" speech.) -
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 27 February 1885, in Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain's letters: Arranged with Comment (1917), Vol. 2, p. 450 -
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- Quoting a schoolchild in "English as She Is Taught" -
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- The Gilded Age -
The first draft is not the joke. The joke is the edit. Click to apply the red-pencil marks and watch the sentence become Twain.
Familiarity breeds contempt — and children..
A proposal, half in jest, for fixing the language once and for all - advance one year at a time and watch spelling collapse into rubble.
For example, in Year 1 the soft "c" would be replaced by "s". Certainly, this will not cause much confusion.
after Twain (apocryphal) · "A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling"
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
· click the cigar to strike a match ·
The white linen suit is late Twain. By 1906 he wore it in mid-winter, in Washington, in front of Congress, on principle. The humorist had become the conscience of the Republic, and the Republic did not enjoy it. What follows is the record of that quarrel.
a dispatch held back from publication, 1905
An aged stranger entered the church and made his way with slow and noiseless steps up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister. He ascended to the pulpit and stood waiting. The minister, startled, ceased his prayer and gave him way.
The stranger spoke. “I come from the Throne - bearing a message from Almighty God.” He waited for the words to take effect. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import - that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of - except he pause and think.”
“You have heard your servant’s prayer - the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it - the part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts, fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compacted into those pregnant words.”
“When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory - must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. 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 in rags and hunger and thirst… 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.”
(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.”
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.- The War Prayer· published posthumously, 1916
The essay sat in his desk. His daughter Jean and his agent begged him to leave it unpublished - “Father, you will lose everybody.” He did. It came out six years after his death. He said: “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world.”
on the Philippine adventure, published in The North American Review
The Person Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to say: “There is something curious about this - curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”
Shall we? That is, shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest? Shall we bang right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way, and commit the new century to the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and think it over first? Would it not be prudent to get our Civilization-tools together, and see how much stock is left on hand in the way of Glass Beads and Theology, and Maxim Guns and Hymn Books, and Trade-Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment (patent adjustable ones, good to fire villages with, upon occasion), and balance the books, and arrive at the profit and loss, so that we may intelligently decide whether to continue the business or sell out the property and start a new Civilization Scheme on the proceeds?
There must be two Americas. And so, the Person Sitting in Darkness is saying to himself: “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.”
And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one - our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.
- To the Person Sitting in Darkness· February, 1901
On the night of 30 November 1835, a child was born in Florida, Missouri. Overhead, Halley’s Comet reached its perihelion. Clemens grew up knowing this; he also grew up with the Comet’s 75-year period, and did the sum.
“I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”- Twain, 1909 (to Albert Bigelow Paine)
The comet returned 21 April 1910, at its perihelion. Twain died the next day, of angina, at Stormfield.
He was right within a day. The comet reached perihelion on 20 April 1910; he died on 21 April, at Stormfield, of angina, his daughter Clara at his bedside.
One more wire, dated earlier - London, thirteen years before the end, when the newspapers killed him prematurely and he refused to co-operate.
The popular version, “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” is a paraphrase. Above is the cable as Twain actually sent it.
The shorter paraphrase - “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” - is the one that traveled. Twain preferred the original; the original has the accountant’s precision of a man who once set type for a living. No word wasted. The longer version is also funnier. That was always the trade.
For eighteen years, Twain poured money into James Paige’s typesetting machine - a marvel of 18,000 parts that was always one adjustment away from working and never did. He bet the house and lost. Then he won it back.
“I have seen Magnificent things done by machines,” he wrote Howells, “but none to compare with the Paige. For it is more than a machine - it is a human being made of steel.” The human being made of steel could not quite keep tempo; Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype could. Twain paid his creditors anyway.
He ran for no office and despised those who did. He wrote about Congress for forty years, and was inexhaustible on the subject. A session, called to order.
The chair recognises the gentleman from Missouri for one further remark. Motion carries unanimously, 1 to 0.
Another joke, in the setup-punch form, on the same theme.
Always do right.
- Letter to the Young People's Society, 1901
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them
- quoted by Rudyard Kipling, 1890, in From Sea to Sea
The almost right word is a decent sort of fellow -
^The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter - ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning.
- to Geo. Bainton, for his book.
- Following the Equator · Redding, Connecticut · 21 April 1910
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI