The MARK TWAIN Line

The management regrets that it cannot promise a moral. It has looked for one in every cabin and under every bunk, and found only a deck of cards and a man from Missouri who says he is a pilot. Passengers who require improvement will find it served at every landing, disguised as a joke, which is the only form in which most people will swallow it.

The man from Missouri is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in a two-room house in Florida, Missouri, on the 30th of November, 1835, the year Halley’s comet was in the sky. He was a printer’s apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a soldier for two weeks, a silver miner for longer than that, a newspaperman, the funniest lecturer in the English-speaking world, a householder in Hartford, a bankrupt, and then, by honest toil and a great deal of talking, not a bankrupt. He signed himself Mark Twain, a leadsman’s call. He made people laugh for forty years and spent the last of them telling them, gravely, what he had meant by it.

The trip runs in two halves. By day the boat goes down the river of his life, landing by landing, and at each one a story of his is waiting on the bank. By night, in the grand saloon, he gives the lecture he gave around the world in other words: how to tell a story, in acts. At every stop the big line at the top is the lesson; his own words come under it; the toy lets you try the thing with your hands; and “For the trip” is the line to put in your pocket and take home. Some words on the way carry a faint ink rule: tap one and a Notice appears in the margin, in his words. Others are tickets: tap one and the purser brings you one of his remarks on the subject, and another if you tap again, and he does not run out quickly.

He kept notebooks the way a printer keeps type: a steady pile of small sharp objects, sorted and reset whenever he needed a line. The pile is on the hurricane deck, eight hundred and three remarks, each with its ticket of origin pinned to it. A word of warning before you browse. More sayings have been put in his mouth than in any other American’s, and most of the best-known ones he never said. A remark without a source in this room is a stowaway, and the purser has orders to keep it below, in irons, where it can do no harm.

The boat puts in first at Hannibal, Missouri, the town on the west bank where he grew up and which he later rebuilt, plank by plank, as St. Petersburg in Tom Sawyer. His father, a justice of the peace called “Judge,” with grand plans and no luck, died in March 1847, when the boy was eleven. Soon after, his mother and he agreed that he should learn a trade, and he was apprenticed to Joseph P. Ament of the Missouri Courier, for the usual wages of the day, his board and clothes: a notice in the marginNotice.more board than clothes, and not much of eitherMark Twain on his apprentice’s wages, in Paine’s Biography and no money at all.

The printing office was his school: his remark on this (9 on the subject), and a better one than the one he had skipped. A boy who sets other men’s sentences letter by letter learns how a sentence is built, and where it is loose. The boy who skipped school also learned something else in Hannibal, which Tom Sawyer will now explain with a bucket of whitewash.

Down river, below the town, lies Jackson’s Island, where Tom played pirate and where Huck and Jim met on the run. Huck’s book came out in 1885, long after the man who invented him had left Hannibal, and it is the deepest thing he wrote. Huck has been taught by his whole town that helping a runaway slave is a sin, and his conscience: his remark on this (5 on the subject) tells him so all the way down the river. At the crisis he writes the letter that would send Jim back, looks at it, and decides against heaven: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”, and tears it up. The joke is that Huck thinks he is choosing wickedness. The lesson is that he is not.

He set type in St. Louis, New York and Philadelphia, and in April 1857, meaning to make his fortune on the Amazon, he went aboard the Paul Jones for New Orleans instead. The Amazon would wait. He laid siege to the pilot, Horace Bixby, and after three days Bixby gave in and agreed to teach him “the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred dollars, payable out of the first wages I should receive after graduating.”

He thought a pilot only had to keep the boat in the river. He found he had to learn twelve or thirteen hundred miles of it by heart, by day and by night, going up and going down, and then learn it again every time it moved. Once he knew a crossing cold, Bixby had the leadsmen call it shallow, to see whether the cub knew what he knew. You may heave the lead yourself.

He learned it. In about eighteen months he had his full license as a Mississippi pilot, and years later, famous for something else, he still wrote home that “all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.” But the river taught him a sour piece of education: his remark on this (4 on the subject) on the side: the more he could read the face of the water, the less he could see it. The sunset that once made him catch his breath became a set of instructions about a rising reef and a shifting bar. Every expert pays this toll at some crossing.

In 1861 the war closed the river, and the pilot was out of work. A few young men of Hannibal formed a company of Confederate volunteers, the Marion Rangers, and he went with his neighbours, as young men do. He lasted about a fortnight; afterwards he wrote that he was a soldier two weeks: a notice in the marginNotice.I was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time.a letter, quoted in Paine’s Biography, and later made a story of it, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.

He knew how a man comes to his side in a quarrel: by where he lives, who feeds him and what the neighbours say. Forty years later he wrote it down as an essay, borrowed from a slave preacher he had heard as a boy, about where a man’s opinions: his remark on this (14 on the subject) come from.

He went west instead, in the summer of 1861, by stagecoach to Nevada with his brother Orion, who had been made secretary of the new Territory. He prospected for silver, found none worth keeping, and once owned a share of a rich blind lead, which he lost because nobody did the ten days’ work the law required; he could always say he “was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days.”

In the summer of 1862 the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City offered him twenty-five dollars a week to write, which was more than silver had offered. Early in 1863 he began to sign his pieces with an old pilot’s pen name, a leadsman’s call. He explained the name to his editor as a pilot’s word for safe water: a notice in the marginNotice.It is an old river term, a leads-man’s call, signifying two fathoms—twelve feet. It has a richness about it; it was always a pleasant sound for a pilot to hear on a dark night; it meant safe water.to Joseph Goodman, editor of the Enterprise (Paine), and it stuck. The mining camps were full of honest men who had never been near enough to a sack of gold to be tested. He remembered them when, in his sixties, he wrote about a town that was very proud of its honesty.

In November 1865 a piece of camp-fire nonsense about a man named Jim Smiley and his jumping frog appeared in the Saturday Press in New York and set the city laughing. Its author, out on the Coast, was disgusted that New York should single out the Frog: a notice in the marginNotice.a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!letter home, January 20, 1866 (Paine) when he had written better things. It made his name all the same. In 1867 it carried him onto the Quaker City excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, and in young Charley Langdon’s cabin he was shown a miniature on ivory of Charley’s sister, Olivia. He asked to see it every time he came. He married her in February 1870, and in 1874 they moved into the big house in Hartford, where they were happy for seventeen years.

Then came the machine. James W. Paige was building a typesetter that would set type faster than any man, and the old printer’s apprentice could not resist it. Paige: a notice in the marginNotice.He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel.on James W. Paige (Paine) was never content short of perfection, and perfection takes money: his remark on this (15 on the subject). Clemens put something like a hundred and ninety thousand dollars into it, and in April 1894 his publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, failed as well. At fifty-eight he was a bankrupt, and the Mergenthaler linotype, a simpler machine, had the market.

The law would have let him off. He could have paid fifty cents on the dollar and started fresh. Instead, in the summer of 1895, at fifty-nine, sick with a carbuncle, he set out to lecture his way around the world, through Australia, India and South Africa, to pay every creditor in full, and told the newspapers that it was a matter of honor: a notice in the marginNotice.But I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law.statement to the press, Vancouver, 1895 (Paine), not law. By the end of January 1898 the last debt was paid.

So tonight’s lecturer is a man who talked his way out of debt, and knows what talk is worth. The lecturer comes on slowly, looks at the audience as if he had expected somebody else, and begins by saying that he does not claim he can tell a story as it ought to be told, only that he knows how it ought to be told. There are several kinds of story, he says, but only one difficult kind. “The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.” He will prove it, with one old anecdote told three ways.

The first rule follows from the first act. The comic teller announces beforehand that this is the funniest thing he ever heard, laughs first, and repeats the nub, glancing round for applause. “It is a pathetic thing to see.” The humorous teller does the opposite. “The humorous story is told gravely”, and the teller never lets on that he suspects anything in it is funny. Watch his face. It is a habit: his remark on this (8 on the subject) that takes years, and it is the whole of the art.

Act III concerns the point, the nub, the snapper. The comic teller shouts it at you every time, and in print he italicizes it, adds exclamation points and explains it in a parenthesis. “All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.” The humorous teller drops it in passing, as if it had fallen out of his pocket, and lets the belated audience find it on the floor.

Then the pause, the fourth and last of the features. Artemus Ward would begin eagerly, “I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn’t a tooth in his head”, then go quiet, as if he had lost his place, and say dreamily, “and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw.” The lecturer says the pause is dainty, delicate, uncertain and treacherous. Try it, and you will find out which of the four it is first.

Act V is a story that does not arrive. In Roughing It the boys in a Nevada camp would get Jim Blaine drunk, which took some doing, so that he would tell about his grandfather’s old ram. He never got past the ram. The lecturer considers this one of the great performances of the West, and he is not joking, which is how you know he is.

The narrator who does not get the joke is the best friend a humorist has. Huck opens his book by saying that the earlier one was written “by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” Huck is never in on it. He reports what he sees, solemnly and exactly, and the reader, who knows more than Huck does, laughs in the gap between what Huck sees and what Huck understands.

Act VII is a sermon against the near miss. He once took apart Fenimore Cooper in public, rule by rule, and the thirteenth of the rules Cooper broke was the plainest: “Use the right word, not its second cousin.” He had been a printer and a newspaper: his remark on this (5 on the subject) reporter; he knew what an inexact word costs in a column and what an exact one is worth.

Now a lie told with a perfectly straight face. In A Tramp Abroad a miner named Jim Baker, who lives alone in the California woods, explains that the blue-jays talk, and talk well; that a jay will lie, steal and deceive; and that “a jay can out-swear any gentleman in the mines.” Then he tells about a jay who tried to fill a house with acorns through a knot-hole. Jim Baker would sooner trust a dog: his remark on this (8 on the subject) than a jay, and the jay, in his telling, is more human than any of us.

The Frog came home again, in Act IX. A French magazine translated it, and he translated the French back into English word for word, and printed all three under the title “In English. Then in French. Then clawed back into a civilized language once more by patient, unremunerated toil.” The frog survived. The joke did not.

Here the lecturer opens the case and shows the works. Every joke of his has a machine inside it, and the machines can be named: the anti-climax, the exaggeration, the reversal, the deadpan. Name them and you can build your own. The machine needs fuel, though, and he says plainly what the fuel is.

Pudd’nhead Wilson, the lawyer nobody in Dawson’s Landing took seriously, kept a calendar with a maxim for every day, and the town took it as more proof that he was a fool. The lecturer kept one too and put a maxim at the head of every chapter of his book about the trip around the world. One line, a setup, and a turn at the end, as with the one about the classic: his remark on this (3 on the subject), or the one about the cauliflower: his remark on this (2 on the subject).

He loved German and suffered for it. He estimated that “a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.” He complained that the German verb waits at the end of the sentence like the snapper of a joke, which, if you think of it, is a compliment.

The lecture turns serious now, and the audience goes quiet. In 1905 he wrote a prayer for victory and then wrote the half of it that nobody says aloud. His family told him it would be taken for sacrilege, and he kept it in a drawer. To a friend who asked whether he would publish it, he said no, because only dead men: a notice in the marginNotice.I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world.to Dan Beard, on The War Prayer (Paine) are allowed to tell the truth. It was printed after his death.

The last act is a defence of lying, read at a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford as though he were sorry to see the art decline. “Lying is universal”, he begins, and asks only that we lie thoughtfully, for others’ advantage. The newspapers lied about him often enough. In London in 1897 his cousin fell ill, the papers decided it was Mark Twain who was dying, and a young reporter arrived with a cable ordering five hundred words if he was very ill and a thousand if he was dead. He handed back the cable, smiling grimly, and said they need not send so much: only that the report of his death had been exaggerated: a notice in the marginNotice.Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.to a reporter, Tedworth Square, London, 1897 (Paine). The young man went away quite seriously and saw the joke only when he was nearly back at his office.

The curtain falls on a different story. In August 1896, while he and Livy were in England, their daughter Susy died of meningitis in the Hartford house, at twenty-four. In June 1904 Livy died at a villa outside Florence; he wrote to a friend that “she was our breath, she was our life, and now we are nothing.” He went on talking and joking, because that was his trade and his nature, but the jokes had sorrow under them now, where he had always said the fuel was.

In December 1906 he went to Washington to lobby Congress about copyright and stood up in the Capitol in a white suit, in the snow season, and never wore black again except for evening dress and special occasions. He said, in 1909, that he had come in with Halley’s comet and expected to go out with it. On the 20th of April, 1910, the comet came back round the sun. He died the next evening, about half past six, with the sun on the horizon, at his house in Redding, Connecticut. The engagement was kept.