Mark Twain: Representative American

...Oratory at its best is a dramatic art...

...It is a realistic novel written with musical and grammatical accuracy in four different dialects...

...Then he spent four years traveling back and fourth on the river, getting acquainted with both North and South...

...The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow...

...Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don't want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot...

...Norman Hapgood once gave me another example of it...

...These tales flourished to their height in the South and Southwest, and that is where Sam Clemens grew up...

...Everything human is pathetic," he said...

...He was 35 years old and a master of six trades or professions— printer, steamboat pilot, silver miner, reporter, lecturer, editor and publisher—before it ever occurred to him that he might become a creative writer...

...On the other hand no boy with any blood in him at all could ask a more glorious destiny than to be somewhere in the vicinity of Mark Twain...

...No child should be permitted to grow up without exercise for the imagination...

...The impression prevailed around Quarry Farm—I know from Ida Langdon—that all the adjectives he struck out of his books were saved up for use when, under pressure, he found it necessary to swear...

...A remarkable thing about Mark Twain was that while his humor was free-reined enough to be called romantic, or riotous, or anything you want to name it, his prose style, apart from that, was on the classic side...

...Clemens naturally chose the train with the biggest sounding name (the Cannon Ball, I think it was), and towards the middle of the day my father received this telegram: 'Train stops every fifteen minutes and stays three quarters of an hour...

...While Sam Clemens had been fooling around as a volunteer in a company of irregulars who thought they were going to fight on the Confederate side in the Civil War, his future father-in-law had converted his home into a regular station on the underground railroad for runaway slaves...

...As a guest in the Langdon household Mark Twain was preceded bv the great abolitionists: Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass...

...Olivia...

...And of them all, he is the only one who looms behind and beyond his humor as the head representative of a nation's culture...

...If there is any other great imaginative writer with a similar record I can't remember his name...

...I will promise anything," he sobbed, "if you won't make me go to school...

...All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me...

...I AM VERY proud that you asked me to come here on this wonderful occasion when Elmira has waked up to her great place in history...

...We all demanded, of course, that Uncle Sam make a speech too...

...He just couldn't help being funny...

...and he had been married 14 years—he was 49 —when he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his masterpiece and in the opinion of many the master-work of American fiction...

...And that gave me, I need hardly tell you, a terrific inferiority complex...

...The Quarry Farm coachman...

...That he wrote most of that book, and of Tom Sawyer too, in the little octagonal study up at Quarry Farm in Elmira...

...What none of Mark Twain's biographers have realized is that there was more democratic thinking about moral and political problems, as well as more literary culture and gentility, in the Langdon family than there was in Mark Twain when he came to Elmira...

...It was on a weekday and the auditorium was half-empty, or rather it was half-full of famous organists...

...Then seven years in the Wild West and on the Pacific slope, where he fitted in so well that he became a kind of public entertainment, a wonder of nature that visiting travelers were taken to see...

...It awakens an interest in church organs and all sorts of things...

...Not for any writing he did, but for his charm and magnetism, his everflowing witty humor and reckless straight talk and his gift of moral indignation—his polemical assaults on hypocrisy and corruption in high places...

...They were installing a new organ, and Jervis Langdon, who was interested in the company that manufactured it, had asked his Uncle Sam—as he called him—to come up from New York and add luster to the occasion...

...And he vowed he would have a long look at the original when thev got home...

...I think I can depend on him to lie for me...

...Mark Twain was entranced by that portrait...

...And yet it is not I but Mark Twain that you want to hear from...

...No boy with red blood in his veins would live in a church— that was perfectly obvious...

...I was a pretty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me," Mark Twain said in one of his letters...

...These personal recollections are worth more than a dissertation, I guess, but still I want to say a word about Mark Twain's place in history—and then also Elmira's place in Mark Twain...

...It opened with a banquet at the Mark Twain Hotel, and closed with a grand ball at the armory...

...Every night now I used to slip ashore towards ten o'clock at some little village, and buy ten or fifteen cents worth of meal or bacon or other stuff to eat...

...No matter how serious he became, or blazing like a prophet with indignation, he couldn't write 10 pages without eruptions of this perennial underflow of imaginative humor— humor for humor's sake: "Pa's got a lot of buckshot in him, but he don't mind it 'cause he don't weigh much anyway...

...Mark Twain became friends with Olivia Langdon's brother Charles, you may remember, on the voyage of the Quaker City—that tour of the Mediterranean and visit to the Holy Land which he described to a hilarious nation in The Innocents Abroad...

...While "giving references" to Livy's austere parent almost with tears in his eyes, he remarked about one of them: "I've lied for him often enough...

...But that only makes the ideal more surprising, for he found it necessary pretty often...

...He was the last man in the world you'd call a "literateur...

...He used often to come down to Langdon's cabin just to look at it...

...On the contrary, there's a whole philosophy, a way of taking life, underlying this trait of American culture...

...My admired and lamented friend Jervis Langdon gave a glimpse of the same truth in a privately published brochure describing Mark Twain's first visit to Elmira as it appeared to the Langdon family...

...In short, he was a skilled technician long before he ever dreamed of writing a book...

...Koppe's memory is clear that he never spoke a harsh word to his wife, Livy, or indulged in such a blast in any direction if she was in ear-shot...

...Charles had hanging on the wall of his cabin a miniature portrait painted on ivory of his exquisite yet slightly austere sister...

...So he never went to school...

...It enriches life for him...

...is abundant reason for an Elmira celebration of Mark Twain...

...His humor was himself...

...In the one case you are likely to be shot, and in the other you are pretty certain to be...

...Anything...

...Ernest Koppe, remembers that once he found a button missing on a shirt he was putting on, and with a cataract of profanity threw it out of the window, and then took all the shirts out of his drawer, one-by-one, and threw them after it...

...He was away on a side trip at the time, and when he got back young Langdon met him at the gangplank and warned him of the trouble ahead...

...Who could resist it...

...If she warn't standing right there, just inside the door, looking as sweet and contented as an angel half full of pie, I wish I may never...

...You can see what it has done for Jervis just to sit on my knee and exercise his imagination...

...It consists of writing lines as though you were speaking them, and speaking them as though you had not learned them by heart...

...That was American...

...For several years after our arrival in Elmira, we lived in the two-story apartment above the parlors over here on the Grey Street end of the church...

...Of all the great comic writers from Aristophanes down, he was, in my opinion, the most spontaneously humorous...

...MARK TWAIN, as he himself said, hardly ever set out to be funny...

...It peoples the earth with all manner of wonders, strange beasts and birds, angels, cherubim and seraphim...

...SO IT HAPPENED that Mark Twain, "the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope," as he was then called, came for a visit in one of the most genteel mansions in Elmira...

...It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of that visit, and of its triumphant outcome, in the life, and more exactly the growth, of Mark Twain...

...I wrote it down not too long after...

...It is a satire on conventional morality so astute and so dexterously interwoven with the simple and exciting narrative of a boy's adventures that it seems, at times, to be the most mature, as well as one of the most beautiful, things ever attempted in the way of literary art...

...Although nobody could find out what was the matter with him, he was unable to get up for several days and Livy of course had to nurse him back to health...

...What's done is done," she said...

...And all that was large and bold and radically magnanimous and scientific, he retained and developed...

...His wardrobe was compressed into such small compass that it didn't appear he had brought any...

...Mark Twain was fully aware of this...

...He made up for the bad beginning a few days later when one of Mark Twain's disrespectful remarks in a published letter got back to the ship, and sent an energetic group of the pious good ladies on board into a rage...

...The symbol of that is Thomas K. Beecher's statue which stands out there in the park...

...I remember two things about that occasion...

...Where other nations in their childhood sang solemnly of the supernatural deeds of Theseus and Hercules, Thor and Balder, we laughed over the "tall tales" of Mike Fink and Davie Crockett and Daniel Boone...

...He was 12 years old when his father died, and seeing him stricken with feelings of remorse for his cuttings up, his mother took him into the room where the body lay...

...He stood abashed for a second, and then said: "You get it all but the tune, Livy—you haven't got the tune...

...Another reason that Mark Twain seems almost to be American is that his life, and his written record of it, spreads all over the country...

...And in every step of it the Langdons were his colleagues and his unwavering and inexhaustible backers...

...recognizing the facts, the brute facts, as we so properly call them—recognizing the pathos of our human predicament, and accepting it with laughter, instead of hiding it from ourselves with pious self-deceptions...

...I can still see him springing up the little curved stair to the pulpit with his limber, loping gait, his great shock of silver hair like a pagan halo around his head, and the keen, almost fierce light in his eyes, more like a hawk's than an eagle's...

...One is that Mark Twain was always, whatever he might set out to be, a "humorist," and humor stands higher in America than it ever did anywhere else in the world...

...He took his first writing job out there in the Wild West, on the Virginia City Enterprise, and here is the advice he received from his editor: "Never say we learn so and so, or it is rumored, or we understand so and so...

...and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting comfortable and took him along...

...Among Mark Twain's most earnest, and indeed quite momentous, essays is the one on "The Jewish Question," and here is a slice from it: "I am quite sure that I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices, indeed I know it...

...He was born and spent his boyhood right in the middle of it...

...As a boy of 17 he even tried his hand at one of these ludicrous exaggerations of prowess...

...He said himself that he never subsequently met a type of man or woman he hadn't known already on those Mississippi steamers...

...His ideal of good writing, symbolized in the phrase, "When in doubt strike out the adjective," was, considering his origins, astonishingly austere...

...With the possible exception of Walt Whitman, at least, I don't know what other writer could even be suggested...

...Although so brief and impromptu it was a characteristic speech...

...The other thing I remember is that after some organ playing Jervis got up in the pulpit and made a little speech in which he told how he had first learned to love music "sitting on Uncle Sam's knee hearing him sing...

...In fact, he was drowned in the Mississippi River—nine times according to his own recollection, though some say only six...

...Mark Twain managed to hurry slowly and remain another night...

...in seven years more he produced Life on the Mississippi, another book that will not die...

...Notwithstanding these unpromising features, the visit was, of course, a riotous success—until one afternoon the "uncouth" guest took Charlie aside and told him he must leave the next day, the reason being that he was in love with his sister, Olivia, the original of the miniature...

...In fact, things in general are going along so well in our household that I'm inclined to think Providence . . . has forgotten us...

...Meeting Mark Twain coming out of his house one day on Fifth Avenue, he asked after his health, and the answer was: "Norman, I'm feeling fine, and so is my wife and the whole family...

...It is something you will not find in the biographies...

...It stands more on a level with serious art and mixes more naturally with impassioned thinking...

...It doesn't matter to him any more, but here by the side of him now I want you to promise me . . ." The boy flung himself into her arms, his eyes streaming with tears...

...BUT THAT WAS not true until he reached Elmira, married Olivia Langdon...

...The expansive, good-natured, pointless hilarity of this, our jocular mythology, laid his foundations, you might say, as a creative artist...

...Now isn't imagination a precious thing...

...As a former Elmiran I had the proud honor of making the keynote speech at that banquet...

...Another thing makes Mark Twain seem the most American of authors: namely, that he was not by early choice or propulsion an author at all...

...And while the truth under that statement invites definition, there undoubtedly is a truth under it...

...Charlie got up immediately, but Mark Twain lay there hardly conscious—so it seemed—or at least so desperately injured that he had to be carried back into the house and put to bed...

...And it has to be exercised...

...but you will preserve the public confidence...

...Such exploits never delay the argument, but only provide a medium of humor in which it moves glidingly as sermons move in a stream of devout emotion...

...it is the art of acting the part of yourself...

...And then like those other representative Americans, Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, Mark Twain educated himself...

...The speech was considerably shorter than what follows, but this is an honest amplification of it...

...There was humor in this, and I imagine he loosed those Niagara tirades as much because he enjoyed the art as through any lack of self-control...

...One has only to read the titles of his books, and observe the dates of their composition, to see that the influence of this new environment, focussed in the beauty and nobility and fine esthetic perceptions of Olivia Clemens, was a crucial factor in raising him up to the heights he attained...

...That was his apprenticeship as a writer...

...It was pure, at its best, of any lushness, any overloading with image or emotion, any momentary sense of the effort to produce an effect...

...And that will indicate the kind of life he lived on the Western frontier...

...At the age of 27 he had learned every twist and turn and snag and shallow of 1,200 miles of the Mississippi River, and, as pilot of one of its largest and most luxurious steamers, was receiving a salary equal to that of the Vice President of the United States...

...Not only that, they were the very foundation—or they supplied exactly one half of the fiscal foundation—on which the church was built...

...And in the morning, fate intervened in his favor—or in favor of American literature...

...And here is the authentic account of that visit as it was handed down privately in the Langdon family: "Mr...

...The farewells had been said and Charlie and his guest were seated in an open carriage ready to drive to the station, when the horses gave a sudden forward jump that loosened the seat, and they both went over backward landing on their heads in the driveway...

...That long pause with a surprise at the end was characteristic...

...He can't be any worse...

...with a deference and concentration that might have been appropriate if I had been the Crown Prince of England instead of a scared kid...

...He was apprenticed to a printer, just as Franklin and Whitman were, and began over a font of type the process of self-development that brought him to the top of American life and letters...

...There are several reasons for this...

...figure out when it will arrive and meet me.' "Accompanied by an old friend, my father went down the road to meet the new friend, whose entertaining humor and irresistible magnetism he hoped would balance up with the family for all the uncouth manners and looks, and make a short visit endurable...

...When I said "humor for humor's sake" I didn't mean mere frivolity...

...I suppose this is because America never had a serious mythology...

...With all his gentleness of heart, Mark Twain had a childishly violent temper...

...Thus when my mother and father were called to be Mr...

...and came into daily contact with what was most noble, fine and free-minded in the devout culture of the Eastern states...

...You hope that I can in some small degree make him live again...

...He had spent six years in adoring intimacy with her before he wrote his first immortal book...

...For America, in the majority of minds, I think the corresponding name is Mark Twain...

...And so, now, looking back, I'm glad...

...I'M HAPPY THAT I actually heard Mark Twain make a speech, even so brief a one, for it lends force to my opinion that he was a great orator...

...Beecher himself, was the brightest luminary...

...It makes things wonderful and beautiful...

...The Adventures of Tom Sawyer...

...It is a solider and more down-to-earth reason than Athens had for the Pan-Athenaic festival, or Rome for the Saturnalia, and I hope it will be as many times repeated...

...He had made up his mind to fight for what he wanted, and the outcome was never in doubt, for he fought with that explosive mixture of moral principle and humorous abandon that would ultimately conquer the world...

...He knew by experience more of America, more phases of its life and thought, than any other writer we produced—than any other man we produced...

...Each country has some great writer who is thought of as symbolizing its characteristic best traits: Goethe, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Ibsen, Cervantes—their names float over their nations like flags...

...Mark Twain hid in his cabin until the storm blew over, and he and Charles Langdon became jovial companions after that...

...She did overhear him, once, and when he entered her room after cooling down, she repeated reproachfully and verbatim every word he had said...

...Their first contact, according to Jervis, was not entirely propitious: "A game of cards was on, and my father Charles Langdon, a youth of eighteen, one of the audience, attempted to correct one of the players, a slender Westerner with curly, mahogany-colored hair...

...Mark Twain knew this and was a master of it...

...I didn't sing...

...To punish himself for this crime he went without any shirt, wearing a rough wool coat next to his skin all day...

...Beecher's Associate Pastors, I came into a circle of people among whom Mark Twain, next to Mr...

...Charlie persisted in admiring the strange Westerner with his charming way of being rude...

...All that was crabbed and bigotted and meanly reactionary in the Calvinistic theology of the old man, Lyman Beecher, his son Thomas revolted against and spewed out of his system...

...It is a gallant way of taking life...

...After a speechless moment, Charlie assured him that by hurrying he could still get a train that same day...

...then speak out and say it is so and so...

...I actually met Mark Twain over in the business end— or perhaps I should say religious end—of the church...

...As we should say now, Charlie was a kibitzer, and the slender young Westerner glanced up and remarked with his laziest drawl: "Young man, there's a prayer-meeting forward in the dining saloon and they need you there...

...As you perhaps know, the Langdons, into whose family Mark Twain married, were the central pillars of Thomas K. Beecher's Park Church...

...but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts...

...They found him in the smoker, in a yellow duster and a very dirty, old straw hat...

...And I can still hear him too...

...Mark Twain sat in a pew right behind us, and when my mother turned me around to introduce me, he took my hand and bowed over it—"I am pleased indeed to meet you...

...That is what I will try my best to do, although I have to confess I felt his magnetism largely through other people...

...It is also a poem of the relations between man and nature, personified in a ragamuffin and a river...

...I can stand any society...