If you're a Mark Twain fan

Samuel Clemens and Hellen Keller.

which I am, you'll enjoy a Facebook page devoted to him. It was set up by a friend and local historian, Brent Colley, who also runs this blog about Twain. This site, the history of Redding, CT, has a good bit of Twain material, including notice that his relationship with Helen Keller will be showcased at the Mark Twain Library in Redding this October.

Here from the Facebook page is a letter Clemens wrote to Keller.

Twain would have loved it

Twain and friend John Lewis, 1903.

The literary world is in a fine and dandy kerfuffle over a new edition of Mark Twain's Huck Finn that replaces the word "nigger" with "slave" and the word "Injun" with Indian.

Oh would the old man have loved the publicity!

Here are the facts, as we know them, from The New York Times.

A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has generated much controversy because it will replace the word "nigger," which occurs 219 times in the book, with "slave." (The edition also substitutes "Indian" for "injun.") Alan Gribben, an English professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, proposed the idea to the publisher because he believes the pervasive use of that word makes it harder for students to read or absorb the book. In an introduction to the new edition, he wrote, “even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative.” 

I'd give you my opinion, but why should you care? Instead, let me quote a few of the scholars posting on this at the Mark Twain Forum.

First, Twain expert Terrell Dempsey. A lawyer and long time resident of Hannibal, Mo., Twain's hometown, Terrell is the author of Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens's World.

I am certainly no literary scholar or educator, but I do know a bit about slavery in the upper Mississippi Valley from 1840 until 1865. If one is to understand slavery, one must understand the dehumanization of the enslaved by the master class. The word nigger certainly does not equal the word slave. Slavery ended in Missouri in January of 1865. The niggerization of a substantial portion of the population continued for another sad century denying people social, political, educational, and economic opportunities. The word nigger still floats around Northeast Missouri. "Nigger work" is used by the rougher sort of white people today to indicate hard dirty work. Asbestos siding made to look like bricks is referred to as "nigger brick." The latter has roots in a whole class of cheap goods manufactured and sold to the master class for use by slaves. Of course, it is still used by some to refer to African Americans. Though today most whites do not use these terms in the presence of non-whites, I still hear them from my clients from time to time.

I think that Twain understood exactly what he meant when he used the word "nigger." It certainly entailed far more than "slave." A slave could be freed, but the person remained a nigger. Surely we have progressed far enough that our students can discuss this concept. It is not necessary to whitewash the institution and clean up Twain. I understand the power of the word and I still wince when I hear it. However, it always strikes me as ironic when I hear my older non-white daughter use the word with her boyfriend (a practice she did not have until she moved to New York.) I think Gribben is taking a very wrong and misleading step with his sanitized Huck.

My friend Brent Colley, an historian of Redding, Ct., where Twain spent his final years, has this to say:

This issue is that Twain used those words for a reason. He was holding a mirror up to society... post-civil war society ... and shouting "THIS IS WRONG!"

As Twain Scholar Dr. Cindy Lovell notes:
"In "Huck Finn" Twain pokes us with a sharp stick, makes us squirm, makes us highly uncomfortable. And it's effective."

This will make this reply super long... but it says it well because it's from Twain himself. I see it as proof that he wrote this book, this way, for a reason:

"In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing--the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly to betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime; carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible--there were good commercial reasons for it--but that it should exist; did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag; bobtail of the community; in a passionate; uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck; his father the worthless loafer should feel it; approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience--the unerring monitor--can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early; stick to it."

I'm almost certain that Twain somehow masterminded this controversy. After all, he instructed that his autobiography could not be published for 100 years after his death. Anything to sell books.

Still fascinated with Twain

The humorist Garrison Keillor has written a review of the Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume I, which can be summed up as: don't bother buying or reading it. "Here is a powerful argument for writers burning their papers," he writes.

It is the sad fate of an icon to be mummified alive, pickled by his own reputation, and midway through this dreary meander of a memoir, Sam throws up his hands in despair: “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. . . . His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world . . . and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. . . . Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

In cataloging the passages he uses as evidence of the vacuousness of the book, Keillor inadvertently (or perhaps advertently?) makes the point that even he is interested enough in the minutiae of the great man's life that he would read these words and then produce a long piece reciting them.

Want to write like Mark Twain?

Use plain, simple language. In a letter to D.W. Bowser in 1880 he says:

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

Mark Twain's thoughts on Thanksgiving

Mark Twain's 70th birthday party

In November of 1905, the month he turned seventy, Macy Halford writes in The New Yorker, Mark Twain was exceedingly famous; the nation was a-tingle with affection for its most humorous and most American American treasure, and all the more so because his birthday that year fell on the most American of holidays: Thursday, November 30th, Thanksgiving day. 

 

In the first volume of his autobiography, Twain describes the efforts of his editor, George Harvey to plan a celebration: 

It arrived on the 30th of November, but Colonel Harvey was not able to celebrate it on that date because that date had been preempted by the President to be used as Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. 

Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist—the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due. 

But, from old habit, Thanksgiving Day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the Governors of all the several States and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand. 

Twain, Halford writes, by this time had travelled a long way—from the banks of the Mississippi to a mansion on Fifth Avenue—and had become, as New Yorkers will, unrelenting in his agendas, and brilliantly so:

Harvey went to Washington to try to get the President to select another day for the national Thanksgiving, and I furnished him with arguments to use which I thought persuasive and convincing, arguments which ought to persude him even to put off Thanksgiving Day a whole year—on the ground that nothing had happened during the previous twelvemonth except several vicious and inexcusable wars, and King Leopold of Belgium's usual annual slaughters and robberies in the Congo State, together with the Insurance revelations in New York, which seemed to establish the fact that if there was an honest man left in the United States, there was only one, and we wanted to celebrate his seventieth birthday. 

Happy Birthday, Mr. Clemens.

How to tell a story

By Mark Twain

The Humorous Story is an American Development.--Its Different from Comic and Witty Stories.

I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many years.

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind --the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and delicate art --and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story--understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print --was created in America, and has remained at home.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the "nub" of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.

Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretense that he does not know it is a nub.

Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wondering what they had found to laugh at. Dan Setchell used it before him, Nye and Riley and others use it today.

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you--every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whopping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote which has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen hundred years. The teller tells it in this way:

THE WOUNDED SOLDIER

In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off appealed to another soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear, informing him at the same time of the loss which he had sustained; whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortunate, proceeded to carry out his desire. The bullets and cannon-balls were flying in all directions, and presently one of the latter took the wounded man's head off--without, however, his deliverer being aware of it. In no long time he was hailed by an officer, who said:

"Where are you going with that carcass?"

"To the rear, sir--he's lost his leg!"

"His leg, forsooth?" responded the astonished officer; "you mean his head, you booby."

Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood looking down upon it in great perplexity. At length he said:

"It is true, sir, just as you have said." Then after a pause he added, "BUT HE TOLD ME IT WAS HIS LEG!!!!!"

Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gasping and shriekings and suffocatings.

It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic-story form; and isn't worth the telling, after all. Put into the humorous-story form it takes ten minutes, and is about the funniest thing I have ever listened to--as James Whitcomb Riley tells it.

He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has just heard it for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny, and is trying to repeat it to a neighbor. But he can't remember it; so he gets all mixed up and wanders helplessly round and round, putting in tedious details that don't belong in the tale and only retard it; taking them out conscientiously and putting in others that are just as useless; making minor mistakes now and then and stopping to correct them and explain how he came to make them; remembering things which he forgot to put in in their proper place and going back to put them in there; stopping his narrative a good while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier that was hurt, and finally remembering that the soldier's name was not mentioned, and remarking placidly that the name is of no real importance, anyway --better, of course, if one knew it, but not essential, after all --and so on, and so on, and so on.

The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself, and has to stop every little while to hold himself in and keep from laughing outright; and does hold in, but his body quakes in a jelly-like way with interior chuckles; and at the end of the ten minutes the audience have laughed until they are exhausted, and the tears are running down their faces.

The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art--and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it; but a machine could tell the other story.

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. Another feature is the slurring of the point. A third is the dropping of a studied remark apparently without knowing it, as if one where thinking aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.

Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal. He would begin to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was wonderful; then lose confidence, and after an apparently absent-minded pause add an incongruous remark in a soliloquizing way; and that was the remark intended to explode the mine--and it did.

For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, "I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head"--here his animation would die out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily, and as if to himself, "and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw."

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length--no more and no less--or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended--and then you can't surprise them, of course.

On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important thing in the whole story. If I got it the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat--and that was what I was after. This story was called "The Golden Arm," and was told in this fashion. You can practice with it yourself--and mind you look out for the pause and get it right.

.

THE GOLDEN ARM

Once 'pon a time dey wuz a momsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm--all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow'ful mean--pow'ful; en dat night he couldn't sleep, caze he want dat golden arm so bad.

When it come midnight he couldn't stan' it no mo'; so he git up, he did, en tuck his lantern en shoved out thoo de storm en dug her up en got de golden arm; en he bent his head down 'gin de 'win, en plowed en plowed en plowed thoo de snow. Den all on a sudden he stop (make a considerable pause here, and look startled, and take a listening attitude) en say: "My LAN', what's dat?"

En he listen--en listen--en de win' say (set your teeth together and imitate the wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind), "Bzzz-z-zzz"--en den, way back yonder whah de grave is, he hear a VOICE!--he hear a voice all mix' up in de win'--can't hardly tell 'em 'part--"Bzzz--zzz--W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n ARM?" (You must begin to shiver violently now.)

En he begin to shiver en shake, en say, "Oh, my! OH, my lan'!" en de win' blow de lantern out, en de snow en sleet blow in his face en mos' choke him, en he start a-plowin' knee-deep toward home mos' dead, he so sk'yerd--en pooty soon he hear de voice agin, en (pause) it 'us comin AFTER him! "Bzzz--zzz--zzz W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y--g-o-l-d-e-n--ARM?"

When he git to de pasture he hear it agin--closter now, en A-COMIN'!--a-comin' back dah in de dark en de storm--(repeat the wind and the voice). When he git to de house he rush upstairs en jump in de bed en kiver up, head and years, en lay da shiverin' en shakin'--en den way out dah he hear it AGIN!--en a-COMIN'! En bimeby he hear (pause--awed, listening attitude)--pat--pat--pat HIT'S A-COMIN' UPSTAIRS! Den he hear de latch, en he KNOW it's in de room!

Den pooty soon he know it's a-STANNIN' BY DE BED! (Pause.) Den --he know it's a-BENDIN' DOWN OVER HIM--en he cain't skasely git his breath! Den--den--he seem to feel someth'n' C-O-L-D, right down 'most agin his head! (Pause.)

Den de voice say, RIGHT AT HIS YEAR--"W-h-o--g-o-t--m-y g-o-l-d-e-n ARM?" (You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly; then you stare steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest-gone auditor --a girl, preferably--and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to build itself in the deep hush. When it has reached exactly the right length, jump suddenly at that girl and yell, "YOU'VE got it!")

If you've got the PAUSE right, she'll fetch a dear little yelp and spring right out of her shoes. But you MUST get the pause right; and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.

 

(The Writer's Den)

The King of Redding

Twain at Stormfield, his home in Redding, Ct.

Mark Twain died 100 years ago in Redding, Connecticut, one town over from me. I wrote a piece about his time there for Ridgefield Magazine and other magazines in the area. If you're into Twain things, you can read it here.

I've made the pilgrimage there, Twain being my favorite. The original house burned down, but he left his mark all over the town.

Local historian Brent Colley has much more here.

Mark Twain's rules of writing

From his scathing essay on the Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper:

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.

3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.

8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

An author should:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.

Mark Twain on interviews

From a recently published essay, "Concerning the Interview," by Mark Twain:

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn't have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn't. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear--a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think--for you don't think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going http://www.pbs.org/newshour/images/multimedia/twain/1.jpgaround in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb way that you hadn't done it, though really you don't know which it is you wish you hadn't done, and moreover you don't care: that is not the point; you simply wish you hadn't done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance and hasn't anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.

The infinite pathos of life's realities

The Rev. Dr. Henry Van Dyke of Princeton participated in the funeral of Mark Twain, making note of the great writer's use of humor:

"Those who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and irrepressible humor which was his gift there was a foundation of serious thoughts and noble affections and desires.
 
"Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humor means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world which must seem humorous even tot he highest Mind. Of these the Bible says, 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall hold them in derision.' But the mark of this higher humor is that it does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.

"Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his humor was infallible. But we may say without doubt that he used his gift, not for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world's false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world's false witnesses in the net of ridicule. In his best books and stories, colored with his own experience, he touched the absurdities of life with penetrating but not unkindly mockery, and made us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life's realities."

(Creativity Central)

Last words

"A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur."

-- Mark Twain

Tomorrow, April 21, we celebrate the centennial of Samuel Clemens' death. Our greatest humorist died at his home in Redding, Connecticut.

He was watched constantly by the press and at one point earlier in his life had to deny that he had died. He wrote his statement.

How Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain

Rob Velella at The American Literary Blog provides more details of the birth of the pen name "Mark Twain:"

A man named Samuel L. Clemens traveled west with his brother, across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, and stopping in the territory of Nevada, where he got a job as a miner. That role didn't work out for him and, instead, he turned to the local newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.

He achieved some notoriety there, later writing to his mother somewhat tongue-in-cheek as having "the widest reputation" possible on the frontier. He noted, "If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond," he might even make money off it. "And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory." Such was Clemens's humor.

In fact, some of his writing for the Enterprise was humor rather than pure journalism. Such was the case for its February 3, 1863 issue, when one of those articles by Clemens was signed, inexplicably, with a pseudonym. Though Samuel Clemens was 28 years old, some call this the birthday of "Mark Twain."

The name comes from the call made by leadsmen aboard riverboats (a role Clemens held at one point), and most scholars agree this was the intended reference. However, in 1874, Clemens wrote a letter offering his own explanation. He claims that he borrowed the name from a senior boat pilot named Isaiah Sellers, who himself used the name when he wrote for the Picayune, a newspaper in New Orleans. He stopped using the name when Clemens made fun of him for it. Sellers died in 1863 and, perhaps to make amends, Clemens took it over, noting that Sellers didn't need it anymore. In fact, the story doesn't check out; Sellers was still very much alive when Clemens adopted the name "Mark Twain," and no articles under that name existed in the New Orleans paper.

Another story claims that Clemens used to order two drinks at once while at the taverns out west. He would ask that both ("twain") be "marked" on his bar tab. In theory, then, he would go to the bar, hold up two fingers, and ask the bartender to "mark twain." 

How Mark Twain became a literary person

In his words:

"In my view, a person who published things in a mere newspaper could not properly claim recognition as a Literary Person: he must rise  away above that; he must appear in a magazine. He would then be a
Literary Person; also, he would be famous--right away. These two ambitions were strong upon me. This was in 1866. I prepared my contribution, and then looked around for the best magazine to go up toglory in. I selected the most important one in New York. The contribution was accepted. I signed it 'MARK TWAIN;' for that name had some currency on the Pacific coast, and it was my idea to spread it all
over the world, now, at this one jump. The article appeared in the December number, and I sat up a month waiting for the January number; for that one would contain the year's list of contributors, my name would be in it, and I should be famous and could give the banquet I was meditating.

"I did not give the banquet. I had not written the 'MARK TWAIN' distinctly; it was a fresh name to Eastern printers, and they put it 'Mike Swain' or 'MacSwain,' I do not remember which. At any rate, I was not celebrated and I did not give the banquet. I was a Literary Person, ut that was all--a buried one; buried alive."