12 - Mark Twain; his life and work. A biographical sketch by William M. Clemens

Delve into the intriguing life of Mark Twain through the eyes of Will Clemens, who, despite not being related to the famed author, became an acquaintance and penned what may be the first comprehensive biography of Twain. Published on July 1, 1892, as No. 1 in The Pacific Library, this 200-page work was available for just 25¢ and garnered enough attention to be republished in 1894 by a Chicago publisher. In this insightful sketch, Clemens draws heavily on previously published works by other authors, offering a unique perspective on Twains literary legacy. (summary by John Greenman)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is chapter twelve of Mark Twain, His Life and Work,
a biographical sketch by William M. Clemens. This LibriVox recording
is in the public domain. Chapter twelve Gems from Mark Twain,
read by John Greenman, collected from his published works, fugitive sketches, lectures, speeches,

(00:21):
and correspondents. Be virtuous and you will be eccentric. The
train is profusely decorated with tunnels. A tortoise shell cat
having a fit in a platter of tomatoes figures stew

(00:42):
out of me, just as natural as the otter of
roses out of the otter. There is no bird or
cow or anything that uses as good grammar as a
blue jay. I would give a cent to hear Ingersoll

(01:06):
on Moses, but I'd give ten dollars to hear Moses
on Ingersoll. One could see the dress creeping along the
floor some time after the woman was gone. When the

(01:29):
musing spider steps onto the red hot shovel, he first
exhibits wild surprise, then he shrivels. I left my rheumatism there. Baden,

(01:51):
Baden is welcome to it. It was little, but it
was all I had to give. I should liked to
leave something more catching, but it was not in my power.
I tried him with mild jokes, then with severe ones.

(02:15):
I dosed him with bad jokes and riddled him with
good ones. I fired old, stale jokes into him, and
peppered him fore and aft with red hot ones. I
warmed up to my work and assaulted him on the

(02:40):
right and left in front and behind. I fumed and
charged and ranted till I was sick and frantic and furious.
But I never moved him once. I never started a

(03:03):
smile or a tear, never a ghost of a smile,
and never a suspicion of moisture. He was deaf and dumb,
and blind as a badger. He was deeply and sincerely pious,

(03:26):
and swore like a fishwoman. He was frescoed from head
to heel with pictures and mottoes, tattooed in red and
blue India ink. There was no hackmen, hacks, or omnibuses

(03:48):
on the pier. I said it was like being in heaven.
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes over it broods the
spell of a curse that has withered its fields and
fettered its energies. Formerly to be a Californian was to

(04:17):
be a speculator. A man could not help it. One
man tried to be otherwise, but he was only kicking
against fate, while everybody was wild with a spirit of
speculation and full of plans for making sudden fortunes. He

(04:46):
said he would farm along quietly and slowly, gain a
modest competence, and so be happy. But his first crop
of onions happened to be about the only onions produced
that year. He sold it for one hundred thousand dollars

(05:12):
and retired a small company. But small companies are pleasantest.
He was full of blessed egotism and placid self importance,
but he didn't know as much as a three m

(05:33):
quad a cat that eat up an entire box of
sidelets powders, and then hadn't any more judgment than to
go and take a drink. It is the nature of
woman to ask trivial, irrelevant and pursuing questions, questions that

(06:00):
pursue you from a beginning in nothing to a run
to cover in nowhere. We walked out into the grass grown,
fragment strewn court beyond the parthenon. It startled us every

(06:22):
now and then to see a stony white face stare
suddenly up at us, out of the grass with its dead.
The place seemed alive with ghosts. I half expected to

(06:43):
see the Athenian heroes of twenty centuries ago glide out
of the shadows and steal into the old temple they
knew so well and regarded with such boundless pride at sea.

(07:06):
Now came the resurrection hour. The births gave up their dead.
These pale specters in plug hats file up. The companion way.
Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments,

(07:33):
notably those of the violin, but it seems to set
a piano's teeth on edge. I am a Yankee of
the Yankees, a practical man, nearly barren of sentiment or poetry.

(07:54):
In other words, my father was a blacksmith, my uncle
was a horse doctor, and I was both. He found
that the education of the nineteenth century is plenty good

(08:15):
enough capital to go into business in the sixth century with,
and the next year he was running the kingdom all
by himself on a moderate royalty of forty percent. There
didn't seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery

(08:39):
to bait a fish hook. But you didn't mind that
after a little while, for you saw that brains were
not needed in a society like that, and would have
marred its symmetry and spoiled it. This vile bit of

(09:05):
human rubbish. Chambermaids are dead to every human instinct. A
forlorn dog with bowed head and tail withdrawn from service.
When a man has been fifty years at sea, he

(09:27):
is only a gray and bearded child. He was a
man with a hair lip and a pure heart, and
everybody said he was true as steel to the Indian.

(09:47):
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre,
but they are more deadly in the long run. They
appointed me clerk of the Committee on Concology, and then
allowed me no amanuensis, to play billiards with. If there

(10:13):
was a horse race, you'd find him flush, or you'd
find him busted at the end of it. If there
was a dog fight, he'd bet on it. If there
was a cat fight, he'd bet on it. If there

(10:34):
was a chicken fight, he'd bet on it. Why if
there were two birds sitting on a fence, he would
bet you which one would fly first. If I had
another cold in the head, and there was no course

(10:56):
left me but to take either an earthquake or a
court of warm salt water. I would take my chances
on the earthquake. Ah to think of it, only to
think of it, the poor old faithful creature, For she

(11:21):
was so faithful. Would you believe it? She had been
a servant in that self same house and that self
same family for twenty seven years come Christmas, and never
a cross word, and never a lick. And oh, to

(11:44):
think she should meet such a death at last, A
sitting over the red hot stove at three o'clock in
the morning and went to sleep, and fell on it
and was actually roasted, not just frizzled up a bit,

(12:04):
but literally roasted to a crisp poor faithful creature, how
she was cooked. I am but a poor woman. But
even if I have to scrimp to do it, I
will put up a tombstone over that lone sufferer's grave.

(12:30):
And mister Riley, if you would have the goodness to
think up a little epitaph to put on it, which
would sort of describe the awful way in which she
met her put it. Well done, good and faithful servant,

(12:54):
said Riley, and never smiled. The less a man knows,
the bigger noise he makes, and the higher salary he commands.
Who can join in the heartless libel that says woman

(13:15):
is extravagant in dress, when he can look back and
call to mind our simple and lowly mother Eve arrayed
in her modification of the highland costume. He buys the

(13:35):
original pig for a dollar and a half and feeds
him forty dollars worth of corn, and then sells him
for about nine dollars. This is the only crop he
ever makes any money on. He loses on the corn,

(13:58):
but he makes seven and a half on the hog.
He stood bewildered a moment, with a sense of goneness
on him, like one who finds himself suddenly overboard upon

(14:18):
a midnight sea, and beholds the ship pass into shrouding gloom,
while the dreadful conviction falls upon his soul that he
has not been missed. Just a hunk of brains, That's

(14:40):
what he was. He will eat a man, he will
eat a bible. He will eat anything between a man
and a bible. He wrote with impressive flatulence and soaring confidence,

(15:01):
upon the vastest subjects but puffing alms, gifts of wedding cake,
salty ice cream, abnormal watermelons, and sweet potatoes. The size
of your leg was his best hold. Tom appeared on

(15:27):
the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long
handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him,
and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty
yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him

(15:54):
seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped
his brush and passed it along the topmost plank, repeated
the operation, did it again, compared the insignificant whitewashed streak

(16:18):
with the far reaching continent of un whitewashed fence, and
sat down on the tree box, discouraged. It was just
like a new author. They always think that they know
more than anybody else when they are getting out their

(16:43):
first book. For weeks, she nursed her grief in silence,
while the roses faded from her cheeks, and through it
all she clung to the hope that some day the
old love would bloom again in Reginald's heart and he

(17:07):
would write to her. But the long summer days dragged
wearily along, and still no letter came. The newspapers teemed
with stories of battle and carnage, and eagerly she read them,

(17:29):
but always with the same result. The tears welled up
and blurred the closing lines. The name she sought was
looked for in vain, and the dull aching returned to

(17:50):
her sinking heart. Letters to the other girls sometimes contained
brief mention of him, and presented always the picture of him,
a morose, unsmiling, desperate man, always in the thickest of

(18:13):
the fight, begrimed with powder, and moving calm and unscathed
through tempests of shot and shell, as if he bore
a charmed life, a cross between a tired mud turtle

(18:33):
and a crippled hearse horse. He means well, but artis
folly to him. He only understands groceries. His strawberries would
be a comfortable success if the robins would eat turnips,

(18:57):
but they won't, and hence the difficulty. Having forgotten to
mention it sooner, I will remark in conclusion that the
ages of the Siamese twins are respectively fifty one and

(19:19):
fifty three years. I found the brave fellow in a
profound French calm. I say French calm, because French calmness
and English calmness have points of difference. He was moving

(19:42):
swiftly back and forth among the debris of his furniture,
now and then, staving chance fragments of it across the
room with his foot, grinding a constant grist of curses
through his set teeth, and halting every little while to

(20:06):
deposit another handful of his hair on the pile which
he had been building of it on the table. The
place is as dark as the inside of an infidel.
She was a perfect polyglot once, but somehow her palate

(20:31):
got down, and so saying, he turned his face to
the wall and gave up the ghost. We write frankly
and fearlessly, but then we modify before we print. Oh,

(20:52):
I know him, A sallow faced, red headed fellow with
a little scull are on the side of his throat,
like a splinter under the flesh. A woman who could
face the devil himself or a mouse, loses her grip

(21:14):
and goes all to pieces in front of a flash
of lightning. He was a man of middle size and
compact frame, and when he was thinking deeply, he had
a way of knitting his brows and tapping his forehead

(21:40):
reflectively with his finger, which impressed you at once with
the conviction that you stood in the presence of a
person of no common order. The poem is smooth and blubbery.

(22:01):
It reads like buttermilk gurgling from a jug. A sincere
compliment is always grateful to a young lady, so long
as you don't try to knock her down with it.
Cain is branded a murderer so heartlessly and unanimously in America,

(22:27):
only because he was neither a Democrat nor a Republican,
a long, cadaverous creature with lanky locks hanging down to
his shoulders and a week's stubble bristling from the hills

(22:47):
and valleys of his face. Epitaphs are cheap, and they
do a poor chap a world of good after he
is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he
was alive. I wish they were used more. I do

(23:11):
not know how it came about exactly, but gradually we
appeared to melt down and run together conversationally speaking, and
then everything went along as comfortably as clockwork. Your conscience

(23:37):
is a nuisance. A conscience is like a child. If
you pet it and play with it, and let it
have everything at once, it becomes spoiled and intrudes on
all of your amusements and most of your griefs. Treat

(23:59):
your your conscience as you would treat anything else. When
it is rebellious. Spank it, be severe with it, Argue
with it. Prevent it from coming to play with you
at all hours, and you will secure a good conscience,

(24:22):
that is to say, a properly trained one. A spoiled
conscience simply destroys all the pleasure in life. I think
I have reduced mine to order. At least I haven't
heard from it for some time. Perhaps I've killed it

(24:45):
through over severity. It's wrong to kill a child. But
in spite of all I have said, a conscience differs
from a child in many ways. Perhaps it is best
when it is dead. End of Chapter twelve and end

(25:08):
of Mark Twain His Life and Work, a biographical sketch
by William M. Clemens, read by John Greenman,