Mark Twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was an
irreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into the
well-springs of human nature. In 1601, as in 'The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg,' and in 'The Mysterious Stranger,' he tore the masks off
human beings and left them cringing before the public view. With the
deftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions and
delighted in exposing human nature in the raw.
The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooted
deep in Mark Twain's nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, who
printed 1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,
“If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 rose
I would say that Mark's intellectual structure and subconscious graining
was from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudor
period. He came from the banks of the Mississippi--from the flatboatmen,
pilots, roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitive
people--as Lincoln did.
“He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers,
gamblers and the men of '49. The simple roughness of a frontier people
was in his blood and brain.
“Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to
him. Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly,
picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation. Such language is
forcible as all primitive words are. Refinement seems to make for
weakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabic
words bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that. Then
I think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred of
puritanism. But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a
sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake.
Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no more
obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. Every
word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their
vocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent,
but only as language to express his meaning. No act of nature is obscene
in itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior
purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive.
I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on what
Chaucer would quite simply call 'the bare erse.'”
Quite aside from this Chaucerian “erse” slapping, Clemens had also a
semi-serious purpose, that of reproducing a past time as he saw it in
Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and other writers of the Elizabethan era.
Fireside Conversation was an exercise in scholarship illumined by a keen
sense of character. It was made especially effective by the artistic
arrangement of widely-gathered material into a compressed picture of
a phase of the manners and even the minds of the men and women “in the
spacious times of great Elizabeth.”
Mark Twain made of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance,
carried over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for
mere delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it
deals. That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is
apparent from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where
he refers to the conversation at the famous Round Table thus:
“Many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great
assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen of the land would have
made a Comanche blush. Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.
However, I had read Tom Jones and Roderick Random and other books of
that kind and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in
England had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the
morals and conduct which such talk implies, clear up to one hundred
years ago; in fact clear into our own nineteenth century--in which
century, broadly speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and the
real gentleman discoverable in English history,--or in European history,
for that matter--may be said to have made their appearance. Suppose Sir
Walter [Scott] instead of putting the conversation into the mouths of
his characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves? We
should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena
which would embarrass a tramp in our day. However, to the unconsciously
indelicate all things are delicate.”
Mark Twain's interest in history and in the depiction of historical
periods and characters is revealed through his fondness for historical
reading in preference to fiction, and through his other historical
writings. Even in the hilarious, youthful days in San Francisco, Paine
reports that “Clemens, however, was never quite ready for sleep. Then,
as ever, he would prop himself up in bed, light his pipe, and lose
himself in English or French history until his sleep conquered.” Paine
tells us, too, that Lecky's 'European Morals' was an old favorite.
The notes to 'The Prince and the Pauper' show again how carefully
Clemens examined his historical background, and his interest in these
materials. Some of the more important sources are noted: Hume's 'History
of England', Timbs' 'Curiosities of London', J. Hammond Trumbull's 'Blue
Laws, True and False'. Apparently Mark Twain relished it, for as Bernard
DeVoto points out, “The book is always Mark Twain. Its parodies of Tudor
speech lapse sometimes into a callow satisfaction in that idiom--Mark
hugely enjoys his nathlesses and beshrews and marrys.” The writing of
1601 foreshadows his fondness for this treatment.
“Do you suppose the liberties and the Brawn of These States have to
do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman words”
Walt Whitman, 'An American Primer'.
Although 1601 was not matched by any similar sketch in his published
works, it was representative of Mark Twain the man. He was no emaciated
literary tea-tosser. Bronzed and weatherbeaten son of the West, Mark
was a man's man, and that significant fact is emphasized by the several
phases of Mark's rich life as steamboat pilot, printer, miner, and
frontier journalist.
On the Virginia City Enterprise Mark learned from editor R. M.
Daggett that “when it was necessary to call a man names, there were no
expletives too long or too expressive to be hurled in rapid succession
to emphasize the utter want of character of the man assailed.... There
were typesetters there who could hurl anathemas at bad copy which would
have frightened a Bengal tiger. The news editor could damn a mutilated
dispatch in twenty-four languages.”
In San Francisco in the sizzling sixties we catch a glimpse of Mark
Twain and his buddy, Steve Gillis, pausing in doorways to sing “The
Doleful Ballad of the Neglected Lover,” an old piece of uncollected
erotica. One morning, when a dog began to howl, Steve awoke “to find
his room-mate standing in the door that opened out into a back garden,
holding a big revolver, his hand shaking with cold and excitement,”
relates Paine in his Biography.
“'Come here, Steve,' he said. 'I'm so chilled through I can't get a bead
on him.'
“'Sam,' said Steve, 'don't shoot him. Just swear at him. You can easily
kill him at any range with your profanity.'
“Steve Gillis declares that Mark Twain let go such a scorching, singeing
blast that the brute's owner sold him the next day for a Mexican
hairless dog.”
Nor did Mark's “geysers of profanity” cease spouting after these gay and
youthful days in San Francisco. With Clemens it may truly be said that
profanity was an art--a pyrotechnic art that entertained nations.
“It was my duty to keep buttons on his shirts,” recalled Katy Leary,
life-long housekeeper and friend in the Clemens menage, “and he'd
swear something terrible if I didn't. If he found a shirt in his drawer
without a button on, he'd take every single shirt out of that drawer and
throw them right out of the window, rain or shine--out of the
bathroom window they'd go. I used to look out every morning to see
the snowflakes--anything white. Out they'd fly.... Oh! he'd swear at
anything when he was on a rampage. He'd swear at his razor if it didn't
cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door
sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter. Well, I'd go and
knock; I'd say, 'Mrs. Clemens wants to know what's the matter.' And then
he'd say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, 'Did she hear me Katy?'
'Yes,' I'd say, 'every word.' Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he was
afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs. Clemens
hated swearing.” But his swearing never seemed really bad to Katy Leary,
“It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow,” she said. “Sort of
amusing it was--and gay--not like real swearing, 'cause he swore like an
angel.”
In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite
billiards. “It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.
Clemens play billiards,” relates Elizabeth Wallace. “He loved the game,
and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and
then the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his
more youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort. Gently,
slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though
they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this
stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives.”
Mark's vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself. In Paris, in his
appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,
Mark's address, reports Paine, “obtained a wide celebrity among the
clubs of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever
found its way into published literature.” It is rumored to have been
called “Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism.”
In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W. Fisher to accompany him on an exploration
of the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learned
that Clemens had been the Kaiser's guest at dinner, opened the secret
treasure chests for the famous visitor. One of these guarded treasures
was a volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed to
Frederick the Great. “Too much is enough,” Mark is reported to have
said, when Fisher translated some of the verses, “I would blush to
remember any of these stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them
when I get to Vienna.” When Fisher had finished copying a verse for him
Mark put it into his pocket, saying, “Livy [Mark's wife, Olivia] is so
busy mispronouncing German these days she can't even attempt to get at
this.”
In his letters, too, Howells observed, “He had the Southwestern, the
Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one
ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was
often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he
had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear
to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to
look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that
in it he was Shakespearean.”
“With a nigger squat on her safety-valve”
John Hay, Pike County Ballads.
“Is there any other explanation,” asks Van Wyck Brooks, “'of his
Elizabethan breadth of parlance?' Mr. Howells confesses that he
sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters, that there were some which,
to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could
not bear to reread. Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years,
while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon 'having that swearing out
in an instant,' he would never had had cause to suffer from his having
'loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.' Mark Twain's verbal
Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which,
not having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward
and left there to ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies
of forbidden words. Consider the famous book, 1601, that fireside
conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth: is there any obsolete
verbal indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not
painstakingly resurrected and assembled there? He, whose blood was in
constant ferment and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that
had been set for him the riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have
an escape-valve, and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless
obscenity--the waste of a priceless psychic material!” Thus, Brooks
lumps 1601 with Mark Twain's “bawdry,” and interprets it simply as
another indication of frustration.