Creators (24 page)

Twain dressed the part, or his part, as did Dickens and Oscar Wilde. But whereas Dickens used the male evening attire of early Victorian England, suitably embellished, and Wilde the velvet pantaloons, golden buckles, and greenery-yallery of the aesthetic movement, Twain devised his own attire. His black tailcoat gave place to an all-white suit, of linen or wool, according to the season, with a white silk tie and white shoes. At the time he became a favorite on the lecture circuit, his flaming red hair turned grayish, then a glorious white, or rather the color of foaming champagne, as did his bushy mustache. This white appearance became celebrated, and Twain was recognized wherever he went, in Europe as well as the United States. He basked in this glory and wore his white outfit everywhere, not just onstage. For special occasions he acquired a new trick, after Oxford University, to his delight, awarded him an honorary doctorate. He loved the splendid full-length black gown, with gold lace trim and red silk hood, crowned with a mortarboard, that went with the degree. He sported this rig, especially at dinners given in his honor, and on any other formal occasion when he felt he owed it to his public to draw special attention to himself.

Being a performer, and a teller of humorous anecdotes, Twain realized that his act had to be varied by modulations in his voice, and that the best way to do this was to clothe his stories, when appropriate, in different accents. Now as we have seen, accents, as instruments of humor, go back at least (in the English language) as far as Chaucer, and were much used by Shakespeare. Dickens used accents to great effect and was a master of Cockney in its many Home Counties variations. But accents, especially in generating humor, are essentially a spoken device. The problem for a writer who uses them on the page is how to transliterate standard English into an accent both authentic and funny. It is not easy to do. Indeed it is very difficult to do. Dickens often suc
ceeded, his accents being reinforced by a brilliant facility in misusing words and forming malapropisms; Mrs. Gamp is a prime example. But Dickens sometimes failed; Thackeray often failed; and even Kipling, who was superb at transcribing Indian accents on to the page, failed when it came to Irish, Yorkshire, and Cockney. Twain never failed. As a raconteur of genius, he could always get his accents right on stage; and he is the only writer I know who successfully transcribed them in his written work. The outstanding example of his skill is
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. Twain says, in a note headed “Explanatory,” just before the table of contents in the original edition (1885):

The dialect used in
Huckleberry Finn
is a virtuoso exercise for which there is no parallel in English literature, and is the greatest single charm in this book of many charms. But Twain’s accents are true and vivid throughout his work, and they were even better onstage or in the lecture hall, where he could introduce emphases and purely verbal descants which are impossible to reproduce in type.
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In the hall, telling a tale to a live audience, Twain could indulge in verbal acrobatics, like a violinist playing a cadenza. The outstanding example is “The Golden Arm,” one of his lecture-hall anecdotes, which he prints in “How to Tell a Story.” He calls this “a negro ghost story that had a pause before the snapper at the end.” The pause “was the most important thing in the whole story.” Like most professional stand-up comedians, he directed
his attention to a particular person in the audience, depending on the story. For this one he needed an “impressionable girl.” He adds, “If I got [the pause] the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make [the girl] give a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat.” I give “The Golden Arm” in full, as there is no other means of showing what a shocking tale it is.

Most of Twain’s best humorous stories can be used, and were used, both on the platform and in print. But they diverged significantly in detail. One of the most characteristic concerns Jim Blaine and his grandfather’s champion ram. The narrator has to be “liquored up when he tells it,” and the point of the story is that he gets so diverted onto sidelines and other issues and characters that he never reaches the point. This is a very dangerous anecdote to tell, as it is easy to bore the listeners and lose them; and it is still more dangerous to put into print, as the bored readers have merely to turn the page and pass on. Transforming a rambling, pointless, stream-of-consciousness bore into something funny requires great art, and not many writers possess the skill. Shakespeare uses the device successfully with Polonius in
Hamlet
; and so does Jane Austen with Miss Bates in
Emma
; whether James Joyce does it with Molly Bloom in
Ulysses
is a matter of opinion. Twain could and did do it, because of the fertility of his irrelevant narrative items and characters, but it is significant that in delivering the story of the champion goat, which originally appeared in print, on the platform he gradually intro
duced significant variations, to get laughs and sustain interest. When the spoken version was written down and he compared it with the original, he was amazed at the differences (or so he says; one is never sure when Twain is being frank).

Some of Twain’s funny devices simply do not work on the platform, as he discovered. For instance, there is his brilliant little work “The Diary of Adam and Eve.” This, like the running gag, is a prime example of another Twain comic invention—the war between the sexes. Earlier authors, such as Molière and Sheridan, had hinted at the topic, and Shakespeare had devoted an entire play to it,
The Taming of the Shrew
. But Twain stood the perpetual joke on its own feet; made it into an independent, entire, complete comic turn on its own; and did this with such skill that the show has run and run ever since. But
Adam and Eve
is not a platform show. It depends for its effects on quiet irony and must be read. Here is Adam’s diary on the subject of Eve and fish in the river:

Irony and ironies within ironies were used constantly by Twain in virtually all his works, often with a delicate sleight of hand that escapes all but the most attentive readers. With irony went the one-line joke, for which Twain had a genius. The one-liner has become the pivot of American humor, and it would be nice and convenient to argue that Twain invented this device. But that would not be true. Benjamin Franklin has some claim to being the inventor: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes”; and his remark on signing the Declaration of Independence: “We must all hang together, or
assuredly we shall all hang separately.” And the one-liner became a feature of American politics in the generation after Franklin, Henry Clay being a notable exponent of the art, as was his enemy Andrew Jackson, who said on his deathbed: “The only thing I regret is that I didn’t shoot Clay and hang Calhoun.” When Twain was a young man, Lincoln was also dealing wholesale in the one-liner. But Twain was the man who made the one-line joke universally popular and respected, as a prime feature of American life. He used it as an eye-opener in short stories—the first sentence in “A Dog’s Tale” is “My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian.” He used it with enormous success for chapter-head quotations in his “dark novel,”
Pudd’nhead Wilson
. (These are allegedly from Wilson’s “Calender.”) If possible Twain liked to begin and end a story with a one-liner. I have counted over 100 one-liners scattered through his works. The true total is probably nearer to 1,000. Characteristic examples—both as to sentiment and as to construction (syntax, etc.)—are: “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” “Man is the Only Animal that blushes. Or needs to.” “Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.” “Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” There is also his comment on the appearance of his obituary in a New York paper: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Twain used one-liners in his books and on the platform. Some he made up as he went along. Others he sweated over.
¹¹

Twain was in some ways a serious man, and he wanted to leave the world a better place than he found it. So he held opinions and espoused causes. He thought, for instance, that Chinese immigrants and blacks got a raw deal, and said so, often. But he was not an idealist or an ideologue. When the Civil War came and gave him the chance to behave nobly, he hoofed it west after a mere fortnight in the Confederate army. Twain was essentially an entertainer. He felt that getting people interested and making them laugh were what he was best at, the surest way to make money, and his best contribution to the health, wealth, and happiness of mankind. As I noted earlier, he was not a novelist, poet, playwright, writer of philosophy and history, or travel writer, though he posed as such. His books are all entertainment.

For example, his autobiographical account of his youth in Nevada and his early journalism,
Roughing It
, is not a structured book, and its supposedly chronological order is misleading. My analysis of its contents shows that it consists of twenty-seven major anecdotes, and many other minor ones, plus a certain amount of topographical ballast or padding. The stories are as follows: virtues and vices of the Allen pistol; the talkative heifter (woman); the camel that ate overcoats; slumgullion; the coyote and the dog; Bemis and the buffalo; the Pony Express; Slade and his murders; Digger Indians; Mormon beds; Horace Greeley and Hank Monk; the escape of the tarantulas; the adventure on Lake Tahoe; the Mexican plug (horse); silver fever; getting lost in the snow; the great landslide case; horrors of the alkaline lake; Buck Fanshaw’s death; running your own private graveyard; important hangings; Jim Blaine and his grandfather’s ram; Chinese virtues; a dueling editor; the delights of California; being in an earthquake; the wisdom of Tom Quartz the cat. Then, in Chapter LXII, Twain takes off for the Pacific and remains there, the business of roughing it disappears, and the book ends not with a bang but with a series of exotic whimpers. The work, in short, is thrown together with no regard for shape or cause and effect—or truth, for that matter. It stands or falls simply by being readable or not. I find it one of the best books I know and have read it, or dipped into it, many times.