Mark Twain to tell all - 100 years after death

The Hindustan Times ^ | 24/5/2010 | staff reporter

[Thermalseeker]

I don’t doubt that Twain was quite earthy.

"Salty" would be the term I would use.....although he did have a fine way of speaking his mind using eloquent language.....

[ClearCase_guy]

Yeah, I was going to use the term “salty”, but since I was talking about a Mississippi steamboat, I couldn’t bring myself to use “salty” — it felt like a mixed metaphor.

[Daffynition]

Great graphics!

[kaylar]

I like his essays better than his fiction, and his short stories more than his novels myself.

[Joe 6-pack]

Figured you’d appreciate this :-)

[DemonDeac]

Nobody has given us more great quotes.

[fidelis]

Except maybe GK Chesterton:
.
http://chesterton.org/acs/quotes.htm

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

There is a tendency nowadays to attribute to *any* quote emanating from Twain a brilliance that is not necessarily there. He probably did say some funny or observant things in his time, but this has morphed into a willingness to believe that if he said it, it must be good. Sort of what some have tried to do with Bob Dylan or the Beatles - if it emanated from their mouths it must be manna from on high.

[Tainan]

bump for later reading - Mark Twain notes

[aimhigh]

It really is 400 pages of bile.

Since he hated God, I'm not surprised.

[laotzu]

"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." -- Mark Twain (to Algore)

[Lockbar]

The reports of his demise have been greatly....oh, never mind.

[Daffynition]

I think I like Will Rogers better ...by just a little bit. ;)

[Daffynition]

The interpreters at his residence call it a “depression.” [over his finances and loss of his wife]

[Oztrich Boy]

If you don’t count Shakespear or Kipling.

[Daffynition]

LOL!!! [to AlGore]!!!

[Tainan]

Clemmens was first and foremost a 'newspaperman.' His writings were a way for him to make a living, which he sometimes did splendidly and sometimes was head-over-heels-in debt, and to do his poking at what he thought needed a good poke.
This characterization of him as some sort of 'genteel literary figure' would, IMO, cause him to chortle and spit some tobacco juice at the foot of the author. Clemmens, or Twain, was far from such a person. He grew-up hard and considered himself an outside observer of the ridiculousness of human vanity. I recommend his "Letters from the Earth" for his take on the human condition. It also gives good insight on his idea of humans true status with the deities they might choose to worship.

As to his idea of society, read his Guide to Manners and see the humor he holds for how society is organized - and who is worth saving from a burning house - to watch him poke fun at those around him.
Twain suffered fools badly and he had a good venue to vent at those he thought worthy of his vent. He was a well-known lover of Kentucky Bourbon, a distiller still markets a brand in his honor, and it was a rare honor to be invited to his parlor at Nook to have a few bottles and discuss, or cuss, the leading issues of the day.
Financially Twain did very well. But like so many, he was a terrible money manager. He was always investing in some scheme brough to him...and losing. His tours on the lecture circuits were done mostly to pay his bills. His famous travels to Europe, as well as Egypt, were well-funded, and well received, but were done to get hard cash back to his debtors.
IMO, he has suffered from over-romanticism, like many famous people after their death. He was a hard-case and became famous for it. He also had the newspapermans' ethic of daily writing and of venting his spleen about topics and people in the public press. He made some powerful allies...and quite a few more enemies in his day. Combine these with his very well-known bad money habits and you had someone who had to write constantly to satisfy both his personal ethics and his staggering bills owed.

As to his personal life, it really wasn;t a source of much happiness for him. tragedy with children, a wife better suited to a banker and a lack-of-trust built upon being an easy touch over the years.

Clemmens/Twain was a true character. Just as good as any he wrote about. His life is a fascinating one to read about. He traveled widely. He was on a first name basis with all the "famous" people of his time. His daily antics received as much newspaper coverage as his literary works did publication...if not more.
He was that rare figure who was as interesting in real life as his writings made the characters of his work appear to be.

But "genteel Victorian"...no. He was far from that. Very far from that.

[Daffynition]

His obit from the Hartford Courant:

From The Hartford Courant
22 April 1910
[Anonymous]

MARK TWAIN.

Mark Twain did not come to Hartford to live until he was nearly forty years old and he lived here only about twenty years, spending a good deal of those years abroad; and yet we of Hartford think of him always as a Hartford man, though in fact he was a man of all the world. No other citizen of the United States, not General Grant nor Theodore Roosevelt, was more universally known and no other American author was ever so generally read. We of Hartford base our claim to him on the fact that he identified himself with this community as he did with no other, and on the other and still more welcome fact that here he spent the happiest and the most useful of his nearly four score years. Although he made his home for some time in New York and later settled down in Redding, the feeling has never died out here that he belonged to Hartford, and this has been intensified by the fact that wherever any Hartford traveler went the first question asked of him was whether he knew Mark Twain.

The man was original in everything, not least in insisting on being referred to as Mark Twain and not as Mr. Clemens. The essence of wit is said by those who undertake to analyze it to be the unexpected, and it was the unexpected that Mark Twain was always doing, even to building a house with its kitchen to the street and the bricks laid at angles, and his humor was inborn and inevitable; it was of the man himself. Like others of literary fame, he was slow in being discovered, but, once found out, he among all our distinctive humorists lasted through. His vein was never worked out. From the publication of the “Jumping Frog” he was a man of note, and as we have said already, for many years he was the most universally read of the authors of his day or any other day.

He enjoyed this as any author would, and he enjoyed it so much that it stood in the way very probably of better work from his wonderful brain and heart. If we are not mistaken, the readers of this paragraph will generally agree that his finest book was the “Prince and Pauper,” but it sold the least, and he has been quoted as giving that fact as his reason for not following that line any further. If it sold the least, it was presumably desired by the fewest number of people. It would be difficult to determine his most popular work, but a first guess would name the “Innocents Abroad,” though you can go on from this to a dozen others and smile as each title comes to mind. How entertaining they were, and how keen he was in his knowledge of human nature!

But with all that he wrote it was true of him, as it was of his old-time associate here, Mr. Warner, that in private conversation at the dinner table, about the billiard table, at club meetings and every-day accidental meetings, his delightful, spontaneous outpourings were more delicious than anything he wrote; they were said and forgotten for lack of a Boswell. Mark Twain enjoyed his success from all points of view. The money that he made was mighty welcome to a man who had known poverty down to the hunger line, but much of the pleasure of his wealth was in the opportunity it gave him for helping others; his charity was broad and abundant. He was singularly companionable and his friends were among those whose friendship was a treasure. In his hospitable home he entertained for years almost everybody of literary prominence in the country, native or passing traveler. But, with all his fame, he was democratic through and through. He would receive a friend’s call in the morning as he lay in bed smoking, for he usually smoked several cigars before getting up, and he would go down town without a hat and in his slippers and dressing gown. He was a world celebrity and yet as approachable and easy as the least known among those he passed on the street.

Here he came and went day by day, and we all felt that he belonged to us; here his family grew up, here his best work was done, here many of his choicest friendships were formed, and after he left here his troubles began. The first thought in writing of Mark Twain is to quote one after another of his whimsical and philosophical sayings and anecdotes. But there is something about his last days that forbids all that. The lights went out for him before life did. His wife died abroad; two of his daughters died tragic deaths. He himself fell sick in far Bermuda, and came back to an empty home to die. It is all so far from the spirit of his earlier years — from the time of his twinkling eye and contagious smile and hearty laugh — that one can only say “The pity of it, the pity of it!” He is gone now. He brightened life in that earlier, happier time, for a lot of us; he will continue to brighten life as long as people know how to read.

[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks Daffynition! ... a section is on his scandalous relationship with a woman who became his secretary after his wife died... had instructed that his autobiography should not to be published till 100 years after his death... He left behind nearly 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs along with handwritten notes that said he didn't want them to be published for at least a century... the University of California, Berkeley, will release in November the first volume of the autobiography. The manuscript is in a vault there. The trilogy will run to half a million words... A section of the memoir will detail his relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after his wife Olivia died in 1904... [Lyon] once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. She was sacked in 1909 after Twain claimed she had "hypnotised" him into giving her the power of attorney over his estate... "He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he'd never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile." Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[Professional Engineer]

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