The Autobiography of Mark Twain - Mark Twain (best english books to read .TXT) 📗

This morning’s mail brings another of these novelties. It comes from France⁠—from a young English girl⁠—and is addressed:

Mark Twain,
℅ President Roosevelt,
The White House,
Washington,
America, U.S.A.

It was not delayed, but came straight along bearing the Washington postmark of yesterday.

In a diary which Mrs. Clemens kept for a little while, a great many years ago, I find various mentions of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a near neighbor of ours in Hartford, with no fences between. And in those days she made as much use of our grounds as of her own, in pleasant weather. Her mind had decayed and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irishwoman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect.

Her husband, old Professor Stowe, was a picturesque figure. He wore a broad slouch hat. He was a large man, and solemn. His beard was white and thick and hung far down on his breast. His nose was enlarged and broken up by a disease which made it look like a cauliflower. The first time our little Susy ever saw him she encountered him on the street near our house and came flying wide-eyed to her mother and said, “Santa Claus has got loose.”

Mr. Clemens comments on newspaper clipping⁠—Tells Mr. Howells the scheme of this autobiography⁠—Tells the newspaper account of girl who tried to commit suicide⁠—Newspapers in remote villages and in great cities contrasted⁠—Remarks about Capt. E. L. Marsh and Dick Higham⁠—Higbie’s letter, and “Herald” letter to Higbie.

Baby Advice in a Car

Old Man Got It, Five-year-old Gave It, Mother Said, “Shut Up”

A benevolent-looking old man clung to a strap in a crowded Broadway car bound uptown Saturday afternoon. In a corner seat in front of him huddled a weak-looking little woman who clasped a baby to her breast. Beside her sat another child, a girl perhaps five years old, who seemed to be attracted by the old man’s kindly face, for she gazed at him and the baby with her bright, intelligent eyes opened wide. He smiled at her interest and said to her:

“My! What a nice baby! Just such a one as I was looking for, I am going to take it.”

“You can’t,” declared the little girl, quickly. “She’s my sister.”

“What! Won’t you give her to me?”

“No, I won’t.”

“But,” he insisted, and there was real wistfulness in his tones, “I haven’t a baby in my home.”

“Then write to God. He’ll send you one,” said the child confidently,

The old man laughed. So did the other passengers. But the mother evidently scented blasphemy.

“Tillie,” said she, “shut up and behave yourself!”

That is a scrap which I have cut from this morning’s Times. It is very prettily done, charmingly done; done with admirable ease and grace⁠—with the ease and grace that are born of feeling and sympathy, as well as of practice with the pen. Every now and then a newspaper reporter astonishes me with felicities like this. I was a newspaper reporter myself forty-four years ago, and during three subsequent years⁠—but as I remember it I and my comrades never had time to cast our things in a fine literary mold. That scrap will be just as touching and just as beautiful three hundred years hence as it is now.

I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method⁠—a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along like contact of flint with steel. Moreover, this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy episodes, but deals merely in the common experiences which go to make up the life of the average human being, and the narrative must interest the average human being because these episodes are of a sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his own life reflected and set down in print. The usual, conventional autobiographer seems to particularly hunt out those occasions in his career when he came into contact with celebrated persons, whereas his contacts with the uncelebrated were just as interesting to him, and would be to his reader, and were vastly more numerous than his collisions with the famous.

Howells was here yesterday afternoon, and I told him the whole scheme of this autobiography and its apparently systemless system⁠—only apparently systemless, for it is not that. It is a deliberate system, and the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted. It is a system which follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. It is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble⁠—a course which begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end while I am alive, for the reason that it I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me