He laughed — a large, wholesome laugh — and this began a dissertation on the rights of a man to do what he liked with his own creations, which being a matter of purely professional interest, I will mercifully omit.
Returning to the big chair, he, speaking of truth and the like in literature, said that an autobiography was the one work in which a man, against his own will and in spite of his utmost striving to the contrary, revealed himself in his true light to the world.
‘A good deal of your life on the Mississippi is autobiographical, isn’t it? I asked.
‘As near as it can be — when a man is writing to a book and about himself. But in genuine autobiography, I believe it is impossible for a man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself.
‘I made an experiment once. I got a friend of mine — a man painfully given to speak the truth on all occasions — a man who wouldn’t dream of telling a lie — and I made him write his autobiography for his own amusement and mine. He did it. The manuscript would have made an octavo volume, but — good, honest man that he was — in every single detail of his life that I knew about he turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He could not help himself.
‘It is not in human nature to write the truth about itself. None the less the reader gets a general impression from an autobiography whether the man is a fraud or a good man. The reader can’t give his reasons any more than a man can explain why a woman struck him as being lovely when he doesn’t remember her hair, eyes, teeth, or figure. And the impression that the reader gets is a correct one.’
‘Do you ever intend to write an autobiography?’
‘If I do, it will be as other men have done — with the most earnest desire to make myself out to be the better man in every little business that has been to my discredit; and I shall fail, like the others, to make my readers believe anything except the truth.’
This naturally led to a discussion on conscience. Then said Mark Twain, and his words are mighty and to be remembered:—
‘Your conscience is a nuisance. A conscience is like a child. If you pet it and play with it and let it have everything that it wants, it becomes spoiled and intrudes on all your amusements and most of your griefs. Treat 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; that is to say, a properly trained one. A spoiled one 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 have killed it from 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’s best when it’s dead.’
Here he told me a little — such things as a man may tell a stranger — of his early life and upbringing, and in what manner he had been influenced for good by the example of his parents. He spoke always through his eyes, a light under the heavy eyebrows; anon crossing the room with a step as light as a girl’s, to show me some book or other; then resuming his walk up and down the room, puffing at the cob pipe. I would have given much for nerve enough to demand the gift of that pipe-value, five cents when new. I understood why certain savage tribes ardently desired the liver of brave men slain in combat. That pipe would have given me, perhaps, a hint of his keen insight into the souls of men. But he never laid it aside within stealing reach.
Once, indeed, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was an investiture of the Star of India, blue silk, trumpets, and diamond-studded jewel, all complete. If hereafter, in the changes and chances of this mortal life, I fall to cureless ruin, I will tell the superintendent of the workhouse that Mark Twain once put his hand on my shoulder; and he shall give me a room to myself and a double allowance of paupers’ tobacco.
‘I never read novels myself,’ said he, ‘except when the popular persecution forces me to — when people plague me to know what I think of the last book that every one is reading.’
‘And how did the latest persecution affect you?’
‘Robert?’ said he, interrogatively. I nodded.
‘I read it, of course, for the workmanship. That made me think I had neglected novels too long — that there might be a good many books as graceful in style somewhere on the shelves; so I began a course of novel reading. I have dropped it now; it did not amuse me. But as regards Robert, the effect on me was exactly as though a singer of street ballads were to hear excellent music from a church organ. I didn’t stop to ask whether the music was legitimate or necessary. I listened, and I liked what I heard. I am speaking of the grace and beauty of the style.’
‘You see,’ he went on, ‘every man has his private opinion about a book. But that is my private opinion. If I had lived in the beginning of things, I should have looked around the township to see what popular opinion thought of the murder of Abel before I openly condemned Cain. I should have had my private opinion, of course, but I shouldn’t have expressed it until I had felt the way. You have my private opinion about that book. I don’t know what my public ones are exactly. They won’t upset the earth.’
He recurled himself into the chair and talked of other things.
‘I spend nine months of the year at Hartford. I have long ago satisfied myself that there is no hope of doing much work during those nine months. People come in and call. They call at all hours, about everything in the world. One day I thought I would keep a list of interruptions. It began this way:—
‘A man came and would see no one but Mr. Clemens. He was an agent for photogravure reproductions of Salon pictures. I very seldom use Salon pictures in my books.
‘After that man another man, who refused to see any one but Mr. Clemens, came to make me write to Washington about something. I saw him. I saw a third man, then a fourth. By this time it was noon. I had grown tired of keeping the list. I wished to rest.
‘But the fifth man was the only one of the crowd with a card of his own. He sent up his card. ‘Ben Koontz, Hannibal, Mo.’ I was raised in Hannibal. Ben was an old schoolmate of mine. Consequently I threw the house wide open and rushed with both hands out at a big, fat, heavy man, who was not the Ben I had ever known — nor anything like him.
‘But is it you, Ben?” I said. “You’ve altered in the last thousand years.”
‘The fat man said: “ Well, I’m not Koontz exactly, but I met him down in Missouri, and he told me to be sure and call on you, and he gave me his card, and”— here he acted the little scene for my benefit —“if you can wait a minute till I can get out the circulars — I’m not Koontz exactly, but I’m travelling with the fullest line of rods you ever saw.”’
‘And what happened?’ I asked breathlessly.
‘I shut the door. He was not Ben Koontz — exactly — not my old school-fellow, but I had shaken him by both hands in love, and . . . I had been boarded by a lightning-rod man in my own house.
‘As I was saying, I do very little work in Hartford. I come here for three months every year, and I work four or five hours a day in a study down the garden of that little house on the hill. Of course, I do not object to two or three interruptions. When a man is in the full swing of his work these little things do not affect him. Eight or ten or twenty interruptions retard composition.’
I was burning to ask him all manner of impertinent questions, as to which of his works he himself preferred, and so forth; but, standing in awe of his eyes, I dared not. He spoke on, and I listened, grovelling.
It was a question of mental equipment that was on the carpet, and I am still wondering whether he meant what he said.
‘Personally I never care for fiction or storybooks. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind. If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me. Just now, for instance, before you came in’— he pointed to an encyclopaedia on the shelves —‘I was reading an article about “Mathematics.” Perfectly pure mathematics.
‘My own knowledge of mathematics stops at “twelve times twelve,” but I enjoyed that article immensely. I didn’t understand a word of it; but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful. That mathematical fellow believed in his facts. So do I. Get your facts first, and’— the voice dies away to an almost inaudible drone —‘then you can distort ’em as much as you please.’
Bearing this precious advice in my bosom, I left; the great man assuring me with gentle kindness that I had not interrupted him in the least. Once outside the door, I yearned to go back and ask some questions — it was easy enough to think of them now — but his time was his own, though his books belonged to me.
I should have ample time to look back to that meeting across the graves of the days. But it was sad to think of the things he had not spoken about.
In San Francisco the men of The Call told me many legends of Mark’s apprenticeship in their paper five-and-twenty years ago; how he was a reporter delightfully incapable of reporting according to the needs of the day. He preferred, so they said, to coil himself into a heap and meditate until the last minute. Then he would produce copy bearing no sort of relationship to his legitimate work — copy that made the editor swear horribly, and the readers of The Call ask for more.
I should like to have heard Mark’s version of that, with some stories of his joyous and variegated past. He has been journeyman-printer (in those days he wandered from the banks of the Missouri even to Philadelphia), pilot-cub and full-blown pilot, soldier of the South (that was for three weeks only), private secretary to a Lieutenant-Governor of Nevada (that displeased him), miner, editor, special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands, and the Lord only knows what else. If so experienced a man could by any means be made drunk, it would be a glorious thing to fill him up with composite liquors, and, in the language of his own country, ‘let him retrospect.’ But these eyes will never see that orgy fit for the gods!