1601 Read online

  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, report
s 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

  thereto 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 roitous 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.

  FIGS FOR FIG LEAVES!

  Of course, the writing of such a piece as 1601 raised the question of

  freedom of expression for the creative artist.

  Although little discussed at that time, it was a question which intensely

  interested Mark, and for a fuller appreciation of Mark's position one

  must keep in mind the year in which 1601 was written, 1876. There had

  been nothing like it before in American literature; there had appeared no

  Caldwells, no Faulkners, no Hemingways. Victorian England was gushing

  Tennyson. In the United States polite letters was a cult of the Brahmins

  of Boston, with William Dean Howells at the helm of the Atlantic. Louisa

  May Alcott published Little Women in 1868-69, and Little Men in 1871. In

  1873 Mark Twain led the van of the debunkers, scraping the gilt off the

  lily in the Gilded Age.

  In 1880 Mark took a few pot shots at license in Art and Literature in his

  Tramp Abroad, "I wonder why some things are? For instance, Art is

  allowed as much indecent license to-day as in earlier times--but the

  privileges of Literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed

  within the past eighty or ninety years. Fielding and Smollet could

  portray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language; we have

  plenty of foul subjects to deal with in our day, but we are not allowed

  to approach them very near, even with nice and guarded forms of speech.

  But not so with Art. The brush may still deal freely with any subject;

  however revolting or indelicate. It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every

  pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation has

  been doing with the statues. These works, which had stood in innocent

  nakedness for ages, are all fig-leaved now. Yes, every one of them.

  Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help noticing

  it now, the fig-leaf makes it so conspicuous. But the comical thing

  about it all, is, that the fig-leaf is confined to cold and pallid

  marble, which would be still cold and unsuggestive without this sham and

  ostentatious symbol of modesty, whereas warm-blooded paintings which do

  really need it have in no case been furnished with it.

  "At the door of the Ufizzi, in Florence, one is confronted by statues of

  a man and a woman, noseless, battered, black with accumulated grime--they

  hardly suggest human beings--yet these ridiculous creatures have been

  thoughtfully and conscientiously fig-leaved by this fastidious

  generation. You enter, and proceed to that most-visited little gallery

  that exists in the world.... and there, against the wall, without

  obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the

  vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses--Titian's Venus. It

  isn't that she is naked and stretched out on a bed--no, it is the

  attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe the

  attitude, there would be a fine howl--but there the Venus lies, for

  anybody to gloat over that wants to--and there she has a right to lie,

  for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw young girls

  stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly

  at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic

  interest. How I should like to describe her--just to see what a holy

  indignation I could stir up in the world--just to hear the unreflecting

  average man deliver himself about my grossness and coarseness, and all

  that.

  "In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood, carnage,

  oozing brains, putrefaction--pictures portraying intolerable suffering--

  pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in dreadful

  detail--and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every day and

  publicly exhibited--without a growl from anybody--for they are innocent,

  they are inoffensive, being works of art. But suppose a literary artist

  ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate description of one of

  these grisly things--the critics would skin him alive. Well, let it go,

  it cannot be
helped; Art retains her privileges, Literature has lost

  hers. Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the wherefores and the

  consistencies of it--I haven't got time."

  PROFESSOR SCENTS PORNOGRAPHY

  Unfortunately, 1601 has recently been tagged by Professor Edward

  Wagenknecht as "the most famous piece of pornography in American

  literature." Like many another uninformed, Prof. W. is like the little

  boy who is shocked to see "naughty" words chalked on the back fence,

  and thinks they are pornography. The initiated, after years of wading

  through the mire, will recognize instantly the significant difference

  between filthy filth and funny "filth." Dirt for dirt's sake is

  something else again. Pornography, an eminent American jurist has

  pointed out, is distinguished by the "leer of the sensualist."

  "The words which are criticised as dirty," observed justice John M.

  Woolsey in the United States District Court of New York, lifting the ban

  on Ulysses by James Joyce, "are old Saxon words known to almost all men

  and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally

  and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical

  and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe." Neither was there

  "pornographic intent," according to justice Woolsey, nor was Ulysses

  obscene within the legal definition of that word.

  "The meaning of the word 'obscene,'" the Justice indicated, "as legally

  defined by the courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to

  sexually impure and lustful thoughts.

  "Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and

  thoughts must be tested by the court's opinion as to its effect on a

  person with average sex instincts--what the French would call 'l'homme

  moyen sensuel'--who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role

  of hypothetical reagent as does the 'reasonable man' in the law of torts

  and 'the learned man in the art' on questions of invention in patent