December 31, 2008
Twain Crashes and Burns (1877)
On this day, Mark Twain found himself on the receiving end of an evisceration from the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter.
The letter was in response to Twain's performance a few weeks before at a dinner celebration in Boston to honor the 74-year-old Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes. To Twain, being asked to give a speech before these titans of literature put him as far up the literary ladder as anyone could go, especially a poor boy from Hannibal, Missouri, who grew up determined to crash the eastern literary establishment.So when it was his turn, Twain was determined to give of his best, and spun a tale. Years ago, he recalled, one snowy night, he knocked at the door of a miner's cabin in California. When he gave his name, the miner grumbled that he was the "fourth littery man that has been here in twenty-four hours." The three — Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes — spent the evening strutting about, declaiming poetry, drinking and playing cards." When Twain suggests to the miner that these three roustabouts are "not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving revernce and homage; these were imposters," the miner delivers the story's punchline: "Ah! Imposters, were they? Are you?"
But Twain's attempt at self-satire — and, let's face it, in cold print, the "snapper" loses any power it might have held — seemed lost on most of the audience. Twain remembered nothing but silence, which another guest described as "weighing many tons to the square inch." Newspaper accounts of the speech elicited public criticism of Twain's bad taste in representing these noble litteraturs as slovenly, drunken roustabouts.
Mortified, Twain sent abject letters of apologies to the three men. Holmes and Longfellow responded with polite and forgiving notes (Holmes: "it grieves me to see that you are seriously troubled about what seems to me a trifling matter"; Longfellow: "I am a little troubled that you should be so much troubled").
But Ellen Emerson was made of sterner stuff, and she saw no need to soft-pedal her reaction:
First let me say that no shadow of indignation has ever been in any of our minds ... But what you will want is to know without any softening [is] how we did feel. We were disappointed. We have liked almost everything we have seen over Mark Twain's signature . . . . Therefore when we read this speech it was a real disappointment. I said to my brother that it didn't seem good or funny, and he said, "No it was unfortunate. Still some of those quotations were very good," and he gave them with relish and my Father laughed, though never having seen a [playing] card in his life, he couldn't understand [the reference] like his children."Nearly three decades later, Twain was still mortified over the speech, although in the retelling, his instincts expanded it into a story which, in the end, the joke was on himself.
Born: Daniel Stern (ps. Marie de Flavigny), novelist, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, 1805; James T. Fields, publisher, editor, Portsmouth, N.H., 1817; Alexander Smith, poet, author, Kilmarnock, Scotland, 1829; Holbrook Jackson, editor, poet, critic, essayist, journalist, Liverpool, England, 1910.
Died: Miguel de Unamuno, poet, author, playwright, Salamanca, Spain, 1936; Marshall McLuhan, author, educator, media critic, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1980; D(ennis) J(oseph) Enright, poet, critic, London, 2002.
Quote for the Day: Since we opened this book with the sight of Samuel Pepys beginning his diary, it seems appropriate to end the year with a quote from this day by a writer who was Pepys' opposite in so many ways — gender (male, female); occupation (bureaucrat, writer); and era (King Charles, Boomer).
"Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts — like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself." — Susan Sontag
Also from "Writers 365":
- Longfellow and the Cross of Snow (1861)
- Mark Twain's Massacre (1863)
- Mark Twain born, sort of (1864)
- The Hoax That Backfired (1877)
- Casey strikes out; Thayer doesn't (1888)
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