Thanksgiving with Twain and Thoreau

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In his autobiography, Mark Twain--in one of the rambling asides that, taken together are the autobiography--writes briefly of Thanksgiving:

The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist--the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due. But from old habit, Thanksgiving day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the governors of all the several states and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand.

Twain can always be counted on to prick self-regard, be it national or personal. But even a pricked Thanksgiving can be a source of joy: even family sans illusions remains family, and seeing them a pleasure. The holiday falling late this year, you might, if you remember, follow your meal, and football, and shopping, with a toast on Saturday to Twain himself, who, had he the physical immortality to match his literary life, would be turning 178.

Thoreau is another to turn to as Thanksgiving approaches; for all his grumbling and unsociability, gratitude was an emotion he understood. On December 12, 1851, the thirty-four-year-old Thoreau wrote in his journal,

Ah, dear nature, the deep remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread.

I have been surveying for twenty or thirty days, living coarsely even as respects my diet,--for I find that will always alter to suit my employment,--indeed, leading a quite trivial life; and tonight, for the first time, had made a fire in my chamber and endeavored to return to myself. I wished for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days, might establish daily prayer and thanksgiving in my family; might do my own work and not the work of Concorde and Carlisle, which would yield me better than money.

(How much forbearance, ay, sacrifice and loss, goes to every accomplishment! I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.)

For those on the East Coast, facing a storm that dealt Chicago but a glancing (if frigid) blow, a more prosaic entry may be in order, like this one from November 24, 1857:

Cold Thanksgiving weather again, the pools freezing.

Freezing it may be, overblown and self-regarding it may be, contemplative and restorative it may never wholly be--but ever since 1996, when I spent my one and only Thanksgiving out of the country, and thereby fully realized for the first time how much I appreciated the simple pleasures it offers of family and food, I've been a devotee, if not an evangelist. Have a good Thanksgiving, folks. May your family be well, and your life flow in its proper channels.

Mark Twain and Satan!

Now how's that for a headline?

Tonight I'll share a couple of additional little bits from Mark Twain's autobiography, and this time, they'll involve Satan! Or at least his name. Having grown up in a small town on the northern edge of the Bible Belt, I'll admit to still getting a bit of a charge out of silly blasphemies. It's something one ought to grow out of, certainly, but I can still get a good chuckle out of a "Christ on a crutch!" or John Hodgman leading his audience in a chant of "Hail, Satan!"--as, it seems clear, Mark Twain would have as well.

The Autobiography includes a couple of jokey references to Satan. The simplest and most charming is this one:

At one time when the children were small we had a very black mother-cat named Satan, and Satan had a small black offspring named Sin. Pronouns were a difficulty for the children. Little Clara came in one day, her black eyes snapping with indignation, and said,

"Papa, Satan ought to be punished. She is out there at the greenhouse, and there she stays and stays, and his kitten is down stairs crying."

The more amusing reference comes when Twain is railing against newly restrictive postal regulations that, he says, have snarled up mail all over the east coast because the addresses on the envelopes don't conform to the tightened specs. Arguing for looser interpretations, and more diligence on the part of the postal service, he points out that he once received a letter addressed only to:

Mark Twain.

Somewhere,

(Try Satan.)

As Twain puts it, "That stranger's trust was not misplaced. Satan courteously sent it along."

This next bit doesn't have any satanic content--unless you're more down on Teddy Roosevelt than, for all his faults, I can ever bring myself to be--but I can't pass up a chance to share it, too: Twain also once received a letter that had been addressed to:

Mark Twain

c/o President Roosevelt

The White House

Washington

America

--------

USA

Seriously, folks: this book is so much fun that I could pass along entertaining bits from it every day until spring and not run short. And that's taking into account that, unlike a letter sent care of Satan, a Chicago spring can't in any way be counted on to arrive in a timely fashion.

If you've got an unread copy of Mark Twain's autobiography on your shelf, read it!

For decades, the title of Most Unread Book was held, with the blithe confidence of a late Romanov, by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Of the approximately forty billion copies that book sold, I believe at last count twenty-nine had been read all the way through.

I suspect, however, that it may now have a rival. In the fall of 2010, the University of California Press pulled off a publishing coup capped by a publicity coup: the publication of the The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. By pitching the story of Twain's wish that the book be embargoed until a century after his death, a provision that, he argued, would free him to offer unvarnished accounts of his life and similarly honest opinions of those he knew, California landed an incredible amount of publicity--then sold a commensurate number of books.

Which, let's be clear, is a good thing. But it's also a trick worthy of Twain himself: most of the coverage emphasized Twain's embargo, while the fact that a not insubstantial portion of this material had already been published--a lot of it under that very same title, The Autobiography of Mark Twain--was missed. I don't think I'm an unreasonable example: I pay a lot of attention to books and publishing, and it wasn't until right before I got my copy that I learned that the embargo was more sizzle than steak. In a sense, Twain got to play one last joke on the American people, a century beyond the grave.

So something like half a million people got the book . . . and, wow. It's huge: 7-1/2" x 10-1/2", 760 pages, and nearly 5 pounds in weight. And it's daunting. Twain's text is buttressed by what Booklist, in a rave review, mildly called "substantial editorial apparatus": 20 pages of acknowledgments, a 60-page introduction, and 200 pages of notes at the back end. Once you wade through the prefatory material, you get to . . . a bunch of short, disconnected bits of memories and memoir, interspersed with clippings from newspapers, none of which at a glance seem to be taking anything like the form of an autobiography. So you flip through it, and, finally, on page 201, you get to a section called, straight up, The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Whew.

But even that starts out with fragments. "So much for the earlier days, and for the New England branch of the Clemenses." Autobiographies are not generally supposed to start in media res. So you flip ahead a few more pages, and what you find is more fragmentation: entries labeled with progressive days in 1906, tied to no obvious chronology or plan.

I suspect that's where a lot of people stopped reading. It just appears to be asking too much.

But if you're one of those people--as I was until last week--I urge you to try again. As the reviews from 2010 all tried to tell us, there's a great book hiding in there! Twain's method--to eschew chronology in favor of dictating stories from present and past as they came to mind--is the method of a man too old and unsystematic to write a proper autobiography, and that lack of system is responsible for a lot of the initial confusion you encounter on opening the book. Fragment of memory leads to current anecdote leads to reflections on old friends and so on, and at no point can you say, "Here is where I am in Twain's life."

The method may be suspect (and lazy?), but surprisingly it pays off: rather than run us through the by-now familiar paces of Twain's life story, the book instead ends up absolutely chock-full of stories, jokes, anecdotes, opinions, ephemera, and nonsense. Page after page after page simply glows with Twain's inimitable, indomitable personality and humor. I'm absolutely astonished at how much I enjoyed this book, and I'm so grateful to Maud Newton, whose long-ago praise for it lingered in my mind and kept me going back to my shelves every once in a while to give it a heft and consider diving in.

I've rambled long enough already, but I don't want to leave this post without giving you a taste of the pleasures of the book. So here is a passage, utterly inconsequential in the scheme of Twain's life, but wholly typical of the sort of wit, digressions, and character sketches the book offers on nearly every page. Twain is telling of a meeting of a discussion group he was once part of in Hartford, the Monday Night CLub, and of the speech of one Colonel Greene on the topic of dreams:

Colonel Greene discussed the Dream question in his usual way--that is to say, he began a sentence and went on and on, dropping a comma here and there at intervals of eighteen inches, never hesitating for a word, drifting straight along like a river at half bank with no reefs in it; the surface of his talk as smooth as a mirror; his construction perfect, and fit for print without correction, as he went along. And when the hammer fell, at the end of his ten minutes, he dumped in a period right where he was had stopped--and it was just as good there as it would have been anywhere else in that ten minutes' sentence. You could look back over that speech and you'd find it dimly milestoned along with those commas which he had put in and which could have been left out just as well, because they merely staked out the march, and nothing more. They could not call attention to the scenery, because there wasn't any. His speech was always like that--perfectly smooth, perfectly constructed; and when he had finished, no listener could go into court and tell what it was he had said. It was a curious style. It was impressive--you always thought, from one comma to another, that he was going to strike something presently, but he never did. But this time that I speak of, the burly and magnificent Rev. Dan Burton sat with his eyes fixed upon Greene from the beginning of the sentence until the end of it. He looked as the lookout on a whaleship might look who was watching where a whale had gone down and was waiting and watching for it to reappear; and no doubt that was the figure that was in Burton's mind, because when at last Greene finished, Burton threw up his hands and shouted, "There she blows!"

That "dimly milestoned"; the sense of appreciation, bordering on awe, for a rare skill; the precise and effective choices of words and images ("burly and magnificent," "dropping" a comma, "a river at half bank with no reefs in it," "staked out the march"); and the pleasure of the Reverend Burton's silly joke, preserved forever because it caught Twain's fancy. What fun this book is!

Now I can't wait to read the second volume, which arrived in stores last month. If Volume 1 is on your shelf keeping Hawking company, you could do a lot worse with your Thanksgiving than to take it down and chuckle over it while your relatives watch football.