menu_book Chapter 1

sixteen o one conversation as it was by the social fireside in the time of the tudors by mark twain recorded by john greenman introduction born irreverent scrawled mark twain on a scratch-pad like all other people i have ever known or heard of i am hoping to remain so while there are any reverent irreverences left to make fun of holograph manuscript of samuel l clemens in the collection of the f j main mark twain was just as irreverent as he dared be and sixteen o one reveals his richest expression of sovereign contempt for overstuffed language genteel literature and conventional idiocies later when a magazine editor apostrophized oh that we had a rabelais mark impishly and anonymously submitted sixteen o one and that same editor a praiser of rabelais scathingly abused it and the sender in this episode as in many others mark twain the bad boy of american literature revealed his huge delight in blasting the shams of contemporary hypocrisy

two there was always the spirit of tom sawyer deviltry in mark's make-up that prompted him as he himself boasted to see how much holy indignation he could stir up in the world who wrote sixteen o one the correct and complete title of sixteen o one as first issued was date sixteen o one conversation as it was by the social fireside in the time of the tudors for many years after its anonymous first issue in eighteen eighty its authorship was variously conjectured and widely disputed in boston william t ball one of the leading theatrical critics during the late nineties asserted that it was originally written by an english actor name not divulged who gave it to him ball's original it was said looked like a newspaper strip in the way it was printed and may indeed have been a proof pulled in some newspaper office in st louis william marion reedy editor of the st louis mirror had seen this famous tour de force circulated in the early eighties in galley proof form he first learned from eugene field that it was from the pen of mark twain

many people said reedy thought the thing was done by field and attributed as a joke to mark twain field had a perfect genius for that sort of thing as many extant specimens attest and for that sort of practical joke but to my thinking the humor of the piece is too mellow not hard and bright and bitter to be eugene field's reedy's opinion hits off the fundamental difference between these two great humorists one half suspects that reedy was thinking of field's french crisis but twain first claimed his bantling from the fog of anonymity in nineteen o six in a letter addressed to mr charles orr librarian of case library cleveland said clemens in the course of his letter dated july thirtieth nineteen o six from dublin n h the title of the piece is a supposititious conversation which takes place in queen elizabeth's closet in that year between the queen ben jonson beaumont sir walter raleigh

the duchess of bilgewater and one or two others and is not as john hay mistakenly supposes a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy to the sober and chaste elizabeth's time if there is a decent word findable in it it is because i overlooked it i hasten to assure you that it is not printed in my published writings twitting the rev joseph twichell the circumstances of how sixteen o one came to be written have since been officially revealed by albert bigelow paine in mark twain a bibliography nineteen twelve and in the publication of mark twain's note-book nineteen thirty five sixteen o one was written during the summer of eighteen seventy six when the clemens family had retreated to quarry farm in elmira county new york here mrs clemens enjoyed relief from social obligations the children romped over the countryside and mark retired to his octagonal study which perched high on the hill looked out upon the valley below it was in the famous summer of eighteen seventy six too that mark was putting the finishing touches to tom sawyer

before the close of the same year he had already begun work on the adventures of huckleberry finn published in eighteen eighty five it is interesting to note the use of the title the duke of bilgewater in huck finn when the duchess of bilgewater had already made her appearance in sixteen o one sandwiched between his two great masterpieces tom sawyer and huck finn the writing of sixteen o one was indeed a strange interlude during this prolific period mark wrote many minor items most of them rejected by howells and read extensively in one of his favorite books pepys diary like many another writer mark was captivated by pepys style and spirit and he determined says albert bigelow paine in his mark twain a biography to try his hand on an imaginary record of conversation and court manners of a bygone day written in the phrase of the period the result was fireside conversation in the time of queen elizabeth or as he later called it sixteen o one the conversation recorded by a supposed pepys of that period was written with all the outspoken coarseness and nakedness of that rank day when fireside sociabilities were limited only to the loosened fancy vocabulary and physical performance and not by any bounds of convention

it was written as a letter continues paine to that robust divine rev joseph twichell who unlike howells had no scruples about mark's elizabethan breadth of parlance the rev joseph twichell mark's most intimate friend for over forty years was pastor of the asylum hill congregational church of hartford which mark facetiously called the church of the holy speculators because of its wealthy parishioners here mark had first met joe at a social and their meeting ripened into a glorious life-long friendship trichell was a man of about mark's own age a profound scholar a devout christian yet a man with an exuberant sense of humor and a profound understanding of the frailties of mankind the rev mr twichell performed the marriage ceremony for mark twain and solemnized the births of his children joe his friend counselled him on literary as well as personal matters for the remainder of mark's life it is important to catch this brief glimpse of the man for whom this masterpiece was written for without it one cannot fully understand the spirit in which sixteen o one was written or the keen enjoyment which mark and joe derived from it

save me one the story of the first issue of sixteen o one is one of finesse state diplomacy and surreptitious printing the rev joe twichell for whose delectation the piece had been written apparently had pocketed the document for four long years then in eighteen eighty it came into the hands of john hay later secretary of state presumably sent to him by mark twain hay pronounced the sketch a masterpiece and wrote immediately to his old cleveland friend alexander gunn prince of connoisseurs in art and literature the following correspondence reveals the fine diplomacy which made the name of john hay known throughout the world department of state washington june twenty one eighteen eighty dear gunn are you in cleveland for all this week if you will say yes by return mail i have a masterpiece to submit to your consideration which is only in my hands for a few days yours very much worrited by the depravity of christendom hay

the second letter discloses hay's own high opinion of the effort and his deep concern for its safety june twenty fourth eighteen eighty my dear gunn here it is it was written by mark twain in a serious effort to bring back our literature and philosophy to the sober and chaste elizabethan standard but the taste of the present day is too corrupt for anything so classic he has not yet been able even to find a publisher the globe has not yet recovered from downey's inroad and they won't touch it i send it to you as one of the few lingering relics of that race of appreciative critics who know a good thing when they see it read it with reverence and gratitude and send it back to me for mark is impatient to see once more his wandering offspring yours hay in his third letter one can almost hear hay's chuckle in the certainty that his diplomatic if somewhat wicked suggestion would bear fruit washington d c july seventh eighteen eighty my dear gunn i have your letter and the proposition which you make to pull a few proofs of the masterpiece is highly attractive and of course highly immoral

i cannot properly consent to it and i am afraid the great many would think i was taking an unfair advantage of his confidence please send back the document as soon as you can and if in spite of my prohibition you take these proofs save me one very truly yours john hay thus was this elizabethan dialogue poured into the moulds of cold type according to merle johnson mark twain's bibliographer it was issued in pamphlet form without wrappers or covers there were eight pages of text and the pamphlet measured seven by eight and a half inches only four copies are believed to have been printed one for hay one for gunn and two for twain in the matter of humor wrote clemens referring to hay's delicious notes what an unsurpassable touch john hay had humor at west point the first printing of sixteen o one in actual book form was done at ye academy press in eighteen eighty two west point new york under the supervision of lieutenant c e s wood then adjutant to the u s military academy

in eighteen eighty two mark twain and joe twichell visited their friend lieutenant wood at west point where they learned that wood as adjutant had under his control a small printing establishment on mark's return to hartford wood received a letter asking if he would do mark a great favor by printing something he had written which he did not care to entrust to the ordinary printer wood replied that he would be glad to oblige on april three eighteen eighty two mark sent the manuscript i enclose the original of sixteen o three sick as you suggest i am afraid there are errors in it also heedlessness in antiquated spelling ease stuck on often at end of words where they are not strictly necessary etc i would go through the manuscript but i am too much driven just now and it is not important anyway i wish you would do me the kindness to make any and all corrections that suggest themselves to you sincerely yours s l clemens

charles erskine scott wood recalled in a foreword which he wrote for the limited edition of sixteen o one issued by grabhorn press how he felt when he first saw the original manuscript when i read it writes wood i felt that the character of it would be carried a little better by a printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneous with the pretended conversation i wrote mark that for literary effect i thought there should be a species of forgery though of course there was no effort to actually deceive a scholar mark answered that i might do as i liked that his only object was to secure a number of copies as the demand for it was becoming burdensome but he would be very grateful for any interest i brought to the doing well tucker foreman of the printing shop and i soaked some hand-made linen paper in weak coffee put it as a wet bundle into a warm room to mildew dried it to a dampness approved by tucker and he printed the copy on a hand-press

i had special punches cut for such elizabethan abbreviations as the a e o and u when followed by m or n and for the commonly and stupidly pronounced ye the only editing i did was to the spelling and a few old english words introduced the spelling if i remember correctly is mine but the text is exactly as written by mark i wrote asking his view of making the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic telling me to do whatever i thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result thus was printed in a deluxe edition of fifty copies the most curious masterpiece of american humor at one of america's most dignified institutions the united states military academy at west point sixteen o one was so be praised by the archaeological scholars of a quarter of a century ago wrote clemens in his letter to charles orr that i was rather inordinately vain of it

at that time it had been privately printed in several countries among them japan a sumptuous edition on large paper rough-edged was made by lieutenant c e s wood at west point an edition of fifty copies and distributed among popes and kings and such people in england copies of that issue were worth twenty guineas when i was there six years ago and none to be had from the depths mark twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted it was an irreverence which bubbled up from a deep passionate insight into the well-springs of human nature in sixteen o one as in the man that corrupted hadleyburg and in the mysterious stranger he tore the masks off human beings and left them cringing before the public view with the deftness of a master surgeon clemens dealt with human emotions and delighted in exposing human nature in the raw the spirit and the language of the fireside conversation were rooted deep in mark twain's nature and in his life as c e s wood who printed sixteen o one at west point has pertinently observed

if i made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which sixteen o one rose i would say that mark's intellectual structure and subconscious graining was from anglo-saxons as primitive as the common man of the tudor period he came from the banks of the mississippi from the flat boatmen pilots roustabouts farmers and village folk of a rude primitive people as lincoln did he was finished in the mining camps of the west among stage drivers gamblers and the men of forty-nine the simple roughness of a frontier people was in his blood and brain words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to him any one who ever knew mark heard him use them freely forcibly picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation such language is forcible as all primitive words are refinement seems to make for weakness or let us say a cutting edge but the old vulgar monosyllabic words bit like the blow of a pioneer's axe and mark was like that

then i think sixteen o one came out of mark's instinctive humor satire and hatred of puritanism but there is more than this with all its humor there is a sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake whitman and the bible are no more obscene than nature herself no more obscene than a manure pile out of which come roses and cherries every word used in sixteen o one was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their vocabulary and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent but only as language to express his meaning no act of nature is obscene in itself but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior purpose they become offensive as everything out of place is offensive i think he delighted too in shocking giving resounding slaps on what chaucer would quite simply call the bare arse quite aside from this chaucerian arse slapping

clemens had also a semi-serious purpose that of reproducing a pastime as he saw it in shakespeare decker johnson and other writers of the elizabethan era 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 sixteen o one 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 payne 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 pain 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 tim's curiosities of london j hammond trumbull's blue laws true and false apparently mark twain relished it for as bernard de voto 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 nathlaces and beshrews and marries the writing of sixteen o one 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 primmer

although sixteen o one 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 weather-beaten 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 payne 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 katie leary lifelong 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 snow-flakes 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 katie 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 katie 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 inflections 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 eighteen seventy nine before the stomach club a jolly lot of gay wags mark's address reports 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 south-western the lincolnian the elizabethan breadth of parlance which i suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self 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 shakespearian with a nigger squat on her safety valve

john hay pike county ballads is there any other explanation asks van wick 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 re-read 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 have had a cause to suffer from his having loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion mark twain's verbal rabelianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which not having been permitted to inform his work had been driven inward and left there to ferment no wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words consider the famous book sixteen o one 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 riotous 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 sixteen o one 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 sixteen o one 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 sixteen o one was written eighteen seventy six 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 eighteen sixty eight sixty nine and little men in eighteen seventy one in eighteen seventy three mark twain led the van of the debunkers scraping the gilt off the lily in the gilded age in eighteen eighty mark took a few pot-shots at license in art and literature in his tramps 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 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 uffici 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 sense pornography unfortunately sixteen o one has recently been tagged by professor edward wagenknecht as the most famous piece of pornography in american literature like many another uninformed professor 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 wolsey 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 wolsey 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 law obviously it is ridiculous to say that the leer of the sensualist lurks in the pages of mark twain sixteen o one droll story in a way observed william marion reedy sixteen o one is to twain's whole works what the droll stories are to balzac's it is better than the privately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of eugene field is indeed an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in rabelais or in the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light from shakespeare's urn it is humor or fun such as one expects let us say from the peasants of thomas hardy outside of hardy's books and though it be filthy it yet hath the splendor of mere animalism of good spirits i would say it is scatological rather than erotic save for one touch toward the end

indeed it seems more of rabelais than of boccaccio or mazuccio or aretino is brutally british rather than lasciviously latinate as to the subjects but sumptuous as regards the language immediately upon first reading john hay later secretary of state had proclaimed sixteen o one a masterpiece albert bigelow paine mark twain's biographer likewise acknowledged its greatness when he said sixteen o one is a genuine classic as classics of that sort go it is better than the gross obscenities of rabelais and perhaps in some day to come the taste that justified gargantua and the decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writing of mark twain human taste is a curious thing delicacy is purely a matter of environment and point of view it depends on who writes a thing whether it is coarse or not wrote clemens in his note-book in eighteen seventy nine i built a conversation which could have happened i used words such as were used at that time sixteen o one

i sent it anonymously to a magazine and how the editor abused it and the sender but that man was a praiser of rabelais and had been saying oh that we had a rabelais i judged that i could furnish him one then i took it to one of the greatest best and most learned of devines rev joseph h twichell and read it to him he came within an ace of killing himself with laughter for between you and me the thing was dreadfully funny i don't often write anything that i laugh at myself but i can hardly think of that thing without laughing that old divine said it was a piece of the finest kind of literary art and david gray of the buffalo courier said it ought to be printed privately and left behind me when i died and then my fame as a literary artist would be last franklin j meen end of introduction to sixteen o one and end of section one