Who Is Mark Twain? Read Free

descended and read aloud his day’s work to the family:
    Once, when for a day he put aside other matters to record a young undertaker’s love-affair, and brought down the result in the evening, fairly bubbling with the joy of it, he met with a surprise. The tale was a ghastly burlesque, its humor of the most disheartening, unsavory sort. No one spoke during the reading, nobody laughed. The air was thick with disapproval. His voice lagged and faltered toward the end. When he finished there was heavy silence. Mrs. Clemens was the only one who could speak. “Youth, let’s walk a little,” she said.
     
    A few weeks later Mark Twain asked his friend William Dean Howells to “tell me what is the trouble with it.” We don’t know what Howells told him, but Mark Twain obviously did not throw the manuscript away. It is published in full for the first time here, and very possibly for the first audience capable of appreciating its humor as the author intended.
    “Happy Memories of the Dental Chair” is manifestly autobiographical, and possibly incomplete—a report of his first encounter with a dentist, but in this case a rather extraordinary one: John Mankey Riggs of Hartford, who gave his name to Riggs’s Disease (what your dentist would call “pyorrhea”). Mark Twain is here characteristically fascinated by technical procedures, including Riggs’s part in the discovery and use of anesthetic: “an event of such vast influence, magnitude, importance, that one may truly say it hardly has its equal in human history.” Much as he admires Riggs for his part in that discovery, he also has him squarely in his sights: “He was gray and venerable, and humane of aspect; but he had the calm, possessed, surgical look of a man who could endure pain in another person.” Riggs died in 1885, shortly after this sketch was written, and that may have been partly why Mark Twain did not publish it.
    Mark Twain also declined to publish, or sought to publish anonymously, things he thought would so outrage his audience that he would lose their support and undermine his family’s income. These are not heavily represented in this selection, but “The Missionary in World-Politics” manifestly qualifies. Its barely suppressed rage at European exploitation of the Chinese was intended for publication in the London Times shortly after the Siege of Peking, during the Boxer Rebellion. On 16 July 1900, Clemens wrote a cover letter for the manuscript to C. Moberly Bell, one of the Times ’s editors, but he never sent either. The piece itself is not signed “Mark Twain,” but rather “X”—such sharply critical things could only be published, if at all, behind a cloak of anonymity. “Don’t give me away, whether you print it or not” he wrote Bell. It seems likely that he decided not to send it when the news reached him that the “massacre of the Ministers” (referred to bitterly in the penultimate paragraph) was only a false rumor, most of the diplomats having survived being attacked by the Boxers. In any case, Mark Twain’s withering denunciation of cultural imperialism—the cynical use of the missionaries by “the Concert of Christian Birds of Prey” to exploit the Chinese—has lost none of its relevance for today. “My sympathies are with the Chinese,” he wrote privately to Twichell. “They have been villainously dealt with by the sceptered thieves of Europe, & I hope they will drive all the foreigners out & keep them out for good. I only wish it; of course I don’t really expect it.” (He was less than a year away from his decision to publicly criticize American imperialism in the Philippines, beginning with a justly famous essay titled “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”)
    This pattern of second thoughts arising to restrain publication is evident throughout his career. “I Rise to a Question of Privilege” was written in May 1868 in direct response to a public rebuke he received from a Baptist clergyman in San