Who Is Mark Twain? Read Free Page A

Francisco—“and in very good grammar, too, for a minister of the gospel.” It was prepared specifically for publication in the San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser, but Mark Twain probably never sent it, having thought twice about the effect so frank a critique of conventional religion might have on his then still fragile reputation. And he did not even finish writing “Interviewing the Interviewer,” an 1870 sketch written to retaliate against criticism aimed at him by Charles A. Dana, the famous editor of the New York Sun, almost certainly because he realized the futility of such public combat.
    Eventually, in the last decade of his life, Mark Twain evolved the habit of writing what he wanted to write, no matter how incendiary, knowing all the while that he would not publish it, but simply put it into that “box of Posthumous Stuff” and let it be published after his death. He stipulates to this strategy in “The Privilege of the Grave,” written on 18 September 1905, the thesis of which is that a dead man “has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person: free speech.” Most of us, most of the time, suppress the truth about our genuine beliefs. “Sometimes we suppress an opinion for reasons that are a credit to us, not a discredit, but oftenest we suppress an unpopular opinion because we cannot afford the bitter cost of putting it forth. None of us likes to be hated, none of us likes to be shunned.” Of the pieces published here, perhaps only the dialect sketch called “The Snow-Shovelers” falls into this category. Its devilish needling of the “socialis” and the “anerkis” is quietly conveyed through the earnest conversation of two black laborers “in the elegant-residence end of a large New England town.” (Mark Twain lived in Hartford at the time, and doubtless overheard the real-life exchange that he here turned into satirical fiction.) But the finished piece was probably made to seem inappropriate by the Haymarket Riot of 4 May 1886, in which ostensible “anarchists” killed more than a dozen policemen and civilians with a bomb, and it remained unpublished.
    Taken together, these short works give us a window into Mark Twain’s literary workshop, a fresh glimpse of his remarkable talent, lavished even on work he decided, for various reasons, not to publish. Most of them are quite capable of standing on their own merits: shrewdly observed, written with preternatural clarity, and often very funny, they are not simple rejects. Their range of subjects and techniques is itself impressive, even when Mark Twain declined to complete his own experiment. And for these and other reasons, I hope their publication now will pique the curiosity of today’s readers about just who Mark Twain is. The success of his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, has tended to overshadow the fact that he experimented constantly in various short forms, even in the things he published during his long career. Public curiosity about him and what he wrote in this vein goes back to at least November 1865, when his friend Charles Henry Webb said that to his way of thinking, “Shakspeare had no more idea that he was writing for posterity than Mark Twain has at the present time, and it sometimes amuses me to think how future Mark Twain scholars will puzzle over that gentleman’s present hieroglyphics and occasionally eccentric expressions.” Not even Webb, however, anticipated that “future Mark Twain scholars” and readers would still be encountering previously unpublished work of this quality, a century after his death in 1910.
     
ROBERT H. HIRST
General Editor, Mark Twain Project
     
     
    Note: I have described all twenty-six pieces as “previously unpublished,” by which I mean not printed or otherwise made readily accessible to the general reader. More strictly speaking, all of them were included in a microfilm edition issued by the Mark Twain Project in 2001. Also in 2001 twenty-two of these