Notes On Mark Twain
January 2023
Mark Twain is one of those colourful personalities that pop up ever so often in quiz questions. With popular literary successes that shaped culture, and acquaintances like Nikola Tesla[^1], Helen Keller and the Aga Khan, he has everything it takes to be an excellent subject for the typical quiz question involving obscure-ish clues for connecting the dots.
And yet, for some reason, I tend to either forget his name entirely (like in Roald Dahl’s case[^2]) or mix it up with Lewis Carroll’s. With commonalities including creative pen names, nearly coterminous lives and authorship of classic children’s fiction with child protagonists, the two have good reason to occupy adjacent positions in my mental latent space, just as they very probably did in my childhood General Knowledge workbook.
After the aforementioned forgetfulness on my part cost me tens of points across quizzes, I have decided to commit the trivial and significant aspects of this illustrious man’s life to memory. Never again shall a quizmaster tap into Twain trivia and escape my pounce.
Starting with the more well-known parts, Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is most well known as the author of the fictional quadrilogy [^3] on the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Set in rural Missouri, probably inspired by his hometown, it follows a couple of mischievous boys across adventures and misadventures, great and small. The novels themselves are nice enough and were part of my childhood’s literary delights, but they are too popular to make it as quizzing hints in most decent quizzes[^4]. So it is sufficient for readers to note that the answer to any question that mentions a story with a runaway slave or fence whitewashing is Mark Twain. Of course, if one wishes to cover more novel-related hints, one should read the books rather than the Wikipedia pages (except for revision), both because these books form part of the children’s literary canon[^42] and because superficial knowledge, while often sufficient for quizzing, diminishes the associated benefits. [^5]
Like with everything about him, there’s an interesting story behind his pen name. It is derived from the riverboatsman’s cry of ‘mark twain’, with twain referring to the two fathoms on the plumb line, which signified a safe clearance for the boat’s passage. Like so many of his works, Clemens drew on first-hand experience for his nom-de-plume as well, this time as a boatman, although it is likely that he borrowed it from another creative riverboatsman who recognised the shout’s propensity to pass as human nomenclature.
Part of what makes him a quizmaster’s pet is that Twain was quite the socialite. In fact, he had so vast an acquaintance that he constituted several “clubs” consisting of slices of his social pie.
One such club was the Juggernaut Club [^6], which drew its membership from amongst the women who wrote to Twain but never received his darshan. We know about the existence of this institution from a letter of investiture Twain sent to a certain Ms Helen, a French Alsatian maiden of 29, who happened to enter his correspondence. The letter solemnly describes the club’s Constitution, part of which is paraphrased here.
The club shall have only one member from one country.
Members don’t get a say in their membership; only the Chief Servant of the club [^7] does.
He mentions members from Scotland, the US of A, and, very interestingly, a Mohammedan girl from Bengal. Had I ever thought about it, my estimation of the likelihood of English-educated Muslim Hindustani women in that era would have been low. That of such a woman knowing about and taking the step of writing letters to the venerable Mk2ain? Zero. People were better at cold mailing back then.
The document containing the Juggernaut Club’s laws refers thrice to caste, as a distinction irrelevant for the club along with others, and features as a foreword an excerpt describing Juggernaut as a kind god, contrary to conventional Western idiom of the time.
Another club of his making was the Angelfish[^8] or Aquarium Club, consisting of little girls, often daughters of his acquaintances, whom he considered his muh boli granddaughters. Unfortunately, the adaptation of such clubs for decidedly different purposes by Epstein, Jackson, et al. makes modern readers look at this innocent, congenial enterprise with more than a tinge of suspicion. He also formed the Modest Club, with one member, His Eccentricity himself, and the Damned Human Race Club, which reportedly never convened.
While this is all I could find about his constellation of clubs, the Twain trivia train isn’t stopping just yet. Twain had yet another interesting connection to India, which, as a product of its civilisation (among others) and a subject of the corresponding nation-state, naturally fascinates me. Plus, Indian QMs like clues and even questions on Indian connections.
Twain was the author of Following the Equator, a travelogue cum social commentary chronicling his lecture tour of the British Empire, with some 250 pages out of ~700 on India. Of course, I didn’t read them all, so the next part is based on the Wikipedia article and some initial and randomly sampled pages. Twain was awed by India, moved by the plight of the Indians[^9], and saw parallels with slavery in the exploitation of Indian natives by foreigners.
Twain charmingly describes Bombay as bewitching, bewildering and enchanting. He refers to it as “the Arabian Nights come again” and a sheer kaleidoscope[^10]. He also critiques the economic exploitation of the colonies and the notion of civilising the natives, held by many of his contemporaries.
Twain’s personality had so many of those idiosyncrasies that mark men of culture. He had a longstanding fascination with science and spent a lot of time in Tesla’s[^11] laboratory. He wasn’t just fooling around either; Twain patented three inventions, including a commercially rather successful self-pasting scrapbook[^12]. He squandered a lot of that revenue (and that from his books) in ill-fated investments[^13], including $300,000 in a failed mechanical typesetting machine, after which he had to file for bankruptcy. According to Wikipedia, “many point to his over-investment in the Paige typesetting machine and other inventions as the cause of not only his family’s financial decline but also the decline of his wit and humor”.
His repute among contemporaries was partly on account of his work as a humourist, and he has been called the “greatest humorist the United States has produced”. He also did a form of what we now know as stand-up comedy. His Struggle to learn Deutsch culminated in a lecture in the German language, The Awful German Language, delivered in Vienna. Maybe one day, when I know enough French, I too shall lecture on Les Horreurs de la langue Français[^14].
Not even his death was unremarkable. Twain, who was born just after a sighting of the Hailey’s Comet, predicted that he would “go out with it” as well. He died a day after the comet was at its perigee.
I realise, of course, that I haven’t written much about the literary aspects of his life. This is partly because QMs in MELA quizzes think literary clues are too mainstream and partly because it’s been a while since I last read his books. I might do that in the future, maybe once I transition to full-time literary critic.
Writing this was fun[^15]. I should do more of this stuff.
[^1] Another one of those QM’s pets
[^2] I only remembered him as the author of BFG, nearly costing us qualification in the Inter IIT MELA quiz. I might also have recalled him as the author who, along with Enid Blyton, I had ridiculed my little sister for still reading at an age where I had read the likes of the Odyssey, the Three Musketeers and 1984. In the quiz, I was split between him and Dr Seuss- another pair of contemporaries with similar literary audiences and almost coterminous lives
[^3] I am not, to my dismay, the progenitor of the word quadrilogy. The more common term is the rather unseemly tetralogy. Additionally, readers should note that three unfinished books on the same subject were published posthumously, which would make it, like Harry Potter, a heptalogy. No, Cursed Child doesn’t count.
[^4] I had encountered one in a MELA practice set and failed to recall his name, although I had identified the work as Tom Sawyer from the description of the plot. I ended up answering Lewis Carroll as a consolation guess for the sake of attempting, even though I knew it wasn’t him. The ensuing embarrassment contributed to the writing of this essay.
[^42] What even did you do in your childhood if you haven’t read these classics? Also, there’s got to be a better way of adding enumerated footnotes in markdown. Tired of changing the numbers of all subsequent footnotes whenever I get ideas for quips. SMH Jekyll doesn’t support linked footnotes natively.
[^5] I intend to write on the subject in more detail in the near future
[^6] Unsurprisingly, the subject of a question in one of those quiz sets we practised on for the Inter IIT Cultural Meet held in IIT Madras in January 2023. I correctly guessed that the person involved was Mark Twain (one of the rare instances I recalled the name) from the sheer eccentricity of the endeavour it described
[^7] Of course, the grand old man himself. Also, what if this is the origin of the phrase Pradhan Sevak? What if he’s a well-read guy with a thing for Mark Twain trivia? We’ll never know for sure.
[^8] Not to be confused with Anglerfish, the old, nasty predator which attracts little fish in the deep dark with its shiny appendage
[^9] In stark contrast to a contemporary of comparable literary repute, who also wrote about a juvenile’s adventures in the wild. Twain, too was initially an American imperialist, supporting Hawaii’s conquest. He later had a change of heart and opposed the Philippines War.
[^10] A very fascinating object that must have been one of humanity’s first psychedelics after some mushrooms. I know this because I bought a bronzish one for my little sister from a faux antiques shop in Delhi Haat. For the record, I have no experience with hallucinogens and do not intend to acquire any.
[^11] The OG eccentric madlad. I first read about him in a book called Philip Ardagh’s Book of Howlers, Blunders and Random Mistakery, which is an absolute gem of a book, especially for quizzers and those who delight in trivia over tea.
[^12] I intend to start keeping a scrapbook some day. The product sounds rather convenient, but a Google search threw up mostly articles about Twain and one scrapbook product priced at Rs 5000.
[^13] Relatable. On a related note, the US (and, to some extent, the Indian) stock market is hellishly volatile these days.
[^14] I know enough French not to have copy-pasted this from Google Translate. Also, Twain took potshots at French too, most notably in the title of a publication The Jumping Frog: in English, then in French, and then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil
[^15] The first draft was on paper, which makes this the first time in aeons I wrote something of this length using a pen. For those curious, the footnotes are around 500 words. For the literary loathers of jargon, I’m not verbose in this essay, as Grammarly proved (to my disappointment) when it told me my usage of rare and unique vocabulary was below average.