"Rebel With a Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs" — Foreword and Preface
Tuesday Serialization 7/19/22
Foreword, by Blackbird Crow Raven
In early 2020, I was touring Stormfield, Mark Twain’s last residence, in Redding, Connecticut. Standing in what had been Twain’s upstairs bedroom, I felt the floorboard beneath me “give” a little. This made me curious, but I betrayed no outward sign of that. After initially following the rest of the tour group out of the room, with a feigned nonchalance I lagged behind the rest, took a place at the tail of that train, and then surreptitiously slipped back into the bedroom. Making sure that I was not being watched, I gently pried up the loose floorboard and discovered a sheaf of yellowed papers inside brown wrapping paper, tied with a string.
Partially in the interests of truth and science, but mainly out of my aroused curiosity, I hid the packet underneath my shirt and rejoined the group, trying to look interested in the guide’s memorized spiel while waiting for an opportunity to abandon the rest of the group and get away to some place private. I was too excited about the contents of the packet I had discovered to pay attention to what the tour guide was saying, though, for I had taken a cursory glance at the contents of the package I had spirited out of the room, and it seemed as if this manuscript was quite possibly the product of Twain’s own hand.
On finally arriving back home, I sat down at my desk, opened the packet, and quickly ascertained that the sheaf of papers contained therein was indeed a manuscript hand-written by Twain and signed by him. And it was not just a long-lost Twain sketch or essay—it was a never-before-known-about-or-even-rumored-about work! Not divulging until now just where it was that I came upon the manuscript, I have until this time led people to believe that I had found it among odds and ends at a garage sale somewhere in the Boston suburbs, the exact whereabouts of which I let on to have forgotten.
I don’t consider what I did in borrowing the manuscript to be wrong—after all, Twain has no living descendants. In such a circumstance, I consider the oft-repeated phrases “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” and “Finder’s keepers, losers weepers” to be ethically or at least legally applicable in this case. The way I see it, I have just as much right to the manuscript as anyone else does. Besides, as you will see in his comments at the beginning of this manuscript, Twain granted publication rights to whoever found the document (provided no family members or descendants of his were still living).
Due to the fact that Twain himself describes the purpose of the manuscript in his own introduction below, I will leave it at that and allow you to “dive right in” as I did on discovering this historic document.
First, though, let me say that Twain gave this manuscript the title The Turning-Points of My Life (plural), but I have opted to view this as a working title only, and changed the title to Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs. The reasoning behind this alteration is that Twain’s chosen title could be confusing to people familiar with his essay The Turning-Point of My Life (singular), which was apparently written just prior to his penning of this manuscript, and was published in February, 1910, two months before his death.
I have roped my fellow Twainesque Twainiac B. Clay Shannon into serving as editor of this volume. His contributions/caveats/explanations/expoundings and theorizings appear in boxes that look like the following:
EDITOR’S NOTES: (Editorial comments appear here)
Shannon also separated Twain’s manuscript, which had no breaks in it, into chapters, and gave those chapters titles in addition to numbers.
Finally, Shannon segmented the manuscript into four parts, naming the final three after what he says seems to have been Twain’s life-long “causes,” namely Justice, Love, and Truth.
The events Twain chose to discuss in this, his final manuscript, are those that formed him as a person and informed his writings.
PART First: ORIENTATION
(1835-1861)
“A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think that is as far as he can get. I think that no foreigner can report its interior—its soul, its life, its speech, its thought. I think that a knowledge of these things is acquirable in only one way: not two or four or six—absorption; years and years of intercourse with the life concerned; of living it, indeed; sharing personally in its shames and prides, its joys and griefs, its loves and hates, its prosperities and reverses, its shows and shabbinesses, its deep patriotisms, its whirlwinds of political passion, its adorations—of flag, and heroic dead, and the glory of the national name. Observation? Of what real value is it? One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.” — Mark Twain
PREFACE
The Turning-Points of My Life
A short time ago, I thought I had delivered myself of the last of my autobiography.
Then Jean died.
I poured out my anguish and despair in an article about her life, and its end, calling it The Death of Jean. I declared it the final chapter of my autobiography.
But later, on request, I added an explanatory sketch on how it came about that I had spent my life in literature. I called this The Turning-Point of My Life.
Now, though, I realize that was not enough, and I am going to write here—in my own hand, not dictated—an expanded version of that sketch. I feel the need to record some reminiscences that, to the insightful reader, will shed light on what made me who I became—the events and circumstances that formed me, and found their way into my writings, in ways both plain and direct and in ways more subtle. These were the turning-points of my life, as it were.
As to the reason for writing this in my own hand—after enjoying the luxury of just talking and having someone else take down my words, as I did with my autobiography—I am spurred on by the intrepid example that General Grant left a quarter of a century ago, and want to make sure that Clara, and my grandchild, whoever it may turn out to be, are sufficiently provided for.
I don’t expect to live out the year. That tramp and derelict of the skies, Halley’s Comet, is about to make its long-awaited return. I came in with the comet, in 1835, when it heralded the coming of this unaccountable freak, and its return will be the harbinger that it is time for me to go.
Besides, as already referred to, I recently discovered that Clara is pregnant with my first grandchild. And I don’t want to meet him or her. Do you find this a strange sentiment? It is because then I should form a bond of affection with the baby, and should then necessarily want to overstay my welcome on this planet, and set myself up for a too-drawn-out departure. It is time. The time for my exit from the world stage. This is my absolute and final encore.
As alluded to, I have previously recorded my notablest successes and failures, as well as my most interesting and amusing experiences, in my autobiography. There is no reason to dredge all that up again here. My aim herein is to be as truthful as possible, thus rejecting the common custom of infusing one’s deathbed utterances with either false modesty or unwarranted bravado. There’s a breed of humility which is itself a species of showing off, and I will try to keep that sort of humility out of this. I will present the events that made a significant impact on me, without necessarily expounding on precisely how they affected me. The reader can supply that himself by simply soliloquizing, “How would this event have affected me had I been in Twain’s shoes?” Your answer to that question will probably be close to how I was affected, and what it did for me—or to me.
For the most part, I will simply briefly recount the events that impressed me the most—those that had the most profound influence on my thoughts and personality. I will leave it to the reader and the future scholars and scourers and analyzers to “connect the dots” and make their psychoanalysis. They can say what they will, for I will not be around to defend myself, or care. Let it go.
With this record I want to make it manifest that when people, while thinking of me, envision in their mind’s eye simply cigar smoke and jokes, they may only be considering me superficially, from a distance.
It is often so that we do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves. Every man is wholly honest to himself and to God, but not to any one else.
Still, a work of this sort—a swan-song, as it were—is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell—the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.
But it is not necessarily my intention for this book to ever be published. I am writing it mainly to get these things off my chest and be done with them.
I shall hide this manuscript in a spot that few would ever think to look, and it is probable that it won’t be found for many decades, and quite possible that it will never be unearthed at all. This should not be understood to intimate that I am going to literally bury it in the ground, as you will know if you are reading this and have found it—or have been posted on where it was found.
If this self-eulogy is discovered while either Clara, my grandchild, or perhaps even grandchildren are still living, my will is that they be the ones to benefit from anything it brings in the way of pecuniary results. My only demand is that it be printed in its fullness, without anything being subtracted from it or modified—not even its orthography or punctuation. If none of the above-named are yet living on its discovery, let the Stanley who finds it be the benefactor of its harvest. Let it go. Let me go.
EDITOR’S NOTES: The Jean spoken of here is Twain’s youngest child, who was always called that, although her birth name was Jane Lampton Clemens (born in 1880, she was named for her paternal grandmother, who died a decade after the birth of her grand-daughter, near the end of 1890).
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The “General Grant” Twain refers to is Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, who also served as the President of the United States from 1869-1877. Grant soldiered on with the writing of his memoirs while suffering greatly from the cancer that was soon to kill him. Up to the very end of his life, Grant forced himself to continue working until his memoirs had been completed, knowing that his family would need the proceeds from it after his death.
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Twain did not date this manuscript, but internal evidence indicates it was written over a period of several weeks in the early months of 1910—perhaps in March, the month before his death.
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Clara was Twain’s middle daughter, and the only one of his four children still living at the end of his own life. She survived until 1962, and her daughter, Nina Gabrilowitsch, lived from 1910 to 1966.
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The “Stanley” Twain mentions is an allusion to Henry M. Stanley (1841-1904), a Welsh adventurer who fought on both sides in the American Civil War, and who famously tracked down Dr. Livingstone in Tanzania, Africa, in 1871.
The book’s amazon page is here.