SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 58 (of 78)
The Pendulum and the Pit (1889)
Chapter 58
The Pendulum and the Pit (1889)
“Connecticut Yankee” was, perhaps as much so as “Huck Finn,” a protest novel. The stop-at-nothing greed of rapacious commercialists, the corruption of kings and royalty and aristocracies and suchlike institutions, and the hypocrisy and absurdity of professional religionists were the targets of my fiery zeal. The underlying purpose was especially that it be a satire on the divine right of kings. Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.
I had a pulpit, as the world’s most famous author, and I thought I ought to use it. Does it seem as if I was preaching? If so, it was out of my line. I only did it because the rest of the clergy seemed to have been on vacation, or asleep, or something. The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.
The book had its genesis this way: While browsing together in a bookstore one day during the “Twins of Genius” tour with Cable, he highly recommended to me Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
This fifteenth-century work proved an inspiration to me in writing Connecticut Yankee, which was published in 1889.
At that time, I considered this novel to be my “swan-song,” as I had become enamored with a marvelous invention—an automatic compositor or, if you will, a robotic printer’s devil.
With my prescient foresight, and my intimate knowledge of the printer’s trade, I easily perceived that Paige’s automated typesetter was the greatest invention since the printing press itself, and so I invested heavily in it.
I expected to live lavishly on the returns from my investment once the typesetter took the printing world by storm. But I was over-hasty in my prognostications. Still, I am not against investing altogether. In fact, there are only two times in life when a man should not speculate: when he cannot afford to do it, and when he can.
EDITOR’S NOTES: The full title of what Twain calls “Connecticut Yankee” is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; some consider it to be the first American science-fiction novel.
It was also a protest novel, as he states above, on several fronts. One of Twain’s main targets in it were royalty and aristocracy. For example, in Connecticut Yankee, he wrote of such:
An aristocracy is but a band of slaveholders under another name
-and:
Any kind of royalty, howsoever modified, any kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don’t believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies—a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.
-and:
...some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world. . . . this gilded minority, instead of being in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and banners flying, at the other end of it; . . . The priests had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially such poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter there and become respectfully quiet.
Yes, another target of Twain’s wrath and ire was the professional clergy class. In Mary Lawton’s book A Lifetime with Mark Twain: The Memories of Katy Leary, for Thirty Years His Faithful and Devoted Servant, Katy recounted this reaction to “Connecticut Yankee”:
I remember Father Hardy said to me one time …after Mr. Clemens wrote A Yankee at King Arthur’s Court—well, Father Hardy said: “Why, how can you work for such a man as Mark Twain! Why, he’s just the biggest atheist,” he called it, “that ever was, and he’s written an awful book.”
I says, “Father Hardy, have you read that book?”
“No,” he says, “I haven’t, but I’ve heard enough about it.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll get it and let you read it, and I’ll explain it to you, if you don’t know what it means.”
Then Father Hardy said, “The way he’s written up the Catholic religion is something terrible!”
“Why,” I said, “he doesn’t say any more about the Catholic religion than any other. When he wrote that book he was trying to put down ‘higher authority,’ so one man was just about as good as another. He said the low man (as he called it) was just as good in the sight of God as the King.” And I says: “Don’t you know about them pictures—the low man being kicked out by the priest, the priest being kicked out by the bishop, and the bishop being kicked out by the cardinal and the cardinal being kicked out by the Pope. All kicking and pushing each other out to see who could be the highest. Well,” I says, “he put the low man on one scale and the King on the other, and they was found just about equal. One didn’t weigh any more than the other. So Mr. Clemens, he wanted to make the world see it that way—that one would be as good as the other if their hearts was all right. That was the idea he had in mind, I guess, when he wrote that book,” I says. “And you haven’t read that, or if you have, you read it without understanding.”
That last sentence of Katy’s could be applied to much of Twain’s work, perhaps most especially to “Huck Finn.”
***
In a letter written to Howells in the latter part of 1889, referring to Connecticut Yankee, Twain shows that he himself was the one to describe his stylus as having been superheated in a place ostensibly full of fire and sulphur:
Well, my book is written—let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn’t be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying and multiplying; but now they can’t ever be said. And besides, they would require a library—and a pen warmed up in hell.
***
In her 1961 book Mark Twain & Me, Dorothy Quick related something that occurred on one of her visits to Twain’s house, as he was reading to her from Connecticut Yankee in 1907:
He often stopped reading to explain bits about the narrative. He told me that the whole idea had come to him in a dream in which he, himself, was back in King Arthur’s Court yet kept a complete remembrance of his nineteenth-century character; the dream had amused him so much that he had carried it ever farther into a book. “That finished all the floweriness of chivalry, Dorothy, and showed the knights as they really were, stripped of all that romantic nonsense. It took me several years and a great deal of study to achieve it.”
“Study?” I was astonished that Mark Twain, who knew so much, should have to study. This was beyond my comprehension.
“Of course, I studied the old legends, the history, the customs. Writing isn’t all play, dear heart. Sometimes even I have to work over it,” he drawled, and then went on even slower, with the laugh lines about his eyes deepening. “You see, you can’t expect to achieve anything without work, and the more you put into it the better it will be. Only be sure, dear, to hold just a little back always, so the public will want more! That’s one thing no writer can afford to forget—their public. If they do, pretty soon they find that they haven’t got any.”
***
Twain and Rudyard Kipling (author of The Jungle Book; Kim; Just So Stories; and much of note besides that) were admirers of each other’s work. Twain at times called Kipling his favorite author. In 1889, Kipling, thirty years Twain’s junior, made a pilgrimage to Elmira, New York, to pay Twain a visit. Kipling wrote of this encounter: “Once indeed he put his hand on my shoulder. It was an investiture of the Star of India, blue silk, trumpets and diamond studded jewel, all complete. If hereafter among the changes and chances of this mortal life I fall to cureless ruin I will tell the superintendent of the workhouse that Mark Twain once put his hand on my shoulder, and he shall give me a room to myself and a double allowance of paupers’ tobacc0.”
Seventeen years later, in 1906, Twain recalled this meeting: “[Kipling] is a most remarkable man — and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.