SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 51 (of 78)
Runaway Remarks and Carriages (1877)
Chapter 51
Runaway Remarks and Carriages (1877)
In 1877, at a gathering commemorating Whittier’s birthday, I gave a speech which was deemed a misfire. During my remarks, Howells was that embarrassed that he couldn’t even look at me.
I apologized to the gents supposedly slighted (Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow), but years later re-read my speech and found nothing amiss about it.
EDITOR’S NOTES: The “Whittier” Twain mentions here was the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Twain inaugurated the “roast” when he told a tall tale on this occasion, set in the backwoods of the California gold rush region featuring as its antagonistic protagonists the revered New England triumvirate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Twain masterfully tossed these into the bubbling and sigh-popping mixture that so discommoded his friend Howells—and others, albeit to a lesser extent, at least for the most part.
In the speech, Twain related how the boorish trio barge in on a not-so-long-suffering miner in his cabin, the upshot of which is that the old prospector finally determines to never let any other such visitors intrude on his abode, explaining, “I ain’t suited to a littery atmosphere.”
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Quarry Farm tenant farmer John T. Lewis stopped a runaway carriage in Elmira in late August, 1877. Twain wrote of this in a letter to his close friend William Dean Howells and his wife, the most pertinent paragraph of which reads:
Lewis, the prodigious … saw the frantic horse plunging down the hill toward him on a full gallop, throwing his heels as high as a man’s head at every jump. So Lewis turned his team diagonally across the road just at the “turn,” thus making a V with the fence. The running horse could not escape that, but must enter it. Then Lewis sprang to the ground and stood in this V. He gathered his vast strength, and with a perfect Creedmoor aim he seized the gray horse’s bit as he plunged by and fetched him up standing!
The “Creedmoor” Twain mentions is in reference to a long-range rifle match which took place on the Creed farm in upstate New York in 1874.
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Twain predicted the portable telephone in his story The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton, which he wrote in 1877. He outdid himself in 1898 when, while living in Vienna , Austria, he wrote a sketch called From the ‘London Times’ of 1904, which contained a device, the telelectroscope, which could be interpreted as foreseeing both television and the Internet.
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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.