SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 74 (of 78)
Dr. Twain, I Presume? (1907)
Chapter 74
Dr. Twain, I Presume? (1907)
When I was a boy, I gave up the red sash worn by the Cadets of Temperance because opportunities to swell around in it were too few and far between. It wasn’t worth the effort involved. That club required me to abstain from something I immensely enjoyed—smoking tobacco. But I have changed; now, I never smoke . . . more than one cigar at a time.
I am getting off the track of what I want to report, though. I always missed that red sash. In May of 1907, I was finally given another chance to parade around in a showy crimson ribbon when I received a cablegram from Oxford University, offering me an honorary doctorate.
A doctor, me? I was not competent to doctor a thing, except maybe my own literature. Not a bad outcome for a boy who didn’t stay in school beyond the fifth grade, and who played hooky more often than he ciphered or cited.
I had never intended to travel so far again, but this offer was such a delightful surprise that I mustered up the energy and enthusiasm necessary to once again board a ship bound for England. This was one privilege that I could not pass up. It was worth it—worth the time, and the effort, and the bother—to go over there and get that thing and bring it home. Now I could have my red sash without having to practice abstinence—or even temperance, for that matter.
On the whole, it is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them. But it is better yet to deserve them and get them.
Among others marching in the procession of honorees was my old friend Rudyard Kipling.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain began his final sea voyage (excepting the one to Bermuda which immediately preceded his death) to receive his degree exactly forty years after he embarked on the Quaker City on his “Innocents Abroad” excursion.
Twain’s autobiography details why the Oxford degree meant so much to him:
Oxford is healing a secret old sore of mine which has been causing me sharp anguish once a year for many, many years. Privately I am quite well aware that for a generation I have been as widely celebrated a literary person as America has ever produced, and I am also privately aware that in my own peculiar line I have stood at the head of my guild during all that time, with none to dispute the place with me; and so it has been an annual pain to me to see our universities confer an aggregate of two hundred and fifty honorary degrees upon persons of small and temporary consequence—persons of local and evanescent notoriety, persons who drift into obscurity and are forgotten inside of ten years—and never a degree offered to me! In these past thirty-five or forty years I have seen our universities distribute nine or ten thousand honorary degrees and overlook me every time. Of all those thousands, not fifty were known outside of America, and not a hundred are still famous in it. This neglect would have killed a less robust person than I am, but it has not killed me; it has only shortened my life and weakened my constitution; but I shall get my strength back now. Out of those decorated and forgotten thousands not more than ten have been decorated by Oxford, and I am quite well aware—and so is America, and so is the rest of Christendom—that an Oxford decoration is a loftier distinction than is conferrable by any other university on either side of the ocean, and is worth twenty-five of any other, whether foreign or domestic.
This last (over-?)estimation of the value of an Oxford honorary degree may explain why Twain neglected to mention the several other honorary degrees that had already been conferred upon him at this point, such as two that he had received from Yale (Master of Arts in 1888 and Doctor of Literature in 1902) as well as Doctor of Laws from the State University of Missouri, in Columbia, in 1902.
In his acceptance speech at Oxford, Twain, speaking of writers of his sort (humorous), explained that there was a method to their “madness,” saying, “Ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it—the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties.”
In a speech written in late 1907, Twain had this to say about receiving the honorary degree from Oxford:
I could not help holding my head a little high, for I realized that I had surpassed my life’s loftiest ambition, since, whether I deserved the great place or not, I was nevertheless representing in my person, and properly gowned in imposing scarlet, one of the giant nations of the earth.
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Twain wrote his anti-bullfighting short story A Horse’s Tale in 1907.
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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.