More Fool You

Mark Twain’s early work

The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass by Mark Twain, edited by Charles Honce

Very quickly and without much ado, I’ll say first that this book is not very funny. Why is that? It’s by Mark Twain, and he is funny. So what gives?

It’s juvenile. That’s what it is. Juvenile: very much an early work. That’s no bad thing, and we need some of it about. Puerility has a purpose, and a point. We all have to start somewhere, to try things out, to dip our dainty, terrified toes into the pools of parody and the grotesque. And that is what Mark Twain, writing as Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, did. But first, readers, a little context, to settle and line the stomach.

Twain, still going by his natal name of Sam Clemens, floated around in his early years. His brother Orion periodically employed him, and Sam was employed himself, as a typesetter and a printmaker, working on other people’s newspapers and magazines. Possibly writing a little for his brother’s paper. And thinking, perhaps, about wandering, about travel.

That’s what this book comes from. Twain (as Clemens), a man in his very early twenties, apt to walk about, suddenly getting the urge to travel, to head off and to make his fortune. And saying to a newspaper editor that he would embark on a journey from where he was in the middle of nowhere, USA, to South America. And that he would like to sell some letters of travel to help him pay his way.

As it happened, he did not get to South America. He did not make money in the gold fields or in farming beef cattle on the pampas. He didn’t even get close. In reality, Clemens (as Twain then was) would be was detained (he was waylaid) many hundreds of miles pre-South America. And so the series of travel letters, sold for five dollars per piece, stopped after only three. But the three that the editors of the newspaper received were printed, two of them more than once, and Twain (Clemens) was paid.

Being paid to write, even once, means you are a better than average writer. And being paid gives you the encouragement and the bravery to go on.

This book is a 1928 collecting of those three travel letters, with a lot of additional padding. We have a brief prefatory note from the bibliophile and parodist Vincent Starrett, who says that the letters themselves are not very good. A fine start. We have a longer introduction by the editor, Charles Honce, who tries to give them a little of the old spit and polish. He says, quite sweetly, that this volume is for friends of Twain, who want to make sure that his early works, though not intrinsically valuable, have a good and decent home.

And we have, to conclude, a brief pen portrait and memoir by the then-famous journalist James O’Donnell Bennett, who profiles Mark Twain’s brother Orion Clemens. A man who was an intellectual, a philanthropist, and the idiot of every village he set foot in, according to the reporter. A man, it is claimed, who ate a loaf of unbaked bread, set aside to proof under his intended lunch, and when asked how his repast was said it was fine, if a little heavy.

All of this, if true, is fine and fair enough and entertaining. But sandwiched between the front and end matter are the letters from Snodgrass themselves. I’ve read them all. What do I think?

I must confess that I laughed once. I did laugh once. I think it might have been a suggestion that if someone is damned, he ought to be sent there via Cincinnati, which is more expensive than hell, so he can be robbed, too.

Or possibly it was at some of Snodgrass’s moments of confusion on the railroads.

But the rest of these three letters are not funny. I can see what Twain (Clemens, writing as Snodgrass) was trying to do. It was grotesque parody.

This was not out of place or unpopular in Twain’s own day. Indeed, even while Twain was at his commerical peak, he works were regularly rivalled in sales by stories of Mr Dooley, a ridiculous Irish caricature written Finley Peter Dunne, whose speech is so colloquial that it’s essentially impossible to read in the twenty-first century.

But there are limits.

With his purposeful misspellings and his rural phrases. Twain (Clemens, writing as Snodgrass) was trying to create the classic archetype of a country rube arriving in the city. Scratching his head and declaring every event and trend the darnedest thing. Taking everything as a personal insult. Perceiving the city folk to move too quickly, to manhandle his luggage, to be in such an awful hurry. And endlessly standing up, announcing who he is, and threatening to smack anyone who seems to be deprecating his honour.

The kind of man who, when someone is shouting at him to get his boots off the wall of a theatre balcony, takes up the cry of ‘boots! Boots!’ with the rest of them. And who takes any instant where nothing much is happening musically (even during a play) to produce his comb and paper, and to insist on beginning a little recital of his very own.

What I’ve written above is funnier than the letters themselves. I state it more succinctly.

All that said, what Twain (Clemens, writing as Snodgrass) did show here was some aspect of the American character. Immense stupidity existing symbiotically with tremendous pride. These were the kinds of people who, after the invention of the motor car, frequently drove while drunk. Wildly overconfident with no reason to be. Typical Americans, you might say. Ideal Americans. Salt of the earth. The very best there is at what they do.