Autobiography of Mark Twain (30 page)

The wait on the balcony was not dull. There was the spacious avenue stretching into the distance, right and left, to look at, with its double wall of massed humanity, an eager and excited lot, broiling in the sun, and a comforting spectacle to contemplate from the shade. That is, on our side of the street they were in the sun, but not on the other side, where the Park is—there was dense shade there. They were good-natured people, but they gave the policemen plenty of trouble, for they were constantly surging into the roadway and being hustled back again. They were in fine spirits, yet it was said that the most of them had been waiting there in the jam three or four hours—and two-thirds of them were women and girls.

At last a mounted policeman came galloping down the road in solitary state—first sign that pretty soon the show would open. After five minutes he was followed by a man on a decorated bicycle. Next, a marshal’s assistant sped by on a polished and shiny black horse. Five minutes later—distant strains of music. Five more, and far up the street the head of the procession twinkles into view.

That
was
a procession! I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. According to my understanding, it was to be composed of shooting-match clubs from all over the Austrian Empire, with a club or two from France and Germany as guests. What I had in my imagination was 25,000 men in sober dress, drifting monotonously by, with rifles slung to their backs—a New York target-excursion on a large scale. In my fancy I could see the colored brothers toting the ice-pails and targets, and swabbing off perspiration.

But this was a different matter. One of the most engaging spectacles in the world is a Wagner opera-force marching onto the stage, with its music braying and its banners flying. This was that spectacle infinitely magnified, and with the glories of the sun upon it and a countless multitude of excited witnesses to wave the handkerchiefs and do the hurrahing. It was grand, and beautiful, and sumptuous; and no tinsel, no shams; no tin armor, no cotton velvet, no make-believe silk, no Birmingham oriental rugs; everything was what it professed to be. It is the clothes that make a procession; and for these costumes all the centuries were drawn upon, even from times which were already ancient when Kaiser Rudolph himself was alive.

There were bodies of spearmen with plain steel casques of a date a thousand years ago; other bodies in more ornamental casques of a century or two later, and with breastplates added; other bodies with chain-mail elaborations—some armed with crossbows, some with the earliest crop of matchlocks; still other bodies clothed in the stunningly picturesque plate-armor and plumed great helmets of the middle of the sixteenth century. And then there were bodies of men-at-arms in the darling velvets of the Middle Ages, and nobles on horseback in the same—doublets with huge puffed sleeves, wide brigand hats with great plumes; and the rich and effective colors—old gold, black, and scarlet; deep yellow, black, and scarlet; brown, black, and scarlet. A portly figure clothed like that, with a two-handed sword as long as a billiard cue, and mounted on a big draft-horse finely caparisoned, with the sun flooding the splendid colors—a figure like that, with fifty duplicates marching in his rear, is procession enough, all by itself.

Yet that was merely a detail. All the centuries were passing by; passing by in glories of color and multiplicities of strange and quaint and curious and beautiful costumes not to be seen in this world now outside the opera and the picture-books. And now and then, in the midst of
this flowing tide of splendors appeared a sharply contrasting note—a mounted committee in evening dress—swallow-tails, white kids and shiny new plug hats; and right in their rear, perhaps, a hundred capering clowns in thunder-and-lightning dress, or a band of silken pages out of ancient times, plumed and capped and daggered, dainty as rainbows, and mincing along in flesh-colored tights; and as handy at it, too, as if they had been born and brought up to it.

At intervals there was a great platform car, bethroned and grandly canopied, upholstered in silks, carpeted with oriental rugs, and freighted with girls clothed in gala costumes. There were several military companies dressed in uniforms of various bygone periods—among others, one dating back a century and a half, and another of Andreas Hofer’s time and region; following this latter was a large company of men and women and girls dressed in the society fashions of a period stretching from the Directory down to about 1840—a thing worth seeing. Among the prettiest and liveliest and most picturesque costumes in the pageant were those worn by regiments and regiments of peasants, from the Tyrol, and Bohemia, and everywhere in the Empire. They are of ancient origin, but are still worn to-day.

I have seen no procession which evoked more enthusiasm than this one brought out. It would have made any country deliver its emotions, for it was a most stirring sight to see. At the end of this year I shall be sixty-three—if alive—and about the same if dead. I have been looking at processions for sixty years; and curiously enough, all my really wonderful ones have come in the last three years: one in India in ’96, the Queen’s Record procession in London last year, and now this one. As an appeal to the imagination—an object-lesson synopsizing the might and majesty and spread of the greatest empire the world has seen—the Queen’s procession stands first; as a picture for the eye, this one beats it; and in this regard it even falls no very great way short, perhaps, of that Jeypore pageant—and that was a dream of enchantment.

In August 1898, after several months of intensive work on his autobiography, Clemens decided to write up how he came to publish what he called his first magazine article, about the burning at sea of the clipper ship
Hornet
. At the end of August he told Henry Harper, “I want to write a magazine article of a reminiscent sort. The first magazine article I ever published appeared in Harper’s Monthly 31 years ago under the name of (by typographical error)
MacSwain
. Can you send it to me?” (30 Aug 1898, InU-Li). Harper must have sent him tear sheets of “Forty-Three Days in an Open Boat,” which had been published in the December 1866 issue of
Harper’s
several months before Clemens published his first book,
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches
. “Forty-Three Days” was not, of course, Mark Twain’s “first magazine article,” since he had already published dozens of articles in
The Californian
and in several East Coast journals. But it was the first nonfictional work he had published in so eminent a journal as
Harper’s
, and even though it was by no means humorous, it obviously followed upon his decision the previous year, in October 1865, to seriously pursue a literary career (19 and 20 Oct 1865 to OC and MEC,
L1
,322–25).

The lengthy manuscript that Clemens wrote in October 1898 is now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. His Vienna typist, Marion von Kendler, made a typescript of it (now lost), which Clemens revised and eventually published in the November 1899 issue of the
Century Magazine
(SLC 1899). The
Century
publication made no mention of the autobiography, but the original manuscript shows that Clemens initially regarded the article as part of that work: “This is Chapter XIV of my unfinished Autobiography and the way it is getting along it promises to remain an unfinished one.” Before the manuscript was typed he revised “unfinished” to “unpublished” and deleted the words following “Autobiography.” In February 1899, when he submitted the revised typescript to
Century
editor Richard Watson Gilder, he claimed he had “abandoned my Autobiography, & am not going to finish it; but I took a reminiscent chapter out of it & had it type-written, thinking it would make a readable magazine article” (25 Feb 1899, CtY-BR). The article, which Clemens subsequently revised again at the request of one of the
Hornet
passengers, was collected in
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays
(1900) and
My Début as a Literary Person with Other Essays and Stories
(1903). The text that follows here is a critical reconstruction, based on the manuscript and revised as Clemens published it in the
Century
, not as it was reprinted in 1900 and 1903.

In 1906 Clemens considered including the piece in his Autobiographical Dictation of 20 February, noting in pencil on the typescript, “Insert, here my account of the ‘Hornet’ disaster, published in the ‘Century’ about 1898 as being a chapter from my Autobiography.” For several reasons, that instruction cannot be carried out. But it shows that the piece was among those Clemens considered including in the final form of his autobiography, and it is therefore included in this section of preliminary drafts. Neither Paine nor Neider published this text.

My Debut as a Literary Person
*

By Mark Twain (formerly “Mike Swain.”)

1866

October 1, 1898
. In those early days I had already published one little thing (“The Jumping
1866
Frog,”) in an eastern paper, but I did not consider that that counted. In my view, a person who
published things in a mere newspaper could not properly claim recognition as a Literary Person; he must rise away above that; he must appear in a Magazine. He would then be a Literary Person; also he would be famous—right away. These two ambitions were strong upon me. This was in 1866. I prepared my contribution, and then looked around for the best magazine to go up to glory in. I selected Harper’s Monthly. The contribution was accepted. I signed it “M
ARK
T
WAIN
,” for that name had some currency on the Pacific Coast, and it was my idea to spread it all over the world, now, at this one jump. The article appeared in the December number, and I sat up a month waiting for the January number—for that one would contain the year’s list of contributors, my name would be in it, and I should be famous and could give the banquet I was meditating.

I did not give the banquet. I had not written the “Mark Twain” distinctly; it was a fresh name to Harper’s printers, and they put it
Mike Swain
or
MacSwain
, I do not remember which. At any rate I was not celebrated, and I did not give the banquet. I was a Literary Person, but that was all—a buried one; buried alive.

My article was about the burning of the clipper ship
Hornet
on the line, May 3d, 1866. There were thirty-one men on board at the time, and I was in Honolulu when the fifteen lean and ghostly survivors arrived there after a voyage of forty-three days in an open boat through the blazing tropics on
ten days’ rations
of food. A very remarkable trip; but it was conducted by a captain who was a remarkable man, otherwise there would have been no survivors. He was a New Englander of the best sea-going stock of the old capable times—Captain Josiah Mitchell.

I was in the Islands to write letters for the weekly edition of the Sacramento
Union
, a rich and influential daily journal which hadn’t any use for them, but could afford to spend twenty dollars a week for nothing. The proprietors were lovable and well-beloved men; long ago dead, no doubt, but in me there is at least one person who still holds them in grateful remembrance; for I dearly wanted to see the Islands, and they listened to me and gave me the opportunity when there was but slender likelihood that it could profit them in any way.

I had been in the Islands several months when the survivors arrived. I was laid up in my room at the time, and unable to walk. Here was a great occasion to serve my journal, and I not able to take advantage of it. Necessarily I was in deep trouble. But by good luck his Excellency Anson Burlingame was there at the time, on his way to take up his post in China where he did such good work for the United States. He came and put me on a stretcher and had me carried to the hospital where the shipwrecked men were, and I never needed to ask a question. He attended to all of that himself, and I had nothing to do but make the notes. It was like him to take that trouble. He was a great man, and a great American; and it was in his fine nature to come down from his high office and do a friendly turn whenever he could.

We got through with this work at six in the evening. I took no dinner, for there was no time to spare if I would beat the other correspondents. I spent four hours arranging the notes in their proper order, then wrote all night and beyond it; with this result: that I had a very long and detailed account of the
Hornet
episode ready at nine in the morning, while the correspondents of the San Francisco journals had nothing but a brief outline report—for they didn’t sit up. The now-and-then schooner was to sail for San Francisco about nine; when I reached the
dock she was free forward and was just casting off her stern-line. My fat envelop was thrown by a strong hand, and fell on board all right, and my victory was a safe thing. All in due time the ship reached San Francisco, but it was my complete report which made the stir and was telegraphed to the New York papers. By Mr. Cash; he was in charge of the Pacific bureau of the New York
Herald
at the time.

When I returned to California by and by, I went up to Sacramento and presented a bill for general correspondence, at twenty dollars a week. It was paid. Then I presented a bill for “special” service on the
Hornet
matter for three columns of solid nonpareil at
a hundred dollars a column
. The cashier didn’t faint, but he came rather near it. He sent for the proprietors, and they came and never uttered a protest. They only laughed, in their jolly fashion, and said it was robbery, but no matter, it was a grand “scoop” (the bill or my
Hornet
report I didn’t know which); “pay it; it’s all right.” The best men that ever owned a newspaper.