1601 | Page 6

for the limited edition of 1601 issued by the Grabhorn Press, how he felt when he first saw the original manuscript. "When I read it," writes Wood, "I felt that the character of it would be carried a little better by a printing which pretended to the eye that it was contemporaneous with the pretended 'conversation.'
"I wrote Mark that for literary effect I thought there should be a species of forgery, though of course there was no effort to actually deceive a scholar. Mark answered that I might do as I liked;--that his only object was to secure a number of copies, as the demand for it was becoming burdensome, but he would be very grateful for any interest I brought to the doing.
"Well, Tucker [foreman of the printing shop] and I soaked some handmade linen paper in weak coffee, put it as a wet bundle into a warm room to mildew, dried it to a dampness approved by Tucker and he printed the 'copy' on a hand press. I had special punches cut for such Elizabethan abbreviations as the a, e, o and u, when followed by m or n--and for the (commonly and stupidly pronounced ye).
"The only editing I did was as to the spelling and a few old English words introduced. The spelling, if I remember correctly, is mine, but the text is exactly as written by Mark. I wrote asking his view of making the spelling of the period and he was enthusiastic--telling me to do whatever I thought best and he was greatly pleased with the result."
Thus was printed in a de luxe edition of fifty copies the most curious masterpiece of American humor, at one of America's most dignified institutions, the United States Military Academy at West Point.
"1601 was so be-praised by the archaeological scholars of a quarter of a century ago," wrote Clemens in his letter to Charles Orr, "that I was rather inordinately vain of it. At that time it had been privately printed in several countries, among them Japan. A sumptuous edition on large paper, rough-edged, was made by Lieut. C. E. S. Wood at West Point --an edition of 50 copies--and distributed among popes and kings and such people. In England copies of that issue were worth twenty guineas when I was there six years ago, and none to be had."
FROM THE DEPTHS
Mark Twain's irreverence should not be misinterpreted: it was an irreverence which bubbled up from a deep, passionate insight into the well-springs of human nature. In 1601, as in 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,' and in 'The Mysterious Stranger,' he tore the masks off human beings and left them cringing before the public view. With the deftness of a master surgeon Clemens dealt with human emotions and delighted in exposing human nature in the raw.
The spirit and the language of the Fireside Conversation were rooted deep in Mark Twain's nature and in his life, as C. E. S. Wood, who printed 1601 at West Point, has pertinently observed,
"If I made a guess as to the intellectual ferment out of which 1601 rose I would say that Mark's intellectual structure and subconscious graining was from Anglo-Saxons as primitive as the common man of the Tudor period. He came from the banks of the Mississippi--from the flatboatmen, pilots, roustabouts, farmers and village folk of a rude, primitive people--as Lincoln did.
"He was finished in the mining camps of the West among stage drivers, gamblers and the men of '49. The simple roughness of a frontier people was in his blood and brain.
"Words vulgar and offensive to other ears were a common language to him. Anyone who ever knew Mark heard him use them freely, forcibly, picturesquely in his unrestrained conversation. Such language is forcible as all primitive words are. Refinement seems to make for weakness--or let us say a cutting edge--but the old vulgar monosyllabic words bit like the blow of a pioneer's ax--and Mark was like that. Then I think 1601 came out of Mark's instinctive humor, satire and hatred of puritanism. But there is more than this; with all its humor there is a sense of real delight in what may be called obscenity for its own sake. Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself--no more obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. Every word used in 1601 was used by our own rude pioneers as a part of their vocabulary--and no word was ever invented by man with obscene intent, but only as language to express his meaning. No act of nature is obscene in itself--but when such words and acts are dragged in for an ulterior purpose they become offensive, as everything out of place is offensive. I think he delighted, too, in shocking--giving resounding slaps on what