My Mark Twain | Page 6

his
make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with
Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and
Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in all
its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it had come
up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was what we
know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference the two,
was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I have
noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in
writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote as

he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to
what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside
what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and
made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him.
Then, when he was through with the welcoming of this casual and
unexpected guest, he would go back to the company he was
entertaining, and keep on with what he had been talking about. He
observed this manner in the construction of his sentences, and the
arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering or disordering of his
compilations.--[Nowhere is this characteristic better found than in
Twain's 'Autobiography,' it was not a "style" it was unselfconscious
thought D.W.]--I helped him with a Library of Humor, which he once
edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition, with
authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he tore it
all apart, and "chucked" the pieces in wherever the fancy, for them took
him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a text-book, but
a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the reader, and he
did not see why the principle on which he built his travels and
reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it; and I do not
now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On minor points
he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite phrases or
pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear
of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a substitute, he would
use it as many times in a page as he chose.

V.
At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began
to write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could
show him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so
abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If
you wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested
that a word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very

good, he struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable
"mush of concession," as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a
little stronger language than 'The Atlantic' had stomach for, and once
when I sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the
profanity. He wrote back: "Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into
the room with danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read
the manuscript to her I skipped that." It was part of his joke to pretend a
violence in that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the
situation to their friends.
I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I
must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write
for us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the
incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country,
and was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of
being eager for him, but it is to the publisher's credit that he tried, so far
as the modest traditions of 'The Atlantic' would permit, to meet the
expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens's books
might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this
he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a
page did not surfeit the author of books that "sold right along just like
the Bible."
We had