Vulgar words in Mark Twain, a Biography. Complete (Page 1)
This book at a glance
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You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right.... That is what I was at 19-20.
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You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it.
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The country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, marble, granite, chalk, plaster of Paris (gypsum), thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpens; coyotes (pronounced ki-yo- ties), poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.
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We simply claim the right to deny the truth of every statement made by him in yesterday's paper, to annul all apologies he coined as coming from us, and to hold him up to public commiseration as a reptile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultivation, no more Christian principle than animates and adorns the sportive jackass-rabbit of the Sierras.
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And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory.
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She is a literary cuss herself.
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Now, it was down in the chain of circumstances that Steve Gillis's brother, James N. Gillis, a gentle-hearted hermit, a pocket-miner of the halcyon Tuolumne district--the Truthful James of Bret Harte--happened to be in San Francisco at this time, and invited Clemens to return with him to the far seclusion of his cabin on Jackass Hill.
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A number of the stories used in Mark Twain's books were first told by Jim Gillis, standing with his hands crossed behind him, back to the fire, in the cabin on jackass Hill.
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Jackass Hill was not altogether a solitude; here and there were neighbors.
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With Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker he left Angel's and walked across the mountains to Jackass Hill in the snow-storm--"the first I ever saw in California," he says in his notes.
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Only a few years ago (it was April, 1907), in his cabin on jackass Hill, with Joseph Goodman and the writer of this history present, Steve Gillis made his "death-bed" confession as is here set down: "Mark's lecture was given in Piper's Opera House, October 30, 1866.
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I saw, at once, what an ass I had been making of myself, and was accordingly confused and embarrassed.
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They are the very bastards of the devil."
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There is another, "The Autobiography of a Damn Fool," a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript, thought it especially good.
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The Parisian note-book has this memorandum: "Aldrich gives his seat in the horse-car to a crutched cripple, and discovers that what he took for a crutch is only a length of walnut beading and the man not lame; whereupon Aldrich uses the only profanity that ever escaped his lips: 'Damn a dam'd man who would carry a dam'd piece of beading under his dam'd arm!'"]
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He could damn the human race competently, but in the final reckoning it was the interest of that race that lay closest to his heart.
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It takes a royal amount of cussing to make the thing go the first few days or a week, but by that time the dullest ass gets the hang of the thing, and after that no enrichments of expression are required, and said ass finds the stylographic a genuine God's blessing.
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For the average ass flings the thing out of the window in disgust the second day, believing it hath no virtue, no merit of any sort; whereas the lack lieth in himself, God of his mercy damn him.
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The "almost daily" assaults for two months consist of (1) adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the London Athenaeum, (2) paragraphs from some indignant Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette, who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais, (3) a remark about the Montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire, and, (4) a remark about refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious; and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about.
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I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon.
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The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side, you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black anymore, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks--rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by- and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers.... And next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!
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You have been flaying your correspondent alive with your incorporeal pen; you have been braining him, disemboweling him, carving him into little bits, and then--doing it all over again.
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And I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
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He is a gentleman; his backer, Mr. Kleinburg, is a gentleman, too, yet is not a Clemens--that is to say, he is not an ass.
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He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you forget it.
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Damn such a world anyway.
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Why did you let me go on making a jackass of myself when you could have saved me?"
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"Well," he said, "when you pick up that cue this damn table drips at every pore."
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"During the next thirty million years the bird arrived, and the kangaroo, and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the Irish elk, and the old Silurian ass, and some people thought that man was about due.
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Joe Goodman, still full of vigor (in 1912), journeyed with me to the green and dreamy solitudes of Jackass Hill to see Steve and Jim Gillis, and that was an unforgetable Sunday when Steve Gillis, an invalid, but with the fire still in his eyes and speech, sat up on his couch in his little cabin in that Arcadian stillness and told old tales and adventures.
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The inhabitants used to go to Satan to build bridges for them, promising him the soul of the first one that crossed the bridge; then, when Satan had the bridge done, they would send over a rooster or a jackass--a cheap jackass; that was for Satan, and of course they could fool him that way every time.
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and on the reverse: FOR SALE The proprietor of the hereinbefore mentioned Promise desires to part with it on account of ill health and obliged to go away somewheres so as to let it reciprocate, and will take any reasonable amount for it above 2 percent of its face because experienced parties think it will not keep but only a little while in this kind of weather & is a kind of proppity that don't give a cuss for cold storage nohow.
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St. Peter cares not a damn for the weather.
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Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every Sunday night in Elmira!
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Mind is plainly an ass, but it will be many ages before it finds it out, no doubt.
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DAMN FOOL (unfinished).