throw them right out of the window, rain or shine–out of the bathroom
window they’d go. I used to look out every morning to see the
snowflakes–anything white. Out they’d fly…. Oh! he’d swear at
anything when he was on a rampage. He’d swear at his razor if it didn’t
cut right, and Mrs. Clemens used to send me around to the bathroom door
sometimes to knock and ask him what was the matter. Well, I’d go and
knock; I’d say, ‘Mrs. Clemens wants to know what’s the matter.’ And
then he’d say to me (kind of low) in a whisper like, ‘Did she hear me
Katy?’ ‘Yes,’ I’d say, ‘every word.’ Oh, well, he was ashamed then, he
was afraid of getting scolded for swearing like that, because Mrs.
Clemens hated swearing.” But his swearing never seemed really bad to
Katy Leary, “It was sort of funny, and a part of him, somehow,” she said.
“Sort of amusing it was–and gay–not like real swearing, ’cause he swore
like an angel.”
In his later years at Stormfield Mark loved to play his favorite
billiards. “It was sometimes a wonderful and fearsome thing to watch Mr.
Clemens play billiards,” relates Elizabeth Wallace. “He loved the game,
and he loved to win, but he occasionally made a very bad stroke, and then
the varied, picturesque, and unorthodox vocabulary, acquired in his more
youthful years, was the only thing that gave him comfort. Gently,
slowly, with no profane inflexions of voice, but irresistibly as though
they had the headwaters of the Mississippi for their source, came this
stream of unholy adjectives and choice expletives.”
Mark’s vocabulary ran the whole gamut of life itself. In Paris, in his
appearance in 1879 before the Stomach Club, a jolly lot of gay wags,
Mark’s address, reports Paine, “obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs
of the world, though no line of it, not even its title, has ever found
its way into published literature.” It is rumored to have been called
“Some Remarks on the Science of Onanism.”
In Berlin, Mark asked Henry W. Fisher to accompany him on an exploration
of the Berlin Royal Library, where the librarian, having learned that
Clemens had been the Kaiser’s guest at dinner, opened the secret treasure
chests for the famous visitor. One of these guarded treasures was a
volume of grossly indecent verses by Voltaire, addressed to Frederick the
Great. “Too much is enough,” Mark is reported to have said, when Fisher
translated some of the verses, “I would blush to remember any of these
stanzas except to tell Krafft-Ebing about them when I get to Vienna.”
When Fisher had finished copying a verse for him Mark put it into his
pocket, saying, “Livy [Mark’s wife, Olivia] is so busy mispronouncing
German these days she can’t even attempt to get at this.”
In his letters, too, Howells observed, “He had the Southwestern, the
Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one
ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish; and I was
often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he
had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear
to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to
look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that
in it he was Shakespearean.”
“With a nigger squat on her safety-valve”
John Hay, Pike County Ballads.
“Is there any other explanation,” asks Van Wyck Brooks, “‘of his
Elizabethan breadth of parlance?’ Mr. Howells confesses that he
sometimes blushed over Mark Twain’s letters, that there were some which,
to the very day when he wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not
bear to reread. Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years,
while going over Mark Twain’s proofs, upon ‘having that swearing out in
an instant,’ he would never had had cause to suffer from his having
‘loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion.’ Mark Twain’s verbal
Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not
having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left