had been delivered up to them in the first place, they would have
sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll; therefore
it was not that he had really committed the murder, the guilt lay
with the erroneous inventory. Everybody saw that there was
reason in this. Everybody granted that if “Tom” were white and
free it would be unquestionably right to punish him–it would be
no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life–
that was quite another matter.
As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once,
and the creditors sold him down the river.
—————————————————————–
Author’s Note to THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS
A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a
troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel.
I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story;
in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind,
and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge
those people into those incidents with interesting results.
So he goes to work. To write a novel? No–that is a thought which
comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a
little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a
tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what
it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more
than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book.
I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.
And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale
grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif)
is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite
different one. It was so in the case of a magazine sketch which
I once started to write–a funny and fantastic sketch about a
prince an a pauper; it presently assumed a grave cast of its own accord,
and in that new shape spread itself out into a book.
Much the same thing happened with PUDD’NHEAD WILSON. I had a
sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself
from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it–a most
embarrassing circumstance. But what was a great deal worse was,
that it was not one story, but two stories tangled together; and
they obstructed and interrupted each other at every turn and
created no end of confusion and annoyance. I could not offer the
book for publication, for I was afraid it would unseat the
reader’s reason, I did not know what was the matter with it,
for I had not noticed, as yet, that it was two stories in one.
It took me months to make that discovery. I carried the manuscript
back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read
it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the
difficulty lay. I had no further trouble. I pulled one of the
stories out by the roots, and left the other–a kind of literary
Caesarean operation.
Would the reader care to know something about the story
which I pulled out? He has been told many a time how the born-
and-trained novelist works; won’t he let me round and complete
his knowledge by telling him how the jackleg does it?
Originally the story was called THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS.
I meant to make it very short. I had seen a picture of a
youthful Italian “freak”–or “freaks”–which was–or which were–
on exhibition in our cities–a combination consisting of two
heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs–
and I thought I would write an extravagantly fantastic
little story with this freak of nature for hero–or heroes–
a silly young miss for heroine, and two old ladies and two boys for
the minor parts. I lavishly elaborated these people and their
doings, of course. But the take kept spreading along and
spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and