The Portable Mark Twain Read Online Free

his “lurking suspicion” that he has been set up. In urging him to search for the edifying company of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, Ward has deliberately thrown Twain in the way of Simon Wheeler and a reminiscence of the notorious Jim Smiley. What follows, of course, is a rambling and hilarious narrative about a “fifteen minute nag,” a bull pup named “Andrew Jackson,” and the precocious jumping frog “Dan’l Webster.” If Twain had been less impatient with Wheeler, we might have heard the tale of a “yaller one-eyed cow” as well, but he storms off in a huff and his readers necessarily must follow. In “An Encounter with an Interviewer” (1874), a “peart” young reporter from the Daily Thunder-storm seeks an interview with the estimable Mr. Twain. The persona here is simpleminded and afflicted with an “irregular” memory, and Twain leads the interviewer on a wild goose chase for even the most basic information. The young man—having learned that Twain is 180 years old, attended Aaron Burr’s funeral, and many other curious things—leaves exasperated and befuddled. Twain regrets the departure: “He was pleasant company, and I was sorry to see him go.”
    In “The Story of the Old Ram” (1872) Twain the tenderfoot is tricked by “the boys” into mouth-watering anticipation to hear Jim Blaine’s inebriated tale. The storyteller meanders about, getting further and further from the announced subject, and it is not until the raconteur falls asleep mid-sentence that Twain perceives that he has been “sold.” There are many other instances of unlikely pairings of character—those emissaries from the “grand divisions of society” in Virginia City, Nevada, Scotty Briggs and the Parson; or Twain the self-satisfied and ignorant substitute editor for an agricultural journal (who advises among other things that “clams will lie quiet if music be played to them”) and the outraged editor who rebukes him; or Hank Morgan, the practical, hardheaded, nineteenth-century Yankee, and Sandy, the good-hearted, innocent, sixth-century jabberer.
    Some of Twain’s encounters were not humorous, however, nor were they intended to be. In “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1874) the former slave and now a servant, Aunt Rachel, literally and figuratively towers above the author, clearly his moral superior. For once, Clemens did not hide behind the camouflage of an adopted persona but is known simply as “Misto C—” and as such bears the full weight of an unwanted recognition: namely, that his judgment of Aunt Rachel’s character borders on criminal stupidity and callousness. Similarly, in one of the most affecting episodes in Huckleberry Finn, after playing yet another joke on Jim, Huck receives such a tongue lashing from the fugitive slave that he mulls over his deserved upbraiding and finally “humbles” himself to a black man. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885) was published in the company of other Civil War memoirs in the Century magazine. Clemens had spent a very brief time in the pro-Confederate Marion Rangers before removing to the Nevada Territory, and he freely admits that perhaps he “ought not be allowed much space among better people.” For the most part his description of the campaign is pure burlesque at the author’s expense, but a sudden revulsion of moral feelings brought about by the shooting of an innocent man decides him on quitting the business of war “while I could save some remnant of my self-respect.” It is almost a certainty that this killing was pure fabrication, introduced to provide the author with a moral dilemma he might respond to with the sort of sensitivity he had attributed to Huckleberry Finn, whose narrative he had completed only a few months before writing this memoir. Clemens