Chapter XIV: American Humor
A humpback stood in front of Des Miriltons, a fashionable club of Paris. Day and night his pathetic figure would be seen, a piteous expression on his face, as he made his silent appeal to the men going into the building—some to try their fortune at the gaming table. The French are a superstitious race and have a thousand little ceremonies to lure the great god Luck, one of the most efficacious being to rub the hump of an enfant d’escalier—one born on a staircase. I have seen gold pieces frequently change hands, as a member of this club rushed in or out, so this particular deformity proved fortunate, for the humpback died wealthy.
Now a hump, if it be a conspicuous infirmity, is never laughed at. One is born with it and it is therefore not one’s fault. But deformities are not all physical. I come of five generations of parsons who talked for a living; also, at school, as I have said before, it was the habit of the teacher to give credit to the boy who shouted his lessons the loudest. This helped along the trouble, and I claim that talking too much is just as much a mental hump as a twisted back is a physical one, and, as such, should be pitied.
My brother used to say that any newcomer to the house where we lived thought at first that everyone was suffering from some throat disease. After a while however, he found that it was only hoarseness from talking too much. I remember, as a boy, the sounds in the Old Manse. With mother upstairs making beds, my sister halfway down, one aunt in the sitting room, and another in the kitchen, there was a sort of continuous rattle of words—never stopped, but only interrupted by the opening and shutting of doors: “Lizzie, when you go downtown, don’t forget to buy—but she won’t need—oh yes, I will if—it’s forty inches wide, and that—but Sophie—well, red, if you—think blue will fade terr—in that case you’d bet—two yards are—why not you see the sleeves will take—oh, let her alone, she’ll get it all ri—”
There is a story of this disease of mine that Jules Guerin is fond of telling. Of course, it never happened, but it makes a good tale. There was to be a contest between the greatest talkers in the East and West. A man from the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and myself were chosen. There was money bet; we were put in a locked room with a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water apiece. After three days the sounds of voices died down and the anxious listeners broke open the door. The Western talker was lying dead and I lay beside him, dying and whispering in his ear.
Sometimes this talk of mine has produced startling results. I had a dear friend, now dead, whose son was connected with a monthly magazine. One day I saw in it a botched attempt, as I thought, to tell, as his own, a wonderful story of Anatole France’s. I was indignant and told everyone I would make it my business to “call that young man down.” Some time after, I was sitting at the writing table at The Players when the boy came up to me, saying:
“I hear you have a bone to pick with me?”
“Yes,” I said. “By what right do you take one of the best stories of Anatole France’s and give him no credit?”
“This is the first time that I’ve heard it is his,” answered the youngster. “Why, Mr. Simmons, I got it from dad, who said that you had told it to him here in the club!”
Rather a stiff “come-back.”
There have been so many criticisms of my talk that I like to remember the times when I have not been too much of a pest. It has always managed to put babies to sleep, and several times it has quieted nervous, distracted invalids. There is a hypnotic quality about it, if used consciously. Once, when quite young, I amused myself by willing my mother to lift her hand. She obeyed, and her giggling frightened me terribly. Another time, much later, I succeeded in swaying a mob of people in an entirely new direction by jumping on the tail of a cart and inciting them to action. These incidents taught me to use this power cautiously, which partly accounts for my inconsequential babbling.
In the St. Botolph Club in Boston I met a very clever man named Eichberg, a musician of ability who had been a pupil of Liszt. I had just returned from a week’s absence when I saw him sitting in his accustomed corner, which I had always avoided, thinking he did not care for me. This time he called me over.
“I must tell you something,” he said. “When one first meets you, one feels as if one has moved to a house which gives upon a railway track and cannot sleep on account of the damnable noise; but you go, and one finds that he has really moved to a house in the country and cannot sleep for the damnable silence. I am glad to see you back.”
Much as my friends may laugh at this statement, there are times when I have listened. Frederick Villiers was the most entrancing talker one could imagine, and I protest I was dumb in his presence lest I miss one word of his conversation. Desdemona never heard anything like what I got from him. This is at least one refutation of the statement of my dear friend Oliver Herford, who said:
“Anyone can lead Ned (meaning me) up to a pause, but no man can make him take it.”
In the earliest ’nineties, Herford and I had rooms beside each other in the St. Botolph Club in Boston. In front of our doors was a card printed in scarlet, indicating the direction of the fire escape. One day, seeing his chance, Oliver took this sign into his room and, blotting out the word “fire,” skillfully lettered in my name in its place and hung it up again. Shortly after that a man came rushing downstairs, boiling over with mirth, yelling for all to come up to the top story. There was the sign, as brilliantly red as ever, but reading:
“Escape in case of Simmons!”
Stories of Oliver Herford come crowding to memory, topsy-turvy, one over another, and although perhaps they should have no place here among recollections of those long since passed away, his type of wit is mellow when it is born and does not need time to soften its edge. Oliver is the child of Whimsey; the eternal Puck or the Peter Pan; he has no age and is of no age; like Topsy, I believe he just “growed.” His fun is full of naïveté and childlike subterfuges; no task is too arduous for him if there be a joke at the end; and he pokes that droll mind of his into the oddest crooks and corners in the daintiest way.
I recall being with him in a restaurant when a man much the worse for liquor approached our table and almost kissed him in his desire to be friendly. Finally getting it into his drunken head that he was receiving no response to his advances, he said.
“I don’t believe that you remember me, Mr. Herford.”
“I don’t recognize your face,” said Oliver, “but your manner is damn familiar.”
I was in Oliver’s studio one day when a strange knock came at the door—three long ones and two short raps. “S-h-h-h!” he said, and we both kept quiet. After a sufficient time had elapsed for the person to have departed, I asked him for an explanation. It seemed that —— was in the habit of calling and boring Oliver terribly, so he told him that in the future he intended opening the door only to his special friends, to whom he would give a private knock.
It needs some uncommon quirk for a man’s mind to work in this fashion. Instead of giving the private signal to his friends, he gave it to his one particular aversion, so that he could recognize it instantly and get rid of him quite neatly and without malice.
Another time, Oliver invited me to dine with him. We took a cab at the door of The Players. On the way to the restaurant he went through his pockets and found he hadn’t a cent. As I was broke myself, I decided we were in a pickle. Not so Oliver. We alighted at the door of a prominent café and Oliver approached the cabman:
“Say, dear fellow,” he began, and the driver, thinking he was going to be held up for the fare, was disposed to be cross. But this was too trifling a matter for Oliver to even mention.
“Say, dear fellow,” he continued, in his most confiding way, “I have invited my friend here to dine and I find I have forgotten my money. Could you—now I wonder if you could be a good chap and lend me ten dollars?”
To my astonishment, the man, taken completely unawares, pulled out a roll of bills and handed Oliver one of them.
One cannot be naïve by will power; the danger in consciously striving to be childlike is that one becomes childish, and that is a very different matter. I always think of Oliver Herford when I recall what Guy De Maupassant said upon being challenged to make a new Beatitude—
“Thrice blessed are the naïve, for they shall never see but God.”
One of the brightest and most witty men I knew in the old days was the actor, Maurice Barrymore, father of the present galaxy of stage folk of that name. A beautiful body—I was told that he had been the amateur champion middleweight of England—a face more Celtic than Saxon, Barry was the originator of bons mots that have gone all over the country. I do not remember much about his acting, but I remember his delightful companionship late at night (for he was a highly sensitive man who burned the candle at both ends), his brilliant conversation, his great intelligence and love of the fine things of life, his finesse, and his swiftness of thinking.
Barry and I were sitting together one night at the Lambs’ Club when a big fellow came up to our table and, hammering on it, said:
“Maurice Barrymore, you are a —— —— liar!”
“Oh no,” said Barry, quietly, “not if you say so.”
Once at the old Fifth Avenue Hotel he was taking a drink with some friends, when he heard a voice mumbling behind him something about a blankety, blank actor. He immediately turned and told the man to shut up, adding a well-known phrase which indicated that he was the son, on his maternal side, of a domestic animal we all know. The man rose and came forward, swinging his arms and shouting wildly:
“You call me that? By God! I wish I had you in Louisville! You wouldn’t dare to call me that in Louisville!”
Barry knew that he was not really dangerous, and, besides, he was afraid of no one, so he calmly walked up to the stranger and, putting his arm affectionately about him, said:
“Oh, if your mother’s reputation is a question of geography, come and have a drink.”
The extreme delicacy of Barry was shown in many ways—chiefly in his kindness to any young actor who was trying to get ahead. He was not the type to help by a lot of talk, but by little attentions quietly shown. When he was playing Rawdon Crawley with Mrs. Fiske in “Becky Sharp,” there was a young countryman of his, newly come over from England, who had the part of Dobbin. Barry was notoriously careless of his appearance on the stage, but in this case he groomed himself to the eyes just to give the younger man a chance to shine by contrast. He was perfectly willing to be what in vaudeville parlance is called a “feeder,” if it were for the good of the play or anyone in it.
Englishmen sometimes twitted Barry for his love of America, and he often had to stand quips from us about his British parentage. An American once stuck a coin in his eye and, in a leering manner, walked up to Barry, singing that famous song of Henry Dixey’s called, “It’s English, You Know.” Thinking to add a little flavor and more insult, the man made a vulgar remark. Barry turned to him quietly and said:
“No, it is not the English I know.”
Once a crowd of English actors started to have some fun with Barry about his long residence in America and his American marriage. Then they started on the American language.
“Why you see the way they spell over here,” they cried. “Good old humour and honour have become humor and honor.”
“Yes,” said Barry. “You see, they don’t think they have to come to you for either one of these qualities, so in such matters they leave “u” out.
Speaking of “humor,” I like to think of Anatole France’s brilliant illumination of the word, which, paraphrased, runs something like this: “The Angel of Humor is sent us that she may teach us to laugh at the wicked and foolish, whom, without her aid, we might have the weakness to hate.” In my reading of funny stories, the really good ones have an element of sadness; also I have watched the development of the faces of the humorists I have known. As they grow older the lines of mirth are sure to be backed by signs of very deep feeling. Humor is distinct from wit (which is the joyousness of childhood) and comes after suffering, proving a man to have graduated from the cave-dweller class. Savages are bitter and yell when hurt, but a gentleman keeps quiet. Humor, to me, is the cry of a well-bred man in pain.
When we New Englanders tell stories of ourselves and our forbears, they are generally based fundamentally on the hard lives, or the characteristic qualities that resulted from the hard lives, which those first settlers on the coast of the Atlantic were forced to lead. Their sense of humor conceals an infinitude of suffering, as does that of the men who live in the hills of Kentucky. Professor Shaler of Harvard told me that he had found them very much alike in their laconicism and understatement—two parents of humor.
To illustrate what I mean—my mother’s sewing woman in Concord, the dried-up individual who made my breeches, always with a mouthful of pins—was asked by the neighbors when her mother died:
“Was she willin’ to go?”
“Willin’! My dear, she was obleeged.”
“Did she leave anythin’?”
“Yes, she left everythin’. Didn’t take nothin’ with her.”
A story which gives a picture of the drudgery so great that they were always careful to save themselves the smallest extra task is of the old farmer sitting with his wife beside the kitchen table in the evening. A newspaper is in his hand, a kerosene lamp illuminates the room, and his feet, incased in woolen stockings, are in the cooling oven. The grandfather’s clock strikes nine.
“Time to go to bed, Maria.”
“Yes, Eben.”
She precedes him with the lamp, and he follows with his shoes in his hand. At the foot of the staircase he stops and says:
“Did you wipe the sink, Maria?”
“Why, of course!”
They proceed. When she is at the top and he is half way up, she leans over the balustrade, saying:
“What made you ask me that, Eben?”
“Well, I did feel as if I’d like a drink of water, but if you’ve wiped the sink I guess I’ll put it off till to-morrer.”
There are many stories of the Yankee thrift, but one very old one is hard to beat. A farmer, in the days when a grocer also kept a bar, drives up to the country store and says:
“How much are yer givin’ fer eggs?”
“Cent apiece,” says the grocer.
“My wife wants a darnin’ needle. What do yer ask fer ’em?” “Cent apiece,” again from the grocer.
The farmer gets off his seat, takes out a weight, ties it to the horse’s head, and drops it on the road. Going to the back of the wagon, he reaches into a basket and takes out one egg, carrying it carefully into the grocery.
“I’ll swap yer this fer a darnin’ needle.”
The grocer gives him the needle and takes the egg. The farmer lingers.
“Don’t yer treat on a trade?”
The grocer looks at him curiously, swears, and then says:
“What’ll yer have?”
“Guess I’ll hev an egg flip.”
The grocer takes the egg, which is still on the counter, breaks it into the glass, and—two yolks appear.
“Hold on!” yells the farmer, “that’s a double yoker. Give me another darning needle!”
Mark Twain’s mind was a treasure house of hundreds of stories of this type—his humor was so essentially American. My most vivid memory of Sam Clemens is being with him around the billiard table in The Players. He thought he could play Chicago pool, and in the earlier ’nineties used to choose me for an adversary. I was younger and a better player than he. One day, having beaten him one game, I dared to be winning another. He swore at me for some shot I had made, so I said over my shoulder:
“Don’t be profane.”
Simulating great anger (he was funniest when he pretended gruffness) his mustache bristled, his eyes glared, his chest stuck out, and he marched up to me, his cue banging on the floor to emphasize each word:
“Young man, you do not even know what profanity is. Profanity, sir, is the unnecessary use of profane words and, applied to you, no such use is unnecessary. Go on with your —— —— game.”
Mr. Clemens was very individual in his tastes. He was fond of bread and had missed it in Europe. He used to say that the British bread was putty and the French bread all crust. His drinks were always made for him in exactly the same way. His habits were not those of a fussy old man, but rather of a monogamous person who, having fallen in love once, remained true all his life. I never saw him the least bit intoxicated, but he certainly was not an abstainer. The hottest day of summer would see him with a steaming pitcher before him from which he poured a hot punch of Scotch, always mixed in the same way.
He was a genial fellow in a crowd of people and would undoubtedly have made a wonderful politician. I was hailed by him at the Grand Central Station one day. It was in the winter and he was clothed in the pure white that he affected in his later years. With his white hair and pink face, this made him so conspicuous that we were soon the center of an interested group of people, exactly as if we had been a dog fight. This always acted a stimulant upon Clemens, and he began to hold forth in the most extravagant fashion. At last he said:
“Now I must get my train—but let me see—I have forgotten something. Oh, I know! I have forgotten my wife.” Then appealing to the crowd, he called: “Does anyone here happen to know where Mrs. Clemens is?”
A dozen voices answered in the affirmative, and some one ran to fetch her. Mark Twain stood perfectly still until she was escorted to his side by an admiring bystander. I can imagine Roosevelt doing this, but Mr. Emerson or Woodrow Wilson—never.
A deep sense of civic responsibility was one of Mr. Clemens’s most marked characteristics. His idea was that every man in a community should consider himself responsible if things did not go well, and not be too lazy to raise a kick. He told me of dining in a Pullman car once where the menu stated there was a selection of roast beef or chicken. He ordered the chicken, was told there was none left, so made up his mind to be contented with the roast beef. Before he had finished, the conductor of the car came in and the negro waiter served him with chicken.
“He was a servant of the company and I was a patron,” Clemens said, “and I rose and proclaimed that that was my roast chicken. I did not get it, but when I arrived home I wrote to the company president and received an apology. If you have a complaint, do not write to a small official, for it will never penetrate upward, but if you write to the highest, it may leak down.”
Another time, coming from Hartford with his daughter, he took a green car at the station. It was very crowded and they had to stand. Mr. Clemens protested at the conductor pushing them about and punching his daughter in the ribs as he collected the fares. Whereupon he said:
“Jesus Christ! Do you think you own this car?”
“I don’t mind being called that,” said the humorist, “but my daughter lives in Hartford and is not used to such language. Her feelings were hurt.”
They got off at the car barn and, looking about for some one with whom to register a “kick,” met Billy Laffan (part owner and editor of the Sun), who advised them to let the newspaper do the kicking.
Sam wrote his troubles to the Sun. The next day the Tribune (it was an august sheet in those days) came out with an editorial saying that it was bad taste on the part of Mark Twain to make fun of the Holy Name; that they had looked up the matter and found that it was all a figment of his imagination. This was answered, the following day, with a letter from the president of the car line, saying that the story was true, that the offending conductor had been discharged, and that he (the president) wished to thank Mr. Clemens publicly for having helped them in the matter.
The sequel to the occurrence was told me by Mr. Clemens himself.
“Some time after, I was at my home in Hartford, when my maid came into my study to say that there was a man calling upon me. She showed in a fellow I did not recognize. He began by saying:
“‘Mr. Clemens, I am the man who called you Jesus Christ.’”
“‘Admit your mistake?’ I asked.”
“‘Yes, and I have come to ask a favor. Don’t you think the public is as much to blame as I am? When I get tired I begin to get hasty, and I have never been called down before. If the public had done its duty in the beginning, I would not have gotten into trouble. I have a wife and four children to support and the president of the company will not take me back unless you write a letter and ask him.’
“Of course, I wrote the letter.”
I often heard Mr. Clemens expatiate on his well-known subject—the Almighty Dollar. He had been out West where gold was struck in abundance, and he could not see any difference between the nationalities in the scramble to get there first. The English were always twitting us about our love of money, but, as he said:
“I admit we are hunting for the almighty dollar, but the Englishman is hunting just as hard for the almighty penny.”
As to fear, Roosevelt was talking in the club shortly after the Spanish War, saying that every man’s experience is the same, that he is always horribly afraid before his first battle, but that it wears off. Then he appealed to Clemens, asking him if it were not his feeling during the Civil War.
“Yes,” Clemens answered, “I was scared to death at my first battle, but it seems to have been different with you. Yours wore off. My fear stuck to me during the whole war.”
Whatever his physical fear, his mental bravery was phenomenal. It requires a particular kind of courage for a man to start all over again, as he did, in his later years. After losing all his money in the publishing business, he picked up the pieces and traveled about the world, lecturing, to get the money to pay back his indebtedness, sixty per cent of which was to his wife. This made no difference to a gentleman, and he treated her exactly as if she were a strange creditor. He used to come to The Players while he was going through his bankruptcy proceedings. It seemed to be a good place to get rid of his troubles. When he wasn’t being funny, he pretended to be cross; but when he was quiet, I noticed his face was very sad. He was an intensely American type in looks, and it was hard to get beyond the barrier he made for himself; but once he chose to let you in, his eyes said, “Down to you, sir,” and you saw the superman.
It was more his manner of saying than what he said that made Mr. Clemens so amusing. I was told he sat at a dinner table and talked for twenty minutes upon the name Brander Matthews, with everyone exploding in laughter. He spoke through his nose slowly and with curious drawl, and repeated his thoughts many times, each variation being funnier than the preceding one, until he worked up to a screaming climax.
But when he wanted to be serious he made you feel (as Priam says of Ulysses), “Words, like winter snowflakes, fell from his mouth. Then might no man compare with Ulysses.” One afternoon a crowd of us were in the club, drinking and making frivolous talk. Clemens was doing more than holding his own with the best of us, when suddenly a thought seemed to strike him. He left for a moment, and when he returned, the expression of his eyes was changed. He had a book in his hand and he sat down, saying:
“I will now read you the greatest piece of prose since the days of Marlowe.”
And then, his nasal twang gone, his voice attaining a beautiful sonority, he read, as no one else could have done it—the Gettysburg Speech. It was one of the big moments of my life.
I remember well a comment he made afterward:
“If any one of you men ever have a class in English,” he said, “give them this. Let them try to put an adverb after the word here. No one but Lincoln could have thought of using, ‘That we here highly resolve.’ No! No! No one!”
The last time I saw Mark Twain was at a luncheon at Delmonico’s, given by one of my friends in honor of a British army attaché. I got there rather early and my host was worried for fear his guest of honor would be disappointed in Mr. Clemens. He was getting old and did not perform readily. I said:
“Will you leave it to me? I’ll make him show off; but you must promise not to be surprised at anything and to back me up, however foolish I may act.”
He promised.
I went to the butler and asked him to see that there was a man behind Mr. Clemens to refill his glass as soon as he took a sip. He did not drink much in those days, so it was important he must not be given a chance to refuse. Before the chill of the beginning of the lunch had passed off, I rose and said to my host:
“I want to tell a story.”
Derision from the others: “He talks all the time!” “Shut up!” They even threw bread at me to keep me quiet. But I insisted in a silly way, as if I were drunk, and my host backed me up. Then I began to tell one of Mr. Clemens’s pet stories in such a manner that no one but he would recognize it. I mixed it all up and finally missed the point altogether, sitting down with a fatuous grin.
He couldn’t stand it. His face grew red, he bristled and glared, reached for his cocktail, downed it, and rose.
“That was a good story,” he said, indignantly, “but he can’t tell it. This is the way it should go.” And he told it in his inimitable way.
After that nothing could stop him. He was witty, clever, and the life of the lunch. The old Clemens girded on his armor and went out again arrayed for battle; but I often wonder if he went to his grave thinking I was as much of an ass as I appeared that day.