Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board

by Unknown

"I tried to write a romance once, and the little wife laughed at it. I still think it is good stuff and I want it written. The plot is simple. You'd best skeletonize the plot. Solly Jenks, Hiram Wall—young men. Time, before the Civil War."

Then the outline of a typical Mark Twain story came in short, explosive sentences. It was entitled, "Up the Furrow to Fortune." A brief account of its coming seems vital to the more sustained work which was destined to follow it. I was not present at the next regular meeting of the society; but at its close I was summoned to the telephone and informed that Mark Twain had come again and had said that "the Hannibal girl" was the one for whom he and Mrs. Hays had been waiting. When they asked him what he meant, the planchette made reply:

"Consult your record for 1911."

One of the early volumes of the society's record was brought forth, and a curious fact that all the members of the society had forgotten was unearthed. About a year after his passing out, Mr. Clemens had told Mrs. Hays that he had carried with him much valuable literary material which he yearned to send back, and that he would transmit stories through her, if she could find just the right person to sit with her at the transmission board. Although she experimented with each member of the club, and with several of her friends who were sympathetic though not avowed investigators, he was not satisfied with any of them. Then she gave up the attempt and dismissed it from her mind. A twenty-minute test with me seemed to convince him that in me he had found the negative side of the mysterious human mechanism for which he had been waiting.

The work of transmitting that first story was attended with the greatest difficulty. No less than three distinct styles of diction, accompanied by correspondingly distinct motion in the planchette under our fingers, were thrust into the record. At first we were at a loss to understand these intrusions. That they were intrusions there could be no doubt. In each case there was a sharp deviation from the plot of the story, as it had been given to us in the synopsis. After one of these experiences, which resulted in the introduction of a paragraph that was rather clever but not at all pertinent. Mark regained control with the impatiently traced words:

"Every scribe here wants a pencil on earth."

Not until the middle of summer did we achieve that sureness of touch which now enables us to recognize, intuitively, the presence of the one scribe whose thoughts we are eager to transmit. That the story of Jap Herron and the two short stories which preceded it are the actual post-mortem work of Samuel L. Clemens, known to the world as Mark Twain, we do not for one moment doubt. His individuality has been revealed to us in ways which could leave no question in our minds. The little, intimate touches which reveal personality are really of more importance than the larger and more conspicuous fact that neither Mrs. Hays nor I could have written the fiction that has come across our transmission board. Our literary output is well known, and not even the severest psychological skeptic could assert that it bears any resemblance to the literary style of "Jap Herron."

Mrs. Hays has found the best market for her short stories with one of the large religious publishing houses, and in the early days Mark Twain seemed to fear that her subconscious mind might inadvertently color or distort his thought, in process of transmission. We had come to the end of our fourth session when he added this:

"There will be minor errors that you will be able to take care of. I don't object. Only—don't try to correct my grammar. I know what I want to say. And, dear ladies, when I say d-a-m-n, please don't write d-a-r-n. Don't try to smooth it out. This is not a smooth story."

That Mark should fear the blue pencil, at our hands, amused us greatly. The story bristles with profanity and is roughly picturesque in its diction. It deals with a section of the Ozark country with which neither of us is familiar, and in the speech of the natives there are words that we had never heard, that are included in no dictionary but are, it transpires, perfectly familiar to the primitive people in the southwestern part of the state. When the revision of the story was almost complete. Mark interrupted the dictation, one afternoon, to remark: