Mark Twain 57

NARRATIVE

     "In writing, it is usually stronger and more dramatic to have a man speak for himself than to have someone else relate a thing about him," Mark Twain told a New York audience during a question-and-answer session after a lecture.
     "Suppose a man dies," someone asked.  "Is it stronger to have the man himself say that he has died?"
     "Sometimes,"  Mark Twain answered.  "Take the case of Major Patterson, down in Missouri, when a squatter had moved in on some of the extensive lands he had laid claim to.  Deciding to use the frightening method to get the squatter off, the Major donned a mask one dark night, moumted an enormous black horse, rode to the squatter's door , called him out, and asked for a bucket of water.  The Major had also availed himself of a contrivance. . . a large leather bag on his chest and stomach, buttoned securely under his coat.
     When the squatter had brought the water the Major raised the three-gallon bucket, slowly poured its contents into the bag through an opening at his throat, turned to the astonished squatter and said, 'Ah-h-h-- That's the first drink of water I've had since I was killed at the battle of Shiloh!'
     "The squatter disappeared from that part of the country,"  Mark Twain concluded.  "And I think you will agree that when the Major spoke for himself, the effect was stronger than otherwise."

NEW DEAL

     "F.D.R. tole me tht he took his famous phrase from M.T.'s Connecticut Yankee when I presented him our Mark Twain Gold Medal, 3rd December 1933," wrote Cyril Clemens, editor of The Mark Twain Journal, a leading scholarley organ.
     The phrase that gave a name to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration was drawn from a chapter entitled "Freemen!" in which the Connecticut Yankee, who is basically an updated Jeffersonian democrat with technocratic tendencies, confronting the backward realities of the medieval monarchy and decides it is high time for a revolution.  "And now here I was in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population," he observed.  "I was to become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board  of direction and took all the dividends.  It seemes to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed wa a new deal."
     A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was less popular with the critics than Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but Mark Twain considered it his magnum opus;  It is the clearest and most complete statement of the author's democratic, egalitarian philosophy.  the book was artistically flawed because the author inserted so much of his own opinion into it and did not disguise himself behind the mask of artistic irony as successfully as he did in Huckleberry Finn.  In Huckleberry Finn, the author's views are so artfully masked that to this day there are some blacks who consider the book racist.  But nobody will ever accuse the Connecticut Yankee, or his creator, of being a monarchist.  A Connecticut Yankee is a literary manifesto for democratic revolution.
     "It's my swan song, my retirement from literature," Mark Twain wrote sadly to his friend Howells.  "Well, my book is written--let it go, but if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out.  They burn in me. . . .but now they can't ever be said;  and besides they would require a library--and a pen warmed up in hell.